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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/overwritten).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 650 – wow – of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you rewrite without overwriting. We’ll discuss tips and techniques for not bogging down your script. We’ll also look at a bunch of items in the news, including the sale of Paramount and a potential IATSE deal. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll discuss the Recording Industry Association of America’s lawsuits against the AI music generators like Suno and Udio about copyright infringement and how this might relate to folks who write movies and TV.

To help us do this, we welcome back a very, very special guest, the creator of The Good Place, and all-around good guy, Mr. Mike Schur. Mike Schur, welcome back.

**Mike Schur:** I’m honored to be here for number 650. Nice round number.

**John:** Round numbers are our specialty here. We just love when we hit them. Chris McQuarrie always comes back for every 200 episodes, which is exactly how much you want Christopher McQuarrie. No more, no less. I could have you back every 50 episodes, it’d be great. Basically a yearly visit.

**Mike:** Could I come back every 650th episode?

**John:** Good lord, that would be a lot. Episode 1300, we’ll book you.

**Mike:** And 1950.

**John:** Drew, make a note now. Somebody will contact us down the road saying, “Hey, you said that Mike Schur would be back on Episode 1300.” We’ll try to hold to it.

**Mike:** God, that’s so many years away.

**John:** That’s 12 years away. That’s a lot.

**Mike:** I’ll be ready.

**John:** You’ll be ready. Let’s get into some news here. Mr. Mike Schur, you were on the WGA negotiating committee with me. We talked through a lot about all the stuff in the WGA strike and of course, SAG-AFTRA strike. IATSE was the next big union up. It looks like they may have reached a deal.

**Mike:** Yes. This is very exciting. Tentative congratulations to IATSE leadership and also all IATSE members. This was the last big piece of the Hollywood union labor negotiations that had to be completed. There’s a lot of consternation about whether or not there would be another strike at a fragile time in the business. It seems like they have reached an agreement, which is wonderful. I hope all IATSE members are happy with what they’ve negotiated.

This is an especially tricky one, trickier even than SAG or the Writers Guild or the Directors Guild, in part because IATSE itself is comprised of so many different sorts of people. It’s an all-purpose trade craft union. It represents a lot of different folks who do a lot of different jobs on movie sets and TV sets and stuff like that. To find an agreement that satisfies everyone is a very difficult task.

I don’t know if you’ve talked to folks about it. Anecdotally, the folks that I’ve talked to seem to generally be pretty happy with what was achieved. Is that your experience too?

**John:** That is my experience. As we’re recording this just yesterday, the full details came out, so I don’t know that people had a lot of time to parse every little bit of things. But let’s talk through some of the top line stuff that they’ve told us.

If you’re on a set and you’re working more than 15 elapsed hours, you move into triple time. This is an effort to combat the endless days of production. It’s a bigger penalty if you move into 15 hours. Now, there’s been some push back saying 15 hours, it still means that you’re working crews 15 hours. That’s still the problem. There was a desire for a hard cap on the hours, and they didn’t get that. But triple time should incentivize, hopefully, productions to stop at a certain sane hour.

There’s new protections around artificial intelligence. Obviously, that’s a thing we’re very focused on in the WGA negotiations. There’s new language that says that employees cannot be required to provide AI prompts in a manner that would displace a covered employee. That sounds complicated. But it was always going to be complicated with such a broad cross section of members who were doing this stuff. The AI concerns of an editor are not the same as the AI concerns of costume designer or a production artist. They’re all doing very different things. As a general solution, maybe this is helpful. Have you talked to any folks about the AI concerns here?

**Mike:** Yes. Your point is well taken, because just as one example, I’m finishing a show now that I did for Netflix. It’ll be on in November, I think. I was talking to one of our sound engineers. We’ve recorded a scene at Pier 39 in San Francisco, famous location in San Francisco where sea lions come and they hang out on these docks. It’s very cute. The problem with sea lions when they gather en masse is that they bark a lot and they make recording dialogue extremely difficult.

We looked at the first version of the scene, and it was nearly inaudible. Two actors are talking, and all you hear is “arr arr arr arr” in the background. I was like, “Oh my god, we’re screwed. We’ll never be able to use this.” The sound engineer, he’s like, “Give me four hours,” and sent it back, and it was completely audible and the sea lions were gone. I said, “How did that happen?” He was like, “We have tools for that now.” Those tools essentially are AI tools. It’s like this extremely powerful computerized program that finds the wave form of a certain sound, combs through the track, and removes it.

There are aspects of AI that these folks use in different capacities in different jobs that are wonderful, that are beneficial to productions, that help everybody. They help actors. They help writers. They help productions. Then there are ones that are meant to essentially replace those people. The idea of trying to legislate at this moment in a time a rule or a series of rules that does nothing but help and doesn’t hurt is a very tall order.

Again, we are just now going over the details of this agreement, but it appears that what IATSE has done is not that different from what we did in the WGA, which is to say we tried to put up some guardrails, we tried to put up some fences that loosely captured what it was that we were trying to preserve, and largely kept out what we were trying to keep out.

In places where it’s impossible to get granular and really pin down exactly what we’re talking about, we just reserved our right to continue to fight in the future. That is a huge key. That was a huge key for us in the WGA negotiations was that the staff did so much work in crafting language that essentially reserved our rights to continue to try to legislate what we thought needed to be legislated. It appears to me, at least from first glance, that that’s what IATSE did as well. Is that your read on the situation?

**John:** It is. Earlier this summer, I was at a conference in Italy, and I was on a panel talking about AI. I was the lone voice, weirdly, who had to defend, like, okay, we need to make sure that the AI that’s coming online is being used by workers rather than to replace workers. It sounds like that what’s they’re trying to go for here. Your example with the sea lions is exactly that. We want to make sure that this is a technology that’s being used in the furtherance of a person’s career and profession rather than to replace that person or profession.

One of the things I try to always underline when I talk about AI things is I try not to use the word tool, because tool is a positive term. No one is anti-hammer. But tools can be used as weapons. That’s why I always try to make sure that I’m saying technology, because technology is a more neutral term, and recognize that you can use technologies for good means or for bad means.

As people who are negotiating on behalf of workers, you want to make sure these technologies are being used by the workers in the furtherance of their job. It feels like that was the spirit of these AI protections. Again, language similar to the WGA, in the sense of they cannot require you to use AI technologies, and they may prohibit you from using some of these AI technologies, because they’re concerned about things like copyright infringement. Just like as we get into in our Bonus Segment, that’s going to be a real worry.

If one of their concerns is going to be like, okay, what if a director or a production designer uses one of these technologies to generate some image? That image ends up becoming ruled as being infringing on copyright. Yikes. There’s all these concerns they have too.

**Mike:** For the record, I am deeply anti-hammer. Nothing good has ever happened with a use of hammer.

**John:** Mike, your position as being team screwdriver is really well known. This is where it’s gonna go from here on out. Like all negotiations, they got wage increases, so percentage increases on the basic rates that go up. Theirs matched pretty close to what SAG-AFTRA got, which is great. It’s a bigger bump in the first year, smaller in the next two years. They got additional money for their health plan, which is important. Their streaming residuals, it’s important to understand, doesn’t go to the person itself. It goes to fund the underlying health fund, which is important. Keep them solvent.

**Mike:** I have heard a couple folks say that there was some ongoing debate and maybe a little bit of dissatisfaction – and I hope I’m not speaking out of turn here – regarding specific details of the VFX editors wing of IATSE. This is a big thing, because obviously, there are entire movies now that are essentially being made through the hard work and labor of visual effects editors.

I don’t think I can speak authoritatively about what exactly they got and what they didn’t get. That I would assume though will be something that is revisited in pretty much every IATSE negotiation going forward, because I don’t think that VFX editing is going to get less important over time in the movie industry specifically. But again, in the handful of folks that I’ve spoken to who are covered by IATSE, some costume designers, some hair and makeup folks, some editors, people generally seem to be pleased with the gains that were made, which is wonderful. I hope that that’s not a non-representative sample of the membership. I hope that most of the folks…

Like in anything else in the WGA, negotiations, for example, in SAG, there are always going to be some folks who end up feeling like they didn’t quite get what everybody else got. I think that’s doubly or triply so for IATSE, because again, you’re talking about grip and craft service and art directors and costumers and all sorts – studio teachers is one thing – groups covered by IATSE at all of these different individual important parts of the engine that drives the locomotive.

The thing that people should understand about IATSE is these groups of people are all individually vital to a production. It’s very hard to imagine making – take your pick – Bridgerton without costume designers. That’s not possible. It’s very hard to imagine making the Three Body Problem without video effects designers. Individually, all of these people are absolutely vital. It’s just that they are all collected into one union, and so it’s going to be very difficult at any moment for IATSE to reach an agreement that every group of people feels that their needs are addressed.

But importantly, it feels like this was a big step forward for them, especially compared to previous negotiations they’ve had that have left I think more people dissatisfied with the result than are currently dissatisfied with this one. Congrats to them again.

**John:** There are people out there who are trying to sell the narrative that the WGA strike and the SAG-AFTRA strike were basically giant wealth transfers from hardworking writers and industry people to Netflix and to AI, and that what should’ve happened is that the WGA should’ve partnered up with the studios to take on the AI companies, and it was idiotic to have ever gone on strike. Your opinion there, Mike?

**Mike:** A couple things. First of all, I think IATSE would be the first to say that a large reason that they got what they got was because of the strikes, because the WGA and SAG drew a line in the sand and said we’re not going to just take these minimal gains in the basic salaries of our employees, but rather, we’re going to fundamentally try to shift the way that studios think about compensating the labor who work for them. It’s a completely false read to say, “Look, IATSE did it. Why couldn’t you guys do it?” Because IATSE did it, because we did it. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is partnering with the studios to do anything is a pipe dream. It’s not like the studios are like, “Guys, please, I beg you, come partner with us to take on AI companies.” It’s quite the opposite. The studios are deeply interested in AI, for a number of reasons, some sinister and some not sinister, which I think you and I both learned.

I would say for those of you listening out there, John was the AI expert, so to speak, of the WGA negotiation committee. You were the guy I think who understood what AI was and how it was positioned to affect us as a union, and all unions, better than anybody. We all took our lead from you. I was very grateful for that. I think you educated a lot of us over the course of many months about what exactly AI was and what it was trying to do.

AI went from a thing – when we first got together to discuss our agenda, it was 23rd on the list of things that we felt was important. There were a lot more big, famous problems. So-called mini rooms were a huge problem in television. Free work was a huge problem for screenwriters. Minimum guarantees of duration was a huge thing for late-night and variety writers. Then 23rd on the list was like, hey, we should do something about AI. By the time I’d say we were deep into negotiations, right around the time when negotiations fell apart, most of us in the committee had come around to a position of like, oh, wait, AI is maybe the most important thing, or at least it’s a top five issue I think facing labor.

Part of the reason for that was that we came to realize through those negotiations how much it mattered to the studios. That was something that I don’t think we totally understood. But we were told flatly, “Stay away from this. Guys, don’t try to do anything with AI. That’s a nonstarter.” When your adversary in negotiations says don’t try to do anything with this issue, that’s how you know it’s a really important issue.

The idea that it is as simple as labor unions saying to studios, their employers, “Hey, let’s wrap our arms around each other and take on this other adversary,” that’s absurd. That’s such a facile way to try to understand the role that AI is playing in the world and in Hollywood in particular. That’s not an option.

It’s not an option to go to the studios and say, “Look, I know that we’re on opposite sides of a lot of issues here, but why don’t we team up and fight these companies against their advancements in AI,” because the studios are deeply interested and invested, financially and otherwise, in what AI might be able to do for them. The whole point of our approach in the AI negotiations was to say, “Hey, if we don’t do something about this, this is what will replace us.” Anyone who believes that it was as simple as us teaming up with studios to fight the advancement of artificial intelligence does not understand what is happening in the world right now.

**John:** I’m not quite sure what the name for the logical fallacy is. It’s not a straw man, but it’s things should just magically be different, basically like, “Oh, you guys should’ve done this thing, which I don’t know if it’s completely impossible or not, but that’s what you should’ve done.” It’s like, “Oh, okay, great, we’ll do that thing that’s actually not even a possible thing. That’s what we will do.”

**Mike:** It is at least adjacent to the content of a straw man, because you’re basically just saying, “Why didn’t you just do X.” It’s like, because X is not possible. That’s why. The one thing that I will say about the Writers Guild staff, which is a tireless group of people who are largely anonymous even to WGA members, but whose only purpose in life is to protect writers and help writers get what they deserve, is that in the years of study that went into the negotiation in 2023, they did not miss something as simple as, “What if we team up with the studios to [inaudible 00:16:49] AI?” I promise you that in all of the if-then scenarios that they worked out, that was not available to us as an option. Saying, “Why didn’t you just do that?” is very silly.

**John:** Absolutely. I think the other criticism I’ve seen about the WGA and “the strike was a mistake” was about this was a terrible time to go on strike, because the industry was going through a change and transition, and so you just made it easier for them to make the cuts that they wanted to make, and the idea that you’ve hastened the inevitable thing that was going to happen. You can’t hasten inevitability. It’s a weird place to land. It’s like, yes, things are going through a transition, and that’s probably why it’s very important to take a strong stand and defend what you can.

**Mike:** Of course. The number of things that contributed to what has happened to the industry in the last five years is large. It’s a large number of things. COVID, for example.

**John:** Oh, god.

**Mike:** If anything hastened anything, it was COVID, in my opinion. There was an out-of-control land grab that was going on where these companies were all starting their own streamers and they were all making this transition from over-the-air broadcasting or cable broadcasting to try owning all of their content in perpetuity in every territory on earth. In order to do that, they had to build up their libraries. In order to build up their libraries, they had to throw a ton of money at a ton of people to try to make a ton of stuff very quickly. Then COVID hit, and it really shook everything up.

One person I remember I talked to, a high-placed industry type person I was talking to right after COVID started, and I said, “What does this mean for us?” This person said, “It means Netflix wins forever.” The reason that they said that was that Netflix had a lead in the race. Disney Plus was racing to try to catch up. But in the race to be essentially everyone’s number one option for entertainment, they had such a huge lead. Then when COVID hit and everyone had to stay in their houses, the other companies hadn’t yet been able to get to the point where they had the same amount of stuff that Netflix did. As a result, everyone watched Netflix, and Netflix became even more indispensable to people’s lives.

That one thing that no union had control over led to the companies really taking a step back and saying, “Okay, wait a second. Are we gonna ever be able to beat them? Should we even be trying to beat them? Can we find another niche or another avenue that we can drive down in terms of making our in-house streamer more viable or more attractive to people?” Not to mention the fact that also coinciding with that was all production stopped for a very long time.

The same kind of person who says, “Why didn’t you just partner with the studios in order to team up against AI?” would probably say something like, “Why didn’t you guys just stop COVID? If you had just stopped COVID, then-”

**John:** 100 percent.

**Mike:** There were things that were completely out of anyone’s control, including the studios and networks. The correction that was happening was already deep into its history by the time that we were even able to begin negotiating. It’s also worth saying that a lot of the stuff that the Guild tried to do and accomplished in 2023, our original plan was to do it in 2020. We went into that negotiation saying, “Look, things are already changing. Because they’re already changing and we see where this is going, we need to make some moves here.” Then COVID hit. You can’t go on strike when you’re not allowed to leave your house and collect in large areas and have big discussions when there’s no cure for a very deadly disease that everyone’s afraid of.

Both WGA and I think SAG did what we did as quickly and efficiently as we possibly could have. It is not the case that there was an easy alternative to what we did either temporally or structurally. I was and will always be very proud of the union and proud of SAG and all of the other unions that fought for what we fought for. I don’t believe that there was any strategic mistake in what we did, in terms of when we did it or how we did it.

There’s always going to be naysayers or folks who look back and go, “You just should’ve done this.” But the number of moving parts here, the number of variables and difficult-to-control aspects of this situation that we all found ourselves in was so numerous, so enormous, that any reading of what we did, what all of the unions did, that falls into the category of like, “Why didn’t you just do X?” is just facile and unhelpful.

**John:** 100 percent. I think as listeners are hearing people give the, “They should’ve just,” or, “This was a mistake,” or, “This cost the industry X number of dollars,” just remember these were necessary things that were done in the time they needed to be done, and the gains that were made last for the next 50 years. Yes, there was short-term pain, and the pain was real. The strike lasted as long as it did because the studios chose to not come to the table and make a deal. That doesn’t mean you can just magically wave it all away. There were real, important things to be fighting for. Most of the things we fought for, we ended up winning.

**Mike:** That’s another important part of it, I think, is part of those arguments amount to, “Here’s how much you lost, and here’s how long it will take you to recoup it.” That is a classic management-side argument for why unions should never strike is, “You’re just gonna lose this and it’s gonna take you that long to get it back.” That’s true. That’s 100 percent true. The point is if you don’t give up those contemporary gains for future gains, that’s in some ways-

**John:** We would have no residuals. We would have no health plan. All of the things we have are-

**Mike:** All of the stuff we had were because people made short-term sacrifices for long-term gains. It’s a classic argument made by the folks who own stuff to the folks who don’t. That’s what they say is, “You’re just gonna lose all this money right now.”

I’m a big sports fan. I know folks who have worked in the management of sports unions. I talked to them a lot during the buildup to the strike and also during the strike about the similarities and differences. One of the things that I was told repeatedly was, one of the reasons it’s so hard, for example, for the NFL players union to go on strike is that NFL careers are so short. The average NFL career is a year and a half long. Guys wash out. They get hurt. They wash out of the league instantly. They’re always being replaced every year by younger guys because that sport is so brutal. A huge reason that it’s hard for them to have a massive labor action is that what you’re going to give up in terms of what you’re gonna have in the future, that could be literally the entirety of the earnings potential of a significant part of your union. It’s a much bigger problem.

It’s always a problem for a union. Always. The pain is real. The pain that was suffered by Writers Guild members was real. We knew it was real. We knew how serious it was. We thought about that probably more than anything else, I would say, while we were negotiating. But unlike NFL players, hopefully a writer’s career is more than one and a half years long, which is what it is in the NFL.

That was our job and the job of leadership was to weigh those things against each other, to say is it worth the pain, the real pain, the potential loss of apartments and houses or cars or people having to move or having to get other jobs? All that stuff that was very, very real and very painful, we’re weighing that now against what we want the union to get out of the next 25, 35, 50, 75 years. It’s a very difficult calculation to make. The Guild what not have done what it did unless we really felt like it was worth it.

**John:** In addition to sometimes calling for strikes, WGA also does things in between those periods, including going after people who violate the MBA. An announcement this past week that the WGA reached a settlement for a total of $3 million for 24 affected writers for CBS shows who were having writers doing writing work, covered Article 14 work, during times in which their writers’ rooms were officially closed.

This is a thing that the Guild does all the time. They’ve collected more than $100 million through enforcement of the contract over the past two and a half years. This is just another example of going after situations where writers come to the Guild and say, “Hey, they’re having me do this stuff. They’re saying it’s not covered work because the writers’ room’s closed.” The Guild won here.

**Mike:** I don’t understand why we didn’t just partner with the studios to get this money more easily.

**John:** Exactly. We could put up a phone call, say, “Hey, guys.”

**Mike:** “Guys.”

**John:** “You really should be paying them for this. You should be paying their weekly pay, their pension, their health, the parental leave contributions you owe. You should really be paying these things.”

**Mike:** I do a presentation every year at the Writers Guild Showrunners program, which is a wonderful program that helps people who are maybe just about to take over their first show or have recently become a showrunner for the first time. It amounts to just epigrammatic wisdom that has been passed to me from all of the people I’ve worked for and with over the years or spoken to.

One of the things that I like to say is that you need to think at all times when you’re a showrunner about to whom you are loyal. You have a loyalty to your show and the characters in that show and the writers who work with you and for you. You need to be loyal to the studio that’s paying you and the network that’s airing your show. But also, you need to be loyal to your union.

By the way, the point of this is sometimes those loyalties come into conflict in that moment of decision that you need to make about, “Where is my loyalty right now at this moment? Is it to my employees? To my studio? To my network?” Whatever.

The reason I add the union into the equation – there are many reasons, but one of them is decisions like this, because without maybe knowing it directly, or without closely following it, the union has your back all the time. It is constantly doing things like they just did, which is to say identifying places in which the studios have cheaped out, have tried to skirt the rules, have gone through the back door and are trying to get work out of you and your fellow writers that they’re not paying for.

I don’t even blame them. You don’t blame a snake in the wild for attacking its prey. That is just what it’s designed to do. These companies are designed. Their only loyalty is to their shareholders, really. They’re a capitalistic entity, like a company. Its only job is to figure out how to make more money and spend less money. They’re constantly probing and testing at the boundaries of what they’re contractually obligated to do, and figuring out ways to not spend money.

The union is the safeguard against that. That’s why we have a union is for things like this, where this staff put together this incredibly difficult presentation and arbitration case to say, “This is what they’ve done. This is why it’s not legal. This is how much they owe us.”

At the end of the day, it’s really wild. If you look at it, it’s one company – one of the many companies that employ writers – owed $3 million for this one thing. This is one aspect of the MBA that they were skirting, and it’s $3 million. $3 million for CBS, Paramount, whatever they are now, Skydance, I suppose, that’s a rounding error. That’s an accounting error on their annual report. But for the writers-

**John:** 24 affected writers. It’s not gonna divide evenly between them, but that’s serious money.

**Mike:** That’s serious money. That’s yearly income that makes an enormous difference in the lives of them and their children and their partners and their lives. Again, the reason that folks in this guild have to remember and keep in their brains that they are loyal to their union is because this is the function, the raison d’être of the union, is to find these places where writers are getting screwed and try to unscrew them. It’s really wonderful. Congratulations to the staff and the Guild in general.

**John:** These 24 affected writers first off may not have been aware that they were owed this money. But individually, they had no leverage to get this money. Their agencies weren’t gonna be able to get this money for them. Their managers couldn’t get this money for them. That’s the job of the union is to say, “Here’s the contract. This is the violation. Pay up.”

**Mike:** Yeah, and they did. The great thing about decisions like this, or the Bird Box decision, which was another huge win for the Guild in terms of money being denied screenwriters, is that now there’s precedent. Now, it becomes much easier to go to the other companies that are trying to pull similar shenanigans and say, “Listen, we know what you’re doing. We fought it once. Here’s what happened. Just don’t fight this. Don’t pretend like you’re not doing this. We know you’re doing it. Here’s how it played out. In the other case, save the money that you’re gonna give to your lawyers and just instead give that money to the writers like you should’ve the first time.”

**John:** Absolutely. You hinted at it, but the other big news of this past week is that Skydance has apparently purchased Paramount. The deal is so complicated. I’ve read a couple of explainers talking about how Skydance bought National Amusements, and based on voting shares and who has voting stock and non-voting stock, and there are three steps they have to go through. You have to close your eyes and turn around four times. But at the end of this, Skydance Corporation will in theory own Paramount, CBS, Viacom, which I think to me is really good news.

Of all the outcomes of this, I was happiest about this. I want to make sure that the Paramount brand stays. I want to make sure that not just the mountain logo but the idea of what Paramount is continues. It feels like this was the best way to see that happen.

**Mike:** I totally agree. Paramount is iconic in this town. It’s where Peewee Herman ended up in Peewee’s Big Adventure. It’s in Hollywood proper, which I think symbolically matters. It’s right on Melrose. Those gates are iconic.

**John:** Those gates in front of which you and I both picketed quite a lot. We had many conversations in front of the gates of Paramount.

**Mike:** We did. That was our home base during the strike. But I think more than symbolically important, this is important because among the many scenarios that we heard as possibilities were an extant studio buying Paramount and just folding it into – is Warner Bros gonna somehow borrow even more money and buy Paramount? Is Comcast gonna buy Paramount? Whatever.

The reason that that would have been worse is because consolidation is bad for labor. Consolidation means that there are fewer individual places who have the means and opportunity to buy scripts from screenwriters and from TV writers. Skydance, which has been their partner on some of their biggest movie franchises in their history, Top Gun and Transformers and-

**John:** Mission Impossible.

**Mike:** … Mission Impossible and stuff like that – the fact that Skydance is actually the company that’s buying them means that they stay an option, another option. It’s hard enough right now to sell anything, a TV show or a movie or anything. If Paramount had essentially been absorbed by one of the other places that buys stuff, that just means there’s one fewer place that buys stuff.

The independence of Paramount as a buyer and the installation of showbiz veteran types to run it would send the message of like, “We’re in the business of Hollywood. We are gonna keep buying stuff and making stuff.” That is only good for the writers and actors and directors and IATSE members who are hoping to have viable careers in the industry.

**John:** I’m excited to see what’s next. I’m excited to keep Paramount around as a company, as a brand, but also as a buyer, as you said, because it’s not a theoretical example. When Disney bought Fox, a bunch of people lost their jobs, but we also lost a major buyer. Yes, there are still things that are put out under the Fox brand. Great. But it’s not the same. We’ve lost a huge place to develop stuff.

**Mike:** You could argue that we lost more than one, because when Disney bought Fox, we lost Fox in general, but also Hulu became completely controlled by Disney-

**John:** Totally.

**Mike:** … where it hadn’t been before. I would have to think back, but I’m sure there were projects that I took out to the marketplace where I pitched individually to Disney, Fox, and Hulu, and then suddenly all three of those were one thing. You’re pitching just to Disney. If they want to buy it, they might say, “This is good for Fox network,” or, “This is good for Hulu,” or, “This is good for Disney Plus.” But it’s all one person. If that one company decided they didn’t want to buy it, it took three options off the table. That is nothing but bad.

**John:** I remember going back even further, there used to be a brand called Fox 2000. I remember projects which we pitched to Fox, Fox 2000, and Fox Searchlight. The fact that they’re all folded into one amorphous mass now is not good. The more buyers, the better.

**Mike:** Exactly. I’m happy, happy, happy that this worked out the way it did.

**John:** Drew, let’s have you hop on for a second, because I wanted you to talk about Weekend Read, because you are the person, along with Jonathan Wigdortz, who’s been assembling the scripts for people to read in Weekend Read. For folks who are not familiar with it, Weekend Read is the app our company makes for reading scripts on your phone. Makes it handy. But what you do, Drew, is pulling together a list of new scripts every week on a theme for people to read if they’ve not had a chance to read these scripts. Tell us about what you put into Weekend Read this week.

**Drew Marquardt:** This week’s theme is Frankenstein’s monster. I was thinking about all the different iterations of that myth or character. We have, of course, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Young Frankenstein, but also Edward Scissorhands and Poor Things and Ex Machina, Stranger Things, Rocky Horror, Weird Science, all that good stuff.

**John:** Fantastic. If people want to read these, Weekend Read is in app store. Just download it on your phone. Also works on iPad. You can take a look at all these scripts, which is great.

Drew, while we have you, last week on the show we asked if any of our listeners were experienced WordPress developers, because we were having a problem with the Scrippets plugin we use on johnaugust.com. Sometimes we want to put little short snippets of scripts in a blog post, and we developed this thing called Scrippets, which is no longer working within most recent versions. You guys are of course fantastic as always. We got, what, six or seven people write in to help us out.

**Drew:** Maybe more. Maybe a dozen.

**John:** We are good. We have solved the problem. Thank you to everybody who wrote in. You guys are the best. We have the plugin fixed. I want to thank again our tremendous listeners for getting that figured out.

Let’s do some more follow-up here. Back in Episode 646 we talked about script revisions. Drew, can you help us out with what our writer said here.

**Drew:** Unlocking the ADs wrote, “I’m producing an indie feature right now. As we’re shifting from blue pages to pink, lo and behold, the writer director did not lock the script pages when they made revisions over the weekend. So the second AD is kvetching, ‘In the production trailer, the pages won’t line up. Everyone’s gonna have to get a whole new script.’ I tried to broach the subject. ‘But aren’t the scene numbers still the same? Does it actually matter if the page numbers change? Who uses the actual page numbers?’ Needless to say, I got my head bitten off by the whole AD team, because it’s the way it’s done. However, I didn’t get an answer as to why it’s the way it’s done, and certainly no answer as to who uses the page numbers. If or when this comes up again, how can I approach this to try and convince some folks stuck in their way?”

**John:** Mike Schur, let me get you up to speed. When Craig was on the podcast most recently, we were talking about locked pages. Craig said that he is done with locked pages and that he believes that we should just stop doing that. For next season of The Last of Us, he says, “We’re not gonna lock pages anymore.” You just finished production. I assume you had locked pages. You were a traditional show. Tell us about that. I saw your reaction there when I said not lock pages. Tell me what you’re thinking.

**Mike:** I don’t know what it’s like in the movie world. In the TV world-

**John:** We lock pages in film too.

**Mike:** Right, but what I was gonna say is, I don’t know how you feel about it. I feel Craig here, because it’s basically this aspect of getting scripts to the set to be actually produced, where when you make a change, you end up with… Let’s say when you lock a script, you make a change. You add a back and forth in the middle of the scene. You end up with this weird thing where there’s one line and the rest of the page is completely blank.

**John:** With a giant Sharpie X across it to really show that it’s blank.

**Mike:** Yeah. It has always been a mystery to me of what the big advantage is. It has been explained to me before by ADs and by script coordinators. I have at various times been like, “Okay, yeah, I guess I understand what that means.” But it makes everything look chaotic to me, and odd. You end up with a lot of pages of different colors mixed into these scripts. It makes things look more – I don’t know if the word is unprofessional, but it makes it look like someone made a mistake.

**John:** Exactly.

**Mike:** It is one of these “this is the way things have always been done” old saws that you hear about all the time. I can’t argue for it. I really can’t. You should have a script coordinator or an AD come on and make the argument for locked pages. But to my mind, it seems like it creates more confusion than it does clarity.

I will say this though, to argue the other side. My first job was at Saturday Night Live. There was a Microsoft Word template that we use to make our scripts. That was a huge improvement over the previous version, which had been that writers in the early ’90s wrote their sketches longhand and then gave them to assistants who then typed them into the format. Writers in the early ’90s apparently didn’t even have computers in their offices. By the time I got there in ’98, we at least had computers in our offices. We all had this really primitive Microsoft Word template that we used.

There was this bananas system, because you talk about a show with a lot of changes. There’s changes happening 10 minutes before a sketch is made. The process by which we made changes in scripts or rewrote scripts or then handed those scripts to the script coordinators and script assistants, who then went over those changes with the cue card folks, it was so primitive and so bad. It was like, “Please, someone has to change this.”

The argument not to change it was, this show is chaotic by its nature. We have all learned this system, and this system, just barely, works. To change it or to try to improve it, the stakes of it were so high, because if it didn’t work on the season premier and everything was chaos and the cue cards didn’t get written properly, then it’s live TV, and everything would fall apart. The argument not to change it was, “Look, it’s not perfect, but everybody knows what this is and everybody functions with this system in place. And so we’d rather leave it in place than change it and risk complete collapse of the system.”

I don’t know if that’s why we do it this way still or whether an AD or a script coordinator would tell us right now, “No, you guys are idiots. This is the real benefit of this.” I don’t know which of those things is true, but one of them is true, or perhaps both.

**John:** So many things to respond to here. First let’s talk with Saturday Night Live, because we had Simon Rich on the show this last week, and he was talking about his time on Saturday Night Live, which I think was after yours. My belief is that the current system in Saturday Night Live is that they’re using Final Draft for most of the show, but the Weekend Update segment is being done in Scripto, which is the system that’s used to do a lot of late-night shows. Colbert actually I think owns or is an investor in Scripto. That’s the online-only software for writing that stuff, because basically, it’s like a big Google doc where everyone can throw in on the same thing. That segment is written in there.

But then as we look at normal scripted film and television, I really wonder whether we’re keeping this metaphor of colored pages, because they’re not really colored pages anymore and locking pages from a physical paper type of universe. We’re trying to drive this into this digital world that we’re in, because Craig says on his show there are no printed scripts. Everything is always a digital thing just for security purposes.

I really think we could probably break with this. Would it be an adjustment? Yeah, but I think we’d come out the other side better and we’d actually save money and save time, and there’d be less confusion rather than more confusion. I really think we can do it, because even the script supervisors, maybe some of them are still using paper, but from what I’ve heard, they’re all using iPad version stuff that they’re using to track what’s actually being done.

**Mike:** This show that I just finished the first season of on Netflix was the first time that I, when we would rehearse a scene, almost all of the actors who had scripts that they were referring to had them on iPads. A lot of the writers, most of whom at this point are way younger than I am, are following them on iPads and making notes on their iPads.

It was the first time that it really felt to me like I am officially a dinosaur, because I can’t do it that way. It’s too deeply ingrained in me. I have to be holding a script. I have to be able to flip pages. I have to be able to make notes on a piece of paper. Now, it should be noted in other areas of my life. I refuse to read books on a Kindle. It’s very hard for me to read on my phone. Just too many years of physical paper to make this change now. Just put me on a raft and shove me off the shore and let me float away and die, is the way I feel.

But when I saw the actors using the iPads to keep track of what they wanted to do, that was when I felt like we have crossed the Rubicon here. We are now fully in a digital world on the physical set of the show. It did make me feel like the idea of like, “Hey, can someone print out copies of these changes I just made and get them to me?” was extremely antiquated. I might as well have been saying, “Could you please shovel a shovel full of coal into the steam engine so the locomotive can move down the tracks?”

I think you’re right. I think that we’re probably two years away from most productions saying, “This is pointless. Why are we printing out these pages? Why are we locking these pages at all? Why aren’t we just refreshing the Google doc or the Scripto doc or the Final Draft document?” We’re just gonna text it to everyone, email it to everyone, and then everyone will have it on their individual device. Then we will know definitively. We’ll just timestamp it and everyone will know. “Okay, everyone refer to Scene 326, Version 6.4,” is what we’re doing now. That will probably ultimately be how it lives forever and ever afterwards.

**John:** How do we make this transition happen? I’m wondering whether we could actually just get together a group of showrunners and ADs and maybe some scriptees and other folks who really are affected by this and say, “Hey, what if we were to just actually stop doing this? How would this change your lives? What things do we need to be aware of?” Because maybe there are some aspects of that. I’m always mindful of the Chesterton’s Fence metaphor. Things were built a certain way for a certain reason. Don’t tear down that fence until you know why it was there. But I think we know what the fence was for, and I think we’ve realized we don’t need that fence anymore.

**Mike:** Saving paper is the 1,000th most important benefit of this, but it’s not nothing. Paper does clog up people’s lives. I have in my office still at Universal, stacks and stacks and stacks of scripts that I just don’t need and never really needed. It would’ve been a lot easier. I think probably the reason for the system remaining in place is just stubbornness or habit and that there is a better workflow.

I think it’s probably the case that if the show that I worked on were to go to a second season, I would probably sit down with the ADs and with the scriptees and with everybody, with the actors to some extent, to say, “What’s a better system we can devise? There must be a way that we can all get on the same page here.” The thing is, that better system will still allow – the folks who want to have a paper script can still have a paper script. You can still print out individual scripts. It’s just that the workflow will probably be streamlined a lot with a better, more digital system.

**John:** I’m finishing edits on the Scriptnotes book. One of the things I’m wrestling with is we have a little chapter about rewrites during production and A and B pages and how not to lose your mind doing this. I’m reading these paragraphs like, “Should this even be in there? Should this whole idea just go away?” Because no one benefited from A and B pages. It was a hack for a physical time that we’re just not in anymore.

**Mike:** You’re probably right. It’s a little bit sad, because there is something magical about holding a script in your hand. I honestly think that to me – and this is, by far, not one of the 25 most important aspects of the process – but I really like read-throughs with physical scripts. I think there’s something magical about holding a tangible product in your hand as the rubber meets the road, as it comes out of the theoretical work of the writers’ room and becomes the literal work of the whole staff of people, the actors and all of the department heads and everybody else. I think there’s something wonderful about holding that product in your hand tangibly.

I have this thing I do at the end of every table read. We get to the end, and I say, “End of episode,” or whatever, and everybody claps. I flip back to the front and I write my name on the front, which I started way back at I think Parks and Recreation, because I remember thinking there were so many copies of this script. I had made notes in mine, and I just wanted to write my name on the front, so that I could easily identify it in case it got lost in a shuffle. I get up and I hug people and I shake people’s hands and then I can’t find my script. I just wrote my name on the front right after we were done. I’ve done that every single read through of every single of episode of every single show.

I would be a little bit sad if I were doing that with an Apple Pen, flipping back to page 1 of a doc, of a pdf. But again, that is just habit. That’s not making anyone’s life easier. I think it’s probably time for all of us who live in this dinosaur age that I live in to give up on some of the little traditions or habits or whatever you call them, to make the workflow go a little easier for everybody.

**John:** Let’s get to our main topic for today, which is rewriting and overwriting. This comes from a friend of the show. Drew, would you mind reading this for us?

**Drew:** “I’m rewriting a project, and I am resistant, not because I don’t want to write more, but because I’m not sure that the rewrite is going to be better. It’ll just be different. How do you weigh that? I’ve watched a couple friends who have producers attached to projects, and they’ve taken on so much feedback that at this point in their rewrites, I’m like, this has lost the pacing and weirdness of your voice. It feels overwritten. In TV I’ve been in writers’ rooms where there’s also this balance of, we’ll write this thing for the executives and take it out later. So sometimes overwriting seems strategic. I’m curious to hear your take on how you’d weigh that as creators.”

**John:** Overwriting. I’ve definitely felt this in my own drafts at times. I’ve felt this in other people’s drafts too. I haven’t gone through and produced a lot of people’s stuff that wasn’t my own. But in looking at people trying to incorporate notes sometimes, they’re both trying to incorporate the new notes and preserve everything else that was in there. You just feel like a bunch of stuff is wedged in there that is not helping to serve the story. Mike, do you see this in TV happening too?

**Mike:** This is a huge thing in TV. Yes. A couple different things are being raised, I think, by this question. The easiest one to address is the thing of, “We’ll write this in for the executives and take it out later.” That’s not overwriting to me. That is strategic management of your relationship with your studio or your executives. I think that’s a separate issue.

The overwriting thing is a real problem. I think one of the most important skills you can learn as a writer and as a showrunner is the art of the surgical fix. Most of the lessons that I’ve learned about writing came from The Office, which was my first sitcom job.

I worked for Greg Daniels, who is a true genius of the genre. He’s got an enormous, juicy brain. He’s the guy who sees the matrix code of scrips and of storytelling. But he also has this thing where he would become fixated on a problem in a script and he would spiral. He would be like, “Oh, no, we’ve ruined this somehow. We did this. This character’s motivation is unclear,” or, “The plot doesn’t make any sense if you have this scene in it, because this is what the characters are going through.” Sometimes he would get so spirally that he would just lie down on the floor, and on the dirty, disgusting carpet of the office we were in.

There was this one moment in particular where we did a readthrough and it went really well, but this one piece of the story was, I would say, overwritten. There was too much stuff in it. He was a character who had a motivation. I don’t remember the details. There was a character who had a specific storyline, a specific motivation. We had written in this scene for this character where he was saying something to someone else that muddied that motivation. There was too much going on. We had added too much stuff.

Greg was really freaked out by it. It was late on a Thursday night. We were starting to shoot it on Monday. It was like, “Oh, god.” We were all texting our husbands and wives and loved ones and saying, “I don’t think I’m coming home for dinner.” Greg was expounding out loud, as he lay on the floor, the exact specific reasons why this scene was screwing up the story. I was like, “Oh, boy, we’re really screwed. We’re going to be here forever.”

Then I said out loud – and I thought I was being stupid – I was like, “What if we just cut those two lines?” There was a beat, and then Greg was like, “Yeah, I think that’ll work.” He just popped back up and he went into the script and he cut the two lines that we were fixated on. I was like, “Oh, okay. Thank god.” The surgical fix is a key weapon for writers, especially in TV, because I think a lot of overwriting comes with good intentions.

**John:** Totally.

**Mike:** You are trying to make everything really clear to the audience. Especially in comedy, clarity is vitally important. People have to know what the characters are thinking and feeling and why they’re doing what they’re doing in order for the jokes to land. Sometimes when you add a bunch of stuff to try to make it more clear why they’re doing what they’re doing, you end up with a bunch of just muddy, mushy stuff that actually does the exact opposite. The surgical fix, the, “Wait, these six words in the middle of this sentence are making everything muddy and stupid,” and if we just remove them, then you’ll breathe a sigh of relief, because the scene will flow so much better.

The fix to an overwritten scene, in my experience, can often be fixed with a good analysis of what’s wrong and a surgical strike on the dialogue. That’s my instinct every time I feel like something is overwritten, is to try to say, “What are the clauses or phrases or sentences that are making us feel this way, and what happens if we just remove them?” Very frequently, that seems to be the answer to how to fix it.

**John:** As a feature writer, a lot of times I’ll get a script for a rewrite, and it has been through multiple writers before. One of the things I’ll notice is it’s overwritten because the writers before me, with very good intentions, were trying to address the notes and problems of the script that they were handed, what they were being told to fix and to rewrite. They’re addressing those problems, but those problems aren’t the problems of the script right now. There’s all this digital crap in there that can just go away. What I’d love to be able to do is just go through and do a clean pass that just takes away all this cruft that’s built up over the months or years or drafts that this script has been around. When I give the script to the people, like, “Oh my god, this reads so much better.” It’s like, “Yes, because I took out all your dumb notes from all the previous drafts, because they were not important.”

Especially I think in feature land, so often you’re doing a rewrite, you’re doing a polish, you want to show how much work you’ve done. You’re making changes that show the work you’ve done, because literally, it makes a little star in the margin to show, “Look how much I did.” Often, the stuff that you’re doing is not actually really improving stuff. It’s just adding. When you talking about removing clauses, removing sentences, in a lot of cases I’m removing scenes that just don’t need to be there anymore. They’re repetitive. They’re not speaking into the actual story we’re trying to tell.

When it’s your turn and when you’re getting notes to address a thing, I really look for what are ways to do things in a better or different way that’s not adding stuff to it. How do you make sure that you’re best addressing both the note and what the movie wants to be, which could mean scrapping that scene that you have and doing a different scene actually to use these goals, rather than trying to graft on this idea to a scene that really wasn’t built to support it. It’s being smart. You say surgical, but sometimes it’s just rebuilding a thing so it can actually support this note, rather than trying to adapt what’s there.

**Mike:** There’s two things that I think are really important. One of them is, there’s different kinds of overwritten. The kind that you’re talking about is a bunch of different people have given a bunch of different notes, and a bunch of different people have then gone in and tried to address those notes. As a result, you get this mish-mosh of stuff.

The question that kicked off this discussion is that sometimes those rewrites, those endless patches that people have put onto scenes, have made it so that it doesn’t seem like there’s a voice in the script. You don’t get the sense that this is the result of a person’s idea or work. Those rough edges, those uniquenesses, are what can often make the difference between a movie that you as a viewer love and respond to emotionally and make you feel something, and a movie that feels like a processed hot dog that’s just bland and mushy and not very interesting.

Look, different movies have different objectives and goals. If you’re making a $300 million summer blockbuster, the goal isn’t to celebrate the uniqueness of the artist’s voice. The goal is to just make a giant, loud, fun, entertaining thing. But the movies that I think we as viewers really just connect with or respond to are the ones where it feels like, wow, one specific person did this one specific idea and executed it.

I don’t know, I think of Nicole Holofcener’s movies, which I love. No one can write a Nicole Holofcener movie except Nicole Holofcener. Part of the reason is because there are rhythms and specificities to her voice that make it unique. If someone came in and took a Nicole Holofcener movie and took a bunch of notes from the studio and addressed them, it would just smooth everything out and make it bland. There’s that kind of rewriting or undoing of overwriting, which is like, let’s try to get back to the feeling that this is a unique idea from a unique artist.

There’s another thing that happens in comedy, and it happens in comedy movies. I’ve been a part of a number of comedy movie rewrites. But it happens within writers’ rooms too. The people who are writing jokes for a TV script or a TV movie script when there’s a rewrite, like a round table rewrite, are coming into that process bringing with them the most recent shows that they’ve worked on.

You have a comedy movie, and you get a writers’ room together. The writers’ room has writers from Barry and then The Bear and The Great and whatever, Everybody Loves Raymond, going back as far as you want. When you’re going through a scene and you’re pitching different jokes for a different scene, those writers are going to write jokes in the style of the kinds of shows that they have recently worked on.

As a result, when you sit back and look at the entire script, you’re going to be like, “This is a joke from The Great, and this is a joke from Everybody Loves Raymond, and this is a joke from The Office, and this is a joke from Rick and Morty.” It’s going to have no thematic consistency to the humor. It’s going to be just this crazy hodgepodge of whatever tone and style was the funniest in that moment. Sometimes you’ll see a comedy movie script where that’s the problem. It’s not just that it’s overwritten. It was overwritten by people who had very different senses of humor.

The hardest thing to do as a comedy showrunner, or I would imagine as a comedy screenwriter, is to remove a joke that you know is funny because it doesn’t fit the tone of the project you’re working on. It’s a really hard thing. I have had to defend that decision to a number of writers in TV writers’ rooms over the years, like, “Yes, this joke is funny, but also, it’s tonally off,” or it’s a character-damaging joke. Suddenly, this character takes on a color that we don’t want him or her to, or it just screws something up.

The point of a comedy show isn’t to just make as many jokes as you can, regardless of what their tone or style is. The idea is to have the show feel holistic and feel like there is a singular humorous voice at work. There’s room for variance within that, of course. Part of the real joy of working on a TV writers’ room is that you know Megan Amram is going to write a very different kind of joke from Alan Yang or Andrew Law or Jen Statsky or whoever the person is. But all of those jokes have to feel like they’re part of the same general holistic crew of humor writers. If they don’t, if those jokes are too crazy, then they just shouldn’t be in the script.

A big part of undoing overwriting to me sometimes in comedy rooms is saying, “Is this joke funny? Yes, it’s hilarious. Should it exist in this script? Should it be said by this exact character at this exact moment? Maybe not.” It’s painful, because jokes are hard, man. They’re hard to come by. Removing one that you know is funny is a very hard task. But I think when you are the steward of the show, of the tone of the show, of the style of the show, it’s a decision you have to make a lot.

**John:** You and I both live in Hancock Park. Some of the streets in our neighborhood are traditional asphalt, and some of them have been replaced by concrete. The concrete streets are really, really nice. The problem comes though if they have to cut into the street or if there’s some damage to the street. They fill it with asphalt. Of course, other neighborhoods, you might have just potholes and things like that too. So often, I think when you run into overwriting and things that [inaudible 01:02:31] it literally is, you fill that pothole. You took out that hole, but the patch is really not feeling great.

I think what we’re asking for is – it sounds like a lot of work to actually go through and repave that street, but you gotta repave that street. You gotta make it smooth, because ultimately, you’re trying to deliver a nice, smooth experience for the reader and ultimately for the audience with this scene that you’re writing. Just avoid filling the potholes, if you can.

**Mike:** This is one of the most difficult lessons that I learned. I have to relearn it again and again and again. When you read a script through, which in the TV world you’ll read every script through 75 times. Every time you go through it, every time you do a readthrough, but then you do a rewrite or you’re reading it at home or whatever, there are moments in the script where you get a little feeling in your chest, where you’re like, “Eh, there’s something wrong with that. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.” Then you keep going.

You can convince yourself that that pothole was filled in the right way, but you’ll just keep having that feeling. If you don’t fix it, if you don’t do the work to really dig up all of the surrounding area and cut out the part that’s mushy and replace it with something more sturdy, you will have that feeling all the way through shooting, all the way through editing, all the way through sound mixing. You’ll never get over that feeling.

Paying attention to that feeling when you have it is a really good skill to develop, because you can convince yourself, because it sounds like so much work to dig up that whole scene or throw away that whole scene or conceive of a new scene or conceive of an entirely new chunk of a script. It sounds like so much work. If it’s a B-minus patch, it’s very easy to convince yourself that everything is fine. But if you have that feeling, that feeling is never going away. You’ll never suddenly read that part of a script and go, “Yeah, no, I was wrong. Actually, it’s totally fine.” You will always feel like it needed to be fixed. The sooner you fix it, the better off you will be in the end.

**John:** To continue this metaphor, there’s a hole in the road and you see it coming up there. One of your strategies might be like, “Okay, I’m going to just put up some cones and drive around that hole.” You can feel that. That often feels like, “Wait, why are we doing this thing? Why are we zigzagging around this thing that’s a natural place to go?”

I think what we’re urging you to do is – probably the goal is to drive through that place and build a new thing that can go through that. But if that’s not really possible, you probably need to back up and just take a different road. Rather than try to do a little zigzag around it, actually just take a different route to get there, because maybe there’s no scene that can actually do what you’re trying to do here and you need to just find a different way to approach it.

**Mike:** This metaphor is surprisingly resilient.

**John:** It really is.

**Mike:** It’s really holding up under the stress we’re putting on it. But yes, it’s a perfect way to put it, which is to say, if every time you drive down a certain route – which is to say get to a certain part of your script – you find yourself having to dodge and weave, and you’re barely hanging on as your car wheels around in this complicated way. You got to where you were going. You reach your destination on the other side. But you have to just understand that there is a better path.

I don’t know how far we want to extend the metaphor. But there’s no GPS. There’s no, “Hey, find me the best route here,” which is what makes it so annoying, because it requires you to erase six pages of your script and then pace around your room and think, “Okay, here’s where I am. Here’s where I need to go. How can I get there a smoother way?” It’s really annoying. It’s one of the most annoying parts of rewriting.

I would say that, going back to the original question, oftentimes the reason that there’s a problem in the route to begin with is it’s been overwritten. A bunch of different people did a bunch of different things and patched this route together. Someone needs to come in and say, “Wait, I’ve got a better path here.”

**John:** You also will recognize that there’s times where you read through the script, you’re like, “Wait, you actually took a whole loop there and then you finally made it. In trying to get around this problem, you went way out of your way to get there.” We feel that as an audience. We feel like we are repeating this moments. “We already saw that house before. Something is deeply wrong here.”

**Mike:** I will say, on the plus side, there are few things in writing as satisfying as realizing that you can cut-

**John:** I love it so much.

**Mike:** … six pages of a script and replace it with two lines. The earliest lesson of show business that anyone remembers is leave them wanting more. You would always rather do something more quickly, unless the whole point of it is to be patient and deliberate. If you’re talking about plot mechanics, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line is a good adage to remember. If you’re finding you’re taking this crazy, loopy journey to do something that isn’t that hard or shouldn’t be that hard to do, try to find that straight line. I think that’s a good lesson.

**John:** Cool. It has come time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. First off is the book Project Hail Mary, which is by Andy Weir. He’s the guy who wrote The Martian. I’m reading it right now, and I’m really enjoying it. I debated whether to read it or not, because it’s being made into a movie right now. Drew Goddard wrote the script. Chris Miller and Phil Lord are directing it. They’re all friends. They’ll all come on the podcast hopefully to talk about it. I could just wait and see the movie when it comes out. But I’m excited that I’m reading it now.

I’m going to encourage listeners to read the book, because it’s going to be a challenging adaptation. I’m really curious what they’re going to do with things that appear in the book and how they’re going to make it all work. I think if you read the book now, yes, you’ll be spoiled a little bit on some of the surprises that happen in the movie, but I think you’ll also be delighted to see, “Oh, they made this choice. They made that choice. This is what they did with point of view on things.” It can be a good exercise to have read the book first before seeing the movie. That’s my recommendation for that.

My second One Cool Thing is a game. It’s a game that we actually made here in the office. Pretty much every Friday we play this game called AlphaBirds, which is a word game. It’s like Boggle or Scrabble but much easier and simpler. You can drink a beer while playing it. Years ago, we printed 100 decks and sent them off to some friends and left it at that. But enough people asked for it that we actually went through and printed a whole bunch more. We got the proper trademark on AlphaBirds with a little TM at the end, so we can sell them legally. They’re now available to anybody. If you want to play this game, it’s a fun little card game. It’s available on Amazon, or if you go to alphabirdsgame.com, you can buy it through there. There’s a code, Scriptnotes, that saves you five bucks off of it if you want to play AlphaBirds. It’s a great little game that Drew can testify is quite a bit of fun to play.

**Mike:** It sounds like a fun office. You guys have a fun office.

**John:** Every Friday after 4:00, we stop and we play some games and drink some beers.

**Mike:** That’s fantastic. My One Cool Thing is when I was making the show The Good Place, we had a philosophical advisor who is a professor. His name is Todd May. He actually appears in the finale of The Good Place, playing himself. He’s the best kind of philosopher to my mind, which is to say he’s a philosopher whose writing you can actually understand when you read it. It’s a very rare thing in the world of philosophy. Todd has a new book. It is not out yet, but it will be out within a month. I think August 6 is the publication date. The subject matter is wonderful and hilarious. The title of the book is Should We Go Extinct? A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times. He is literally answering the question of would the universe be better off if humans just went extinct.

What’s great about him as a writer and what attracted me to him to begin with is he takes on these incredibly huge, thorny problems, but he writes about them with a tremendous amount of empathy and humanity, in a very clear and straightforward way that anyone can understand. You do not have to have studied philosophy in college or any other place in order to understand it. He argues the pros for us going extinct. He argues the cons for us going extinct. He makes compelling arguments on both sides. I read the book. He sent me a copy of it when it was in galleys. It’s 176 pages long.

**John:** Love it.

**Mike:** It is not overbearing or exhausting. I encourage everyone to check it out when it comes out next month.

**John:** Mike Schur, you introduced me to Todd May years ago. I just emailed with him this morning.

**Mike:** Really?

**John:** There’s a thing of mine that he’s reading through which is philosophically oriented. He’s giving me some notes and thoughts on that, so thank you for making that introduction.

**Mike:** Absolutely. I hope you enjoy his book. It’s really great.

**John:** I’m looking forward to it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help this week from Jonathan Wigdortz. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Vance Lovett. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today.

You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and glassware. They’re all cool and great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on AI music. But Michael Schur, what an absolute pleasure having you back on the show. Thank you so much.

**Mike:** It is an absolute joy to be here. I will see you for Episode 1300.

**John:** I’m so excited.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Mike Schur, we’re springing this on you. But about two or three weeks ago, the Recording Industry Association of America filed these two lawsuits against these AI music producers called Suno and Udio over copyright infringement. I was a little skeptical at the start, because in general, I think the music copyright stuff has been overblown and overdone.

I remember the Blurred Lines lawsuit. I thought that was actually crazy, because did the song Blurred Lines feel like a Marvin Gaye song? Yes. But did it actually infringe? Can you actually say this is the same notes, the same thing? Could it be mistaken for a specific Marvin Gaye song? I think not. I was skeptical of this lawsuit, and then I listened to some of the examples. Let me play a few samples here from this lawsuit.

(AI song samples)

What we just listened to, obviously, that sounded like Mariah Carey singing All I Want for Christmas is You. But that was not prompted for Mariah Carey. It was basically like, give me a Christmas song that’s a pop song that’s in this style, and that’s what it generated was something that was basically-

**Mike:** Whoa. Really?

**John:** Yeah, really.

**Mike:** Oh, no.

**John:** The prompt did not even include the words Mariah Carey. It just generated this. Apparently, for the one that sounded like Green Day there, “A reproduction of a nostalgic acoustic ballad by a pop band famous in the 1990s whose name rhymes with mean nay, whose lead singer has a name that rhymes with Millie No Marmstrong, with a sense of musical urgency.” They’re really trying to tip it in there. But for the one that sounded like the Beach Boys, it didn’t reference the Beach Boys at all, and it comes up with Good Vibrations.

**Mike:** Wow. That’s intense. I had not heard those before. That American Idiot is just the song American Idiot which a very slightly different chord progression, it sounds like. The Mariah Carey song was just the Mariah… I thought you were playing the Mariah Carey song so that you could then play a song that was a ripoff of the Mariah Carey song. I didn’t know that that was the ripoff. That’s intense, man.

**John:** What the lawsuit brings up, and I think what we’re grappling with, is it infringement to make these things or to use these things in other ways? Is the copyright infringement the existence of a model that could create these things, or is copyright infringement only when you use these things to create a knockoff of a song? I think that’s not quite clear where we’re at there, because it’s clearly not copyright infringement to listen to a song. If you then, having listened to that song, make a song that is functionally identical, that’s the problem.

**Mike:** I would say this entire conversation has to be prefaced, at least on my end, by saying, boy, am I not a lawyer and do I not know what I’m talking about. But this was the fear that the Writers Guild had. In fact, the two main fears I would say that the Writers Guild had were, one, how is the work that we have written being used to train AI, and two, what is AI going to do with that work?

The nightmare scenario is that they feed all of our scripts into a machine, and the machine breaks them down into their component parts and understands the mechanics of storytelling and so forth. Then someone says, “You know what we need next summer is a romantic comedy set in New York, featuring a character who is a police officer and a character who works in an advertising agency, and the meet cute is that the police officer arrests,” and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then the computer searches the database and finds 600 romantic comedies, Nora Ephron’s and yours and whoever’s, and spits out an entire script in .01 milliseconds that is a fully realized screenplay with story beats and moves and characters and jokes and whatever.

What has happened is a bunch of human-designed material has been mushed around and muddied up, and then something is spit out that is entirely derivative of that work. No one whose work went into the programming of that computer gets paid for it. Also, no one wrote that script really, and so they don’t have to pay anybody. That’s the nightmare that we were addressing.

The thing about songs that I think is different is that there’s only so many variations on a three-minute pop song. I think we’ve all had the experience of hearing songs and going, “You know what this reminds me of is this.” That doesn’t mean that the person who wrote the second song was consciously thinking of the first song. How many songs have the same chord progression? Thousands and thousands and thousands of songs.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Mike:** There’s a fundamental difference, I think, between pop songwriting and screenwriting. But at essence, the questions are the same. The questions are, should the people who are the humans who create these things be compensated for some way when those things are used to program a machine that could spit out versions of them that the people didn’t write themselves.

**John:** Absolutely. To that extent, I say A, yes, they should be compensated, but B, there’s this larger existential question of what are we losing. What are we losing from the fabric of being alive on earth? If we outsource the work of creativity to machines that are only creative inasmuch as we have programmed them to be creative, that’s the part of it that really makes me not sleep well at night is I don’t know what humanity is.

If the most fundamental work of humanity, which is to say artistic endeavor, is outsourced to a machine that only exists because we built it and we fed all of our previous creativity into it and asked it to kick out new versions of things, that’s the part that is so unsettling, so uncanny valley, and so unappealing to me. I think without being a lawyer, without knowing the legitimacy of these claims, I wholeheartedly support the idea that the recording industry is trying to stop this from happening.

**John:** So many different threads we can pull at. I’m going to try to pull at a bunch, and it’s going to probably be a very messy sweater by the end. As we went into the WGA negotiations, we talked about the Nora Ephron problem. Basically, if you train a model on all of the scripts of Nora Ephron and you ask it to generate a new Nora Ephron script, who should get credit for that? Literally, who should be credited as the writer of the screenplay? But also, shouldn’t she or her estate have some ability to determine how that all works?

Looking at the parallels between songwriting and screenwriting, one of the things about these examples we just played, All I Want for Christmas is You, it’s so clear that this is the same thing. It’s based on the same thing. Or even American Idiot, we can see this is the same thing. But that analogy does not hold especially true for movies, because so often, movies are referencing each other.

These movies are similar, but rarely do we have a situation where you say, “That movie is actually just this movie.” We will have lawsuits saying, “Oh, this was actually based on my screenplay,” or there was some sort of chicanery happening behind the scenes, but almost never do we say, “This movie is exactly the clone of this movie,” except for weird cases where it was some Nigerian knockoff of Star Wars, which we love for its just sheer ballsiness.

That’s not a thing that we’ve had to worry about so far, but in theory, we could be worrying about this, where the version of this software that’s not making songs but it’s making video could just say, “Make me a Star Wars,” and it just goes off and it makes you a Star Wars. That’s coming eventually. Music is always the canary in the coalmine for where these things are.

I want to play a little devil’s advocate here, because we say that these things are trained on all of the stuff and then they are generating new stuff based on what they’ve done. That’s also the process of culture. The process of culture is reading and watching everything that has happened out there. Then a human being or a group of human beings takes that and synthesizes it and creates a new version of it. I think our concern is that there’s not a human in the mix, and also that the new version in this case isn’t new enough. It’s not original enough. It just feels like a shitty copy rather than something new and a synthesis that actually pushes stuff forward.

**Mike:** This is the philosophical question involved in all of this, which is right now the technology in its nascency is bad, in the sense that if you say, “Give me a song that kind of sounds like a Christmas song with female voice,” it literally just spits out All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey.

Now, given the ways in which computational power advances, the speed at which software gets better, the difference between the iPhone 2 and the iPhone 15, which didn’t take that long to get from A to B, you would imagine that in three years if you say, “Give me a Christmas song with a female voice,” it’s going to just generate a Christmas song. There will be new lyrics. It won’t sound like Mariah Carey. But it will be the result of Mariah Carey’s work and the work of a lot of other artists, a lot of other songwriters, a lot of other performers.

Right now we are able to hear those clips and say, “Oh my god, this is horrifying.” In three years, I don’t think we will, because it’ll just play a song, and we will say, “I like that song,” or, “I don’t like that song.” But it will just be a song. It won’t be so obviously derivative and ripped off.

The philosophical question that we’re really asking, I think, is do we want to live in a culture where we are no longer allowing or relying on human ability and instinct to be the primary generator of pieces of art, creativity? I think there will be some people, some futurists, and some folks who are like, “Who cares? It’s art. It’s art. Art is art. What does it matter?” Maybe they’ll think, in a post-modern Banksy way, that it’s cooler. Was it really art when, who was it, Duchamp put the urinal in the museum? Is that art, or is it just a urinal that he threw into a museum? I’m not unsympathetic to that argument.

I think there’s an argument to be made that says this is where we are in 2025 and going forward is we as a species have invented these powerful machines. The powerful machines have capabilities because we programmed them to have capabilities. You could make the argument that it is no less valid a piece of art to have a person program a machine that looks at the history of songwriting and generates its own songs than it is to have a human generate those songs. I don’t think that’s an invalid argument. I think there’s something to that.

We always talk about what separates us from the animal, like it’s our ability to cognitively reason or it’s our ability to maintain complex relationships with other members of our species. I have always felt like the thing that separates us from the animals is art. It just is. There’s occasionally a story about an elephant in Thailand who can paint, and that’s really cool and awesome. There’s occasionally a story of a crow who will create a sculpture by picking up little buttons and pieces of metal and making them into something. Yes, fine, the exception that proves the rule. There isn’t a hedgehog that wrote Casablanca.

When I get into this discussion, and we had many of them over the course of the WGA negotiations, the thing that I feel the most deeply – not that I reason out the most or that I focus on in contractual language the most – but the thing I feel the most is, I fear the loss of something fundamentally human when we have gotten to a point where anyone can say to a piece of software, “Hey, give me a two-hour movie about a guy running a bar in West Africa during World War Two.” Then you get a pretty good screenplay. I fear what that means for us as a species. That’s not an argument that we could make to the folks that run movie studios. It’s not an argument that could be made to the folks who run AI software companies that generate pop songs, because their response will be like, “Sorry, man. Sorry that you fear this, but whatever.” It’s the philosophical component of this that makes me lose sleep at night.

I think there is a difference between someone looking at the world that they live in and painting Guernica or putting a urinal into a fine art museum, and a piece of software saying, “Here’s a random object that represents a sort of unpleasant part of humanity. I’m going to just install that into a museum and call it art.” I think there’s a fundamental difference when you insert the middle man of technology between the artist and a thing they’re creating.

**John:** One of the things you’re pointing to is intention, is that Duchamp has an intention behind that, Picasso has an intention behind when he paints Guernica, and the AI does not have an intention other than to please the person who typed in the prompt. I think another thing you’re getting to is, in the WGA negotiation, the WGA is negotiating with the studios, and that is the one place we can negotiate. We had to really draw lines around what our relationship with them was going to be like in terms of AI.

With something like this, it’s like, yes, you can say maybe it’s governmental reaction to AI companies or what the laws are going to be, but it’s really societal, because it goes beyond our borders. It’s just like, what choices are we going to make about what is okay and what is not okay? Collectively as a group and individually, what do we feel are the right paths through there?

As I look at AI in my own life, I’m always thinking about is this use of AI replacing a person’s work that I would otherwise be going to? Going all the way back to your example of taking the sea lions barking out of the back of this audio, there are other ways they could’ve maybe addressed that without AI, but it would not have as successful or nearly as efficient to do it.

**Mike:** Efficient, yeah.

**John:** This was a right choice, and I feel like very, very defensible. But I think we have to ask ourselves, any time we’re using one of these technologies, is this the right use of this? If it’s to create a knockoff Mariah Carey song, I think the answer is no.

**Mike:** Just to go one step further – and again, these are philosophical arguments. I’m not sure that they would sway a lot of people, but they’re how I feel. The process of making something like a TV show or a movie, it amounts to 10 phases of creativity with 10 different groups of people.

In TV, the final phase is a sound and color correction mix, where you are in a room in a dark studio and there’s a group of people around you and those people all have different jobs. There’s dialogue mixers. There’s sound effects mixers. There’s a music editor and a composer who’s composed music. You’re putting the final ribbon on the thing that you have spent months, if not years, creating. It’s incredibly collaborative. It’s really magically a team sport at the end.

By the way, every one of these phases is a team sport, regardless of whether you’ve written something completely by yourself or with a group of people. They’re all team sports. The shooting process is a team sport. The editing process is a team sport.

Its final phase is one of my favorites, because we are now done with everything. We have edited the picture the right way. We have chosen the right takes. The actors have done their jobs. The costumers and props people and art directors and caterers, everyone has done their jobs as well as they can do them. We’re at the very end. Now we’re going to make sure that everyone who watches this gets the best possible viewing and auditory experience. Every phone ring in an office comes at the right exact moment. Every little bit of dialogue. Maybe the actor got a little choked up when they said this line, and we want everyone to see exactly, hear exactly how they got choked up. It’s like painting a grain of rice. It’s like a group of people all coming together to paint this grain of rice and get it perfect.

When the sound editor presents that cleaned-up audio of that scene in San Francisco, and what he has done in this case is remove the stuff you don’t want to hear, so that you can hear the stuff you do want to hear, he has used AI to do that, and he’s used a computer to do that. But he has been there the whole time, combing through every moment, just making sure that every single little thing is exactly right, and by the way, at various times, has put some of those seal noises back in. When you cut to a shot, there’s a moment where you cut to a shot of the sea lions. At that moment, he undid what the AI had done, so that you could hear those seals barking, because we want the audience to hear them bark at that moment and not at other moments.

What I’m getting at here is that yes, that software program made his job a lot easier and a lot more efficient, but it’s still his job. He is still doing the work of going moment by moment and examining every nook and cranny of that scene with his headphones on, staring at wave forms on a computer and getting everything exactly right. That is not a thing that you could tell an AI to do. It’s impossible, because that requires the observation and thought and careful work of a human being observing what you’ve made and thinking, when we do we want to hear what and when and how and why.

I find that in other words, if you told me that right now we could replace all of the people in that room with software programs and that the process of sound mixing and color correcting an episode of TV could be 10 minutes long instead of four hours, which it often is, that sounds horrible to me. That sounds awful. That’s a worst-case scenario for how you complete the final phase of the thing that you spent so much time working on, because what I want it to be is a group of people who are thinking about doing what they’re doing and have, like you say, an intention. The intention is let’s make this piece of art as good as we can make it.

I think that the philosophical argument becomes pretty non-philosophical when you think of it that way, when you think of it as, what do we want this to be. We want it to be the product of a group of people who are all thinking really hard about how to make it as good as possible. Thinking really hard about something is not a job for an AI. It just isn’t.

**John:** Mike Schur, thank you so much for all your philosophical musings on this topic and everything else. I’m going to let you get back to that sound mix and be done with those sea lions. Absolute pleasure talking with you.

**Mike:** Thank you, buddy. Talk to you soon.

Links:

* [Mike Schur](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1321658/) on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Schur)
* [Weekend Read 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* [IATSE tentative basic agreement](https://basic.iatse.net/)
* [David Ellison’s Skydance Taking Over Paramount After $8 Billion Investment](https://deadline.com/2024/07/david-ellison-skydance-paramount-takeover-1236002996/) by Dade Hayes for Deadline
* [WGA West Reaches $3 Million Settlement With CBS Studios Over Writer Fees and Benefit Payments](https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/wga-west-cbs-settlement-writers-mcgyver-hawaii-50-seal-team-1236066838/) by Cynthia Littleton for Variety
* [Project Hail Mary](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611060/project-hail-mary-by-andy-weir/) by Andy Weir
* [Alphabirds](https://alphabirdsgame.com/)
* [Should We Go Extinct?](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760946/should-we-go-extinct-by-todd-may-introduction-by-michael-schur-creator-of-the-good-place/) by Todd May
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Vance Lovett ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Drew Marquardt](https://www.drewmarquardt.com/) with help from [Jonathan Wigdortz](https://www.wiggy.rocks/). It is edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/650V2standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/its-brutal-out-here).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** You’re listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, if one were to eavesdrop on the conversations happening at Los Angeles restaurants or the chatter occurring on Zoom meetings before everyone gets there, you might assume things are pretty rough in Hollywood these days. Today on the show, we’ll look at what’s going on in the industry, its historical analogs, and some suggestions for what might fix it.

**Craig:** I’m sure that they’ll listen to that, right? We’ll suggest what to do.

**John:** We’ll suggest the things.

**Craig:** And then they’ll do it.

**John:** The industry bigwigs will do it.

**Craig:** They’ll do it.

**John:** It’s not even just the industry bigwigs. It’s really the structural fundamental changes that will happen, or maybe we don’t need to do anything. It’ll all sort itself out.

We’ll also answer listener questions. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what happens after we die. No, Craig, we’re not talking about the afterlife.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** What specifically happens to all of our accounts and passwords and other aspects of our digital lives and what preparations should we make, should Craig or I or Drew, for that matter, suddenly keel over and all our stuff is there.

**Craig:** Sweet release. Yes.

**John:** Sweet relief for us, but not for our heirs, not for everybody else.

**Craig:** No, everybody else is gonna have a mess to clean up. But we will be free, released-

**John:** Free.

**Craig:** … back into the simulation.

**John:** Clear.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Drew Marquardt:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** First we have some follow-up. To start us off with, Javier in Peru apparently has some corrections about our Star Wars beer ads.

**Drew:** The Star Wars beer commercials were real, but not in Peru. They happened in Chile.

**Craig:** Ah, all right. Then apologies to Isabela Merced, who is Peruvian, and ha ha Pedro Pascal, who is from Chile.

**John:** Love it all. But apparently, that was not the only mistake Craig made in Episode 641.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**Drew:** Daniel wrote, “Craig referred to the birthday paradox and got it wrong in the same way that Johnny Carson famously did. The paradox is not that if you have 23 people, there’s more than 50 percent chance that at least one will have your birthday. In fact, that’s very unlikely. The paradox is that in a group of 23 people, there’s a more than 50 percent chance that at least two of them share the same birthday. This is actually a simple calculation, as it’s one minus probability that they all have different birthdays.”

**Craig:** You know what, Daniel? Absolutely correct. This isn’t me being defensive. I knew that. I think I just said it wrong. I misspoke. But yes, I did in fact know that that was what it was, so you do get the gold star for the correction. I have no problem saying oh, darn it, I blew it, but in this case, I just misspoke. I did know the nature of that.

**John:** Now, apparently, Craig was not the only person who made a small mistake or a small issue of disagreement in 641. James wrote in and actually send audio. I think because of the nature of this, we’re gonna play James’s audio, which is fantastic. Let’s take a listen to James.

**James:** In addition to the email, John, I thought you ought to hear from a native New Yorker. I was born in Brookdale Hospital. My father was born in Brookdale Hospital. We are still here. Our accents are still here. I’m a Black dude, so you gotta throw in the AAVN, whatever. My parents are from the South, so I got New York, I got down South. But I always tell people either go from y’all or yous, depending on who I’m talking to. You know what I’m saying?

I understand what you saying, but Brooklyn has more people than Philly. We gotta stop seeing four or five gentrifiers in Bushwick, Greenpoint, and they represent Brooklyn. No, they don’t. They will be in another city in five years. My mother is buried in Brooklyn. I’m just saying that to say that we still here. You gotta move around.

I don’t know where to send people these days to find a real New York accent. But it’s not the vegan dude with the mustache and his stupid lumberjack, whatever that is, that nonsense. He wasn’t wearing that in high school. Come to Brooklyn, he gonna change all of a sudden. Whatever, dude.

But like I said, the Brooklyn accent is still in effect, no question about it. I’m writing characters. All my stories are set in New York City with real New York natives. I gotta hear that accent, because like I said, people only associate the accent with white people, to be honest with you. But like I said, we out here. It’s funny, because whenever rappers from New York go anywhere, the first thing they talk about – these are Black rappers, of course – is our accent, because they know where we from: New York.

**Craig:** Oh, man.

**John:** Oh, man.

**Craig:** I love James so much. I just want to hug him. That is the sound of my youth. James, Brooklyn-born Craig over here. Absolutely. There’s a generational thing. There are different kinds of accents inside of Brooklyn. What we think of as that classic Brooklyn accent, I would say it’s an accent that was predominant in the mid-20th century and mostly among white people. Very specific things. For instance, my grandfather wouldn’t say “toilet.” He would say “TUR-lit”. The TUR-lit. That is a specific thing. But Black Brooklyn accent is also a specific thing. That was awesome. That was a great example of it.

There are all those different accents. What he’s referring to as, I guess we would call them the hipster Brooklyn people, I agree. My mom grew up in Bensonhurst, and she still has that accent. The mid-20th century Brooklyn accent’s very strong.

**John:** It’s fantastic to hear James’s voice. On 641 I talked about how the fact that when casting breakdowns say they want Brooklyn accents, what are you actually talking about? They probably honestly really want James. But if you actually look at who’s living in Brooklyn right now, you can’t guarantee that a person that you pluck off the street in Brooklyn is gonna have that accent. I was just in Brooklyn actually this whole last week. I was there for the Brooklyn half-marathon, which was really fun. I got to run through all the neighborhoods of Brooklyn. It was fantastic, and I loved it. James also makes the very good point that Brooklyn is huge. Brooklyn would be the fourth biggest city in America if it was its own city.

**Craig:** It’s massive.

**John:** It’s nuts how huge Brooklyn is. In that giant not-quite-city. You’re going to find all sorts of different accents, but this is the one that I think people are really talking about. We just need to actually denote specifically what you want when you want to hear James, because we want to hear James.

**Craig:** I’m gonna go ahead and put an R rating on the episode here. Hannibal Buress has one of the funniest things. He’s talking about these people in Brooklyn that James is referring to with their lumberjack shirts. I’m paraphrasing, but he’s like, “I don’t mind if you want to wear a lumberjack shirt and have a waxed curly mustache, but don’t talk to me like you aren’t standing there looking like a carnival face motherfucker.” Carnival face is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** Carnival face. We are so far past the whole hipster thing. We’re probably 12 generations of pop culture cycle hipsterism now. God only knows what it’s up to now. I sure do like James for just being as real and true Brooklyn as possible. God, I hope he’s a Yankees fan. I don’t know what to say. If he’s a Mets fan, it’s gonna break my heart. James, can you just let us know, Mets or Yankees.

**John:** I want James making movies too. I’m glad he’s listening to the show. I’m glad he’s writing. I want to see what he makes.

Also in Episode 641, we talked about gendered words. We’ve talked about blonde with an E versus blond without an E. Ian wrote in to point out that there actually is a male equivalent. The male word for brunette is brunet. Really, it’s without the extra T and the E on the end. I’ve never seen that used in English. Have you?

**Craig:** I have not, but it’s certainly consistent with the way French works. Brunette is not a word that I ever use anyway.

**John:** Yeah, it’s weird.

**Craig:** What’s wrong with just brown? Brown hair?

**John:** What is wrong with brown? It got me thinking as we had this discussion. Why don’t we just use the Anglo-Saxon word for blond? Because there were Anglo-Saxon blonds. Why don’t we use that? I looked it up, and the Anglo-Saxon word for blond is whitlock.

**Craig:** Great. Let’s use it.

**John:** Which means wheat-haired. Whit is wheat, and lock is that… I had a friend, Paige Whitlock, who I went to college with, who had blonde hair.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Her name was Paige Blonde.

**Craig:** That’s on theme. Also, there’s towheaded, which we usually use for children. My oldest kid was a towhead. I guess that’s a slightly different meaning. Yellow isn’t really a great descriptor of what blond hair is, because blond hair is more of that kind of lightish brown. To me, truly yellow is you’ve dyed your hair.

**John:** There are people who are almost just platinum blond, but it tends to be really young people, who have strikingly blond hair.

**Craig:** Towheads.

**John:** Towheads.

**Craig:** Towheads.

**John:** Also in 641, we asked people who had to deal with putting in the act breaks and streaming shows if they had firsthand experience to write in. Somebody did.

**Drew:** JG writes, “I have a few features running on services like Prime, Tubi, and Roku. The service that distributes those movies to those sites, Filmhub, requires that you provide metadata with commercial breaks for each movie. Their rule is you have to offer a break every 12 minutes or less, but not more. As a producer submitting the movies, it’s my job to go in and fill in the time codes for where each commercial breaks will take place. My goal was always to find the best or least intrusive spot for the breaks. But I suspected if a producer didn’t provide the metadata, the system would randomly insert the commercials within that 12-minute framework. It was a frustrating and time-consuming process, because as we know, movies aren’t designed for ad breaks. I know I opted for more breaks than I might’ve needed in order to put breaks at what felt like the most opportune moments.”

**John:** This feels like delivery requirements. We probably have talked about this on one of our 642 episodes before this. If you make a feature and you are delivering a feature to the buyer, they will have a whole long list of delivery requirements, which is not just, “Here’s the finished film,” but, “Here’s all the audio. Here’s all the paperwork that shows that we actually control all the music in this.” Delivery requirements will also be apparently now this metadata for where the commercial breaks should go. Not surprising that they’re asking for it, but JG had to do this him or herself.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s actually a good point. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about delivery requirements. We’re so focused on how do you write a screenplay, how do you get something made into a television show or a movie, but there is a kind of industrial aspect of all this, where what you provide needs to meet legal requirements. It is a product to some people.

We think of it as art, but there are people who must make sure that there is some sort of quality control and product uniformity. That means there is a minimum run time that it must hit. There are long lists of requirements for credits. How large are the credits? Where do the credits go? How big are the credits? Is that per individual deals? Is that per union bargaining agreements? There are certain delivery requirements in terms of sound levels. There are delivery requirements in terms of the fidelity of the image. Do you have to submit in a certain resolution or more or less? Do you have to supply it with sound that is capable to be both stereo only or surround? Is it full surround? Is it 5.1? Is it 7.1? Blah blah blah blah blah. All that technical stuff, there are just entire departments working on that, to make sure that when you and I get our job done, that wherever it ends up, it’s theoretically hitting some minimum level of quality.

**John:** Where our listeners are gonna probably run into this is that if you go off and make an independent film, you’re like, “Great. I spent the money. I made this independent film. I maxed out my credit cards. I’m selling it to this company.” They say, “Great. Here are the delivery requirements.” Suddenly, you have tens of thousands of dollars more expenses you have to incur in order to deliver the thing that they are buying. That could be a real drain. On my movie The Nines, we had to deliver in this format and that format and the other format. We had to deliver a cut negative. There were things I required.

**Craig:** Negative cutting, there’s something that no one worries about anymore. Hey, kids. Listen up. You would film on film, and then by the time you and I were working in the business, the images would be transferred to video using something called a Telecine. Then that video would be digitized into your digital editor, your Avid probably. You would edit on that. That would create an EDL, an edit decision list. Every single shot has a frame. Then when all that was done and the picture was locked, they would send those just reams of paper with all of the ins and outs of every single shot. Then negative cutters would take the negative of the film and a splicer and a chopper, and they would begin to assemble it painstakingly over the course of I don’t know how many days, creating one long Frankenstein negative that was the edited film. That was then run through and reprinted onto a single negative. Then that was the thing that they made. I believe that’s how that worked. Then we ended up with a DI, digital interpositive, and all that other stuff.

Now the workflow, unless you’re dealing with Christopher Nolan or a filmmaker that’s really committed to physical film, all that’s gone. There is no more negative cutting.

**John:** Yeah. Not only would you need to deliver a print or something else that could be distributed, as Craig was saying, the sound has to be in this format versus that format. You had to deliver a print that has the sound printed on it. There were all these requirements. Some of those have gone away. As JG is saying, now there are new requirements.

I didn’t have to, at that point, supply where the commercial breaks are. With my movie The Nines, one of the things I was required to do was to deliver a broadcast-ready version of the movie, basically a sanitized version of the movie that could be aired on, realistically, cable. I remember talking with the company who was doing that, and here were their suggestions for how we were going to get that done. It was crazy. As far as I know, it hasn’t ever aired on basic cable, but there is a cut someplace that could do it.

**Craig:** Somewhere. We went through this on Season 1 of The Last of Us. We had to go through a delivery process that held two weeks to convert the image into HDR, high dynamic range, which some televisions can make use of. That two weeks was brutal actually, because we were right up against it to try and get things done. A lot of movies and television shows are right up against it because of the proliferation of visual effects, how many visual effects there are, getting those visual effects delivered in time and then shoving it through the rest of the sausage factory, including things like HDR and all that other fun stuff. Yay the people that do the delivery stuff, because god knows I would butcher it.

**John:** Oh, yeah, also because it’s a job that you are doing once. You are doing maybe once or twice a year if you’re just doing a lot of stuff. You would need a person whose job it is to do that every day, who actually understands what these things actually mean on paper and what they actually take in time. That’s why you have post-production supervisors and-

**Craig:** Sure do.

**John:** … contractual obligation people who oversee stuff, people who are figuring out what the credits are, what that run is. It’s a lot.

**Craig:** There’s a reason that there are all those names in the credits.

**John:** Now, before we get on to our main topic, a few episodes back we had Ken White come on, and he did a great job of talking through the realities of the law we see on TV and the lawyer-client relationship we see on TV versus realities. I was thinking we should do that for some other professions, because there’s professions we see all the time in film and television, and we don’t know what the actual realities are behind that. This is a thing where our listeners may be able to help us out.

Some things we would love to be able to talk with people about. A private investigator. If you know or are a private investigator who does the kinds of things we see on TV but the reality version of that, we’d love to talk with you. A military specialist. We see all these military actions in film and television. We don’t know what the realities are behind that. Public school teachers, especially in high school. There’s a whole genre of teacher movies. We could talk a little bit more about teachers. Police officers, of course. We see cop stuff all the time. Be curious to see what the realities are there. Then we have a few more long reaches. We have an astronaut on deck. We could talk about that.

If you have suggestions for this is a person who actually does this job who could be a great guest on Scriptnotes, write in to ask@johnaugust.com, because in the weeks ahead, we’d love to do more of those kind of episodes.

Let’s get on to our main topic here, which is, man, things are just terrible, or they feel kind of terrible. Literally, at dinner last night, I was sitting with a group of other writers and filmmakers. It’s really tough to set up a project now, to sell a project right now. Craig, you may be a little bit insulated from this, because you’re up in Vancouver, you’re doing your TV show. Your head’s down, doing your work. But for the rest of us who are down here in Los Angeles, it is really weird and tough in a way that is just different than previous years.

**Craig:** Insulated though I may be, because I have a television show that’s on and running, I hear about it all the time. There’s no part of me that’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know what everyone’s cranking on about.” No. There has been a significant – I hesitate to use the word correction, because that implies that things were wrong prior. There has been a significant change in both the quantity of shows that are being made, the way they’re being made, the amount of episodes that are being made, the costs of those series. Everything has changed in such a way that there’s a squeeze now.

I think that a lot of the issues that we’re dealing with were anticipated by and partially addressed by the strike. The things that the Writers Guild were looking for dovetailed entirely with the problems that we see now. What’s important to always keep in mind is the Writers Guild negotiates a collective bargaining agreement for people who are hired. The Writers Guild, even with the minimum guaranteed room size, that’s not going to be something that keeps 9,000 people at work if there aren’t 9,000 jobs. It’s just not how it goes. There is no way to insulate the workforce from a contraction like the one we’re seeing right now.

**John:** Yeah, for sure. We’ll put links in the show notes to two different articles. The one that had the most people talking about it the last couple weeks was one by Daniel Bessner, he was writing for Harpers, called The Life and Death of Hollywood. It’s really recapping what’s been happening over the last few decades and how we got to this moment. For a lot of people, it’s gonna be very familiar territory. But there were a couple of quotes and interviews in there that stuck out.

The first one I want to talk about is Alena Smith. She wrote and created the series Dickinson for Apple TV. She says, “It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multi-billion dollar grant from the tech world, but we mistook that and were, frankly, actively gaslit into thinking that was because they cared about art.”

What’s she’s saying here is that we did, with a rise to streaming, just get suddenly a whole bunch of new opportunities to make weird, cool shit, but we shouldn’t ever confuse ourselves that they wanted to make the weird, cool shit because they wanted us to be artistically satisfied. They were chasing audience. They were chasing just esoteric, strange audience. Their whole goal was to get as many people as possible to subscribe to these shows. They really weren’t that obsessed with how successful any individual show was. Now, the correction is that they really want those shows to be hits, and that is likely largely driving some of this contraction and this retreat to safety that we’re seeing in the things they’re actually choosing to make.

**Craig:** I think the phrase “too good to be true” comes to mind. You said they were chasing an audience. I’m not even sure they were chasing an audience. I don’t even know what they were doing. In terms of the amount of content that was being created, it seemed like they were trying to build overwhelming libraries of stuff. Instead of saying, “Hey, come to our new store, because if you like pants, we have pants,” they were saying, “Hey, we built a new Walmart. We have literally everything you could possibly ever want. Go wander the aisles.” It’s Costco of stuff. What they weren’t doing, and I couldn’t understand it, was having any concern whatsoever with who, if anyone, was watching some of these shows.

When the Warner Bros-Discovery merger happened, there was this immediate convulsion, because under the direction of the CEO, they took off a bunch of things from the streaming service. In the articles, there were these little mentions that some of the things that they had taken off were being watched by tens of people, so in a statistical sense, unwatched. There was so much stuff. Because everything is expensive when you are creating demand, high labor demand, the cost of things, not necessarily of the writers, but the cost of production and key actors start to go up. Everything inflates. What we ended up with was a bubble.

The only thing that I would say to Alena is that the studios and networks have been actively gaslighting writers forever. This is not new. They are constantly lying to us any time they say, “Hey, we love you. We love your mind, and we love what you do.” They’re lying. What they’re saying is, “We hope to god that whatever it is that you do, which we may not even understand, people become obsessed with and pay us to watch.” That’s all they’re ever saying. That’s all they’ve ever said. That’s all they ever will say. But they dress it up in all sorts of alluring phrases.

What changed during the bubble time was they actually didn’t seem to care about anything. They just wanted stuff to get made. It was almost like in the late ’80s and early ’90s when home video made it so everything was profitable. In this case, profit didn’t matter. Therefore, they made everything.

**John:** I’m really glad you brought up the difference between audience and just doing stuff to do stuff, because it reminds me of criticism I see of web traffic. For a long time, these websites were generating huge numbers of eyeballs. People were seeing stories on these sites. Everything was about chasing views. But there’s a difference between views and audience. An audience actually likes the thing you’re doing and wants to come back and see it again. They actually really engage with the content you’re making, versus someone who drops by your site and then immediately bounces back off and leaves. Many websites are having to retool and really think about who do we actually want to attract to what we’re providing, and how do we keep them engaged and involved.

That does feel like the same kind of distinction we’re seeing here is that they were trying to build these megamalls and recognizing that most of these stores that they were opening up, no one wanted to walk into.

Also in this article, they were talking about the short-termism that happens is because once you actually start just looking, like, quarter by quarter, how much are we growing these things, when you have investors really wanting to see, “We have to have a return on investment immediately,” that’s not a very good way to make movies and TV shows. You need to be able to think a little bit longer than just the next quarter for how you guys are doing and then to try to correct out of the situation, you end up making these gargantuan cuts that are so brutal.

**Craig:** We are getting pretty violent pendulum swing/whiplash syndrome here. A healthy industry does make money, because if they don’t, then they fall apart and they stop hiring us. We have a vested interest in a healthy industry. If the industry decides, “We actually don’t care about profit anymore. We’re just gonna borrow crazy amounts of money and spend crazy amounts of money with no goal in sight,” then it is inevitable that they are going to then pendulum swing back to keep themselves alive. The pendulum swing will be too much of a squeeze, too much of a minimization, because they are now trying to pay back their own bad decisions.

But ideally, this whiplash pendulum effect settles down and we find ourselves back in some kind of healthy balance, where the studios are making money, don’t feel like their backs are against the wall, are no longer in a wild cocaine spree of spending, and then hopefully are able to go back to the way it used to be. “Here’s some safe stuff. Here’s some slightly risky stuff. Here’s a little bit of this. Here’s a little bit of that. But overall, we have a balanced slate.”

**John:** There’s a quote here from Jason Grote, who is talking about prestige TV. He’s really talking about the HBO model of prestige TV, so like The Sopranos, and when you suddenly got like, “Oh my god, we have this really good TV.” He’s pointing out that it wasn’t about a bunch of new people coming into Hollywood. It was a bunch of people who actually really knew how to make TV shows, who were suddenly given the opportunity to make the TV shows they really wanted to make. That feels like a crucial distinction. It’s not just about newcomers making brand new stuff. It was actually like, “Oh, let’s actually take some chances on some people who actually know what they’re doing.”

**Craig:** Yes, and I’m a beneficiary of this. No question. There are a lot of people who worked for a long time, making the things that they were told to make, the way they were told to make them. They had to fit in a certain box. There had to be ratings. There had to be this. There had to be that. It had to be for a particular budget, repeatable for 22 or 26 episodes a season. All of those restraints suddenly disappeared. You did get remarkable stuff. Now, there are some things that are excellent that also get huge audiences. There are things that are excellent that don’t.

I think a lot of those things in part suffered more from where they were and how they were, or often, not even, marketed, because in the crazy gush of content, it was almost like nobody making the stuff had time to even tell you about it. They threw it in your face as you were walking by. Maybe you took it, and maybe you didn’t, and then you just kept going.

But that’s absolutely true. Vince Gilligan is such a good example. He was making great network television. It was standard network television. But when you said to him, “Hey, do what you want.” Same thing with David Chase. Charlie Kaufman worked on – was it Alf? I think it was Alf. When you let certain writers go free… But no question; it wasn’t like prestige TV helped, for instance, under-represented writers. It didn’t.

**John:** Wrapping up on Bessner’s article here, I think his last suggestion is frustrating, because he undercuts it immediately after he says it. But he’s talking about, oh, the one change which would actually make a big difference is if we let these writers control the copyright on the things that they make. As we’ve talked about since probably Episode 1 of this show, there’s a reason why that doesn’t happen in the U.S. It’s because that’s what lets us have the powerful union that we have. The other good counterexample is, in lots of other places in the world, writers can control the copyright. It’s not like it’s awesome for them there.

**Craig:** No. When you see somebody suggesting that the answer to a screenwriter’s ills is retaining copyright, you know you’re dealing with a tyro or somebody who is simply from the outside and doesn’t get it. It is a nonstarter and it’s a bad idea. You’re absolutely right.

We can simply point to the rest of the world and say, “Show me in the rest of the world where writers for television or film are being compensated the way American writers are. Show me in the rest of the world where writers for television and film get a pension the way American writers do, get residuals the way American writers do, get credit protections the way American writers do.” You can’t. You can’t. The copyright suggestion just falls apart anyway, because we don’t publish screenplays to be read by people. It is a part of a composite work. That’s kind of a huge red flag that maybe somebody didn’t do the research they needed to do.

**John:** The second article we’ll put a link in the show notes to is One Weird Trick for Fixing Hollywood by Max Read.

**Craig:** I like this.

**John:** He starts out by talking about how among his screenwriter friends, it is just really tough. It’s the same conversation you and I have about our screenwriter friends. The only things that are getting made, in his case he’s hearing about ultra premium limiteds, which are a six-episode miniseries that has an A-list star. I would say even that is very hard to shop and get made right now. No one wants to buy those things. I’ve been out with things like that, and it’s still really tough.

The number of projects that have, “That’s a great writer,” the script’s already written, there’s a director on board, there’s an actor on board, the number of those that have not sold in the last six months is just mind-boggling. There’s no guarantees about what’s going to happen.

What I did like about Max’s article is that he points out the bigger issue that the industry as a whole is facing is that we have a lot of new competition for the amount of time that people would normally spend watching TV or going to a movie, and that’s because we have phones, we have other things that are going to keep our eyes entertained during the day. That’s time that we’re just not gonna be watching TV. The amount of hours viewed of the television that’s being made or the movies that are out there is gonna suffer.

**Craig:** This is an odd argument to me, I have to admit. Billions of people are watching things that are on Netflix and Amazon and Max and network television, which still earns millions of viewers a week. The old stuff, Suits and Friends, these things get recycled again and are watched by millions and millions of people and then discussed on TikTok. TikTok, in fact, is where a lot of these shows get their popularity in the first place.

You and I talked about how our kids got caught up in this crazy TikTok phenomenon of watching Criminal Minds, a show that was never intended for 16-year-old girls to watch, and yet there was this massive wave of girls one summer – mostly girls as far as I could tell – watching Criminal Minds and discussing it together on TikTok.

I don’t understand, A, the argument that the problem with television is that people aren’t watching it. They are. We have fragmented the audience across 4 billion shows. At peak TV, the John Landgraf phrase, I think there were over 600 television shows made in a single year. The audience probably grew, but it was spread out over 600 shows. This is a division problem. It’s not an addition problem.

Second, I don’t understand how to solve Hollywood by going off and supporting or helping YouTube and that. That’s not Hollywood. That’s a different thing. We need to protect this business as it functions here, because what people do on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and Twitch and Twitter is not Hollywood. It’s its own thing, which is massive and incredibly profitable and valid, but it’s different.

**John:** It is different. I’m gonna make his argument that I don’t fully endorse, but just so it’s actually made. His metaphor would be, let’s say you are a home builder who’s building apartment buildings, and then a few blocks away you see there are these hobbyists who are building things that are basically like buildings, that are competing for the housing of people around you, but they’re doing it much cheaper and without any of your protections. You would be thinking about that. You would be looking, like, “Shit. How am I going to be competing against them if they are doing it cheaper?”

**Craig:** If I bought into the premise that we’ll call the paramedia is limiting the audience or ruining the audience for what Hollywood does, yes. There’s an argument to be made that the theatrical experience has been permanently damaged by both the pandemic and the paramedia, but not the streaming business. The streaming business was damaged by the fact that the business plan made no fucking sense. The streaming business was damaged by the fact that they were spending more than they could ever hope to make back, with no end in sight. All of them decided they should try and outspend each other.

But the viewership is enormous. Enormous. We’re talking about tens and tens of millions of people in the United States alone, much less the rest of the world. Netflix has an audience that has, I don’t think, ever existed before in terms of size. I include them, of course, as part of Hollywood. I don’t buy that the audience is being taken away.

My concern about the way things have been going is that none of it made any sense. It all felt a little bit like MoviePass to me, where you and I would look at it and go, “You spend $80 billion try and get $5 billion? Why?”

**John:** The answer is because there was a time when tech companies could do that, and sometimes it had great outcomes because of that. Google was an example, or Amazon was an example of companies that burned money until they became incredibly profitable. I think there was a thought that these legacy studios could burn money and then suddenly become profitable. Netflix was able to do that. In order to compete against Netflix, we need to become Netflix. It didn’t quite work out that way.

**Craig:** It didn’t work great. I think that there’s been a settling in. We do have some more convulsions on the way, because Paramount is clearly up for sale. As we’re talking, maybe it’s already been sold. I know Sony has put in a bid. Disney bought Fox. Let’s say Sony buys Paramount. We’re now squishing ourselves down, but in a way also getting back to the number of things that we used to have, because if you include Amazon and Netflix and Apple, those are three big studios. We’ve lost Fox. We’re about to use Paramount. We’re getting back almost to the same number of studios that have always kind of existed. It will be interesting to see in the years to come if we can achieve some kind of stability again in our business.

**John:** In talking with agents and managers and other folks who are on the sale side of stuff, they will agree that this is a really tough time. But there are some, I won’t say brighter spots, but there are some areas that are less affected. There’s still money to make indie features. That pool of money is still out there, and there’s still a market for that. There’s ways to do that, especially things that come to a certain price.

I was talking to a documentary filmmaker who said that he’s been working on this thing that he was originally gonna pitch as a three-episode documentary series. You can’t do that now. People aren’t gonna buy that now. But he can make it as a documentary feature, so, “Great. I’m gonna pivot. Same story. I’ll do it in 90 minutes versus I guess 90 minutes in three episodes.” It all works out. The same thing happens for narrative features as well.

I also think we just need to be mindful that, the classic truism, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. People can be so gun-shy to actually try to do something that they’re looking past simpler things they could try to do. If these $200 million movies are not working out for you and you’re losing money on them, maybe take a look at the Anyone But Yous, smaller movies that are successful, and just try some of those, because there may be some different ways and different kinds of movies and series you can make that are gonna be cheaper, that can actually give you the outcome you want.

**Craig:** This has been going on for quite some time. The squish of the small movie preexists all the Netflix stuff. It preexists the pandemic. The chasing of massive things really accelerated with the Avengers. You can draw a line where the Avengers came out, did what it did, and everybody said, “Okay, I guess this is our business now, because the amount of movies we have to make and the amount of swings we have to take to match one of those.” One of those gets you four more of those. That keeps your business afloat for years. Years.

**John:** We are making some big, expensive movies that pay off. Dune 2 was incredibly expensive. It paid off. It’s not going to generate a bunch of more Dune movies, most likely, but it was great that it happened. We of course had Barbenheimer, was a great success for both of those films. Those films were very profitable and big successes. I think what we’re urging this industry to do is to take a look at what were the things about those films that were successful. They were made by great, visionary filmmakers who were swinging for the fences and doing interesting things. It wasn’t a retreat to safety that made those things giant hits.

**Craig:** I’ll point to a movie that is one of my favorite examples. I think the budget was something like $60 million. This movie was from 2019. In 1990 or 2000s, that would be the classic $35, $40 million movie. Joker. Joker was a hard R. It was kind of an art film. It borrowed a little bit of comic book shine, but barely any. There were superpowers. There were really no action scenes. It was an art film. The box office for Joker is $1 billion. Joker: Folie à Deux is coming out. That is the kind of bet that I think is well worth taking and is terrifying.

**John:** Let’s also talk about Joker is that not everybody liked it. In fact, a lot of people hated Joker and to this day hate Joker. You know what? That’s okay, because it doesn’t have to appeal to everyone in order to be a giant success.

**Craig:** People talk about the four-quadrant movie. There are movies you can make that everybody likes. There are very few movies you can make that everybody loves. But what you can do are make films that some people love so much that they will evangelize them, they will market them for you, they will see them multiple times, they will buy them again when they come on the streaming service. Joker is a great example of that and the definition of a risky pitch. By the way, the sequel looks just as risky to me.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Good for them. It’s a big budget.

**John:** Here was the bet. The bet was that there wasn’t an audience for it. It wasn’t the bet that everybody in America will want to see this movie. It was that it was talking about there’s gonna be an audience, and that by definition of audience, people who will genuinely love this movie.

**Craig:** Yes. That kind of artistic risk taking, which I think you could also see with Barbie… There’s so many ways to make Barbie bad. There are about a million ways to make a bad Barbie.

**John:** Oh my god. Almost every way is to make a bad Barbie.

**Craig:** There’s pretty much one way to make a great one. Trusting somebody like Greta Gerwig, that’s risky. It is. They used to just have a bland filmmaker deliver a bland script for these things, to hit the thick middle and hedge their bet, and they didn’t do that with that one.

Oppenheimer only gets made because Christopher Nolan is the kind of filmmaker who gets to do stuff. That’s it. Again, nobody’s sitting there thinking, “Oppenheimer’s gonna make a hell of a lot of money.” How much did Oppenheimer make? $965 million globally.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** That’s insane. That’s insane. That’s a biopic of the guy that ran the nuclear program. We’ve made movies about the nuclear bomb before. We’ve made movies about the father of the nuclear bomb before. Universal said, “We will take this huge bet. We will spend $100 million on this.” An algorithm most likely would say, “Oh, that’ll get you $30 or $40 million.” But instead, they made almost a billion dollars, because it’s a quality film. What’s the bet there by Universal? Good movie, people will come and see it. That’s old-school thinking. Really old-school thinking. You know what else we see out there that’s old-school thinking? Ads on television shows.

**John:** It’s craziness.

**Craig:** We may be hurdling ourselves backwards to 1988. Let’s find out.

**John:** Craig, a term I heard this last week, I saw it in a blog post by Hannah Ritchie, who writes about environmental issues, was the Moloch trap. Have you ever heard this term, the Moloch, M-O-L-O-C-H?

**Craig:** I only know that from the Bible and Watchmen. What is the Moloch trap?

**John:** The Moloch trap, it’s these forces that coerce and cause competing individuals to take actions which although are the best for them individually, ultimately lead to situations where everyone is worse off. It’s almost impossible to break out of that cycle. Tragedy of the commons is kind of an example of that.

But there’s a lot of things in environmental science that are Moloch traps, because, okay, I recognize that burning coal is bad for everybody and it’s bad for this, but if I stop burning coal, then other people are gonna burn coal. It’s very hard for any one individual to make a change or any individual nation to make a change, because the forces force you to do that.

I do feel like there’s a Moloch trap happening with the streaming wars, because it was like everyone was trying to do this thing. I think everyone recognized this thing we’re doing is unsustainable, but if I don’t do it, then I’m worse off.

**Craig:** Right. Basically either we’re all sinking together or one or two of us need to sink. I don’t want to be one of the one or two that sinks.

**John:** It’s hard to break out of the Moloch trap, but you do it by basically changing your motivations, by embracing innovation. The case of environmental science, it’s now cheaper to make power without burning things, which is great. Now it’s like we’re out of this cycle because we just don’t do those things, because it’s actually cheaper to build solar panels or turbines or other things. We’re not competing on these limited resources anymore, because we can just do stuff, and we actually think about abundance rather than limitations.

I do wonder whether there’s some way we can be thinking about changing our motivations and our goals here to break out of the cycle. Instead of always thinking about subscriber numbers or this or that, really thinking about what are the markers of success that we want for this. Profitability, sure, but with ads or with other stuff. Is there other ways we can think about how we’re judging whether this project was worth making, that are not purely based on the impossible metrics?

**Craig:** Hollywood is not a great place to try and metric yourself to success. The reason is, unlike basically every other industry, there’s something going on here that is incredibly unpredictable and also incredibly attractive. Our business creates culture, which is exciting and alluring, and predictable, sort of, a little bit, sometimes, but mostly not. Betting is really on human beings saying to you, “The thing I love and like, a lot of people will love and like.” You don’t know if that’s true or not. Your gut may not be particularly good or it may be okay. Your job basically rests in their hands.

Hollywood will always frustrate the modelers and the quants. It’s why I think people that just want to make money don’t bother with Hollywood. But if you want to make money and be part of something exciting and meaningful, yeah, Hollywood.

**John:** That’s why people make Broadway theater. That’s why people invest in independent films. The last point I’ll make here is that I think we’ve talked about the quants. They are doing these calculations that are incredibly esoteric, and it’s really hard to know what is the purpose behind, that they’re basically the navigators in Dune who are adjusting this device to get them from one place to another place. But this is not Dune.

I think there was something really good about the simplicity of Nielsen ratings and box office weekend grosses that lets you know was this a successful thing or was this not a successful thing. During probably five years of streaming, no one knew. We never knew, was this successful, was this not successful. I don’t know what actually worked. I think that by making it so opaque, we were really hurting ourselves.

**Craig:** It’s a really tricky thing. Have we talked about the new subscriber data thing on the show?

**John:** The WGA one?

**Craig:** I don’t think it was a WGA thing. It’s more a method of measuring, because one of the questions is, if you put all this stuff out there on your streaming service and it says, “We have a whole bunch of subscribers. Lots of them watch this,” did that show keep them subscribing? Hard to say. In fact, impossible to say. But one of the things they look at is, when we put a new show on, are there new subscribers? Are the new subscribers clearly coming in for that show? Now, it’s impossible to draw a perfect line, but you can kind of see these waves.

They are trying to find ways to figure out which of these shows is actually contributing to the subscriber money and which are not. It’s hard to say, because let’s say you make a show and you put it on your streaming service and not a ton of people watch it, but those people are subscribing to your service only for that show. That’s valuable. Then you could have a show that a lot of people watch, but nobody’s gonna cancel it if the show gets canceled. Then what is that worth? These are very tricky things to figure out.

**John:** They are tricky. I can see why an individual service might want to look at those numbers, but I don’t think it does the industry as a whole, or certainly the filmmakers they’re working with, all that much good to just trot out these weird, esoteric numbers. Tell me, is this show a hit? How many Americans or people worldwide are watching the show? Because that’s what really matters culturally is knowing this a very popular thing. There’s a reason why – what is the new Netflix series, Baby Reindeer?

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** It broke out. We know it broke out because people are talking about it. They can also tell us that the numbers are really big. It’s great to see. That’s also again an example of a weird show that shouldn’t work and does and a risk that somebody took and it paid off.

**Craig:** We used to have a line we could draw between watching and money. Like you said, people bought tickets. Every person that came to see the movie put money in your pocket. When there were ads, every single person that watched the show put money in your pocket. When you take away the ads and you take away the tickets and you just have a store that people can wander through and it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet, how do you know that people are paying for the buffet for the shrimp or the salad? You don’t. You just don’t know. Even in success, I think a lot of times these people might be going, “Okay, but is this success meaningful?”

Let’s go back to the quote we got from Alena Smith, who said we were actively gaslit, because they don’t care about making an impression on culture, actually, I don’t think. I don’t think they care. I think what they care about is money. I think they are deeply confused about what is actually putting money in their pockets and what isn’t. They’re looking for something to hold onto, but it’s a lot of sand. It’s not that I’m gonna go so far as to say that I sympathize with the people sitting in the rooms trying to figure the math out. But from a problem-solving point of view, it’s a tricky one.

**John:** The only point I’ll slightly push back against is you said they only cared about money. I think one of the issues was they weren’t caring about money for a number of years.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** They were just caring about growth, and then they realized. “Oh, and money will come at some point.” It’s like, but will it? That’s not sustainable.

**Craig:** No. That’s a classic Silicon Valley think. Hollywood of old, those people were like, “I’m not making a picture unless I know it’s gonna make money, and that’s it!” I like talking like Tony Shalhoub from Barton Fink. That was the way it goes. Then suddenly, there were these other people like, “We got a better idea.” Silicon Valley is remarkable. They do these things that sometimes turn into these world-changing, axis-shifting, gabillion-dollar businesses.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Sometimes they just set massive piles of money on fire and dance around it. It’s so bizarre. I don’t know what’s going on up there.

**John:** We got our Quibis.

**Craig:** We got our Quibis. We got our FTXs. We have our things that just were like, what in the hell is it? But hey, man, you know what? We just write them.

**John:** We just write them.

**Craig:** We just write them.

**John:** Let’s answer some listener questions. The first one here is from Ellie.

**Drew:** Ellie writes, “I’ve been receiving some incredible feedback on the first draft of my screenplay. However, I’m finding that I’m now super scared to move forward with any rewrites or editing things that I know that I have left to revisit on the second draft. It’s like the excellent feedback has made me feel scared and completely frozen. I literally feel tense. It’s quite a timely story, so I really feel I want to get this out in the world ASAP. Perhaps I’m also afraid of the unknown of what I’ll do with a second draft. Ach, help. How do I unfreeze myself?”

**John:** I hear you, Ellie. That’s a familiar state, because here’s the thing. Your first draft, it wasn’t perfect, but it was complete and full and you loved it. It was an expression of what your original intentions were. You get this feedback, and they’re describing something that’s maybe even better, but you don’t know that you can actually do it. That’s probably a fear, a perfectionism. There’s all sorts of things that are holding you back. Man, you just gotta go for it. You gotta jump in and I would say pick some random moment in that thing and get going.

**Craig:** I too have had this, Ellie. You’ve described it so well that it’s making me feel tense, because I’ve been here so many times. I’m gonna say something that is maybe a little bit scary, but there’s some sunlight at the end of it. The second draft is usually worse than the first.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** It’s just part of the process. This is one of the reasons why. Your first draft was knitted together, and now you’re starting to pull stuff. You know that you have to change things, and you know that there are some things you want to change. But now when you pull stuff, you’re gonna make wounds, you’re gonna diminish some things. You might step on something that it turns out was incredibly important.

Allow yourself to write the second draft that is worse than the first draft, as long as you can say to the people you’re working with, “I’m gonna go for some stuff on the second draft. This one will be a little messy.” The third draft is where it’s all gonna happen, because that’s the one where you get it back and then some.

**John:** Ellie, a technique that might work for you, and this sounds counter-intuitive, but actually start with a blank page. You might want to just open up a new document, and in this new document, type bullet points of, like, “These are the new scenes. This is the new stuff that’s happening.” Start to write those new scenes. Then from your old script, copy through the scenes of the moments that are actually gonna come through unchanged, where you’re not doing anything, because that may actually help you avoid the problem of just like, “Oh, I don’t want to damage this perfect thing that I built,” because you realize you’re damaging it. Think of the second draft as a new thing that gets to pull from your first draft. You approach a new thing differently than a rewrite. By letting it be a new thing, it may be actually a little less scary for you.

**Craig:** Yep, that may work. Basically, try anything you want and give yourself permission to suck. It might suck. That’s okay. Third draft is around the corner.

**John:** We have a question on a different kind of paralysis. Here’s Richard. Let’s take a listen.

**Richard:** Hello, guys. Richard here from the UK. I wanted to ask you something that seems to just steal so much time for me. I’ll set the scene if I can. You’ve made a really promising contact, and they’ve asked for some work, and you’re readying an email, a one-pager, and maybe even, say, a script. You reread your breezy yet professional email about 17 times, and then you worry that maybe the one-pager has got a typo, so you go through that a few times, and then the script, scanning for mistakes that may have eluded the 27 rewrites that you’ve already done. Then obviously, you better reread your email with fresh eyes, or maybe, oh, we should change that word. Then you think, oh, if I’ve spotted a mistake in the email, then maybe there’s one in the one-pager. Before you know it, four or five hours have just passed and it’s time to pick up the kids and start their dinner.

Both of you have obviously had to send some super important emails to some super important people. Can you give me any advice on how to cut out this excruciating ordeal. Thanks, guys. You’re the best.

**Craig:** We are the best. Thanks, Richard. I wonder how long Richard worked on this.

**John:** Absolutely. How many times did Richard rerecord his question to us?

**Craig:** Here’s some good news, Richard. Yes, we have certainly written our fair share of emails and documents and things. The fact is if you look at the emails you get back from these people, you will find all sorts of mistakes in their emails. You are dealing with an illusion that our minds create whereby all of our decisions are important. Emails are glanced through, scanned, sometimes barely. The documents that you send will have moments in them that make people sit forward and go, “I want to make this.” You can have an entire sentence missing. If it’s working for them, that’s okay. If you are riddled with spelling errors and typos and you’re actively putting forth the attitude of carelessness, that will call things into question. But ultimately, the quality of things is what matters. If you find yourself in a loop, just stop the loop and send the email.

**John:** You’re in an anxiety trap. You’re anxious because you’re anxious. It feeds upon itself. It’s real. It’s natural. You gotta get out of it. What might help you out would be to literally set a timer for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever, and take a reasonable amount of time to reread the email, take one last look at the document you’re attaching. When the timer goes off, press send and walk away from your computer, because you’re not doing anybody any favors by obsessing over things that are not important and not worth obsessing over.

**Craig:** There’s a feeling sometimes when you send these things. You’re about to hit send, and you think, “I’m sending you me.” You’re not. That’s the scary part is I’m sending you a document. I’m sending you an email. This is me to you. If there’s a flaw in it, there’s a flaw in me, and I will be rejected. None of that is true. It’s a way for us to imagine a control we do not have over people’s impressions of us. You could be given a year to perfect an email and a document in terms of editing, the surface editing you’re describing, and it would not change their opinion of you or the work in any significant way.

**John:** For our Premium Members, we sometimes send out emails about live shows or other things coming up or Three Page Challenges. In Mailchimp, the service we use, there used to be this thing right before you sent the email. There’d be this animation of a big monkey finger, a sweaty monkey finger above this red button for pressing send. It’s very effective and really anxiety-producing, like, “Oh, shit. Is it really ready? Is there anything left to fix?” They got rid of that image, because I think they probably did some surveys and realized that’s actually making it worse for people. It’s too true to the experience. It no longer says that. Now you can send it out more willy-nilly and it doesn’t do that, freak you out.

**Craig:** Do you really want to send this email?

**John:** Really want to?

**Craig:** I mean, I’m a monkey, but I’ve read it. Do you really want to send it? I mean, if you want to, but I wouldn’t.

Richard, you’re gonna be all right.

**John:** He’s gonna be fine. Let’s do our One Cool Things, Craig. My One Cool Thing is this artist named Lola Dupre. I have no knowledge of who she is. I just know her artwork is just so effing cool. I’ll put a link in the show notes to her archive, her gallery. She makes these portraits of animals and people that are collages, and so they’re distorted. It’s an image of a thing that’s just been distorted and pulled into different directions. They’re all really, really cool. Craig, you’re looking at this now too. Help me describe what you’re seeing.

**Craig:** There are images of let’s say cats, and it’s somewhat caricatured, but most salient, the cats have 20 eyes or there are painted images of people and the length of the face is really distorted. One of these is wonderful. I might just get that. It’s an old-school Mac with a keyboard, but the keyboard has like a thousand buttons on it. This is amazing. I love that one.

**John:** It’s all great. They’re done through collage. Basically, she’s starting with one original image, and then just by overlapping and overlapping, she’s distorting the dimensions of it in ways that are just really, really cool. It just made me happy to look at and just things I would love to have on my wall. Lola Dupre, an artist. We’ll put a link in the show notes to her shop and her gallery.

**Craig:** Very cool. Looks like most of her stuff has been sold. You’re doing great, Lola. I have two One Cool Things, because sometimes I have none, so I’m trying to make up for it. First is Codenames Duet. We’ve talked about Codenames.

**John:** Which I’ve played. It’s so much fun.

**Craig:** It’s so much fun. Codenames Duet, I played with Melissa. If you just have two people, you can’t play against each other, of course. The idea is you both have the same board of words. You each have different words on that board you’re trying to clue to each other. You need to work cooperatively to get all the words uncovered by a certain number of turns. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a very clever way for two people to play Codenames, and it’s just as interesting. There’s something nice about the cooperative experience. As opposed to the, “I beat you,” it’s more like, “We beat it.”

**John:** Now, Craig, we haven’t talked about the new Scrabble, and so all the controversy over, in Europe they came out with an alternate version of Scrabble, which is a cooperative game rather than a competitive game. There was all this Sturm und Drang about like, “Oh my god, they’ve ruined Scrabble.” But it actually reminds me of these cooperative games like Codenames Duet, where basically you’re trying to work together to get a thing done.

**Craig:** I don’t know why people would be annoyed that there’s a version of Scrabble that people can play cooperatively. Who cares? Just play your regular Scrabble. It’s still there. It’s not a problem. I think sometimes people are just looking for stuff to get angry about. Scrabble is made by, what is it, Mattel? They’re a company. They’re trying to make money. Who cares? Do you know how many versions of Clue have been made?

**John:** One or two.

**Craig:** Yeah, like 400,000. My other One Cool Thing, I landed on this because I was talking with somebody about the Bible and weird Bible verses. I thought, “Oh, I bet you the internet has a great collection of weirdest Bible verses,” and they did. They had lots of them, but there was one that I loved so much that I need to read it. This is my new favorite Bible verse. This is from 2 Kings Chapter 2, Verse 23.

“From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ they said. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ He turned around, looked at them, and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of the boys.” There’s so much going on here-

**John:** There’s so much.

**Craig:** … that I love. First of all, at first I was like, you can’t kill kids because they called you baldy, although I was not aware that people were yelling “baldy” back in, whatever, 300 BC, but fine. But then I was like, wait a second, 2 bears mauled 42 of the boys. That means there’s more than 42 boys. Now, that’s a riot. That’s 70 boys now following you screaming, “Get out of here, baldy!” I’m afraid.

**John:** I don’t understand the bears’ agenda. It’s [crosstalk 01:04:16].

**Craig:** The bears don’t have an agenda. The bears have been sent by the Lord. But this is the next mind-blowing part. He only sent two bears. Two bears mauled 42 boys. That’s 21 boys per bear. Let’s say these bears are real quick. It takes maybe five seconds to fully maul a child. You got 21 of them. That’s almost a minute. After 30 seconds of watching your friends being torn apart by bears, how are you not running?

**John:** Run away.

**Craig:** Just run. Why only send two bears? Also, I like that there happen to be woods nearby, and also that the Lord was like, “Oh my god, no. You can’t call my guy baldy. Oh, bears, that’ll work.” Bears.

**John:** Bears.

**Craig:** It’s just such a great verse. “Get out of here, baldy!”

**John:** I’m looking it up on Biblia, which is showing me the different translations of that same section, because I was wondering was baldy just one esoteric choice that one translator chose to make. But no, baldy is common in most of this.

This is from the New International Readers version. It’s slightly different. “Elisha left Jericho, went up to Bethel. He was walking along the road. Some young fellows came out of the town. They made fun of him. ‘Go on up. You don’t even have hair on your head,’ they said. ‘Go on up. You don’t even have any hair on your head.’ He turned around and looked at them and he called down a curse on them. He did it in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods. They attacked 42 of the young fellows.” It’s not just a weird translation.

**Craig:** That’s what happened. That’s the story.

**John:** That’s what happens.

**Craig:** That is the full story of what happens when you start saying “baldy.” Is it possible that the two bears were just large, hairy gay men? Because now this is getting good.

**John:** Now it makes more sense.

**Craig:** Now this is getting good.

**John:** Could they really maul these? Maybe they were carrying a maul. They were carrying a giant hammer.

**Craig:** We know they’re big. We know they’re big guys.

**John:** They’re big. They’re big guys.

**Craig:** I just love this verse. I think it’s “baldy.” Ultimately, it’s just-

**John:** “Baldy” is pretty great.

**Craig:** That is a word that you’re not imagining people in the time before Christ or even shortly thereafter saying “baldy.” It’s so mean. As a bald person, I’m in love with this.

**John:** I’m thinking of our D&D Zoom group and just how many bald heads there are. We would all be subject to these taunting youths.

**Craig:** “Go away!” Why do they care? Why are they so mean? Anyway, they got what was coming to them.

**John:** They do. That’s a lesson learned. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-

**Craig:** Baldy.

**John:** … and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Baldy.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Ben Singer. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. We love when you send little audio clips, so keep doing that. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to do about all of our digital stuff and what to do with it after we die. Craig and Drew, thanks so much for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Drew:** Bye, baldies.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, so as we’ve established well on the show, you believe we’re living in a simulation, so therefore your death has no impact on you, because you’ll just return to the cloud. But your loved ones will still be around. Melissa will have to deal with, oh my god, all of Craig’s computers and stuff like that. Have you done anything to help her out in this situation, or, god forbid, you don’t die, but you’re in a coma, and she has to deal with that stuff, what are you doing to make her life better and easier?

**Craig:** I have thought through all of this, and I think everybody should. Of course, Melissa and I have done some estate planning, which you do not need an estate to do. You just need something. You own a spoon, you can do estate planning. We have provisions should either one of us die or become incapacitated medically. Because I use 1Password, she has access to my 1Password, which means she has access to all of my passwords. If I drop dead, she can use that to basically get into any account that I’ve created and cancel them, or perhaps cause mayhem.

**John:** Absolute mayhem.

**Craig:** What about you?

**John:** I had to deal with some of this when my mom died, because she was the last of that stuff. We had a bunch of her accounts and things like that. To her credit, she made good lists of where her physical bank accounts were and that kind of stuff, and I had to deal with all the closing off of her estate. For the digital stuff, because my mom was not technically all that sophisticated, I just had a list of all her passwords anyway, so I could get into her Gmail and all that stuff and deal with those situations that came up.

With Mike and I, we have similar situations where that stuff is in 1Password and most stuff will be pretty easy to do. I was reading a blog post this last week that was talking about, it’s one thing to have all the accounts, but that doesn’t tell you what a person actually needs to do. This blog post is recommending a document that’s like, here’s how to be me, basically just talking through, like, this is all the stuff that I’m actually doing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that’s keeping stuff going, because Mike is paying a bunch of our bills that I don’t really know about. Here’s where this thing is. This is the phone number for the tree guy, because I don’t know who that person is. That kind of stuff we haven’t done a great job of sharing, and we probably just need some sort of shared document for that. God forbid something happens to both me and Mike, because Amy has no idea where any of this stuff is kept.

**Craig:** Yeah, that probably would be good to have somebody be able to provide her that. We have a trust set up. If the two of us go down, then there is an executor of the trust who has to operate with the fiduciary responsibility to the people who are assigned stuff, like our children. They would help them. That would be their gig. Part of the trust is making sure that those people are compensated fairly, so they’re not working for free.

But yes, there are ways to make sure that your kids are helped. I never had this issue, because my mother is still alive, but my parents didn’t have really much in the way of assets for me to worry about. Same for my grandparents. I didn’t have to think about it, but certainly my children will.

**John:** Drew is reminding us here in the Workflowy we did talk about some stuff on this area back in 594. Drew, remind us, what did we actually get into?

**Drew:** We were talking more about what happens to the things you’ve written after you’ve died. We had a little bit of estate planning. That’s always good.

**John:** In terms of the stuff we’ve written, I guess there’s all the things that I’m halfway through on. I have just a big Dropbox full of the finished projects and the stuff that was started that never got finished. I have a Notion database of my 36 projects that are in some form of active development in my brain. But that’s not gonna be so crucial. It’s worth something, but it’s not gonna be worth a lot. The Big Fish musical that I did with Andrew Lippa is an asset that I do control copyright on, and that will be a thing that my heirs will have to be thinking about and thinking about future productions and what changes they will allow to make to that down the road. But that’s not gonna be a, “Oh crap, in the next 24 hours, what stuff do I need to get done?”

**Craig:** It is gonna become an issue going forward. There’s an entire generation of old people that are on Facebook, and no one knows their passwords for anything. They barely know their passwords for stuff. When they die, there are just gonna be all these just floating accounts of dead people just hanging out.

**John:** Closing those accounts is an important thing too, or arguably, it’s an important thing. I think zombie stuff out there is gonna be bad. You don’t want people to be getting emails from dead people about stuff. There was a service – we’ll try to find a link to it – that basically checks in that you’re alive on a regular basis and then has a plan for if you don’t respond in a certain period of time, it starts closing things down, which could make sense.

**Craig:** I think Facebook has a, “Hey, here’s a thing to fill out for when you die.” They’re aware of it. Probably costs them money. All these dead people hanging around on our Facebook. I’m sorry. Meta.

**John:** Meta.

**Craig:** Meta.

**John:** But then I feel like in the not too distant future, we’re also gonna have to worry about, what about the AI versions of ourselves? Do we want to continue after we die versus not continue after we die? I think it was Laurie Anderson, the performance artist, was talking about, I don’t know if it was her husband or some other person, that she has basically an AI representation of their work as a chatbot. She finds it therapeutic to chat with this representation of a friend or husband or somebody. Yes, and also, should I have the ability to say no, you can’t do that? It’s weird.

**Craig:** If they make an AI chatbot of me, it’s mostly just gonna be saying the following to people: Get out of here, baldy!

**John:** With that, another Scriptnotes is resolved. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [The Life and Death of Hollywood](https://harpers.org/archive/2024/05/the-life-and-death-of-hollywood-daniel-bessner/) by Daniel Bessner for Harpers
* [One weird trick for fixing Hollywood](https://maxread.substack.com/p/one-weird-trick-for-fixing-hollywood-6f0) by Max Read
* [Moloch Trap](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/moloch)
* [Lola Dupre](https://loladupre.com/archive)
* [Codenames Duet](https://codenames.game)
* [2 Kings 2:23-24](https://www.bible.com/bible/116/2KI.2.23-24.NLT)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Ben Singer ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/642standard.mp3).