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

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 628 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, Craig and I will discuss how things get cool, then hot, then terrible. We’ll have listener questions and a ton of follow-up, including about secret projects and alternative screenplay formats, something that Craig is always into talking about.

**Craig:** I’m into it.

**John:** In our bonus segment for premium members, we will look at various fandoms and do our best to absolutely enrage them.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** Oh, no. That’s why we put it behind the paywall. If you want to be angry with you, you gotta pay us some money.

**Craig:** Pay $5 to watch us get beat into a pulp. Fun.

**John:** Craig, we missed you last week. Aline was on, and we discussed How Would This Be a Movie. We had some new topics for How Would This Be a Movies. Also, this week, I was looking through the chapter on picking which movie to write, for the Scriptnotes book. I mentioned, oh, a bunch of our previous How Would This Be a Movies have become movies. I had Drew get on the case to figure out how many of those that we discussed actually did become movies. The number is shocking. Drew’s going to help us out, talking through the things that became movies, the things that became documentaries, and the things that are in development right now. Drew.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Talk us through how many of these projects have actually been made since we discussed them.

**Drew Marquardt:** Twelve of these have actually been made as narrative feature films.

**Craig:** Jeez. Wow.

**Drew:** Or series.

**John:** Also, Craig, you start to realize, man, we’ve been doing this for 10 years, so some of them I knew, like The 15:17 to Paris, which is about those Americans who prevented the terrorist attack. That was a Clint Eastwood movie. I knew that happened. Zola we talked about at the Austin Film Festival. That became a movie. Do you remember The Hatton Garden Job, which was the old men-

**Craig:** The old guys, yeah.

**John:** Yeah, the heist. Two of those happened.

**Craig:** They made two of those?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I like that. You’re making the movie, and someone’s like, “We’ve gotta beat the other The Hatton Garden Job movie.” Oh, business.

**John:** Business, business. But Drew, talk us through some of the other things we had in How Would This Be a Movie.

**Drew:** There was also The Act, which was the Dee Dee Blanchard and Gypsy-Rose Blanchard.

**John:** She just got out of prison, right? I didn’t really follow that story closely.

**Craig:** Yeah. Apparently, our daughters’ generation is obsessed with Gypsy-Rose and her impending freedom, or freedom. She’s become a cult hero among the children, because she murdered someone or whatever.

**John:** What else we got, Drew?

**Drew:** There’s also The Mandela Effect, which was just the idea that we had talked about, but they made into a feature. There’s Stolen By My Mother: the Kamiyah Mobley Story, which was the young woman who discovered she was kidnapped as a baby by the woman she thought was her mom.

**Craig:** I don’t even remember that one.

**John:** I don’t remember that one at all.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Drew:** There’s the Danish series The Investigation, which is about Kim Wall’s murder.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** It’s a submarine murder. That’s right.

**Drew:** Six Triple Eight, which is in post-production right now, but Tyler Perry directed it. It’s about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, which was the predominantly Black battalion of women during World War II in the Army Corps.

**John:** I do remember that. I remember thinking, “Is there enough of a story there?” It was a part of history I didn’t know existed. We’ll see if there’s a story there.

**Drew:** We have How to Murder Your Husband, which was about the woman who wrote the book How to Murder Your Husband and then murdered her husband.

**Craig:** Oh, murder lady. Come on.

**John:** It’s a great title, so that’s why it needed to happen.

**Craig:** How to murder your husband, step 1: don’t write a thing about how to murder your husband. Jeez.

**John:** It could actually go on endlessly, because if you make a movie called How to Murder Your Husband, everyone’s going to suspect you of murdering your husband. It’s perfect.

**Craig:** Now I’m rooting for that person to murder their husband. What else did we do?

**Drew:** Death Saved My Life they made into a Lifetime movie, which is the wife who showed up at her own funeral, because her husband had her killed but not well.

**Craig:** Oh, man.

**John:** Death Saved My Life, I guess that’s a good title. It’s a good Lifetime title. It’s a good book title, so sure, I’ll get that.

**Craig:** I’m with them.

**Drew:** There’s Dumb Money, which came out last year.

**John:** We talked about that. It’s about the GameStop situation and story. Not at all surprised that happened.

**Craig:** No, considering that I personally received multiple calls from multiple companies about it.

**John:** As did I.

**Craig:** I was like, “Okay, apparently they’re making this thing.”

**John:** Craig, you and I should’ve both taken the job for different companies and just raced to see which one-

**Craig:** Wow. Just go head to head in the theaters.

**Drew:** Then finally, Holiday Road, which I think might’ve been a TV movie, but that was the 13 stranded strangers who all rent a van together when they can’t get a flight.

**Craig:** Here’s my question. Of all of these, how was our batting average on predicting whether or not they would be made?

**John:** That could be good follow-up for Drew, because I don’t think you went through and looked at that. Drew, maybe for next week, can you take a look at, of those movies, how many did we say, okay, that’s definitely going to happen?

**Drew:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Similarly, were there any where we were like, “Never in a million years will anyone make this.”

**John:** That’s what I’m excited to see. We’ll put it on the blog so people can see which of these movies happened and which one didn’t. But you also found 10 things that are in development, including-

**Craig:** Jeez.

**John:** … one about Jim Obergefell, the Hulk Hogan Gawker lawsuit, Dr. James Barry, who was a gender-fluid Victorian doctor, which I remember we thought was really interesting, and apparently is Rachel Weisz. Feels like the perfect casting for that.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** There’s the PTA mom for drug dealing. You May Want to Marry My Husband. These Witchsy founders who formed a fake male co-founder.

**Drew:** Brie Larson got that one.

**Craig:** Oh, nice.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** McDonald’s Monopoly.

**Craig:** That one is a great one.

**John:** The Scottish hip-hop hoax. Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. There’s a bunch of those things. That was also a thing that came to me a couple times. There probably will be a Sam Bankman-Fried movie. I think it’s tough. I think the relative lack of success of Dumb Money is going to very much hurt the Sam Bankman-Fried movie, but we’ll see.

**Craig:** They’re going to make it anyway.

**John:** George Santos, there’s at least one movie. That’s right, we talked about that, the George Santos movie, the one that Frank Rich is doing.

**Craig:** All I need to know is Frank Rich. I’m in. That’s great. This is pretty remarkable. Similarly, I’m interested to see if any of these we thought were not even worthy of development. The conceited question is, hey, are people listening to us and then just rushing out to get this done? But I suspect not. I suspect there is an industry of assistants that are doing nothing but Buzzfeed-style collating whatever buzzy news item of the day is and putting it in front of people, and then there’s just a general race to get rights and make a thing. It is amazing how many of these are getting made.

**John:** I was just surprised at the total numbers here. We’ll also include in the blog post the ones that were made as documentaries, because I think a thing we often talked about is, is the best version of this a fictionalized version, or do we just want to see the documentary series that tracks that, which in some cases may be more compelling.

**Craig:** That’s very interesting. Good to know that we’re not just wildly off, at least with the things we’re considering. I root for all movies.

**John:** Root for movies and TV series. Some more follow-up. We talked two episodes ago about accurate but distracting, so things that, if you put them in your script, they might be actually accurate to what happens in real life, but would be distracting to the viewer or to the reader. We have some follow-up from that.

**Drew:** Richard in Boston writes, “There’s an example of this that historical fiction writers have to deal with called the Tiffany Problem. It was coined by fantasy writer Joe Walton. The Tiffany Problem describes the tension between historical fact and the average, everyday person’s idea of history. If you’re reading a book that takes place in medieval times, you’ll have trouble believing that a character’s name could be Tiffany, even though Tiffany is actually a medieval name that goes back to the 12th century. But in our modern perception of the medieval world, Tiffany just doesn’t fit. Even though authors might research carefully and want to include historically accurate information in their book, like a medieval character named Tiffany, a popular audience likely won’t buy it.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Totally tracks. I love that as a name for that phenomenon.

**Craig:** That really does track. I would absolutely be stopped in my tracks if there was a scene in a medieval story and Tiffany shows up. That would just seem anachronistic. That’s a great example. I guess in the end, it really doesn’t… There’s no victory in saying afterwards, “No no no, Tiffany was a name,” because people are like, “I guess now that I know, that’s interesting, but in the meantime, it screwed up my enjoyment of this story.” Tiffany. All right. I like that.

**John:** Now, I don’t want to get Drew’s mailbox overflowing with stuff, but if you are a listener who has another example of something that really does match the Tiffany Problem, which is basically something that is historically accurate or accurate to true life but is distracting if you were to encounter it, I’d love more examples of that, because it feels like Tiffany’s great, but I think we can find more ways that this manifests.

A thing I’ve talked about on the show a lot is that when I want a bedtime book, I love a book that is really interesting and completely forgettable, that you can read, and the minute you set the book down, you don’t think about it, so you can fall back asleep. I’ve been reading some books on counterfactual history, basically like, what if this thing happened in a certain way.

**Craig:** Alternative history, yeah.

**John:** Love it. One of the stories I wasn’t familiar with was Arminius, who’s also known as Hermann, who’s the German barbarian chief who drove back the Romans at a certain time. In reading this account of Arminius, “That’s a fascinating movie. I’m surprised no one has made a movie about that. Let me Google and see why no one has made a movie about it.” It turns out there’s two seasons of a Netflix show that is specifically about that. There’s just too much-

**Craig:** Netflix.

**John:** … Netflix.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** There’s just too much Netflix.

**Craig:** It’s almost like Netflix has become like Google, but instead of getting a search result, you get a series.

**John:** Yes, exactly.

**Craig:** It’s insane.

**John:** I looked at the trailer. It looked great. I’m like, “Great. Someone has already made the thing I was thinking about making.” Congratulations. I will say I’ve not watched a frame of the actual series. They shot it in Latin and in German, which feels great.

**Craig:** Whoa. That’s impressive.

**John:** Kudos to them. Kudos to everybody involved in making Barbarians, which I may watch at some point, I may not watch at some point. But I know it’s out there, and I know that I, John August, don’t have to write it. That sometimes is the greatest relief.

**Craig:** Apparently, we don’t have to write anything, because Netflix did it.

**John:** Another thing I don’t have to write is the Harry Potter series.

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** Episode 623, I talked about a project. This is when we were talking about bake-offs. I talked about a project that had come into my orbit, and they asked, “Hey, would you want to adapt this very popular piece of IP.” I’m sure, Craig, you were guessing it was Harry Potter. We can now reveal it was Harry Potter. They’re doing a Harry Potter series for HBO Max or Max. Deadline posted a story about who the finalists were who are going through the process. I wish them all well. They did find people who have good, proper credits. I do wish them well. I do think it’s just a very hard road ahead for them.

**Craig:** I have no inside information on this. I work at HBO, but no one has ever talked to me about Harry Potter. I don’t know what it is. It seems like it’s about adapting the books. That was what I initially thought. But then they’re saying in this article, “We’ve heard that the group of writers were commissioned by Max.” First of all, that’s cool that they’re paying them.

**John:** Yeah, they’re paying somebody.

**Craig:** “To create pitches for a series reflecting their take on the IP.” Now, I guess my question is – and this is my dum-dum question – what take? I thought that the idea was, we’re going to take each book and adapt it fully over a season, because those books are big. When they were adapted into movies, very successfully, of course they had to do quite a bit of compacting. I guess maybe there’s more to it than that. I don’t know. I’m fascinated by this.

I would be terrified to be one of these people. They’re way braver than I am. There’s something very scary about knowing that there’s somebody somewhere else doing what you were doing, to try and do what you’re doing, and maybe will do what you do instead of you. It’s scary. But I do think on the plus side, they’re being paid, so that’s actually quite good. On the downside, I could also see where this becomes this cottage industry, where you’re paying people to do these pitches, but you’re not paying that much. The thing about pitching a season is you have to do quite a bit of work.

**John:** Oh god, so much.

**Craig:** That’s definitely an imposing prospect. I guess for something that is as huge as Harry Potter is – and it is – it’s almost as close as you can get to a guaranteed success, as far as I can tell. I can see why it is like this, because I assume also that these people will have to meet with JK Rowling and get along with her, because she’s always part of it.

**John:** If you look at the attempts to expand the franchise beyond those books, they’ve not succeeded. They’ve succeeded in physical spaces. I feel like the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, tremendous success, those things, but the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them have had diminishing returns. Hardcore Harry Potter fans are not as enamored with those as with the original books, of course. It looks like, based on this article – and we don’t know the inside truth here – is that some of these takes may be moving outside of the books, some of them may be more faithful adaptations of the books.

**Craig:** I don’t know. Those movies, I guess they did well enough for them to make more. They ran into some trouble, because Johnny Depp suddenly was in a situation. They may have not been the size of the original Harry Potter films, but I think they were doing okay. The Harry Potter play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is a phenomenon, our friend Jack Thorne being the primary playwright there. Well, the playwright. I guess, technically, Jack wrote the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child from an original story by him, JK Rowling, and John Tiffany. Tiffany. Then the Harry Potter video game was an enormous hit.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** In the world of video games, there are some enormous hits. When they are enormous, they dwarf what we do. That was one of them.

**John:** I guess I should restate that they’ve had a hard time expanding it out as a filmed franchise, but this is maybe possible, going to happen. For folks who are looking at, oh, what is a popular book series that did not get a good treatment, Percy Jackson. The movies were not a big success. The new series on Disney Plus is terrific. For folks who are curious about that, really worth watching. I thought it was just a very smart adaptation, much more faithful to the books. My daughter, who grew up reading those books, loved it. They really are quite enjoyable. It was well cast. So difficult to get great performances from young actors, and this succeeded in it.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** It’d recommend it for people.

**Craig:** Great. We wish those folks the best of luck. I don’t know if they’ll want to do this, but when it’s all done and the winner of, what is it, the tri-cup wizard, the tri-wizard tournament, whoever wins the big cup that actually turns out to be a Horcrux or, no, a Portkey, it would be great to have them on our show, just to talk about the process, if they’re willing.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** It’s fascinating to me. I get it, but also, it makes me nervous.

**John:** It does. Also, I think you have to look at are you going with people who are familiar with the movie series or new folks. That’s a challenging [crosstalk 16:09].

**Craig:** I could be wildly off here, but I suspect that the Harry Potter books are transgenerational, that people who read them as children are now reading them to their children, that they aren’t going anywhere ever.

**John:** I don’t know that to be the case. I feel like there’s been such a backlash against JK Rowling that I wonder if that’s still the case.

**Craig:** There is a backlash against JK Rowling on Twitter and social media, no question. I don’t think that that has translated into the actual audience and how they interact with the stories and the characters. I will cite the video game again, because when the video game came out, that was thick in the middle-

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** … of JK Rowling and her controversies. People were really angry about the game and angry at the game, and yet it sold a gazillion copies. There is a disconnect, I think, between… There’s a topic. One day we should probably jump on the third rail, John, and discuss the notion of separating the art from the artist, because this comes up all the time.

**John:** For sure. Noted for future discussion is how we separate those things. We’ll find some other good examples of what do you do with problematic people who also make art.

**Craig:** Roald Dahl.

**John:** Roald Dahl, Joss Whedon. It’s tough. There’s that tendency to retroactively discount the thing that they were able to make and do, because we now believe that they’re terrible people.

**Craig:** There’s also this weird phenomenon of feeling guilty about enjoying something. Roald Dahl said a lot of really antisemitic stuff. Not mildly. Very. I love Roald Dahl books. I do. I love them. I really enjoy the Wes Anderson Henry Sugar adaptation. I feel like I’m a little like, “Should I?” Then I’m like, “I really like the stories.”

**John:** Let’s talk about some UK writing credits. In 625, I think we were answering a listener question about UK credits, and we said we know they work differently. Tom wrote in with some follow-up about that.

**Drew:** Tom is the chair of the Writers Guild of Great Britain Film Committee, which is the WGGB. He writes, “Per the question from the British writer, I thought that you and indeed he would be interested to know that the WGGB and the Producers Alliance of Cinema and Television, or PACT, negotiated the screenwriting credits agreement way back in 1974. This agreement is referenced in the 1992 basic screenwriting agreement between our two organizations. Both these agreements are in the process of being updated, as we seek to bake in some of the gains secured in last year’s WGA strike, so thank you for that. We operate under a different labor framework in the UK, so these agreements are only advisory. Specific clauses can be negotiated out, though obviously we discourage that. Most screen credits are agreed in consultation between the producers and the writers in question. However, the Writers Guild of Great Britain does arbitrate on small number of credit disputes every year, following similar guidance to that used by the WGA.”

**John:** That’s great. It’s good to have some answers there.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is not surprising. The Writers Guild of America has a very legalistic system to arbitrate and assign credits. It is contractually the sole arbiter and sole authority of credit assignation. Other places, there’s that big bus-sized loophole that you can drive through, which is advisory or in consultation between producers and writers. It is not as strong of a system, presuming one agrees that the Writers Guild has the best interest of writers at heart, which I think it does. It’s just that when you are deciding what credits should be, there are sometimes winners and losers, and people that don’t get the credit are upset. But it’s good to know that there’s something. But I’m not surprised to see that it is not the ironclad structure that we have here in the U.S.

**John:** Absolutely. All these things come down to power. In the U.S., the Writers Guild has the power to basically force this system upon the makers of film and television. But the Producers Guild, for example, does not have that degree of power. But they have been able to negotiate and cajole and get people to take their PGA credits seriously, so that now when you see a PGA after a producer’s name, you can recognize, oh, that’s the person who did really more of the producing job, and it’s just not a person whose name showed up for various contractual reasons.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. I am a member of the PGA. I don’t put the PGA thing after my name, only because it just feels a little bit like a odd degree I earned in college or something.

**John:** But if you were producing a feature film, you might be more inclined to use it, I suspect.

**Craig:** Ultimately, I don’t think people at home care, but what the PGA does do is leverage its agreement with the Academies to determine who is eligible to win awards. That is actually quite a bit of interesting power that they’ve garnered for themselves. I think ultimately serves as their most relevant function. When the Oscars are coming, and Best Picture is announced, producers will go up to accept the Best Picture. Those producers have been vetted by the PGA. This works for the Emmys as well. We get a questionnaire, and they ask me, “What did these people do? Just tell us what they did.” And I do, and then they make their decisions.

**John:** More follow-up in Episode 626. We talked about the Nobel Prize and the Ig Nobel Prize, which I knew was a thing, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. Matt wrote in with some more specificity here.

**Drew:** Matt says, “The Ig Nobel Prize already exists, and they celebrated their 33rd First Annual Ceremony in 2023, based on offbeat yet real science. The prizes are often presented by true Nobel laureates.” Matt says, “I personally appreciate their method of preventing long acceptance speeches, where an eight-year-old girl marches on stage to tell the recipients to, ‘Please stop. I’m bored,’ while the audience throws paper airplanes at the stage.”

**Craig:** That is very reminiscent of what happened at this year’s Emmys, where Anthony Anderson, the host, brought his mom. When people talked too long, they put a camera on his mom with a mic, and she just told the people to stop. I gotta tell you, it only really happened once. After that one time, I think everybody was terrified of Anthony Anderson’s mom.

I think she should be at all of these award shows. There’s really no excuse for it. They tell you very clearly you have 45 seconds, which is actually a lot of time. Some people go up there and just don’t seem to… They think, “Oh, but not really.” No, really. We’re in show business. We all understand that there’s timing. It’s remarkable to me that people just don’t do that. In any case, Anthony Anderson’s mom or an eight-year-old girl marching on stage, either way, yes, genius. Much better than the playoff music.

**John:** Craig, I did not watch any of the award shows so far this year. You attended many of them.

**Craig:** You missed it.

**John:** Give us a quick review.

**Craig:** I lost.

**John:** How was it for you?

**Craig:** I lost. I lost.

**John:** You lost and you lost and lost and lost and lost.

**Craig:** I lost. I lost. And then I lost.

**John:** But your show won many awards that were not part of the main telecast, which is great.

**Craig:** Yes, we did. We won eight Emmy Awards, which is one shy, I believe, of the record for most for a first-season show. That was terrific. I would have probably felt a bit more glum about constantly losing all the big awards, had it not been that I was losing to Jesse Armstrong and Succession. He is such a lovely, wonderful guy. Have we not had him on the show?

**John:** No, we’ve never had him on the show. We should get him on the show.

**Craig:** Oh, good lord. Let’s fix that. He’s wonderful and so smart and so deserving. Also, there’s a nice thing about certainty going into these awards shows, where you don’t really have to worry. I didn’t write speeches, for instance. You go and enjoy that, and it’s actually quite nice. I have a few friends there that are also up for other awards. Quinta Brunson, who we love, won an Emmy, which was wonderful to see. You do get to see a lot of people that you’ve come to like and enjoy.

I made a shorter night of all those things, just because the strikes had that weird impact of jamming four awards things into the course of 10 days. Oh, god, man, I walked out of one of those things. I’m like, “This thing was 4 hours long, and I feel more tired than I do shooting for 12 hours.” I didn’t do anything. I just sat there. It’s oddly exhausting.

**John:** Now, everything has got jammed up, tied together, but the alternative is it gets dragged out over the course of weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks, which wouldn’t have been great either.

**Craig:** That would be worse. It was a way, at least, for people to go. Everybody’s schedules, once the strikes ended, everybody accelerated into work. Maybe not so much the actors, because there’s a bit of a lag time for them, but certainly writers and producers are working on things.

There will be awards shows coming up. We were very nicely nominated for the aforementioned PGA award. Going to be difficult for me to get down there and lose again, because I’m going to be shooting. I will have to lose in absentia. It was good to get it all done in this crazy pressure cooker 10 days, because it was Golden Globes, and then it was AFI, and then it was Critics Choice, and then it was Emmys, all boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and the Oscars are right around the corner.

**John:** Yeah, crazy. Last bit of follow-up is another Arlo Finch. Karen Finch wrote in and said, “Would you believe my dog is Arlo Finch? He’s nine, so technically, I named him first.” This dog is gorgeous.

**Craig:** Look at this little boy.

**John:** Oh my god, such a good dog.

**Craig:** What a cutie. He’s got his little toy.

**John:** His toy.

**Craig:** It’s so funny. My younger dog, Bonnie, she loves toys. But my older dog, Cookie, no interest in toys. Bonnie, when you come home, she sees you, and then she immediately runs away from you, gets a toy, and runs and brings it over to you, like, look, I have a toy. It always looks like this, just ripped up and gummy and dirty. Aw, look at this little boy, Arlo Finch.

**John:** It makes sense. Karen Finch, obviously her last name was already Finch. Arlo does feel like one of those names that probably starts in dogs and then goes to kids. Basically, it’s a fun name for an animal, and then you hear that name a lot and you start applying it to kids. It makes sense. Cooper was probably the same situation. I know there are a lot of Cooper dogs, and then you started having Cooper kids.

**Craig:** Cooper kids. Maybe Craig. It’s possible. Used to be a Scottish dog name. Craig!

**John:** You know that dog names tend to be two syllables, so you can yell out for them and they come back. Craig doesn’t work well as a dog name. Arlo does.

**Craig:** There’s Spike, Butch. I’m always thinking of the cartoon dogs. You’re right. Fido. Who names their dog Fido anymore?

**John:** It’s a good name though.

**Craig:** It’s a good one.

**John:** Craig, a thing we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast, probably from the very start, is that the screenplay format is well established. We’ve been used to it since the days of Casablanca. It’s 12-point Courier. The margins are a certain place. The dialog works a certain way. Character names are above stuff. As the Oscar nominations came out, we always try to make sure that we have all of the Oscar-nominated screenplays available on Weekend Read. That’s Drew’s responsibility, so Drew has been a hero to getting this all to make sure they look fantastic in Weekend Read.

We’ve got all of them except for one, which is Anatomy of a Fall, which is a fantastic script, a fantastic movie. It is not going to be possible to format that in Weekend Read, because it is bizarre. We’ll put a link in the show notes to how it looks. But I also pulled out some screenshots here.

It looks to be maybe in Times Roman, I’m guessing. It’s some sort of serif font. There are scene headers. It’s “8 – Chalet, Extérieur,” “Interior plus exterior/day.” We see that kind of stuff. It’s all in French, but you can totally tell what’s happening there. There are letters for A in parentheses, talking through the scene description. It is in the present tense, like the way we’d expect this to be. There are photos. There are photos of what the chalet looks like. Dialog is blocked over to the right in a way, with the character name above it but not centered. It’s just different. Craig, how are you feeling as you look at this?

**Craig:** I love it. I love this. This is going to start happening more and more. For screenplays that are speculative – and I don’t mean just spec screenplays that people are writing without money being paid; I mean even things in development, that are not necessarily automatically going to be produced – perhaps this would be too much or unnecessary.

But if you are writing for production, what I love about this is how many questions it answers for people, because, look, I’m in prep right now. People that work on movies, to produce the movies, all the department heads, they don’t read these scripts the way people that are gatekeeping at festivals or development executives read them. They’re reading them as instruction sets for what they’re supposed to do. The more information they can have, the clearer it becomes, and the fewer questions the filmmakers have to answer, because answering questions becomes the bane of your existence in prep. You have to do it. That’s sort of the point. But the fewer questions that are floating out there, the happier your day is.

This is brilliant looking at this. It answers so many things. It makes so many things clear. You’re going to end up drawing these things anyway. You’re going to end up taking photos of these things anyway. For a movie like Anatomy of a Fall, which is so specific about a space and what occurred in the space and the relative position of the window to the attic to the downstairs to the outside, this makes complete sense. It’s very easy to read. I have no problem with this whatsoever. None.

**John:** It does French things too, where they tend not to put extra blank lines between paragraphs, which is something I would choose to do. Looking on page 15, for example, there’s a sketch of how this attic space works and which windows open and which ones don’t. Just super helpful for anyone reading the script to get a sense of what the actual plan is here. We’ll try to get Justine on the podcast to talk through this, because I’m really curious-

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous.

**John:** … how early in the process did she know this was the house, this is how it’s all going to work. The other thing, which we always talk about, are alt lines and how you handle that. For this tidbit here, Sandra, in parentheses, “taking time to reflect or think about it,” she answers, “Not always, but often, yes, because of the wood dust.” And then, in parentheses beneath it, “Alt: often, yes, because of the wood dust. Alt: I think so, yes, because of the wood dust.” Here, those alts are there, already in the script there as a plan. Great. It feels very useful for production to know this is the situation, this is what we’re getting into, this is how we’re going to be doing it.

**Craig:** It’s a perfectly good thing to do. At some point, very early on, when you enter production, or let’s say you’ve been green-lit and now you’re in prep, as a writer you are confronted with how unromantic everyone is about creating it. You know the parable of the blind men and the elephant. The makeup people see makeup. The hair people see hair. The clothing people see clothing. The production designer sees spaces, materials, construction. They aren’t necessarily plugged into your grand, romantic, artistic dream. They’re just trying to make it happen. It’s so practical. This kind of work is incredibly practical, including listing the alts, because then your actors are aware. You can have that discussion. You can decide on the day, “Do we want that other line? Which of these do you prefer?” It’s all very practical.

I’m in complete support of it. I think the screenplay format that we use is a perfectly fine format for people to read and decide, “Would I want to invest in this? Would I want to see this happen?” It is not a useful document for, “How do we make this happen?” It’s just not. This is very clever, very well done.

**John:** Also, if we do get her on the show, I want to talk about decisions of when to be in French, when to be in English, because if you’re reading this document, you basically have to be able to speak both French and English to parse it and understand what’s happening there. It’s a French script with just really mostly English dialog in it. It’s just such a fascinating hybrid form.

**Craig:** Yeah, which reflects the reality of the film, where it’s taking place in France, and yet one character is often answering questions that are posed in French in English.

**John:** It’s delightful. Here’s the other thing is, we talked about the Tiffany Problem, like it’s realistic, but would you believe it. As an American, you’re watching these courtroom sequences, you’re like, “Wait, there’s no possible way you’re allowed to do that.” Of course, but no, it’s France, and you can do things that way. The way that the prosecutor behaves, it’s like, “How is that possible? Is she always on the witness stand, and she can just stand up and talk whenever?” It’s wild.

**Craig:** It is wild. I think a lot of people have that natural, like, “Did they just invent this to make the courtrooms seem more interesting?” The answer is no. Then following that, there was quite a discourse of, “What is wrong with France?” The way they conduct a trial just feels bad. It feels bad.

**John:** It feels incredibly unfair to the defendant.

**Craig:** It really does. In a country where there is a history of just chopping people’s heads off for political expressions, it does seem a little like, oh, I don’t like this feeling. But then we know in, for instance, the case in Italy with Amanda Knox, the way other countries investigate, prosecute, pursue, charge, and judge is not like we do. It’s interesting.

**John:** I would love to hear from international listeners, because they must see so much of the American courtroom process, because it’s in all our movies, it’s in all of our TV shows. How much does that color their expectation about how stuff should work in their own legal systems? They must have some expectation it’s going to work similarly, and it clearly doesn’t.

**Craig:** The other interesting thing about the constant presentation of the American justice system is that typically, for the purposes of drama, the stories that we tell are of falsely accused people or people who are guilty in the letter of the law but not in the spirit of the law. That’s what’s exciting to us. But there are times where we do tell stories of people who are guilty. The question is are they guilty or not.

The aforementioned Jack Thorne wrote a terrific miniseries that was centered around an actor who was accused of sexually assaulting people. It became a courtroom drama where you were rooting for guilt. That’s an interesting concept we don’t often see. But even though a lot of American lawyers… If we had Ken White on, for instance, he would run down how inaccurate and stupid American courtroom dramas are. It does at least give you a sense of our process and form, which is way more rigorous than apparently France, which is like, this is a free-for-all. This is kind of exciting though.

**John:** For our main topic, I want to talk a little bit about fandom and the dynamics of fandom. The jumping-off point was a blog post I read, which turned out was all from 2015, so it’s a little dated there. But I really liked how he laid out how subcultures become fandoms become these bigger things and tend to ultimately implode or get warped. This is a post by David Chapman. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it. He talks through that generally the dynamic you see is that there is a scene where you have some creators who are doing a new thing. It could be a musical new thing. It could be an artistic new thing. Some sort of cultural product that they’re making which feels new. That then attracts fanatics, who are people who are not making the things themselves, but are so into it and want to follow it and follow those creators. Both these creators and the fandoms are geeks, in the sense that they are deeply, deeply into it. This is more than just a weird hobby. It’s becoming an actual subculture.

Once that gets up to a certain critical mass, you have what he calls MOPs, members of the public, who are attracted to it and start to enjoy it, but they’re not on the inside. They get kind of geeky about it, but they’re not actual hardcore fans. They’re like tourists coming to the thing. Sometimes there’s in-grouping and out-grouping, where these new people you label as posers, because they’re not true believers, they’re not really part of it.

But what I found so fascinating is he also charts it through to generally you get a place where there are sociopaths who become attracted to this movement, this thing that’s more than a scene. It’s become a subculture. They adopt some aspects of it, and ultimately the drive either is for money or to do some other kind of nefarious purpose.

I thought it was just an interesting dynamic. It’s very easy to chart this to the rise of the hippie movement. It feels accurate to a lot of the ways we see things begin, blossom, grow, and fall apart.

**Craig:** This is an interesting dissection of the phenomenon of phenomena and how things catch fire and become a social exercise. There are certain presumptions baked into this that I think are worth questioning.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** For instance, is it better to be a fanatic than to be a casual enjoyer? One of the things I think about as a person that does create things is what do I want my audience to be. If I had a wish, how would I want them to be reacting and interacting with the work I make.

I don’t think I have a great desire for people to be fanatics, per se. What I want is for people to enjoy. I want them to take from it what I intended to give. The fandom itself is separate from what I want. I just want people to watch it and feel things that I hope they feel and think about things that I want them to consider. I am not doing this so that people tattoo it on themselves or go to every show and get signatures and autographs and things like that, but people do. I understand that, because I’ve tattooed myself, so I get that.

I do question the premise that one kind of fandom, there’s a pure, truer fandom than another. I wonder if most creators are really just trying to appeal to what this author refers to as MOPs, members of the public.

**John:** I think that’s a great distinction. Also, maybe we can talk about it both in the terms of the things we write and make, so Last of Us for you, or Chernobyl, versus what we’re doing right now, which is that we have fans of Scriptnotes, who are listening to this podcast that we’re making, and to what degree do we feel like we need to engage with that community that forms around, because we made a thing that the community is around it, or that we want to distance ourselves or not really think about and worry about that.

The answer is different for different things. I think with Scriptnotes, we do engage our community to a pretty significant degree, not a degree to which a YouTuber or a Vine star back in the day might’ve. But we’re answering their questions. We’re meeting them at live shows. Some of them are paying us $5 a month. There is a sense that we are attempting to service that community to some degree by also doing a thing that we want to do, which is different than what you’re doing with Last of Us, which is you’re trying to make the thing, and you recognize that there is a role to which you need to go out and promote the thing and go to Brazil to do a fan launch of the thing, and yet you’re still trying to maintain some boundaries around your exposure to that community.

**Craig:** Because the goal ultimately is the point. The goal of making things is hopefully for people to see it and appreciate it. When I say people, I mean as many as possible. I don’t think anyone makes a show or writes a book or writes a song so that very few people will listen to it.

There’s this thing that happens when something is new – this author refers to it as the new thing – where the first people to appreciate it feel a kind of ownership. They feel special, because they fought their way to it. They found it when it wasn’t promoted to them, when no one told them about it. They had a pure experience with it. Then other people don’t, in their minds. Other people are promoted to. Their friends tell them.

In reality, I’m not sure it matters, because let’s say I’ve never heard of a thing. I remember somebody… I think it was Shannon Woodward. Yeah, it was Shannon. I was having lunch with her or something. She’s like, “Have you seen Stranger Things?” I said, “No,” because you know me. I don’t watch stuff. She’s like, “There’s this girl who plays this little girl who’s just a phenomenal… She’s just doing this stuff that’s just mind-blowing to me as an actor.” I was like, “That’s a pretty good recommendation. I’ll check it out.” Then I watched it, and I was like, “Wow. Millie Bobby Brown is really good at this. The Duffer brothers are really good at this. This is great.” Is my appreciation less valuable because I was told, as opposed to somebody who’s just flipping through the 4,000 shows on Netflix, lands on something, and goes, “Yes, this. I have unearthed it.” I don’t know.

**John:** I think we often have the experience of being champions of a thing that we want other people to see. Our One Cool Things are like, “Hey, take a look at this thing that you may not have otherwise been aware of.” That signaling thing is important. We’re using some of our cache and our authority, to whatever degree we have it, to say this is a thing that is worth your attention. We sometimes seek out people who can recommend good things to us. A lot of the blogs I follow are basically like, I like that person’s taste, and so if they are recommending something to me, I will click through that link, because they don’t steer me wrong, which is absolutely great and true.

I think what’s different though is that the difference between a recommendation and something that becomes a fandom is a fandom requires some kind of organization. Interesting that a lot of times, fandom, it is self-organizing. It’s not the creator who’s going out there and creating that community and organizing that community. They’re just making their thing. That community is creating its own rules and its own structure around it. The relationship between that fan organization and that creator can be great. It can be toxic. It can be problematic. That’s a real challenge.

**Craig:** Yeah. What this guy is describing is fandom protecting itself, which actually has nothing to do with the art. It’s only about the community that’s built around the art, which I understand. When you find a community, it’s important to you. As we all know, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, belonging is the most important of the non-fundamental needs like food, shelter. You find belonging, especially if you are someone who struggles with belonging. Let’s say you’re on the spectrum. You’re on the autism spectrum. It’s hard for you to find belonging in the real-world space, but you connect with other people who have a similar struggle, over your shared joy of this new thing. You get really deep into it. Then your community is now something different and important from the art itself.

What this is talking about is how to protect that, because what happens as things become more popular is a lot of people enter the community that maybe you don’t think have the same depth of connection to the work that you do, or some people – and in this article they’re described just fully on as sociopaths – enter the community for purely exploitative reasons, to sell things, to get attention for themselves. And then they can, quote unquote, ruin the culture, the subculture.

The truth is all of this analysis does matter to a lot of people, because most people are fans, not creators. But for those of us who make things, I think it’s important to appreciate fans, to appreciate early fans, rabid fans, passionate fans, and the community they build up, while also maintaining that what we do is meant for anyone who enjoys it. Anyone. There is nothing exclusive about what we do. There is, however, apparently something exclusive about the people that begin that first community.

**John:** This is a thing I was holding back for maybe a future How Would This Be a Movie, but I think it’s actually good to bring up right now. There’s an article by Sarah Viren which ran in the New York Times this past week. It’s looking at this woman whose sister was murdered when she was a kid. Fifty years have passed. It’s a cold case. But this woman said, “Listen, I feel a calling from God. I need to figure out who killed my sister in this brutal way 50 years ago.” She goes to a true-crime con thing and meets these podcasters who had done similar kinds of things, and starts working with them about, “How are we going to try to solve this? How are we going to group-source this?” The podcasters have a plan. They’re going to build up a Facebook group. They’re going to get people involved in working through this. They start putting together episodes. They’re making some progress. The police agree to reopen the case. Things are proceeding.

But ultimately, this woman starts to have frustrations with these podcasters, feeling like they violated some confidences that she had shared with them, and doesn’t go on this one Zoom. And essentially, this whole community turns against her, the actual person who is the instigator of all this, the one whose sister actually died. I found that to be fascinating too, because who’s the creator in this situation? Is it the podcasters who did organize this group, or is it her? And who is the victim in this situation?

True crime fandom is a thing. In this case, it’s a community that was formed around this one murder, and the only thing they have in common is that there’s a curiosity about this, but they’re not making the thing. They’re just contributing. The sense of online communities in particular can be incredibly toxic, because you’re not doing it to someone’s face.

**Craig:** It’s also a question of what is it that you are obsessed with. Here’s a woman who’s obsessed with who killed her sister. That is a fact, and that is a crime. That’s somebody that she loved and cared for. The fandom is obsessed with a podcast, so now they are interested in what is an act of creation. It’s a show.

If you care mostly about the show, I always think of this as the Skyler problem. Skyler White on Breaking Bad. Anna Gunn is an incredible actor and portrayed Walter White’s wife beautifully and had to carry the burden of a very difficult part. There was this thing where the Breaking Bad fandom just started to hate her, hate both Anna Gunn and Skyler White. Why? Because Skyler’s character was in direct opposite to Walter and his stuff. If she finds out what he is doing, she’s going to be angry and make him stop. When she does find out what he’s doing, she is upset. She becomes sort of a co-conspirator, and then eventually just no more. But her character was a threat to the existence of the show. If Skyler wins, Walter White stops making meth, and there’s no more show. What the audience cared about was that the show would keep going, and so they started to hate a character. I find that fascinating.

I think in this case, I could definitely see where if the woman whose sister was a victim became uncomfortable with the show and was threatening the continuation of the show, the community gets angry at her, because they don’t care about her and her justice. They care about the show. And that is where fandom gets a little squiggly, when you’re dealing with stuff that isn’t purely fictional, but rather a presentation of truth.

**John:** Absolutely. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to continue this conversation and talk about different fandoms and the degree to which it feels like the creators have some control over that and the degree to which the creators are being held captive to their fandoms, which I think is a challenging situation, which happens far too often. Let’s answer some listener questions. Drew, what you got for us?

**Drew:** Brent writes, “My understanding is that if a stage musical is adapted into a film, the songwriter retains copyright, and the songs are licensed to the film. But how does ownership and authorship work with original songs written for an original musical film? Are they considered separate from the screenplay? Is the lyricist considered a co-writer of the script by the WGA? And how is that songwriter typically contracted?

**John:** Here’s a question I could actually answer, because I have-

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** … much experience with this. First, Brett’s assumption that a stage musical adapted into a film, yes, and so that the lyricist composer of the original Broadway or stage production, they own the copyright on those songs, and so those are licensed as part of the package to make the movie. The Mean Girls movie, Jeff Richmond, who wrote the songs for that – and I don’t remember who the lyricist was – those songs were licensed for the movie, pretty straightforward.

When you write an original song for a movie, and so if you’re Billie Eilish to do for Barbie, they come to you and they say, “Hey, would you write this song for this movie?” You write it. It’s phenomenal. There’s a separate contract for that. It is licensed to be in the movie. It’s relatively clean. It’s similar to how it would’ve worked the other way around, like if the song had previously existed.

What gets to be complicated is when you are writing stuff that is fundamentally integrated into the movie. For Corpse Bride or for Frankenweenie and for Big Fish, I wrote songs into the script that became part of the movie. Those, I was not contracted separately. They were just part of the script. They were folded into my writing fee for writing the movie. But those songs, which also Danny Elfman then did the music for, also exist separately, and so I am paid separately for those, for royalties and for all the other music-y things that songwriters get paid for. I get separate checks for each of those things. When it plays in Norway, I get 13 cents, and those checks accumulate separately, by different accounting systems, so ASCAP or BMI.

**Craig:** Yep, I’ve done the same. That’s how it works. You do retain authorship of those songs. I have the distinct honor of receiving checks from ASCAP every now and then for a song called Douchebag of the Year in Superhero Movie, which how many people can boast that, John? Very few.

**John:** It’s nice.

**Craig:** I wrote a rap song for Scary Movie 3, and I get royalties for writing the lyrics. Your outline is exactly correct. Authorship of lyrics and authorship of music will always generate royalties through ASCAP and BMI, and not only if they’re played just on their own, but also if they’re played in the movie. It is an interesting hybrid there, but generally speaking, you do retain more rights and more financial interest with songs than you do with, say, a work for hire as a script, because in that case, you’re really relying on the WGA formula for residuals and nothing else.

**John:** One other question embedded in here. Is the lyricist considered a co-writer of the script by the WGA?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Generally, no. It’s a thing we’ve talked about with Rachel Bloom a couple times is that writing the songs for things like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she’s often writing actual story material. She’s writing everything that happens in the song. It’s like she’s not just writing dialog, but she’s writing a whole sequence. You could imagine there could be scenarios in which the songs are so much of what the actual story is that it crosses into situations where it really should be considered literary material that goes into WGA arbitrations. Maybe that’s happened in the past, but classically, no, it’s not considered literary material in that same way.

**Craig:** Generally, no. If you’re dealing with something that is a recitative, where everything is sung, for instance, Les Mis, then certainly, I think the Writers Guild has the ability, through its pre-arbitration structure and participating writer investigations, to say, “Hey, look, even though this is in a lyric format, it is dialog. It is screenplay material. It is literary material.” We have the ability to be flexible on that front and to pose the questions and ask them. It’s another reason why the WGA’s sole authority is important, because it can, as an institution, allow for some flexibility and exclusions and exceptions. There are ways for it to actually account for unique properties like that.

**John:** Next question.

**Drew:** Kaylan in Alaska writes, “Are there best practices to follow as to not break up scenes or dialog in an annoying way? I specifically mean when a scene begins at the bottom of a page, and only one line of scene description fits, or when dialog gets broken between two pages in a way that feels like it might break up the reading of the line. My brain really wants that soothing feeling of a scene starting at the top of a page.”

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what my brain wants, Kaylan. My brain is trying to anagram and Kaylan and Alaska together. There’s so many overlapping letters. I love it. Best practices are what you feel good with, what makes you happy. Most people reading, my opinion, don’t care. For me as a writer, I care so much. I don’t like splitting up dialog across pages. If I can mitigate that, I do, because, I don’t know, I don’t like it. It just feels bad. If you can avoid ending a scene with a single line of action that’s on the subsequent page and then start a new scene, yeah, do it. Avoid it. It’s actually not that hard to do. As long as you don’t get into a situation where you’re actually hurting things to make it look better on the page, you’re fine. My brain wants that soothing feeling as well, and there’s nothing wrong with a little self-soothing there as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Here’s one situation where screenwriting software, from Final Draft to Fade In to Highland, all the legitimate applications, are going to be doing some of this work for you. What they will all do is they will not let you start a scene at the very bottom of a page. They’ll push that scene header to the next page. If there’s a single line on the next page, they’ll pull stuff across, so that you don’t have a little orphan or a widow there happening. Some of that stuff happens automatically.

What Craig is describing is generally the last looks before you’re printing or turning in a script to somebody, is just going through it one last time and seeing are there any really weird breaks that I want to fix here, and seeing if there’s way you could pull stuff, push it down or pull it across, so you don’t get those weirdos there. I used to be much more of a freak about it. I just don’t let it stress me out too much. I will look for situations where that’s actually confusing because it broke that way.

The other thing you don’t appreciate until you actually have to build the software to do it, most of these apps will also break at the sentence, rather than breaking at the end of the line. If dialog has to break across a page, they will create the break, add a period, rather than just having the line taper off, which is just helpful. It just makes it much easier to read.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**Drew:** Not Too Happy writes, “I wrote a script in 2014 that became my calling card for many years. It performed well on The Black List site, found producers, went to all the agencies, got offered to a bunch of different actresses and directors, and spent years almost getting made. Then a few weeks ago, I saw a Deadline announcement that a very famous actor is set to produce and star in a movie with the exact same plot. Normally, that would be an oh well, what are you going to do? But in this case, that actor was sent my script in 2015, along with an official offer of a million dollars to play the lead. This all went through their reps at the time, from reputable producers on my end, above board, blah blah blah. Now, I’m not accusing anyone of knowingly stealing anything, but I can’t help but feeling like I’m being ripped off. My manager offered a, ‘That sucks,’ and my lawyer advises a wait-and-see approach. I’d rather not. Do I have any recourse, and what would you do?”

**John:** Not Too Happy provided some context here which Craig and I can take a look at, but we’re not going to discuss on the show.

**Craig:** It is quite the context. It is certainly relevant. Not Too Happy, I get why you’re not too happy. Your manager actually here is giving you the proper answer, which is that sucks. Your lawyer advising a wait-and-see approach, that’s the lawyer’s version of, “We’re not doing anything.” Here’s why.

Unfortunately – and we’ve talked about this quite a few times on the show – premises, plots, these are not really intellectual property. They fall under the general heading of ideas. Let’s say I write a script, and it’s about two guys who discover that they’ve grown up separately, but actually, turns out that they’re brothers, and in fact, they’re weirdly twins. They’re fraternal twins. But one of them is really short, and one of them is tall and super strong. They don’t look anything alike. Okay. That’s Twins. That’s cool. What I just described, anyone can write a movie like that.

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:58:50].

**Craig:** I could sit down, I could write another movie today with a different title that is the exact same plot, and it is not legally actionable, because unless you get into unique expression in fixed form, there’s no infringement there. If you get a copy of the script that this star is going to be making, and they have taken chunks of your action description or runs of dialog that are non-generic, okay, that’s just straight up copyright infringement. They won’t.

**John:** They won’t.

**Craig:** Unfortunately, this is one of those things where we can’t even say that the person went, “Oh, you know what? I love this idea, but I just don’t like the script. Can somebody else do this idea?” Maybe that’s what happened, which by the way, that’s not stealing either. Is it ethical? No. But is it criminal? No. You can’t steal something that isn’t property. And unfortunately, concepts and ideas and general plot lines, not property.

**John:** We don’t know the backstory on how this actor came to do this project, which is apparently moving forward. My hunch though is someone else had basically the same idea and wrote it up, and the actor said, “Oh yeah, I’ve always wanted to do something that’s in that space,” and said yes to that thing. I suspect that the second writer really did come up with that idea on their own, because it’s a good idea, but it’s also an idea that a lot of people could have, honestly. They wrote their own thing. This star attached themselves to it. If you cannot show that there is a connection between that second writer having exposure to your script and having decided, “I’m going to do this thing that’s basically the same premise,” there’s no case to be made here.

Your manager and your lawyer are saying the right thing. The lawyer saying, “Let’s wait and see,” is also saying you don’t know this thing’s ever even going to happen. If this thing actually goes in production and it clearly looks like there is an infringement case to be made here, that’s the time when she would raise her hand and do something.

**Craig:** There almost certainly won’t be. Let’s also dig in a little bit on Not Too Happy here. When you said, “That actor,” the one that’s now said to produce and star in the movie, “was sent my script in 2015,” so almost a decade ago, “along with an official offer of a million dollars to play the lead,” now, that sounds impressive. But the fact is, actors of a certain level are constantly getting stuff submitted with an official offer of whatever their quote is, or maybe their quote is less than that. They might not have even read it.

Listen. I get offered things where someone says, “Here’s something. We’ve bought a book, and we want you to write this,” and blah blah blah. I’m like, “No, I’m not interested.” I just tell my agent, “It doesn’t sound for me. No, thank you.” Then four years later, someone that I’m really fascinated by starts talking to me about that book or a different book on the same topic, and now suddenly I am interested, because there’s just a different context to it. Did I do something wrong? No. I changed my mind, or I wasn’t in the same place, or something was more attractive to me about this other version of it.

The point being, what I think you need to do is let yourself off the hook of feeling like you’ve been screwed, because that’s a terrible feeling to walk around with. I don’t think you’ve been legally screwed. If you were somewhat ethically screwed with, let’s look at the bright side. You had an idea that other people thought was worth making. Now, what you need to do for the next step, Not Too Happy, is to write a script of an idea that people like, that is so good they want to make that script. That’s ultimately what separates the steadily working writers from folks who are trying to be steadily working writers. Good idea and undeniable execution, as opposed to good idea, decent execution.

It’s not fun to hear. By the way, your script may have been amazing. But in this case, it sounds like, by your own admission, it went to all the agencies, lots of different actresses and directors, and it just ultimately wasn’t compelling in and of itself to get that next level going.

As John says, in this case, I’m looking at this article that talks about this. There are articles like this every five minutes. “So-and-so is attached to produce some blah da blah such and such,” and then it never happens. Who knows?

**John:** Who knows? Let’s try one more question, Drew. Let’s do Will here.

**Drew:** Will writes, “Before Christmas, I reached out to the representation of a character actor I had in mind for my script. Today they got back to me asking about financing. How do I answer them saying I don’t have financing without scaring them off?”

**John:** That’s going to be the first question you’re going to get back. It’s good we bring this up, because any time you’re reaching out to a specific actor, who’d be the character actor who’s exactly perfect for this, the reps are doing their job. They’re saying, “Okay, is there any money here?” The answer is, “There’s no money here. These are the producers that I want to approach. This is my plan going forward.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Look. Character actors really should be asking about this. Basically, what the reps are saying is, are you offering us a job, or are you asking us to attach a name? Will, you’re referring to an independent film. There’s a long, glorious tradition of independent films trying to get financing using the actor’s name to help them get financing. The financing is like, “Do you have an actor attached?” Everybody’s basically in a catch-22.

But attaching yourself to a script ultimately isn’t much of a commitment. No actor’s going to say, “Yes, I’m attaching myself to your unfinanced project, and also I’m clearing the decks for these months, and I will take no other jobs for those months.” That’s not a thing.

How do I answer them? Honestly. You answer them honestly. You say, “We are looking for financing. We honestly feel that we will have a much better chance of getting financing if we can say that this actor is attached and happy to play this part, should all of the other things that need to happen line up, like schedule, payment, etc.” If they’re like, “Yeah, no, we don’t actually want to attach ourselves to this without financing,” what you just heard is “no.” And that’s just life.

**John:** Yeah. Is there a future situation where somehow you’re able to find financing, and you come back to that actor, and suddenly they’re interested? Yes, that could happen too. Don’t bank on it, but that’s possible too. You’ve burned nothing to do this. Being honest is the right approach.

Whoever the reps are for this character actor, this is a chance for them to be more in a lead role. That’s exciting for them. There may be ways that you can spin this as helpful. They may also know people who are, relationships that that actor has with producers or something. There may be some way that it could be helpful. So be honest and open to what they’re saying next.

**Craig:** These reps, we don’t know, they may have been yelled at by their client two weeks earlier, saying, “Stop sending me stuff that isn’t financed and isn’t, quote unquote, ‘real.'” Because here’s the thing. They gotta read all this stuff. They gotta read all of it. They gotta get excited by it. And then they do, and someone’s like, “Great. We actually have no money. We’ll talk to you in a year.” Then they’re like, “Why did I go through all that?”

**John:** The same thing happens for writers, of course, is that you get approached, like, “There’s this book,” blah blah blah. It’s like, that’s fantastic. Some cases I’m willing to engage, and I’ll at least try to set this up someplace. Other places, no. If there’s actually a home for this, then I’ll talk about this, but I’m not going to spend three months of my life trying to get this thing set up.

**Craig:** Or, god forbid, help you get the rights, by saying, “I’ll adapt it.” Hell no.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Get your own rights. Otherwise, what do I need you for? Do you know what I mean? I’ll just go get the rights then.

**John:** Yoink. Cool. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book that I read over the Christmas holidays. For whatever reason, I plow through books during the holidays. I had three this time. One of them I really enjoyed was Going Zero by Anthony McCarten.

So the premise of this is – it’s fiction – there is a joint program between the CIA and a Facebook kind of organization. What they’re trying to do is to be able to track people who fall off the grid, who disappear, and to see how quickly we can find those people, prevent terrorist attacks and other nefarious things. To test this system, they are going to recruit, I believe it’s 10 people, and basically say, “We’re going to tell you one day that you have to go zero. You have to disappear, fall off the grid. If you can stay hidden for 30 days, we’ll give you $3 million.” It’s a good premise. The story’s alternating between the people who are trying to hide and the people who are looking for them. So that’s that cat-and-mouse game.

**Craig:** That’s cool.

**John:** Naturally, there are complications that ensue. I read this as a pure, clean, looking for a good read, and of course, as a person who makes film and television, I’m like, “I know how to adapt this.” But I deliberately did not look up the credits of the person who wrote the book until I was finished. I looked him up. Anthony McCarten is actually a very successful, very produced screenwriter, who I ended up emailing him, and he has his own plans for the book. So I’m excited to see what’s going to happen next to it. But if you are into a fun, breezy thriller to read, I recommend Going Zero by Anthony McCarten. If you read it now, then you can also see what becomes of it. It’s sort of a how would this become a property down the road.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Good recommendation. My One Cool Thing is full-on nepo baby.

**John:** This is your incredibly successful father who gave you your career. That’s what you’re talking about. You are the nepo baby.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m the nepo baby. My father was an incredibly successful social studies teacher in the New York City public school system.

**John:** Without him, you would not have been able to find Chernobyl.

**Craig:** He taught American history, so actually, I didn’t even have that. No. I speak of my youngest child, Jessica Mazin, who is currently attending school at Berklee College of Music in Boston. John’s daughter is also there in school in Boston. She is a budding songwriter and has written some really good songs. She’s written stuff that actually got…

There’s a song she wrote – talk about fandom – that was based on a book series on Wattpad, which I know you’re familiar with, because you also have a daughter. Wattpad’s basically a fanfiction conglomeration site, as far as I can tell. There was this incredibly popular series there. She wrote a song based on characters and things from the series, and it actually got, I don’t know, millions of listens on Spotify. It’s pretty remarkable. She got paid money. She got over a million listens to that. In a nepo daddy way, I also had her sing a cover of a Depeche Mode song for The Last of Us. But I did so because I think she’s awesome.

**John:** She’s really good.

**Craig:** I actually think she’s great. It’s an interesting thing of creating a person who creates things, and then I listen to the things they’ve created, and it’s like this weird echo of creation. She’s written a song called The Devil. She wrote the lyrics and the music, and she performs it, and then her friend Henry Dearborn, who’s an also very talented young guy, produced it and helped add instrumentation and mix and all that. I think it’s really good.

**John:** Yeah, I agree. I listened to it.

**Craig:** That is a really good song. It’s super catchy. I think the lyrics are really intriguing. I’m making Jessica and her song The Devil my One Cool Thing. It is on Spotify. I think you’ll enjoy it. I actually think you’ll like it. It goes down easy, and it’s got a good chorus. She’s just very good. I actually think she’s really, really good.

**John:** We’ll start playing the song now. It’ll become our outro for this episode. One thing I think is so interesting about Spotify is there’s obviously so many criticisms with Spotify, but the fact that Jessica is on Spotify the same way that Beyonce and Taylor Swift are on Spotify, or Girl in Red, it equals things out in ways that are really fascinating and unprecedented, so that’s nice. The fact that people could discover her – my daughter discovers music all the time on Spotify – is exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is. I’m very proud of her. I’m proud of how independent she is from me. She doesn’t do what I do. She doesn’t ask me for help. She doesn’t ask my opinion. What happens is it just appears, and then I listen to it like anyone else. I think maybe that’s what I’m most proud of is that she doesn’t give a sweet damn what I think. I like it. I love it, actually, honestly, anyway.

**John:** Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Woo woo!

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Jessica Mazin. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. Our list of outros is getting a little bit sparse, so we’d love some more outros coming in here. Ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and 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 the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on creators and fandom. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Craig. Continuing our conversation about fans and creators, I have a list here in the Workflowy of different kinds of fandoms. I want to think about what is the relationship between them and their creators and the people who own the underlying material behind this.

I’ll start with Formula One, because last year I went to my first Formula One race. I just didn’t realize what a giant community that is, just the money they mint doing that. It’s interesting, because I feel like with Formula One, they’d already had fans, but then the Netflix show really drew up a whole bunch of new fans, including my daughter, to it. Where’s the center of fandom for it? Is it the individual teams? Is it the organization that puts on the races? Is it the Netflix show? It feels like it’s one of those in-between things, and it’s hard to say who’s in control of it.

**Craig:** It’s a bit scary, actually, how fandom as a business can get larger than the core business. This satellite business that grows around it. It is remarkable. One thing that I think really big artists have become very good at is getting ahead of it. BTS, for instance, that group is also its own fandom industry. They got ahead of it. They control it. They run it. Yes, there are obviously a lot of independents that grow up around it, but they’ve created so much of it. It was baked in from the jump, whereas some of the boy bands that we remember from the ’90s, for instance, were just selling records and selling tour tickets and merch, which we used to call merchandise. Merch, it’s like IP. That was like backstage talk that was slightly cynical, and now it’s front stage talk for everyone.

The business now, I think, is such that creators are starting to get more of a handle on it. I would imagine Taylor Swift at some point woke up one day and said, “Why are other people making more money off of me than me?” Because that actually probably doesn’t feel great. It feels a little exploitative, and yet it’s all about the energy of people that are in love with what you do.

**John:** I’d be curious what Jessica’s relationship is like with her fans at this point, because she has enough people who are listening to her music, who are curious about her next thing that’s going to be happening, that they feel some investment in her. They’re rooting for her. They discovered her early on. Maybe Berklee School of Music is the perfect place for her to learn some of this. How should she be thinking about that? To what degree does she need to start thinking about her mailing list, how she’s communicating with the people who are her truest fans?

**Craig:** I think in a healthy way, like any young artist, she’s mostly concerned about getting better, about creating work, getting better, learning. She’s got some gigs now. Berklee’s amazing about how they facilitate this. She’s going to start getting paid to perform live. But she definitely does have the Generation Z TikTok conversation with people who like what she does.

I have a feeling that fandom is a hockey stick chart, where there’s a little bit, there’s a little bit, and then something happens, and then boom, it just explodes. Even in the article we were discussing where the guy was talking about the fanatics, the fanatics aren’t the first people in. There’s always other people that are in first, and then there’s that moment that happens where there’s a big upswing, and then it becomes a real thing. I think she’s got her head on in the right place. There are obviously a lot of people for whom the fandom is the point. Those people tend to head more off into the influencer zone as opposed to trying to create things.

Taylor Swift is a wonderful example of somebody that clearly was about creating art, and it became enormously popular, and now there is an industry. But she didn’t start for that. I’ve never read an interview with her or seen her talk and thought to myself, oh, this was all calculated. No, she’s just a really good artist that people love.

**John:** Yes. I will note Taylor Swift has her challenges with her community as well, like the Gaylor Swift, the people who are obsessed that she’s actually lesbian and that all these songs have coded meanings in them.

**Craig:** Gaylor Swift.

**John:** How does she both refute that without driving those people away in a way that makes them feel unseen and unheard? It’s so challenging, because she’s an artist trying to tell stories, and people, false stories, they’re going to derive their own meaning from them, which is exactly the point. And yet when there’s a community that is obsessed with picking everything apart to discover a secret, hidden meaning behind things, it’s tough.

**Craig:** It is. It would be fascinating to talk with her about this, although we never will, because she now exists on Mount Olympus. But when we start out as artists, we are looking for the outliers, the people who will love what we do, because most people are going to ignore new things. We’re looking for somebody – ideally somebody with some influence –to love what we do. That one special person, even if they’re just 1% of the people that have been listening, helped spread the word, and now lots of people listen. But then, once it gets really big – and Taylor Swift operates on a massive scale – then what you’re dealing with are outlier problems.

Let’s say 99.9% of your fans are healthy people who just love your music, which I think is probably the case for Taylor. That .1% is the problem. They’re the people who are driving an enormous amount of discourse online, who are agitated, aggressive, angry, possessive, parasocial. Those are also the people that are showing up at your house, trying to climb over the wall, sending you weird messages, stalking. The outlier becomes the problem. I think sometimes in our culture, we mistake the outlier discussion for the mainstream discussion when it’s not.

Gaylor Swift is a fascinating concept. I suspect the great majority of Taylor Swift fans are just enjoying the music and are not at that level of, “I need you to like who I want you to like,” which is just I think part of an outlier behavior.

**John:** One of the other books I read over the holidays was Taylor Lorenz’s book Extremely Online, which tracks creators and fandoms and the rise of internet creator culture. It goes back from vloggers and mommy bloggers and the rise and fall of those. But one of the most fascinating sections is on Vine, because Vine was never meant to be what Vine became. You had these young men, some women, but mostly young men, who became extremely famous for doing little Vines, but also just became famous for being famous, in the way that Paris Hilton’s famously famous for being famous. People need to figure out, how do we monetize that? How do we exploit that? They would have these mall tours where they’d put together these Vine stars to perform, kind of. There was teenage girls who were their fans. They really weren’t part of the community.

It was a strange fit, particularly because the platform that they were on, Vine, did not like them. It did not want them around. That tension between the space you’re in and what you’re trying to do can be a real factor as well. It’s a thing we see again and again with studios and their stars and filmmakers and the need to do press and publicity but also feel constrained by it. It’s tough.

**Craig:** It is. It is. It is an interesting concept, the notion of a platform that you intend the platform to be used one way, it ends up being used another way. OnlyFans comes to mind.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** I don’t know, but I assume that OnlyFans began as a thing of like, hey, this is where people can talk to their fans, because they’re songwriters or they’re visual artists or whatever it is, and this is a way for them to get paid for what they do by the people that love them. From what I understand, John…

**John:** That’s not really where it is right now. I think OnlyFans may have known that sex work was going to be part of it from the start. But there’s wholesome versions of that as well that are just not as successful.

**Craig:** OnlyFans I guess was uncomfortable enough with the fact that it had become a platform for sex work that they said no more sex on OnlyFans, and everyone went, then what the hell are you for? It’s like if McDonald’s was like, “We didn’t mean to sell chicken nuggets. We were hamburgers. No more chicken nuggets,” and everyone lost their minds. Then OnlyFans was like, “Okay, I guess this is what we are now.”

**John:** Credit card processing with anything involving sex work is also incredibly complicated. Let’s wind back to Star Trek. We think of Star Trek was designed to be a delightful show about space travel, wagon to the stars. It did sell toys. It had its own stuff that it was doing, its own merch. But fan culture around Star Trek became its own industry. Suddenly, there’s actors who appeared on one episode now being booked for fan conventions. It’s self-sustained in a way that was important and made it possible ultimately for the renaissance of Star Trek and for the movies and for everything else to have happened after the fact. It was necessary for those fans to exist, and yet they’ve always been in a bit of a strange relationship with the owners and creators of Star Trek.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a pretty famous sketch on Saturday Night Live. William Shatner was the guest host. The sketch was him at a Star Trek convention where people are asking him questions, and he finally just broke down and told them all to get a life. This was very funny to the people in the audience there in the studio, whatever it is, 8A. But a lot of people in the fan community were upset. They were hurt.

Listen. A lot of people – and we’ve mentioned this before – who join these communities struggle to find other communities. Here was somebody basically making fun of them for that specific struggle. They weren’t just there as part of the Trekker community because of how much they love Star Trek. It’s because of also how much they loved and were loved by people who loved Star Trek, as opposed to everywhere else in their lives, where maybe they were being discounted or put down. For the objects, the center of the wheel to behave towards them the way that the jocks at high school behaved had to have been pretty hurtful.

There are certain genres that do tend to appeal more to people who do struggle with, we’ll call non-virtual communities. I think it’s important for people to be aware of that and to be kind, because I have another daughter, who’s on the autism spectrum, and we talk all the time about her special interests and the things that she’s super into and how she finds community with other people that love it, and it’s important to her.

**John:** A community that’s growing very quickly – I’d really be curious what the subculture’s like two or three years from now – is pickleball.

**Craig:** Pickleball.

**John:** The number of people who tried to recruit me to play pickleball is somewhat astonishing. It’s also interesting to watch the fights that are happening in communities about the conversion of normal tennis courts to pickleball courts and, of course, the noise that pickleball creates.

**Craig:** Fricking noise. Yeah, pickleball really came out of nowhere there. Wow. You’re absolutely right. Now, pickleball is an interesting one, because unlike most fandoms we discuss, which are driven by the young, pickleball is driven by the old. Old people – and I don’t say that with any stink on it, because I’m getting there, man. Let’s call them older people. Older people are tough. They’re organized. They have money. They know how systems work.

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** Fans of a new rap star who comes on the scene, fans of that rap star generally aren’t going to be also serving on city councils or know how hearings work, but the pickleball fans do. They’re lawyers. They’re doctors. They’re heads of the PTAs. Now it becomes interesting. Watch out for the pickleball people. They’ll get you.

**John:** It’s good stuff. The last thing I want to distinguish between is there’s fandom, and there’s also collectors. Watching what’s happening right now with Stanley cups. Have you been tracking that at all?

**Craig:** I sure have. I live in Canada now.

**John:** Just the obsession with these collectible cups. It’s great that you love them, but no one needs 30 of them. That’s the difference between, are you entering into it because you want to be part of a community that collects these novelty cups, or are you doing it because you see a market for it, and that sense of really what is the angle. Are you seeing this in a capitalist sense, like the crypto bros were? Crypto bros saw this as a way to make a bunch of money, but also they had that missionary zeal, like we’re going to convert the world over to this thing. We all know how Stanley cup collecting will end up. It’s going to end up with a bunch of these things in landfills.

**Craig:** This is the bust and boom of these things. When I was a kid in high school, my friends and I would go down to Point Pleasant in New Jersey, which is on the shore, and it had a big boardwalk. The boardwalk had rides and restaurants and lots of little stands that would sell things. Every summer, there was a stand that was selling the new hot ticket toy. It was different every summer. The rabidity was consistent. It was just the thing that people were obsessed with that changed.

When I was really young, my sister, like many young girls, was pulled into the Cabbage Patch doll craze. I have the distinct memory of being in a Toys R Us in Brooklyn, watching adults fighting, almost physically, as Toys R Us employees pulled out a large shipping box of Cabbage Patch dolls, because of the insanity of it.

Humans are not good at valuing things. We’re notoriously irrational about it. Forced scarcity or this belief that something is valuable will drive our behavior. I think Bill Maher once famously said if you put a velvet rope in front of a toxic waste dump in LA, people will start lining up. There’s just something wrong with our brains.

I will say – and I’m not boasting here, this is just dumb luck of my brain – I don’t understand collecting. I’ve never collected anything. I don’t see the point of it. It just seems like a pointless accruing. I don’t quite know what it means. But I do recognize I’m alone, or, not alone; I’m rare, I guess.

**John:** I have some cool vintage typewriters, but I have them because they’re individually cool. But I don’t know anything about them. I don’t know anything about the community. It’s not part of anything. I guess what I’m trying to distinguish between is there’s people who collect and enter into a community about those collections, and it does enter into a fandom situation, and then there’s people who are just there to make a buck and don’t actually care about it, which I guess does tie into the whole poser issue of fandom is who are the true believers and who are the follow-ons who are trying to exploit it. It is a good moment for me to remind everybody to buy your Scriptnotes T-shirts on Cotton Bureau, especially the limited editions, which will only be sold for periods of time, because-

**Craig:** So rare.

**John:** When those drop, sometimes it’s only 100 of them that were done.

**Craig:** When they drop. If you’re a real Scriptnotes fan, not a poser, if you’re real. The ultimate posers are the people that sell stuff. Those are the posers. Hasbro.

**John:** There were times out on the picket line where I’d see a Scriptnotes shirt that I’d never seen out in the wild. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, I need to photograph that, because that is a true fan who has that,” or has the Courier Prime shirt, which we only made for a short period of time.

**Craig:** Or maybe that was the brother of a true fan who stopped being a true fan and just left that T-shirt behind when they moved.

**John:** No, I don’t believe it.

**Craig:** I’m so much more cynical.

**John:** When I asked that person who was wearing that very distinct shirt, also, “How’d you get that so crisp?” he’s like, “Oh, I never put it in the dryer. I always hand-dry it.”

**Craig:** Wow. It gives me a little bit of anxiety.

**John:** It’s true fandom for me. Craig, I’ll always be a fan of yours.

**Craig:** Aw, John. I’m a fan of yours too. You know what? Let’s just do this podcast until one of us just drops dead on our desk.

**John:** That’s what we’ll do.

**Craig:** And hopefully during a podcast. It’ll make a great bonus segment.

**John:** You have to hear that thump.

**Craig:** Yeah, just a thump. And then like, “Oh, okay. That’s Scriptnotes for you.”

**John:** That’s why we turn the Zoom off, so you can’t see when one of us drops. You have to listen for it. Thanks, Drew.

**Drew:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Tiffany Problem](https://dmnes.wordpress.com/2020/08/05/the-tiffany-problem/)
* [‘Harry Potter’ TV Series Zeroes In On Premise As Selected Writers Pitch Their Ideas To Max](https://deadline.com/2024/01/harry-potter-tv-series-premise-writers-set-max-1235798159/)
* [WGGB Screenwriting Credits Agreement](https://writersguild.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screenwriting_credits_agreement.pdf)
* [Ig Nobel Prize – “Please stop, I’m Bored”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAnVNXaa5oA)
* [Anatomy of a Fall – Screenplay](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Anatomy-Of-A-Fall-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Podcasters Took Up Her Sister’s Murder Investigation. Then They Turned on Her](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/magazine/murder-podcast-debbie-williamson.html) by Sarah Viren for the New York Times
* [Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution](https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths) by David Chapman
* [Going Zero by Anthony McCarten](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/going-zero-anthony-mccarten?variant=40641169686562)
* [The Devil by Jessica Mazin](https://open.spotify.com/track/6mgwrkmCQMfxRj810BOlvB?si=ed91e62ef4cc43e4) on Spotify
* [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 Jessica Mazin ([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/628standardV2.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/a-very-special-christmas-episode).

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

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

**John:** This is a very special Christmas episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, when I say a Christmas episode, what comes to mind? What are the themes or the plots in a Christmas episode?

**Craig:** There’s somebody who’s coming home to see their family. I’m just going to Hallmark this. She’s been putting her career in front of her personal life. Then there’s that guy that she remembers from high school who’s back, and he’s raising a kid on his own, because his wife died, at 23. She’s just woken up to the possibilities that maybe she doesn’t want to be in the big city anymore, and she’s going to live here in the small town and get together and become a stepmom but still work. She doesn’t give up anything. Actually, she gets everything.

**John:** That’s a Christmas movie. That’s a onetime story that happens. I’m thinking about more a Christmas episode of an existing series.

**Craig:** Oh, a Christmas episode. Everybody does a little Secret Santa. They each give each other gifts. Those gifts prompt memories, which then go [imitates magical sound effect] and you get clips.

**John:** Remember back, like a clip show.

**Craig:** Clip show.

**John:** It’s also the opportunity for actors to sing.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** They reveal that one of them actually can sing really, really well.

**Craig:** Because they hate that.

**John:** They hate that. Never let an actor sing.

**Craig:** They’re like, “Oh, no, don’t make me. Okay.”

**John:** The other thing that’s often a hallmark, I want to say, of these Christmas episodes is A Christmas Carol. There’s some version of a Christmas Carol where they are visited by ghosts of past and present, which is actually the case for us here today, because we are visited by the ghost of producers past in the form of Megana Rao is here.

**Megana Rao:** Hello.

**Craig:** Yay! I know we have producers present.

**John:** Drew Marquardt is here.

**Drew Marquardt:** Hello.

**Craig:** Is a producer’s future going to show up and do that weird, creepy bone hand point to my grave thing?

**John:** We don’t have a producer future yet, but for all we know, one of the listeners is the future Scriptnotes producer.

**Craig:** That’s pretty deep.

**John:** That’s pretty deep.

**Craig:** Everyone, it could be you.

**John:** We’re going to learn some valuable lessons today-

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** … hopefully on this podcast. We are also going to do a bake-off. We’re going to talk about bake-offs, and we’re going to eat delicious cookies, and we’re going to discuss these delicious cookies in front of us.

**Megana:** I cannot wait. I won’t be able to focus on anything else.

**Craig:** It’s a little bit like Lambert, your dog. He just keeps cheating, looking over like, “You’ll pet me now, right?” Megana’s like, “I’m talking, but really-”

**John:** The cookies are right in front of Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Can we give any preview?

**John:** Please describe these cookies for us.

**Craig:** There are three cookies. One appears to be a standard good old-fashioned chocolate chip. The other one might be oatmeal raisin. Hard to tell. It’s a darker brown. Then the third, it’s a brown-black kind of color. It looks like white chocolate chips in there. Maybe macadamia. Who knows? That’s the one that’s tweaking me right now. That’s where my eyeballs keep going.

**Megana:** It looks decadent, like it’s got a good mouth feel.

**Craig:** My understanding is these are from different places.

**John:** These are different bakeries across Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Drew and Megana consulted about the best cookies we could get.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** We will be discussing this bake-off as we talk about writing bake-offs and the scourge of Hollywood.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Are we going to do this wine tasting style where we take a bite, chew, spit it in a bucket.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. You see the bucket in front of you. That bucket is for spitting.

**Craig:** That’s what that’s for?

**John:** Yeah. You wouldn’t actually eat a cookie.

**Craig:** No. God. Yuck.

**Megana:** Over my dead body. You will have to scrape it out of my teeth.

**Craig:** Megana’s going to eat the plate.

**John:** We’re also going to talk about Netflix, who released a bunch of viewership data.

**Craig:** You said that like the Berlin Wall didn’t just come crumbling down. This is insane.

**John:** It is insane. We will get into that. We’re going to answer some listener questions. In our bonus segment of premium members, let’s talk about gifts and the best gifts we remembered getting as a child or afterward. Let’s talk about gifts, because that’s the season.

Now, before we even get started here, Megana is here because we really wanted her to come. I texted her to say, “Hey, Megana, we had to postpone the live show, but would you want to come over on Sunday to record an episode with me and Craig?” Megana texted back, she wrote…

**Megana:** I said, “Oh, I would love to, but I think I’m going to prepone my flight. Any chance Saturday works?”

**Craig:** I’m sorry, did you say prepone?

**Megana:** I did say prepone.

**John:** That was exactly my response.

**Craig:** Now we have a problem.

**John:** I asked her, “Did you just create a brand new word?” Because you know what it means.

**Craig:** Of course. I’m using logic. Actually, in theory, it should work, although it’s a bit like gruntled, like, “Oh, I’m so gruntled to be here.” No one says that. We only have the negative. There’s only the post and not the pre version of poning something. Did you create this?

**John:** She wondered if she created it. But I turned to Drew, who was right there, and so Drew did some research.

**Drew:** Megana did not create it. It is standard in Indian English and South Asian English, but it goes all the way back to Latin.

**Craig:** Things are starting to make sense.

**John:** What is your theory now on prepone?

**Megana:** When I said it and you questioned it, it felt so natural to me. I was like, “This feels like this word has always been a part of me.” It is, because my mom uses the term a lot, as does everyone in my family. I was telling John, it makes sense to me that prepone would be a South Asian English term, because we are so fluid with time and logistics and all of those things that-

**Craig:** Interesting. It almost implies though that there’s more specificity to time. You’re pulling something forward, as opposed to pushing it later? Is that what prepone means?

**Megana:** It is what it means. But people in my family are always like, “Just prepone your flight, or prepone this, and then do that.”

**Craig:** Which means do it earlier?

**Megana:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s actually great. Just like in production, we have a push, which means you’re not going to come in tomorrow at 8:00, you’re going to come in at 9:00. We also have a pull. We’re going to pull your call. But we don’t have that really for standard English or American English. We only have postpone. Prepone makes total sense.

**Megana:** It’s more efficient.

**Craig:** I’m fascinated why it emerged in Southeast Asia as an English word that I don’t think the British use either.

**John:** It traces back to the 16th century, so it was used in British English, but not very commonly. It goes back to Latin praeponere, which means to place in front of.

**Craig:** Prepare.

**John:** Yeah, prepare, or ponere would be to place something someplace.

**Craig:** Pre-place. This is fascinating.

**John:** If a character said that in a script, we would be like, “What is that?” It would jump out.

**Craig:** Word to the wise, Megana. Although I feel like we probably did it right now.

**John:** We did it.

**Megana:** We’re normalizing it.

**Craig:** We’ve normalized prepone.

**John:** Prepone.

**Craig:** I have a feeling I’m going to get a call from my agent a year from now going, “Hey, can we prepone this call?” I’m going to be like, “Oh my god. Oh my god. It’s a buzzword now.”

**Megana:** It’s so funny that it rankles you or you immediately recognize it as strange, because it couldn’t feel more natural to me.

**John:** I’ve never heard it.

**Craig:** I have never heard it before.

**Megana:** Wow.

**Craig:** I just went da-doing. It’s not one of those words that’s offensive. I’m actually annoyed I haven’t had it. I feel deprived.

**John:** Should’ve been there. Something we also should’ve had this entire time was viewership data for the streaming services. This was a huge point of contention in the WGA strike. Of course, the SAG-AFTRA took the same basic formula. But now, this last week, Netflix released just a ton of viewership data on all this stuff. It is the hours viewed for every title original and licensed, watched over 50,000 hours. The premiere date for any Netflix TV series or film was listed on this chart, whether it was available globally. In total, this report, which they released, covers more than 18,000 titles, 99 percent of all viewing on Netflix, and nearly 100 billion hours viewed.

**Craig:** This is an insane thing. I guess question number one is do we believe this?

**John:** That’s fair. We don’t have any sort of independent way of verifying that these are the real numbers. I guess my volley back would be, what would be the reason for fudging the numbers on any given title or multiple titles?

**Craig:** Two potential reasons. One, fudge upwards to look better for Wall Street. Two, fudge downwards on shows where fudging upwards would cost them a lot, because now that the WGA made their deal and got success-based residuals of some sort, and SAG… Is their success-based slightly different than ours?

**John:** It’s exactly the same.

**Craig:** Exactly the same.

**John:** But they get paid more than we do [crosstalk 08:21].

**Craig:** That makes sense, because they have to split it across a cast. That’s my question. The number one title on this list is The Night Agent: Season 1.

**John:** Craig, you’ve seen every episode of The Night Agent. You know exactly what it is. Tell me about The Night Agent. Tell me what you love about it so much.

**Craig:** As you guys know, I love agency-based stuff, agency-based narratives, whether it’s a travel agent, a secret agent. When I have a choice of viewing, and I know, okay, this whole thing takes place during the day, as opposed to this happening at night, I always go to the night. It just looks cooler. That’s what drew me to The Night Agent: Season 1.

**John:** I think you’re getting confused though, because it’s not about an agent that works at night. It’s actually about an agent who helps you find the right night for you. It’s like a real estate agent. What is the right night for me?

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** It’s that fulfillment kind of show.

**Craig:** Buying and selling knights.

**John:** No, it’s not that at all. It’s a Shawn Ryan show. Shawn Ryan, who’s a [crosstalk 09:17] guy. It is his show for Netflix. It is by far the top title.

**Craig:** He’s destroying. Is this a crime kind of thing or a spy thing?

**John:** It’s not. Let me give you the description of it.

**Craig:** It’s like I don’t work in this biz. Literally, so oblivious.

**John:** Here’s a summary that’s on IMDb. Low-level FBI agent Peter Sutherland works in the basement of the White House manning a phone that never rings – until the night it does, propelling him into a conspiracy that leads all the way to the Oval Office.

**Craig:** As they often do.

**John:** As they often do. It has no stars to speak of. The two people I recognized in the cast are Hong Chau and DB Woodside.

**Craig:** They’re both very good.

**John:** Both very good, but there’s no marquee star. That’s not either of those people. It’s based on a book by Matthew Quirk. Seven writers in the room. It seems like a very conventional show that is a giant hit.

**Craig:** It’s a giant hit. That’s my question. You mentioned no huge stars. I don’t think the star thing necessarily would connect to these hours viewed, although individual actors may make deals with Netflix that say, hey, if you hit this number, you got to pay me extra. Doesn’t sound like maybe they have, like you said, a big marquee A-lister, Bradley Cooper kind of guy. When I look at this, I just wonder. I want to believe all of this. I don’t know what to do with 812 million hours viewed exactly. I don’t know what it means.

**John:** One of the challenges with hours viewed is it’s hard for a feature to hit hours viewed, because a feature’s just two hours of film. It’s not 10 hours the way that a limited series would be.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I assume they keep track of people rewatching things, although I’m not sure how you even convert rewatchability into money when there is no advertising. If you rewatch something on a network, you get new ads. That’s money.

**John:** Ultimately, Netflix will have ads, and so that will be useful for them down the road, the rewatching.

**Craig:** What is interesting is what we don’t see on here. There’s a lot of stuff on Netflix, and a lot of hoopla around all sorts of things. Every time a new show comes out, as I like to say, Netflix announces it as the most watched show in the history of mankind. Wednesday is not surprising to see here in the top five.

**John:** We had the creators of that show on here to talk about it.

**Craig:** You, very popular, people talk about all the time. But then there are these… FUBAR: Season 1?

**John:** Don’t know it.

**Craig:** What is FUBAR?

**Drew:** It’s an Arnold Schwarzenegger show.

**Craig:** That actually makes sense. That’s kind of cool.

**John:** Ginny and Georgia I’ve heard about only in the sense that it’s a giant hit on Netflix that I’ve never heard of.

**Craig:** Same. Giant hit on Netflix, and I don’t know what it is. BEEF: Season 1, very good, I would say for that. There are shows that, now that we’re in the thick of an incredibly compressed award season because of the strikes, everything is happening in January and February, basically. The discussion is, okay, there are these shows that are not necessarily widely watched by audiences around the world, but they’re very hot in our circles. Of course, inside Hollywood, that’s where all the voters come from. Then you think, okay, BEEF, everyone talks about BEEF, everyone’s seen BEEF here, but is it a hit anywhere else? Answer: yes.

**John:** Yes, it is.

**Craig:** Yes, it is.

**John:** It’s important to note that almost all these titles, they’re showing the global hours viewed. Some of these shows may not be huge hits in the US, but they are big hits overseas. The third title listed on here is The Glory, which is a Korean show. There’s actually quite a few Asian shows that show up pretty high. There’s Spanish shows that show up pretty high.

**Craig:** La Reina del Sur. Physical: 100: Season 1, that looks Korean as well. Physical: 100: Season 1 has two colons in it, Physical, colon, 100, colon, Season 1. I’m into that.

**John:** What will be the actual impact of Netflix deciding to release this? Will it pressure the other companies to do similarly?

**Craig:** Not necessarily. Probably, if I had to guess, I would say the opposite, that Netflix is the most widely watched streaming service. If I’m Apple, I would probably destroy small countries before I would agree to put out hours viewed, because every indication is they’re not viewed anywhere near this level. Other companies may not have this hours viewed data the way that Netflix does. For instance, Max, or HBO, is still linear and streaming. Do you get the hours viewed like they do? Because that data doesn’t come in. When grandma watches it over her satellite dish, it doesn’t collect the data the way it does on a streaming service. Disney Plus I think might, if they felt they could compete with these numbers. I think Netflix is kind of smart, because they’re like, “You guys want to see numbers? We’ll show you numbers. Now you. Now you do it.” I don’t know if we’re going to see any of these anytime soon from anyone.

**John:** I guess the counter-argument to that is you can always divide the hours viewed by the actual number of subscribers you have. That’s the reason why Paramount Plus, it’s not going to have 812 million hours viewed, but based on the number of subscribers, they could show what are the hits for it.

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s the subscribers that matter. That’s the problem. Paramount’s like, “Our subscribers watch more per subscriber than Netflix subscribers do.” It doesn’t matter, because if you have one subscriber, you’re dead, no matter how much that guy watches. I like the idea of one crazy Paramount Plus subscriber who’s just 24/7.

**Megana:** It’s me.

**Craig:** It’s you?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It you.

**John:** Megana, some insights. Are there shows on here that you’re aware of that we’re not aware of?

**Megana:** Some of these shows like The Night Agent and FUBAR my parents were all over, so I was aware of the popularity of those shows. Something I was surprised about though looking at this is very few comedies.

**Craig:** Comedies are not global. That’s the problem. That’s why comedies in motion pictures were always questionable investments and always got squeezed on budgets, because it was just hard to make back anything anywhere else, because some comedy just doesn’t travel. But is there anything on here that you’re surprised to see how low it is?

**Megana:** We only have two sheets of this, and scrolling through this whole report, it’s just endless.

**John:** It is endless. This is also January through July 2023. Stuff that’s more recent we wouldn’t actually show here. I’m always happy to see things like Never Have I Ever: Season 4 showing up. It’s on the second page, but it’s still pretty high up there. It’s a comedy in its final season. You think about like, the nice thing about multiple-season shows is, was that last season worth it for us to make, and this seems like yes, it was worth it to make that last season.

**Megana:** A huge win for Aline with Your Place Or Mine right below that.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. In what’s called the national competition, the Olympics level competition, Korea with the gold. There is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 Korean series listed here. That’s impressive.

**Megana:** I also listened to the media call that they did with this. One point that they made was that Korean series have 40 to 50 episodes. If you are watching and you’re engaged, that’s-

**Craig:** I see.

**Megana:** … a lot more hours then.

**Craig:** It’s going to rack up. Korea, it’s not a massively populated country. It’s nothing like India, for instance. Where’s India on this list? That’s what I want to know.

**Megana:** I’m not seeing a ton of-

**Craig:** I’m confused.

**Megana:** … localized Indian things.

**Craig:** There’s Netflix India. It’s not like they break it out into a different service.

**Megana:** There definitely is, and they have really great localized content for India. I don’t know. I feel like most people’s viewing patterns in India, the types of shows that they’re watching, I don’t know that everybody’s watching Netflix stuff.

**Craig:** It’s not necessarily the biggest thing there.

**Megana:** I feel like culturally, they are still going to the movies a lot.

**Craig:** Thank you, India. Somebody has to go to the movies.

**John:** We’ll see in the future what happens here. I should say that the WGA formula, which became the SAG-AFTRA formula, is that if at least 20% of the streaming platform’s US users consume a new original film or TV series within its first 90 days, that kicks off the payment, and then the bell rings again in future 90-day installments. If a scripted series shows up here in this first page or two, I think it’s a very likely chance that it’s going to kick off one of these residual payments.

**Craig:** Do we happen to know what the domestic viewership base for Netflix is?

**John:** I don’t.

**Craig:** How do we know that we’ve hit 20%?

**John:** We know how many subscribers there are.

**Craig:** That’s what I meant.

**John:** We do. I don’t know it off the top of my head.

**Craig:** You just don’t know, I see.

**John:** We do know it.

**Craig:** We do.

**John:** That’s a public figure they-

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** … are proud to boast about. Cool. We’ve got some follow-up, Drew.

**Drew:** In Episode 621, John said that one of his goals for the year was learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, which led to a whole discussion about words like present versus present, which Craig called homonyms. Andrew wrote in with a follow-up, wrote, “Homonyms are the intersection of words that sound the same and words that look the same. The term refers to both homophones and homographs, but in combination. Examples would be ring/ring or tire/tire. What you described as a homonym is, in fact, a better example of a homograph. That’s two words that are spelled or graphed the same but have different pronunciations and different meanings. Present/present is a great example of a homograph, so words that look the same on the page but sound different when spoken aloud.”

**Craig:** The difference between a homograph and a homonym, if I understand what he’s saying, is that homonyms sound exactly the same when spoken, they just mean different things?

**Drew:** Yes.

**Craig:** Whereas homographs look the same, spelled the same, but pronounced differently?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Thank you. You know what? I don’t recall learning about homographs. I got to be honest with you. That was not something we were taught.

**John:** No, I think we were just told homonyms.

**Craig:** Homonyms.

**John:** Which is only supposed to be the combination of the two.

**Craig:** They’ve carved off a chunk of what we were taught were homonyms and reassigned them to homographs, which is a much better word. I agree with that.

**John:** Homophone are things that just sound the same but would be spelled very differently, so eight and ate, or bear like the animal and bare like without clothes. If you have bear with me, that’s an example of a word. Bear can be a homonym in that sense too, where bear the animal and bear with me are the same.

**Craig:** Right, but a homograph would be like resume and resume.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Got it. I also have some additional follow-up I should mention-

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** … that Melissa wanted to add.

**John:** I was not surprised that we have additional follow-up to the last follow-up from Melissa.

**Craig:** This was not about cooking. Now it’s about biopic. She said, accusingly, “You said that,” there was another word I use with bio, that we don’t say bai-AH. She said, “But you do say biography. If you say biography, it’s reasonable that somebody might think you would say biopic [bai-AH-pik].” I think that’s fair. That’s a fair point. I still think if you say bai-AH-pik, you’re stupid. I want to be on record with that. It’s not as annoying as the past participle of cast being casted instead of cast. When people say casted, I don’t know what to do. I’m on a crusade. We’re going to get rid of it.

**John:** Casted.

**Craig:** We have to stop people saying casted. We have to. Why do they do this?

**John:** Because they do. You’ll never win that.

**Craig:** I’m not going to win.

**John:** You’re not going to win.

**Craig:** I’m punching against the ocean, aren’t I?

**John:** You are. You absolutely are. English I think is generally drifting towards just standardized E-D endings for everything. I think ESL learners will always put the E-D on because the instinct is there to do it.

**Craig:** ESL people are going to learn the proper way because they’re being taught. It’s the non-ESL people, it’s the native speakers of English, who just don’t care. They’re ruining our precious language.

**John:** During Ramadan, we fasted. During the storm, we lasted through the night.

**Craig:** Of course, of course.

**John:** The oil lasted through 40 days and 40 nights.

**Craig:** It turns out, unfortunately, cast doesn’t work that way. I don’t know. It’s sort of like “I putted this here.” No, you did not. You put it there.

**Megana:** But “putted this here” is so cute. I’m going to start saying that.

**Craig:** I putted this here.

**John:** It’s a very common child error.

**Craig:** Mommy, did I putted it in the right place? It is cute, isn’t it? Casted is not cute. Casted is repulsing.

**John:** Putteded, they’ll recognize that something is wrong, and so they’ll put an extra E-D on it again.

**Craig:** Putteded.

**John:** I putteded.

**Craig:** Putteded. Oh, is putted wrong? Oh, I puttededededed it. Lambert is scratching the couch in protest against casted. Correct.

**John:** We have more follow-up on coverage.

**Drew:** We talked about AI script coverage. R wrote in. R says, “I interned this past summer at an independent production company that has several movies on a major streamer. My main job was script coverage, but they would have me and other interns do random tasks during my time with them. One was training ChatGPT to provide script coverage. I asked to switch assignments after a day, because it felt like I was actively helping AI to replace me. To make matters worse, I wasn’t getting paid for it. The internship was for school credit. I do want to acknowledge that maybe they weren’t trying to replace script readers, but still, script coverage is a great way for people like me, fresh out of school, to gain experience and meet new people, and I’d hate to see that go away. Not that you guys necessarily need confirmation that companies are doing this, but hopefully this anecdote provides further insight into how other companies are using AI.”

**John:** I have some follow-up on this. I was emailing back and forth with a woman who works in script coverage. She’s a union script reader. She was talking about how in the upcoming IATSE negotiations, script coverage is paneled under IATSE, that is going to be a thing they want to talk about is-

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** … making sure that professional script analysts are in charge of the process of doing script coverage. If these tools are used, they need to have the ability to be the people using those tools. I used to do coverage. A lot of us have done coverage. Writing a synopsis is horrible. It’s the worst part of that job. If you could use a tool that would help you get through that, and you could verify that it was correct, great. It’s the analysis that I’m actually most concerned about. That’s the part that we need to make sure stays in the hands of actual human beings with taste.

**Megana:** Also, when you’re doing script coverage, a huge part of it is you being able to tell your boss, “This was good.” That just can’t be replaced.

**Craig:** That’s what they don’t know, because if you think about it, let’s say the boss is being paid a lot of money to decide what should be made, meaning what should we spend tens of millions of dollars on. They are turning to somebody who is either an intern or being paid $60,000 to tell them what they should think. The system already doesn’t make sense in that regard, so you can see how, where it’s at least exploitive, those people would be like, “I already am cheating. I’m already asking somebody else to tell me what I’m being paid to know. Maybe I’ll just have the computer tell me what I should know.” I could see dumbasses doing that.

**John:** Craig, I think what you’re describing is it’s almost like they’ve outsourced the job of reading stuff to a low-paid person. If it’s a free person, it’s not that different, so it’s like a black box of it all.

**Craig:** I remember when I came to Hollywood, I was shocked, honestly. I thought that the whole point of being an executive was you were being paid for your taste and your analysis, and then I found out, no, you’re not.

**John:** You’re being paid for your ability to communicate to the other creatives and communicate up effectively and to manage your superiors.

**Craig:** Sure, but then it’s almost like show business is show business. None of it’s real. I’m still struggling with that to this day.

**John:** Some more follow-up from Ward here.

**Drew:** Ward writes, “I wanted to thank Craig for emphasizing that even though we all know California will go for Biden, he’s still planning to vote. What people sometimes forget is that local elections can be very, very tight, sometimes on the order of tens of votes or fewer. Even in states like California, those down-ballot choices don’t always go the way that you might expect. That one vote could really end up making a difference. Your vote really does matter.”

**Craig:** That is a fact. Facts.

**John:** Facts and evidence.

**Craig:** Facts.

**John:** We’ve actually had episodes where we had… Beth Schacter was on. We had Ashley Nicole Black on to just talk through voting, elections, and local issues, just to make sure we actually understood about them. We agree. Fully agree.

On to a marquee segment here. This last week, I got a call from my agents about a project that was out looking for a writer, looking for a showrunner. It’s a TV thing. It’s based on this giant IP that everyone’s heard of, and now they want to make it into a series.

**Craig:** Is it the toilet?

**John:** No, it’s based on a very famous book series that has become a movie series that everyone knows and loves.

**Craig:** I see. We used to use the slinky.

**John:** Slinky, yeah.

**Craig:** Now I’m just down to the toilet.

**John:** The toilet.

**Megana:** That’s actually already in development.

**Craig:** It is?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is the awareness. Toilet awareness is through the roof.

**John:** Almost everybody on earth knows about toilets.

**Craig:** Knows about toilet. But this is not toilet.

**John:** This is not toilet.

**Craig:** This is quite a bit better.

**John:** This is already a hugely popular, successful franchise that they now want to make into a series.

**Craig:** Based on books, made movies.

**John:** Made into a film series.

**Craig:** Now making a TV series.

**John:** [Indiscernible 00:26:24].

**Craig:** I think we know what it is.

**John:** Although there’s a couple of choices that could-

**Craig:** I think we know what it is.

**John:** It wasn’t The Hunger Games.

**Craig:** And it’s not toilet, so what’s left?

**John:** I passed on this immediately, because I did not want to be a part of it. I asked them, what is the process, how are they going to pick the person to be the showrunner. This was the game plan. They’re not going out to any writer exclusively. They’re going out to a few select writers, but no one’s exclusive. There will be a series of meetings going up the ladder, pitching a vision, so about five meetings going up the ladder.

**Craig:** Five?

**John:** Five meetings.

**Craig:** The ladder’s not that… I know where this is, and there’s not that many rungs on the ladder, so I’m very confused. Do you start with the receptionist?

**John:** Then they’ll get down to four or five writers who they’ll have write pilots. Then they’ll pick the favorite of those pilots.

**Craig:** They’ll pay them.

**John:** Yes, they will pay them. They will pay them to write pilots. They’ll pick their favorite of these pilot scripts. They see this as a 10-year commitment.

**Craig:** I would agree with them that it’s a 10-year commitment. That makes sense.

**John:** Let’s talk about the pros and cons of this. I think this is a doomed process, because no person who actually knows how to run a show will agree to go through that process in my perspective. I don’t think they’re going to be agreeing to compete with other experienced showrunners who would go through this.

**Craig:** Counterpoint.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Ego. One of the things that a lot of writers have is a belief – and I kind of feel like I fall into this category – that I know what to do, I know the answer to this. They will see that my way is correct. I think there is a little bit of hubris involved here, necessary hubris. How else could you even think to say, “Hey, I’ve thought a bunch of things and written them down. Spend a lot of money to make people see it.” Look. The best showrunners in the business I think generally are probably already running shows. The timing of having somebody roll off something that’s brilliant and then rolling onto something like this is tricky. You’re not going to get people like Vince Gilligan, the best showrunner in the business, because he only does Vince Gilligan stuff, right? There is some trickiness there. I think they will get some good people, but the thing I’m really catching on is, getting people to write pilots like that, only to be… Although isn’t that what development is? You write a pilot, and then they decide if you’re going to do it or not.

**John:** Yeah, but it feels so different to know that in the classic broadcast model, your pilots can be against all the other pilots at that network.

**Craig:** But not pilots for the same show.

**John:** Also, that feeling like, is this thing that I’m writing in my script going to end up in that other person’s script, because we’re all writing the same thing based on this. That’s what’s so tough here.

**Craig:** In support of your concern, there is something that gets a little bit weird in the water when you know you’re not competing against yourself when you’re writing, when you’re being paid to write, that there’s somebody else writing something. It almost starts to maybe corrupt your own process. You start to worry, like, “I think what would make them choose mine over that one would be if I did this or that or avoided this or that. You could start to get a lot of, as Lindsay Doran says, unsharpened pencils, just blunted, fear-based, appeal to the down the middle committee kind of vibe. Hard to say. Because of the size of it, I understand, and because of the 10-year commitment, I understand. But I don’t know. That’s a new one on me.

**Megana:** The precedent feels pretty scary.

**John:** It does.

**Megana:** To be competing and auditioning like that, because I imagine the people they’re going out to, if you had a conversation about this, are very tenured, very experienced showrunners. To continue to have to audition like that feels…

**Craig:** Maybe that’s what going to happen is that they’re going to find out just how many fish they catch with this particular trawling net, because if they’re not getting the quantity and quality of writers they want to participate in this particular winnowing Hunger Games process – it’s not Hunger Games.

**John:** It’s not Hunger Games.

**Craig:** Then they’re going to have to revise it.

**John:** We’ll see what happens here. I’m going to keep an eye on what happens with that project.

**Craig:** Ten years to work on toilet.

**John:** That’s a long time on toilet. During the strike, I went to this big event at Universal where members were bringing baked goods and competing to see whose baked goods were the best. I was one of the judges for that. It was fun. It was really crowded. Andrea Ciannavei, who came up with the idea, she gave this great speech during the time about what bake-offs are like, why they’re a scourge on Hollywood. I asked her if I could get her speech and we could draft off of that for a little bit while we do our own bake-off competition. We have three delicious cookies in front of us that Drew has brought in. I thought we would start with one of them.

**Craig:** Megana, you already ate them. There’s nothing left.

**John:** You have crumbs on-

**Megana:** Drew, where did you put the cookies?

**John:** Drew, why don’t you pick the first cookie that we’re going to taste? We’ll describe it and give it an assessment.

**Drew:** The first cookie we’re going to taste is the OG cookie. It’s the OG chocolate chip cookie on the far left there.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** This is the original chocolate chip cookie. I’m looking at this. It’s a classic chocolate chip cookie. It’s a lot of chocolate in here. It looks like chocolate chunks. It’s not greasy. It’s got an amazing smell. Craig, what’s your first instinct here?

**Craig:** It’s a little bit intimidating how much of a cookie sommelier you are. It’s flat, and there’s too much chocolate in it. I’m just looking at it. For me, there’s too much chocolate. What I do like is that there’s salt on the top. That makes everything better. It’s a chewy cookie. I can tell by squeezing it. I’m just concerned about the quantity of chocolate in this thing. Shall we?

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Craig:** Oh, Megana, do you have any thoughts?

**Megana:** No. I’m excited by the salt, and it has a nice crunchy layer on top of the chewiness.

**Craig:** That’s pretty much what I thought.

**John:** It’s nice and crispy on the outside, and it is chewy on the inside. It’s a solid chocolate chip cookie. I agree with Craig that it’s basically a chocolate delivery mechanism.

**Drew:** Yeah, it’s chocolate dominant.

**Craig:** It’s almost like a thin cookie-crust-covered brownie. Now, I recognize that they’ve pulled a trick here. They smashed a bunch of chips down, then put another little bit of cookie dough, then put the cookie. I don’t know if I’m the only one that has that.

**John:** I wonder if they’re maybe not chips but actually some sort of chunky chunks kind of situation.

**Craig:** Yeah, like a ganache almost. Confession. People get upset with me when I say this and so many things. I don’t love chocolate. Look at Megana. Megana, literally, I wish I could’ve taken a picture, and we could’ve put it in the show notes. The look of disgust on her, just utter contempt. I’ve never actually seen her look like that.

**Megana:** You know what it was? It was a moment where I was like, I thought that we were very close.

**Craig:** You’re shooketh, because it’s like, I don’t even know who you are anymore.

**Megana:** Exactly. It was a look of betrayal.

**Craig:** I am sorry. I want to assure you that I am who you know. But this is how we keep things spicy, by just occasionally going, “Oh, by the way, I have a kink.” My kink is not loving chocolate. I don’t hate it. I just don’t love it.

**John:** Drew, what’s your first read on this cookie?

**Drew:** A lot of chocolate. My gut is that it would be better if it was warm, but I also feel like we’re doing ourselves a disservice by not having them warm, because all cookies are good when they’re warm.

**Craig:** That’s fair.

**John:** Let’s talk about some bake-offs here, because I described-

**Craig:** By the way, you just assumed Megana loved it.

**John:** Am I wrong?

**Megana:** He knows me so well. I did love it. As a vehicle for chocolate, I loved it. The salt did a lot of work for it.

**John:** Yeah, it did.

**Megana:** I will say that.

**Craig:** Always good with cookies. I agree.

**John:** Bake-offs in general. I described that one TV project as a bake-off, but that’s really the exception where you’re going after these giant, established showrunners. Most bake-offs are really targeting writers who are newer to the industry. Producers are asking you to come in and pitch your take on the piece of IP that they own, or open writing assignment, and they sit back and pick the one that they like best. You’re doing this tremendous amount of work for free for them. It is both really tempting and kind of natural to approach, because it’s good practice for how to find a take on something, but you become free research and development for these projects. Oftentimes, they pick none of the above. It’s like, “Oh, there’s nothing here to make.”

**Craig:** Sometimes the winner is no one. It’s a function in part of anxiety. It’s also a function in part of just lack of trust. But having been on the other side of not writing bake-offs, but employment bake-offs, basically interviews, so we have to interview a lot of people to come and work on our show. Sometimes I’ll talk to three or four or five different, say, cinematographers. They will bring different levels. Sometimes they just talk, and sometimes they put together mood boards. Everybody has a different thing.

For me at least, I wish I could say that that process led to certainty. It doesn’t. You’re guessing before they show up, and then you’re guessing after they show up, because you realize what you’re getting is not necessarily the work that will be done. They’re not shooting something for you right now, in the case of cinematographers. Also, you’re getting their interview self. You’re just hoping, and you’re going on your gut. It’s a process designed to create certainty where certainty cannot exist and doesn’t exist, which is why bake-offs, a little bit like pretty privilege, I think bake-offs lead to room privilege. People that are good in rooms, fun, easygoing, seem like they’d be a great hang, those people have privilege in bake-offs.

**John:** In theory, you are developing the idea, and you’re coming in there, and people are responding to your idea. But they’re really responding to your charisma, your ability to sell yourself as the person. They can have confidence that you are the person who can deliver this thing. When we talk about bake-offs, we really should think about actors auditioning are really in a very similar situation too. There is that scourge where actors will go in and audition and come back in and get callbacks, but there are some rules about how many times you can call an actor back without paying them.

**Craig:** There are also now rules about how many pages they can be. We’ve been dealing with that now as we go through our audition process for certain roles. Coming out of the SAG strike, we now have a limitation on the amount of pages we can send for reads. You can’t just dump 12 pages on them, not that we were. But I think it’s five maybe total, I think, something like that, which is fair.

**John:** Which is fair.

**Craig:** By the way, same deal with actor auditions. Actor auditions, at least there’s time where somebody, you just go, “There it is. That’s it. That’s our person. Done.” I saw Bella Ramsey’s audition. I was like, “We’re done. It’s over.” You’re hoping for that. You will never get that certainty from writing bake-offs. It’s not possible.

**John:** When Bella Ramsey came in to do that thing, you saw, “Oh, that’s it.” She created that moment. It happened. A writer coming in in that bake-off situation, that’s never going to happen.

**Craig:** No, it’s not possible, given what we do, and it’s not really possible for, I think, any other job except for acting.

**Megana:** Because such a huge part of it is the revision process. That’s not something that every writer is capable of or that you would be able to know from the first pitch that they have about that project.

**John:** Craig was able to see Bella doing a version of a scene that would actually be in a thing. But if I’m going in to pitch a thing, I’m pitching a vision, but that’s not the script. They’re going to hire me, and then three months later, I’m going to deliver this script, and who knows?

**Craig:** You’re not able to show them anything like the final product, nor are you able to show them, like Megana says, how you would participate in the process of developing that. All you can show them is, hey, does this person make my skin crawl? Do they seem defensive? Are they imaginative? Do we ping-pong? Do we converse? Is there a dialogue, or is this a monologue? The bake-off process, to me, that’s the problem with it. There are some incredible writers who, I think if they were coming up now, wouldn’t even get a shot, because they don’t have, what would you call it, charisma privilege.

**John:** Let’s try our second cookie here. Drew, describe this cookie for us.

**Drew:** This is an oatmeal raisin cookie.

**Craig:** Now we’re talking.

**Drew:** It’s a brown exterior with raisins pretty solidly throughout, it looks like.

**John:** I would say softer on the outside. It’s definitely soft on the inside. Very cinnamony.

**Craig:** It smells good.

**John:** It does seem good. A lot of people just despise cinnamon raisin cookies for not being chocolate chip cookies.

**Craig:** Yeah, but that’s why I love them. This is the kind of thing I love. Megana’s so upset. She’s like, “There’s no chocolate in it.”

**Megana:** I keep looking. No, I’m enjoying it. Texturally, it’s good and interesting, because I feel like oatmeal raisin sometimes have too much texture, too much oatmeal. This is nice and gooey.

**John:** I’m not getting much oat here at all in terms of actual… I’m not a fan of this cookie. It feels a little gummy and under-baked to me.

**Drew:** It’s a little wet.

**Craig:** I love it. I’ll tell you why. Because this is my flavor profile. I love, I’m going to say, the fall spice kind of vibe. I love raisins in cookies. Everybody else is like, “What’s wrong with you?” I made a joke about it in the first season of The Last of Us. Still, I love it anyway. I also like how much you can take a molasses, brown-sugar-forward kind of vibe in this, which makes me so much happier. I ate my whole piece.

**Megana:** It was enjoyable. I just don’t think you should call it a cookie.

**John:** What would you call this then?

**Craig:** What would you call it? An abomination?

**Megana:** It was just like a breakfast item, like a breakfast pastry.

**Craig:** A flat, disc-like coffee cake?

**John:** If you take one of those Quaker Oat bars and just soften it, microwave it, it could be-

**Craig:** That sounds great. I’d eat that. This is really turning into a real Jets versus Sharks situation. I feel like we’re star-crossed lovers.

**John:** Drew, texture-wise?

**Drew:** Texture-wise, wet. But I think Craig hit the nail on the head with that molasses, and I like that gingerbread kind of flavor to it.

**John:** Let’s talk about you’re approached as a writer in a bake-off situation. Generally, your agent, your manager, somebody’s coming to you for the situation. Have you been hit by these yet, Megana?

**Megana:** Thankfully, I have not. I have not.

**John:** You’ve had to go in and meet on rooms. You’re just coming off your second room. But you haven’t had to go out and pitch on a job. Back when you were still a producer, there were projects you were going out to meet on, but were you the only person they were going out to?

**Megana:** I was going out to meet mostly on projects that I was pitching and developing, so luckily, I have not had this.

**Craig:** You haven’t had the bake-off experience.

**Megana:** Exactly.

**John:** Here’s the information you want to know from your reps before you would consider taking off for one of these things. How many writers are in the mix? You ask the question, and they need to tell you the answer. That’s in the contract, because they have to do that. You need to figure out how invested is the studio in this. Is it a priority for the bosses, or do they even know that it exists? How many people need to say yes before you get the job? One of the things I did like about this thing that the agency came to me with is they could talk through the process. They’ve asked the questions. They knew what the process was going to be.

How long has this been assignment been around, because if things have been around, floating for a long time, that’s a really bad sign, that they’ve never been able to crack it. Do they actually have the rights. I’ve heard so many horror stories where, “Oh, we’re trying to do this thing. Oh, we haven’t gotten the rights yet, but don’t worry, we’ll get the rights to this eventually.”

**Craig:** “If you tell us how to make it something good, then we’ll tell the people.” Then I’m like, “What do I need you for? I’ll go talk to them then.” Now they’re just laundering your work into IP that they would control. It doesn’t make any sense. But there are some people in Hollywood that just are not scrupulous.

**John:** Funny that way.

**Craig:** Shocker.

**John:** Shocker. The last red flag that Andrea has here, which I think is such a good point, is that if you hear something like, “The director has a preferred writer, but we’re exploring our options.”

**Craig:** You’re dead.

**John:** Run away.

**Craig:** Dead. You’re dead.

**John:** Even if you get the job, you won’t want to have that job, because you’re not the person the director wanted to work with.

**Megana:** I’ve also heard experiences from friends who have gone on open writing assignment pitches and things. It feels like an open book test, but some people have had after-hour sessions with the teachers or something, where some friends will know exactly what that executive wants, and they just want you to repeat that back to them from a different body. It’s like, okay, so not every writer has this information.

**Craig:** It’s not a healthy or sane or principled process. It just doesn’t really make sense to me. In the case of a massive project, where a studio has invested a billion dollars and wants to make 10 billion dollars, I understand to an extent. But the process is very formalized. They come to you, and they say, “There’s going to be five steps,” and da da, bah, bah, bah. When you get what we’ll call the standard bake-off, I just feel like that is the first indication that nobody cares and that this is kind of junky, because why are they doing it like this? It means they don’t really know what they want, and they probably don’t have money for bigger writers. It’s all sketch at that point.

**John:** The alternative would be just go to a writer who has experience making movies and you know can deliver a script for you.

**Craig:** Exactly. If you’re like, “Okay, I bought this neo-noir book. I now have some IP,” why wouldn’t I call Scott Frank first? Of course I would, unless I can’t afford it. Now that means I don’t have the vote of confidence from the studio, and I’m just begging and looking. Then I need to seat seven people, because I don’t know. Problematic.

**John:** Let’s take a look at our final cookie here. Drew, talk us through this.

**Drew:** This final cookie is a dark chocolate peppermint chip.

**Megana:** Are you kidding? You don’t like mint in your…

**Craig:** I really thought it was going to be white chocolate, which I love, because I don’t like chocolate. I’m basically the anti-cookie person. It’s mint chocolate chip?

**Drew:** I don’t know. It’s peppermint.

**Craig:** Peppermint.

**John:** Those look like peppermint pieces, I think. It’s a smashed-up candy cane.

**Craig:** A smashed-up candy cane in a cookie. Let’s just say also, this thing is massive.

**John:** It looks more like a rounded brownie than a cookie.

**Craig:** It’s a mound.

**John:** You can smell the mint in it.

**Craig:** It also just looks so chocolatey to me. That’s foul. This is terrible. It’s toothpaste. I’m eating toothpaste. Megana’s like, “I’ll take yours.”

**John:** It really is a brownie to me.

**Craig:** It’s gritty.

**John:** If it weren’t for the rounded shape, I would say this is a brownie. Megana?

**Megana:** If I was closing my eyes, I would think that this was a brownie.

**John:** I’m not a fan of candy cane kind of things, but Drew, what are you thinking?

**Drew:** I’m not either a big fan of the candy cane. It has a similar amount of chocolate as the first cookie, as the chocolate chip, where it’s everywhere.

**John:** Everywhere!

**Craig:** I actually like mint chocolate chip ice cream. It’s when they put mint and chocolate together, like those Andes after-dinner, I’m like, “Gross,” because I don’t like chocolate that much. Now, it just tastes like disgusting toothpaste. I hated it. Apologize to the bakery. Literally, I’m choking.

**Megana:** Is this a new thing? I don’t remember you not liking chocolate.

**Craig:** No. Even as a kid, I was always confused why let’s say after baseball practice, the team goes to get ice cream, and everyone’s like, “I want chocolate!” Everyone was in pure agreement, chocolate ice cream. I’m like, “I would like vanilla, please.” I love vanilla. It’s amazing. It’s just never been my thing. It’s not for me, dog.

**John:** Now we’ve tasted the three cookies. Should we vote first, or should we reveal where these cookies are from?

**Craig:** Good question.

**Drew:** Let’s vote first.

**John:** Let’s vote first. I would say cookie number 1 was my choice of the three cookies.

**Megana:** I would also say number 1.

**John:** Yeah, which is a very classic chocolate chip.

**Craig:** Number 2.

**John:** Number 2, of course.

**Drew:** I would also vote number 2.

**Megana:** Drew!

**John:** Oh my god, tie.

**Craig:** Whoa. I did not see-

**John:** I did not see that-

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Didn’t see it coming.

**Craig:** Wow. That is gasps from the audience. Okay, so now-

**John:** Final two contestants here. I guess it gets kicked up to the boss, the studio head, to decide between these last two contenders.

**Craig:** Right, and you know they have just a D20 that they’re rolling.

**John:** But I think you actually can pull this back to what we’re talking about with bake-offs, is that tasty is subjective.

**Craig:** Sure is.

**John:** You may have delivered the pitch that wins over that executive, but their boss may not have the same taste, and you’re screwed.

**Craig:** Also, I remember seeing on a producer’s table, when very young… I was starting out. I was coming in and pitching on something. The system brought me into the meeting room, the office. But he was on the phone. He would be right in. Right there on this desk was a list of names. Obviously, I was one of them. Next to each thing, it said a credit, and then there were dollar signs, like Yelp.

**John:** So exciting.

**Craig:** It was like one, two, three, four, because part of it is how much do you like this person, because they’re way more expensive than this one. If cookie number 1 costs half as much as cookie number 2, cookie number 1 will probably get the job.

**John:** Drew, it’s now time to reveal the cookies that were…

**Drew:** In third place-

**John:** In third place.

**Drew:** The dark chocolate peppermint cookie is from Levain Bakery.

**Craig:** World famous.

**John:** Right up the street, yeah, world famous.

**Craig:** They do have some lovely things there. I can’t hang this on them. They probably have an amazing oatmeal raisin cookie that I would love to try.

**John:** I would say all the cookies I’ve gotten from Levain have that quality of it feels like a giant ice cream scoop was used, and it never quite all the way baked down. That’s their way of doing cookies.

**Craig:** They are kind of doorstops.

**Drew:** Is that too much baking powder? I feel like there’s got to be something that’s [crosstalk 48:36].

**John:** No, it’s not risen. It’s just dense.

**Craig:** It’s just quantity. It’s quantity of dough.

**Drew:** Tied for first, but the oatmeal raisin is from DeLuscious Bakery, which was a Megana recommendation.

**Megana:** Oh my god, I betrayed the love of my life.

**Craig:** Megana!

**John:** Tell us about DeLuscious Bakery. Why was that your choice for a place to pick?

**Megana:** It was a place that I discovered when somebody sent you a gift three or four years ago. Their cookies are just divine.

**Craig:** I agree.

**Megana:** Oh, gosh. I’m betraying my team. They’re delicious. Their chocolate chip cookies are so good. They also have vegan and gluten-free cookies, which I am not, but they’re still delicious.

**Craig:** Levain also, I know for a fact, has a vegan cookie and possibly a gluten-free as well.

**John:** Excellent. My top choice, the chocolate chip cookie, is from where?

**Drew:** It is from The Very Best Cookie In The Whole Wide World bakery, which is LA Times number one cookie in LA.

**Craig:** I’m going to challenge their name, but okay.

**Megana:** Wait, that was the name?

**Drew:** That’s the full name. I feel like a lot of cookie places have names that make me a little-

**Megana:** I thought you were just vamping.

**Drew:** No.

**John:** I thought maybe it’s for search optimization.

**Craig:** The best cookie.

**John:** Dentists will have a place called Dentist Near Me. Their actual practice name will be Dentist Near Me.

**Craig:** A lot of plumbers that are AAAA Plumber. It’s got a The Country’s Best Yogurt vibe for their name. It was, I’m sure, fine. I don’t know how to evaluate a cookie like that. It’s just not my jam.

**John:** My favorite cookie in Los Angeles is at La Provence bakery over in Beverly Hills in a strip mall. Their vegan gluten-free chocolate chip cookie is incredible. It’s better than any of these cookies here, I believe.

**Drew:** I love vegan desserts. The best brownie I ever had was a vegan brownie.

**John:** They can be really good.

**Craig:** I don’t know where you are in this, Megana, but to me, as somebody that likes to make desserts, cook, bake, etc, I support vegans, I love them, I disagree with what those two people just said. Eggs are essential.

**John:** They’re really [crosstalk 50:44].

**Craig:** Often, cream is essential, but eggs and butter. Eggs and butter, that is what a dessert is.

**Drew:** They do coconut usually in the vegan stuff.

**Craig:** I can’t stand that.

**John:** Let’s answer a listener question.

**Craig:** No, no, no, I need to get support.

**Megana:** When I have a vegan dessert that I really like, I’ll say it’s a surprise rather than an expectation.

**Craig:** Girl, boom.

**John:** Got a fist bump there.

**Craig:** Owns.

**John:** Let’s answer a question or two. I see one from Carlos that seems good.

**Drew:** Carlos writes, “What do you consider a draft? I’m sorry if the question seems a little bit obvious, but I’m new to this sort of thing. I understand that a first draft is what comes out from beginning to end with the story laid out, characters and all. Next, you take out a scene or add up some more story. If it’s just a new paragraph, is that considered a draft or a pass? How many changes are considered to make it a new draft, and what do these many color labels mean in various drafts and revisions?”

**John:** Craig, this week I was working on the chapter of the Scriptnotes books which was about script revisions and colored revisions and all that stuff, so the idea of a draft comes up here. My instinct is that a draft is any time you have a script that you’re handing to a different person that you’re saying is different. That’s a change that’s going out there. It’s not just you’ve made a change on one page. It’s just like, “This is actually a new thing I want you to read.” That’s a draft.

**Craig:** I think of draft as a pre-production term. This is my first draft. Okay, here are some notes. Beginning, the end. Here are some notes. Here are some thoughts. Okay, I’m going to go off now and do a rewrite. This is my second draft. I’m going to do a polish. This is a polished draft. It just means these are new versions of the thing from beginning to end. Once you get into production, those now aren’t drafts anymore.

**John:** They’re revisions now.

**Craig:** We will sometimes say blue draft. But really, I like to say blue revision. It doesn’t matter. Ultimately, in production, if you change one word on one page, and it’s really important, and it has to go out today-

**John:** That page goes out.

**Craig:** … it’s technically a draft. It’s a page. Pink page is out.

**Megana:** It’s so fun, because I’ve been getting the updates from the Unstable: Season 2, what is it called, the distribution?

**Craig:** Yes, synchronized?

**Megana:** Yes, exactly. I’ll be like, “Oh, cool. What did they change here?” It’s like, “We have changed the hat to a visor.”

**Craig:** There’s definitely a lot of that, and sometimes one small word, like, “They walk outside. It’s raining.” Pink page, “They walk outside. It’s sunny.” That’s a very big change. I should give a little shout-out to Ali Chang, who is my intrepid assistant, but also our script coordinator on Season 2 of The Last of Us. She’s doing an outstanding job.

**John:** In this chapter, we talk through revisions mostly from the future perspective, where you and I have to be the script coordinator, because we’re the person responsible for making sure the script doesn’t get messed up. But on an actual TV show, there’s a whole person whose job it is to make sure that those revisions go out in a way so that they are sensible for everybody.

**Craig:** We have a shared folder. I say, “Okay, I believe Episode 203 blue is ready to go.” She proofreads, adds in, if need be, the production days. We do D1, 2, 3, 4, N1, 2, 3, 4, and all that, and make sure the headers and the title page, and then sends it through Scenechronize, which I think it’s owned by Entertainment Partners, that also owns Final Draft. For something that is even remotely associated with Final Draft, it works quite well. It is not Final Draft-esque in its [crosstalk 54:13].

**John:** Craig, a question for you. In the chapter that I put through, we talk about pages in that sense. I don’t bring up Scenechronize at all, because I want to make sure the book doesn’t feel like it’s too tied into one thing. But I do mention the fact that often it’s now software. On your set, how often are people looking at physically printed pages?

**Craig:** Our initial feeling for Season 2 is that we would have no printed pages, until the morning when certain people would have sides, director, showrunner, actors. Little bit of a revolt by the heads of departments. We loosened it up and allowed HODs to have printed things, because they just need them to do their work. But beyond that, we really are trying to keep it digital. Security is a thing. Once you have a show that people are really paying attention to, you do have to be careful. I know Game of Thrones went through all sorts of… There used to be this thing where they would print scripts on these red pages, because they couldn’t be xeroxed. No one xeroxes anything anymore. What’s nice about Scenechronize – so it’s synchronize but it’s Scene-chronize – is that it distributes PDFs, but they are only viewable online and watermarked and dated. If you try and take a screen cap, it’s going to have exactly your name and the time and all that stuff, your IP, blah da da blah. It’s actually quite solid for security purposes.

**John:** On the day, certain people are going to have sides, just because you have to look, like, what is this thing?

**Craig:** Of course. One of the things, I always ask for my sides to be on full-size pages, because I don’t like the little tiny pages. I don’t understand why they have to be little tiny pages. I can’t see them. There is somebody who, at the end of each day, studiously gathers those things up and runs them through the shredder.

**John:** Great. Let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a game that we played yesterday called Clue Conspiracy. It is the game Clue, but built out in taking cues from Avalon and other sort of social deception, teamwork. It’s cooperative, but there’s traitors in your midst.

**Craig:** Pandemic kind of vibe?

**John:** Yeah. It’s really a smartly done thing. It took a bit to figure it out, but it does come with a video explainer. Drew, you liked it.

**Drew:** I had a great time. Avalon’s a good comp. It’s like Clue but White Lotus.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** You’re trying to prevent a murder, but you probably won’t prevent the murder. Then you have to figure out-

**Craig:** I bet. Avalon, they’re classic.

**John:** They’re good. We played with four, which was okay, but I think five to seven to nine would probably be the right number there.

**Craig:** More of a party game.

**John:** It’s more of a party game, but nicely done.

**Craig:** Does anyone actually die?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In real life?

**John:** Oh, no, not in real life, no. That’d be nice if it did. Megana, what have you got for a One Cool Thing?

**Megana:** I’m going to say on the baking theme, last weekend, my friend brought this spiced persimmon cake from Claire Saffitz’s Dessert Person book.

**John:** Such a great book.

**Megana:** Such a great book. So delicious.

**Craig:** Persimmons.

**John:** I can’t summon the taste of a persimmon. What is persimmon like?

**Megana:** I don’t totally enjoy them, but the profile that they brought to the cake was just a little fruity, really moist, and it was just perfect.

**Craig:** It’s a milder citrus flavor, to me at least. I think they’re delicious. But a little goes a long way with persimmon. We don’t generally put oranges in cakes. You put fake orange in cake, probably. But it’s very strong, whereas lemon and lime somehow work better. Persimmon is really interesting. Spice I think is the key. You know I love my spice. I thought for a second you were going to be like, “My One Cool Thing is oatmeal raisin cookie.” That would’ve been awesome.

**Megana:** I’m also pitching this because I’m hoping that one of the two of you will… Drew, do you bake?

**Drew:** No.

**Megana:** You guys are my bakers.

**Craig:** You want me to make one for you?

**Megana:** Yes, please.

**John:** I have her book.

**Craig:** Send me the recipe. I will do it.

**Megana:** The hack that my friend did was she used butter instead of oil. I’m still thinking about it.

**Craig:** I am not a big believer in recipe hacks. I feel like you should always try it once the way the author intended, maybe because I’m a writer. What happens, I’ll look on, for instance, the New York Times, and they have some really nice recipes there, and then there’s all the comments. I like the comments, because people can say what they thought. If everybody agrees really you should probably not leave it in the oven as long as they say, okay. But inevitably, there’s five people like, “It was incredible. I loved it. I just replaced the eggplant with tuna, and instead of cheese, I used graham crackers.” People are like, “Why are you here?”

**Megana:** Have you seen the Reddit thread that’s people who have made substitutions in recipes and then get really mad that they don’t work?

**John:** That’s a perfect subreddit.

**Craig:** That is a dream. I got to go look that up, because I’m like, “Guys, how is it their fault?”

**Megana:** There’s literally one that’s like, “I substituted mayo for marshmallow fluff, and it did not work well.” It’s like, who asked you to do that?

**Craig:** Oh my god. Because they are the same color?

**John:** They’re both white, in a jar.

**Craig:** I used an old T-shirt instead of butter, and it didn’t work very well, but they’re the same color. If you send me the recipe, what I will do is… By the way, since you’ve had it, I’ll do the OG version, and let’s see what you think. Look, in general, butter is butter, but every now and then-

**John:** If Claire didn’t use butter, she’s-

**Craig:** Every now and then, there’s a reason. There really is. Sometimes I’ve even come across recipes where they do use strange substitutes for things. Some people are just like, “Look, if you’re going to do this, you’re using Crisco. Sorry. I know it’s kind of trashy, but that’s what works.” You make a pie crust, use Crisco. It’s bad for you.

**Megana:** But so is pie.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Craig, what have you got?

**Craig:** Have I talked about steaming yet?

**John:** No.

**Drew:** No.

**Craig:** You guys, I’ve become obsessed with this.

**John:** Steaming for clothes or steaming for vegetables?

**Craig:** Steaming for clothes.

**John:** It’s better.

**Craig:** It’s so much better. I get frustrated with wrinkly clothes, but I don’t want to have to constantly take it across the street to people to press it. That just seems stupid. Ironing is hard. It takes so long. I’m terrified I’m going to burn something. It’s just so long.

**John:** Setting up the ironing board and all that stuff.

**Craig:** Setting up the ironing board. There’s always one corner of a shirt that is topologically un-ironable. Then somebody, and I can’t remember who, said, “Just get a steamer.” I’m like, “What?” I watch this video of this guy doing it. I’m like, “There’s no way it’s going to work that well.” Oh my god.

**Megana:** It’s magic.

**Craig:** It’s magic! You just do it. You can watch wrinkles. Some shirts are easier than others, but even the hard ones, it’s okay, because you’re just running this thing up and down it. It just goes, not wrinkled anymore. I do it on pants. I do it on shirts. I do it on sport coats. I love it.

**John:** We went to Drew’s wedding, so we were staying in Boston. We had our suits. Things get wrinkly. The hotel room didn’t have an iron, but it had a little steamer in a little bag. You plugged it in, put the water in it.

**Craig:** Off you go.

**John:** After that point, I immediately bought the same steamer.

**Craig:** Oh, so you don’t have a standing steamer?

**John:** Oh, no. It looks just like a hair dryer, but with water in it.

**Craig:** John, if I may.

**John:** The standing steamer?

**Craig:** Step your game up, dude.

**John:** No more closet space, nothing like that.

**Craig:** You can shove it in a corner. It’s not that big. The whole thing is the size of a football, and then there’s a pole-

**John:** A pole.

**Craig:** … and a hose, and it goes in the corner.

**John:** I’m so happy with what we have.

**Craig:** I’m just saying.

**Drew:** Do you put the water in the bottom?

**Craig:** Yeah, you do.

**Drew:** How do you get it in the bottom?

**Craig:** There’s a little tank. You lift it up. Always use distilled water.

**John:** This one doesn’t require distilled water. This requires any water you got.

**Craig:** I’m super suspicious about this janky ass steamer you got.

**John:** Works delightfully well.

**Craig:** I’m just saying. I’m in. I’m in. Megana, do you have a steamer?

**Megana:** I do have a steamer. I wasn’t using distilled water, and so I got the LA water buildup. My clothes have flecks of calcium deposits on them.

**Craig:** This is what I’m saying. Distilled water, good steamer. I used to have this panic. I came home yesterday from Vancouver for our holiday hiatus, packed all my stuff into this big bag. I’m going to go to a holiday party this evening at someone’s house. I would normally be like, “I’m screwed. I’m going to take this out of the suitcase. It’s going to be wrinkly. I’m just going to look like an idiot.” I have no fear. Know what I’m doing after this? I’m going home and I’m steaming. I so enjoy it. It’s so Zen. Love it.

**John:** Drew, what do you got for us?

**Drew:** I get a One Cool Thing?

**John:** Yeah, you get a One Cool Thing, of course.

**Craig:** Yeah, you do.

**John:** It’s a Christmas episode, a very special Christmas episode.

**Craig:** Is it also steaming?

**Drew:** I should be. My embarrassing joy this year has been, I got a new-ish car, and you get a few free months of SiriusXM when you get a new car. There is a Kelly Clarkson radio station on SiriusXM that is anarchy. It’s basically like someone hacked into Kelly Clarkson’s iTunes and hit shuffle, and you don’t know what you’re going to get. It’ll go from ’40s country to ’90s RnB. It is crazy, but it’s incredibly joyful and insane. I love it. I’m going to be really sad when my free trial ends.

**Craig:** Did you just Tinder match with Kelly Clarkson in front of us?

**Drew:** I might’ve. I think she’s fantastic now.

**Craig:** That’s incredible.

**Drew:** I wasn’t a huge fan, and now suddenly, I’m all Kelly Clarkson.

**Megana:** So sorry. I have some follow-up questions. The Kelly Clarkson bit of it, it’s not just her music?

**Drew:** It’s her music sometimes, plus whatever Kelly’s influences are or she feels like playing [crosstalk 01:04:14].

**John:** But how often [crosstalk 01:04:15]?

**Drew:** Occasionally.

**Craig:** Just enough to keep you going.

**Drew:** Just enough to have that Kelly Clarkson… She’s never taking over. I’m learning all about SiriusXM. Lisa Loeb hosts the 90s on 9. Lisa Loeb has guests. She’s not that involved. She’ll just do bumpers. It’s just her feelings and her vibes. It’s super modern stuff. It’s old stuff. You’re like, “Yeah, you know what? I guess that is what influenced Kelly Clarkson.”

**Craig:** Are you into Broadway at all?

**Drew:** A little bit. I don’t keep up with Broadway.

**John:** SiriusXM on Broadway.

**Craig:** SiriusXM on Broadway with Seth Rudetsky, that’s my jam.

**Drew:** I’ll check it out.

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**John:** Drew, you very naively say as long as you have your subscription, you get it free for a while. Good luck getting rid of your Sirius subscription. They will try to hold onto for whatever.

**Craig:** You haven’t given them a credit card or anything?

**Drew:** Not yet, because I looked, and I was like, “What would this take to keep?” It’s 25 bucks a month, which-

**Megana:** Wow.

**Drew:** Insane. I’m sure they’ll try and get me offers and stuff. I’ve already got some [crosstalk 01:05:13].

**Craig:** Yes, they will. As long as they can get your credit card in some way or another, you will be unsubscribed maybe 40 years after your death. Wow, they’re good at what they do.

**John:** They are good at what they do.

**Drew:** Don’t subscribe to SiriusXM for this channel, but if you have it, check it out.

**Craig:** I think Seth is worth it myself.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Woot woot!

**Megana:** Woo!

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Our outro is a Christmas throwback by Matthew. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where we can send some questions. 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 weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We were on the Cotton Bureau’s Christmas list [crosstalk 01:06:00].

**Drew:** We were front page.

**John:** Yeah, it was nice. We were front page of them.

**Craig:** You mean the front page of the Bureau?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Damn.

**John:** 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 gifts. The three of you are my gift, so thank you so much.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Drew:** Aw.

**Megana:** Aw.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The best gifts we ever received at Christmastime. Two things come to mind for me. Maybe I’ve mentioned them on the show before. I remember getting Lester, the ventriloquist dummy.

**Craig:** Oh my god, terrifying.

**John:** Terrifying. So great, so wonderful. I had my little Lester doll, which was great, and also a safe, a little child’s safe to store all my valuables in. I had a little safe.

**Drew:** I don’t know anything about Lester. Was that a mass produced-

**Craig:** Yes. Sorry, I’m just hung up on John hoarding stuff in his safe, this little kid. What were you putting in there?

**John:** Exactly. What valuable things did I have? I had a silver dollar. I had that cool rock I found.

**Craig:** A gold crayon. No one can get at it. I love that.

**Megana:** Was it a children’s safe, or did your parents give you a safe and call it a children’s safe?

**John:** It was a children’s safe. Both of these were definitely out of the gift book or the wish book. We used to get these big catalogs from department stores that had a bunch of stuff to buy. Those were the things that [crosstalk 01:07:39].

**Craig:** My first safe.

**John:** Yes, my first safe.

**Craig:** For paranoid children.

**John:** I became obsessed with safe-cracking and pretending like I had a great idea.

**Megana:** That’s so cute.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** Two little dials there.

**Craig:** That’s so great.

**John:** Those were gifts I remember loving [crosstalk 01:07:51].

**Megana:** How old were you when you got this ventriloquist dummy?

**John:** Second or third grade.

**Craig:** So creepy. This Lester thing was a nightmare.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to Lester. It’s an African American, looks like a small adult, kind of.

**Craig:** Yes, like all dummies, it is both a child and man.

**Megana:** Is this where your thing against ventriloquism came from?

**Craig:** No. Ventriloquist dummies are horrifying and famously have been featured in horror movies. Yeah, there’s Lester. My issue, look at the mouth. The problem is the mouth.

**John:** It’s just up and down.

**Craig:** It’s just terrifying.

**Megana:** This is what they’re making fun of in Arrested Development.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly. My issue with ventriloquism as a craft is that it’s just stupid.

**Megana:** Got it.

**Craig:** It’s just dumb. You’re just not moving your mouth. Who cares?

**John:** Megana, gifts you received and loved that were life-changing, or at least in the moment were really significant?

**Megana:** I remember I was obsessed with these baby dolls that would pee.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Megana:** You would put the bottle in the mouth, and then they would pee. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt that longing since. It was like, “If I have this plastic child, my life will be-”

**Craig:** Your biological clock ended with that little baby that peed, and you’re like, “I’m satisfied.”

**Megana:** I was just like, “I got to have it. I want to change its diaper,” or whatever.

**Craig:** You were teasing your mom at that point. She was like, “Yes! I’m going to have grandchildren.”

**Megana:** Yes. I was four or five years old.

**John:** She should not allow you to prepone your childbirth with a doll.

**Megana:** I got that and then pretty immediately I was like, “This is a mess. I don’t want this.”

**Craig:** It’s basically just a doll with a hole in it, that just comes out. It’s a tube. I’m pouring water in. Then water comes out.

**John:** We’re all tubes.

**Craig:** Correct, so what do we need a doll [crosstalk 01:09:49]?

**Megana:** I don’t need a plastic one to hold around.

**Craig:** I remember my sister was super into that too. She was like, “I want the doll that pees.” It was a huge thing. Nobody thought that was weird, by the way. Nobody. Nobody was like-

**John:** Natural.

**Craig:** Just all these kids want dolls that pee.

**Megana:** Literal four-year-olds.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was totally fine.

**Megana:** I have that. Then I remember I got this fuzzy diary, a blue fuzzy, it looks like a shag carpet almost.

**Craig:** Yep, that you could write all your secret thoughts in?

**Megana:** Yeah. I was just like, I’m a glamorous woman with-

**Craig:** My fuzzy blue-

**Megana:** … an interior life and-

**Craig:** A lock.

**Megana:** … a key-

**John:** Of course.

**Megana:** … for my locked diary.

**Craig:** An unbreakable lock. You’d need literally something as rare as a paper clip.

**John:** How often did you use your diary? I feel like one of those things where you maybe wrote in three pages of the diary.

**Megana:** I found it recently. I remember being like, “I don’t have the key for this. I can’t open it.”

**Craig:** Jesus. God, Megana.

**Megana:** My friend just ripped it open.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Megana:** I actually wrote in it a lot. All of the entries were about a boy named Taylor in my class and whether or not he was in school that day, because I am so cool.

**Craig:** I thought you were just a budding truant officer.

**Megana:** No. It’s like, “Today was a bad day. Taylor was sick.”

**Craig:** Taylor was sick. What ever happened to Taylor?

**Megana:** I do not know.

**Craig:** Prison.

**John:** It was Taylor Lautner. He [inaudible 01:11:19] career, but now he’s in a weird in-between place, where he’s kind of famous, but he’s not actually being cast in things.

**Megana:** Exactly.

**John:** Or casted.

**Craig:** Go get him, girl.

**John:** Taylor Lautner married a Taylor, who’s took his last name, so Taylor Lautner is now married to Taylor Lautner.

**Megana:** He used to date a different Taylor.

**Craig:** Wait, really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is that true?

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s weird.

**John:** It happens.

**Craig:** I guess it does.

**Megana:** Yeah, that you would marry-

**Craig:** If you have a name that’s unisex, it doesn’t matter whether you’re gay or straight, you have a chance of running into somebody that is going to have… Then if they take your last name, it’s done. Now you’ve just married yourself. We’d love to invite you to the wedding of Taylor Lautner and Taylor Lautner.

**Megana:** It’s a homograph.

**John:** It is a homograph.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s actually a true homonym.

**Craig:** It’s a homonym.

**Megana:** A true homonym.

**Craig:** It’s a homonym.

**John:** It’s both written and-

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s not pronounced differently. If one of them was Taylor Lautner [laht-NUR], then we would be in homograph territory, I believe.

**John:** Exciting. Craig, gifts, what gifts are you thinking back to that were meaningful?

**Craig:** 1977.

**John:** Now, your family celebrated Hanukkah, obviously, but did you also do Christmas evenings too?

**Craig:** No. It’s hard to describe. If you grew up in a Jewish household in New York in the ’70s, it was like a war was going on. The war was between your parents and the obviously best holiday. It was like, “We will not have a Christmas tree. There will be no decorations that are Christmassy. We will actively not do any of it, because then we are destroying our faith and traditions. Therefore, we’re going to pour all of our effort into this fake holiday.” Apologies to those who celebrate Hanukkah. On the list of Jewish holidays, I think there’s 4 million, it’s probably in the 3,900,000s of importance. It just happened to line up with Christmas, and voila. For me and my sister, Hanukkah was really just a time of resentment, because everybody else would just look like they were having the best time. We couldn’t put lights up. We couldn’t put lights up, because that was Christian.

**John:** Sorry.

**Craig:** Did you have that in your family?

**Megana:** No. We fully bought into Christmas as a-

**Craig:** Well done.

**Megana:** … purely capitalist holiday.

**Craig:** As an American holiday. It wasn’t a grievance. Anyway, so yeah, we celebrated fake Christmas, basically.

**John:** Your memories of best presents, was it a birthday present? Was it also just a Hanukkah present? What was it?

**Craig:** I don’t know when I got this, but it was definitely a gift. 1977. There was a line of toys. I remember there were three of them called Shogun Warriors. They were large. I’m going to show you a picture in a second. They were very big. This is the part I didn’t expect, because usually action figures, dolls for boys, were small. They were maybe a couple inches, or maybe if it was-

**John:** A GI Joe is a large, almost like a foot.

**Craig:** GI Joe, yeah, it was like a foot, or the Bionic Man. This thing was two and a half feet tall. It was really tall.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It looked like this.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** What I did not realize until much, much later on was that this thing had a name, because I think the package may have just had Japanese on it. What was cool about him was, he’s this big robot warrior, kind of like-

**John:** It almost looks like a nutcracker to me, honestly.

**Craig:** Yeah, looks a little nutcrackery, but also you could tell that they’ve cheated a little bit from Darth Vader on the mask, clearly. This thing in his belt fired out, and his fist had missiles. There was all these little spring-loaded things. I loved this thing. I can remember the smell of the plastic, this toxic wafting fume of, I assume it was plastic. It could’ve been made of body parts. I don’t know. Loved it. Years later, I went to look it up. I was like, “Maybe I’ll buy one of these.” They are selling them. It was made by Mattel. It is currently I think on eBay for $800.

**John:** Wow.

**Megana:** Wow.

**Craig:** At the time, I assume it cost $6. They were eventually banned because of the choking problems.

**John:** I was going to say anything that shoots off-

**Craig:** Yeah. You can see these little missiles here. Those are little missiles, perfectly designed to catch in a child’s throat. The name of this Shogun is Mazinga, which is just Mazin and a G-A.

**John:** Wow. Made for you.

**Craig:** It was like it was made for me. Mazinga. Shogun Warrior, 1977, Mazinga. If you had one of these things as a kid, please write in and let us know. There were two other ones. I don’t remember their names. I did not have those, but I wanted them.

**John:** Love it. Drew, how about you? Gifts that are meaningful?

**Drew:** Christmas ’98, because I would go out with my mom every weekend, and she’d go shopping. At Pier One they had these papasan chairs, which are the circle ones.

**Craig:** Of course, the classic dorm room chair.

**Drew:** Yeah, dorm room chair. I was like, “I want one so bad.” Christmas morning, there was a papasan chair. That was the big gift. That was like, “I am an adult now. I’m eight years old. My room is like the house in Friends.”

**Craig:** You were eight?

**Drew:** I was eight.

**Craig:** You wanted a papasan chair?

**John:** Was it a full-size one?

**Drew:** It was a full-size one.

**John:** You could nap in that thing.

**Drew:** Yeah, I would just curl up basically in that, because I was a weird kid.

**Craig:** What a weird little boy.

**Drew:** I was very strange.

**Craig:** Everyone else is like, “I want Nintendo [inaudible 01:16:48].” You’re like, “I would like this poorly put together rattan chair.”

**Drew:** Corduroy.

**Craig:** “With corduroy cushions, please. I will sit in it like the king.”

**John:** I also remember gifts I didn’t get that I really, really wanted. In the first case, I was too afraid to ever ask for this gift. But whenever I was flipping through the wish book, this is the gift I really wanted. It’s Barbie, but it’s Barbie’s head.

**Craig:** My sister had one.

**John:** Makeup Barbie, where you could get that stuff. I desperately wanted that, but even then, I knew, oh, no, that’s-

**Craig:** That’s probably not going to fly?

**John:** That’s not going to fly in the household. I couldn’t ask for it. Internalized homophobia wouldn’t let me do that. I also really wanted – and Craig, you will remember this one – Big Trak. Do you remember Big Trak?

**Craig:** Oh, absolutely, I remember Big Trak. Look how ’70s that is.

**John:** It is amazingly ’70s. To describe this-

**Craig:** Incredible.

**John:** It feels like if you took an Atari and put tractor wheels on it, tank wheels on it. The idea behind this is that you punch in little buttons and set a course for it, and then it’ll go and run. It’ll drive itself around on that course, which was just revolutionary at the time.

**Craig:** Magic. Absolutely magic. With that membrane style pushing the button.

**John:** My Atari 400 computer had that.

**Craig:** The membrane keyboard, yeah.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** My sister and I had loads of board games. We would play everything. My closet was jammed full of those things. We liked Battleship, but I was obsessed with the idea of getting electronic Battleship. Obsessed. The ads made it look so incredible. I asked over and over, and every single time, my dad was like, “Why? It’s just Battleship. You already have Battleship.” I’m like, “You don’t understand. It’s like you’re in the middle of a naval battle. There’s explosions and lights.” Never flew. Never flew. Never got it. Never got it. Still don’t have it. Will never even give it to myself, because you need to have something missing, or else… The day I get electronic battleship, I’m probably just going to keel over and die.

**Drew:** Now we know.

**Craig:** Now we know. Now you know how to kill me.

**John:** Drew, you and I were talking about adults who collect toys, adults who go shopping for toys, because you were working at a company that they would actually just go out and buy toys.

**Drew:** I worked at a stop motion… I worked at the studio that did Robot Chicken. They would just be toys all the time. They would go out and get stuff. Even the people that I worked with would go. There’s so many collector places around LA. It’s a whole subculture. It’s cool for a bit, but I don’t know. People go really far.

**Craig:** There’s a weirdness to it. It gets weird to turn something so lovely and innocent into something rather serious and tense.

**Drew:** The collector aspect too sort of bothers me. My dad, when Star Wars toys came back in ’95, bought all of them, and they are still pristine in our basement in boxes. I got some toys, but he has all of them. That always drove me nuts. I can’t wait for, someday I want to just give those to a kid.

**Craig:** Until you see what they’re worth, and then you’re like, “Yeah, I won’t give these to-”

**Drew:** I don’t think they’re worth… I think everyone had that same idea.

**Craig:** I think everybody did have the same… I don’t understand collecting at all anyway.

**John:** I’m not a collector. I collect some typewriters, but I don’t know anything about the typewriters. I just collect them because they’re cool. I like them. Megana, any gifts you never got that you are still resentful about?

**Megana:** Papasan chair is actually on there.

**Craig:** What is going on?

**Megana:** I don’t know what it was, what choke hold Pier One Imports had me in, but I would beg my mom to stop by Pier One on our way home from the mall. The first time I failed my driver’s test, my dad took me to Pier One to make me feel better about it.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Megana:** But he still didn’t get me the papasan chair.

**John:** Instead, he bought some wrapping paper and some Chilean wine.

**Craig:** I know. Exactly. Baubles. Here’s some baubles.

**John:** Absolutely. Here’s a wind vane.

**Craig:** I like that when you failed, your dad tried to make you feel better instead of what I had, which was just anger on top of shame. Your dad was cool. That’s nice.

**John:** Cool dads, that’s the best gift of all.

**Craig:** Cool dads are the best gift of all. You hear that, my kids?

**John:** Thanks, everyone.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Megana:** Thanks.

**Drew:** Thanks.

**Craig:** Merry Christmas!

Links:

* [Netflix Viewership Data](https://about.netflix.com/en/news/what-we-watched-a-netflix-engagement-report)
* [The absolutely legitimate, incredibly useful Indian English word you’re not using](https://qz.com/india/380388/the-absolutely-legitimate-incredibly-useful-indian-english-word-youre-not-using) by Diksha Madhok
* [Homographs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph)
* [The Very Best Cookie In The Whole Wide World](https://www.theverybestcookieinthewholewideworld.com/)
* [DeLuscious Cookies](https://www.delusciouscookies.com/)
* [Levain Bakery](https://levainbakery.com/)
* [Clue Conspiracy](https://hasbropulse.com/products/clue-conspiracy)
* [Dessert Person](https://www.dessertperson.com/dessert-person-cookbook) by Claire Saffitz
* [Upright Steamer](https://pureenrichment.com/products/puresteam-pro-upright-garment-steamer-with-4-steam-levels)
* [The Kelly Clarkson Connection](https://www.siriusxm.com/channels/the-kelly-clarkson-connection)
* [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 Matthew Chilelli ([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/623standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/entering-the-post-strike-era).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 613 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s time for a five-year checkup. We’ll open an email time capsule about the state of the industry and maybe just perhaps spend a lot of the episode talking about the WGA deal. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, dreams.

**Craig:** Dreams.

**John:** Not the aspirational kind, but those pictures in your mind while you sleep. We’ll talk about those. Hooray! But this is an episode with actual news, because-

**Craig:** What? Did something happen?

**John:** Something happened, Craig.

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** I don’t know if you’ve been aware. I don’t know if you’ve checked the headlines.

**Craig:** No. What happened?

**John:** After 146 days on strike-

**Craig:** We were on strike? Oh, no.

**John:** Did you forget?

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** I am in so much trouble.

**John:** Oh, man. So much explaining to do.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** WGA reached a tentative agreement with the studios.

**Craig:** Woohoo!

**John:** The strike is over. We are back to work. We discussed this almost entirely over on the sidecast episodes, so this is our first main feed mention post-strike. For future historians, five years from now, this was the first episode that was recorded in the post-strike era. Now, Craig, because it’s usually just Drew and Megana and I talking over in sidecasts, and because I was on the Negotiating Committee, you and I really have not talked about much of this stuff at all. This is my first chance to ask you, what do you think? What’s your impressions?

**Craig:** I am thrilled. Look, I’m thrilled that the strike is over. Of course, when strikes end, obviously, a lot of pain ends for a lot of people, so that’s important. But there are a couple of ways strikes end. Either end in achievement or end in not so much achievement. This was a whole lot of achievement. You saw something that I wrote 10 weeks ago on Threads, the poorly attended Threads.

**John:** Oh, remember Threads?

**Craig:** What I wrote was, “The AMPTP,” this is 10 weeks ago, “has lost already. They’re in denial, and they’re paranoid about giving in, but none of that changes the facts.” What I said was, basically, they were going to lose, because they had already lost, and it would behoove them and save them quite a bit of money and save everybody a lot of pain if they just could just lose quickly, as opposed to slowly, because the outcome could not be anything other than, with the exception of adjustments of quantity, the WGA had to secure everything in principle that it was asking for. It was the only possible outcome, and that is exactly what happened, although that is not to diminish how hard it was for you guys, for the leadership, and for the membership to stick to it.

I don’t think I had a single conversation with anybody where it felt like people felt we had a choice. Everybody just kind of felt, “This is it. Either we get it or what’s the point of any of this?” We got it. Jeez, I wish they had just… It’s funny. I look at this deal, and right after I’m, “Yay,” I go, what is it about any of this that was hard to give? It’s just mind-blowing to me. Would love to just run through-

**John:** Let’s run through it, because you and I have never really done this. You can take the lead here. I can jump in when I have clarifications or some color to put on stuff.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** I’m mostly curious to hear your take on this.

**Craig:** First up, the standard minimum bumps, those are more than they typically are, but those were negotiated by the DGA. This is where pattern bargaining is just a rigid fact of life. Those were always going to be what those were always going to be, and it will forever be so. But just as important to note that when we were done negotiating and striking, we got a lot of stuff that was just simply different. Not different from what they had, but different as in they don’t have it at all and we got it. Those minimum bumps, not surprising to me at all, and unquestionable, essentially. Anybody that says that you guys should’ve gotten more just doesn’t understand how the world works.

**John:** Something people should understand is that those top line minimum bumps is basically anything in the contract that doesn’t say it changes by a different percentage all increases by that percentage. If it doesn’t say otherwise, everything rose by 5% in that first year.

Now, there’s a lot of stuff that’s new in the contract that has its own bumps. It’s important to note those things, because there’s a whole new Writer-Producer tier, which is 9% above what the Story Editor rate was. That’s a big change. Things increased overall more than just the minimums, but those minimums are the top thing you see.

**Craig:** One other thing that I think it’s important for people to understand about those minimums is that they’re cumulative. If you have a 4% raise in year two – I can’t remember the exact details – and then year three it’s maybe 5%, that 5% applies to the already 4% bumped-up number. So it is cumulative. It compounds. There are quite a few people who, I remember when the DGA deal came out, were like, “That doesn’t even match inflation.” It does, I think.

But there were many other places where we needed to improve things, and we did, so let’s get into those. We made made-for-streaming movies move much closer to the theatrical residual model than ever before. That’s a great improvement.

**John:** Absolutely. There aren’t a lot of these movies, honestly. Most of the stuff that’s being made for streamers is done under theatrical terms anyway. We wanted to make sure that there wasn’t any incentive to start making them under streaming contracts rather than under theatrical contracts.

**Craig:** A good loophole to be closed and a good bump for people that were operating under that, let’s call it a loophole. Oh my god, a second step for writers in theatrical who are earning double or less than double scale. Anything above double scale, no. But if you are earning under twice scale, you get a guaranteed second step. This is a thing that I proposed on the Negotiating Committee in 2004. It took 19 years. You guys got it done. Can’t thank you enough. That is a huge, huge win for theatrical writers.

You may say, is it really going to put that much more money in their pockets? In the short term, probably not. But what it does is reintroduces the business to the value of the second step. We’ve talked about it on the podcast quite a bit. It’s just a revision to a broken system, and it gives theatrical writers a chance to learn how to do their jobs without feeling like they’re always one draft away from being fired.

**John:** It’s also a way to push back against the scourge of free work. If you know that you have that second step coming, you can say to the producers and executives and everyone else pressing you for, oh, if you could just fix this thing and this thing and this thing, “You know what, guys? I have that whole extra rewrite guaranteed. Let me do it then.”

**Craig:** Correct. It also removes the fear factor from producers who feel like they only get one chance to submit this thing to the studio. Now they have two. It helps. It helps everybody. It’s particularly helpful for the studios, because they don’t have to worry about producers just going crazy for seven months. Weekly pay in theatrical, a nudge in a positive direction, although I do think the two steps will be more impactful overall. But good to see. Good to see.

**John:** Where we got to in this was, rather than weekly pay, we have accelerated pay for those same writers who are 200% of scale or less. After nine weeks, they invoice, they get paid initial 25%. After nine weeks, they’ve been paid out 75%. Does it solve the problem? No. But it puts more money in their pockets sooner. Talking to writers in this situation, cashflow is really a huge problem. They were running out of money. This gets them more money quicker.

**Craig:** I misspoke when I said weekly pay. The typical method was, “We’re going to divide your amount of money in half. You get half up front. You get half when you turn a thing in.” The problem is the turn the thing in. Producers were delaying that endlessly. This not only gets you half of the half that you would normally get at the end sooner. It also alerts the studios to the fact that a bunch of time has gone by and they haven’t gotten a script, so they might start asking for it, which is good. We want that.

**John:** Craig, this is something I’ve wanted to say on the podcast for a while, so this is a little sidebar here. I do think it’s best practices for when you are starting a theatrical project. When you get that first commencement check, email the whole team and say, “Hey folks, I just got commenced on this. I’m so excited. Today I’m starting a 12-week contract per my deal. I anticipate handing in the script on this date.” Just making sure everyone actually understands what the timelines are here and just putting them on notice that this is a 12-week deal, this is not meant to be the next eight months of my life, can just be helpful, just be good framing here. After nine weeks, for writers who qualify for this, it’s a reminder for yourself, oh, that’s right, I actually have to stupidly invoice at nine weeks to get paid that 25%.

**Craig:** Certainly, our lawyers are all aware of this now. I think if you do say something like what you just suggested, John, you have to brace yourself for a very angry phone call from the producer, who knows exactly what you’re up to. There is that, just to be aware of.

But certainly, it’s enormously helpful to note that the trigger payment that comes earlier, it’s an internal alarm that can go off at the studio, like, “Why have nine weeks gone by, and we haven’t seen a thing?” or, “How are you doing? Where are you at?”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** We do have escalated minimums for higher-level Writer-Producer tiers. That’s what you just described earlier. It’s important because it basically rebuilds the ladder in television. Basically, there used to be a ladder. You would start as a staff writer. You get this minimum. Then as you went up, you got more. At least from the writing point of view, it all flattened out to minimums for everybody, and there was no more ladder. It was just a floor. The ladder has been restored.

Some people may say, “How does this help me if I am a new writer?” There’s a ladder. You can climb it now. It means there’s a chance for you to earn more as you progress in your career. Yes, in the short term, it benefits the people above you. In the long term, assuming that things go well for you, it benefits you. That’s important.

**John:** It also ties into the fact that now you’re required to have a certain number of those writer-producers at the higher pay tier, are required for staffing. It pulls people up that system. When everyone was being paid the same, it didn’t matter who you were hiring. You saw people just stuck and stagnating.

**Craig:** Exactly. Let’s talk about mini rooms, which I think quite rightly took it in the shorts, as they should. I like the phrase that the Guild’s been using, which is development rooms or pre-greenlights rooms. It helps, because mini room is actually a terrible word for what they are.

What’s happened? We as a Guild have secured more pay for a longer guaranteed time if writers are working in these pre-greenlight development rooms. In short, these rooms have gotten more expensive and less attractive to the companies, which is good, because from a creative point of view and from a quality of life point of view and from a career point of view, I can detect nothing positive about them at all.

**John:** Mini rooms, or development rooms, came to be as an alternative to pilots. Once upon a time we made pilots, and then we shot the pilots, and we saw what the show was. Increasingly, streamers decided, oh, no, we are just going to get a bunch of scripts and they’ll make a decision based on that. They didn’t have to pay any premium to make those things. Now they do, and so it may cause them to reevaluate how they are choosing to develop their shows and whether they might shoot more pilots or how they are going to proceed.

**Craig:** Correct. The Guild got script fees for staff writers, or any writer in television, on top of the weekly amount they’re paid. That is excellent. To borrow a D and D term, it stacks nicely with the new streaming residual formula, because there are a lot of things that are tied directly to credit, like residuals. It’s good to see that if you write a script, that is an additional amount of money on top of the amount that you were already getting paid. It means that you don’t essentially write a script for free, I guess, if they had to pay you anyway. It was good to see.

**John:** It was great to see. That has been an issue, like a guaranteed second step for feature writers, that’s always been there. It’s always been like, “It’s absurd that we can’t get this.” This time we got it.

**Craig:** We got it. Let’s talk about minimum staffing, which was something of a controversial thing. For starters, there is a carve-out for writers who like to go it alone. Hooray. Now, I have been that writer. I am not currently that writer on The Last of Us, because I do work with Neil Druckmann, and for Season 2, also Halley Gross. I was actually quite thrilled to see that. Let’s talk about the value here. Minimum staff of, to start with, three Writer-Producer tier people. Now, I have a question for you. What level does that include?

**John:** Co-producer and above.

**Craig:** Okay, so it is the new, higher-paid level.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Basically, the first three people that you have to make sure you have, if you are not writing everything by yourself, are three writers, including the showrunner, if they so choose, at that higher level. Beyond that, depending on how many episodes you are writing, you may then also need to hire additional writers who can be at that higher level or not.

**John:** Yeah, and would likely be not at that level, just in terms of how budgets and things work out.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s of course important to stress that these are minimums. One of the goals in any contract is to make sure that you’re not incentivizing the minimums to become the maximums. We are very mindful of that in how we’re putting these together. Staff writers and story editors are less expensive now than writer-producer level writers, and so this is a good budgetary reason to make sure you’re including them in your show.

**Craig:** This was going to happen. I think any time you look at what a guild asks for, or at least in this circumstance, if there was a quantity, we of course weren’t going to ask for our bottom line quantity, so there’s room to give there. But the existence of this was going to happen. I got asked about this all the time. I know Mike White got asked about it all the time. Part of me wishes that we could’ve just incorporated the carve-out from the start. I think it would’ve eliminated a lot of internal strife and a lot of carping about certain writers, as if, for instance, Mike White was doing something wrong and not just writing two great seasons of a TV show in the way that he likes to write.

Given that part of the argument about this was, “99% of shows use rooms anyway, so we really have to address their needs,” okay, then, so why obsess over rooms for that last 1% of shows? In all negotiations, you have to have things to give away. I don’t know, and I don’t need to know, if this was part of the calculation that maybe, okay, we’ll toss that back into the pile to get what we need.

But also, I can say, people ask me, “What do you think about it?” What I think about it is I’m one member of a union with over 10,000 members, and one thing became incredibly clear from the jump. This was an extremely popular demand. Our union on the whole wanted this. They had thought about it. They had considered. They weren’t bamboozled. They looked at it. They examined it. They said, “We want this.” Like any union member, I think it’s important to say, “Hey, you know what? I benefit from the union in all sorts of ways. I’m not going to necessarily benefit from every way.” My answer to the question, “What do you think about it?” is I’m glad the union got what the membership wanted, because to me, it seemed like any notion that we weren’t was insane. We were going to get this. And we got it.

**John:** One of my great frustrations in the discourse around minimum staffing, it’s like, “No other union tells people how many union members they have to hire.” I’m like, no, every union does that. That’s what unions do. You don’t get to choose whether you want assistant directors on your show. There are ADs. That just is a thing that happens. It was not this revolutionary seizing of the means of production that some people were portraying it as.

**Craig:** No. It was a response to the fact that there had been a system where 99% of shows had rooms. Those rooms were full of the amount of writers the showrunner felt they needed. Then the companies started to screw around. This is what happens. This is the eff around and find out moment.

**John:** I was going to say. Lindsay Dougherty.

**Craig:** They found out. Weekly minimums in post, we didn’t get it. I do not consider this a failure, because I don’t understand how we can get that, because I don’t think we’ve solved the wording problem yet. Obviously, I was not in the room with you guys, and I did not dig into all this. I understand the problem. The problem is, we want to ensure that writers, other than the showrunner, are going to be included, for instance, in editing, so that we can train them and they can prepare and they can learn, so that we have showrunners down the line.

But there is a wording problem, because no matter how many time the Guild says editing is writing, it’s not. We have a contract. The contract defines what writing is. There is a jurisdiction. I understand that we’re reserving legal rights. I don’t think that’s going to pan out. I think we need to figure out another way to solve it. The good news is, okay, no harm in trying. No harm, no foul. It helps define the path that doesn’t work. We’re going to have to figure out a path that does, because I think it’s important.

**John:** Just speaking up for some of the writers on the Negotiating Committee, some of other showrunners on the Negotiating Committee, who felt strongly that they were not being paid as writers during post. They were being forced down below Guild minimums for that time in post. You could say that’s a failure on their reps for not negotiating a proper payment for that time they were spending in post. Also, they literally had Final Draft open and were writing new scenes and new moments and new dialogue in those times, and that’s clearly writing. There is writing that happens during the post-production process, and that’s what they’re arguing. That’s why there’s ongoing arbitration over this. It will continue to be figured out.

**Craig:** Little dangerous. Yes, we do occasionally have to write things in post, and that is writing. If we argue that that’s the basis for this, I’m sure the companies will respond with, “Great. Let us know if you’re writing, and we will work up a weekly deal for you. That will be a minimum writing deal, and only for the time you’re writing. Let’s see what you write.” It’s tricky. This is one of the downsides of having writers who are also management. This is a tricky area. It’s not going to be an easy solve.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** But at the very least, we understand there is a problem. Now we’ve just got to figure out a different way to get there. I have faith.

**John:** I have faith.

**Craig:** Foreign streaming residuals. Question for you, John, was that reflective of the DGA deal? Either way, it was positive. I just didn’t know if this was something that was unique to us or we were inheriting from the DGA.

**John:** This was inherited from the DGA. Like everything, our asks were larger, and this is where we ended up.

**Craig:** That makes sense. Viewership-based streaming. This one was the holy grail here. It I’m sure at times felt somewhat insurmountable, because it was wrapped up in this other problem. The problem wasn’t that they were greedy and cheap, although they often are. The problem was they were greedy, cheap, and did not want to share the data required to actually be able to calculate this stuff.

**John:** Our residuals classically are based on reuse, where you can just see that reuse, like, oh, it aired on TBS, and therefore you’re getting residual payment, or based on units, and we had ways of auditing the number of DVDs or videotapes sold. Those are physical things we can track. Reuse that’s based on this is an incredibly popular show on your streaming service is a new metric for us, is a new thing we’ve never been able to study before.

**Craig:** Correct. What we were asking for was, since just basic reuse seems very difficult to define here, the moral argument was, guys, if a show is watched by a billion people, how is the writer of that show getting 12 cents in residuals? It doesn’t make sense. It’s not correct. We have to fix it. So where you guys landed I think is a decent start. It’s going to be fascinating to see how it goes.

There are bonuses now tied to viewership. They kick in when a show hits viewership that is equivalent to 20% of the domestic subscriber base. If there are 10 million people in the United States who subscribe to a platform, then we’re talking about 2 million. You have to get 2 million views within the first 90 days cumulative to then trigger the bonus scheme. This goes along hand in hand with a very obviously necessary data-sharing plan. The data itself will stay somewhat confidential with the Guild. The Guild will be able to present an aggregate of that to the membership, not necessarily a, “This many people watch Apple. This many people watch Amazon.”

The big question over the next three years is how many shows qualify. If a lot qualify, then we’re in good shape. If seven qualify, we’re going to need to bargain that threshold down. That’s how it’s going to be. That is a negotiation topic. What happened here was the invention of an entirely new payment plan.

This is something that is as close to being conjured out of thin air as you can get in a negotiation like this. Certainly, the DGA didn’t get this at all. To me, this was the most important and probably the most hard-fought victory that you guys had to get to. It’s a great beginning.

**John:** Thank you. I agree with you. It’s a first step, because we won’t know… We were told in the room, some staff, what roughly percentage of shows on their services should hit that. The way I like to think about it is that if the service is bragging, like, “This is the top show on our service in America,” it should probably be kicking off a payment here. If something is genuinely a hit on that show, and they’re bragging that it’s a hit, there probably needs to be a payment associated with that. I think we will get there. I think this will be that first step, this next two years and seven months before we’re back negotiating contract again. We’ll get some actual dollars out of this, but it’s that data transparency, our ability to actually look and see what other shows are doing that will tell us where we need to go next.

**Craig:** Correct. The battlefront will be on the threshold. That’s where we’ll live. We’ll see how we do. You can’t have that battle if it doesn’t exist, and it now exists, so that’s huge.

Residuals for ad-supported streaming. Not only is that great to see, that one was one of those things where I’m like, why are they not just giving… Just unreal that they didn’t just give that, and they had to fight about it. Anyway.

**John:** AVOD services, FAST services, I think we all recognize it’s a future growth area. There will some shows that are made specifically for those services. They’re not there yet, but we want to make sure that we have protections and residuals for those shows as they start to come up.

**Craig:** Health care bumps. Fairly typical when we need these things, usually, we get punished. You say, hey, look, we need you to add a little bit more into the amount you contribute per writer and per this much of earnings into health care. “Okay, we’ll do that, but instead of giving you the 3% minimum bump across the board, it’s going to be 2.5%.” We got all of it. We got the bigger bumps, and we got an increase in the health care bump, and wonderful to see also, an extension of one quarter of eligibility, one quarter of a year, to reflect the time that was lost to the strike. That’s a big deal. That is an example of a lesson learned from the last strike, where our staff honestly just miffed it. They thought that was just how it would work, and told the membership as much in leading up to the strike vote, and then later went, “Oh, actually, no.” Everybody was well aware that this was an issue going in.

This is one of those areas where I got to actually tip my hat to the AMPTP. I’m not saying that they were not jerks to not offer it immediately. But it does strike me that when it comes to these issues, they at least are less Scroogey perhaps than in some of these other areas. It was good to see that.

Huge, huge win here for writing teams. For as long as I’ve been in this union, for as long as you’ve been in this union, teams have been penalized, essentially. They had a different deal for how much money they could receive health care contributions for, and now, finally, at long last, we have won what is only fair, which is that even if you write with somebody else as a team, you are treated individually for the purposes of qualifying for pension and health care. It’s unreal that we have been living with this for so long, but it has been fixed. Thank god.

**John:** The way to think about it is these are two human beings who are writing as a team, but they’re also two human beings, and each of them needs pension, each of them needs health care. You and I both know so many partners who have struggled with this. In some cases, especially if they’re married partners, they would do tricks to put all the pension contributions under one person’s name so they could do spouse minimums. It was insane.

**Craig:** It was crazy.

**John:** To finally close this is such a welcome relief.

**Craig:** Yeah, really brutal and a huge relief. AI obviously, media-friendly topic. It was solved I think exactly as it should’ve been, to the extent that anybody can say that AI has been solved. The nightmare is still emerging. Basically, AI-generated stuff is not literary material. Writers cannot be required to write AI. Writers cannot be required to incorporate AI. They don’t have to adapt to AI. AI is not eligible for credit.

The one area that we’ve punted to the courts – it makes sense that we’ve punted it to the courts – is basically scraping. The companies are reserving the right to feed all the scripts that they own, that we wrote, into an AI to see if they can help make that AI better. It’s going to be a tough case for us to win in a court, because we’re basically arguing that they can’t scrape their own copyrighted material, because they own the copyright. The fact is, we don’t know where any of this is going. It was going to be nearly impossible to get them to not do that. I think getting all these other concessions was really important. It is a markedly stronger set of language than the language the DGA secured.

**John:** I was obviously very involved in the AI frontier. I say there’s really two buckets of gains you can be thinking about here. First off is the writer’s daily working life. Those are issues like, AI-generated material is not literary material, source material, or sonic material. That makes it so it’s not your problem, that you cannot be forced to use AI tools, that if something is being generated by AI and then handed to you, they have to tell you that. They have to disclose that to you. Those are all protections for you and me today.

The other thing we’re wrestling with is what happens to the huge trove of material that we have written for the studios, that they control copyright on, that they could use to train their models? It’s true, they do control copyright, but we also hold back certain rights. As you know, Craig, we have separated rights on material that govern reuse and remakes and other things, so that the mutual agreement, neither side is giving up their ability to assert that they have controls over this. We’ll see where it goes and whether it’s something that happens in the courts in the next couple years. We’ll see.

One thing I think it’s important for everyone to remember is that the companies that are actually really doing AI, Microsoft, Facebook, Open AI, they are not parties to this contract at all. Whatever we did in this MBA does not affect them directly. In many cases, writers and the studios are aligned in our ability to say you cannot do these things, you other companies. It’s going to be a really live and active issues. In some cases, we’ll be allied with the studios. In some cases, we’ll be fighting the studios. But this contract does not give up any of our rights to do so.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think you hit on it, that the area where this can get worked out is in separated rights. Those are negotiated. We’ll have more success there than we will in a court, but we’ll see how it goes. The important thing was not only did we get about the strongest language I think we could’ve expected to get, but we also then set up SAG for their negotiation. Because I’m not on a negotiating committee, I’m just going to go ahead and presume that the major terms we got on things that are applicable to them, for instance, streaming success residuals, will carry through to them. They’re not going to do better. They do have specific needs regarding AI that we didn’t have, for instance, likeness, voice. They need to do more work on that. But we have given them a very good start, a very good basis. It was really important just for our sister union to see that we got much further than the DGA did with their language.

**John:** Speaking of SAG-AFTRA, of course they’re on strike right now, but in the times since these deals have come out, I’ve actually been talking to a lot of other labor organizations. I think there’s two principles that were tried to enshrine in this that are applicable to workers everywhere else is that AI cannot be used to replace the human worker and that you can’t use AI to drive down the wages or working conditions of the human worker. It’s going to be different in every industry, and it’s hard to make absolutes, but those are the kinds of guiding principles that you’re going to see other people try to enact to meet their specific needs in their industry.

**Craig:** Yes. This was the time it needed to happen.

**John:** We were uniquely positioned to handle it. It was just fate that the time came up at the right moment that we could do this.

**Craig:** Yes, things sort of lined up. We were unlucky in one regard that it fell in your lap. On the other sense though, we were very lucky that it fell in your lap when you guys were ready to start negotiating. That was good.

Lastly, I just want to talk about the overall value of the contract, because oftentimes – you’ve spent a lot of time in these Negotiating Committee rooms, I’ve spent some time in there – this becomes a bit of a shorthand of, how much money are we actually asking for? It gets calculated in various ways. But it was interesting to see, the amount that we were asking for and then the amount they initially offered, where we landed was a little bit under halfway.

You might think we should’ve gotten more or we should’ve been exactly halfway. But here’s the deal. What we were asking for was enormously more than we had ever asked for before. The Guild’s analysis is that where we landed is, the value of this contract is $233 million per year for three years. That is more per year than we got for the entirety of the 2023 year contract. I hope that puts it into perspective for people.

**John:** It’s also worth noting that 2020 was our biggest contract year to date.

**Craig:** That’s right. We didn’t do better. This was a paradigm shift, quantum leap. Pick your trope. This number is simply a different category of number. This contract is a different category of contract than any contract that the Guild has ever gotten in my career or yours.

Couple things to conclude, and then we’ll move on with the rest of our show. First, thank you, John. Thank you to you, the Negotiating Committee, the leadership, Chris Keyser, and Ellen. Ellen Stutzman deserves a medal. There’s something about the right person at the right time. I just think it was really important, the role she played and the way she played it. I was so impressed. I hope she continues to do that for us and for the companies, since we’re all working together again.

My parting advice for the companies in the aftermath of all this is to manage to do something that is very uncharacteristic for them from here on out, and that is avoid grinding labor down until our backs are against the wall, because the deal is, with this strike it was so evident that, as a labor force, our backs were against the wall. If you’re against the wall, you strike until you’re not. That’s it. You’ll strike forever. You’ll strike for a thousand years. It doesn’t matter, because there is no alternative that is success. Only success is success.

If they continue to follow that plan of theirs, to just chip away, chip away, chip away, they’re going to find themselves right back in the spot they were in in 2023, which was having perfectly, flawlessly, thoroughly motivated an entire union to walk the picket line for as long as it takes to get the biggest contract in union history. Try and avoid that, companies, because if it happens, we’ll strike again, and we will win again.

**John:** I’d second all of that. I would also say that it’s so easy to focus on the leaders of this organization and where we got to because of their hard work, but of course, it was the 10,000, 11,000 members who actually stood together through five very difficult months that made this all possible. It was really hard for basically everyone to do this.

Sometimes when you come out of a war, it’s hard to think about, what do I do next? I would encourage everyone to remember that you are in this Guild because you are the best writers of film and television in the world. That’s how you got to be here. It’s now your job to make the best film and television in the world, and to remind everybody that not only are you worth this $233 million, you’re still underpaid, you still should be paid more, that you are just absolutely unique in your abilities to do this.

All of the energy and brilliant and creativity we saw during these five months, everything that happened on the picket line, everything that happened online to support this, channel that energy, channel that brilliance into writing brilliant things. I would love for future historians to ask, “What happened in ’24 and ’25? Why did everything suddenly flourish and become so much better?” Maybe it’s because all the energy that was diverted into striking came back to where it really, truly belonged, which is on the page, and then we wrote just groundbreaking, incredible things.

**Craig:** I sure would love to see that. I have a question for you, John.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Were you writing at 12:01 a.m.?

**John:** No, I was not writing at 12:01 a.m., although shortly after it was called, I did send out those first emails to all the producers and all the people who I had not talked to in five months, saying, “Hello. Checking in. What’s happening?” It’s busy again, and it’s exciting. For the folks who it’s not busy for quite yet, just remember, the same drive and determination you showed over these last five months, show for yourself, and stand up for yourself, and stand up for your fellow writers.

**Craig:** I’m going to say I was playing D and D, in the game I play, not DM, on Tuesday. I think it was 11:30 p.m. when we finished. Everyone went home. I had a Diet Coke, watched the clock, and then it felt so good.

**John:** It did feel good.

**Craig:** One of the things that I think people don’t understand – certainly the companies don’t understand it – is that as much as we deserve to be treated correctly and compensated correctly, almost no one is driven to do this because of a love of money. We do this because we’re compelled to create things. It’s what we do. It’s how we define ourselves. One of the costs of a strike is disconnecting yourself from your thing, from the thing you’re supposed to be doing. It hurts. I hope everybody is enjoying reconnecting to the thing they’re supposed to be doing and having fun with it.

**John:** Fantastic. Drew, now, this is your part of the podcast, because you got a very interesting email this past week.

**Drew Marquardt:** I’m so excited to follow that up, by the way. I got an email this last week from Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell, sent September 24, 2018, which is five years ago-

**John:** Very exciting.

**Drew:** … asking me to follow up about Scriptnotes Episode 369 and the things you were talking about then, because you made five-year predictions then, and we can see if they came true. I went back and listened to Episode 369, and it also had a five-year follow-up, because producer Stuart Friedel had also sent an email five years into the future, because of course he did – that’s Stuart – to see if your predictions in Episode 108 about iPads making the way into movie theaters had come true. Of course, that did happen.

**John:** We all know that everyone brings their iPads into theaters all the time now.

**Drew:** Exactly.

**John:** That’s become so common. We were talking about it way back in, what was it, 2013 or whatever.

**Craig:** That was as close as you’re going to get to a meal-in-a-pill moment, John.

**Drew:** This is a chain going back 10 years in Scriptnotes history. It’s kind of like a wormhole. I figured listening to your predictions from Episode 369, they felt pretty timely and relevant to everything we’ve just been talking about, so I’m excited to hear you guys reflect on them.

**John:** Let’s listen to our predictions from Episode 369.

[Episode 369 Clip]

**John:** Let’s make some predictions for Megan to send five years in the future. Five years in the future, what’s going to become of award season, and what’s going to become of movies?

**Craig:** I’ll take the lead on this. Nothing will change. In five years, movies will pretty much be as movies are. There will be more original movies running on our screens at home through the Disney service and Netflix and so on. But there will still be huge theatrical releases coming out every single week. There will be a big summer box office battle issue of Entertainment Weekly and so on and so forth. When it comes to awards, nothing is going to change at all.

**John:** But will anything have changed in terms of getting writers and other people fairly compensated for movies that are not released theatrically?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Will we figure any of that stuff out?

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** We will have essentially the same conversation five years from now you predict?

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Franklin, what’s your thinking, five years in the future?

**Franklin Leonard:** It’s really hard for me to argue against that, honestly. Look, the theatrical business will still exist in five years. I think people will be going to see movies of all sorts. There will continue to be a giant summer blockbuster season and probably a six-month award season. As far as how people are compensated, I certainly hope there’s a change, but you guys have much deeper knowledge on the realities of that than I do, so I happily defer to your judgment.

**John:** A thing we found out as we surveyed screenwriters for the WGA is that 80% of screenwriters are also TV writers. Either they’re currently working in TV or they’re planning to work in TV. As these things get more and more combined, we’re going to have to figure out ways to do what Craig describes. Basically, after a certain window, every new time it’s watched, a nickel goes into the jar, because it shouldn’t really matter ultimately whether it was a 90-minute thing or a 30-minute thing. Just you pay that person.

**Franklin:** I totally agree.

**John:** There will be more things like Chernobyl, like Craig’s.

**Franklin:** Exactly, and more limited series specifically authored by Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** There will be at least one more. There will be at least one more of those.

**Franklin:** That’s my big call for 2023.

**Craig:** I do agree. I think that that is a format that is expanding, and expanding rapidly. It’s a tricky one, because I feel like a lot of these… Here’s another award season bunch of baloney. The whole limited series, not really limited. The Crown was a limited series its first season. No, it wasn’t. A lot of these limited series become these sort of backdoor seasons into a multi-season show. But I do think that that is going to… What’s happening is the television business seems to be shifting away from just pure ratings and into more of a kind of targeted depth. They’re like, “Look, we don’t need to be the Super Bowl. We don’t care if 80 million people watch. What we want is these five million people to all watch, if we can get those five million. And the only way to get those five million people is to show them this.” It doesn’t matter that most people don’t see it. These five million did, and that’s going to keep them paying for all the stuff, because they’re not going to watch any of the rest of this junk. They’re just going to watch this.

You start to get into the… There’s a great article by Malcolm Gladwell many, many years ago about how Prego figured out for the first time that if you sold five different kinds of Prego, you would make so much more money than if you just sold one kind of Prego. It’s the Prego-ization of television. That’s what’s happening. I think that is going to drive actually a lot of wonderful new content. I think there’s going to be a lot of limited series. There’s going to be more documentaries. There’s going to be all sorts of smart stuff. But for movies and for award stuff, I just think, as the guy says in Fallout, “War. War never changes.”

[end of clip]

**John:** Craig, how did we do five years ago? Which of these predictions do you think we landed on pretty well? Which ones were whiffs and misses for us?

**Craig:** I got to be honest. I think we did great. The one thing we missed was, what was going to happen just three months later, basically, which was COVID. Obviously, COVID was a massive monkey wrench into everything. But when it comes to theatrical, even in spite of COVID, it’s still here. There have been huge theatrical releases coming out. Are there huge ones every single week? No. Will we get back to that? Probably, yeah.

**John:** I would notice that during the strike, and of course we had the Barbenheimer phenomenon, and everyone was so desperate, like, “Oh my god, we need to make more movies, and of course we can’t make more movies right now.” You felt the industry having a frustration that they couldn’t do the thing which was so obvious they should be doing, because of the strike.

**Craig:** COVID and the strike certainly challenged our prediction, but I think that’s kind of why our prediction’s good, because if it hadn’t been good, between COVID and the strike, movies would be dead, theaters would be shuttered. That did not happen. I think we did really well there. I think we were right to suggest that the awards season, it’s the cockroach of seasons. Doesn’t matter what’s going on, there must be awards, and so the awards continue to happen, and the discussion and advertising around awards never, never, never seems to change.

**John:** That didn’t change over the course of the five years. This year is still an open question, because until a SAG-AFTRA deal is reached, they can’t do the normal award season stuff. I was talking with a friend who is an indie film publicist. There are these films that are going to festivals right now that have those SAG-AFTRA waivers, and so their actors can do the press. But the ones who came out in big studios can’t do that. It’s a really messy situation. Everyone is hoping and assuming that by the time it really becomes important, there will be a SAG-AFTRA deal, and normal things can resume. Of course, those same actors who were supposed to doing press, publicity for movies, are supposed to be also filming other movies, and their schedules are completely messed up. It gets sorted out.

**Craig:** Take it from me, as a guy that’s finally now looking at schedules. It’s just scrambled eggs out there, man. We’re all trying to figure this out. We’re talking about hiring a director, and she’s like, “But they have this other thing.” We’re like, “What are their dates?” She’s like, “I don’t know.” Nobody knows anything. Everybody’s just going to work together and figure that stuff out.

I agree with you. I think that SAG-AFTRA will hopefully conclude with a great deal for that union sooner rather than later. The award season will, I think, begin primarily in earnest in January, when you have the delayed Emmys, and then there’s Oscars and Golden Globes and all the rest of that. Fun, fun stuff.

**John:** Fun, fun stuff. There’s a prediction about more limited series, and that came true. There were a lot more limited series, especially for streaming, and so many of them that I couldn’t keep track of them. They just disappeared.

**Craig:** Yep, a gazillion of them. I think we’re probably set up for a contraction, not because of the strike, but because where else could you go? At some point, the balloon was going to pop. There are still a ton of those. Also, if the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that, with the rare exception of those remarkable shows that continue to do it the old way – Abbott Elementary – most television shows, even when they’re not limited series, are operating like limited series, 8 episodes, 10 episodes, 12 episodes, that sort of thing, and not coming out every fall. That format seems to be the format. It’s taken over.

**John:** I’ll disagree with you. I’ll put that on the record for our five-year follow-up. I think you’re going to see a lot more longer-run shows. The reason Daredevil is a 20-episode season, I think. I think these streamers and, of course, broadcast networks are finding, oh, it actually is more valuable to keep people watching a show over 20 weeks rather than the 8 weeks, and it’s more profitable for us. I think we’re going to see a return to some of those, also because once you’ve put a show out there, and it starts getting some traction, you don’t have to keep spending all the money marketing, because it can roll on its own. When there’s only 6, 8, 10 episodes of a show, it can be hard to keep it going, and it can be expensive to keep it going. Not every show is The Last of Us. Some shows, you try to launch them, and they don’t really launch, and that really kills you.

**Craig:** It does. I think you’re right from an economic point of view. It makes total sense. The challenge will be that the toothpaste is a little bit out of the tube in terms of quality, because when you have these shorter seasons or larger budgets, the audience gets used to a size of things. It’s hard for a standard 20-plus-episode rolling show to match that, although comedy is particularly well-tuned to match it. I got to be honest. I could see both. I’m not sure which way it’s going to go. I think what’s for sure is the limited series thing isn’t going away at all. It’s just will there be a clawing back from the traditional 22-episode season. That would be interesting to see.

**John:** Let me make my least controversial prediction, is that there will be a contraction, because there already was a contraction before the strike, a contraction back down towards a more normal, typical number of series and number of people employed on those series, just because there was a huge over-building phase during the early part of the streaming wars, and that’s going to stop. There will be a contraction. It’ll be wrongly blamed on the strikes, which were not actually a huge factor in it. It’s really about bottom lines and making shows for the right price.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s almost weird to suggest it’s a contraction when it’s just an inevitability. Because of how over-productive the business was, there’s just too many things being made. Everybody knows it. Nobody can keep track of all of it. Nobody’s quite sure why. Even if there is a reduction in the amount of shows that are made, it will still be more shows than were ever made before. I think that’s likely, although, god, what happens if five years from now — I’m going to give her a name, Annalise — the new producer, says, “I got this five-year email from Drew, and apparently, you guys thought there wouldn’t be 14,000 shows each day.” And boy, will we look stupid.

**John:** We will look so, so dumb.

**Craig:** Dumb.

**John:** What are predictions for AI? Five years now, what things-

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** … are we going to be expecting to see?

**Craig:** That’s a fool’s errand, honestly.

**John:** It truly is. Even as we were doing these AI proposals, I’d try to remind myself and everybody else, we cannot know beyond a certain horizon what this is going to look like, because some AI company we’ve never heard of could make a thing that is so compelling that it replaces our interest in film and television. Things could happen. We just don’t know.

**Craig:** We don’t know.

**John:** Something like TikTok.

**Craig:** We don’t know. It’s almost like an instant disqualifier if you see somebody babbling on about where AI is going to head. Who the hell knows? I have no clue. It would be interesting to ask AI where they think it’s going. I’m sure they also have no clue. I don’t know why I’m calling them they.

**John:** But also remember that the generative AI we’re talking about today, as we’re recording this in 2023, is just a prediction machine. It can say a thing, but it actually has no decision-making capability. It’s not sentient in any meaningful way. Yes, we get closer every day to things that kind of feel like Scarlett Johansson’s character in Her, but there’s not a consciousness happening there, and we need to make sure that we don’t mistake that, at least as we’re recording this in September of 2023.

**Craig:** What we call AI today, people later will call something else, because we’ll have something else. I refuse to predict.

**John:** Streaming. How many streaming services will there be? Of the existing streaming services, which ones get merged, combined? Do new ones come online? What do you think is happening five years from now, Craig?

**Craig:** Anybody that’s going to try and launch a new streaming service right now is insane. That feels almost suicidal. I think Apple’s not going anywhere, because they can afford to do this until the end of time. I don’t think Amazon’s going anywhere, for the same reason. Same reason with HBO/Max. The interesting thing is, Disney has Hulu and FX, so it’s three streaming services smushed together into one of them. Similarly, there’s Paramount Plus, smushed in with Showtime.

**John:** It’s also CBS.

**Craig:** Then that’s also CBS. What’s that? It does seem like I could see some squishing down there. I do not predict that there will be another swallowing of a major company the way Disney swallowed Fox.

**John:** I agree with you there. I think there’s going to be just too much heightened attention. Unless we get an entirely Republican administration that wants everything to be mega-merged, I don’t think the FTC or other people in regulatory functions would allow that to happen.

**Craig:** I think maybe people have seen enough now to go, “I don’t know if buying these companies makes sense,” because it seems like everybody’s tried to buy Warner Bros at this point. Maybe Target.

**John:** Target.

**Craig:** Warner Bros Target.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** That’s not bad.

**John:** It’s not bad.

**Craig:** That’s my prediction, Warner Bros Target.

**John:** While I don’t think there’ll be a new streaming service, I think some of the AVOD or FAST services, the equivalent of what’s now Pluto TV or other things, I think more people will watch those. I think it’s actually a good market for shows that are no longer valuable to a streamer but still have value out there in the world. Yes, it feels like old broadcast or cable, and that’s fine. It’s fine.

**Craig:** It’s essential, because what’s happened is, as these companies have chased Netflix –which is stuck in its one moat, because it has no other moat it can do — they’ve sat there going, “But wait. We used to make money off of Friends, because we would license Friends. But now we don’t, because we just show it to people ourselves. Why did we do that?” It’s interesting. HBO is strange in this regard. They license their shows to Amazon. Some people watch my show via Amazon, and they pay for it a la carte, which is great. That means that’s kind of a syndication. I think we will see more of that. I think we will see more shows being licensed to ad-supported streaming. It’s inevitable. It’s smart business. There are a lot of people who have no problem watching stuff with commercials as long as they don’t have to pay for it. That’s what television used to be.

**John:** It was, one day. Hey, Drew, is there anything else we didn’t make predictions about that you want to hear our prognostications?

**Drew:** I have heard rumors around indie TV coming. Do you think that might happen at all?

**John:** Can you describe indie TV? I want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing.

**Drew:** Indie TV is stuff that’s made independently and then licensed to a network, which sort of is the same where you have a typical studio that then licenses it to a network, and it has international distribution, but doing it more on a show-by-show basis.

**John:** Craig and I both, pretty recently we advocated for, “Oh, that model actually was good for a lot of people.” I don’t know that we’d be able to get there without some government regulation. We don’t have to get all the way back to [indiscernible 53:36], but without some motivation, on a governmental level, I think it would be tough. Craig, what are you thinking?

**Craig:** You do see this sort of thing still with variety and talk. Independent companies create a talk show, because it’s so cheap to make.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** Then they license it to exhibitors to run. That’s how we ended up with 500 Oprah clones in the ’90s.

**John:** The Ricki Lake Show, for example. You take a celebrity, you build a show around them, you license it to stations.

**Craig:** Sally Jessy Raphael. There were so many of them. There are still a lot of these things. But traditional narrative shows are expensive. They are so expensive that typically in the old days, when one company would produce them, and another company would air them, the company that produced them would deficit finance them, meaning they lost money. They would continue to lose money, because the licensing fee did not cover anywhere near what it cost to produce the show, until the show went into syndication, at which point it was all profit. It is an incredibly difficult thing to finance television shows without having some sort of massive financial safety net under you. I would be surprised.

**John:** I would be surprised too for scripted, but you never know. For all we know, there could be much cheaper versions of shows or much cheaper ways to make shows that we’re not thinking about right now, that become successful. Just the same way TikTok videos don’t cost money to make. There may be something like that that becomes a different means of production. Hard to say.

**Craig:** Yeah. If it doesn’t cost that much to make, what do you need those places for anyway? You just put it on TikTok.

**John:** Yeah. Drew, bundle this up, please. Send it five years into the future. What did we say, Annalise is her next name?

**Craig:** Annalise.

**John:** Annalise. She will open it up and be surprised by it, but hopefully also charmed and delighted like we are whenever we think of Megan McDonnell and Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Drew:** Good luck, Annalise.

**John:** Also, the bottom of the email is like, “John and Craig are monsters. Run.”

**Craig:** “Dear Annalise, you are not yet born, but I write to you now to warn you.”

**John:** It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this very cool, interactive visualization done by Alvin Chang for Pudding, called 24 Hours in an Invisible Epidemic. It’s about loneliness. It’s taken from this American Time Use Survey that looks at what Americans are doing hour by hour over the course of their day. It’s tracking, oh, they are grocery shopping, they are cleaning their house, they are at work.

Some of the things you discover in this is that people spend so much of their time alone, or at least not with friends and family members. One of the things that was shocking to see is this one chart that shows, among people 34 and younger, the time spent with friends has just plummeted. It’s just down so much. Some of that is the pandemic, but some of it’s also just sort of other structural changes in society.

Why that matters, there’s also this concept called Cantril’s ladder. They say, “Imagine a ladder. At the top of your ladder is your best possible life. The bottom is your worst possible life. Which step of the ladder do you personally stand on at the present time?” They ask people this question, and the people who are not around friends and family, they rank themselves very, very low.

It’s just a really nice way of visualizing and talking about something that’s hard to see, which is that people are not just alone, but lonely, and this is not good. We need to be thinking about how to get people around family and friends and feeling better about life.

**Craig:** Given everyone so many other things to do, that are so easy to do, and so here we are. We’re part of the problem, aren’t we? Because I’m looking at this chart, and there’s a whole lot of watching TV. Sorry.

**John:** We’ve always had TV though.

**Craig:** But there’s so much more of it.

**John:** There is more.

**Craig:** There’s so much more. Also, everybody had to watch the same show at the same time, kind of. If you missed it, you missed it. Then you had to gather around the TV. There was a great book that was written about the culture of television in America, called The Cool Fire, the idea being that it was the new fireplace. Now everybody can just go to their corners, they have their own screens, and watch their own things. They can watch whatever they want, whenever they want, and there’s way too much. There’s more than they could ever watch. Sorry, America.

**John:** Some of these are not new concepts. I’m looking at the famous book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, which was talking about the scourge of loneliness and people losing a sense of community. But I do think the pandemic, remote work, you’ve taken away the places in which people would not only be around people, but also make new friendships. We need to I think just be much more proactive about finding places to meet people. I have a friend who went to a board game meetup, specifically just like, “I just need to be around some new people.” That’s great. That’s taking good initiative. I also have friends who were talking about, “Oh, I realize I have a best friend who lives in another city. I don’t really care. It doesn’t really matter where I live. I’m just going to move to that city where my best friend lives.” I think that’s a great choice.

**Craig:** Unless that best friend’s like, “I’m not your best friend. Please leave me alone.” Happily, you and I have D and D.

**John:** Which solves everything.

**Craig:** Solves everything.

**John:** It does. But I would say during the pandemic, our Zoom D and D games were some of the only consistent social interactions I had with people outside of my family.

**Craig:** Exactly right, the D and D games. Then I was involved in a bunch of Zoom Mafia games that were incredibly elaborate and fun. That was it. It was like, what else can you do? You can’t go anywhere. You can’t do anything. Very cool. I like that it’s also for Pudding. I like just the thought, Alvin Chang did this for Pudding, like he was paid in pudding. But apparently, it’s a place called Pudding.

**John:** It’s a site called Pudding. It mostly does interactive visualizations of stuff.

**Craig:** Do you think Alvin Chang sat there and realized that some people were going to spend a bunch of time alone looking at Pudding?

**John:** Maybe he did. I will say actually, it has a tip jar on it. It was the best set up tip jar I’ve ever seen, so I tipped Alvin Chang really for all the incredible hard work he clearly did to make this.

**Craig:** Pudding. I have, uncharacteristically, two One Cool Things, because sometimes I have none. First one, easy, Rusty Lake, Underground Blossom. Everybody who listens to the podcast knows how much I love the Rusty Lake games. They have a new one out. It’s called Underground Blossom, the story of Laura, who’s a tragic figure, like literally every other character in Rusty Lake. Terrific puzzles. The theme is you are on a subway car, moving through various subway stations, but each station is a different place in time. The classic Rusty Lake vibe, good puzzles, weird, creepy, disgusting, funny, the usual. Well worth the purchase there.

My second One Cool Thing is a woman named Melissa Smith. I’ve probably mentioned before, John, that I took an acting class in college. That acting class was probably the best instruction I ever received on writing, because I learned what had to happen between the page and performance. We write for actors. Melissa Smith was the head of the acting program at Princeton. She was wonderful. She’s a wonderful teacher, very good actor. Very good actor. I just learned so much from her.

All these years go by, and I did a Zoom seminar with one of the screenwriting classes at Princeton. The instructor had said, “Hey, do a One Cool Thing.” I was like, “You know what? I think my One Cool Thing will be Melissa Smith.” I went to look her up, to see where she was, because it’s rare that people stay the entire time in one place. Indeed, she did move on from Princeton at some point and became the Conservatory Director at the American Conservatory Theater and also continued to act and played Frances McDormand’s sister in Nomadland, in fact-

**John:** Oh, nice. I didn’t know.

**Craig:** … and died two years ago.

**John:** Oh, god.

**Craig:** And that’s where I went… Here’s the thing. We get older, and we forget everybody else is getting older, especially when they were already older to begin with. We just think that we’re the only ones getting older. There are people in your life who were, back then, the age you are now. You will let 30 years go by. Actually, she was much younger than I am now. She was 64 years old. You will let all this time go by. Then you think, “Oh, you know what? I can drop them an email and tell them what they mean to me.” No, not always.

If you have that instinct, do it, because I never had a chance to tell Melissa Smith exactly how important I thought her instruction was and how formative it was for me as a writer. I didn’t even know that that was her in Nomadland, because all that time had gone by. She was just a terrific person and a brilliant actor and a really, really good teacher, just really good. More than anything, she taught me how important brutal honesty was in what we do. Honesty, which hurts all the time. Thank you to Melissa Smith. You are my One Cool Thing this week. I’m sorry I didn’t get to tell you.

**John:** Excellent. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Holland Gallagher. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. You can send us an outro. If you want to send me a three-minute version, that’s lovely, but honestly, a 30-second version is much more useful, because that’s about as much as we’re going to use. I would say don’t kill yourself to do the extra 2 minutes 30 seconds. Give us the 30-second one.

ask@johnaugust.com is also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find 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 the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on dreams. Craig, Drew, thank you so much for a good episode.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig?

**Craig:** Yes?

**John:** Are you a dreamer?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes?

**Craig:** Yes, of course.

**John:** How important are dreams in your life? Do they just disappear, or do they stick with you at all?

**Craig:** Sometimes they’ll stick with me a little bit because they were particularly bizarre, but I give them no import. I seek within them no reason. I do not dwell upon them. I don’t think they’re significant in any way, shape, or form. But I definitely dream. I definitely dream.

**John:** I’m a big dreamer myself. I will say that it feels like I spend at least as much time asleep as awake. I feel like I spend a tremendous amount of time in my dream space. I know that’s all really an illusion, because your dreams are just your brain kind of going through its washing cycle. It’s your brain cleaning up all the goop and getting yourself ready for what’s next, and yet I love my dreams. I genuinely enjoy them most of the time. I’m lucky I very rarely have nightmares, and most of my dreams are cool. I sort of like being in them. Drew, are you a dreamer?

**Drew:** I am a dreamer. It comes in and out. I was also wondering too, do you guys feel that you have a few days of certain tone of dreams? Maybe it’s just me. But three days in a row, the dreams will be sort of similar in tone.

**John:** I definitely notice the tone and nature of my dreams can change based on what’s happening in my life. At times when I’m stressed out in my life, the dreams can reflect that, or at least the fact that my life circumstances are different will be affected in my dreams. When I’m sick, my dreams are different. If I’m super jet-lagged, if I’m in a strange place, if I’m going to bed at a weird time, that will affect my dreams. Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah, the dreams that I fear the most are not nightmares. Honestly, if I do have a real nightmare, I’m actually quite thrilled, because it’s intense, and I might be able to steal something from it. But it’s the dreams where I am stuck doing a task or trying to solve a problem that is unsolvable and unending. All you need to do is just move this box to this corner and this box over to here. Oh, but it moved again. You just spend seemingly hours exhausting yourself in your own dream because your brain is stuck in a solve loop. I hate those. They do happen every now and again.

**John:** Do either of you have moments of lucid dreaming, where you’re aware that you’re dreaming, and you can affect what you’re seeing and what you’re experiencing? I’ve had it rarely, but it’s not a thing I’ve sought or tried to control.

**Drew:** I had it this week, where I thought I was having a full conversation with my fiancée as she was getting ready to leave early one day, and then I realized that I was still in bed and that I was sort of having a completely different conversation. But I knew that I was dreaming. I wasn’t controlling it necessarily, but I was aware of the two.

**Craig:** I’m aware sometimes, I guess, “Oh, this is a dream.” Somebody was saying that they wanted to train themselves to be able to do whatever they wanted in their dream. That’s a little scary to me. I think if we gave you the power to do whatever you wanted in the world, you would do it, you would seize that power. I’m a fairly humble dreamer, I guess. Here’s what obsesses me about dreams. What obsesses me about dreams is they’re all from my brain, but things are constantly happening in dreams that surprise. People are constantly saying things in dreams that I did not know they were going to say. I don’t understand how that works.

**John:** I would say the current best guesses and understanding of what’s happening with dreams is that, as I said, it’s your brain going through its maintenance cycle and clearing off the stuff. But you have to remember that of course our brains are taking in all this external stimulation normally and creating meaning out of it, because what our eyes are seeing and what our ears are hearing isn’t really what we’re experiencing. That’s our brain forcing meaning onto it, which is why we have optical illusions and auditory illusions.

In this case, some part of your conscious brain or some part of your brain is experiencing all this crap that’s being thrown up by this cleaning process and trying to create a narrative meaning out of it or trying to make sense of it. That’s why it seems to have some dream logic to it. There’s no one in charge of the narrative there. It’s pattern matching. It’s actually not that different than when the eye is hallucinating. It’s stringing together the next thing. It doesn’t know whether it really makes sense.

**Craig:** It doesn’t even need to make sense. Really, the thing that puzzles me is that I don’t know what’s about to happen. How can I surprise myself? How can somebody in my head say something that makes sense in conversation, that I didn’t predict they were going to say?

**John:** It comes down to the assumption there is a Craig Mazin, there is a myself.

**Craig:** This is the thing.

**John:** The homunculus problem.

**Craig:** The problem is, it seems to me not a problem, just a fact, that our consciousness can absolutely split. In a weird way, that’s what we’re doing when we’re writing, consciously, I think.

**John:** I think so.

**Craig:** We’re just being other people. It is amazing to me that in our dream state, we still reserve some kind of weird consciousness. We understand there’s a concept of I. I went into a room, and I picked up a thing. Then something leapt out at me and freaked me out. Whatever is creating the leapt out and freaked me out bit, that section of the brain somehow can function entirely independently of the eye portion of the brain. That is fascinating to me.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** I don’t think anybody knows how that works.

**John:** No. I would say that my POV inside dreams is not first-person shooter. It can vary a lot. Sometimes that can be a person inside the dream, not often, but sometimes. Sometimes I am watching a movie to some degree. It’s always strange. At times I’ll see extreme angles in my dreams. It’s like, why is this top-down shot from the ceiling? That doesn’t make sense. I as a person could never be there. But I guess it’s the person who’s watched movies in me or the part of my brain that’s watched movies has made that choice. It’s a strange thing. But I think we assume that there’s an intended viewer for this dream, and it’s probably not accurate.

**Craig:** I’m an FPS dreamer.

**John:** You think you’re always looking through the virtual eyes of yourself in your dreams?

**Craig:** I don’t recall ever waking up going, “I was just watching myself do something.” In fact, I’m positive I’ve never had that experience. I’m a first-person dreamer. We have a lot of theories about all of it. The other thing that they always say is, everybody dreams. It’s just that a lot of times you don’t remember it.

**John:** Exactly. It’s probably good that you don’t remember it too vividly, because it would mess you up.

**Craig:** Because it’s a nightmare.

**John:** It’s a nightmare. You said that maybe you’ll have a nightmare, and that nightmare will inspire you to write some sort of scene. Have you written anything that has been directly or indirectly prompted by a dream? You woke up, like, “Oh, yeah, that’s the thing.”

**Craig:** Not per se. It’s really more of a weird vibe. It’s like, okay, I remember feeling deeply disturbed by this little thing. I’m just going to channel that disturbed feeling. Sometimes all I’m trying to do is reaction match. I know what it feels like to be particularly creeped out. Is this giving me that feeling? Is this giving me that feeling? Happily, most of us will never experience something that is on par with whatever happens in a horror movie, but we can imagine it. Dreams are a chance to have that. A dream or a nightmare version of creeping you out always seems more intense than a movie version, always, than things you see that other people come up with.

**John:** I can’t think of the exact example, but there was one time where I woke up and realized, oh, that actually just was the scene of whatever I was writing. Like, oh, that was the scene. I just wrote down the dialogue that was in the scene. That literally became the scene. But that’s really rare. I’ve never even really tried to be the person who, “Okay, now, I’m going to think before I go to bed about the scene I’m trying to write or the story problem I’m trying to solve, and let my dreams do it.” That’s never been a [crosstalk 1:12:58] for me.

**Craig:** Dream dialogue generally is total garbage.

**Drew:** Do you ever have the dreams where you hear the greatest song you’ve ever heard, and you wake up and you try and explain it and it’s garbage, it’s just gobbledygook?

**Craig:** I’m glad you mentioned that. Never, ever tell somebody your dream. Never do it. Never tell it. It’s boring. It’s boring for everyone, unless there’s crazy sex involved, and then you have to be careful who you’re telling it to. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever tell people your dream, because you think it’s so interesting, and everyone’s bored, always, 100% of the time.

**John:** I think the only time you’re interested is the question of like, why would you tell me this dream? What is it you’re trying to reveal about yourself in this dream? But that’s not very often.

**Craig:** No, it’s usually like, “Oh my god, the craziest thing happened, and then, and then, and then… ” Shut up.

**John:** Also, the fact that it is “and then, and then, and then” is part of the reason why there’s not narrative logic there. As we’ve talked about on the show countless times, if your recap of a story is “and then, and then, and then,” there’s a problem, because there’s not a forward drive.

**Craig:** Completely.

**John:** We want better dreams. Better dreams in 2024.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** That’s my motto. Cool.

**Craig:** Are you running for president?

**John:** That’s what it is. By the way, I’m running for president.

**Craig:** Awesome. Thanks, guys.

**John:** See you.

**Craig:** Bye.

**Drew:** Bye.

Links:

* [WGA Tentative Agreement Summary](https://www.wgacontract2023.org/WGAContract/files/WGA-Negotiations-Tentative-Agreement.pdf)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 369 – What is a Movie, Anyway?](https://johnaugust.com/2018/what-is-a-movie-anyway) from 2018
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 108 – Are two screens better than one?](https://johnaugust.com/2013/are-two-screens-better-than-one) from 2013
* [24 Hours in an Invisible Epidemic](https://pudding.cool/2023/09/invisible-epidemic/) by Alvin Chang
* [Melissa Smith, longtime head of ACT’s MFA program, dies at 64](https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/theater/melissa-smith-longtime-head-of-acts-mfa-program-dies-at-64/amp) by Sam Hurwitt
* [Rusty Lake Underground Blossom](https://www.rustylake.com/adventure-games/underground-blossom.html)
* [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 Holland Gallagher ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and 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/613standard.mp3).