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)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [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 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).