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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-exit-interview).

Previously on Scriptnotes.

**John August:** Subject: Podcasts. Wondering if you’d have any interest in doing a joint podcast on screenwriting?

**Craig Mazin:** A podcast would solve my “I want to talk about screenwriting, but I’m tired of writing about screenwriting” problem. So, yes, count me in.

**John:** Bonjour. Et Bienvenue. Je m’appelle John August.

**Craig:** Je m’appelle Craig Mazin.

**John:** There’s NaNoWriMo, which is National Novel Writing Month. I’m strongly considering actually just doing it this year.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And there’s an idea I have that is not a movie idea, or at least it’s not an idea that wants to exist first as a movie. And so I’m thinking about actually doing it this year and writing a book.

Bin Lee asks, “When can we hear Stuart’s voice on the podcast?”

**Craig:** I don’t know. I mean, we could just keep him like Maris, Niles’s wife on Frasier. Sort of a presence.

**John:** Indeed. Like in Fight Club the whole time through. I’ve always – I’ve actually been Stuart the whole time through.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 259 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the season finale of Scriptnotes, we have major announcements about the future of the show that listeners may find exciting and/or troubling. So, if you’re driving a car, please don’t swerve and hit a Pokémon Go player.

You might want until you get to a safe space. We will also be discussing that computer algorithm that says that there are only six plots, which is pretty much a layup. And, Craig, welcome. You are here in person. This was a big show, so we couldn’t do this by Skype. You had to be here live.

**Craig:** No, I had to be here live. I wanted to be here live. I did, unfortunately, mow down 14 Pokémon Go players.

**John:** Were they in a parking lot?

**Craig:** And nothing of value was lost.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I mean, what? What?

**John:** So, here’s what we were talking about before you came. It’s like if a Pokémon player dies while collecting Pokémon, do they all spray out like the rings like from Sonic the Hedgehog?

**Craig:** That would be amazing, because then the amount of murders – Pokémon Go related murders. Because then we would be living in Grand Theft Auto 5.

**John:** Yeah. It kind of feels like we already are. So, it’s a nice time.

**Craig:** Actually, that reminds me of my One Cool Thing. Because, as you know, I do believe in the fact that we are. But there’s maybe a way out. So, my One Cool Thing is going to be about the way out of that. But, no, I’m happy to be here. It’s very exciting. I don’t know what season finale of Scriptnotes means, since I believe our new season starts next week.

**John:** Our new season starts next week. But this is the end of five seasons. So, this is our fifth anniversary we’re coming up on.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Which is crazy.

**Craig:** What you get me?

**John:** Uh, nothing. I got you some changes. I got you some changes to the show, which is sort of exciting, too.

**Craig:** I hope they’re good ones.

**John:** And the reason I was thinking about the season finale concept is that when a television series comes to its series finale, there are certain things that are sort of tropes that are going to happen. And so there tends to be the defeat of a big, bad villain. I don’t know if we have any villains on our show. Do we have any villains?

**Craig:** Stuart.

**John:** Well, yeah. We have the death of a major character. The removal of a major character. Someone leaves the show. We have a change of venue.

**Craig:** Stuart.

**John:** He’s not a venue. He’s sort of a world onto himself.

**Craig:** Right. Good point. Good point.

**John:** We have meta conversations about the series and sort of how far we’ve come. There’s always that thing. There’s always that thing where you’re reflecting back on sort of all the stuff you did. Or like, hey, do you remember when.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So like at the end of a season of Survivor they used to do that thing where they had like all the torches, the torches of the fallen, and they got through all that. Jeff Probst listens to the show, so–

**Craig:** I know! I know. I think you and I are one of the 12 people that he follows on Twitter, which I think is fantastic. I was for a long time a longstanding Survivor watcher. It is a huge commitment of your life to be a first season to current season Survivor watcher.

**John:** I’ve watched every season.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. Admittedly, I – my wife continues, but I fell off somewhere in there. But that show is brilliant.

**John:** It’s really, really good. And so on that show they would always pass the torches of the fallen. And basically it felt like a huge filler, but it was excuse for showing footage of all the people who used to be on the show who are no longer on the show.

**Craig:** Well, it’s like in the Hunger Games when somebody dies, and then they show their face in the clouds. And they play sad music.

**John:** Yeah. But the last thing you always do on a season finale is really set up the next season. So that the wheels are in motion for next season. And like True Blood used to do a really good job of like they’d wrap up all their business like halfway through the final episode of the season, and then like introduce the whole new thing that was going to happen. Sort of tease that next thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or in books sometimes they’ll have the first chapter of the next book at the end of the book. The kids’ series will have that.

**Craig:** Yeah, like when the season – I think two seasons ago on Game of Thrones, the last shot was Arya Stark heading off to Bravos. So, you knew, okay, exciting things would be happening with her in Bravos, which curiously just was kind of a zero in terms of it’s actual – like the one thing I can criticize about what those guys have done character-wise, and I don’t even think it’s their fault, because I think they had to… – It’s like, look, that’s a huge chunk of the books. But, narratively, if she had missed that boat and then hit her head and slept for two years, she’d be right back where she is now.

Well, with little changes.

**John:** With little changes.

**Craig:** Yeah. Little changes. She’s got some new skills.

**John:** So, we are to some degree sailing off to Bravos. Hopefully there will be some growth and some change, but that’s this episode.

And so we’re going to dig into it after we do some follow up. And we’ll start with some boat follow up, though. So, in an earlier episode we talked about magical dad transformation comedies, and someone brought up the Goldie Hawn/Kurt Russell comedy, Overboard. And we both, I think, commented that like that movie is really dark when you think about it.

**Craig:** Yeah. The actual circumstances of Overboard require a man to take massive advantage of a brain-injured woman, gaslight her, total gas-lighting her into believing that. And then kind of employ her as a domestic slave. And then also have sex with her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then in the end convince her to stay of her own volition.

**John:** So a troubling premise, really. And so we said on the show, someone could easily recut that trailer as a dark kind of thriller. And one of our listeners – because we have the best listeners in the entire world–

**Craig:** We do.

**John:** Did this. So, Fredrik Limi, we’ll provide a link in the show notes, he did what’s sort of a David Fincher version of it called Girl Gone Overboard. And it’s nicely done. I found it a little bit long, but I thought he found the really good shots that sort of told that very dark story from her point of view. Questioning like, wait, am I really the woman you say I am?

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. I wanted creepier music.

**John:** Yeah. Creepy music is very important.

**Craig:** We can’t help but criticize everything, right? We’re the worst.

**John:** We are the worst.

**Craig:** We’re the worst.

**John:** We’re the worst.

**Craig:** This guy did us a favor.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And we’re like, eh, it’s too long. Change the music.

**John:** I thought he did a brilliant job selecting out those moments.

**Craig:** He did. Actually, there were moments that I had forgotten happened, like when he’s pushing her head in the water. And you’re like, “Oh, god.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a terrible, terrible premise for a movie.

**John:** Terrible premise for a movie. Today’s episode is unique in the history of our podcast, because in this episode Stuart Friedel, who has always been a man behind the curtain, a person we refer to but don’t actually invite onto the show itself–

**Craig:** For good reason.

**John:** Yes, Stuart Friedel is here because this is his going away. This is his exit interview.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Stuart Friedel, the producer of Scriptnotes for five years, is finally leaving the nest. So we thought it’s about time to have him on the show to actually talk about what he’s done, what he’s doing, what he’s going to do. Stuart Friedel, welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Stuart Friedel:** Thanks for having me.

**Craig:** Wow. He did that so well. It’s like he’s learned. This is bizarre, because as you know, I still – even though I’m looking at you, Stuart – right now I’m not quite sure you’re real.

**Stuart:** I’m not either, frankly.

**Craig:** Good. So we’re on the same page.

**Stuart:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I guess we should probably start by finding out why you’re leaving, right?

**Stuart:** Yeah. That’s a good question. I would say that I’ve hit the critical mass of other projects, so it’s just time for me to pack my bags and hit the road.

**Craig:** And your other projects are of what nature?

**Stuart:** TV writing, kids’ TV primarily, which is my – I’d say my life’s work. My passion.

**John:** So, I think it’s good for us to fill in the backstory and really chart the entire person who is Stuart Friedel, because so far he’s always been this name, or the person who answers the emails, or like sends out the tee-shirts, or gets yelled at when the phone rings while we’re trying to record.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s my favorite part.

**Stuart:** [laughs] Those are all things that I do. This is true.

**John:** So, Stuart has been my assistant for five years. And I hired you from Disney Channel.

**Stuart:** You did. Yeah. I was working as the Assistant in original programming development at Disney Channel.

**Craig:** And how did you even come to find him there and pull him out like a bird stealing another bird’s egg?

**John:** That’s what it was. Stuart went through the Stark Program, the same graduate school program that I went through at USC. And so when Matt Byrne, when my previous assistant, was time for him to go, he got staffed on the TV show Scandal and is still a big writer on Scandal.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We put out the call to Starkies saying, “Hey, this job is open.” Whenever that job becomes open, people scramble for it. So, we don’t sort of put out the call too wide. How did you find out about the job?

**Stuart:** I was at the time teaching – is a very loose word – but I was instructing a third of a Stark class at nights, The Negotiation Game, which is awesome. And one of co-“adjunct professors” was on a Stark email list that I didn’t know existed. And they were like gossiping about it after class.

And I kind of kept my ear to the ground. We had Chad and Dara come speak to us, and I guess Dana come speak to our class, while I was at Stark.

**Craig:** All former John August assistants.

**Stuart:** Yeah. They all gave the advice, like if you have any interest in writing, you know, keep your ear to the ground. And my time at Disney, for this job specifically, my time at Disney was fine. I was definitely at a point where it was like a crossroads. And I was either going to be there for a long time, or not. And for a few reasons I kind of wanted to be in the “not” camp. And so this was like fate. It was the exact right moment. I was at Disney for 365 days on the nose. And I had always said I don’t want to do it for less than a year.

**Craig:** This means something.

**Stuart:** Yeah. So it was, you know, kismet.

**Craig:** Nice. And so then John plucks you away.

**Stuart:** Yeah. The application process was long.

**Craig:** Long and arduous.

**John:** Yeah. So I think during your session I met with like five different candidates, and I had you edit together a bit of the blog – because at this point there was no podcast, so it was mostly about the blog. It was mostly about johnaugust.com. And I had you read a script? What else?

**Stuart:** Yeah. So I remember the job description was like don’t write a typical cover letter. So I remember writing this two-page cover letter and like going over it. I remember I had line that was like “In the grand Disney tradition, I’m ready to be rescued,” and like all that stuff. I was really proud of it.

**Craig:** That’s adorable, Stuart.

**Stuart:** That was true. And then came in for an interview. And first round interview was just meeting. You sent me home with a script and said do notes on this. And it was like this whole prompt. And the last line was, “And proofread it.” Come in with like casting, all this.

And I got here an hour early and I was sitting in the car, and I was like all ready with my notes and my casting. And then it was like, “And proofread it,” and I had totally forgotten to do that. And I remember coming in during my interview and saying like you asked that at the end, and I was like I thought I had gotten through the whole, and forgot that you wanted us to proofread it. And I was like, “I got to be honest,” and I told that story. And I was like, “And while I was reading it, I found one mistake, which was you wrote four-poster bed, but it’s supposed to be four-post bed.” But then I looked up on my iPhone and it actually is four-poster bed.

So, not only do I have no mistakes, but the one mistake that I found wasn’t actually a mistake.

**John:** Yeah.

**Stuart:** And then, for some reason, you didn’t count me out. You sent us home again–

**Craig:** Yeah, I would have – just that ridiculous story, I would have, absolutely, I would have removed you from my premises.

**John:** So not only did you not follow instructions, then you were wrong when you attempted to follow the instructions, but at the last minute you scrambled.

**Stuart:** I owned it. And I admitted it. Hopefully I–

**Craig:** That’s the worst part. That’s the absolute worst part, is now you’re making me have to care about your problem. I would have had you removed from the premises.

**Stuart:** Yeah. I mean, that’s what I figured. If I make him internalize it. If I–

**Craig:** Well, that worked on him.

**Stuart:** [laughs] Yeah. And then you sent us home and it was like the next prompt was – or the hypothetical. I want to write a book that is the blog as a book, that’s very much like Chapter Three of Tina Fey’s Bossy Pants. And went to Barnes & Noble that day and I read cover to cover at work the entire book. And then you were like, “So what’s the table of contents of my book.” And we went, I think, three notes sessions back and forth.

And then I remember the day that you called me, and I went to the Disney Channel parking garage to take the call.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Stuart:** And I got the job.

**Craig:** That’s spectacular. Now, for people that are thinking about breaking into our business, I don’t know – because I actually never did the typical assistant job. My first job was through a temp agency really. So there wasn’t much of an interview process. It was just, “How fast can you type? Yeah, you seem to wear clothes. You’re fine.”

Is this normal or abnormal?

**John:** I think it’s abnormal in the sense that most times when you’re hiring an assistant, you’re basically like can you keep track of my calendar and schedule and–

**Craig:** Phones.

**John:** Phones, yeah. And that kind of stuff. And I recognized that over the years, my assistants, there wasn’t a lot of that calendar and phone stuff. But there was a lot of like the ability to talk about the script I’m working on, the ability to read stuff and proofread it. The ability to sort of recognize what was important and what was not important.

So, some backstory on my side. Like I’ve been lucky to have this string of remarkable assistants. My first assistant was Rawson Thurber, who has been a guest on the show. Then I had Dana Fox. I had Chad Creasey. And the Creaseys went on to do great stuff. I had Matt Byrne. And now Stuart Friedel.

And so I got to recognize over time that it wasn’t just about the person sitting there being barely level competent. You wanted somebody who could actually do something really good. And somebody who I wouldn’t be annoyed with sitting downstairs and doing their own stuff the whole day.

**Craig:** That’s the huge part. Because that eliminates almost everyone for me.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. You don’t want anyone else in your space.

**Craig:** No. No, to look at somebody – I do have someone who works with me, and she’s been with me for years. And I can’t do – like if she came to me and said, “I’m thinking of moving on for a reason,” I would just say, “Well, then I’m retiring.” Because I can’t do this again. I can’t meet anyone new. I can’t look at a new person. It’s going to be terrible.

**Stuart:** Yeah.

**John:** The other difference is that I’ve hired a lot of other people sort of in addition to assistants, so I’ve had designers, and I’ve had Nima who does our coding. So there’s been other people who have sort of come through the world. And so you get a sense of who is going to fit in and who is going to be additive in a great way.

**Stuart:** I remember in the final interview you said like, “I’m not always the best roommate, but in this situation we’re not roommates. I’m the boss. So you just have to be aware of that.” And I think that’s a very–

**Craig:** Perfectly. I mean, that is accurate. I wouldn’t have said that either. Because, to me, what do you not know that I’m your boss?

**Stuart:** Right. Right.

**Craig:** I’m already – you could see the problem with me, right?

**John:** So I’ll tell you that when I hired you, I really didn’t think you would last five years.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** I thought you would last one year. And here’s why. I remember telling Mike my husband this. Is I thought like, well, he’s really good. I bet in a year he’s going to go back to kids’ TV, because he’s the only person I’ve ever met who actually genuinely loves kids’ TV. Like you’re not faking it. You really do love kids’ television. And when we come back from a trip, on the DVR we’ll see all the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon shows that you’ve recorded that you’ve actually watched because you keep track of that stuff. You actually know the names of the actors. You can recognize sort of trends and things.

**Craig:** Well, Stuart, you should be on children’s TV. I mean, people don’t necessarily know what you look like. But you look exactly like the sort of guy I would be thrilled to have my young child watching a la Blue’s Clues.

**Stuart:** Oh wow. I thought you meant as a child.

**Craig:** No, no. Steve from Blue’s Clues.

**John:** He very much has a Steve from Blue’s Clues quality.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, you look like fun. And you look safe.

**Stuart:** All right. Cool.

**Craig:** And you look nice and kind. And you would be – you should make a show for yourself.

**Stuart:** All right. I’ll take that one to the bank.

**Craig:** Only if you do it. If you don’t do it, now it’s just tragically upset guy.

**Stuart:** If I were a kid that lived in LA, there’s no doubt I would have pressured my parents to getting me on at least in the room for those things.

**John:** Stuart, who is the one kid I see on everything now who has the red hair, who is in the recent version of Wet Hot American Summer, but he was also the pseudo bully kid, but he’s also in Another Period recently? He’s in everything.

**Stuart:** Yeah. And he was on those commercials as the fairy that flies through that room. I don’t know his name, but you’re right that he is on everything now. He’s not really on many kids’ things though.

**John:** No. he’s always the kid in an adults’ thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But that’s sort of – he grows up to be you.

**Stuart:** Yeah. I had a kid when I was a camp counselor who I really liked, but he was like the punk red-headed kid that was in my cabin. He’s that kid, but this generation’s “that kid.”

**Craig:** That kid. Yeah.

**John:** And so I thought that you were going to be leaving about two years ago, also, because when my assistants are working for me they’re always writing stuff, and I never read their stuff until they ask me to read it. And so finally you asked me to read something. And I read it and it was really good.

And it may not have been the very first thing I read that said like, “Oh well, he can really do it,” but like the second thing I was like, oh, that’s really good. I can totally see–

**Craig:** Stuart can do this.

**John:** He can do this. And like you are going to get staffed, and then all this stuff was going to happen. And I remember actually talking with a showrunner who called in sort of doing a background check on you. And I was like, well, he’s totally—

**Stuart:** Oh really? I didn’t know that.

**John:** The MTV show.

**Stuart:** Yeah. I know what you’re talking about. I didn’t know that they called.

**John:** Oh, no, they called.

**Stuart:** I didn’t get the job.

**John:** No, you did not get the job.

**Craig:** What did you say, John?

**John:** I said lovely things about how talented he is.

**Craig:** Stuart should be a character on a child’s show. He appears to be an animated Muppet. Yes. Oh, what is your channel? MTV? Oh, no, no, no, no.

**Stuart:** Glad to hear that that staffing meeting went well, because I thought it went well, and then I was sort of disappointed that I didn’t get the job. But at least if they were calling about me it means I wasn’t crazy.

**John:** I’m sorry that for the last two years I haven’t told you that the meeting went well.

**Craig:** What else have you not told him?

**John:** That’s sort of the bulk of it. So, as Stuart is preparing to leave, I can tell you that there’s a pattern that happens where people’s scripts get passed around without them knowing they get passed around. And so when I started hearing from Stuart that like, oh, someone else read this thing and I didn’t even know they were reading it. When I started hearing those kind of conversations I was like, oh, his clock is ticking. This is all happening here.

And then people come to a point where the number of meetings they have to have and the number of phone calls they have to have is just tremendous. And I was able to sit down with Stuart and say like the most important thing for you to do is to take all these meetings and do all these things. And I need somebody who is here to answer the phones and do stuff. And so we’re at this threshold now. And I’m happy that we’re at this threshold.

And also, you’re–

**Stuart:** A lot of good stuff is happening.

**John:** And you’re getting married.

**Stuart:** Getting married in three weeks.

**Craig:** I’m so excited. I’m going to be there.

**Stuart:** Me too. Yeah. I’m pretty stoked.

**Craig:** Are you going to be there?

**John:** I’m going to be there.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**Stuart:** The all-stars Scriptnotes team.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Is your dad going to be there?

**Stuart:** My dad will be there.

**Craig:** I love Stuart’s dad so much.

**Stuart:** Me too.

**Craig:** Your mom is great.

**Stuart:** Yeah. I love my mom also. It’s her birthday today actually.

**Craig:** But there’s something about your dad. Oh, it is? Happy Birthday, Mrs. Friedel.

**Stuart:** I’ll pass it along.

**John:** Congratulations. Indeed. Stuart’s parents and even grandparents would come to live shows, which I just found remarkable.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** Because live shows can be really filthy. Like, this is a clean episode, but sometimes they’re not clean.

**Stuart:** Yeah. I have a brother who lives out here. And he in the course of my working here has had two babies. And so I’ve been lucky enough to have four grandparents that will come for those things. And those things also seem to coincide with live episodes.

**Craig:** And all of your grandparents are alive?

**Stuart:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Wow. Good genes.

**Stuart:** Yeah, right, it’s kind of crazy.

**Craig:** Is everyone red-headed?

**Stuart:** No one. I’m the only one.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**Stuart:** Back to post – like before my grandparents. I’m the only one.

**Craig:** Then, if the pattern holds, you will also be the only one who dies young.

**Stuart:** There we go.

**Craig:** Congratulations.

**Stuart:** As a statistician, you understand how these patterns and things work.

**Craig:** Absolutely. What I just said was mathematically valid.

**John:** We have questions from listeners and you’re here, so let’s have you answer some of these. Kevin writes, “I wonder, does Stuart – hi Stuart – keep a mental track of the best entries in his opinion in the Three Page Challenge? If so, that could be a great post on your blog, or yearend podcast material.” Stuart, do you keep track of the best entries in Three Page Challenge?

**Stuart:** Well, first of all, hi back Kevin. No I do not. If you’re saying best as in like most professional, I wouldn’t feel comfortable judging these scripts in three pages for that in and of itself. We were talking earlier about the Stuart Special–

**Craig:** Oh, the Stuart Special.

**Stuart:** It’s sort of something that happens–

**John:** Describe the Stuart Special.

**Stuart:** So, what has been deemed the Stuart Special is–

**Craig:** No, it’s the Stuart Special. [laughs]

**Stuart:** Is something happens exciting and then it’s like “two months earlier, six hours earlier,” you know, the flashback. The tease and then the flashback. And I do not go out of my way to purposely pick those. I think what happens is, so we say you can turn in any three pages of your script. Most people – and by most I mean over 99% of people – turn in their first three pages. And in your first three pages, you should hopefully be writing something eye-catching in some sense.

If it were me, I wouldn’t be turning in my first three necessarily. I would be turning in–

**Craig:** Right. I’ve always been surprised by that. I’ve always thought that more people would–

**Stuart:** I think people think it’s a precedent. I think people think like, oh, it’s supposed to always be your first three because they usually pick the first three.

**Craig:** We’ve only done the first three I think, right?

**Stuart:** I think we had one. I think we had one that wasn’t.

**Craig:** One that was in the middle? Okay.

**Stuart:** But, not only have we never said that, but it clearly says it I believe on the submissions page.

**Craig:** For sure.

**Stuart:** At least it has. So I think that people turn in their first three and then a lot of times there’s not something eye-catching there, or just not something to talk about or something exciting.

**Craig:** You mean, so they’re kind of forcing – they rewrite it to create a Stuart Special?

**Stuart:** Or, it’s just that those are the ones that wind up getting picked because those are the ones that have something in it that are not first three page moments. And so even though they are “the first three pages” but there’s something happening that’s actually a third-act or a second-act moment.

**John:** Because they’re actually starting in the middle of some action, so therefore there’s things to discuss that isn’t just like clearly like let’s open up the story.

**Craig:** Right. That makes sense. But you don’t necessarily pick the ones that you think are “the best.” You’re looking for the ones that you think will give us the most to discuss.

**Stuart:** Right. And I should be clear that if you are chosen, you are in like at least the 85th or 90th percentile. I am not picking the ones that are not competent. I am picking ones that are – I don’t think these people should be embarrassed to have their pages exposed. I would never purposely embarrass somebody.

And don’t think – like sometimes I would go on like Reddit Screenwriting or something in the early does of Three Page Challenges and see the way that people were talking about ones that got ripped apart. And I felt really bad because I was like I wanted to reach out to those people and say, “Oh, you were so much better than 75 others that I read at the same time that I read yours that I flagged yours for a reason.”

So, I’m not picking the best ones. The best ones – there’s nothing to talk about. Oh, you want to read good writing, I will tell you what professional screenplays you can read that’s good writing. You know, like it’s the one that if – my goal is we’re teaching a class and we’re going to take out that little slide projector thing that puts some pages on the wall and we are as a class going to go through this together and dissect it.

And what three pages of this pile of 1,500 submissions has something in it that the whole class will benefit from?

**Craig:** That’s the current amount that we have?

**Stuart:** It’s over 1,500. And by the way, since we switched to entering through the web page – it used to be an email submission, and we had however many more even before that.

**Craig:** Oh wow.

**John:** It’s a lot. So, you’re going to miss Three Page Challenges tremendously. You’re going to wake up in the middle of the night going how could I possibly – people will just start sending your Three Page Challenges just so you can enjoy them.

**Stuart:** Yeah. Yeah. I have no doubt. I mean, I’ve gotten that before. Like, I’ve met people at parties and they hear who I am and they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to send you three pages.” Or, “Oh, I sent my three pages. Can you go read them?” And I’m like, “Well, I probably read them.” My answer is, I never say like, “Yeah, I’m going to go home and read it today.” It’s either like I’ve read it, or I will read it, or, you know, and you don’t get special treatment. And–

**Craig:** I’m just, you know, I get very frightened when the reality of the podcast enters my vision, you know, because I like to just think that we’re talking and no one is listening to this. So that story makes me nervous. [laughs] I don’t like it. It’s scary.

**Stuart:** And you guys, and now I’m an old man, I’m settling down and getting married, but in the day when I was going out on Saturday nights and meeting random people–

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**Stuart:** Well, you know, at parties. It’s Los Angeles. Go to Los Angeles parties. Then I’d fairly regularly come across people that were listeners and had entered.

**Craig:** You know what I’m going to ask you now?

**Stuart:** What’s that?

**Craig:** Did it ever?

**John:** Did it help?

**Craig:** Did the whole, “I’m the producer of Scriptnotes,” did that – did it Stuart?

**Stuart:** Uh, it most certainly did not.

**Craig:** I had a feeling. [laughs] It probably does the opposite.

**Stuart:** It’s a conversation starter for certain people, for sure. And, great, I’m happy to talk about it. If you ever see me, I mean, there’s a gentleman who I’ve seen at Village Bakery in Atwater a few times who is really nice and said hi to me. And I was like, cool, I’ve officially been recognized now.

**Craig:** Oh nice.

**Stuart:** First time in my life. And probably only. He’s probably listening to this now.

**Craig:** Until you get your show.

**John:** Till now. Next question is from Andrew in DC who writes, “After a few years of development hell, the $200 million movie is finally being made. Who plays John and who plays Craig in the Scriptnotes movie?” So, Andrew proposes Thomas Middleditch for me. Tony Shalhoub for Craig.

**Craig:** It’s the worst.

**John:** And Douglas Rain for Stuart. And Douglas Rain being the voice of HAL in 2001.

**Stuart:** Great.

**Craig:** This is terrible.

**John:** Terrible question. So who plays you though?

**Craig:** Who plays me?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know. That’s a tough one.

**John:** I could see like Paul Giamatti, but you’re much younger than Paul Giamatti.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. I definitely have the hang-doggy, grumpy, and then vaguely ethnic–

**John:** Steve Zissis could play you.

**Craig:** That’s who I want. I want Steve Zissis to play me. You are not played by–

**John:** I’m not Thomas Middleditch. He hasn’t seen me.

**Craig:** You’re older and you should be, ooh, there’s those actors that look like you.

**John:** So, I’m blanking on his name right now. He’s always the villain in things. He’s always a secondary character.

**Stuart:** Danny Trejo?

**John:** Danny Trejo is really who I should be.

**Craig:** That’s who should play John.

**John:** I’ll think of his name in like five minutes. But he was the villain in Ant-Man.

**Craig:** You know what? When I was a kid, I don’t know if you guys had them where you lived, but we had the commercials for Hebrew National hot dogs. And the mascot for Hebrew National hot dogs was Uncle Sam. And he said we answer to a higher authority. It was like, okay, god is telling us what the…

And that guy is probably dead by now, but in his prime, that’s who you were.

**John:** Sounds very good.

**Stuart:** He may have been, I don’t want to say a One Cool Thing, but I think that – I mean, I’ll find the link again for this episode, but I think we’ve actually linked to that in a previous episode of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** To the Hebrew National guy?

**Stuart:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sweet.

**John:** Corey Stoll is who I was thinking of. Corey Stoll as the Ant-Man villain.

**Stuart:** He’s great.

**Craig:** That works.

**John:** I’ll be Corey Stoll. But who should be Stuart now? Because obviously this person has no idea what you look like.

**Stuart:** Is it just a voice?

**John:** Yeah, I guess you’re just a voice.

**Craig:** No, I mean–

**Stuart:** If it’s just a voice, it’s Billy West, who is my favorite voice actor.

**John:** Is he on Futurama?

**Stuart:** He is on Futurama. And he is on Doug. And he’s on Honey Nut Cheerios commercials. But, if it’s just a voice, I mean, I might as well shoot for the stars.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it shouldn’t be a voice. Obviously we get that kid that we were just talking about.

**Stuart:** That child? That 13?

**John:** Because in the movie version, he is a child.

**Craig:** That child? By the way, the best thing is that Stuart is played by an 11-year-old, but we give him all the dialogue of an adult. And we never comment on the fact that this child is producing our show.

**Stuart:** Louis C.K.’s agent in Louis.

**Craig:** Right.

**Stuart:** I wrote a pilot that I’ve done nothing with called Recessive Genius, about a redhead that wants to be a rapper, and all of his red-headed family members. And so I have a cast list somewhere of all the redheads in Hollywood. We can pull that.

**Craig:** There’s a good amount.

**Stuart:** Yeah, there is. I mean, it’s cast-able. Homeland.

**Craig:** What’s her name?

**Stuart:** Faye Dunaway?

**Craig:** Ron Howard’s daughter.

**Stuart:** Paige. Oh, Bryce Dallas. Sorry.

**Craig:** Bryce Dallas. Bryce Dallas Howard.

**John:** Good stuff. Our final question comes in from Mark in LA. He says, “Have you seen the writing credits for the new film Ghostbusters? I almost fell out of my chair when I saw that Ivan Reitman’s name is listed in the writing credits as Based on the 1984 film Ghostbusters, directed by.” So, let’s talk through sort of what the writing credits are, the writing credits block on the new Ghostbusters, because it is a little bit strange.

So, it says written by Katie Dippold and Paul Feig, based on the 1984 film Ghostbusters directed by Ivan Reitman, written by Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd.

Craig, you are the credits master. Talk us through what’s going on here.

**Craig:** Well, it is very odd. Typically you will have a “Based on” when there is source material. And that’s the company can sort of say, okay, we’ve assigned you a certain amount of material. So, in this case, certainly when Katie and Paul sat down and made their deals to write Ghostbusters, they were assigned everything. So, I guarantee you they were assigned every prior Ghostbusters, the scripts that have been written, like Lee and Gene had done one, and a whole bunch of people, right?

So, all of that was assigned to them. And also Ghostbusters 1 and Ghostbusters 2, the original movies were assigned to them as source material. So, yes, normally what you’d see is it would say “Based on Ghostbusters,” but it doesn’t have to say that, by the way.

I mean, on remakes typically they don’t bother with that. So, in this one they did. And then they added the credits in. So, Mark is not correct. Ivan Reitman’s name is not listed in the writing credits. The credits are actually accurate. He’s the director. And then Dan and Harold are listed as the writers, which is correct.

So when I saw this, I assumed that what happened was Paul Feig and Katie Dippold went to the Guild and said this is something we want to do. Would you grant us a waiver? It would require a waiver. So, the Guild can – because our credits are governed by our contract, right? So any time we want to do a different kind of credit, and the studio wants to do a different kind of credit, the Board of Directors has to vote to grant a waiver. And so I suspect they went, because they wanted to do this, and the Guild said sure.

**John:** To clarify, the based on, that whole section is considered the underlying materials credit. So that’s not the actual writing credit on this movie. That is the source material credit. And does the Guild have like final authority on determining what is the source material for the project?

**Craig:** Yes. So, typically what happens if there’s any dispute about it, then that’s a pre-arbitration and that has to do with the company. But usually it’s pretty well-governed because the contract that we all get is a – we call it a Guild-covered contract. That means the contract is conforming to our collective bargaining agreement. And one of the ways you conform to it is you say I’m assigning you the following material. That now becomes underlying material. So the Guild doesn’t actually have to do after-the-fact choices. It’s just sort of baked in.

But like I said, on remakes – one thing that does happen on a remake is the writers of the original movie actually go in to the arbitration as Writer A, which is an interesting thing. Now, it’s rare that that writer does get credit, because usually on a remake quite a bit changes.

But there have been cases of it. 3:10 to Yuma. And most notably the new – the remake of The Omen. Only the writer of the first movie got credit because essentially they felt that nothing had changed substantially in such a way that another writer should have credit. That’s remarkable. And I don’t know of any other movie like that.

But, so for instance, when Gus Van Sant remakes Psycho word-for-word, the first writer gets credit alone.

**John:** So in the case of the new Ghostbusters, Harold Ramis’ estate and Dan Aykroyd, they are not getting residuals for this new thing because they are not the credited writers on this new movie.

**Craig:** Right. So all of the residuals for this movie will go to Katie and Paul. They will be split in half exactly.

**John:** Because they are ampersand, we should clarify. They are ampersand as a writing team.

**Craig:** Whether they were ampersand or not.

**John:** They’re a single writing credit, yeah.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, if one team, they would share it. If two separates, they would share it. And they are the only ones. It’s possible that Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis had a separate producing kind of thing, but that’s aside from what the Guild does. That’s extra money on top of things.

So, the writing credits are – in terms of who actually wrote the screenplay of the Ghostbusters that’s in theaters now – Katie Dippold and Paul Feig, and that’s it.

**John:** Very good. All right, many people on Twitter this week wrote in talking to us about these six plots. So, essentially what happened is a bunch of researchers at the University of Vermont in Burlington, they used sentiment analysis, which is where you look at strings of words to determine their emotional content. You set algorithms in computers to do all of this.

And they mapped the plot of 1,700 works of fiction. Most of these are novels, but some of them are plays. And so they track the changes of sentiment from moment to moment. And they build these charts of the overall arc of these different works. And from there, they determined there are basically six categories of works.

There are works that have fall, rise, and fall, like Oedipus Rex. There’s rise then a fall. There’s fall then a rise, like a lot of super heroes. There’s the steady fall. There’s the steady rise. There’s a rise, and a fall, and a rise, like Cinderella. So, we’re basically out of business because the computers have figured out that there’s only six plots.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, look. Everyone knows that Romeo and Juliet is a timeless classic and still works to this very day because it has a steady fall.

**John:** Yeah, that’s really–

**Craig:** WTF to the maximum level of WTFs.

**John:** Because there’s no moments of happiness or joy in Romeo and Juliet. There’s no rise, there’s no love, there’s no flash of love.

**Craig:** There’s nothing frankly at all except a steady fall? This is the dumbest of all these things. And many of them are dumb. I love the graph. A stupid graph. And then the fact that these… – This is what happens, unfortunately. I love science. You know, I’m a scientist. But, see, I don’t go into labs and start pressing buttons. And I really wish that scientists would not go into novels and start pressing buttons, because what they’re doing is they’re just engaging in a kind of reductive analysis, which anyone could do.

You could also say that there’s really only one plot: beginning, middle, end.

**Stuart:** Right. There’s arrows. There’s up and down. And in a macro view – we’re not even going to look at the way there’s up-down-up-up-down-down – just in a macro view, look at where the up is, and look at where the down is. There’s only six plots.

**Craig:** And also, why are the ups and downs now how they define plot? That’s not how I define plot at all.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, Nima who works for us, he was pointing out that essentially there were theoretically eight different plots you could find. But they compressed them down because you could theoretically have rise-rise-fall, or rise-fall-fall, but they compress those down to just rise-fall.

So, even in potential plots, they’re just compressing them down.

**Craig:** It’s like trigonometry. Side-angle-side. Side-side-angle. Angle-angle-side. It’s the dumbest. Of all of these, this one truly is the dumbest because it is useless. It’s bad science that provides click-baiters something to say. It teaches you nothing. It informs nothing. It doesn’t inform you as a reader. It doesn’t inform you as a writer. It doesn’t help you think about the world in any way. It is the emptiest of noise.

I hate it.

**John:** [laughs] I knew this would be a simple layup here.

**Craig:** I do always rise to the occasion. I mean, never once will I ever resist umbrage. When you wave a red flag in front of me, I’m going to do what I do. I’m a simple man. Rise-fall-fall.

**John:** All right, so it’s time for our second big announcement on the show, about a huge change that’s happening. Which is something that, Craig, you’ve known about for quite a long time, but I’ve deliberately sort of not said anything about it because it’s one of those things where you tell people that it’s going to happen and then everyone is like, “Ahhhh….” And it makes people sort of nervous.

And so now it’s 30 days away, so it’s time for us to say. I am leaving Los Angeles. I am moving to Paris. And so I’m going to be living in the City of Light. I’m going to be a writer there in Paris.

**Craig:** But not permanently.

**John:** Just for a year. So, for one year, I will be in Paris. And I’ll be living there. So, it’s always been the plan. This is not in reaction to something. I don’t have like insight about what’s–

**Craig:** You’re not fleeing.

**John:** I’m not fleeing. There’s no investigation. I’m not nervous about sort of the – well, I am nervous about the election. It always has been the plan that I’d be gone for the last part of the election.

**Craig:** Well, Europe seems to have managed to screw themselves up even worse than we are.

**John:** Absolutely. And there’s a French election coming, too.

**Craig:** That’ll be brilliant.

**John:** Really genius. And so the plan has been for quite a long time that my family and I are going to be moving to Paris starting in August and going through next August for my daughter’s 6th grade year of school. So, she’s been at a K-5 school. The schools we want to go to start in 7th grade after that. And so for 6th grade we had to do something.

And so a bunch of years ago Film France took a bunch of screenwriters over to Paris and showed us a bunch of locations that they wanted us to film in. So, I was on a trip with Derek Haas, [Unintelligible], and John Lee Hancock. And John Lee Hancock – and Justin Marks – but John Lee said, “You know what? I’m loving this. I’m going to pull my kids out of school and we’re going to live in Paris for a year.”

And I said that’s a great idea. I’m going to steal it right now. And so that’s been the plan for–

**Craig:** But he didn’t do that.

**John:** He never did it.

**Craig:** No. Because I could have told you that John Lee Hancock does not run his household. Holly Hancock, on the other hand–

**John:** Yeah. Holly Hancock is fantastic.

**Craig:** Amazing. And surely said to him, “No.” And that was the end of that discussion.

**John:** But you’ll notice that now they are single parents because their kids are off in boarding school.

**Craig:** Not far from here. So they’re visiting them plenty.

**John:** They’re visiting them plenty. So, anyway, I stole John Lee Hancock’s idea. It’s been the plan for the last five years that we’re going to be moving to Paris. And now it’s finally suddenly here.

And so I want to talk about why you don’t expose that ahead of time, because I didn’t want sort of everybody in Hollywood to know that I was moving because then it’s that weird thing like, well, are you going to hire somebody for a job knowing that they’re not going to be around to deliver the second trip.

**Craig:** Absolutely. This comes up. I remember actually – not to bring everybody down – but I remember having a long talk with my friend Don Rhymer, who was a working screenwriter for many, many years.

**John:** He did the Rio movies.

**Craig:** He did the Rio movies. Exactly. And Surf’s Up. And then he had worked in television for many, many years, like on Evening Shade and other shows like that.

And he got sick. He got cancer. And he was really worried about who do I tell, because I don’t want people to not hire me, because right now I’m happy to work. And he did, by the way, he worked – it was remarkable. His whole cancer odyssey was about four years long and unfortunately did not end successfully. But, the entire time he worked.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And at some point he was unable to keep it from people. But, it’s a real thing. You don’t want people to suddenly put you in the box of, “Oh, you’re moving to Paris. Well that’s like you’re dead.”

**John:** Yeah. Women writers often face this with pregnancy. And so our friend, Dana Fox, who was on the show – I’m not sure quite where it was in her development process – but she had a pregnancy that required her to be on bed rest, and yet she also had a tremendous amount of work to do. And she had writers to meet with.

And so she had to sort of keep the pregnancy a secret from the people she was working with so they wouldn’t freak out about her TV show.

**Craig:** She just pretended to be incredibly lazy?

**John:** I think she’s fine with me telling you. She faked a back injury to sort of explain why she was having to take meetings at her house rather than at the office.

**Craig:** In her bed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I feel like I want to that now, just so I don’t have to get out of bed.

**John:** It’s a really good plan.

**Craig:** It’s amazing.

**John:** It’s an amazing plan. So, obviously we live in 2016 in a time where I can remotely on anything, and so most of what I do is emails anyway. It’s not going to be significantly impacting my ability to do my work. But it is a real change. And even when I was in Chicago doing Big Fish, or New York doing Big Fish, I was always sort of in the country and in the same time zone.

And so a challenge for our show is that we do the show by Skype, and so that’ll be the same. But we’re also on really different clocks.

**Craig:** That’s the problem. So, Paris is 10—

**John:** Depends on what time of year. But, yeah, 10 hours.

**Craig:** Does it go down to nine when we–?

**John:** I think there’s some times where we’re at nine, and sometimes where it can go more.

**Craig:** Based on Daylight Savings. So, that’s a terrible time split.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** It’s nearly flipping AM/PM. So, it’s always going to be one of us either too early or too late. But I’m happy to take the late shift by the way. That’s my jam. I don’t like getting up.

And then the nice thing is, you’re right, we could be on different planets the way we do the podcast normally. But, you know, we have some plans to – that I don’t think will disrupt your… – I mean, I’d like to think because – not because we care about our listeners but because we’re just the way we are—

**John:** We are the way we are.

**Craig:** We deliver a consistent product.

**John:** Agreed. And so you’ve done episodes without me. Like the Alec Berg episode you did, which was terrific. And so there’s already a plan for a solo one that you’re going to be doing very soon. There are writers in the UK and in France who I may be talking with in doing some solo things, too.

We’ll find ways to make it work. You don’t listen to any other podcasts, but if you did, you would know that some of them actually go to like a season format where they’re off a few weeks, and then they’re on for a bunch of weeks. So, Serial does that. And other shows do that. I don’t think we’re going to go quite that far, but there may be some weeks where we’re doing a best-of, or we’re just off. And we’ll let you know if that happens. But I think we’ll be able to keep up sort of like a normal schedule.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think so. Certainly we’ll have plenty to discuss. I’m not freaked out about it completely. I’m freaked out like 78%. You know, because I’m your child. Daddy is leaving.

**John:** And Stuart is leaving. So it’s a lot of change.

**Craig:** But I never believed Stuart was really real. So, that’s not a problem for me at all.

**John:** Matthew though is staying put. Matthew is still editing our show.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** Matthew, you’re listening to this right now. Please – please stay.

**Craig:** Good. Okay.

**John:** The other sort of big change and sort of big bit of news is this next year I’ll be doing a lot less screenwriting because I sold a book. I sold a series of three books, which is very exciting.

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** So, this next week, sometime they’re going to announce it. By the time you’re hearing this podcast, it may already be announced. But we’re recording this on Thursday, so I couldn’t be sure that the news is going to be out there. But back when we were at Austin Film Festival and you remember this last year there were those horrible storms and everything. And Melissa was there and my husband Mike was there.

I was talking on the phone with this novelist who had written this middle-grade fiction book that was really good. And we were talking about whether I would adapt his book. We had a great conversation and I asked him a lot about sort of the history of the book and sort of the history of writing and sort of stuff, and over the course of this hour-long conversation I realized like I really don’t want to adapt this book, but I think I kind of want to write a book like this.

I don’t want to be the guy who gets sent all these adaptations, but actually the guy who like writes the original book. And so that was October 30. And then November 1, start of NaNoWriMo, I just sat down and I started writing the book.

**Craig:** So this is the one that came out of NaNo – I’m not going to say that word, because I hate it. Hate it. It’s a nonsense word. It’s nonsense. This is the one that came out of the National Book-writing Month?

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** Fantastic. You may be the only person that has ever made a dollar. I’m a terrible person. I’m a bad guy.

**John:** That’s fine. You’re not bad at all.

**Craig:** No, I’m bad.

**John:** So for people that don’t know NaNoWriMo at all, we actually mentioned it on the air that I was thinking about doing it, and then I did it. It’s this idea where you write every day in November and you can build up to a full book by the end of November. And I didn’t write the entire book then, but I wrote enough of it that like, oh, this feels like the outline of this book.

And so it’s middle-grade fiction. It’s the same genre in general as a Harry Potter or Percy Jackson. It’s very much sort of my childhood and sort of pushed into a fantasy realm. And it was just a delight to write. It was a delight to write fiction. You’ve written some fiction over the years.

**Craig:** Yeah, not much. I mean, honestly, I’m still deeply on the hamster wheel of screenwriting.

**Stuart:** Popcorn Fiction.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, no, I’ve done it. And I have a little secret novel that I work on every now and again that, you know, is mostly for me. But, yeah, no, I can’t tell if I’m envious of you or not. I think I am. Because I’m currently on a – it’s a hamster wheel.

**John:** So, what’s interesting is we obviously know a lot about how screenwriting works. We know how the screenwriting industry works. We know about Hollywood.

And when I went off and did the Broadway show, I got to learn how all that works. And you recognize: these are things that are the same, these are the things that are very different. These are the gatekeepers. This is the process. And with the book, I got to learn all that again. And I’m still learning it now. So I’m just taking a lot of notes as I sort of see it. But, I’d written this first third of this book, I’d written the proposal for the rest of it. You show it to your agent. Your agent shows it to another agent. You find a really good book agent. You’re very lucky that she says yes.

And then you go out with it, and it’s very much like going out with a spec script. But rather than going to studios, you’re going to the big publishing houses. And there’s this whole conversation about which editor at which house is the right one. And all these discussions and debates.

And then you make your top choices. You go out. And I was very lucky that the place we wanted to do it said yes.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** And bought it up and bought it for three books.

**Craig:** And that’s Hustler? Hustler Press?

**John:** Hustler Press, yes. That’s what it is.

**Craig:** Got it. Good. Good label.

**John:** Raunchy middle-grade fiction – it’s really – that’s the future there.

**Craig:** Well, they put a lot into marketing.

**John:** They do. So, anyway, I’ll have more to say in the coming weeks about it, and I’ll have stuff on the blog, and there will probably be a second site that’s geared more towards the people who would ultimately be reading this book.

It’s weird writing something that is not sort of for my age to read. It’s a strange thing, too. But I’m really looking forward to all of it.

**Craig:** Well, that sounds fantastic. And since I have, you know, our daughters are essentially the same age, so I’m sure that my daughter will be reading. In fact, she can be one of your beta readers.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Or even gamma reader. Is that–?

**John:** Alpha.

**Craig:** Oh that’s right. It goes–

**Stuart:** There’s an alpha bed.

**Craig:** Right, so gamma would be like, oh my god, we’re almost about to–

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a whole thing called Advanced Reader Copies Arcs that you send out ahead of time. And our mutual colleague, Geoff Rodkey, is a writer and he’s been incredibly helpful sort of in those initial conversations about like what do I even do. What is the process here?

And so I’ll be trying to sort of keep track of the process. And I may end up doing a second podcast that is just like a six-episode leading up to the book to sort of show this is how you actually do it.

**Craig:** I don’t have to do anything for that?

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Because then I can just – now I can stop paying attention to that.

**John:** You can not even listen to it.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. What were you saying? [laughs]

**John:** That would be the most Craig thing you could do.

**Craig:** Got to be me.

**John:** The last and most crucial thing we need to do today–

**Craig:** This is the big one.

**John:** This is the big one.

**Craig:** You thought that all that stuff was big.

**John:** That’s all–

**Craig:** Jettisoning Stuart. Moving to France. Writing a book. None of that matters.

**John:** Yeah. So some of you listening to the show may go like, well, without Stuart, like what’s going to be here. Or should I polish up my resume because Stuart’s job is now open?

And so we need to hire somebody. Maybe there’s going to be a giant competition, where we’re going to ask our listeners to send in stuff.

**Craig:** That sounds great, John. Let’s do that.

**Stuart:** The best Three Page Challenge gets picked.

**John:** Becomes my new assistant and becomes the producer of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** What a great idea.

**John:** It’s a great idea.

**Craig:** Or, no.

**John:** No. Or actually no. But I think we are going to do something very different. And we sort of hid Stuart away for five years, our new producer is not going to be hidden away anymore. It is time for us to actually introduce our new producer of Scriptnotes. We’d like to welcome Godwin Jabangwe.

**Godwin Jabangwe:** Hi.

**John:** That’s Godwin Jabangwe!

**Craig:** That’s perfect.

**John:** That’s fantastic. Godwin, you are my new assistant. You are the new producer of Scriptnotes. Have you listened to the show ever?

**Godwin:** Yes. I have. And I love it, obviously.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Godwin:** And I’m really, really excited to be here and to be playing a part in this.

**Craig:** Well, I already like him better than Stuart.

**Stuart:** Great, thank you.

**Craig:** But that’s not saying much.

**Stuart:** The bar is low.

**John:** Godwin, some backstory, you are currently at UCLA. You are studying screenwriting?

**Godwin:** Yes, I am. I just finished my first year. I am going into my second and final year at UCLA. Go Bruins. And I just have to throw that in.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Godwin:** And, yeah, I love it. I am excited. I’m from Zimbabwe, so this is like a big deal for me.

**John:** So you were born and raised in Zimbabwe, and from Zimbabwe you went to–?

**Godwin:** I went to a small college in Michigan where I got my undergrad in film production. And then I applied to UCLA and somehow they said yes. So, yeah.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, they obviously saw what – I feel like whatever we saw in him, and really it’s John. I mean, that’s the truth. John, no big surprise, did all the work here. Obviously.

**Stuart:** Hiring his own assistant.

**Craig:** I would have also picked you. I would have done it quicker. I would have done it with much less drama. But, no, of course, they saw in you whatever John saw in you. It’s exciting. And I believe that we know your instructors at least are the Wibberleys.

**Godwin:** The Wibberleys. I took a class with them last quarter. And they are fantastic. If they’re listening, hey.

**John:** So, the Wibberleys are married screenwriters. They worked on – they did the National Treasure movies. They also worked on the second Charlie’s Angels movie. I met them because they rewrote me on the second Charlie’s Angels movie. And the very first time we had a phone call, the very first time I actually met them in person, was at the Charlie’s Angels premiere. They were seated behind me. And so we just talked.

And they were so cool. And they’ve been great. So, when it became clear that Stuart was leaving, I did put out some small feelers, both to Stark Program which is where I’ve always gotten my assistants, but also to other folks. And the Wibberleys raved about Godwin and they were correct.

**Craig:** So, not a Stark guy.

**John:** Not a Starky. First non-Starky.

**Craig:** Good. Let’s break that tradition.

**John:** Let’s break that mold, yeah. So, I was able to meet with five fantastic candidates. And there are just remarkably talented people out there. And gave them different assignments than what Stuart had, but a chance to sort of talk through their work, to sort of see how their brains worked. And it’s been a pleasure to have Godwin be part of this.

**Craig:** So how does this work with Godwin being a student and also doing this job? Tell us how that’s going to- or one of you can tell us.

**Godwin:** Well, it will be a lot of work. But it’ll be fun work, because what I am hoping to learn and pick up is what I’ll be applying to my schooling. You know, the writing program at UCLA is intense and it’s a lot of work, but I’ve been doing this for a while and I know that I am not – I’m not here to play, either in school or at work. So, it’ll be a fun challenge.

**John:** Stuart, any advice for?

**Stuart:** Your classes are at night, right?

**Godwin:** Yes. I mostly take my classes at night.

**Stuart:** I mean, honestly, I think you will find, especially with John away, that this is like – sometimes you get detention in high school and it’s a blessing because you get all your homework done. I think you’re going to find that your life is actually kind of a little easier. You’re getting up. You’re going into an office. And you’re just going to do the work that you are going to be doing.

**Craig:** That’s another good point. So, you’re going to be John’s assistant, but John is going to be in France.

**John:** Yeah. So one of the things I had to warn him about, all the applicants before they even applied, saying like we’re going to be starting work at 7am LA time, so that we have some overlap of hours.

**Godwin:** Yeah. So, but–

**Craig:** Oh man.

**Godwin:** I wake up early anyway. So I’ll be fine. I can handle it.

**Craig:** All right. I wouldn’t have taken this job.

**John:** No, clearly.

**Craig:** I mean, 7am.

**John:** It’s early. You’ve seen 7am, but usually on the other side of 7am.

**Craig:** No. I’ll tell you, this is why – I love production, but the worst part of production is waking up.

**Stuart:** Oh god.

**Craig:** I hate it. I hate it so much.

**John:** For me, the worst part of production is when you’ve done a night shoot, and you’ve done all night, and then you’re racing to finish night shots before the sun comes up. And when you’re cursing the sun for rising, that’s a bad sign.

And then you’re driving home against rush hour traffic. That was Go. And I will never write a movie that’s mostly shot at night again.

**Craig:** I love shooting nights. Oh my god.

**John:** I love how quiet it is. But then I hate the end of it.

**Craig:** So great. I love it. I just love being – because now, yeah, the world has gotten out of your way. There’s just something, I don’t know, calmer at night. But I got a lot of mental problems.

Godwin, I’m very excited. And now as the producer of Scriptnotes, maybe you could finally explain to me what the producer of Scriptnotes does. Because I don’t know.

**Stuart:** I would love to hear this.

**Godwin:** I’m looking at Stuart like help me out here. I think creating the transcripts of the show. Making sure that everything is right with each episode. Making sure that it’s uploaded to the website. That it is shared on Facebook. You know, just bringing it to the people.

**John:** I always forget that Stuart actually has to manually share it on Facebook.

**Stuart:** Yeah. I think, honestly, I think that the credit I’ve been given is a little generous at times. At the same time, I think that there’s probably a lot of little things that you guys don’t even realize I’m doing to help the machine stay well-oiled.

**Craig:** I didn’t realize you were doing anything. So, it all goes under the folder of “What does Stuart do?”

**Stuart:** Yeah. And sometimes I – when I talk to my dad about it I say like, it wasn’t something specific, but we’ll have a conversation at lunch, and then next week that conversation is the fodder for what becomes the episode. As simple as that.

**Craig:** Well, you know, Stuart, I like to tease you, because you’re adorable.

**Stuart:** Well, thanks.

**Craig:** But you’ve done a spectacular job. And I know it’s a lot of work, because I know I’m not doing it. So, we’re going to miss you.

**John:** We will both miss you very much. You’ve done a fantastic job.

**Stuart:** Thanks guys.

**Craig:** You have big ginger shoes for Godwin to step into.

**Godwin:** Yes.

**Stuart:** Get ready.

**Godwin:** I’m looking forward to it.

**Craig:** But you will be available, I assume, as a resource if he calls you?

**Stuart:** Well, let’s put it this way, if you ever need me, feel free to email me. I will reply to you as quickly as I can. I hope to be too busy to be [unintelligible] very quickly.

**John:** Yeah, we’re being cagey about sort of what he’s heading off to do. But I think it’s going to be a big, noteworthy announcement.

**Craig:** It’s not war?

**John:** It’s not war.

**Stuart:** It’s as much war as waking up at 7am for production is war. Hopefully. We’ll see. Knock on wood things continue to go well.

**Craig:** I like this. This is exciting. Perhaps one day Stuart will be our guest.

**John:** Oh, that would be very exciting, to announce the launch of a certain project.

**Craig:** Oh!

**John:** That could be good.

**Stuart:** I’m coming back.

**Craig:** That’s right. It’s like coming back to host Saturday Night Live.

**Stuart:** Yeah. Like graduating, you come back to your old college.

**John:** See all the people who are still there, yeah.

**Craig:** I love it.

**Godwin:** So, one thing, you guys were talking about who should play Stuart. Justin Timberlake.

**Craig:** Kinda, yeah. Actually, I kind of get it.

**Stuart:** One of my first days here, John’s daughter told me I looked like Phillip Phillips, who I had never heard of at the time. And I looked him up and I look nothing like this person. And I’m the worst singer in the history of the world. And now I’m apparently being compared to another very good singer, who is significantly better looking than I could ever dream to be.

**Craig:** I would love to hear you sing.

**Stuart:** Oh, well, you know, if you guys stick around for 150 episodes, I’ll take out my guitar, and then we’ll delete it before we put it in.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. Mine is actually a recommendation from Aline Brosh McKenna, who is our favorite sort of go-to guest. She recommended this podcast called My Dad Wrote a Porno. And what it is is these three guys, three British people, one of whose father was trying to be Fifty Shades of Grey, but he’s like a 60-year-old man trying to write erotic fiction.

**Craig:** Oh no.

**John:** So they read aloud the chapters and it is sort of half commentary while they’re reading it. It’s just delightful.

**Stuart:** That’s fabulous.

**John:** It’s fantastic. So, the book that they’re reading is called Belinda Blinked.

**Craig:** Belinda Blinked?

**John:** It’s just remarkable. So there will be a link in the show notes to My Dad Wrote a Porno.

**Craig:** Wow. Awesome. My One Cool Thing is a little bizarre, but you know I talked before about how I think that this is not real and that in fact what we think of as reality is a computer simulation. And there are a lot of very fancy physicists who have put this theory forward.

And one of the arguments for it goes like this: if we can create – eventually we’ll be able to create a simulation in which the people in the simulation don’t know that they’re in a simulation and they are fully intelligent. And if that’s the case, what are the odds that some other civilization like us hasn’t existed and made us that?

Okay, so an interesting argument has emerged against this. And the argument basically boils down to pi, the irrational number. Because pi never ends. And the argument is if we’re in a simulation, the simulation must be finite because it is created. If it is finite, you can’t have a number that never ends.

And I think we now have a computer that has calculate pi to the three-trillionth digit, with no repetition of pattern, and no suddenly a trailing bunch of twos. Basically, think of pi as like Truman in the Truman Show sailing on that water. But he never gets to the wall.

So, it’s possible that this might – I’m now saying this is a chance this is real. It’s a slim, slim chance.

**John:** But the counter-argument would be that there’s some programming that’s happening that’s making us believe that pi is incalculable. Essentially, Nima, our coder, says that’s absolutely true.

**Craig:** That we are essentially being manipulated in this. But what a bizarre and pointless manipulation. Or is the point of the manipulation to make us think that it’s real? This is the great trick.

**John:** Exactly. That’s the great trick. The greatest trick the devil ever played.

**Craig:** Okay, so then whoever is listening now above us, and watching our simulation, must be concerned that we’re onto them.

**John:** What if this is actually the last episode of Scriptnotes?

**Craig:** Or the last episode of existence.

**John:** That, too. Both are tragedies.

**Craig:** Wow, man. One Cool Thing.

**John:** We’re going to give Stuart the last word, so Godwin, why don’t you give us your One Cool Thing.

**Godwin:** My One Cool Thing is something that is happening in Zimbabwe. We have this incredibly brave one man who has stood up and started what can be called the Zimbabwean Spring. And so you should check out the hashtag called #ThisFlag and see how people are finally speaking up in Zimbabwe and it’s about time.

So, I’m really thrilled about that.

**Craig:** What is the man’s name?

**Godwin:** His name is Pastor Evan Mawarire. And so—

**John:** Say that back three times.

**Craig:** Well, I knew about Morgan Tsvangirai.

**Godwin:** Tsvangirai. He was an opposition leader. This guy is not a politician. He is not starting a party.

**Craig:** He’s a religious man?

**Godwin:** He is just getting the people to get up and—

**Craig:** Robert Mugabe cannot leave soon enough from this earth as far as I’m concerned. Well, we will definitely check that out. That’s excellent.

**Godwin:** You should.

**John:** So, the hashtag is #ThisFlag?

**Godwin:** #ThisFlag.

**John:** Great. Stuart Friedel?

**Stuart:** Thanks for making me look petty.

**Craig:** So, his was that entire nation. Mine was about the nature of reality. And tell us, Stuart, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Stuart:** Right before we started recording, John said like do you have a One Cool Thing? And my response was it’s 260 episodes. I’ve had over 260 One Cool Things. I just haven’t been able to say any of them. And in the time that I’ve worked here I think I’ve introduced John to some things that I’m proud to have introduced him to, like Nathan for You, and the iced tea that we drink in this office.

But there is one thing that I’m perhaps most proud to have introduced him to. And it is my One Cool Thing. And I’m going to pitch it to you, to all of our – I think it’s going to be helpful to our listeners as well. And that thing is specifically the chicken kabobs at Fiddler’s Bistro on Third Street, right near the Grove. And here’s my pitch.

**Craig:** That’s right up there with #ThisFlag.

**Stuart:** Right. Exactly. So, you’ve probably all seen Fiddler’s Bistro. Like you drive down Third Street. It’s just sort of there. It’s unremarkable. It’s just a sign. It’s just there. It’s near the Grove. It’s next to 7-11.

**John:** It’s part of a motel complex, right?

**Stuart:** Part of a motel. It’s the bistro in a motel. Exactly. And I remember once a few months ago, or I guess a few years ago, you and Mike made a joke that I had heard before that’s like, “Whoever goes to Fiddler’s Bistro?” And I was like, ah-ha, I have. And it’s awesome.

It is right near the Grove. I hate the Grove. I absolutely hate the Grove. And my least favorite part about the Grove is parking there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s terrible.

**Stuart:** So, if you go to Fiddler’s Bistro, there is parking on the street. There’s also a little lot and there’s parking right around the corner, so you can park there if you’re going right before the Grove and then walk to the Grove. Leave your car there. Easy.

But the best part are these chicken kabobs. So you get there, you walk in, it is unpretentious. There are a lot of restaurants in Los Angeles that look really fancy and pretentious and their food is not very good. Fiddler’s Bistro is the exact opposite of that.

It caters this motel, so they have everything on the menu – breakfast all day. But, there’s one section that is differentiated, that sticks out, and that’s the kabobs section. And there’s a reason for it. Their chicken kabobs are out of this world.

So, you sit down. First thing they give you is warm bread with this roasted red pepper dip that is fantastic. And then the chicken kabobs. Simple marinated chicken that is so succulent and delicious. You have no idea.

**Craig:** This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard.

**Stuart:** Some of the best hummus you have ever had. Really good pickled beets. Great rice. Peppers. Onions. Pita bread. Absolutely delicious. If you live at Park La Brea, you’ve probably seen it 500 times. You never thought to walk in. It fabulous. And if you read the reviews online, you’ll see that it’s either five-star or like two-star. The five-star reviews are all from people that either got the kabobs or this chicken couscous soup that I’ve never tried, but now I have to try.

And the two/three-star reviews are all from people that were staying at the motel that just got regular food and were not terribly impressed. But the chicken kabobs at Fiddler’s Bistro. My One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** My mind is blown right now by the – I love – I’ve never seen you this enthusiastic about anything.

**Stuart:** Find something I love, and I—

**Craig:** Turns out the answer was chicken.

**John:** Chicken kabobs at one place. So, Stuart brought in the kabobs from there this week. And the hummus was wrong. And there was no red pepper sauce.

**Stuart:** And the credit card machine wasn’t working. But first time in seven years that I’ve been there that there has been any sort of blip.

**John:** Everything is falling apart.

**Stuart:** Now that I’m leaving. Such a forgivable blip, though.

**Craig:** But how were the chicken kabobs, John?

**John:** They were fine. But without the red pepper sauce, it’s just not the same. The red pepper sauce is what sort of pushes them over the edge to me.

**Stuart:** Well, John had this idea that in all my years of going there, I first was introduced to this place by a friend of mine from Stark. Matty C. Matt Conrad, if you’re out there, hi Matt. And Matt lived near me.

**Craig:** He’s doing shout-outs now. This is unbelievable.

**John:** I just love that. He’ll be like turn down the radio while I’m talking on the phone.

**Craig:** When did we become the Morning Zoo?

**Stuart:** Five years. Five years! Five years!

So, Matt was like, oh, we got to try Fiddler’s Bistro. And I was like, “That place I’ve walked by a thousand times? Why would I go there?” It’s a perfect place to like sit back, relax, and write.

This red pepper sauce is what like – the second they brought that out, I knew I was somewhere special. And when I brought it here the first time for work, John saved some. And the next day I came in and was like, “I use that on my eggs.” And that is a game-changer.

**Craig:** Oh, the red pepper sauce on the eggs?

**John:** That’s how you do it.

**Stuart:** Get it to go. Save some of the extra. Use it on eggs the next day.

**Craig:** I’m just—

**John:** You’ve learned so much.

**Craig:** I’m happy. But, that was pretty great, actually. I got to say.

**Stuart:** Oh great, good.

**Craig:** You delivered.

**Stuart:** Thank you.

**John:** Well done. That is our season finale, but we’ll be back next week with the start of the new season.

**Craig:** Which is the most ridiculous thing. I’m going to miss Stuart.

**John:** I’ll miss Stuart, too.

**Stuart:** Thank you guys for five fabulous years. I mean, all I’m doing is pushing buttons. You guys are the—

**Craig:** Yeah, but we love you.

**John:** You’re the only one here getting paid, so.

**Craig:** Exactly. That’s not true. I know you are. I know you are, John. I know it. I know it.

**John:** At some point there will be forensic accounting and you’ll see all the millions that we’re raking in.

**Stuart:** We’ll show you the numbers. You’ll have a good laugh.

**John:** The other person getting paid is Matthew Chilelli who edits our show. Thank you, Matthew. And our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro for us, you can write in to ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and Godwin Jabangwe. And, yes, we did pick him because he had a good NPR-sounding name. It’s just a fantastic—

**Craig:** That was the only reason?

**John:** It’s a reason. Not the only reason.

**Godwin:** It’s funny you say that, because I have been writing like tweets to NPR for years saying I have the perfect name for NPR. It’s paying off.

**Craig:** It’s finally paying off.

**John:** It’s finally paying off.

**Craig:** Godwin Jabangwe reports.

**Stuart:** Close enough. It is so phonaesthetically pleasing. It’s like Cellar Door. Godwin Jabangwe just flows so – it’s like Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Texas. You know that song by Mountain Goats?

**John:** No.

**Stuart:** It just flows. Like your tongue is in exactly the right place for the next syllable.

**Craig:** Godwin Jabangwe. You’re right. It’s like typing the word point.

**John:** I’ve been looking forward to it all week to be able to say it.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Guys, thank you very much, and thank you to our listeners for five years. That’s just crazy and remarkable this has been going on for five years. And we look forward to what happens in the next couple years. See you.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Girl Gone Overboard](https://vimeo.com/174427174), cut by Fredrik Limi
* [Stuart Friedel](https://twitter.com/stuartfriedel) on Twitter
* [The Peter Stark Program](https://cinema.usc.edu/producing/)
* [Matt Byrne](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4791766/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1), [Chad Creasey](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1548657/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1), [Dana Fox](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1401416/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1) and [Rawson Thurber](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1098493/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1)
* [Thomas Barbusca](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4564958/?ref_=tt_cl_t13)
* [The Three Page Challenge](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Steve Zissis](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1587813/?ref_=nv_sr_1) and [Corey Stoll](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1015684/)
* One of John’s doppelgängers [as Hebrew National’s Uncle Sam](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf2j-YzZRAA)
* [Ghostbusters (2016)](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1289401/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm) credits on IMDb
* Gizmodo on [The Six Plots](http://gizmodo.com/data-analysis-suggests-there-exist-only-six-book-plots-1783263768)
* [NaNoWriMo](http://nanowrimo.org/)
* [Godwin Jabangwe](https://twitter.com/itaizhou) on Twitter
* [The Wibberleys at UCLA TFT](http://www.tft.ucla.edu/2015/02/the-wibberlys/)
* [My Dad Wrote a Porno](https://overcast.fm/+FQ0rlFek8)
* [Do irrational numbers like pi disprove humanity being a simulation?](https://www.quora.com/Do-irrational-numbers-like-pi-disprove-humanity-being-a-simulation) on Quora
* [Pastor Evan Mawarire](https://twitter.com/pastorevanlive) on Twitter, and [#ThisFlag](https://twitter.com/hashtag/thisflag)
* Fiddler’s Bistro [chicken kabobs](https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/fiddlers-bistro-los-angeles?select=O5lDBWpGnHsPoGEcP69Qxw) and [red pepper dip](https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/fiddlers-bistro-los-angeles?select=0ASoVfJyY3ahUW_S2p3Uwg)
* The phonaesthetically beautiful [cellar door](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellar_door) and [The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IsXKMkDAMQ)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_259.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/flaws-are-features).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 257 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be looking at unforgettable villains, screenwriter billions, and something else that rhymes with illians/illions. Maybe we’ll find a good rhyme for illions.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s the Nathan Fillions. All the Fillions.

**John:** All the Nathan Fillions. Done.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig Mazin for the rescue. We’re also going to be answering a bunch of listener questions, so it’s going to be a packed episode, but sort of a hodgepodge. There’s no central unifying theme.

**Craig:** Good. Because as we know, that’s a terrible thing for drama.

**John:** It’s absolutely the worst. I think you should have a bunch of disparate elements that don’t really add up to anything. That’s the sign of a quality piece of entertainment that’s working at its very best.

**Craig:** Wouldn’t it be great if that were in fact the opening salvo of Aaron Sorkin’s thing online? Where he just suddenly goes for everything. His master plan is to ruin all screenwriting forever. [laughs] Because everybody will listen.

**John:** That would be fantastic. You have to throw in as many things as possible and don’t pay anything off.

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** Ever. That’s the kind of advice I was giving this last week up at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. I was up on a mountain in Utah, talking with a bunch of writers, directors, and writer-directors about their projects. And it was really good. This was the 12th, or 13th, or 14th time I’ve done this. But there were really good projects this year, and a bunch of movies I’m excited to see get made.

So, the process for people who’ve never heard about the Sundance Labs, is a bunch of people apply to be part of it, or they’ve been sort of recruited by Sundance to come up there. And we spend a good week looking at their projects. We have individual meetings. Andrea Berloff from Scriptnotes fame was there with me.

And so you’re sitting down with them, talking about their projects, and sort of what they are trying to do and trying to help them get their scripts into the best possible shape. And it was so great because the kinds of projects that go through Sundance Labs are not big Hollywood studio features. They’re generally very specific, unique things that you couldn’t imagine existing anywhere else. So, it was a very good, fun time.

**Craig:** That sounds great. One of these days. One of these — I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but I was supposed to go one year, but I ended up having to cancel because we were shooting. One of the Hangover movies. And then nobody ever called me again. [laughs]

It was like you don’t cancel on Sundance, Buck-O.

**John:** Yeah. So I actually spoke to Michele Satter, who runs the program, about you and about that. And so I think I’ve gotten you back on the list.

**Craig:** Was she like, “Yeah that’s right. He canceled on us. And you don’t cancel on — ”

**John:** Dead to me.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. And I did before I was invited to go up, I did have lunch with her. She’s delightful.

**John:** She’s the best. So I think part of the pact of getting you back into the Sundance fold is that I did maybe promise that at some point we would do a live show benefit for the Sundance Institute. And so at some point in the years to come we will be held to do some sort of live show for them. Which could be great, because I feel like we don’t talk a lot about indie film. We’ve had some indie filmmakers on here, but I think a live show focusing on that could be fantastic.

**Craig:** Let’s do it tomorrow.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Everyone just write in, or just show up. Just show up wherever you want to show up. Just show up at Sundance and we’ll be there.

**Craig:** Exactly. We could do a very good show, even if we limited our guests to graduates of that program. Like Mari Heller came out of that program.

**John:** Oh my god, of course. Yeah. There are really fantastic writers, directors. Quentin Tarantino, to name somebody.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Lena Dunham was up there with a project. That’s where I first got to really know her.

**Craig:** We should get Lena Dunham on the show.

**John:** She’s fantastic.

**Craig:** I say that like we never even thought about it. Obviously she would do it if we — like, hey, come on.

**John:** Come on. So, Lena Dunham will every once and a while email me back when I email her, but she’s kind of busy running a TV show, and writing a book, and a blog, and a newsletter. So, there’s a lot that he’s doing.

**Craig:** In my mind, that turned into you emailing her every day.

**John:** I do. [laughs] Lena, Lena, please email me back.

**Craig:** No, you don’t even acknowledge. Just every day you’re like, “Hi Lena, so here’s what’s going on. Here’s something funny that happened.” And then like, I don’t know, twice a year she writes back and she’s like, “Ha-ha.”

**John:** Yep. Totally delightful.

**Craig:** Or, “Funny!”

**John:** The reason why I know that is so specifically true for your experience, is because there’s going to be people in your life who are just that same way. And you can be frustrated by that, but you can also just acknowledge that like, hey, that’s an incredibly busy famous person. And that’s fine.

**Craig:** I’m trying to not email famous people.

**John:** I text famous people more than I email them.

**Craig:** You know, by the way, if you ever do want to get in touch with Melissa McCarthy, text her. I have tried calling. I have tried emailing. She will not — I mean, forget it.

**John:** She won’t email me back. But Ben Falcone will. And so like I will tweet to Ben Falcone, or email, or I’ll CC Ben on an email, and he’ll answer back sometimes.

**Craig:** Ben sometimes just is at my house when I wake up.

**John:** That’s really — that’s the best thing about him. Because it’s sort of like a jarring presence, when you first open your eyes.

**Craig:** Very.

**John:** But then, no, it’s fine. Because he has that improv background, so he can sense what you’re feeling, and he’ll just go with it.

**Craig:** He’s perched on me like that famous gothic painting, of the little demon. And when I wake up, and Ben Falcone is perched on me, and looking down at me with his mustache.

**John:** Well, Falcone/Falcon. It all makes sense. It all adds up. It’s an Edgar Allan Poe-y kind of thing. Let’s get to our follow-up.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Aaron Sorkin’s masterclass, you brought it up, but John from Quebec wrote in to say, “This is the best bang for your buck around, at least for writing — forget tennis and singing. I did the James Patterson masterclass and I can tell you it’s really polished and professional. And includes the A-Z of writing a novel in video segments, a course book, an outline of Patterson’s novels, a class forum, permanent access to the masterclass, and various feedback classes from the author where you can submit log lines, etc. And is all ongoing. Really complete and interactive.”

So, that’s John’s experience with James Patterson’s class. Or, is it James Patterson writing in to tell you how good his class is?

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s possible that James Patterson uses a sock puppet, John from Quebec. But I tend to think that this is true. How could it not be the best bang for your buck considering that they’re charging $90, and everything else anyone charges money for stinks?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, talked about damned by faint praise. But I do think that this is going to be a valuable — it seems like it’s going to work. It’s Aaron Sorkin, for god’s sakes.

**John:** So, John is the only person who wrote in about his experience with this program overall. And I guess not with Sorkin’s thing in specifics. If you are a listener who bites the bullet and tries the $90 once it’s available, let us know what you thought. Because, Craig is never going to do it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Craig doesn’t do anything.

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** Also on last week’s show, we talked about Anagnorisis. And Gabe in Southampton, England wrote in. Craig, what did he say?

**Craig:** He said, “Listening to your talk on Anagnorisis in Episode 256, I was quietly amazed that you hadn’t heard of it. My tutor,” hmm, “made a big deal of it. And used a great example in Greg Kinnear’s father character in Little Miss Sunshine when he dances alongside his daughter. Every film teacher I’ve had has made a bit of a deal about how American’s are great at story, and Brits are great at character. Which they also attributed to why US films sell across the world, whilst British films are more intricate.”

I am so getting so angry here.

“Do you think this is why you hadn’t really heard of Anagnorisis before? Is scriptwriting taught differently around the world?”

John, please, tell me your honest reaction to Gabe’s inquiry?

**John:** All right, I was a little bit offended at the end, but mostly I want to reassure him and our other listeners that no one is talking about Anagnorisis on a general basis. So, I was up at Sundance this last week and after a screening of — I think Tiger Williams showed a clip from Se7en. And at the end of Se7en as we all know there is a head in the box. And when Brad Pitt realizes what must be in the box, that is a moment of Anagnorisis. We realize that Kevin Spacey’s character has done this thing and that everything is different than you thought.

And so I said that like, oh, we actually just talked about that on the podcast and it’s called Anagnorisis. And no one there knew what that word meant. So, it’s great that Gabe’s tutor —

**Craig:** Tutor.

**John:** Uses that term.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But I would say that you should not feel that your screenwriting career was uninformed or that every screenwriter talks about Anagnorisis or that all the British screenwriters talk about Anagnorisis. I just think it’s a think that this one person brought up that other people don’t bring up.

**Craig:** Yeah. Maybe this is what happens when you have a tutor?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know. Or maybe this is being lost in translation. In America, a tutor is a privately hired one-on-one instructor that provides supplemental education on top of your normal education, typically because you’re falling behind in something. Gabe, I don’t know. I imagine now Gabe as being a Lord, and he has a tutor who obviously — here’s the thing to understand, Gabe. We all talk about Anagnorisis here, we just don’t call it Anagnorisis. We call it other things. We call it “that moment,” “that revelation.” Sometimes we’ll say, you know, the “eureka moment.”

But it’s the word that is unknown, not the concept of it. As far as the discussion about all of the film teachers you’ve had, and I can only presume now it’s quite a number, their theory is Americans are great at story and Brits are great at character. Those film teachers apparently haven’t been watching many movies.

I can tell you some wonderful films written by British screenwriters that are very much about a terrific story and the characters aren’t particularly what you would say intricate. And likewise, I could point to many films written by American screenwriters that are absolutely gorgeous. I mean, I don’t know, Paul Thomas Anderson, does he strike you as somebody that’s really great at story, but not so good at character?

It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. So, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that every film teacher you’ve had is a dope. And that, in fact, what of the things I love about British screenwriters is that they are really good at telling stories. They do like to entertain. Tess Morris.

**John:** Tess Morris. We love Tess Morris.

**Craig:** What a great storyteller.

**John:** Kelly Marcel I’m a fan of as well.

**Craig:** Great storyteller.

**John:** Great storyteller. I would argue that it’s very hard to differentiate story from character, at least in successful films. Is that I can think of very few things as like, oh, that’s a terrific story. Too bad about the characters. That’s not really a successful film, in my estimation.

**Craig:** Yeah. I completely agree. I mean, there are films where you look at — you’ll say, oh, it’s a character study. But inside that character study there is a story that’s occurring. It’s just that your film teachers, Gabe, weren’t smart enough to realize that both things were going on at the same time. And I’m trying not to be an offended proud American. Really what I’m saying is this is just dumb. Americans and British are really good at making movies, I think.

**John:** Yeah. And so are Iranians and so are Chinese.

**Craig:** Oh my god, by the way, I’m glad you actually singled out Iranians. Iranians are fantastic filmmakers.

**John:** There’s a tradition of just phenomenal filmmaking that combines really amazing character work with just fantastic storytelling.

**Craig:** Storytelling. Koreans, oh my god. Dude, Snowpiercer? Wow.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** So many across the world. I don’t think any one particular — I don’t know if writing or story are taught differently across the world. I do know this: that across the world, people are looking at big, famous, important movies, and they’re not always the same. But big, and important, and famous as touch stones for what they want to do. And that is the movies themselves that are the most important and powerful instructors of up and coming filmmakers, not film teachers.

**John:** Gabe may have had a moment of Anagnorisis right there with that education we provided him.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Aaron in Shanghai wrote in to say, “You briefly touched on the magical dad transformation story and said that there’s not a direct female equivalent. You’re right, but there is a close equivalent if you look at romantic comedies, which include a lot of magical ingénue transformations. In this trope, you see successful hardworking but romantically inept female lead discover that she’s worthy or capable of romantic love.”

And that’s absolutely true. So it’s the magical thing that is the problem. Is that by some supernatural means, the person is changed. In the romantically challenged equivalent, or the ingénue who doesn’t sort of see what’s important, it’s very rarely magic. It’s usually like a handsome man teaches her a lesson.

**Craig:** Or she just finally takes off her glasses.

**John:** Yeah. I love that trope. That’s a good one.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. I mean, clearly you have a magical story in Cinderella that is very much about someone waving a wand and turning her from this dirty whore wretch into this beautiful princess. Yeah, usually it seems like movies where females are transforming in clunky, silly, tropey ways, there isn’t magic involved.

I wonder if the implication is that, again, we instinctively understand that female characters have the psychological capability to change if they are confronted by certain things. Whereas men literally require supernatural intervention.

**John:** I think the other thing she’s bringing up is that someone intervenes and is like, “Oh no, you’re better than you think you are.” And in these magical dad transformation things, someone intervenes to say like, “No, no, you’re being terrible. You need to learn how to be better.” It’s basically like it’s like in the ingénue ones, it’s like they’re stripping off a coat a paint and revealing the beauty inside. Versus the dad ones are like, “No, no, no, you’re terrible. Let me fix your soul.”

**Craig:** Absolutely, yeah. And I understand that. I mean, there is something believable about the notion that for many women that there is an issue of self-image, or lack of confidence for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is the patriarchy. And so, so yes, the idea is hey sister, you’re stronger than you think, and go get ’em.

And we inherently kind of buy into that narrative, as tropey as it is. And again, for men, we presume that they’re just dumb. They’re literally stupid. And, in fact, they’re so stupid, they need to be punished by god. Like in Liar Liar, he is so ridiculously dumb and impervious to good behavior that he needs to be punished by god until he finally breaks down and realizes what he must become.

**John:** So several listeners tweeted in to say like, oh, you were talking about Nine Lives. And that really was the genesis point for this. You’ve seen the trailer for this, Craig, right? This is Kevin Spacey is a dad who is transformed into a cat.

**Craig:** I’ve seen it and I — I mean, I never say bad things about movies. What’s going on there?

**John:** It looks like a parody of a movie that it is. And I think for that reason alone, it might just be fantastic.

**Craig:** I could be. I was just —

**John:** It may be leaning in so far to what it is that it’s just like brilliant.

**Craig:** And I believe in this movie he’s a dad who works too much, and so he must be punished by god and turned into a cat?

**John:** Yes, that is correct.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** And so he still has Kevin Spacey’s voice, so that makes it fantastic.

**Craig:** By the way, that actually kind of does make it fantastic. [laughs]

**John:** Zander in Portland wrote in to point out that the closest comparison for women is probably enforced motherhood, with the examples being Baby Boom and Overboard. And a few other people brought up those two movies. He says, “In both the enforced motherhood and the magical dad transformation comedies, the protagonists realize that she or he has been missing things in life, and thus becoming a better parent, a happier person, and a more moral creature.

“The key difference is the female had never been exposed to parenthood before, while the male was already a father. The male thus requires a magical awakening to see the true unrealized riches in his life. In this way, the male archetype is arguably more stunted than his female counterpart, because he requires supernatural intervention.

“On the other hand, mothers often take on a greater child-rearing burden than fathers do. One could argue that the male can call in his role more easily, so intervention is required.”

**Craig:** Yeah. This is great. I love this. Enforced motherhood. That’s exactly right. Baby Boom is a perfect example. Yeah, and Overboard, too. Actually, they’re both great examples. And actually, yes, there is something that speaks to this belief that all women are really supposed to be mothers, and they’ve just been avoiding being a mom because they’re afraid.

Now, that’s not true as it turns out. That a lot of women are not mothers because they don’t want to be. I know, it’s crazy, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it’s seductive, because plots that circle around people overcoming a basic fear are catnip for screenwriters, because a lot of the work is suddenly done.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And so for a while there, you could do those movies because I think, still, there was this underlying presumption that, you know, if you just hit your head and woke up on a boat with a bunch of kids and you were told that these are your kids, you would by behaving like a mom suddenly realize, oh my god, this is what I wanted my whole life. That’s baloney.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s baloney. And that movie is basically about wrongful imprisonment. And —

**John:** It’s really troubling when you sort of add up all the things that happen in it. And it’s not troubling in the way it’s like a dark comedy about it. It’s actually a pretty light and bright comedy that just trades on some very dark themes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I know. There’s — someone should do one of those recuts. You know, when they take a movie and they recut the trailer to be different genre?

**John:** Absolutely. Where The Shining is a father comedy?

**Craig:** Right. Or Mary Poppins as a horror. And somebody should do this as like one of these serial killer/thriller movies.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like Saw with children.

**Craig:** Right. It would be so cool. Somebody do it.

**John:** We’ll do it. I won’t do it, but one of our listeners will do it, and it will be fantastic. That idea is out there in the world, so please someone do that.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** The other thing that happened last week was Brexit. So, Tim from England wrote in. Craig, take it.

**Craig:** Tim from England writes, “Rather than some backward look at an old England past, the leave campaign made clear this was a vote for the future. Unshackling the UK from a Soviet style European Union and freeing us to make bilateral trade deals with America, India, China, etc.

“What leavers did want to get back to was a pure European free trade agreement, which is what we were originally sold back in the ’70s, not propping up a bloated EU super state. To use a Star Wars analogy, you should be applauding the rebels and not the Empire.”

Oh, boy, he doesn’t know me at all, does he?

**John:** I included this because I knew it would anger you, but also I think it is really important that last line, which is like Star Wars and these kind of things are one of the situations where both sides can kind of claim the meme high ground. And I just thought it was a fascinating way to frame it. As like any terrorist group can say like, “Oh no, we’re the rebels of Star Wars.”

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. Prisoners starting a riot. “We’re the Rebels.” I always root for the Empire. I believe that only through the Dark Side can you bring order to the Galaxy. And from order shall follow peace.

Look, a lot of what Tim writes is dismissible simply as opinion. And there’s a lot of opinion to counter it. I mean, we could go into a long discussion of how his belief that this is going to lead to better trade deals for the United Kingdom is insane.

But, I’m going to pick on one thing that actually bothers me. And it’s when he says, “Soviet style European Union.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t care how bad the European Union is. I’ve been spending, because of this project I’ve been working, I’ve been spending a lot of time living with Soviet research and watching Soviet television recordings. And going through books and books and books that are centering around Soviet decisions. The European Union isn’t in the same universe as the Soviet Union. It is not Soviet Style. Soviet Style was a terror that literally led to the deaths of nearly 100 million people either through starvation, bad policies, or bungled military moves. And those are the people who died.

Forget about the people that were imprisoned or just lived in misery. So, let’s not say Soviet Style European Union.

**John:** So I think Soviet Style is one of those things which you have to be so careful when you bring it up, because it’s almost like a Godwin’s Law thing where like you mention Hitler and then you’re just done. Or saying like a Holocaust, or something. Like, when you bring that up, you’re actually dismissing the huge realities of what that thing is. And making it just impossible to have a discussion. So, you can say like the bureaucracy, all these things.

And we talked about last week, like kind of no one likes the European Union. It’s really messed up in a lot of ways. But it’s not the Soviet Union. And it’s not that situation whatsoever.

**Craig:** Every now and then somebody in the United States will compare something to slavery, and you can just hear — you can hear their credibility crashing to the floor.

The problem is we all know why people do these things. They compare stuff to the Soviet Union or the Holocaust, or Hitler, or slavery because they’re really trying to make their point. Eh, you know what, if you need that crutch to make your point, your point may not be so hot.

**John:** Yep. This email came in early in the week, and so I do feel like over the course of the week his arguments may have changed even from there, because it’s clear that they will not be able to make these amazingly better trade deals. Because they can’t. Because a smaller thing can rarely make better deals than a bigger thing.

**Craig:** They might not even leave the European Union. I mean, that’s the beauty of the whole thing is that there’s no one to actually do it. So, remarkable.

**John:** Well, one union we will never leave is the Writers Guild. See, that was the segue I was waiting for.

**Craig:** Because they won’t let us. [laughs]

**John:** They will never let us. Actually, the Writers Guild will let you leave kind of. You can always go FiCore, which means you are no longer a voting member and are not bound to certain things, but you’re still contributing your dues to the WGA.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** And just today as we were recording, the WGA sent out their financial report. So, this is a place where I can remind you that in the podcast we provide chapters. So, if WGA financials bores you silly, you can skip through to the next chapter where we talk about villains.

**Craig:** No one will skip this.

**John:** No one will skip this, because it will be fascinating. So, we will try to provide a link to this. When we got this this afternoon, it was only on paper, but there should be a link for this pretty soon. So, this one looks through basically what happened in 2015 and gives you the breakdown by people writing for screens, or writing for the movies, and people writing for TV. The bulk of the income for the WGA comes from TV. But I thought overall the picture was not so bad.

Craig, what was your first instinct on this?

**Craig:** Yeah. Basically seems like more of the same. You look at number of writers reporting earnings total, it’s essentially hovering in the same zone it’s been hovering in since 2013, which is around 5,000 or so. A little bit down from last year. A little bit up from ’13.

Total earnings, kind of down a touch, but not much.

**John:** Here’s the important thing to say. Whenever they report earnings for the previous year, they’re always a little bit depressed because they don’t have all the numbers coming in yet. So, they actually warn you in the stats that these numbers always creep up.

And so when you look at it year-to-year, the numbers are basically flat. So there’s about 5,200 writers, so feature and TV writers. Altogether, they’re earning about $1.2 billion, which is a lot of money.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** That’s a serious amount. Except that if you think about the AMPTP, the people we’re working for, they made about $49 billion in profits over that same year. So, there’s a lot of money out there in the system.

**Craig:** Well, and that’s profit. So that already discounts —

**John:** Profit-profit, yes.

**Craig:** Yeah, the money they pay us.

**John:** So our money already came out of there. So like even after they paid us, they had $49 billion left over.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re good. They’re going to be just fine. In terms of television employment, it does seem like actually even with the creep up it’s going to be down a bit from last year, but that was inevitable because last year you saw perhaps what was kind of a peak given the explosion of Netflix and Amazon. So, it was only inevitable it would come down a little bit, but it’s still up quite a bit. I mean, it’s up massively from five years ago. How about that?

I mean, you look at total earnings in 2010 for television writers – $570 million. Last year, and this was the non-creep up number, $800 million. With a nearly 900 more writers working in television.

So, television continues to be fairly healthy. In screen, some good news.

**John:** Yeah, some goodish news.

**Craig:** Ish.

**John:** So these numbers will still creep up a little bit more, but we had more writers employed last year in 2015 than the year before, so we are up 3.6%. Earnings were up to $362 million, versus $355 million. So, still an increase. And I would say that on the ground, it feels that the feature world is shrinking, and shrank last year. But in terms of actual dollars, it didn’t appear to.

**Craig:** Well, kind of.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Part of the problem is that every year from 2011, almost every year, from 2011 to 2015 you’ve had more screenwriters reporting earnings. So, for instance, in 2011 it was 1684. Last year, almost 1,800. However, we’re making about $13 million less overall as a group than we were in 2011.

So, we’re making less, and there’s more of us making it. So, the amount per —

**John:** The per-writer, per-capita.

**Craig:** It’s the amount individual screenwriters get on a — yes, on an average basis has gone down. And it gets really frightening when you look, going back to 2010, where our total earnings were $408 million. So, we are way — we’re still way, way — we’ve come up from the low point in 2013, but we’re still way off where we were in 2010. So, again, to compare to TV, TV is up essentially $230 million and we are down about $45 million. No Bueno.

So, that’s still — it’s good news only in that it didn’t get worse I guess is how I’d put it.

**John:** So, the how writers earn their money we talked about on the show many times. And so TV and film writers, they’re paid money for writing their screenplays, or for writing their scripts. That is the bulk of what a writer earns in a year. The other important caveat we should put on this is that TV writers, they do make money as writers, but they also make money as producers. And sometimes that producer money is vastly bigger than the writer money. That producer money does not show up in these figures at all. So, that is not covered by the WGA. That is a whole separate thing that they are paid.

So, it can be a little bit confusing because a TV writer might be bringing home a lot more, but they’re not being paid as writers for that extra income.

**Craig:** Correct. We also then have some numbers on residuals. And residuals overall continue to go up for television. And they are driven — that increase is driven essentially by the explosion of new media.

**John:** Yeah. So, again, sort of the quickest recap is whenever a TV show or a film is reused in different mediums, or not how it was originally broadcast or put on the big screen, writers get a tiny little fraction of that money that comes in. And the rates are different based on DVD, or VHS, or new media which includes things like streaming. It includes iTunes purchases. And there are different rates. And most of our WGA negotiations are about those rates, it turns out.

And the new media rates, which were a contentious thing a while back, are now a very significant portion of the residuals that both TV and feature writers receive.

**Craig:** Yeah. No question. There’s also a fairly large increase, a dramatic increase actually, in foreign free TV and basic cable residuals. So, our programs are now airing over across the world much more frequently than they used to. In 2010, we were looking at $29 million in residuals for that. And last year, $56 million.

**John:** Yeah. That mirrors sort of our experience in both first run in TV overseas as well. We talk about how increasingly TV shows are profitable from the moment they first air because they’ve made all those foreign deals. That also holds true for the explosion of foreign free TV for residuals. And so there are more places around the world showing our programs, and we get a little bit of money every time they do that.

**Craig:** Sadly, the theme of poor screenwriters continues. Not technically poor, but theatrical residuals down. And they will probably continue to tread water for a while. What’s nice to see, of course, is new media reuse which, let’s say from 2015 over 2010 it’s an increase of 1,043%. But, of course, in 2010, only $1.2 million came in from new media, which is amazing. But then you have to remember the iPhone didn’t even exist until 2007. 2015, closer to $14 million, which still seems low to me considering that I feel like everyone is — but maybe it’s the Netflix thing.

Paid TV, still the biggest driver: $54 million of our $138 million. Overall residuals, down. Forget about from last. Down from 2010. We are — we have not recovered. And I don’t think we’re going to recover from the double whammy of the loss of the DVD market and the strike. I think what happened in the days following 2008 —

**John:** The DVD money was never coming back. So, DVDs were the perfect way to watch movies for a while. And that was a huge source of income both for studios, and therefore for screenwriters in residuals. That sort of went away.

If there’s a positive trend here I can see is that you look at the new media reuse residuals, they are going up by $3 or $4 million most years. There’s a very steady increase. And so, that is going to surpass DVDs. And it’s going to surpass other things down the road. And that — luckily we actually have a better rate on those than we ever did on those other things.

**Craig:** Yeah, kind of. We do for rentals. For sales, we have a slightly better deal on sales than we do on DVDs, but that covers all the stuff that’s been produced and put in theaters since the strike. Everything before the strike, this is one of the big disputed items, and this is one of the areas where the Writers Guild dropped the ball in a way that, frankly, everyone should have fired, but that’s just me. The Writers Guild thought that they had also gotten that slightly better rate to extend to the library, which we consider back to ’71 or something like that.

And the companies said no you didn’t. And it turned out the companies were right. We didn’t.

Now, the companies’ positions, oh that, DVD rate, no matter if you buy anything from before 2008, DVD rate, whether you buy it on iTunes or not. We, I think, ultimately have to accept that.

**John:** Yeah. And there’s other factors, because like the purchase through iTunes tends to be a lower price point than a DVD. But maybe at that lower price point more people are buying that stuff. Streaming seems to be dominating everything anyway. And so certainly in music streaming has become so incredibly important. I have to believe it’s going to continue to be incredibly important for videos. So, we’ll see.

I’m a little optimistic that some of this down slope in feature residuals will perk back up.

**Craig:** Yeah, me too. I mean, one nice thing about new media is that the margin is so much better. They don’t have to print a thing on a disk, stick in a box, stick it in box, ship it in a box. You know, but then Apple takes a pretty decent cut, I’m sure.

**John:** Yeah. They do.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, I think the summary for the numbers is that if you have to say bullet points for a friend who kind of cares is that the numbers were not terrible. And so these numbers are for writer earnings for 2015. It doesn’t get into our pension health. It doesn’t get into some of the other really crucial things that screenwriters and the WGA is looking at.

But it’s talking about sort of like how overall writers are doing this past year. It wasn’t terrible. And so there was no steep drop offs or declines or anything that would set off huge alarm bells for me.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get to a craft topic. So, way back, we’ll find the number of the episode, but we did an episode about villains. And it was actually one of my very favorite episodes we’ve done on the podcast. And so I wanted to write up a longer piece for it. And so I got this guy, Chris Csont, who is a screenwriter himself, to write up a long piece about villains and focusing on what I came up, sort of seven fundamental tips for unforgettable villains.

So, a lot of times in features, you’ll see — and TV as well — you’ll see sort of functional villains, like, well, that villain got the job done. Basically served as a good obstacle for your hero. Kept the plot moving. But a week later, I couldn’t tell you anything about who that villain was.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I wanted to look at sort of in the movies that I love and the movies that had villains that I loved, what were some of those characteristics of those villains that I loved. And so I boiled it down to seven things and then Chris wrote up a nice long blog post that sort of talked through in more detail and gave more examples of what those kind of villains were and how they functioned.

So I thought we’d take a few minutes to look at this list of unforgettable villains and sort of how you can implement them.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool. So, my first tip for unforgettable villains is something I’ve said a lot on the show, is that the best villains think that they’re the hero. They are the protagonist in their own stories. They have their own inner life. They have hopes, they have joys. They might seek revenge or power, but they believe they have a reason why they deserve. They can reframe all of the events of the story where they are the good guy in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. Nobody does bad things just cause. Even when we have nihilistic villains, they’re trying to make a point. Like the Joker is trying to make a point, you know. There’s always a purpose. And so, yes, of course, they think they’re the hero. They have — you know that thing where you look at somebody on TV, maybe in the middle of a political season, and you think how is that guy so happy about all of these terrible things he’s saying?

Well, because he believes in part that he’s the right one, and that his purity is in fact why he’s the hero. Just as a character says I won’t kill is being pure. You know, Luke at the end of Return of the Jedi is being pure. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m not going to kill you because I’m a good guy.” Right? That’s my purity.

Well, on the other side, the villains are heroes with the same purity towards their goal. And other people are these wish-washy, mush-mouthy heroes in name only. They’re HINOs.

**John:** Yeah. So I think it’s absolutely crucial is that they are seeing all of the events of the story from their own point of view and they can defend the actions that they’re taking because they are heroes. Our favorite show, Game of Thrones, does that so well, where you see characters who are one hand despicable, but on the other hand are heroic because you see why they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. So, Daenerys can completely be the villain of that story. It’s very easy to frame her as the villain in that story, and yet we don’t because of how we’ve been introduced to her.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then look back to the very first episode. It’s maybe the last line of the first episode, I think. Jamie Lannister pushes Bran out the window, sends him theoretically to his death, although it turns out to just paralyze him. And then he turns back to his sister and he says, “The things we do for love.” And he’s doing it because he’s protecting her because they’re in love. Now I go, okay, I don’t like you, and I don’t like what you did, but I recognize a human motivation in you.

Now, some movies are really bad at shoving this in. You ever get to the end of a movie where you’re like, “Why the hell was this guy doing all this bananas stuff?” And then as he’s being arrested he goes, “Don’t you understand? Blah, blah, blah.”

**John:** Yeah. It’s like it’s already done. It’s already over. Or, that bit of explanation comes right before they’re about to, you know, “Before I kill you, let me tell you why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

**Craig:** And it’s like a weird position paper. It’s not felt. Whereas at the end of — speaking of Sorkin — A Few Good Men, when Jack Nicholson says, “You’ve weakened a country,” I believe he believes that.

**John:** A hundred percent.

**Craig:** I believe that he instructed people to hurt other people because he’s doing the right thing. He’s pure, and they’re not.

**John:** So, let me get to my next point which is unforgettable villains, they take things way too far. So, whereas hopefully all villains see themselves as the hero, the ones who stick with you are the ones who just go just too far. Simple villains who have sort of simple aims, like I’m going to rob this bank, well you’re not going to remember that one. The one who is like, “I’m going to blow up the city block in order to get into this bank,” that’s the villain you remember.

And so you have to look for ways in which you can take your villain and push them just too far so that they cross, they transgress something that no one is ever supposed to transgress. And the ones that really stick, you know, the Hannibal Lecters, the Buffalo Bills, the Alan Rickman in Die Hard, they are just willing to go just as far as they need to go in order to get the job down. And actually too far to get the job done.

**Craig:** Correct. And in their demonstration of their willingness to go to any length to achieve their goal, you realize that if they get away with it, this will not be the last time they do it. This person actually needs to die, because they are a virus that has been released into the world. And if we don’t stop them, they’re going to keep doing it forever, until the world is consumed in their insanity.

And then you have this desire in the audience for your hero to stop the villain. We rarely root for a hero to stop the villain because we want the hero to feel good. We root for it because that person has to go, you know.

**John:** Absolutely. We don’t root for the hero as much if it’s like a mild villain. It has to be the villain who is absolutely hell bent on destruction. And doesn’t have to be destroying the world, but like destruction of what is important to us as the audience.

**Craig:** Yeah. It could be somebody who just wants to take your kid from you.

**John:** Yep. That’s a good one.

**Craig:** And then you’re like, argh, and you just realize — you won’t stop — you’ll ruin the rest of my kid’s life. And you might do this to somebody else’s kid. You just feel like you should be stopped in order to return the world to its proper state of being a just world, which as we know, realistically it’s not.

**John:** Never going to happen.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Third point about unforgettable villains is that they live at the edges of society. So sometimes they are literally out in the forest, or the creepy old monster in the cave. But sometimes they’re at the edges of sort of moral society. So they place themselves outside the normal rules of law, or the normal rules of acceptable behavior.

And so even if they are the insiders, even if they are the mayor of the town, they don’t function within the prescribed boundaries of like what the mayor of the town can do.

So, you always have to look at them — they perceive themselves as outsiders, even if they are already in positions of power.

**Craig:** They certainly perceive themselves to be special.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There were a lot of people, speaking of the Soviet Union, in the ’30s and ’40s, a lot of people who were Soviet officials who did terrible things. But, frequently they were tools, or sometimes Stalin would go so far as to call them “useful idiots.” Stalin was special. He considered himself special. And special people are different than people who do bad things.

So, when you’re thinking about your villain, you know, it may not be one of those movies where the villain actually has henchmen, per se. But, special people do have their own versions of henchmen. People who believe them at all costs. You know, the poor — the albino guy in The Da Vinci Code. You know, he’s a villain, kind of, but he’s not the villain. He’s a tool.

**John:** Yeah. So even if the villain has prophets or a society around him, he perceives himself as being outside that society as well.

**Craig:** He can go ahead and bend the rules, because he knows, once again, he knows what’s better. He is different and above everybody else. That’s we’re fascinated by a good one.

**John:** Also because they hold up a mirror to the reader. That’s my fourth point. Is that a good hero sort of represents what the audience aspires to be, what we hope we could be. The unforgettable villain is the one who you sort of fear you might be. It’s like sort of all your darkest impulses. It’s like what if I actually did that terrible thing. That’s that villain. It’s that person you worry deep down you really are.

**Craig:** Which goes to motivations. Universally recognizable motivations. And this is something that comes up constantly when you’re talking about villains. The first thing people will ask is, “What do they want?” Right? Just like a hero, because they are the hero of their story, what do they want? What are they motivated by? What’s driving them to do these crazy, crazy things?

And it’s never, oh, it’s just random, because again, that’s not — so for instance, you can look at Buffalo Bill, the character in Silence of the Lambs, as really more of like an animal. We can talk about his motivations, and they do, but those motivations are foreign to all of us. It’s a rare, rare person who is sociopathic and also violent and also attempting to convince himself that he will be better if he’s transgender, which he’s really not. That’s not any of us.

But, Hannibal Lecter is. Hannibal Lecter has these things in him that we recognize in ourselves. And in fact, it’s very easy to fantasize that you are Hannibal Lecter. It’s kind of sexy. It’s fascinating. A good villain is somebody that you kind of guiltily imagine being.

Who hasn’t imagined being Darth Vader? He’s the coolest.

**John:** Yeah. Imagine having that kind of power. The power to manipulate. The power to literally control things with your mind. That’s a seductive thing. And I think the best villains can tap into that part of the reader or the audience.

Also, I would say that the great villains, they let us know what they want. And we sort of hit on that earlier. Sometimes you’ll get to the end of the story and then the villain will reveal what the plan was all along. That’s never satisfying.

The really great villains that stick with you, you’re clear on what they’re going after from the start. And even if it’s Jaws. I mean, you understand what is driving them. And you understand at every moment what their next aim is. And they’re not just there to be an obstacle to the hero. They have their own agenda.

**Craig:** Yeah. A good movie villain will sometimes hide what they’re after, and you have to kind of figure it out, or tease it out. For instance, you mentioned Se7en. You don’t quite get what Kevin Spacey is up to. In fact, it seems just random. Like so a bad villain. Random acts of senseless violence. You know, kind of connected together by this interesting motif. Until the end when you realize, oh, there’s some sort of larger purpose here.

They often tell us what they want because they have clarity. Good heroes don’t have clarity. The protagonist shouldn’t have too much clarity, otherwise they’re boring as hell, right? They should be conflicted inside about what’s right and what’s wrong. They make choices.

Villains are not conflicted at all. So, of course, they’re going to be able to say, “What do I want?” I want this because of this. That’s it. I figured it out already. I don’t have any of your handwringing or sweating. I know what I’m going to do, and I know why, and I believe it’s correct. That’s it.

**John:** And they tell us what that is. And so they may not tell the hero what that is. Often they will. But we as the audience know what they’re actually going for, and that’s really crucial.

And ultimately whatever the villain is after, the hero is a crucial part of that plan. The great villains make it personal. And so we talked about Se7en. Like you can’t get much more personal than sort of what Kevin Spacey does to poor Brad Pitt’s wife in Se7en. It starts as a story that could be about some random killings, but it dials down to something very, very personal. And that’s why we are so drawn into how things end.

**Craig:** Well, what’s interesting is that in the real world, this is another area where narrative drifts so far apart from the real world. In the real world, most villains are defined by people that do bad things. And they’re repugnant. We like our movie villains to be charismatic. We love it. We like our movie villains to be seductive, and interesting, and charming. And part of that is watching them have a relationship with the hero.

We want the villain to have a relationship with the hero. It can be a brutal relationship, but a fascinating relationship. And the only way you can have a relationship is if the villain is interested in the hero. And inevitably they are.

Sometimes it’s the villain’s interest in the hero that becomes their undoing. Again, you go to the archetype of Darth Vader and Luke.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He wants to know his son. And so ultimately that’s what undoes him.

**John:** Yeah, you look at the Joker and Batman in Christopher Nolan’s version of it is that the Joker could not exist without Batman, fundamentally. They are both looking at the same city, the same situation, and without each other they both wouldn’t function really.

It’s like the Joker could create his chaos, he could sort of try to bring about these acts of chaos to make everyone look at sort of how they are and how the city functions. But, without Batman — if he can’t corrupt Batman, it’s not worth it for him.

**Craig:** Right. Batman is the thing he pushes against. And The Killing Joke, which is maybe the greatest graphic novel of all time, is entirely about that relationship. And there is something at the heart of the Joker/Batman dynamic that’s probably at the heart of most hero/ villain dynamics in movies, and that is that there is a lot of shared quality. There’s a similarity. It’s why you hear this terrible, terrible line so many times, “You and I, we are not different.”

Because it’s true.

**John:** Because it’s true. It doesn’t mean you should say it.

**Craig:** That’s right. Don’t say it.

**John:** But it is true. You can maybe find a way to visualize that or sort of let your story say that for you, but just don’t say that.

**Craig:** Just don’t say it. Or have them make fun of it.

**John:** Yeah. My final point was that flaws are features. And that in general the villains that you remember, there is something very, very distinctive about them. Either physically, or a vocal trait. There’s something that you can sort of hang them on so you can remember what they’re like because of that one specific tick, or look, or thing that they do.

And so, obviously, Craig is a big fan of hair and makeup and costuming. And I think all of those things are crucial. But you have to look at sort of what is it about your villain that a person is going to remember a month from now, a year from now, that they can remember — that they can picture them. They can hear their voice.

Hannibal Lecter is so effective because you can hear his voice. Buffalo Bill, we know what he looks like when he’s putting on that suit. Find those ways that you can distinguish your villain so that we can remember him a year from now.

**Craig:** It would be nice, I think, for screenwriters to always think about how their villain will first be perceived by the audience. Because you’re exactly right.

This is part of what goes to the notion that the villain is the hero of their story. That the villain is a special person. What you’re signifying to the audience is this is a person who is more important than everybody else in the movie, except our hero. Right? And just as I made a big deal about the hero, I have to make a big deal about this person, because they are special.

And if you look at the first time you see Hannibal Lecter, his hair — let’s first start with the hair — is perfect. It’s not great hair. He’s a balding man. But it’s perfectly combed back. And he’s wearing his, I guess, his asylum outfit, crisp, clean. And he’s standing with the most incredible posture. And his hands, the way his hands and his arms are, it’s as if he’s assembled himself into this perfected mannequin of a person. And he does not blink.

And that’s great. Just from the start. You know, we all get that little hair-raising feeling when somebody creepy comes by. Sometimes it’s the littlest thing like that.

**John:** And sometimes it’s a very big thing. So like Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter movies is one of my favorite arrivals of a villain in a story, because she’s wearing this pink dress that she’s in for the whole movie. And from the moment you see her, you know in a general sense what she is. But you just don’t know how far she’s going to push it. So she seems like this busybody, but then you realize she’s actually a monster. She’s a monster in a pink housecoat. And she is phenomenal.

And that’s a very distinctive choice of sort of the schoolmarm taken way too far. And you see it from the very start. And so I can’t — I could never see that kind of costuming again without thinking of her. That’s a sign of a really good design.

**Craig:** That’s a great reference. And it goes right back to J.K. Rowling’s book. That’s an example of taking something that’s amusingly innocuous and not villainous, like oh, a sweet old lady who loves cats and collects plates. And loves pink, and green, and pastel colors. And saying, that lady, now she’s a sadist. Ooh, blech. Great, you know, just great.

And then you get it. You walk into her office and you can smell that bad rose perfume, you know. Terrific.

**John:** Terrific. So, I have these seven tips, but also a very long, very detailed article by Chris Csont you can find, so that’s at writeremergency.com/villains. There will be a link in the show notes, too.

But, Chris, thank you for writing up a great post. And we’re going to try to do a few more of these things, we’re we can sort of do a deep dive. I don’t have time to write these big long things, but Chris does. And he does a great job at them. So we’re going to try to have a few more of these up over the course of the year.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool. Let’s answer a question or two. Tom wrote in with a very simple question. “What are your thoughts on opening a script with a quote?”

**Craig:** Oh, I don’t mind it so much. I mean, it’s a little cliché. I always feel like when you open your script with a quote you’re basically borrowing somebody else’s genius and importance to create a mood that you have not earned yourself. So, I say if you can avoid it, probably try it without it.

**John:** Stuart got really frustrated by this question. We were talking about it at lunch. And he said, I think a very good point, is like, “The script is supposed to represent what the movie is going to feel like. And if the movie is going to feel like it’s going to open with a quote, use it. If it’s not, then don’t.” And I think that’s actually very good advice is that always remember the screenplay is meant to duplicate the experience of seeing the movie. And if that’s important for your movie, it’s important to set the expectation of what your movie is, use it. Otherwise, don’t. And I agree with that.

So, I think the only one of my scripts that started with — not even a quote but sort of a dedication page — was Big Fish. It was very important for Big Fish, because it had to set the tall tales expectation. So, I wanted you to stop on that page and understand what kind of movie you were about to get into.

One of the great scripts at Sundance this year had a similar kind of thing where it was very much setting up the tone, and I loved that. But I think it’s only the scripts that need it should use it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just don’t throw it on there, you know. I mean, let’s put it this way, if you could conceive of your movie actually opening with this quote on the screen, then sure. You know, it’s got to feel like something that’s appropriate.

I’m not a purist about this. But I would say if you cannot, don’t. Right? Because it’ll just be, I don’t know, you’ll just impress people with your writing immediately, you know? As opposed to something wry from George Bernard Shaw.

**John:** Yeah. And I would say don’t use a quote that we’ve heard before.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, don’t.

**John:** That doesn’t help. It’s just like, oh, this is a cliché.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you’re not an original person. You just went on Bartleby.com.

**John:** Craig, do you want to do this last question? It’s Jay in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Sure. Jay in Los Angeles writes, “I’m a screenwriter who is finishing the deal to sell my spec script to a known production company. The deal should be announced in the next week or two.” Congrats.

“I have an agent from a top-four agency, as well as a lawyer handling the deal. A well-known actor is attached to the project. I was able to attract interest from a producer on my own and then hustled to find my reps after the fact.

“The agent on the deal, and I, never had a conversation on my becoming a client.” Is this my son writing this? Because he does that thing where “on my becoming,” and I’m like you got to stop writing that. Anyway.

“The agent on the deal, and I, had never had a conversation about me becoming a client. He never even asked to read the script. Am I already a de facto client? I want to be able to while the iron is hot, get a manager, and try to get in as many rooms as possible. I also have a pitch prepped for a new project. The question is: how does one approach that conversation with the agent? What can I do to prepare for the news of the deal to get out, aside from prepping a new pitched script?”

**John:** This is actually not an uncommon situation where you sort of got stuff started, you got stuff to a producer. This agent helps you make this deal. And then it’s sort of this vague situation like “am I client of this agency or not?”

The way to find out is to ask the person who you should ask. And ask, especially if you like this person. If you don’t like this person, you haven’t really signed with this agency, and maybe you can take some other meetings. This producer may help you meet some other folks. But you are right to be thinking about what your next steps are and to capitalize on the news of this getting out.

**Craig:** Yeah. I completely agree. It’s as simple as asking him the question, or asking her the question. I wouldn’t worry so much about the agent — oh, it’s a he — the fact that the agent didn’t ask to read the script. I don’t need my agents to read my scripts. I just need them to get me as much money as they can.

So, I’m not freaking out by that. Yeah. Ask them. Also ask yourself: what do you think about this person? I mean, so far so good, I guess, right?

**John:** I guess. I would say, you know, be honest with yourself about what you want to write next, what things you’re interested in doing. What else you have ready to kind of have pitched. And then have the conversation about sort of like what is the deal with this agency. Do you guys want to represent me on an ongoing basis? Is this a one-off thing?

They will say like, “Oh, no, we want to represent you on an ongoing basis,” but then they should probably bring you in for a meeting where they meet with you and with other agents there and they talk about the things you want to do. Before you have that meeting, you should actually be able to answer that question about the things you want to do.

So, I think you’re in a good place, but you’re also right to be asking these questions.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can try and prepare things like a new pitch or script, but don’t rush anything in there. Don’t feel like you need to have this shoebox full of stuff. Frankly, your concentration should be on writing the next draft of your spec script.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** That’s where you are now. But unless you haven’t sold it under a WGA deal, and I can’t imagine that’s the case, you are guaranteed the right to be the first rewriter of your script. So, you need to start now transitioning from being a spec guy to a professional writer.

**John:** A hundred percent agree. Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing, Craig, did you already click on this link? Because it’s really good. You’re going to like it a lot.

**Craig:** I did. And I thought it was spectacular.

**John:** So, this is called The Mill Blackbird, so the Mill is a place that shoots a lot of film type stuff and special effects things. The Blackbird is this very cool car they’ve built. Essentially if you’re shooting a car commercial or anything on film that involves a car, it is a hassle because the client wants the car to look beautiful, you are trying to do things under different conditions. And sometimes cars change, or you want to change the color of the car afterwards. So what this thing does is basically it’s this skeleton of a car. The wheel base is adjustable. You can change out the actual wheels on it.

But essentially you are driving this thing around and then you are putting the car skin on top of it in post. And it sounds like, well, why would you do that? That’s ridiculous. But you would totally do this in a lot of situations because it lets you switch things out in really remarkable ways. The car itself, this Blackbird, also has cameras on it that are capturing everything around it, and so you can use that for VR applications, but also to get all of the data that you need so that you can have proper reflections on the car when you are putting the skin of the car on in CG.

It seems like just a very smart idea. I can imagine it’s going to be used a lot. Chris Morgan, doing the Fast & Furious movies, probably already has three of them on order.

**Craig:** Seriously.

**John:** It seemed very, very cool.

**Craig:** It is cool. You know, cars are something that they’re so good at making digitally. Like the car racing games are always the best looking games. Those are the ones that are the most close to, wait, is this real? There’s something about just the metal and the paint and the whole thing. It works so great.

And I had no idea, by the way. I’ve been fooled this whole time. I thought those were cars out there. Ah, what do I know?

**John:** What do you know? I would say like a lot of times you’ve seen so many fake cars in movies, and when people complain about like, oh, bad CG, people don’t realize that half the cars you’ve seen in movies are not actually there. So, when you see car racing and stuff in films, a lot of times that’s all done digitally.

**Craig:** Yeah. People complain about CG because they’re like, “I saw a thing.” Yeah, you didn’t see a thousand other things, did you? So, maybe you shouldn’t complain.

**John:** Maybe not.

**Craig:** Yeah. Maybe you should shut it. I’ll tell you what is my One Cool Thing. Strangely enough, helium. Did you know that we were running a little short on helium? [laughs]

**John:** I remember this being a thing from before. But they found more of it.

**Craig:** They found a whole lot more. So, helium is not only used for the party balloons, although if you had asked me, I would have said, “Balloons, right?” It’s kind of important. We actually, for instance, use it in every MRI scanner. There are over a million MRIs in the world, and we need helium for each one of them. We need helium for energy production. We need helium for all sorts of things.

And we were kind of starting to run low, because the deal is helium is an element. You don’t make it. Right? It’s just what we have is what we’ve got.

**John:** I presume once we get fusion really going, you can make helium. Is that correct? People will tell me if that’s not correct. I assume that we can actually make helium off of fusing hydrogen atoms, but I could be wrong.

**Craig:** I’m not going to say yes or no to that.

**John:** All right. We’ll let Wikipedia determine.

**Craig:** Smells a little wrong, but I don’t know. Sometimes the most right things smell a little wrong. But, and we, by the way, this is another thing I didn’t know. We have something called the Federal Helium Reserve. It’s in Texas. And it’s this massive thing. It’s got 242 billion cubic feet of helium, which is about 30% of all the helium in the world. Until they just found this whole big thing in Tanzania.

A massive helium gas field. Apparently, we’re going to be fine. And some Tanzanians hopefully will get rich off of the helium. How do you mine helium?

**John:** Carefully? I don’t know. I just worry it would all leak out.

**Craig:** Balloons. Just endless balloons.

**John:** Endless balloons. Poppers. It’s going to be good.

**Craig:** Poppers.

**John:** Swelling up so high. A lot of squeaky voice. I bet that’s how they found it. I bet like, “There’s something wrong here,” and —

**Craig:** Somebody goes into a mine looking for something, comes out like —

**John:** “Something’s really weird.”

**Craig:** “I didn’t find anything”

**John:** Craig, your helium voice was much better than mine.

**Craig:** All you have to do is like really shrink your voice.

**John:** Well done. I got to say. I would prefer that to almost any of your other characters. [laughs]

**Craig:** Helium Craig is official now. Helium Craig.

**John:** It really is. I looked it up as you were talking, and so yes, you can make helium off of a hydrogen fusion process. It’s probably a terrible, dangerous version of helium. It probably would kill everyone. But I bet it could make some balloons float up.

**Craig:** I don’t care. Listen, man, you were right about it. I think they should do it.

**John:** They should absolutely do it. Scriptnotes, as always, is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is a class Matthew Chilelli outro. But if you have a new one for us, you can always write in to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions like the ones we answered on the program today.

You will find links to most of the things we talked about on the show notes, which are attached to this podcast, or you can find them at johnaugust.com.

If you want to read that whole villains piece, that’s writeremergency.com/villains.

If you would like to tweet to Craig, he is @clmazin on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. If you are on iTunes for any reason, please leave us a review. We love those. We haven’t read those reviews aloud for a while. Maybe we’ll do that next week.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And that’s all I got. Craig, thank you so much for a fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** See ya.

Links:

* [Sundance Feature Film Programs](http://www.sundance.org/programs/feature-film)
* The [James Patterson MasterClass](https://www.masterclass.com/classes/james-patterson-teaches-writing)
* [Nine Lives trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jHA97HzhxE) on YouTube
* Scriptnotes, 75: [Villains](http://johnaugust.com/2013/villains)
* [7 Tips for Creating Unforgettable Villains](http://writeremergency.com/villains)
* [The Blackbird, from The Mill](http://www.themill.com/portfolio/3002/the-blackbird%C2%AE)
* Newser on [Tanzania’s game changing giant helium field](http://www.newser.com/story/227284/game-changer-giant-helium-field-found-in-tanzania.html)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/television-economics-for-dummies).

**John August:** Hey, this John. So today’s episode has a little bit of swearing. Not a lot, but if you’re driving in the car with your kids, this is your warning. Thanks.

[Episode begins]

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 253 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be doing another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we take stories in the news and discuss how and if and whether they should become movies. But first, we’ve just come through upfronts where the networks announced their new TV shows. And as I read the coverage, I was perplexed and did not know what they were talking about, so we invited someone on to explain what’s actually happening.

**Craig:** Thank God.

**John:** Yes. Jonathan Groff is our guest, and he is a writer and producer whose credits include Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Andy Barker, P.I., How I Met Your Mother and the late great, Happy Endings. He’s currently one of the executive producers of Black-ish.

Welcome, Jonathan Groff.

**Jonathan Groff:** Thank you so much, John. Thank you, Craig. It’s nice to be here.

**Craig:** And taking time off from Hamilton?

**Jonathan:** That’s what I was just going to say. I’m so glad you went to it.

**Craig:** Yes. Yeah.

**Jonathan:** The disambiguation that is necessary now with my name.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You are in fact both the television writer/producer and portrayer of King George.

**Jonathan:** Thank you for the disambiguation, Craig. Exactly.

**Craig:** I do something called re-ambiguation.

**Jonathan:** You re-ambiguated, that’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Well, the best thing was — do we keep this clean on this podcast?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** We don’t have to.

**Jonathan:** Okay, good. The first —

**Craig:** Fuck it.

**Jonathan:** There you go. The first time I heard of him, my manager had my name on a Google alert which is, I think, how he knows how to manage me. [laughs] He finds out what I’m doing and that’s — I’m kidding. Tim Sarquis, lovely guy.

**Craig:** He’s been arrested.

**Jonathan:** Again. Better make a call.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**Jonathan:** So he had my name on a Google alert and also this name popped up and he was like, “Are you doing Gypsy at the South Shore Music Circus in Hyannis or in Cohasset, Massachusetts or whatever?”

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s so great.

**Jonathan:** And I was like, “No.” This guy was just out of like drama school. Really young.

**John:** Yeah, he started young. He’s still young.

**Jonathan:** He’s still young. He’s still really young. So I had no — so that was the first time I noticed him. Then he — you know, every once in a while, I’d hear something, and then he blows up in a show called Spring Awakening.

**Craig:** Oh, Spring Awakening prior to him being on Glee.

**Jonathan:** Prior to Glee, yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** Right, Spring Awakening.

**Jonathan:** And he really blows up on Broadway and he’s a big deal. And, you know, I would have incidents where I would be — like I was casting a pilot and I’d been on the Sony lot every day for three weeks going to a certain casting office and all of a sudden, they’re like, “Oh,” — one day like, “You’re not supposed to be here until 4 o’clock and you’re not supposed to be even coming into this gate.” [laughs] And I was like, “Ohhhhh.”

And then he had the same problem. He — I got an inkling that he was a good dude because he left his email address and said, “This is funny. We should connect.” I don’t think — I think I misplaced it. Or I was like this isn’t — the time isn’t right yet.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, you didn’t feel like it was — you weren’t ready.

**Jonathan:** I didn’t feel like the time was right. I want to chase this a little bit further —

**John:** Right.

**Jonathan:** And see where this went. And then Glee happened and he really blew up on people and he’s, you know. And so that’s sort of the high, whatever.

Finally, a couple of months ago I went to see Hamilton and he was King George III in it, and he — I got backstage because somebody from Black-ish knew Leslie Odom who plays Aaron Burr and he’s fantastic. And I just said, “You know what, this is going to happen.”

**Craig:** It’s time.

**Jonathan:** So we met, and he’s fantastic. He was wearing a bike helmet.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Because he’s a big biker.

**Jonathan:** A big biker. Gave me a huge hug. We had a great conversation. And we actually have emailed back and forth now. So it’s a nice story.

**Craig:** Ah, that is a nice story.

**Jonathan:** He said that he would occasionally get stuff that was meant for me like — not, you know, lots of them. But I think it was more —

**John:** He rewrites a few scripts just on the side.

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Or he’s just like, “Yeah, I would occasionally get calls but nothing exciting like you would get that was meant for me.”

**Jonathan:** Exactly. [laughs]

**John:** He put out an inflammatory quote about Black-ish, about sort of like an upcoming plotline of Black-ish. That’s always a good thing.

**Jonathan:** Exactly. That’s the best you get.

So on the other night, I was in New York and I did a panel with some other comedy writers and there was a woman, an alum of my college who had seen the bio listed on the flier to come. And she was very sweet. And she like sheepishly —

**Craig:** Oh, God.

**Jonathan:** When she was introduced to me, like, put her Hamilton playbill that had been signed by every other cast member, tucked it into her purse like, “I’m sorry. I just maybe thought it was the same guy.” [laughs] Yeah, it’s still happening.

**Craig:** Oh no, I have no interest in hearing anything you have to say at all. Well, anyway.

**John:** You’re both very nice guys. And so Jonathan Groff was the — played Will in one of the readings of Big Fish along the way, with the Big Fish Musical.

**Jonathan:** Oh, wow.

**John:** So O known him from that. And so I know that he’s a bicyclist from that.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely.

**John:** So it was him and Michael C. Hall where we asked — that’s sort of how all the iterations you go through when you are trying to put a show together.

**Jonathan:** You know what’s frustrating is I’ve always been like the nice Jonathan Groff and now there’s a guy who’s nicer than me.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** And he’s younger, he’s better looking, and he’s nicer.

**Craig:** Better looking, nicer —

**Jonathan:** More successful.

**Craig:** More successful.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**John:** I will say you know more about TV, and so therefore —

**Jonathan:** Okay. There you go. Good segue.

**John:** You are more useful for —

**Craig:** We actually don’t know that.

**Jonathan:** I’m not sure that’s true.

**Craig:** Yeah, but we will —

**John:** He has been a star of a TV show.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Two TV shows.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah, so —

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Well, we’re going to find out. He’s going to educate us.

**John:** So this is the education I need. So the point of entry for me was this Deadline article about network ownership. It’s all about upfronts and so they’re talking through all the new shows. And Les Moonves talking about sort of this new season and how ownership is important. And like there were all these terms I just didn’t fundamentally understand.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** So I hope you can explain some of this. And just — can you talk us through what the deal is with ownership because unlike features where it’s all sort of one company, there’s a studio producing a TV show, there’s a network airing a TV show.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** And those used to be different things and they don’t seem to be different things. What’s going on with ownership?

**Jonathan:** They still can be different things. It’s really complicated. I mean, basically, the very basic — and I’ll do my best, and I’m sure there’s some things I’m going to get wrong and you probably — you guys are both so smart —

**John:** No, explain like we’re five.

**Jonathan:** Okay.

**John:** Because we really don’t know.

**Craig:** Well, explain like he’s five. I’m an adult.

**Jonathan:** Craig, no. Exactly. Craig’s been in the business.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know what’s going on.

**Jonathan:** So basically, the studios are the entities that make the television shows. And they are the ones who take on the cost of producing them, the deficit. And most television shows, they get — and then they get paid a license fee by the networks which is a lot less than the deficit. So, you know, roughly, maybe for a single camera television comedy, it might cost $2.1 million to make an episode and they probably get a $1.1 million license fee from the network. So the studios are eating that million dollar deficit for shows until they can eventually sell those shows into syndication.

**John:** So —

**Jonathan:** In which case they then get all of that money back and a lot more.

**John:** So let’s say the 2.1 number that you are getting for that half-hour show —

**Jonathan:** Should we say $2 million? Let’s say $2 million. It’s going to be a lot easier.

**John:** $2 million and $1 million, yeah.

**Craig:** Thank God. The show just got shorter.

**John:** Explain it like I’m five. Indeed. We lost a commercial break.

All right. So let’s say it’s a $2 million show. For the $2 million show, that’s all in, like all the expenses/costs to make that show and an amortization of sort of the overall costs of the sets and things like that, because it’s a weird thing to make a TV show because sometimes, you know, you have things you write a check for once and those —

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** Could be things that are going to be used for the rest of the series.

**Jonathan:** Right. Amortization is a big part of it which is why, you know, they like to make as many episodes. And one of the big things that they’ll — the networks really want these six episode orders now and eight episode orders of things to fill in because they want to be doing more and more original programing, and they want to be in fewer reruns which is something I think you want to ask me about as well, probably, because that’s another part of what’s going on in the business. But today like a lot of times, these short orders and the studios don’t like them because it’s much harder to amortize the shows. Because, yeah, especially, you know — and by the way, the $2 million figure does not count the cost of a pilot, like even a half-hour comedy pilot, probably a single camera which is mostly what I’ve done are — maybe I did one that was over $5 million, I think. That got really expensive, but they’re often three, four, four or five, something like that. So you’re figuring that factor in.

And yeah, the cost of building a standing set, you know, the cost of your actor contracts, your buyouts. You’re hiring a staff and writing staff, guaranteeing them a certain number of episodes. You know, that is all of kind of built in. So the more episodes you can do, the faster you get to that magical — used to be a hundred, now they talk about 88 or — when I did Happy Endings, we almost got another 20. We had done 57 and we almost got another 20 episodes when we were going to be able to sell it to USA. And that supposedly would have been enough to maybe —

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** Make a real syndication sale.

**John:** So $2 million is what it costs to shoot that half-hour.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**John:** The network is paying you $1 million. So let’s say — that $1 million is the right to air it on US broadcast television?

**Jonathan:** Yeah, and a limited number of reruns, I think —

**John:** Okay.

**Jonathan:** They get like three or four or something like that.

**John:** So for the studio to make its money back, it has to be able to sell that show either in reruns, syndication, or overseas.

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** And so a lot of the money is coming from overseas now —

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** Because that first run could be worthwhile overseas. So they could be airing that in China or Australia or someplace else right now.

**Jonathan:** Well, apparently. And I’m told that that is a bigger and bigger part of the equation for the studios and that they are making their money back in foreign sales a lot sooner than they used to.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** Because the market has expanded and there is such a demand for product. As many platforms as there are here, there’re platforms internationally and they want product. So the whole idea of what used to constitute, you know, the back end and what really you would, you know, recoup or when the thing was out of deficit and now in profit, supposedly it happens sooner than it used to.

The Writers Guild feels this way strongly that these studios sometimes are making that money back sooner with foreign sales than they used to.

**Craig:** That’s really interesting because, you know, the independent feature film model is essentially based entirely on foreign pre-sales so we have a budget, the budget is $10 million, we’re going to go sell the rights in various countries until we have at least $10 million.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** Then we’ll make the movie.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** So we actually have no risk when we make the independent movie like that. You know, the interesting case with television is the idea that they could also create a situation of foreign pre-sale where before they’re even getting to the fifth episode, they’re essentially saying if we have — now, there’s a danger involved, obviously, where foreign pre-sales is the infection that incurs is an infection of talent. They all say, well, certain actors —

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sell shows overseas and certain do not. And now that starts to infect the kinds of shows that we get here because the studios need to sell them overseas. I can see trouble on the horizon.

**Jonathan:** Well, there was — speaking of that and related, there was a really kind of a rough article in Hollywood Reporter about, you know, Empire, not selling as well overseas. And that plays into like race and all that kind of stuff. Black-ish supposedly has done very well. I think maybe a family comedy aspect of it helps it. But Empire, you would think — you know, since so much of like black culture and hip hop and so on is one of our national — international exports.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** You would think it would sell but apparently it has been somewhat challenged so that gets into like —

**Craig:** I wonder if primetime —

**Jonathan:** The backlash against — is there’s going to be some kind of backlash against all the fantastic diversity, which is helping, I think, the networks get a little bit of a second wind. Especially ABC has done really well with it. FOX as well, obviously. And all of them realizing like, “Oh my God, the country is changing. This is who is watching television. We’re not reflecting America. Let’s be more diverse.” But that could factor in if it isn’t helping us.

**Craig:** It could be a problem. I mean — and the Hollywood Reporter is fairly reliable in getting things wrong. I do —

**Jonathan:** That’s true.

**Craig:** At least they are consistent. I mean, I remember reading that article and just thinking, there’s a thousand other possible explanations.

**Jonathan:** True.

**Craig:** For instance, I don’t know how primetime soap operas do overseas.

**Jonathan:** Yep, that’s a good point.

**Craig:** I don’t know if that’s something that people like.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** And the fact that a show Black-ish is doing well is sort of — I refute thus.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, right.

**Craig:** I mean, kind of argument over.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** I think it’s basically Malcolm Spellman’s fault. As a previous guest on the show.

**Craig:** Everything is —

**John:** He’s one of the Empire producers. It’s probably on his shoulders.

**Jonathan:** It should be.

**Craig:** He screwed it up. He really screwed it up.

**John:** So here is a question. This is again back to that same article.

**Jonathan:** Okay.

**John:** They’re talking about — Les Moonves talking about like, “Oh, in the shows we are picking up, we own a stake in all of them.”

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** And so I’m taking this to mean that even if it is a Sony show or a Warner Bros show or some other studio is behind it, a network gets to say, “Okay, we are an investor in this show up to a certain percentage.” Is that — am I reading that right? Is that what they’re — ?

**Jonathan:** That’s exactly what they’re saying. And it happens all the time. I mean, it feels rare unless — it feels like the exception now is for — it’s the exception for an outside studio that’s not owned by the network that they’re selling to, to be able to maintain a 100% ownership of it. I think some of the studios are a little bit stronger than others and hold the line better, but a lot of times it comes out of deal-making.

In that same article that we both read, it said that, you know, NBC was less aggressively pursuing ownership of a couple of single camera comedies that were coming on because they felt that the backend wasn’t as significant so they didn’t want to assume the cost. Because when you co-produce, co-own, you’re also putting up the money to buy in essentially.

But, you know, they all talk about like, you know, they’re all I think so nervous. And again, I’m a writer, so I don’t understand all this stuff, but I think they all are worried about the business of being in the distributors. They all want to be in the content business.

**John:** Yeah, they want to be the hype. They want to be the, yeah.

**Jonathan:** Exactly. And that’s where the future is. There’s always going to be room for content even if the pipe changes and the distribution platform has changed that content is king. You see Netflix go from obviously migrate from pipe, a brilliant pipe, to how many boxes of screeners did you get —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** From Netflix this year.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** They’re making so much stuff.

**Craig:** Well, you know, you’ve been around for awhile, so you remember the days where it was actually illegal —

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For a network to own any part of a show that aired.

**Jonathan:** I wasn’t in the business then but —

**Craig:** Okay.

**Jonathan:** I remember that was the facts back in the day.

**John:** Was that called fin-syn?

**Craig:** The financial syndication laws abbreviated as fin-syn. And the purpose of those laws was essentially to prevent monopoly.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they did make sense when they were three networks and, you know, and so there was essentially a forced kind of competition where, essentially, the networks would pay a license fee and then make their money through the sale of ads. But they could not own. Similarly theaters, studios couldn’t own theaters.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** And I don’t know if it’s changed or not. I think that’s still maybe a thing. But it’s not a thing anymore for television.

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**John:** Well, they certainly don’t have monopoly power but it does feel like a network has a tremendous amount of leverage over the studio where it says like, “That’s a really lovely show. It could be a challenge if you couldn’t put that on the air.” Or they say like, “You have to let us buy in.”

**Jonathan:** It’s absolutely what’s happening.

The only thing that’s hilarious is that all these networks pretty much own studios that want to sell outside. Every studio is able to attract better talent, writers and actors, producers, you know, a producer on overall deals, pods, people, if they can say we can sell everywhere. Like I will sign up with Twentieth in a deal or with ABC Studios — I like ABC Network, I like Fox Network, but, oh boy, I would like to be able to take my project to the right place.

And so, they’re all doing it to each other a little bit. Like Sony is really fascinating to me because they don’t have that partnership and they’ve actually — in some ways, I like that studio a lot because they’ve really kept their independence. But they were the ones also more forced I think a lot of times to always co-produce.

**Craig:** Right. So —

**Jonathan:** Happy Endings was a Sony and that was partly because I was in an ABC Studios deal and I got involved in that show. They needed a showrunner. Happy Endings —

**Craig:** But they’ll find some way in or another.

**Jonathan:** I think they would have.

**John:** But it is interesting. When we think about the old Hollywood system where you had writers’ rooms and you had like, you know, MGM writers’ room and like you were bound to MGM and that all went away. But to some degree, that still happens in television where you make a deal with a studio. And so you are writing shows for that studio and you are prohibited from working for anybody else unless certain conditions come up. In order for them to get you on Happy Endings, didn’t they have to do something with the studio who you originally had your deal with? There was a negotiation involved.

**Jonathan:** Yes. Sony, to bring me in, had to —

**John:** Buy you out of —

**Jonathan:** Had to basically, yeah. I think that became a co-production partly because I became involved. But then again, Craig is probably right. Certainly now it feels like it would just become a co-production, whether they were —

**Craig:** Right, right.

**Jonathan:** Needing a piece of talent or a writer to make the show made.

**Craig:** Well, getting rid of that law essentially cleared the way for the most obvious request of all. We are interested in airing this. The fact that we’re interested in airing it means we think it’s good. The fact that we think it’s good means we would like to own some of it. Now, it may be a case where multiple networks want to air something, which probably doesn’t happen that frequently.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there’s a lot of leverage there on their part.

**John:** But some of these negotiations though would happen at the point where you’re selling the pitch. But some of these negotiations I’ve heard from other showrunners, they’re happening like at the last minute. Like you’re into upfronts and they’re still trying to hammer out this deal.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely. It happens really late and it’s the last piece of leverage that the networks have in negotiating with the studios. And the studios then have to decide whether they want to do it or not and whether it’s worth it to them to take on a co-producer. But, you know, all the studios are interacting with each other so well.

I’ve been in two Sony/ABC Studios co-productions, one on Happy Endings and one on a pilot I produced. And, you know, they’re smart people at both studios. Sony was kind of the lead studio on both of those, ABC Studios. I mean that’s why Black-ish is such a — you know, if you can get the owned show that works for you, that is the homerun. Like —

**John:** Right.

**Jonathan:** Like ABC loves Modern Family but Twentieth —

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Twentieth owns all of that. They’ve never gotten into that one and that would be, you know, great.

I will give you a little bit of interesting context though, that there has always been a tendency, and I think it’s partly about executive dynamics and like how to reward them, to migrate the purview, the sort of responsibility from network president and give him or her also the title of studio president. And every time they do that, it doesn’t work for you if you work at the studio.

**Craig:** You mean when they leave the network presidency or you’re saying —

**John:** No, no, they basically —

**Jonathan:** Perfect example is like Paul Lee was the president of both — under his, whatever, job description was the head of the studio at ABC Studios and also the —

**Craig:** The network president.

**Jonathan:** President of ABC.

**Craig:** That doesn’t make any sense to me at all.

**Jonathan:** I hated it. I always hated it. And it happened at NBC when I was there. Yeah, I think it’s the way it is at Twentieth Century Fox right now with Dana and Gary are also the head. They came from the studio and the studio was such a profit center and they did such a, you know, huge job in keeping that, I think, probably the strongest of the independent studios for a long time, that they wanted to keep that job. And it was part of the —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** But the problem is that what I found happening is, and I remember talking to my agent about this, it never really worked for me as a producer because I would be like, “Well, why can’t so and so put on his studio head hat right now and keep my show on the network?” Happy Endings is a perfect example. Like, let’s keep that show on the network. Paul Lee could have kept that show on the network and probably gotten all of ABC Studios’ money out of it if he had programmed it better.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** But, you know, at the end of the day it’s like the big job still at that point, and this may be changing, was the network president. And they’re always going to choose the network president, “What’s better for me as the network president? Better for me to cancel Happy Endings. It’s not doing that great.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** You know what I mean? And I want to try something else. And so, it’s gone. So which is why I like the configuration they have now at ABC Studios. It kind of vacillates back and forth. It swings back and forth. And now, it seems like Patrick Moran is really growing ABC Studios and has a lot of independence, and makes deals with other places, and doesn’t just do it with ABC. But it’s so tricky when the networks own studios because they have that leverage and it’s an internal kind of thing, so.

**John:** Great. The next term I don’t understand, stacking.

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** What is stacking?

**Jonathan:** I had never heard of that before a month ago.

**John:** Okay, all right.

**Jonathan:** But I get it.

**John:** Then tell me.

**Jonathan:** What it is, is the networks and the studios really realize that they are getting a lot of views of their shows, and the way people are watching television now is to binge watch. So, there’s obviously the DVR usage and that’s now counted for advertisers and it’s counted live plus three and live plus seven and live plus something else. And same-day viewing and it’s all, you know, added up and then sold to the advertisers. The other way that they can kind of binge, “Oh, I didn’t see The Last Man on Earth yet this season.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** “And hopefully it’s up on Fox.com,” or whatever their thing is. And the networks want to have those stay on longer and go past what they call I think the rolling five, which is usually what it has been. So even though they have to pay a little bit more to the writers for a residual, and I actually investigated this because I was curious about it and I talked to somebody at the Writers Guild today, they’re willing to pay that little bit of extra residual to maybe directors and certainly to the writers to have the shows hang around longer on the .com websites, the ad-supported video-on-demand segment.

**John:** So the theory being that it’s good for discovery, it’s good for helping people catch up on a show.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**John:** And so especially a show in its first season, you want to make sure people who’ve missed it the first round can actually —

**Jonathan:** Yes. And it’s something the networks I think want more than the studios because I think the networks keep the lion’s share of that .com advertising. And it’s a way of building audience. The studios are nervous about it because it affects, potentially, their back end.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So the stacking rights are a negotiation between the network and the studio.

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** Which in many cases are the same company. But aren’t always the same company.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and then, you know, you’re dealing with one pocket versus the other pocket. But it’s true. I mean the studio, theoretically, their interest is in making you pay to see this even if it’s a week after it was on air, right?

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And the network, their interest is in, no, see it forever.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** See it a billion times. They want to expand the breadth of the license, right?

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That they’re paying for. And it’s interesting because we tend to look at it as writers as how are we going to get screwed on the residuals, because — and this will get us into our rerun thing. There was a time in the world when it was really simple and network paid a license fee, they were allowed to air a show once or twice. That was primary exhibition. But then there was something called the network rerun where they would rerun it again on the network, during primetime. And the writers would get paid a lot of money.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they don’t really do that anymore.

**John:** Very rare shows do. And a friend just got staffed on a show that actually does that. And so he’s like, “Score. I get a second run.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But let’s talk about how writers get paid.

**Jonathan:** Well, the networks will do it on certain shows and like it’s another way of building audience. Essentially, it’s part of the license or the agreement that they have, so it’s not a great additional cost to them and the studios pay out the residual. And it’s fine. But yeah, like the comedies tend to do it more. I think ABC runs — we’re getting rerun a lot this summer on Black-ish. They’ll rerun their Wednesday night comedy block.

What I’m told is that the procedural dramas will do it. The place where it really is hurting is any kind of hour-long that is serialized —

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** They don’t tend to rerun as much. And that’s where you’re seeing, you know, short order things to fill in. You’re seeing reality shows, game shows, all the stuff that NBC does every summer. And they seem to be the most kind of throwing anything out there.

**John:** It’s a whole different network in the summer.

**Jonathan:** Kind of.

**John:** So let’s say I’m a brand new staff writer on Black-ish. How would I get paid? So what would my deal be like for working there and would I be paid a certain amount per week? If I got an episode to write, would that count against what I had already been paid? How would it work from there?

**Jonathan:** My understanding of it is I have weirdly never been a staff writer on TV show. I had this weird way in because I was a Conan writer and then I started creating shows and so I always had this kind of creator-producer role kind of early on. But the way I think it is, the staff writers do get paid weekly. Their scripts actually they don’t get paid for, which is why the residual is very important if a staff writer writes a script and the episodes gets rerun. They do get a residual.

**Craig:** They have to be paid for it in terms of Guild minimum. But my guess is that it comes out of their — in other words, their salary is this much plus this much for the script and we’re going to pay you that on a weekly basis.

**Jonathan:** I think the deal is that maybe that money gets thrown back into their weekly pay or something —

**Craig:** It has to be. Yeah.

**Jonathan:** But they’re really not getting additional — like if you assign a staff writer a script, it’s not a big like —

**Craig:** It’s baked into their salary. But —

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**Craig:** But that baked in price still has to cover pension and health and stuff, yeah.

**Jonathan:** Sure, absolutely, yeah. And so they’re on a weekly thing. And I think they’re only ones who are, maybe story editors are, too, I don’t really know exactly. But then after a certain point and, you know, a number of episodes, you bump up in the job description and, well, the job title really, and you then get an episodic fee. Which is paid out weekly, I think. But it’s an episodic fee.

**John:** But that episodic fee is not as a writer. That episodic fee is as a producer, correct?

**Jonathan:** Technically. But everybody’s a writer-producer, essentially.

**John:** Yeah. The frustration, the challenge that always happens in Writers Guild is that like a lot of the money that TV writers get is actually producer money and therefore it’s not Guild money. And so that becomes a strange —

**Craig:** And like we get so screwed because we pay 1.5% guild dues on every dollar we make.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** You guys do not at all.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** Not even close.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** But this is not an East Side/West Side —

**Craig:** No, but in return —

**John:** We recognize.

**Craig:** In return for the larger share of money we kick in, can we get much less attention? [laughs]. So it’s a great system.

**John:** It’s really an awesome system.

**Jonathan:** Your name is much bigger though in screens and stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. When a movie gets made —

**Craig:** Really cool.

**John:** It’s really nice.

**Craig:** That’s right. It’s awesome.

**John:** But it is fascinating how, like, the writers who didn’t actually write that episode, their names do show up on the show as like those other credits.

**Jonathan:** Producer, yeah.

**John:** That’s nice, too. I think it’s a good thing.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, we don’t mind that.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**Jonathan:** Well, television, I don’t know about hour-longs. The only hour-long show I ever did was Ed. I was on that for a season. But I do know that every half-hour is super collaborative and super room-written to some degree, like you’re breaking the story as a group and then one writer goes off and does an outline and then gets feedback from the showrunners. Maybe another writer or two could get involved in looking at the outline and then the script comes in and the room works on it. So there’s a lot of people kind of throwing and it’s different.

**John:** So I’d forgotten to rave about your show but Black-ish is one of the few shows that we watch every night sort of when it airs. It doesn’t sit on the DVR long.

**Jonathan:** Fantastic.

**John:** And one of the episodes that you are credited with this last season is the flu episode where the whole Johnson family gets sick. So in an episode like that, how much more is that your episode than other episodes that ran in the season? Like percentage-wise, how much more invested are you in that episode than other episodes?

**Jonathan:** Well, I went off and wrote the draft by myself but I had a lot of help on that story. The story came together in the room and there might have been hours even when I wasn’t in the room when they were working on the story. And I came back in and people were like, “We think this is the direction for this.” There was lots of like group effort on the story. And then I went off and wrote the draft and lots of language and jokes are mine and sort of the structure of the scenes sort of. But then you come back in and it goes through another rewrite and you get jokes beaten and all scenes rewritten and you do a table read and it gets rewritten again.

So, you know, I would say the person with the highest percentage of stuff that he wrote in a draft being shot is Kenya Barris who created the show. It’s his show, it’s his voice. He’s a hilarious writer and he also takes on the toughest episodes that we do where we’re really talking about something. I had the advantage of — it was kind of a light episode. There was a sweetness to it, in which Dre was learning to take care of his sort of — like realizing he had missed out by avoiding taking care of his kids and had some regret. And then we learn at the end that Bow is pregnant. So he will have opportunities in the future to step up and be more involved in that way.

So it had an emotional wallop, I think. But it was in general not —

**John:** But it wasn’t the —

**Craig:** Police brutality episode.

**John:** Police brutality episode, yes.

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Oh, why didn’t they give you that one? [laughs] That’s weird.

**Jonathan:** It’s so funny though. But even now, and like Kenya, we really broke that story as a group. I mean Kenya had so much of the way in because it was really his story of how do you tell your kids about something really hard, like he’d been watching the Ferguson riots with his little boys and they were like, “Why is everybody so mad?” Well, how do you explain this?

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** So the way in was totally his. But then a lot of the structure of that and a lot of the comedy stuff or ideas for that were, you know, kicked around in the room. But then he went off and wrote a script over Christmas and kind of came back and it just had that feel to it of like this, we don’t need to — we cut a couple of things and changed a couple of folks —

**Craig:** Shoot it.

**Jonathan:** And then it was pretty much shoot it, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just shoot it, yeah. Yeah.

**John:** It was a one set sort of, you know, a little play.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, that was his vision. And that’s in a lot of ways his vision for that show is he likes the sort of, like, let scenes play out. Let it be almost a multi-cam in some ways, believe in the characters and their abilities to be interesting. You know, I tend to be a little bit more single camera and it’s probably a good blend because I’m a little bit like, “Just keep it moving in the scene because the scene is three pages. It could be two — ”

**John:** That living room is almost proscenium. It’s almost —

**Jonathan:** It is.

**John:** You know, a three-camera setup and you’re in that space probably more than any other space.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**John:** So the discussion of the police brutality episode, this is actually a pretty good segue into our other thing we want to do this time which is to talk about these ideas, these stories that are in the news and how they could be movies, which in the case of you, I’d also like to know like how could this be either a series or an episode, because some of these ideas feel like, okay, I can see a series about this but some of them feel like, okay, well that is the premise for an episode.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** So we’ll dig into these and see what we have. So first one up on the boards, this is Peter Thiel v. Gawker. So I’ll link to it —

**Craig:** Who do you root for here?

**John:** Yes.

**Jonathan:** That’s a tough one, right?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’ll link to an article from —

**Jonathan:** This one kept me up a little bit, thinking about it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** I’ll link to an article from Nicholas Lemann for The New Yorker sort of going into the back story behind it. But the short version for people who are like following this years after the fact, Peter Thiel is a billionaire. He’s made his money off of PayPal and other places. He’s a big investor in Facebook. He has a vendetta against Gawker. There was a lawsuit that Hulk Hogan filed against Gawker for discussing or releasing images from a sex tape and Hulk Hogan actually won this huge lawsuit against Gawker. But it turned out that Peter Thiel was actually funding the lawsuit against Gawker. And the whole notion of this billionaire versus this company, here’s a man who can spend his entire fortune to bring down a company if he chose to.

**Craig:** There are some free speech issues. The one fact you didn’t mention is the source of his vendetta.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which is I think relevant. Gawker outed him.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So —

**John:** As gay. You can be outed as anything now, so.

**Craig:** Yeah. They even outed him as Jewish.

**John:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** That never happens. So I honestly don’t know who to root for here. I understand all the problems, you know, inherent to a very wealthy person possibly stifling a media outlet. On the other hand, ugh, Gawker.

**John:** Let’s talk about this as a movie because like the most simple, obvious thing is basically what if Bruce Wayne sued The Daily Planet out of existence. I mean —

**Craig:** Worst movie ever.

**John:** Yes. [laughs] But I mean there’s that quality of like, you know, what are the limits that you can put on an incredibly wealthy person who can just use the system to their advantage.

**Craig:** It feels like an episode of a TV show, doesn’t it? Like just an episode?

**Jonathan:** Well, first of all, it will be. Somebody will do that.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** They’ll find a way to sort of boil that down for Law & Order or something.

**Craig:** Yeah, so like torn from the headlines kind of thing.

**Jonathan:** Yeah. If Good Wife was still on or somebody would find a way to tear that from the headlines, I think. But it also does feel like it could be a really great movie because it could leave you with like just as kind of conflicted coming out as you are going in because it’s easy to see both sides of it in a way. Like Gawker is disgusting.

I had lunch with my friend Todd Barry who’s a very funny comedian and we were talking about like some of the stuff they’ve just done and some of the shots they take of people in New York, friends of his. And he’s like, it’s gross. And I’m like, “Yeah. Screw them. They’re the worst.” And then like it’s chilling because what we’re not talking about yet is the context a little bit of Thiel’s thing is what Donald Trump is talking about.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** You know, and the way he went on the attack and played, I think, to a lot of receptive ears when he went on attack the other day against the press and what they were trying to do in just asking basic questions about where that money went through, his veterans things, where there were people going like, “The press is dishonest. The press is disgusting. The press needs to be shut down. There have to be better laws.” And that’s the legitimate press they’re talking about. So that’s the context of like it’s very much of a slippery slope kind of a thing.

**John:** In my head, I hear a lot of the Aaron Sorkin kind of dialogue about the arguments. And sort of like the way that both sides can make really impassioned cases for what they believe and sort of why what they’re doing is the noble thing. So the journalistic quality of like, you know, you may hate Gawker for what they do but recognize that any media publication could just as easily be in Gawker’s position where someone could go after them for anything they’ve ever written. And in this case, like the lawsuit for Hulk Hogan has nothing to do with Thiel other than the fact that he hates Gawker —

**Jonathan:** Exactly. The way to take them out. I would say this. I think that you’ve got to come down on the side of Gawker, ultimately, as much as I hate to say it because I — and I’ll say why.

**John:** For the movie version. Let’s just say like what it is the best movie.

**Jonathan:** But I think the aspirational thing that I would build into the movie, the ending, I don’t know how you get to this, is I thought about this as I watched the sketch that somebody posted today of Amy Schumer doing AMZ, a takedown of TMZ.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** And it was devastatingly great, on point. And it’s like the aspirational, maybe Sorkinesque, maybe somebody else would write it better. But like the idea that like — do you remember QB VII, the ending of QB VII where the libel case where the author of the book about Adam Kelso who was the doctor who was accused of Nazi crimes that Anthony Hopkins played. It was a TV movie, Leon Uris novel. That he wins this libel suit but he wins a British ha’penny, the lowest coin in the English crown.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** The ending would be that Gawker wins but that they close for other reasons. So the market, the people would go, they’re discussing, we’re no longer going to read them, we’re no longer the market. It’s almost like a weird belief in the power of the common sense of people in the market to go like, you know, TMZ is disgusting and corrodes your soul so don’t watch it anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know if I would believe that ending.

**Jonathan:** Of course not!

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**Jonathan:** But that’s the ending I would want to write, you know.

**Craig:** There is possibly another angle where you are on the side of this guy and he is taking on a group that, look, the one thing that gets left out of the discussion is you can’t successfully financially back someone’s winning lawsuit if they can’t win the lawsuit, right? That he did win the lawsuit —

**John:** Oh, no, no, no. But here’s the thing. It’s like he —

**Jonathan:** He drained them.

**John:** He drives them down. So basically like he can bankrupt them just through legal fees, essentially because he’s filing like —

**Craig:** But they got a judgment. I mean the point is they did —

**John:** Yeah, I think they got a judgment but here’s the thing. It’s like he could file 150 judgments and he doesn’t care if he ever makes any money back.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Right. But in this case, what muddies the water is — see, because Peter Thiel is not actually acting like a super villain. He’s acting like a guy that specifically hates one group of people and he has reason to hate them. And a lot of people hate them. And so he’s going after them. And they did do something wrong. They’ve done a lot of wrong things. But there is an interesting ending where in the movie version he wins, gets rid of Gawker, feels good, and then turns on the TV the next day and somebody that is bad is doing it to somebody that doesn’t deserve it and he’s essentially released a virus, you know, of behavior.

**Jonathan:** How about this?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Another version, probably not as interesting as your version but I’ll pitch it anyway, is that I do think like he takes down Gawker, he wins, Gawker goes out of business, but when he tries to take down something has journalistic standards, people say no. And that’s the rally. Maybe that’s the sort of like, so all of a sudden let’s just say he tries to take down the New York Times. We could debate whether the New York Times —

**Craig:** Right. He goes too far.

**Jonathan:** Is of quality or not, I’m not going to get into that argument. But like he goes too far —

**Craig:** They’re not Gawker.

**Jonathan:** They’re not Gawker. And people go, no, and they go we still want a free press.

**John:** Yeah. So essentially like he’s taking down Spotlight essentially. Like, you know, he’s taking down the noble journalistic crusaders.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And like that’s the thing. What I do kind of find fascinating are the characters involved. And so I think Thiel is a great character because whether you portray him as a villain or a hero, he definitely perceives himself as a hero. He sees himself as that person like all great villains should. Nick Denton is a fascinating character who’s like — I think he is actually clearly very smart but also to some degree self-delusional about sort of what his function is. And he’s willing to sort of say like, “Well, to make an omelet, we’re going to break, you know, people’s lives.”

**Jonathan:** Nick Denton is the head of Gawker.

**John:** Yeah, the head of Gawker, yeah. You have the Hulk Hogan or whoever the plaintiff is you sort of put in that place is really fascinating because that person kind of knows they’re being used as a tool and it’s not really about them. Like Thiel doesn’t honestly care about Hulk Hogan whatsoever.

**Jonathan:** That’s so great.

**Jonathan:** He’s just only a vessel.

**Craig:** We don’t know that. [laughs] He might love Hulk Hogan.

**John:** Oh, he might love —

**Craig:** He might have Hulkamania.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Probably not.

**John:** Probably not. I mean, to me the fascinating —

**Jonathan:** The realization by that guy that he’s been used —

**John:** Oh, yeah —

**Jonathan:** The conversations between him and the Thiel character where he’s —

**Craig:** Because I can see he’s like, “This is amazing. Somebody…”

**Jonathan:** Believes in me.

**Craig:** “…that cares that much about me, I still got it.”

**Jonathan:** That’s a heartbreaking scene.

**Craig:** That is a heartbreaking —

**John:** And so there’s a possibility for like, you know, you think that character thinks that they’re an Erin Brockovich, that they’re like little town Erin Brockovich. And like no, no, no, you were just a pawn being used by these plutocrats moving stuff around a board. That I think is a fascinating —

**Craig:** I still feel like to me, everything we discussed would be a great hour of television. I don’t know —

**John:** I think it’s a great HBO movie maybe.

**Jonathan:** I think it’s an HBO movie. I think two hours —

**Craig:** That counts as television.

**Jonathan:** Two hours of it. Yeah, television. It’s not going to put butts in the seats in —

**Craig:** No, because these kinds of movies ultimately, the issue involved needs to be like — The Insider was a wonderful movie and that’s about tobacco companies killing people and lying. This is in the end, I get that it is relevant to our lives but doesn’t quite feel like it deserves to be that — I always ask myself, “Am I going to drive somewhere and park to see this?” Probably not.

**John:** That was Amy Pascal’s thing which always, like, you know, if she’s going to green light a movie is, like, would I actually get a babysitter and go to the theater on a Friday night —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** When I’m already tired and had a long day’s work? And like, that’s a high bar to put for yourself.

**Craig:** It actually is a very high bar.

**John:** All right, let’s go to a much simpler —

**Jonathan:** HBO movie — it’s an HBO movie.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s go to a much simpler one here. This is about stoned sheep. So this is a Daily Mail article by Keiligh Baker for MailOnline. So essentially what happened is a bunch of cannabis was dumped at the side of the road. A bunch of sheep ate the cannabis. They went crazy and ballistic and destructive.

**Craig:** Well, okay, but they didn’t so first of all —

**John:** Yeah, it’s a sort of false headline and I —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Of course.

**Craig:** It’s a classic Daily Mail.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The Daily Mail headline is a Sheep Go on Psychotic Pot Rampage and then you read the article and what happened was they were wandering. They seemed confused. One of them got into a house and pooped. [laughs]

**Jonathan:** And one got hit by a car.

**Craig:** And one got hit by a car which is the most sheep thing of all time.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, exactly. With all the — pot is only going to have them act more sheep.

**Craig:** More sheep.

**John:** Yeah, like —

**Craig:** Like enhance their natural —

**Jonathan:** Like we used to say when we were getting high.

**Craig:** — harmlessness.

**Jonathan:** Like let’s get sheep.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like sheep are —

**Jonathan:** Sheep-faced.

**John:** Let’s use this is a springboard.

**Craig:** Sheep-faced. [laughs]

**John:** What is this? If someone came into the writer’s room with this idea, what might that spin into? Like what does that sort of get to?

**Jonathan:** You know, we would have to put it in a context of, you know, like a personal family story.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** I mean, a Black-ish, it’s much more of a — it’s not a Black-ish story maybe, you would try to — we have, you know, a —

**Craig:** Not really access to sheep.

**Jonathan:** No real access to sheep. Tracee Ellis Ross’s character, Bow, is a doctor so maybe there’s some way in which we could find an analog where a bunch of her patients got high or something off of an anesthesia — she’s an anesthesiologist or maybe something like —

**John:** You have grandparents — I also feel like they’re always potentially —

**Jonathan:** True.

**John:** You know, getting into things that they shouldn’t get into.

**Jonathan:** I can think it could be an interesting comedy movie, again, maybe, I don’t know.

**John:** Craig, can kids get high on pop syrup?

**Craig:** No, I mean, as somebody that has written a sheep movie —

**John:** Yeah, he has a sheep movie in development.

**Craig:** It’s a sheep movie about sheep that solve — they’re detective sheep, and they solve the murder of their own shepherd. This is not how we want to see sheep. [laughs]

**Jonathan:** Can I throw this in? What about — and I say this because I actually — every once in a while, I would perform on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and one of the things I did was we used to do the Clutch Cargo, which is the moving lips thing, where Conan would interview Bill Clinton or Bob Dole whatever.

**Craig:** Yes, yes, of course.

**Jonathan:** And I was Dolly the cloned sheep.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**Jonathan:** So what if there’s like a — because this happened over in Britain, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Swansea or something?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Jonathan:** That was in Scotland. She was a Scotland sheep.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Jonathan:** And I remember trying to do a Scottish accent. “Baa, I don’t know. I recognize myself.” I was trying to like — she was basically freaking out because there were two of her.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** So maybe there’s a cloning — maybe there’s some kind of high concept? I don’t know.

**Craig:** No. No.

**Jonathan:** Animated?

**Craig:** No. It’s just — here’s the problem.

**Jonathan:** Animated for adults?

**Craig:** Here’s the problem, sheep getting high is as funny as people getting high. People getting high is occasionally funny like back — but it used to be way funnier. Like Cheech and Chong were hysterical because getting high was transgressive.

**John:** I think sheep getting high is funny for a scene in another movie so like —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So like, oh, the sheep got high and then they like they ruin the house. That’s a moment, but it’s not a —

**Craig:** It’s a moment, yeah.

**Jonathan:** High sheep in like a DreamWorks movie, they would be like the penguins of Madagascar.

**Craig:** Right. But then you can’t put drugs in kid’s movies so you can’t do that, so.

**John:** Yeah, but they could eat like spoiled something or they eat the grass, yeah.

**Craig:** Or do like the fake high stuff? Like —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, my God. He ate those weird flowers.

**Jonathan:** We did a show called Father of the Pride for DreamWorks.

**Craig:** I remember that one, yeah.

**Jonathan:** That made it for NBC. Was kind of a debacle. Like it the show about Siegfried and Roy and the white lions that worked for them.

**Craig:** And the Union debacle.

**Jonathan:** Oh, Union debacle, exactly. That was crazy and then it was physical debacle because Roy got eaten by a tiger which was terrible.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Jonathan:** It was a huge amount of money that was wasted all round. But there were some funny things and one of the things, it’s sort of a thing you would do but is that the daughter who’s a white lion — teenage daughter gets caught with catnip. So you can do catnip as a —

**Craig:** The fake drug, yeah.

**Jonathan:** The fake drug, yeah.

**John:** Cats on catnip. All right. Our next story is The Great Swiss Bank Heist. This is a New Yorker article by Patrick Radden Keefe. It tracks Hervé Falciani who is a worker for the Swiss Bank HSBC. He stole a bunch of data from HSBC and in the revelation of what was in the data revealed that there is a tremendous number of people hiding a tremendous amount of money. And it becomes much more complicated from that. Craig, you were the one who loved this more than anything.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. So, first of all, this will absolutely be optioned by somebody if it hasn’t been optioned already.

**John:** Yeah. So usually whenever we do this section, one of these things absolutely becomes a movie. This is Craig’s prediction.

**Craig:** Somebody will — I don’t know if it will eventually become a movie. Somebody is going to buy the rights to this and here’s why. Here’s what’s boring. A guy steals a bunch of data and it’s got a bunch of information about tax dodging, whoop-dee-doo, right? They couldn’t make an interesting movie out of Julian Assange, so how are they going to make an interesting movie of this guy?

Here’s why it’s interesting. This guy is nuts, okay? This guy is amazing. He is a total psychopath, you can tell, right? Even from him talking. He invents these crazy scenarios and nobody knows if it’s true or not. So he invents a scenario where he was kidnapped by the Mossad. He invents a scenario where he wanted to get arrested because people were trying to kill him. He tells the French that he is bringing them this information out of a sense of some kind of patriotism to let them know that French people are hiding their money.

But he may only have gone to them because he couldn’t find anybody to sell this to, right? Because he was trying to sell through a woman he seduced, right? Even though he was married. This guy is a nightmare. And the character that’s unmentioned in this but the one that I would love to write because this is one of my favorite kinds of characters is — like we’ll call it the Diogenes character. Somebody who sees everything for exactly what it is and no one else does.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How frustrating that there’s this one guy who’s like, “No, this is not a hero. This is bad man who’s doing bad things.” And, you know, in a weird way, the one person that comes through like that in this article is the former mistress who’s — she’s the one saying, “Why are you all being suckered by the guy the suckered me?” [laughs]

“I’m telling you, you’re crazy.” Anyway, I love that character. I think there’s a really interesting story to tell here. It’s like I could see the trailer starting like, okay, we’re doing, it’s like we’re doing a movie about finances. It’s like we’re doing a Wall Street movie. But then, WAA-BAA. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Crazy guy.

**John:** So it’s that sense of like, is he a hero? Is he a villain? It’s one charismatic guy you’re sticking at the very center of this thing and from the audience’s perspective, are we supposed to be deciding ourselves or do you think the movie has a clear take from the beginning of good guy/bad guy?

**Craig:** I think, ideally, we are left to decide.

**John:** So, it reminds me a bit of — I can’t remember the name of the movie but it’s Matt Damon and Steven Soderbergh directed it where he claimed to be like this much more important CIA figure than he actually really was and he —

**Craig:** Is it the Good Shepherd?

**Jonathan:** The Good Shepherd?

**John:** No, not the black and white one. This was —

**Jonathan:** That wasn’t black and white.

**Craig:** It wasn’t black and white.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** The Good Shepherd was about the founding of the CIA so that can’t be it.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, those Yale guys in the —

**Craig:** Oh, The Informant?

**John:** The Informant.

**Jonathan:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** So The Informant had like a really interesting tone where, you know, you thought Matt Damon was the character he initially portrays himself to be and then you realize like, “No, no, no. You are actually a self-deluding fraud at the heart of this.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that makes it really fascinating when you get into it. What I do like about what you’re describing, though, is it’s a way — sort of like The Big Short where you can tackle some real issues about sort of the way the wealthy hide money and sort of like how that cripples countries but actually have a story to it.

**Craig:** Right, exactly. Yeah.

**John:** A thread to follow on.

**Craig:** Yeah, because taxes are boring and Swiss bank accounts vaguely are boring. I mean, they’re — I mean, we’re all familiar with the phrase because of spy movies and so forth. But you’re right. I mean, this man’s insanity and his crimes, they’re not globally important. It turns out actually the boring stuff is globally important. This is a way to tell that story but at the same time show a scene where he is pulled off the street and a pillowcase put over his head, and he’s thrown into a room, and there’s two guys from the Mossad and they’re telling him that he needs to pretend to be arrested, and he needs to pretend this and triple lies and — oh, and he claims that there is a — what does he call it? The organization or the —

**John:** The Network.

**Craig:** The Network. He claims that his act of data theft was aided by a shadowy —

**John:** Yeah, a loose confederation of anti-tax evasion crusaders, consisting of law enforcement officers, lawyers, and spies.

**Craig:** Oh, bullshit, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, such bullshit and of course his former mistress says, “Yeah, that’s total bullshit. You knew the network was me and him. That was it. And, you know, why he’s doing it? Money, no big shock there.” But you see the things as like I would love to see the story that he’s telling be real and then from another perspective think, “Wait, did that happen or not?” That’s just you telling it. “Are you Keyser Soze or are you Verbal Kint? Which one are you? I can’t tell.” So I love this and somebody should be making this.

**John:** So Jonathan, is there any — if this comes into the room —

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**John:** Is there any pieces of this that you say, like, “Okay, well, that’s an interesting thing we can use for our show.” Like the idea of hiding money or where people hide money or the idea of what information you reveal like, you know, Dre finds stuff out at work and has to decide — has to make a moral choice as sort of whether to reveal it, like, there’s little bits and pieces you can you use in this probably.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely. I mean, I think that in general, I mean, these things are — I wouldn’t call it high concept but they’re the kind of idea that can support the weight of a two-hour movie where I think the thing about a half-hour television show is it’s smaller stories that you spend a little bit more time. And, you know, characters don’t really change that much so you can’t —

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** You don’t quite have the giant crusade, like, the thing I always say about a half-hour show in a pilot, you do take your characters maybe from A to C or D in terms —

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Of a growth but then you spend the rest of the series shuttling back and forth between A or B.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly.

**Jonathan:** You know, and maybe at a special episode at the end of the season two, they get to C again and then they return —

**Craig:** But right back again.

**Jonathan:** Back a little bit. That’s kind of what people like in a way. So I think that it’s hard to find exactly what the father — but I will tell you a story like this will get us into — here’s what I think could absolutely happen with that story. If Kenya happened to read that and I happened to read that and a couple of other writers happened to read that. Or I said, “I want you all to read this.” It would get us into an interesting discussion that would potentially be — that I think we could do on our show which is the tendency to believe something like the Network exists or the conspiracy. Like, I was in San Diego last weekend and walked past the 9/11 truth squad —

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**Jonathan:** Display on Embarcadero. I walked past a Trump merchandise table which was very happily unpopulated by customers. Flags make America great again. Right near it, though, was a pretty well-attended, lots of curiosity seekers — including I saw this young black family that was listening to this guy give this crazy conspiracy that ultimately was kind of anti-Semitic about, like, Larry Silverstein, the [crosstalk] of 9/11.

**Craig:** And there’s a shock. And there’s the shock.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, exactly. And this family kind of listening and going —

**Craig:** Was it a black guy giving the speech?

**Jonathan:** No.

**Craig:** Because I learned this term called hotep. Have you ever heard of hotep?

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** What is hotep?

**Craig:** Hotep is — I’m sidetracking here. Hotep is —

**Jonathan:** I just learned this this year.

**Craig:** Yeah, I literally just learned — yeah, exactly. Hotep is basically like the subculture of black men who over — they basically lecture all black people on black superiority and they’re kind of —

**Jonathan:** We did a hotep pop in an episode earlier this year when it was in, I forget. But it was a pop to Dre in college and he was a — he had a hotep face.

**John:** I didn’t know that you call those pop, so the quick cutaways where you’re in a different time period and it’s just for that one joke that’s a pop —

**Craig:** Hotep face.

**Jonathan:** Where he was talking about the, you know, the — the yeah. All this stuff.

**Craig:** Anyway, I learned and loved it but these people are spewing paranoid conspiracy cloning.

**Jonathan:** Yes, that gets me back to like where I would think we could do an episode where why a black family — a super educated black family could buy into some conspiracy stuff and I think a lot of the reason is because there has been a conspiracy against them a little bit.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** You know, in some ways and even if it isn’t necessarily as organized a conspiracy as what these 9/11 truthers would say happened on 9/11, you know, the belief in the black community maybe that there was — that AIDS was started as, you know, that there was —

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** Cooked up in a lab and, like, why would they think that? Because the Tuskegee experiments happened, you know what I mean? There have been conspiracies and so like — and we did sort of tap this when Dre had his fear of going to the doctor and then that was amplified and completely multiplied by Dre’s dad, Laurence Fishburne’s character, absolutely wouldn’t go to a doctor. Well, we talked a little bit about why there is a little bit of sometimes mistrust of doctors in the black community or certain members of the black community. And I hesitate always to say the black community because it’s not monolithic, another thing that I’ve kind of really learned a lot by being on the show. So I think that that kind of what would make people draw to something. So I don’t know whether that’s really what that — to be honest I did not do my homework.

**Craig:** No.

Jonathon: I did not read the long the New Yorker piece about the Swiss Bank Heist.

**Craig:** Clearly. But you see how important it is —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For those of you listening at home —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To be able to think and talk on your feet when you’re completely unprepared.

**Jonathan:** Exactly. [laughs] That’s what I do.

**Craig:** That’s how you get a career in this business.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No, but —

**Jonathan:** You have to love to hear yourself talk about nothing.

**Craig:** About nothing.

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**Craig:** But you are — you are demonstrating something else other than the fact that you’re not prepared, which is that for television, for episodic, I think a lot of times the real value is some kind of underlying psychological issue that you can carry through to any character, right? So how would we deal with this interesting thing?

Whereas in film, a lot of times what you’re looking for are characters like that man to me is a movie character. And you want to try and take it — it’s like the way I would pitch that movie to studios. I want to do The Insider, but what if you cannot trust? Like what if instead or Russell Crowe’s character, it was the Joker because basically that’s what’s going on. Like who do — how do you feel about this? How do you feel — and in a weird way, it is kind of similar to the Peter Thiel thing. It’s just that it’s a much cooler story.

Because it’s not about Gawker or whatever. It’s about the Swiss Banks and billions and trillions of dollars and countries fighting. It’s like in there — if you had read the article, you would’ve seen that they sent Greece a list of — so Greece, you know, few financial problems over there. Meanwhile, they get the data and they send Greece a list of all the very, very wealthy Greek people that have hidden their money in Swiss Banks and are not paying taxes on it. And the amount of taxes that these people were not paying was the equivalent of like 10% of all the taxes that should’ve been collected there. And you know what the Greece did about it? Nothing.

They couldn’t even — then like the new guy came in and found it in a drawer and the old guy had tampered with it to remove three family member’s names from it. It was a disaster — I mean that stuff you can’t make up.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, a final story. I think it’s going to fit more into the world of an episodic show. This is about the wrong grandson. So this is a story that comes from South Carolina. There will be a link in the show notes. It’s basically a 65-year-old Orangeburg County grandfather picked up the wrong son — the wrong kid at daycare. Actually the elementary school. And so, essentially, it wasn’t until he got the kid home and that someone looked at him and said like, “Wait you’re not our kid.”

And so basically the school released the wrong kid.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** The granddad —

**Jonathan:** Absolutely an episode of television.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely an episode I’m doing this fall.

**Craig:** And a broad comedy movie.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely.

**John:** I don’t think it’s enough of a movie premise. Unless the —

**Craig:** I know how to do it.

**John:** Unless it’s Home Alone — okay, tell me.

**Craig:** I know how to do it. You’ve got a kid. It has to be like, you know, think of like a Dennis the Menace age kid.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And his family sucks. And they don’t understand him or at least he thinks they don’t understand him and he doesn’t like them. And his grandfather, in particular, is the worst. [laughs]

And he wants to run away. So he’s made a plan — in fact, he doesn’t even have a grandfather, right? Just his parents. They’re the worst. So he’s made a plan, “After school today, I’m running away.” And he’s about to do it when this car pulls up and this guy goes, “Get in!” [laughs]

But it’s a nice car and he’s got like McDonald’s with him. And the kid’s like, “Oh my god, that’s Stewart’s grandfather but he thinks I’m Stewart. I’m getting in. And he goes and basically lives the high life for a weekend with this guy making this guy feel like he’s the grandfather except that he isn’t. And then, you could see all sorts of interesting —

**Jonathan:** I could see that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then, like, you know, family blah-blah-blah.

**John:** It writes itself. That was such a development executive pitch. Basically it’s like, yeah, do this thing and you can figure out the rest.

**Craig:** Family blah-blah-blah.

**Jonathan:** Have you seen the Mitchell and Webb thing about not that but that?

**Craig:** Yeah. A pebble, a penguin, a policeman —

**Jonathan:** No. It’s not that. It’s a guy talking about his novel.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s what he’s saying. But he says, “It could be a pebble, a penguin, a policeman. All of the above, none of the above, and they are in love or they’re not in love.” That, write that. Or, don’t.

**Jonathan:** Or don’t. It’s hilarious. But, yes, so that could totally be a development executive’s thing — something like that. You’ll figure it out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** But I do think that could be an episode of television. I think you could have — I love the story. I do this story over and over, I think most shows with a strong lead are this most episodes where you have a problem, you try to solve the problem, make the problem worse. And then you solve the problem but in the way you thought you were going to solve it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** And it ends up kind of being a little bit of a moment of growth. So that would be the grandpa, we would have Dre or Laurence Fishburne, Anthony Anderson or Laurence Fishburne pick up the wrong kid. Try to fix it, make it worse, and then actually solve something else. Maybe not solve the real problem but solve something else getting not what he thought he wanted but what he actually needed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** And you can do that in a half-hour television show.

**John:** For sure.

**Jonathan:** A lot, all the time.

**John:** And I bet what some of the challenges as you’re breaking the story in the room is figuring out like what it’s actually really about.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely.

**John:** The premise of it is like he does this thing. But like what is that actually really about? Is it about the fear of kidnapping? Is it about the —

**Jonathan:** I think it could be the fear of not having enough of a connection with your grandson that you notice the difference. You notice the difference until too late.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** So then Pops would try to fix that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Or Dre would try to fix that. I was so in my own head and distracted by work that I let this kid get in my car and drove him. And all of a sudden, the police think — people are thinking I’m kidnapping the kid. And I’m not and I try to fix that. And then you overcompensate and spend too much time with your kids. And realize that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

**Craig:** This guy — look at this guy. [laughs]

**John:** This guy looks great.

**Craig:** He looks so confused.

**Jonathan:** It’s such a bummer.

**John:** Yeah. So what Bart Simpson would always say is like, “The only thing worse than your crappy under-parenting is your scary over-parenting.”

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**John:** And that would be sort of the thing —

**Jonathan:** That would be a story I could see us doing. And that might not exactly be it but that would be what caused this problem in the first place. And you go back at the end of the third act to kind of actually address the problem in a rational way as opposed to the irrational way that you —

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** Addressed it for all of act two.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this graphic novel series, a series of comic books from Image Comics but they’re gathered up together in nice little books you can go buy, called Sex Criminals. I’m the last person who’s read these things. Everyone has read them. But they’re really good.

**Craig:** You’re not the last person.

**John:** So in case you have not heard about it, it’s a series by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky from 2013. They are terrific. So the basic premise to this series is that you have this young woman who when she achieves orgasm, time stops. And so she can live in this sort of glowing moment for a period of time. A sort of refractory period in which she can wander around and everything else is frozen except for her. She meets a guy who has the same ability and together they rob banks. And it is brilliantly done. It is about sort of taking control of your sexuality. They’re funny, they’re weird, they’re naughty, so you shouldn’t live them sitting out on —

**Craig:** I have that thing by the way.

**John:** Yeah. It’s amazing.

**Craig:** I have that.

**John:** [laughs] That’s why everything seems a little bit misplaced every once in a while.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. You snuck in and done things.

**Craig:** I have two weird things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have the ability to stop time when I have an orgasm and I have the ability to just spontaneously have orgasms. So, yeah, my days are strange.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that’s how, you know, sometimes people remark on the podcast, “Oh, Craig tends to speak in complete sentences.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I just simply go back and stop time. I think, I write it out, I memorize it, I put it in my pocket. But, first, I have to jizz my pants. Yeah. So if it smells bleachy in here.

**John:** That’s what it’s for.

**Jonathan:** Oh.

**Craig:** What?

**Jonathan:** Oh.

**Craig:** It’s just — it’s biology.

**John:** It’s biology.

**Craig:** Yeah. We have dirty shows so we can do whatever we want.

**John:** Yeah. We can do whatever we want.

**Jonathan:** I took it to that. I got into it earlier on with the cream my jeans in the third row of the theater.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Boom. I was also made —

**John:** Craig Mazin, do have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** That’s not your orgasm?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know how to get cooler than that but I’ll try. Fallout 4, I believe, was one of my Cool Things when it came out. It’s very fun game. I don’t know if you’re a video game guy.

**Jonathan:** Not at all.

**Craig:** So big video game guy. Fallout 4 is a wonderful, huge, sandbox, open world exploration, quest-based game. And they have a new DLC for it, downloadable content, called Far Harbor. And so in Far Harbor, instead of wandering around Boston, irradiated post-apocalyptic Boston, you get to take a boat up to their version of Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park and go kill different stuff up there but always, of course, with these interesting moral dilemma storylines. They’re very good at that. Excellent. And I think it’s like 15 bucks or something and it’s another, god knows, 20-hours of game play or something, so Far Harbor —

**John:** Cool. What’s your One Cool Thing for us, Jonathan?

**Jonathan:** My One Cool Thing, this is going to sound lame, but is foreign travel now. You have to do it. We were just in Mexico. My wife and I had our 20th wedding anniversary and we took a fantastic trip to the Yucatan where I’d never been. We stayed at a great resort and it was really fun. And we took this day trip and in talking to our guides — our driver and our guide — the sort of tentativeness with which they asked about how we felt about Donald Trump made me say it’s really important right now to go and let them know that we’re not all crazy. Especially in Mexico, but I think anywhere and honestly the sort of overjoyedness with which when we said, “Oh, god, no please understand that that is something that is — not everybody is that way,” was actually kind of heartbreaking and heartwarming. So I’d say like it’s an old standby, but if you have a chance to reassure anybody —

**John:** Before November?

**Jonathan:** Before November and even after November that even if something — if he wins that he’s going to have a rough road because that’s not who we are.

**Craig:** I don’t think he’s going to win. I think we — I don’t think so.

**Jonathan:** I know, but he’s the nominee of a major party —

John. Yeah.

**Craig:** Kind of.

**Jonathan:** That has seemed to have left its senses.

**Craig:** Kind of. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Well, I lost $500 on that with Kenya Barris, who’s a very good —

**Craig:** That’s the biggest problem with what happened. [laughs]

**Jonathan:** I lost the money.

**Craig:** You lost 500 bucks.

**Jonathan:** He took out in a thousand dollars from two writers who were both — Courtney Lily, who’s another writer on the show. We were both like, “Come on! He represents 30% of the Republican Party. Well —

**Craig:** Yeah, you failed to account for whom he was running against.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I could’ve been of assistance to you.

**Jonathan:** Yeah. I know. You should have stopped me.

**Craig:** I should’ve stopped —

**Jonathan:** Is that an okay One Cool Thing?

**John:** It’s a wonderful One Cool Thing.

**Jonathan:** It’s not a thing but it’s a thing that I think people — I’ve had a little hiatus and I’ve been — I took the opportunity to travel a little bit and it reminds me of a — it’s incumbent upon us now.

**John:** I’ve had the library as a One Cool Thing. So we go general sometimes.

**Jonathan:** Okay good.

**John:** Yeah, totally. That’s lovely.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** And that’s our show. Jonathan Groff, thank you so much for being on our show.

**Craig:** Thanks, Jonathan.

**Jonathan:** It was fantastic. Craig, John, thank you.

**Craig:** Our pleasure.

**John:** As always our show is produced by Stuart Friedel and is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is from Adam Lastname, who does such great outros for us. We don’t know what your last name is but it’s Adam Lastname.

**Craig:** I’m so curious.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Doesn’t he —

**John:** Weirdly, that’s a thing in podcast music where people use other bizarre names. You wouldn’t think there would be a podcast music thing but there is —

**Craig:** There is a thing for everything.

**John:** There’s a hotmoms.gov is another sort of podcast band.

**Craig:** Hotmoms.gov?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is the greatest title ever. That’s amazing. [laughs]

**John:** If you have questions for me or for Craig on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Jonathan Groff, are you on Twitter?

**Jonathan:** I’m @notthatgroff.

**John:** What a great handle for you.

**Jonathan:** Notthatgroff.

**Craig:** I’m going to consistent every day. I’m going to be like, “By the way, love you in Hamilton.”

**Jonathan:** Thank you. [laughs]

**Craig:** Love you so much.

**John:** Yeah. We haven’t even gotten into all the stuff you do on your gay HBO show, Looking. So that was really brave.

**Craig:** Very brave.

**Jonathan:** You know, it just, to me it was just a job.

**John:** Very good. It’s just a body. It’s the instrument that you’re given.

**Craig:** It’s just bodies.

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**John:** If you have a longer question, you can write in to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcript for this show in a couple of days. The 250 episode USB drives just arrived as we were recording this episode. So they should be in the store if not this week, but the next week. And if you’re on iTunes for whatever reason, please leave us a review because it helps people find our show. Thank you all much.

Thank you, Jonathan.

**Jonathan:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Jonathan Groff on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0342917/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/NotThatGroff)
* [Network Ownership & In-Season Stacking Rights Rule 2016 Upfronts: In-Depth Look](http://deadline.com/2016/05/network-ownership-in-season-stacking-rights-series-pickups-2016-upfronts-1201752808/) on Deadline
* [America’s TV Exports Too Diverse for Overseas?](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/americas-tv-exports-diverse-overseas-879109) from THR
* [Financial Interest and Syndication Rules (aka fin-syn)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Interest_and_Syndication_Rules) on Wikipedia
* Black-ish, season 2 episode 16, [“Hope”](http://www.hulu.com/watch/909068) on Hulu
* The New Yorker on [Peter Thiel vs Gawker](http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-peter-thiels-gawker-battle-could-open-a-war-against-the-press)
* Daily Mail’s [Stoned Sheep](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3609322/Stoned-sheep-went-psychotic-rampage-eating-cannabis.html) coverage
* The New Yorker on [The Great Swiss Bank Heist](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/herve-falcianis-great-swiss-bank-heist)
* [The Informant!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Informant!) on Wikipedia
* [Hotep, Explained](http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2016/03/hotep_explained/) from The Root
* [Grandfather “very sorry” after accidentally picking up wrong grandchild at school](http://www.kplctv.com/story/32102101/report-grandfather-accidentally-picks-up-wrong-grandchild-at-school?clienttype=generic&sf27594567=1)
* [Ok… Not this…](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LC0JjvAJt8) sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look
* [Sex Criminals](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1632152436/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky, on Amazon
* [Fallout 4’s Far Harbor DLC](http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/435881/) on Steam
* [Travel abroad!](http://www.state.gov/travel/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Lastname ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/david-mamet-and-the-producer-pass).

**John August:** Hello and welcome, my name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 240 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be answering a bunch of listener questions about the craft, about the profession of screenwriting, and about Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Lots of Craig questions.

**Craig:** I won’t know how to answer any of them.

**John:** It’s one of our easiest types of episodes because we had to do almost no work. We basically pasted a bunch of questions in here and we’ll just answer them one at a time.

**Craig:** Or, it’s exactly as easy as it is for me, always, because you do everything.

**John:** This is the Craig special we’re talking today.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Last week on the podcast, we were talking about an article on acting by Marcus Geduld, and so we were looking at his article, and we were comparing what would the similar advice be for talking about good writing. And so Marcus listened to that episode and wrote in and said, “Hey, a friend alerted me to the Episode 239 of your podcast in which you discussed my Quora post about acting. I’ve been feeling some qualms about it. But I was very pleased that it sparked such intelligent conversation on your show. You have a new listener and a fan. Forgive me for bringing up stuff you may already know about. It will take me some time to listen to your whole back catalogue, but I wonder if you’ve discussed David Mamet’s memo to his writing staff on The Unit. It was dashed off and contained a lot of typos, but it’s great fodder for discussion.” So he sends a link to this memo that David Mamet wrote in 2005 for the writing staff of this — I think it was a CBS show called, The Unit.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I remember seeing it when it came out, but I don’t think we’ve ever discussed it on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. Before we started recording, I asked you to go check it because I thought for sure we would have discussed it because I remember reading it and thinking about it and then talking about it, but I guess it wasn’t on this podcast about things that are interesting to screenwriters. So we should talk about it.

**John:** We’ll have a link to this in the show notes, so you can just click through and see what we’re talking about, but it’s about a four-page, just memo, like a single sentences about advice and frustrations and guidance to his staff about what he’s looking for in an episode in their writing. And you know, one of the sort of central tenets behind it is like don’t be lazy, like you know, the stuff I’m asking you to do is really hard, but that’s sort of your job to do the really hard work. And what he’s really looking for is not plot, it’s not story, it’s drama. And he’s sort of railing against those scenes that are so common, especially in procedural dramas that are not dramatic at all, they’re just information dumps.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the things that I found remarkable about this when I read it was that it needed to be written at all, but I understand particularly when you’re doing a procedural, and there is an enormous amount of plot, because every episode has to be centered around some new bit of narrative, it’s tempting to fall into the trap of letting narrative and plot drive everything else. But what he’s reminding them here is very, very true, and it’s something that I think is a little easier for us to keep an eye on in a movie because it’s just our one story — character drives plot, and character relationships drive plot. Even when it seems like the plot isn’t driven by those things, the plot must ultimately be in relationship to those things. It has to either come out of them or exist to change them. So he’s really refocusing their eyes on that.

**John:** He’s arguing that every scene needs to be about the conflict and discovery of characters within that moment and the scene itself has to have drama, it has to have a spark to it. And it can’t really be the thing that’s connecting you to the next thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’ll read a little bit from it here. “Everyone in creation is screaming at us to make the show clear. We are tasked with it, it seems, cramming a shit load of information into a little bit of time. Our friends, the penguins, which is what he calls the studio execs, think that we, therefore, are employed to communicate information, and so at times, it seems to us. But note, the audience will not tune in to watch information. They wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned in to watch drama.

“Question, what is drama? Drama again is the quest of the hero to overcome things which prevent him from achieving a specific acute goal. So we, the writers, must ask ourselves of every scene these three questions. Who wants what, what happens if they don’t get it, and why now?” Those are three great questions.

**Craig:** They are, and they are questions that I ask of myself constantly and I try and ask them before I write the scene. I don’t like going into a scene without knowing the answers to those questions. The scene must be first and foremost an immediate answer to why now because if the scene could happen later, it probably should happen later, or earlier, or not at all, right? It needs to feel like it must be now, must be. And then the who wants what, this comes up so often, and it’s articulated in so many different ways, but it is the bedrock question of following characters and believing that their people. What do you want? And it changes at times. At times it doesn’t. And it’s static. But when actors say, well, what’s my motivation? That means what do I want? It’s the only way to perform. I think it’s the only way to write a scene. It’s the only way to write a movie.

I think it might have been frustrating for his staff to read this because I don’t know, I suspect that they might have known a lot of this, and they were like, hey, you know, we have to do 26 of these? And it’s not like writing a play, but if you don’t know the answers to these, you are going to end up with that feeling of treading water.

**John:** Yeah, I definitely would feel some sympathy being on his writing staff because like, hey, you hired us to write on your show because we are writers who’ve written on other things, like, we should in theory know what we’re doing. I think where I sympathize again with Mamet though is that sense of when you’re actually in the process of trying to make these things, you’ll reach those scenes where it’s like, there’s nothing — the scene just needs to be here so I can get this piece of information out. And he’s saying, I know you feel that way, but that’s not a good enough answer. You have to find a way to make that scene dramatic. Otherwise, it’s just not a scene, and it’s not worth anything.

Circling back to his question of like what do the characters want, we’ve talked a lot about, you know, wants and goals and wishes and dreams and motivation on the show, and there’s a whole scale, there’s a whole like sort of mountain of want that a character experiences. There’s that overarching, that wish, that dream, that someday want, which is informing a character for like one day I hope to get this thing. And a character on a TV show will kind of never get that thing they hope to get. A character in a movie probably should get that thing they’re hoping to get.

And then there’s sort of more immediate goals, like what are the things we’re trying to do in this section, like what is a thing I can see in the distance I’m trying to get to, that mountain that I’m trying to get to. But there’s also a very immediate goal, and this is I think what Mamet is getting frustrated about is that it is literally like in this moment where I’m standing here talking to you, what am I trying to achieve?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And sometimes you don’t see those things happen. And it’s those questions — what I’m trying to achieve right now — that’s informing each line of dialogue, it’s informing why the characters are interacting with each other the way they’re interacting. And I think his frustration is, you encounter these scenes where it’s, “Well, Tom, as you know, blah, blah, blah.” And then it’s just an information dump.

**Craig:** Precisely. The essence of conflict is each character in conflict, and in one of our episodes we went through all different kinds of conflict, but for all of them, each character in the conflict wants something that is different than what the other person wants. There is no conflict, and thus, no drama in a scene where one character is explaining something to another. That’s a meeting. People go to meetings all day long at work, even if they don’t work at places where you think they have meetings, they do. If you work at Burger King, at some point, the manager is going to be like, hey, guys, we just go these new kinds of fries, and here’s the order that they have to go in. That’s a meeting. That’s boring. It’s just boring. And that’s not why people come to see shows.

So your job, he says, is, you know, information is necessary to make the whole thing work, figure out how to encode that into scenes that are dramatic. Otherwise, why are we watching it, you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like he says, look at your log lines, a log line reading Bob and Sue discuss is not describing a dramatic scene, and he’s right because if they’re just discussing it, there’s no conflict.

**John:** I think it’s really interesting that he’s going back to the log line because as you’re doing sort of like quick and dirty outlines of like sort of what’s going to happen in the show, you’ll see these things which are basically, these two characters discuss this thing and decide to do this thing. And discuss is never going to be a dramatic scene. And so if all they’re doing is discussing, that scene is not going to meet his standards. If they decide, well, then, what is the nature of the conversation that led to a decision? And so if it’s an argument, then that probably could work. If it is a, you know, Tom convinces Mary to do this thing, that is conflict. You can see what the different character’s goals are. But if it’s just discussing, if it’s just like you know they’re passing the ball back and forth while they’re talking about it, that’s not going to work.

**Craig:** There are so many ways to bury conflict in there while this information is happening. For instance, one character can be explaining something, let’s say, I think The Unit was a law enforcement show, correct?

**John:** Yeah, I think so.

**Craig:** So one character is explaining to another what they found and what he thinks they should do next. And she is listening to this, and then her response is going to be okay, let’s go do it. No conflict, right? But if while they’re talking she needs to be somewhere else, or she wants to be on the phone with someone else, or she sees someone through the window, or she just walked out of something that’s pissed her off, or she has a secret. Anything that makes her want to not be there, suddenly the scene is interesting. He can stop and say, I’m sorry, are you not paying attention to me at all? Of course I am. Now, it’s interesting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s about people.

**John:** Yes. So he’s stressing that the scene has to have drama in it. The scene has to be dramatic and again, his words, “It’s not the actor’s job. The actor’s job is to be truthful. It’s not the director’s job. His or her job is to film it straightforwardly, and remind the actors to talk fast. It is your job.” Although Mamet is, you know, weaving in that talking fast, but that’s Mamet, and that’s absolutely true. And I can’t think of any TV shows that are not non-fiction cooking or sort of building thing shows that don’t have that central conflict woven into every scene.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And frankly it’s why there are certain kinds of shows that I never really got into like Law & Order has been on forever and a lot of people are big Law & Order fans, but I always found my problem with Law & Order was that there were scenes where people that just generally were agreeable coworkers would discuss facts. And I found that like I was in a meeting. I just did not like that so much.

**John:** I have never liked that show. And that show is sometimes a nice intricate crossword puzzle, but in general, characters would have scowls while they gave each other information, but that wasn’t actually conflict.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Every once in a while, Sam Waterston would like throw some papers around and he’d get really upset, and there were moments where there generally was disagreement, but those things were rare.

**Craig:** Yeah. So then what you really end up with is living or dying on what I call the prurient interest of the plot. Will they be found guilty or not, which is fine, but kind of not enough for me to watch your show.

**John:** Yeah. He talks about clarity and curiosity. He says, “The job of the dramatist is to make the audience wonder what happens next. It’s not to explain to them what just happened, or suggest to them what happens next. It’s to create that question mark.” And, you know, to the degree that Law & Order succeeds, I think there is a question mark about how are the pieces going to fit together.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s like they’ve shaken up the box of the big puzzle and now you have to figure out, oh, are they going to be able to put the pieces together in time? The answer is yes, but maybe there’ll be some detours along the way.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a really good outline of how to approach scene work, I think, and a great way to — it’s a nice enumeration of pitfalls.

**John:** I agree. So why don’t you hit our next question?

**Craig:** So Robert writes, “When you’re writing for a first step for a studio, do you give the draft to the producer for their notes, that is to say, do a producer pass before you submit to the studio? And if you do, is there a limit to the quantity or scope of adjustments that you will do for the producer, or will you do as much additional work as the producer desires?” And then he clarifies, “As a young writer, you want to do what’s best for the project and be known as a team player, but also don’t want to be taken advantage of, or undermine the guild in any way.”

**John:** Yes. So Robert is going to be so happy to hear that once you have had a few projects made, this never comes up again. And it’s free and clear to answer your question. So the answer, Robert, is that there’s no great answer for how much leeway you should give to the producer before it goes into the studio, to what degree you should bend to their wishes, to what degree you should be a good team player versus stick to your guns, it’s a really tough thing that you’re going to be wrestling with your entire career.

**Craig:** Yeah, boy, it’s rough for us when we can’t give you a good answer. And look, for me, I’m actually dealing with this right now. And I’m kind of a hard case about this. Frankly, I don’t have the time to do these passes just for the producer because I have other things I have to do. But in addition, my entire outlook on things is I want everyone to tell me what they think, not just the producer. The producer oftentimes is wonderful and has great insight into the movie they want to make. They will convince you that they have the greatest insight to the movie the studio wants to make. But as you go on in your career, you’ll find out they don’t, any more than anyone does, seemingly. And so sometimes you end up in this trap where you’ve done all these work and then work, and then work, and then work, then you turn it into the studio, and they’re like, what? This isn’t what we wanted.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So here’s the uncomfortable fact for every screenwriter whether you’re new, it’s particularly brutal when you’re new, or whether you’ve been around forever: there will always be pain and friction here in this relationship. You will find yourself in positions where you are going to make people upset. You will find yourself in positions where you’re making yourself upset. And all I can say is that if you are involved in a producer that you believe is starting to behave in a way that is abusive or counter productive to the project, you’re not going to want to work with them again.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you might as well hunker down with your agent and say, “I’m drawing the line here, we’re turning it in here. And that’s it. And if they flip out, they flip out.” But I’ll say this much, if the studio likes it, they’ll be your best friend.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s talk about the difference between realistically in daily practice and contractually. Contractually, you owe the script to the studio, you don’t owe it to the producer. And so when you turn it into the studio, you are saying, you’re delivering your script, and they’re going to pay you your money, the other half of the money that they owe you for the script. And so there’s one person listed on your contract, you turn it in to him or her, and they should cut you a check.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In practice, what tends to happen is you show it to the producer first, kind of as a courtesy, but also to get their feedback. And sometimes you will do additional work based on their notes, and then you will turn it into the studio, and they will pay you. The pitfalls that happen: sometimes the producers will come to you with a tremendous number of notes or just like really crazy things, like wow, that’s going to take so much time to do.

Sometimes you’ll agree with them, sometimes like, well that’s just a better idea, I’m going to go through and fix that. Oftentimes, you’ll be questioning whether it’s a good choice to be doing those notes, and then you’re kind of stuck so do you say like, “Yeah, I don’t think so,” and you go into the studio? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. You also are always wondering where is that note really coming from. Is that note because they think it’s what’s best for the project or because they’re just playing from fear? If they’re playing from fear, that’s not going to be a helpful situation for you.

The real danger is that they actually have shown it to the studio, and they’re actually sneakily trying to get you to do the studio’s notes as their notes, and that’s just the kind of BS that you encounter and you want to throw somebody through a wall.

**Craig:** That happens all the time and is literally fraud that they are perpetrating upon you. The thing that bothers me maybe the most about this is that, you said something that I think would be great if both sides saw it this way. But you do this as a courtesy to the producer. But so many producers don’t see it as a courtesy. They see it as something that they’re entitled to.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I don’t feel that way. I just had a very difficult discussion with a producer the other day. And I just said, look, I’m turning in the script, and I’m just kind of curious what you’re intending to do forward, how do you want to deal with this because it’s a one-step deal like they always make. And I said, are you the kind of place that does the whole, oh, let’s do another draft now just for the producer, and he’s like, yeah. I said, well, I’m not that guy.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** And it was a difficult conversation. And I will remain not that guy. And here’s the deal, yeah, if there’s something terrific and wonderful and interesting, and it’s a couple of weeks, or a week, yeah, I’ll do it. Sure. If it’s what I consider to be a re-write or a draft, no, I won’t. And they’ll say things like, well, the studio will never go forward with this. Okay, that’s right. You know what, they had a choice of how to structure my contract, this is how they structured it, so you know, I’ll take my chances there.

**John:** Yes. I ran into this situation on a project and the frustrating thing when I sat down with the producers, and things were going great, I sat down with the producers and their notes were just crazy pants like, wait, that’s a fundamental rethinking of the entire thing. That’s actually not the movie I pitched to the studio. And you’re wondering, just like, yeah, as an experiment, maybe I could try that, like the answer is no. And so I just flatly said no, and I left the meeting. And it really messed up my relationship with those producers, but there was just no way I was going to do it. And so we turned in the draft that I had done, and the studio loved it, so great, but it made it for an awkward situation with those producers because I frankly said, “You are insane. I’m in no way doing that thing.” And I thought they were abusing — in the context of trying to like, oh, let’s just like open up all the doors and like really explore things, they were trying to get me to write a completely different movie. And that was not going to fly.

**Craig:** No. And see? So Robert, note what John said. It screwed up his relationship with these people. That got broken. But I would hazard to guess, John, that you wouldn’t be running back to those producers with something else.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So sometimes you got to break things. You can’t be everyone’s friend. If you want to be everyone’s friend, you’re walking around with a mark on your forehead that says, take advantage of me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you are going to have to judge these things unfortunately on an incident by incident basis and you’re going to have to understand that the people who are telling you that it has to go this way or else are saying that to con you. And they are sometimes also incidentally correct. But their primary concern is to con you.

**John:** Yeah. A mutual friend of ours is very, very hardcore about like, oh, I’m done. Here’s the script, bye. And so if you made a one-step deal with him, he’s done. He’s not going to like fix a comma in the script and he’s incredibly hardcore and I think he’s perceived as being incredibly difficult for that reason. And he’s had a lot of success, but I think he also has a reputation for being really difficult. And it’s the kind of behavior that makes you seem really difficult. I’ve never been that hardcore, and I’ve always been like happy to have the conversation with the producer or even the studio saying like, hey, we have this issue, can we talk about this issue specifically because of this problem because we’re trying to go after this actor, or whatever else, I’m fine and happy to do that.

It’s when they’re asking me to essentially just come back in and do more free work that I do go back to what Craig said, is like, well then maybe you should’ve have made a different deal for me. Or in fact, we have optional steps in the deal that you did make for me, let’s visit those.

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s do them, exactly. Look, I would never recommend to anybody to be the not one period or comma because I think that’s just dumb, you know. And I think that there is great value in doing what I’ll call tweaks to make everybody feel good and invested and whole as they go into the studio with this. But my whole thing is, look, if you want to do more than those tweaks in advance of the studio seeing it, it means this isn’t working for you. If this isn’t working for you, I’m not your guy. So I got to go because I got other things I want to do with my life and what I don’t want to do it just now chase you. I don’t want to chase you and what you want to do. This should be enough for people to go, well, everybody, studio and producer alike, after a week or two of tweaking, we see enough value here that we want you to continue, or we do not see enough value for you to continue. But I think a lot of writers end up chasing somebody who is just running ahead of them flinging fear glitter into the air and they’re just chasing them down this terrible path designed to assuage anxiety to no end.

**John:** I thought experiment it just occurred to me. So somebody says like, oh, can you just do a couple of days at work and my instinct is usually sort of yes, but what if I rephrase it as like, oh, we just want to reshoot a couple of days. That would be free, right? Of course that wouldn’t be free. Like to reshoot a couple of days would be tremendously expensive. So it seems really weird that you expect my labor to be free whereas everybody else’s labor would be incredibly expensive.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, it’s a funny thing actually for me, I brought this up in the conversation with this producer. When I’m in a development phase, I have to be careful about my time, and careful about being paid for the work I do and protecting what I feel is my earned status as a professional writer, to not just do stuff cause. When we’re making a movie, I don’t ask for anything. And what I find a lot of times is, then they’ll call me and they’ll say, you’ve done quite a bit here, we should pay you something for it. And I’ll say, great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when we’re making a movie, there’s no teamier team player than me because I love it, but I hate development and I certainly hate wasting my time writing screenplays that aren’t being read by the people that decide to make a movie. Ugh. But anyway, Robert, long answer, difficult answer. You’re asking a good question and I’m sorry we don’t have a great answer for you, we just shared our pain with you instead.

**John:** Right, let’s do a simpler question. Najeeb writes, why does Craig feed the trolls so hard?

**Craig:** So I assume Najeeb is talking about Twitter and the people that occasionally go after me because I’m not a fan of Ted Cruz. And they seem to be breaking down into three categories, there were two, now there’s three. Category number one, people whose Twitter avatar is a flag with an eagle. Category two, people whose Twitter avatar is a flag with a cross. And the new one is, flag with don’t tread on my snake.

**John:** Yeah, very, very important.

**Craig:** Eagle flaggers, snake flaggers, cross flaggers. Why do I feed the trolls so hard? Because it’ s fun for me. I don’t feed them, they’re feeding me. I’m having fun. Now when I don’t like what they say, or if it’s just like a boring thing and most of them are, I’ll just ignore it. Or if it’s really disgusting, I’ll block them, or it’s just like enough already from you, I’ll block them. Like, oh, now you’re having fun, I don’t want you to have any fun.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there’s this great line from the Watchmen, Alan Moore wrote for the character Rorschach. He’s been sent to prison, and all the prisoners hate him so much and they’re like, now you’re in here with us, we’re going to kill you. And he says, “No, you don’t get it. I’m not locked up in here with you. You’re locked up in here with me.” [laughs] And that’s me on Twitter. They’re locked in there with me. So that’s why, Najeeb.

**John:** I do notice sometimes people put those little hashtags at the end of things and they’ll sort of make up their hashtags but like there’s one just yesterday, it was #MazinBaby. And so I was like, oh, I hope other people are using #MazinBaby but they’re not. It was a one-time occurrence of #MazinBaby.

**Craig:** MazinBaby was pretty good. I like MazinBaby.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, nice.

**John:** Talking about Twitter best practices, I used to block people. I don’t block people anymore. I just mute them. And so if you’re not using block or mute, I would encourage you to explore the wonderful world of mute because mute, they just disappear. You just don’t hear them again. It’s like you just ignore them and they never show up in your feed again. And it’s really useful because they don’t know that you’ve done anything and that’s a lovely —

**Craig:** That’s a great point. It’s funny. Like without naming names, I’ve used mute many times for people I follow.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Who I don’t want to upset but who are just boring me. They’re tweeting a lot and it’s all boring.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So I mute them. It’s the little white lie but then you got to be careful because then they’re like, hey —

**John:** Why don’t you ever write me back?

**Craig:** Yeah. Didn’t you see what I wrote?

**John:** Yeah. I’m thinking of some people you might have on mute. Here’s a question for you. If somebody is muted, and I can look this up. By the time you’re listening to this podcast, I will have already looked it up, but if I have muted you and somebody writes to both you and me, do I still see the tweet or does it go away completely? I’m not even sure.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think you see anything that’s got an @ to you. The muting is just basically for stuff that isn’t adding you and it’s just them talking.

**John:** Oh no. Muting does block people. It does keep people from adding you.

**Craig:** Oh, it does?

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** Oh. Oh, well in that case.

**John:** It’s useful for that too.

**Craig:** Then I’m going to stick with blocking for certain people. [laughs]

**John:** John Lambert writes, “A hypothetical, of course, but if your second script is an original one-hour spec, and it’s genius, what would your next three steps be?”

So here’s the numbers here. It’s the second script. It’s a one-hour drama. He wants to know what three steps you should take next.

**Craig:** No idea. What? [laughs] What kind of?

**John:** Yeah, Craig’s not a good person for a one-hour specs but — so you’ve written a spec script and by this I believe you are — I think you’re meaning that it is an original, so that’s not just an episode of you know Law & Order 16, or Chicago Social Services. You’ve written a great episode of television, original episode of TV, a pilot. And people like it. So, I would say — you say it’s great. Well, I think you need some objective measurements about whether it’s great. So, I would say enter it into Austin, enter it into Black List, get people to read it and see whether other people think it’s fantastic.

While you are doing that, you need to write more. Because one or I guess this is your second script, you’re going to need a trunkful of things under your belt before you try to make the move out here. You can make the move out here but before you’re seriously in consideration for a job writing television.

**Craig:** Yeah. That makes sense to me. I get thrown up by the next three steps. I can’t see three steps ahead. That’s like chess.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I got one step, show it to people and see if you’re right. How about this, get it out of the world of hypothetical, and into the world of actual. And then that should be your next step.

**John:** So I actually witnessed Craig thinking a few steps ahead though because last night we were playing Pandemic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It was your second session, my first session playing Pandemic, which was a former One Cool Thing. This is the legacy version where the board actually physically changes once you’ve gotten through a gaming session. It was terrific. And you were very smart about sort of, you know, as we discussed sort of planning to keep cities from going rogue and falling and outbreaks from spreading.

**Craig:** Well, that’s where my mind is really suited to useless strategic things like playing Pandemic and sometimes not at all suited to what would my next three steps be if I had a genius script in my hand. We all have our strengths. That game by the way, a lot of our One Cool Things just aren’t that cool. That game is so good. I had so much fun. So much fun. I can’t wait. So we — the game is laid out in months. So you play it 12 times assuming that you win each time but if you lose, you get to play it a month over again if you lose. So we’ve only played January and February but we won both times. We’re very proud of ourselves.

**John:** And our funding has been cut to nothing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I know. We were extremely — can’t wait to play it again. So, next question. John Sweeny writes, “Subject, idea.” John Sweeny, I’m intrigued. “You guys should sponsor a screenplay contest.” John Sweeny, intrigue, lost. “The prize, the winner gets his screenplay purchased WGA minimum and produced.” What? [Laughs]

**John:** Because Craig, it’s so easy to make a movie. It’s just ridiculously easy, because you and I, any movie we write, it automatically just gets made.

**Craig:** Well first of all, let’s back up for a second. I don’t really believe in screenplay contests. I’m still waiting for the waves of incredibly successful screenwriters that are pouring out of these contests.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just — even the Nicholls which is like the big one, there’s been a few people over the years. A few. Most, no.

So screenplay contests, to me, are a little bit of like an accomplishment trap for people that are trying to achieve something in a business where the actual achievement is an on-off switch and it’s almost always off, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the on-off switch is basically get hired, make movie, movie hopefully appeals to people, right? This is a very hard switch to flip to on, so instead, they’re like, you know, you see then people when they write their, “Well, I’m a semi-finalist in this and I was a quarter-finalist in this” and it’s like, what, there’s an Appalachian screen festival where you got fourth round in that? It’s bananas. The last thing in the world I’d want to do is sponsor a screenplay contest.

The prize, the winner gets his screenplay produced. So ladies, you’re out. WGA minimum for an original screenplay I think is $98,000. So that’s a hundred grand for us to split, no problem, and then produce. We have to make it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s like, just because we do a podcast, we should probably spend a few million bucks.

**John:** Well, yes. Probably so. So, Project Green Light was essentially what he’s describing, which is basically it was a competition and they’d read a bunch of screenplays and they pick a screenplay. And they would make it. And so, that was a show. It’s been shown several times on HBO and other places. So you can watch Project Green Light. I don’t think we’re going to ever be Project Green Light.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** The thing which I think, they’re not — you know — John is really not keeping in mind is how much work it is to read through screenplays in a competition setting. So I have friends who read for Nicholls, and it’s sort of their job for like months of the year. All they’re doing is reading scripts. Same with Sundance Labs, like all they’re doing is reading scripts. And that’s just no fun at all.

**Craig:** No, it’s no bueno.

**John:** Circling back to the idea of screenplay competitions because in the previous thing, I said like, “Oh, you should submit to Austin or one of the other things,” I’m saying you should submit to those things because they will get your script noticed, and purchased and produced. I’m saying because they will tell you like, “Oh, you’re a really good writer.” And objectively, other people telling you like, “Oh, you’re a really good writer.” Then that’s a clue that like, “Oh, you know, I should probably go where the really good writers are and just get started in this business.” If they’re not telling you’re a really good writer, maybe you need to work on your craft a bit more.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that’s pretty much the most you can hope for from those things. And even then, you have to take them with a grain of salt. Sometimes, they say things are bad and they’re not bad. It’s just that they were wrong. And sometimes —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Frankly, more often than not, they’re too easy on you. I mean, I judged — I was a judge, a finalist judge for the Austin Screenwriting Competition one year, a number of years ago. So, it was — I think there were three judges or four of us. And we were judging the five scripts that made it all the way to the finals.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And I hated all of them. All of them. Hated.

**John:** So right now someone is doing the research to figure out like which year that was and feeling really bad.

**Craig:** I hated them and I was shocked. I’m sorry to say if you were in there and you remember me being involved. But I hated them. And I didn’t think that they were of the quality that, if it had been me running it, I would have — no one wins. This is why I shouldn’t run.

**John:** So one of the things I love most about Sundance Labs is they’re kind of upfront about the fact that like they’re not picking the best scripts they’ve ever read. They’re picking the fast hitting stories that can be great movies that no one else is making. And like that’s such a great mandate. Like they’re trying to get stories and voices on screen that are not usually onscreen.

And so when they’re reading things from that perspective, they can overlook some clumsy writing and things that aren’t as good as they could be because they know they’re going to go through these labs process, they’re going to get these things in their best fighting shape to make a really great movie. That’s such a different thing than having to say like, objectively compare like, “Well this is a really good script or that’s a really good script.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I just don’t like it. I don’t like it and I would never ever in a million years would I be involved in a Project Green Light thing. And I’m not — it’s not a moral thing. I get it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I mean they’re making entertainment. And Matt and Ben are terrific guys, great screenwriters also. And they’re entertainers. And that’s an entertaining show. But for me, I don’t want to entertain people that way. That’s not how I entertain people. I would never do it. Like, the Sundance Labs, you know, it’s a shame because I was supposed to go one year and then I had to cancel because we were shooting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I’d love to go one year. I got to call Michelle and talk to her about that because it sounds like it’s exactly the kind of thing I do like to do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is sit in a very real way with another human being and help them be the best them.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Kevin writes, “As an Englishman, it’s easy to tell when non-English actors fail to summon a realistic British accent. So, do American audiences and filmmakers care as much about an accurate non-American accent? Is it an area that’s advanced or gone backwards during your careers? And how important do you think it is for maintaining the audiences’ focus on a story?”

**Craig:** That’s a good question. I think we do. I think we care very much when we hear bad accents. I think we know bad accents. Remember that we consume a lot of English language entertainment including entertainment from the UK. And even when it’s not UK entertainment but American entertainment, we employ a lot of English actors.

**John:** A tremendous amount of English actors.

**Craig:** We love English actors, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So anytime you meet an English actor, they kind of giggle about the fact that they get this extra boost for being classy and smart just because of their accent but it’s true, right? So we’re very familiar with that.

So, when Kevin Costner attempts to do a British accent in Robin Hood, the world kind of goes bananas because it’s terrible.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s really bad and we absolutely notice it and it gets called out. Similarly, we also notice bad regional American accents.

**John:** But I will say that most British actors who are doing sort of a down-the-road kind of Middle American accent, they tend to do a pretty good job and like rarely do I hear somebody who is like, “Oh, you’re not concealing your British accent very well.”

It’s a weird thing. I don’t perceive it as being like, “Oh, they didn’t hit like Kansas City accent.” It’s just that I can tell they’re not actually American. I could tell they’re concealing something. We definitely notice when we see people trying to do a very specific regional accent where we actually have the ear for like what that’s supposed to sound like. And when they don’t hit it, it’s really painful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it’s more noticeable to me when American actors are doing a bad British accent because I think British actors are just better trained in doing an American accent because if they want to be in films, they know that there’s this enormous other opportunity for them. There’s an enormous market. I’m with you. It’s very rare that you hear an actor from the UK doing a bad, like a bad American accent, or like come on man, I’m not buying that.

**John:** It’s fun when you watch on shows where they’ll ask like normal British people to try to fake an American accent. And they tend to go either for like this crazy Californian thing or sort of a John Wayne. They’ll slow down a lot. They’ll try to do things. And it’s the American bias that it’s just sort of always assumed that like, “Oh, if you get rid of your accent, then it’s American.” And of course, it’s just different vowel and letter sounds for everything. And different phrasing and different everything else. But my incorrect perception is that everyone else’s accent is just a hat they’re wearing on top of a normal American accent.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, like ultimately Kevin, I guess the answer to your question is, yeah, we all know when somebody’s not doing it right. Everybody knows and nobody likes it.

**John:** But I think it doesn’t bug us as much as I think it bugs British people when American actors try and fail.

**Craig:** Well, because they have a pride in their language. It is the English language. It’s not the American language. We don’t. Like if somebody mangles an American accent I don’t think, from another country, I don’t think, oh you — you violated the great, what, it’s not the Queen’s English but Washington’s English? It’s not. So we don’t have that pride in our own. The only — we do have a regional pride, so you have some guy from California trying to do a Boston accent and everybody just goes “Ugh.” Everybody in Massachusetts loses their mind because they have pride in that regionalism.

All right. So we have a question here from Avishai, Avishai from Brooklyn. He writes, “In the screenplay I’m currently writing, there is a news montage. It depicts clips of videos sourced from different TV news reports spanning the course of a month. And beneath that, I want there to be truncated snippets of different reporter VOs that overlap and bleed into each other. For each bit of voice over, how do I label the speaker? Do I write Reporter 1, Reporter 2, Reporter 3? Do I write Reporter, another reporter, yet another reporter?” How about just Reporter each time and specify in the description that it’s always someone new?”

**John:** So this is the kind of thing which people freak out too much about. Like what is proper screenplay format and that belief that like every person who speaks onscreen has to be individually credited to get their own block of dialogue. How I would do this, and Craig, I’m curious what you would do, I would say, various reporters, and then just have dialogue in there, the little snippets of things. A little slash and then like the next person keeps talking because ultimately you’re going to do this as just like a crazy montage. So breaking this out as individual people talking is not going to be helpful or your friend.

**Craig:** Sometimes though, you have to, if in between the different reporters talking, new visuals are emerging.

**John:** Absolutely true.

**Craig:** So in those cases, I still would do it essentially the way you’re describing and Avishai, you picked on it, it’s your last thing. How about just reporter each time and specify in the description it’s always someone new. That works.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Reporter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 starts to feel like a spoof almost. It’s goofy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You definitely don’t want to get into over describing them like reporter, another reporter, yet another reporter because that sounds like a joke. You don’t want to do black reporter, tall reporter, skinny reporter, small, because then it’s like is that important or do we have to go find a short reporter now? So yeah, I just think various reporters, then just do reporter VO, reporter VO, reporter VO.

**John:** Sounds good. Blake Wrights, “I just finished a feature script and I wrote post credits scene for it. If it was you, how would you let the reader know that this scene takes place after the credits?”

**Craig:** Oh, okay. Great. So for me, I’ve done a couple of things like this. What I’ll do is, instead of writing “The end,” I’ll just put in bold and sort of to the left where, you know, scene header would go, I’ll say, “Roll credits,” and then I’ll just do like a return, return, return and then I’ll say, “Then:,” and then do a little scene.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve done similar things. Usually, I’ll do a page break and make it on a new page and then I’ll say like, “Post credits,” and maybe underline that and then there’s that scene that’s post credits. And a lot of my things recently have had post credit sequences and it’s great. That’s what you have to do. So I have sometimes used “The end” or I’ve done “Roll credits” or I’ll say, “After credits” when the next thing happens.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah. Whatever essentially is clear, there’s no — this is another one of those things where just go for what’s clear and what feels — you can use whatever language feels appropriate for your tone and all the rest of it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. We’ve got here, we’ll do one more.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Two more. We have two.

**John:** They’re short.

**Craig:** They’re short. Okay. Mohammed from Iran. So this is great. I love that we have listeners in Iran. Mohammed from Iran writes, “Big fan. Really helpful site. Really funny podcast.” Hey, Mohammed, guess what, you’re right and thank you.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** “But you know what would be a cool idea, if you guys did the book version of the show. The material is there, you just need to come up with a logical order to classify stuff into, maybe sexy Craig — ” Oh, yeah, Mohammed, yeah, “can do a bit of illustrating for it. I’d pay for that. Just kidding.” Wait.

“But please don’t forget the chapter about female reproductive health. That’s what 99% of your fan base wants.”

Mohammed from Iran basically is the coolest dude ever.

**John:** He really is.

**Craig:** Thank you, Mohammed. We will get to work on that right away.

**John:** So I thought about doing the book. So our podcast unlike most podcasts, we have transcripts for every single episode. This is episode 240, later on this week, we’ll have the transcript for this episode that you’re listening to. So we go back and do all of those transcripts partly so I can search for things, like did we ever talk about David Mamet before? But also because have people who are deaf who can’t listen to the show, and so they love to read the transcripts. My friend Steve Healy only reads the transcripts. So that’s great.

So we have all this material and we have thought about, or in the office we’ve talked about like, “Do we do this as a book somehow?” The idea of a book gives me a bit of a shudder just because I hate how-to screenwriting books.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** But if it was just a book that was like, you know, John and Craig talk about screenwriting, I guess I’d be all right with it. I mean, how do you feel about it, Craig, because I really don’t have strong opinions.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I mean, the transcripts are on the internet, it’s like they’re there. I know the book sort of curates it all for people which is nice.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, but like —

**John:** You can read the book in the bathroom or —

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. My problem is the same as yours. I’m so angry about these books and what they do. So I feel like, if we’re going to do a book, it has to be proper and well thought out and done in a way that’s not just throw in the transcripts but that we actually say, “At last, here’s a book that you can buy and don’t — not — you don’t have to buy any other book. Don’t buy any other book ever.” Literally, every store should only have this book. It is definitive. Everything else is crap. Only this book.

**John:** Well, I think that’s — if the book is about how to be a screenwriter, but I think this is probably — our podcast really isn’t about how to be a screenwriter. It’s basically sort of like, “What is it like being a screenwriter?” And so, that’s the kind of thing which —

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** There are multiple versions of it. That’s something that might be better — you know, could be taken from the transcripts in a more meaningful way. Like it’s our conversations, maybe sort of, you know, annotated and highly edited because lord know we ramble a lot.

So as I thought about doing it, it’s just the matter of who’s going to do that. And so, it’s not going to be Stuart. Stuart is already way too busy. So that’s probably another new person and just becomes this other big project — and let’s be realistic — in my life, to have to be on top of it.

**Craig:** Definitely not in mine. Yeah, plus you’d have to learn a new person’s name which is really —

**John:** It’s the worst.

**Craig:** Hard to do.

**John:** Something about this last year, I’m having the hardest time remembering new people’s names. It’s just — like the buffer is completely filled. And so, I have a new agent I’m working with on one project and for the life of me, I keep forgetting her name and it’s been so awkward because they’ll be phone conversations where I need to talk about her and I’m like, “Yes. Yes, I was talking with her about — ” Oh, it’s so embarrassing.

**Craig:** You really need to learn that name.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I like that you’re saying it’s just this random thing and not say the fact that you’re getting old.

**John:** Oh, no. It couldn’t be that at all.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think it’s just some bad circuit kind of thing. So once I get the memory upgrade, I’ll be set.

**Craig:** We’ll take care of that. Don’t you worry.

**John:** Maxwell writes, “Who do you think would win in an all-out brawl to the death, John or Craig?”

**Craig:** Huh? Normally, I’m not one to toot my own horn, but I feel like I could kill you.

**John:** I think Craig probably could. Craig has weight on me. He’s also just —

**Craig:** Angry.

**John:** He’s determined. He’s angry. He’s determined.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I think I would have — here’s what it is: I would have that moment of qualm. I was like, “Am I really going to kill him?” And Craig wouldn’t have that moment. He wouldn’t have that pause.

**Craig:** No, it’s the pause is the problem.

**John:** As he’s chocking me out, he would finish it.

**Craig:** No, no. For sure like they would have to — they’d have to do that thing where we’re like, “He’s dead, man, he’s dead. Stop. He’s already dead.” [Laughs]

**John:** They’re pulling you off —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you’re going back to hit him some more.

**Craig:** Exactly. “No, no. I don’t believe it.” I won’t stop ever until he’s dead.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I’m going to go with Craig.

**John:** Yeah. We got 100% agreement on this podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a blog post by Brent Underwood and he has a post called, “What does it take to become a bestselling author?” And he’s a guy who does book consulting and he was very frustrated that on Amazon it is so easy to become the number one bestselling author in any given category because they update their lists continuously.

So unlike The New York Times which has like this methodology how they are like polling all these bookstores across the country and figuring out like what the bestsellers are, Amazon is just looking at their own numbers, like, “Oh, we sold three copies of this book in this one-hour period. It’s the bestseller in this tiny little subcategory.”

And so, this guy’s frustration is that people will, you know, legitimately to some degree claim like, “Oh, I wrote a bestselling book on Amazon.”

**Craig:** Oh, my god. [laughs]

**John:** And it’s because you picked this incredibly narrow category that you sold three copies. And so he does this little exercise where he actually does become the bestselling book about free masonry on Amazon.

So an amusing post that I think our readers will enjoy. And it’s also interesting because as screenwriters we’re never really concerned about rankings in a meaningful way. Like when our movies come out, we want our movies to be number one at the Box Office, but there’s no sort of power rankings. But for print authors, getting on that list is incredibly important and this guy is saying those lists are much more suspect than you’d believe.

**Craig:** There’s an internet meme, one of my favorites, I don’t know if you’re ever seen Identifying Wood.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So it’s a real book and the book is called Identifying Wood and it’s a picture of a man curiously in like a business shirt with a tie and he’s staring at a block of wood through like a jewelers loop.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then, what they’ve added to the bottom is, “Yup, its wood.” [laughs] And I just — like I’m sure that is the bestselling book in the category of wood identification —

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Publications. It’s Identifying Wood. Unbelievable. Well, my One Cool Thing is a sad thing but he was so, so cool. I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about Father Ted on the show, I might have. It’s a great Irish sitcom from the ’90s and it ended so — just ended too soon because the star who played Father Ted died very young. It was a brilliant, brilliant show. It was about this kind of morally challenged priest who was always involved in self-aggrandizing schemes, a little bit like Basil Fawlty kind of. Working in this god forsaken parish on some miserable island called Craggy Island off the coast of Ireland.

So it was like he’d be sent to, you know, the ends of the earth and he shared his home with two other priests. One was named Father Dougal who was a complete idiot and the other one was Father Jack. And Father Jack was played by an actor named Frank Kelly who unfortunately passed away this week or this past week. And Father Jack appeared to be a 70-year-old incredibly alcoholic sexually obsessed degenerate who only said four words, one of which was arse, and he’s disgusting, truly just like you take the bad stereotype of the lecherous priest and just put it on roids and it was — that was Father Jack.

Frank Kelly, by all accounts, an incredibly gentle, beautiful nice man and a wonderful actor, played this loathsome character and he was so good at it. So my One Cool Thing this week is Father Jack from Father Ted and we’ll throw a link in the show notes. You can watch episodes of Father Ted on Hulu.com.

**John:** Fantastic. So while you were talking, I was Googling and because we have transcripts, I was able to pull up that in episode 14 that was your One Cool Thing, was Father Ted.

**Craig:** Oh, fantastic. There you go.

**John:** And so you talked about it there. So if you would like to listen to the Father Ted episode, it is available on the Scriptnotes app, you can download that in either of the App stores.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Segue Man. The premium episodes and all those back episodes are available through Scriptnotes.net as well. So that’s where you get an account. It is $2 a month for all of those back episodes. We also have a few of the 200-episode USB drives that have all of the back episodes, or at least the first 200 back episodes. If you would like a copy that could survive post-apocalypse probably, you could get one of those USB drives.

**Craig:** It has to survive the post-apocalypse as well?

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. So it’s one thing to survive the initial blast, but once the reavers come through and sort of —

**Craig:** So it’s really designed not for the blast at all [laughs] —

**John:** Oh, no, no.

**Craig:** But for the reavers.

**John:** Yeah, because honestly the initial blast could probably melt the thing. So —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You want to put it in like a fireproof safe. You want to go to 10 Cloverfield Lane and like — and slide it underneath the bed there and then you’re fine.

**Craig:** See that poster by the way, great poster.

**John:** Great poster. Very exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the director of that film is I think a listener of our show and I had coffee with him about a year ago when he was going off to direct some movie and it turned out that was 10 Cloverfield Lane.

**Craig:** How about that? Excellent.

**John:** Very nice. If you would like to harass Craig on Twitter, he is @clmazin. I’m at @johnaugust. I won’t mute you unless you say something terrible to me.

**Craig:** You won’t know.

**John:** We are on iTunes. So please go subscribe to the show in iTunes. It’s great if you want to listen to it at johnaugust.com where we host all this stuff, but it’s even better if you subscribe because that way people know that you are subscribing. Give us a nice little review there. That’s always lovely. We have a Facebook page, too, which we occasionally check. So like us on Facebook and tell your friends that we are a show that you listen to.

Our show, as always, is produced by Stuart Friedel. Our outro this week is by Adam Lastname who’s done several of our best outros. If you have an outro for us, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com with a link to it. That’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. And that’s our show.

Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** I have one last question.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Who edits this show?

**John:** I forgot to mention Matthew Chilelli. Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel, as always, and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yeah. Okay. Now, I feel good.

**John:** That’s very good. Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [David Mamet’s memo to writers of The Unit](http://movieline.com/2010/03/23/david-mamets-memo-to-the-writers-of-the-unit/)
* [Craig’s Twitter feed](https://twitter.com/clmazin)
* [Muting users on Twitter](https://support.twitter.com/articles/20171399)
* Brent Underwood looks at [what it takes to become a “best-selling author”](http://observer.com/2016/02/behind-the-scam-what-does-it-takes-to-be-a-bestselling-author-3-and-5-minutes/)
* [Identifying Wood](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0942391047/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* Father Ted [on Hulu](http://www.hulu.com/father-ted) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Ted), and [Frank Kelly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Kelly)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 14](http://johnaugust.com/2011/how-residuals-work) and other back episodes are available at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) and [on the 200 episode USB flash drive](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-200-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* The poster for [10 Cloverfield Lane](http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTzD7J7Y1hiY1rgen9sd__hgFWkRz0wOr1xamo7pZr7PUKLhfEj)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Lastname ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))