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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)
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by 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).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/storytelling-and-the-strike).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 614 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This week, the WGA ratified a new contract with the studios, marking the conclusion of the 148-day strike, but that’s not the end of the story, nor does it really give a sense of how this all began. Today on the show, I will welcome the co-chair and chief orator of the WGA Negotiating Committee, Chris Keyser, to help us understand the storytelling behind the strike. Chris Keyser, welcome back to Scriptnotes.

**Chris Keyser:** It’s good to see you again, John. It’s been a couple of days since I was locked in a room with you for five months.

**John:** We were locked in rooms for a very, very long time. I know we are all kind of sick of talking about negotiations, but I promise this one is going to be different, because it’s going to be crafty. It’s going to be much more like… Greta Gerwig was sitting in your seat a few years back, and we were talking through Little Women. We were going through pages of the script, like, “Why did you make this choice? Why this word, not that word?” We’re going to do the same with you here, because we’re going to look at three of your speeches as a framework for talking about the overall narrative and storytelling that was so crucial for this whole campaign, for figuring this out.

**Chris:** A speech and two sequels.

**John:** A speech and two sequels, yes. You became not notorious but beloved, I’ll say, for long speeches. People loved your long speeches. We’ll talk through those speeches.

**Chris:** Is “long” the operative word in all that?

**John:** No. Inspiring, meaningful, scene-setting speeches. I think actually there’s a lot to learn here just in terms of how we tell stories, because in these speeches, we see that you had to establish a premise, identify themes and characters, structure a timeline, and it weirdly is a lot like what we do in our day jobs. One of the members of the Negotiating Committee said it was like being in the best writers’ room that just went on for forever.

**Chris:** It’s true. It’s true. Although we don’t start by saying it’s a story, in the end we have to tell a story to the members, and they have to believe the story and want to be a part of it.

**John:** Yes, and so we have to tell a story that feels true to them, and we have to be honest and truthful with them at every moment. Yet we’re still always trying to make sure that we’re framing it in ways that they can relate to, that they can identify with.

**Chris:** Exactly.

**John:** We’re going to talk about all that, and in a Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about debate, because you were president of the Harvard University Debate Council.

**Chris:** You remember.

**John:** I remember way back then. You’ve stayed active in debate. I just don’t know debate at all. You’ve coached debate.

**Chris:** I have. We can talk about it, yes. I’m happy to talk about that.

**John:** Also, we’ve got a clip of you as a 23-year-old.

**Chris:** I’m less happy about that.

**John:** It’s amazing. You’re killing it on the debate stage. It’s strange to see, because it’s both you sound like a 23-year-old and you sound exactly like Chris Keyser, which is a great combination. You’re going to want to be a Premium Member to hear that Bonus Segment.

Last time you were here, Chris Keyser, I think we were sitting in this room, and we were talking through the agency campaign, which was a whole thing and a challenge. Before we got into what happened in this campaign, this negotiation, could you set the table a little bit for where we were at around 2019, where the Guild was at, what we saw as the big, broad issues going into 2020 and then into 2023?

**Chris:** Sure. I might even go further back than that-

**John:** Please.

**Chris:** … if that’s okay. I remember.

**John:** Please.

**Chris:** David Goodman will remember this too, because I bring it up a lot, that he and I had a breakfast while I was president of the Guild at some point. I don’t even know what year it was. I finished my term in 2015. He said to me, “Nothing’s going to happen unless you come up with an agenda for how we’re going to move things forward.” I don’t mean it was just mine alone. But that began a conversation, and he was part of it, and obviously a central part of it, and others were too, and so was David Young and everyone on staff at the Guild.

We began to identify some issues that we were seeing on the horizon that we need to deal with over the next decade or so. They included, and you know because you were a part of this, one, dealing with how we’re paid, the idea that drafts, which were the old measure of payment, the unit of pay, were no longer sufficient either for screenwriters or for television writers, whose work was getting longer and longer. So we talked about that. We talked about our relationship with our agents and the extent to which our agents were representing us as true fiduciaries. We talked a lot about the three guilds and the need for a kind of unified bargaining strategy. Those were the among the highlights of that. The conversation began in earnest. A good first step in all of that was probably 2017 when we took on span, in addition to trying to save our health care plan.

**John:** Span, for folks who are new to this, is the idea that a certain amount of pay in television gives you a certain number of weeks of that writer’s time, but you can’t drag people out forever on that.

**Chris:** Exactly, exactly. Essentially, when you sign a contract, you need to know what the term of the contract is. It doesn’t mean very much to say, “Look how much I’m paid. I just didn’t realize it was for the next 25 years.” That was all part of a conversation that we’d been having also, because we’d talked about free rewrites for screenwriters. The Committee on the Professional Status of Writers had made the rounds amongst all the studios for years and years and years talking about all of that. It was part of the same question, which is you get you a payment, you think it’s for a period of time, and then you end up working some multiple of that, and it’s no longer a viable career. It began there in 2017.

2017 was also important, I think, because it was the beginning of us testing the relationship between leadership and the membership. Maybe testing is the wrong word, but solidifying it, beginning to use our power again. Broadly speaking – and I’m not the best expert at this, other people will do better – the strike of 2007 and 2008 came after nearly two decades of Guild fear of using its own power after the strike of 1988.

Patrick and John Bauman and all of those and David Young, who reestablished the Guild as a kind of fighting force, took on the issue of jurisdiction of the internet, at some cost, because the Guild was not unified at that point. They had to build it from scratch. That strike obviously succeeded in achieving its principal goal but also revealed some of those ongoing divisions in the Guild. In 2017 we took a strike authorization vote. It was the first time the membership had voted not to strike but to give the Negotiating Committee the power to call a strike if needed to at contract deadline.

That was an important process. We didn’t end up going on strike, but it tested the waters in some sense. That led us to begin to talk about the agency campaign. It’s the way in which the agents and minimums in the MBA are, as David Young has said, just two sides of the same coin, how we get paid. The agency campaign was maybe the most important thing the Guild has done.

**John:** It was one of the strangest things the Guild has done, because it’s not going up against our traditional adversary. It’s not going up against the studios the way you do every three years. This was attempting to forge a new relationship with the agencies, who are in theory our allies, but oftentimes were working at cross-purposes to us.

**Chris:** That’s right. That was not an easy thing to do. It was different from a strike, because writers did not lose work in the course of doing it, but it went on for a very long time, and it tested the Guild’s resolve. The Guild held together through all of that, thanks in large part to everybody who was on that Negotiating Committee. David Goodman was remarkable in that struggle.

We ended up obviously resetting the relationship between writers and their agents and limiting the extent to which they could function not as our fiduciaries but as independent parties to our contracts, who would be paid directly by the studios or, alternatively, establish their own studios. They were both our employers and our representatives at the same time.

**John:** But that campaign also, I think, established a different connection between writers and the Guild, and the sense that the writers should’ve felt like they were in charge of the Guild and they could act together as part of the Guild to make changes that they wanted to see happen.

Going into that, we had the captain system, which we built up out of the remnants of 2007, 2008. But it was the first time really in practice we had to see people following leadership but also leading and self-organizing to do things. I remember the events like Latinx writers nights to talk about staffing and how to figure out new, alternative systems for that. Just the entrepreneurial nature of our membership was so apparent that they actually could take on that role and weren’t afraid.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s exactly right. The other thing that the agency campaign proved was precisely how democratic the Writers Guild was. Without going back and reliving that or identifying who was on what side of the conversation, there were some number of people, showrunners and others, who wish we hadn’t done what we were doing during the agency campaign and made that relatively clear.

Probably if that had happened two decades earlier, that might have fundamentally divided the Guild and undermined the campaign itself. But what became clear during the agency campaign is that every individual member of the Guild has one vote in the decision about what the Guild does. That became critically important. I don’t want to suggest that we had a major fracture. It was overwhelmingly supported. But there were meaningful members of the Guild, people who had-

**John:** Famously, we had people running for office during the course of the agency campaign, who were down on the agency campaign.

**Chris:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** And so that we could have tension within the Guild and still be resilient and still get through it was crucial.

**Chris:** Yeah. Not to say it’s like 1864, but David Goodman, like Abraham Lincoln before him, was forced to run for office in the middle of a war.

**John:** Now, actually in the middle of the agency campaign, we had 2020, which was supposed to be a negotiation. Streaming was going to be one of the central issues on that. I was on the Negotiating Committee for that. This felt like the time where we’re going to actually really deal with streaming. We went in there with a plan. We had member meetings. Then we had a pandemic, and all the leverage we possibly would have just disappeared, because we couldn’t mount a strike threat in the middle of the pandemic. It was so strange. Everything was strange about 2020. But to go into this and have the air just go out of the balloon was really frustrating.

**Chris:** Yeah. It’s weird how history is defined by climate and disease so often. The pandemic marginally helped the agency campaign and undermined the MBA negotiations. I don’t want to say it exactly that way. Actually, the committee did a very good job. Not only did we use our leverage the way we could at that point, but we won some things we didn’t think we were going to win. You were centrally part of paid family leave, which was a meaningful achievement. A huge, meaningful achievement. And to do that in the middle of a period when no one was in a position to exercise the leverage we normally do was pretty remarkable.

But we had known, I would say we knew in 2017, looking forward, that there were issues that we hadn’t dealt or were just beginning to see on the horizon that at some point would come to a head. And the question was, would 2020 be the moment in which that happened, when the Guild suddenly had to deal with the changes that were being brought about by the shift to the streaming model. Not being able to do it in 2020 delayed for an additional three years the ability to face all of that stuff. That’s really difficult in an MBA perspective, because one of the things that we talk about a lot with the members is the AMPTP tends to see things as solidified inside the contract.

If you wait too long to make a change, they say, “We have a mature contract on that provision, and you’ve been okay with it for a number of cycles. We’re not really inclined to do anything about that.” That’s what we faced in 2023, a long list of things, and longer than I think we knew in 2020, or at least problems that had become exacerbated in the intervening three years that had to be addressed.

**John:** Let’s talk about that list-making, because the process for figuring out what we’re going to negotiate in this MBA, obviously there were conversations ahead of time, but it started with a member survey. We surveyed the entire membership to see where they’re at, what are the things they’re facing. There’s quantity of information on that, but there’s also just a lot of anecdotal data and a lot of just people’s stories. It became clear, I think from that, that there was a big list of things.

I guess the question I want to get to is, how early on did you have a sense this was going to be a kitchen sink negotiation, where it felt like there was a whole bunch of stuff that all had to be addressed in this one thing, where there wasn’t a thing we could point to that’s like, let’s save the health plan, let’s save pensions, let’s deal with that. When was it clear to you that like, oh crap, it’s a big list here?

**Chris:** I think it was pretty early. I don’t know for you, but we were paying enough attention in the three years intervening, although I didn’t have any sense that I was going to be playing the role I had, because I had been tracking it somewhat and was in touch with Guild leadership and all the way through. I knew that list was getting longer and complicated.

I’ll tell you one thing that relates to this. In 2017, the staff of the Guild, because they had also done research then – there were surveys done then – came to a meeting with the co-chairs of the Negotiating Committee and said, “Here’s what we think should be on the table in 2017.” I remember having a pretty vigorous conversation, where there was a lot of push back from me and Billy and Chip, Billy Ray and Chip Johannessen, and said, “That’s too much.” I don’t know what that story is. It might actually be worth… I’m sorry for-

**John:** Oh, go for it.

**Chris:** … being parenthetical about this. It’s important to know that when we talk about this as a story, it’s more documentary than a piece of fiction. I know it’s not fiction. The story doesn’t come first. The facts on the ground come first. You can’t make that stuff up. What the Guild fights for is what the membership says it needs. I don’t want to make it feel as if story matters more than the reality of being a writer.

It’s also true, as you suggested, that it’s very difficult to have a negotiation where there are many, many things on the table, both because that’s a more difficult, complex story to tell, but also because it’s more difficult to defend a negotiation itself, where the tendency is for the other side to say, “What do I need to give you before you get so close to that point at which the membership is no longer willing to fight for everything that you have to start dropping stuff?” We can talk about that more. But it’s a risky way of going into a negotiation. Maybe risky is not the way to put it. Ellen would tell me that’s the wrong word. But I see it that way as a non-pro.

In 2017 we said, “We have to begin to couch this in a way that we cover as much as we possibly can, we don’t ignore any of the central issues, but that people understand fundamentally what we’re fighting for.” This was, by the way, before the health care stuff came up in 2017, for those who don’t remember, because that was a rollback on the table.

**John:** That’s right. That’s right.

**Chris:** They gave us the story that we didn’t have. Yes, I think it was pretty clear well before this negotiation that there was no way to boil this down to one or two things.

**John:** Let’s talk about the first framing of all this. The first time I heard it framed was in what you call the Member Rap, which was the presentation that you give to membership, saying this is what this is going to be about. I know you had to pitch it. You gave a version to the board. You read it to the Negotiating Committee. We all had notes. I feel so bad for how many notes you got, both in the room and emailed afterwards.

**Chris:** That was the largest writers’ room I’ve ever been in. Everyone felt free to.

**John:** Of course. You’re always surrounded by the best writers who have the strongest opinions in the world, and yet you got to a really good place. I thought we might spend a few minutes looking through this rap. It’s 20 double-spaced pages. The version I see says 22.0. Is that the 22nd draft?

**Chris:** The 22nd draft, yes.

**John:** 22nd draft.

**Chris:** Yeah. I should say, John, remember also, we had a month or more of meetings before that where we began to talk about which issue should be included and also making some really important decisions that held all the way through. For example, the question of whether minimum room size should be based on episodes or on show budget was a big conversation that we had.

**John:** I do forget that there was the long list, and we were scratching things out from that early stage. It was more detailed than what the Pattern of Demands is, but it was also allowing for some flexibility. Staff would weigh in on things. There were some wild ideas that were shot down. We were also really searching for how do we unify, bring this all together, what is the story we’re telling membership out of this. You were responsible for writing out the story.

Let me hand this over to you. This is something you’ve read 20,000 times, I’m sure. I thought we might start with, this is on the bottom of Page 1, you kind of establish the premise. Would you mind reading that aloud to us, that part?

**Chris:** This feels a little bit like I’m in a courtroom. They say, “Do you want to read out loud what you said? Do you stand by that?” I said, “Driven in large part by the shift to the streaming model, writing is being devalued in every sector of the business: in features, with its insufficient streaming residuals and continued reliance on free work – in comedy variety, whose writers were being unprotected by Guild standards on streaming platforms – in episodic television, where short orders, endless production calendars, the decoupling of writing from production, and the related rise of the mini room are an existential threat to writer compensation and power.”

**John:** That feels to me like a premise. In that paragraph, you’re really talking through this is the problem that we’re facing. This is the central thing that we have to look at. It sounds obvious, but without that, I don’t know what this whole campaign is about.

**Chris:** It’s always important, I think, in these kinds of negotiations, to tie what’s happening to some meaningful kind of sea change in the business. In 2007-’08, it’s obviously the hint that the internet is going to take over and our stuff is going to migrate to that, to an online platform. Here it was what came out of the shift to the streaming model. People understand that. They realize it’s the “why now”-

**John:** Exactly.

**Chris:** … of this conversation.

**John:** In a pitch, you have to sell why do we make this movie now, why do we make this series right now, why is this important right now. This is the “why now” of this. This is the premise.

**Chris:** The other important thing that is more apparent to me now than before is that premise that we stuck with all the way through, of no writer left behind, of every single sector of the business being attended to, dovetailed really nicely with – we were talking about it – the increasing democratization of the Guild. This strike relied in large part on the energy and dynamism of younger members. If we had decided, and we were never going to, that this was going to be an agenda that mostly took care of showrunner problems, for example, that wouldn’t have flown. We wouldn’t have been able to get away with that. What we ended up with was broad, near universal solidarity for an agenda that, as we said here, within the first minute and a half of the very first member message, said this is for everybody.

**John:** Let’s talk about who this everybody are, because next up, you have a premise, but it’s not a story until there are characters. On the next page, you get to the characters. I highlighted a few of them there, if you’d mind reading those.

**Chris:** “Our survey tells a story – your story. Almost 7,000 of you responded. You wrote to us in detail, with anger and sometimes with anguish and fear. Here’s who we heard from:

“The screenwriter who’s on a one-step deal, who’s been writing for months while their delivery money is held hostage to the next free rewrite, whose residuals on streaming are capped at the movie-of-the-week rate, even with its A-list stars and theatrical budget.

“The staff writer who’s kept at the same level on short orders, year after year.

“The lower-level writer who’s going from 10-week job to 12-week job to 20-week job. Who sometimes can’t even get those jobs because mini rooms with their small staffs and uniform salaries, tend to favor higher-level writers. Who gets a script – maybe.”

**John:** In that same segment, you’re talking through comedy variety writers and mid-level writers and showrunners and making clear this is about everybody. In doing that, you are letting people say, “Oh, he mentioned me, because that’s what I am,” but also, you can imagine yourself in those other people’s position, which ended up being crucial for solidarity to make sure that we all felt like we were fighting for each other.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s right. The interesting thing about this is, though the membership, I’ll say first of all, understood it intuitively, because it did come from that, the full understanding of it in some ways didn’t come until people were in these meetings and then on the picket line where they began to meet each other. It was a little bit like those stories of… We’re not really like this. We’re not provincial and living in our own little wards, but it’s like you got called up to war and you met all these people from all across the country whom you had never met before. You went places you never knew existed in some ways. You learned stuff that you wouldn’t have learned had you not been drafted into a conflict.

**John:** I remember on the picket line talking with Jeopardy writers or folks who do Hallmark movies. It’s such a different structure of work than I’m used to, but it’s also covered by the same Guild and they have the same issues. Because I knew that those Jeopardy writers are under the same kind of provisions, Appendix A, as comedy variety writers, I understood what the kind of things were that they were facing, which was crucial.

**Chris:** The companies, I think, were often – I don’t know if they are anymore, maybe not – under the misconceptions that these agendas are imposed by leadership on the membership. That is not at all what happened. It comes up from the membership, and the leadership just echoes that.

Then I think the truth of this in any one of these longer struggles is that, just as in writing, you can’t make up stakes. You can put all kinds of flowery language around something, but either the stakes are there or not. The reason why this ended up actually holding people together was because they felt it deeply.

**John:** You want to move ahead?

**Chris:** Sure.

**John:** You literally state the theme. It’s Page 4 there.

**Chris:** Yes. “7,000 individual stories – your own private economies. With one repeated theme: the business is broken. Writing is broken.”

**John:** You literally state the theme. That’s a thing we came back to again and again is that the companies have broken this model that was so successful for them for so many years, and we need to fix it. We need to put in place practices that actually fix and correct the mistakes that they made, not to go back to an old system, but to make this current system workable, livable, survivable.

**Chris:** I don’t know we knew that. The thing is, you’re just guessing at… I don’t mean we’re guessing at the problem or the solutions. It’s like having a test screening, these early member meetings, to see whether it works or not, is this a four-quadrant negotiating agenda.

**John:** Let’s talk about the revisions and the rewrites, because I don’t remember clearly your first passes. What was different and what changed in that rewrite process, getting notes back from the board, from Negotiating Committee, from early people listening to the drafts of this?

**Chris:** That’s also a little distant in my memory, because there are so many drafts. First of all, it was a honing of the way we talked about the issues. I needed, and we always need, the first time through – and I remember this in every single one of these negotiations I’ve been part of – to have people hear it and say, “Am I understanding immediately what you’re talking about?”

Remember, these meetings, you’re sitting in the audience. You have some slides up of what the proposals are, but there’s a lot of information passing through your ear canal very quickly. It’s not easy to keep track of that stuff. It’s really important. It’s mostly not visual. One thing that goes on is people saying, “I’m getting this like this. It’s crystal clear.” The second thing is, to be honest, different constituencies in the board and NegComm saying, “This doesn’t entirely address what I need, and can you make sure that it does?” There was a lot of that.

Then the third thing is just there’s a lot of good language that comes out of a 40-person writers’ room. I found it, and I think that staff and anyone did, very useful to hear even the casual comments that people made in conversation. We would just jot things down and say, “That’s a beautiful way of putting that.” I remember, because I actually referred to it at one point, Mike Schur said, “The minimum size for a writers’ room in the MBA is zero.” We’re going to use that forever.

**John:** Absolutely. I do remember some NegComm meetings where someone would say something, like, “Yep, we’re pulling that in.” Let’s talk about some of the very specific and, in some cases, very strong language you’re using in that. “Cold calculation.” “Unconscionable practice.” “Systematic elimination.” “Held hostage.” “Spent money like maniacs.” You’re not afraid to paint the other side as being ruthless, which I think is important here. It’s not personifying them individually. You’re not trying to go after the CEOs. You’re saying these companies are acting in ways that are not necessarily evil, but not rational, not forgivable.

**Chris:** That’s right. First of all is you say ad hominem attacks ever, because eventually you have to negotiate with those people, also because it really is about companies at this point, not at all about CEOs, who probably have no idea exactly what’s going on at this point in the conversation.

It is an interesting thing that one of the things you deal with, with a membership that’s very attuned to obviously its own issues but also fairness – because writers really care not just to get the most of what they deserve but to make sure what they’re asking for is fair and that we’re characterizing things honestly, which I think is probably not necessarily the case in every single negotiation for every single Guild or union – but there isn’t a requirement early, particularly if you think that this could be a conflict negotiation – and we knew from the very beginning that there was certainly a possibility of that – to rev the membership up enough to have them ready to… Negotiation really isn’t a war – really, when we said that later, we meant it – but certainly a battle. To rev them up for battle, to take it out of the realm of, these are reasonable conversations with people who would deal with you reasonably, and remind them the fact is, left alone individually, they’re really being taken advantage of in the most obscene ways.

That will change over the course of the next… This is in February, March, so the next seven months, as we begin the strike and then move toward trying to settle it, the rhetoric will change, because, and David Young always used to say, first you have to make war, and then you have to make peace. Both of those things, you have to do them equivalently well.

**John:** In your recollection, did you have to tone anything down? Because I know that it is always a concern about overshooting or going too far. Do you remember softening any lines in this speech as you went along?

**Chris:** I don’t remember specifically, but I know all the way through, yes. There’s no question that sometimes you write these things, and you begin to rev yourself up, and it feels good looking at your computer. You need somebody to say, “This may be more than we need to say.” Staff was great about that. Ellen Stutzman, Rebecca Kessinger, in addition to all the members of the NegComm who read this in the leadership, and David Goodman in particular, they were all very good about it. But yes, periodically, you had to pull back on it.

**John:** Now, reading through here, I was also struck by the number of times you were heading off counterarguments, and so examples being, “You are going to hear relentless rumors of the demise of the streaming business. They will be used as a weapon against you – against all of us.” “You’re living in the past, the companies will say, This is the new business model. It’s not a business model. It’s bad faith.” “Some will say the companies want us to strike. That they want an excuse to shut down production. As if anyone’s stopping them from doing that now.” “You’ll be punished, some will say. We’re being punished now. This is what punishment looks like.” Many cases in here, you’re having to anticipate the argument and shut it down before it can be made.

**Chris:** It’s very, very deliberate, obviously, over and over again. First of all, it is sort of a debate tactic to preempt arguments. But even more important not to think of it that way, and you probably experience this with members, is one thing that we heard from them over and over again is, “Oh, you could see it coming. You told us what was going to happen, and then it happened.”

That was important for two reasons. One, obviously, it inoculates people against the shocks that necessarily will occur over the course of some number of months. A good example of one of the largest was, “The DGA is going to make a deal at some point. You need to know that. You need to know that we’re going to stay on strike, that they’re not going to solve any of our problems. We need to tell you that up front, so in that moment there’s no fracture.”

**John:** There’s no other Guild in no other hall that’s going to make our deal.

**Chris:** That’s right. Exactly, exactly. The other thing is, you begin to get a deep well of trust with a group of people who hear you saying this is what’s going to happen tomorrow, and then it happens tomorrow. We say, “Look, they’re going to make a deal. They’re going to make us an offer, and it’s going to be a bad offer. Then they’re going to tell you this about your leadership.” All of those things end up happening.

The thing is the AMPTP in some ways were undermined in this cycle, because it really did play the same playbook over and over again. They were undermined, one, because it didn’t work, because the world had changed then, but also because they were running the same offensive or defensive plays that we had seen over and over again. We knew where we could do the shift.

**John:** It’s interesting you use the word playbook, because we’ve used it a lot in the last couple of months, but it doesn’t appear in these early speeches. It’s a thing that came up later on. It’s such a useful way of describing their standard procedure, which is so ineffectual, which is crucial.

**Chris:** Here, for example, in this speech, really what we’re doing is saying, let us articulate for you what you have not been able to put together entirely, because you are still living in your own, as we say, private economy, what’s going on across the whole biz, where you fit into the way writing in general is being undermined and how we’re going to solve that. Though we talk about some of the companies’ arguments here, we don’t talk yet about negotiating very much.

**John:** We do say that we will be heading into negotiations. On Page 24, if you want to jump ahead to there, you introduce the notion of we may need to go on strike, which was I know a debate, like how much do we talk about the possibility that we’re going to head out on strike. Let’s listen to how you actually introduce it.

**Chris:** “But if the companies are unreasonable in response, it may require us to demonstrate our resolve – and we will come back to you for a strike authorization vote. We will still work to make a deal. That is always our goal. But if the companies’ answer is still no, then to get what we deserve, what we need to survive, may require a strike.”

“A strike is a brutal thing and it’s not always a fair thing. It’s okay to be afraid of it. Like a war – it takes its toll on all of us – but it also punishes some of us more than others. And yet, here is a simple truth, it is our willingness to strike, and nothing else, that gave us our health and pension funds, our minimums, and our jurisdiction over the internet.”

**John:** Here you’re just getting people ready for the notion that we may need to go on strike, especially a membership who most of them were not part of the 2007-2008 strike, so they don’t have a recollection of it.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s right. Two things are true about this. One, and it’s sometimes hard to remember when you’re on the Negotiating Committee, is that we’ve been talking about this amongst ourselves for months and months and months, preparing, I guess inoculating yourself against all of those things, but internalizing what might happen in the future. Members are dealing with this for the first time. They’re coming to a meeting not quite knowing particularly here what they’re going to hear.

It’s really important to give them the time to process. Here we’re in – I can’t remember what the date of this is – sometime in February, but we’re going to go into negotiation in March. So we’re only two months away from a contract deadline. They need time. You can’t come back to somebody a couple of days before a contract deadline with a strike authorization vote and say, listen, we’ve never mentioned the possibility that what you could be doing could send you out on strike. That would be too much of a shock to the system. We needed to begin to put into play the possibility. Trust us, we’ll try to avoid it, but remember that this is always an option and something we might actually need to do. That I think was a place, if you remember, John, where we had lots of conversations about quite how far to go.

**John:** Of course.

**Chris:** There were people who were very nervous about that and saying, “You’re going too far. May be going too far to say a strike is a scary thing and it hurts some people.” We, broadly speaking, had the philosophy, talk about the fear. It’s like raising kids. The best thing to do is talk about everything. Don’t let anything fester inside unspoken.

**John:** Now, we’re looking at this as a printed document, but of course this was a performance. You were reading this aloud. How much did that influence both your writing process and the shape of it itself? Because it’s not meant to be a pdf that someone’s reading. It’s meant to be someone’s watching you actually say it. A related question is, stuff got applause in here, and how much did you need to anticipate where the crowd was at during the speech?

**Chris:** First, I wrote it as a speech. I wrote it according to the rhythms of how I speak. Sometimes I’d get notes, and I’d have to say to people, “Listen, I know. Just trust me. It’s not a document you’re reading. It’s a document you’re hearing, so I’ve got to do it that way.” This is the least speech-like of all of them though in some ways, because it had a very long section of proposals, which are really-

**John:** Slides, yeah.

**Chris:** … just a slide deck. But everything else is like that, and it’s written intentionally that way, with repetitive clauses and builds and things like that. You can’t know until you get there what the audience is going to do. I actually have some memory of not being flustered but thinking, “Okay, where do I need to stop? How far should I go? When do I pick up again?” All of that. I’m sure David would tell you the same thing, and Ellen as well, who sometimes when she read through the list of proposals would get a standing ovation. Certainly at the end, you get a standing ovation between every one. You learn a little bit the way the audience is going to react to it, and then you adjust. All of these things we did only a couple of times each. We didn’t go on the road with any of them and really learn.

**John:** Never see how they played in Wichita.

**Chris:** Exactly.

**John:** Let’s talk about the audiences, because the audience who is hearing this speech are all WGA members. They’re all sophisticated. They can handle complicated language. They can handle these things. They know most of the esoteric terms that you’re talking about. You may need to explain a few things, but they get the whole scope of this.

One of the things that became really clear as we got into negotiations and I would hear from people who were outside of the business or who were producers of stuff, they had never heard of this speech, and so they didn’t have the framing of all this. We talk about inoculation, but it’s also education. It’s really making sure everyone’s on the same page. Our membership was really good at being on the same page. The rest of the town didn’t have any of that information and was just perplexed by what we were doing.

**Chris:** Actually, I was going to think about something before we get to that. Remember also, we actually did a couple of other small test runs of this. We got some writers and just did it in front of them and got some notes on these things, so that the first time we did it was not in front of, I don’t know, 800 people.

**John:** First, we had the captains’ meeting.

**Chris:** That’s right.

**John:** You read it at the captains’ meeting. There was also a showrunners’ meeting. It wasn’t in front of giant hotel ballrooms. It was smaller groups first.

**Chris:** One of the things that I experienced in this, and I think David Goodman would say the same thing, is we always went into those early meetings thinking, “You don’t know how this is going to play.” Writers adopted it almost immediately and universally. You could tell me better than me, because I’m too in the middle. Was there a sense that the town truly didn’t understand this and thought there’s no way this was going to happen?

**John:** Yeah, they truly didn’t. I remember a phone call with a producer on one of the projects who said, “Oh, yeah, I know you guys might be on strike, might call for a vote, but you wouldn’t actually be on strike until September 1st.” I’m like, “I have no idea where you’re getting that information, but I guarantee you that’s not correct.” There were other just really fundamental things about what it is you’re actually going for. They clearly didn’t understand it.

**Chris:** I don’t know if you were going to bring this up or not, but very early on in the process, I think probably even in the early member meetings with this message, even though it was broadly very well received, was this repeated question: what’s the bumper sticker?

**John:** I wanted to get to that.

**Chris:** Oh, sorry.

**John:** There was no great slogan. The closest you got to it, which you did repeat three times in this, was “Put money back in writers’ pockets and power back in writers’ hands.”

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s right. That’s what we came up with in this one. I think some other version of it was, if somebody asks you what it’s about, it’s compensation, compensation, compensation. And yet, that didn’t really end up being the way we talked about this, although fundamentally, obviously, it is about compensation and power. No one asked us again after the first month, what’s the slogan?

**John:** We never had a bumper sticker. We never had the thing to put on a T-shirt. It wasn’t that. It was about this. Once we were on strike, we were on strike, and that was the message is that we were on strike.

But before we got out on strike, we had to have a strike authorization vote. That’s the next speech. Talking through this, this was the SAV. We had a couple of these meetings. They were mostly in hotel ballrooms. The audience for this was probably different. We obviously had a ton of captains there, because captains will come to everything. We had skeptics. We had nervous people, because the people who were fully on board, I don’t know that they necessarily needed to come to this.

**Chris:** That’s right. It’s generally true in the Guild that some percent of people who trust and are fine don’t show up to the meetings, so the meetings may encourage a broader range of points of view. I had to admit, this SAV again went very well, even in the room, as I remember, although it triggers a different kind of question, like, “Tell me you’re not going to stay on strike over this or that,” kind of thing.

**John:** Absolutely. Cleverly, you’re trying to hold off on some of those issues, and you’re trying to hold member questions back about what would a strike be like or what the logistics of a strike would be. You’re just talking about trying to balance the hope and fear going into this moment, talking about why the strike authorization vote is important for leverage in the Negotiating Committee, so we can try to get the best deal possible without a strike, and yet at the same time say, “We’re asking you to trust us that we will make the best deal possible, but if we need to go on strike, we will go on strike, even though it’s a difficult thing to do.”

**Chris:** Yeah. I don’t know whether your listeners need even more of an explanation. By the time the SAV, the strike authorization vote meetings and the strike authorization vote happen, we’ve been in negotiations for some number of weeks. They haven’t gone particularly well. The companies are not really engaging us in a meaningful way. They’re engaging us in the way they would do during a normal negotiation, which is to say, “We can give you some version of Pattern, some increasing minimums, and a few sweeteners.” The message to the membership needs to be that, but also to talk about how a strike authorization vote will put us back into the negotiating room for about two more weeks or so before the deadline, and how that member power is going to give us what we want.

It’s an interesting conversation, because in some sense, you want to say to people, “Look, a really high strike authorization vote number gives us the kind of leverage to do the work that might avoid a strike. But you can’t vote for it thinking that’s what you’re doing. You have to know that it’s real, and if we don’t get there, then a strike is what may come next.”

**John:** Going back to 2017, a lot of the messaging was maybe not intentional, but a lot of the messaging you heard is like, “Vote for the SAV because then there won’t be a strike.” That was a message that got out there. This time we were definitely trying to push back against that. Don’t just say yes because you’re trying to avoid a strike. Know that a strike is possible.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s right. It was an adjustment based on what we learned from 2017, where we probably went too far in that direction. It was effective, and it got us some of what we needed. The issues were important but not quite as existential that we describe these. I can’t say that we knew absolutely whether we were going to strike or not.

**John:** We had a rollback on the table too, and everyone wanted that rollback gone.

**Chris:** That’s right. Once that came off, of course things changed substantially. We made adjustments in that, because as I said, writers are very attuned to the truth of an argument that you’re making. It used to drive David Young crazy. He appreciated it, but it’s the only Guild that says, “I don’t deserve that, so don’t ask for that.”

**John:** Thinking back to this moment in the strike authorization vote, we did tell members that the AMPTP didn’t have crazy rollbacks. We were very honest with them. The AMPTP was polite and patronizing, but not outrageous. We worked really, really, really hard to get out giant SAV vote. Then it turned out every other unit after us could get a giant SAV vote just because, just because that was a thing that happened.

**Chris:** It drove us crazy. I went, “You can do this without being really neurotic?”

**John:** Absolutely. Without calling each individual member, it’s actually possible to get a giant number? It’s great that they did.

**Chris:** Writers are writers.

**John:** Writers are writers.

**Chris:** The other thing I was going to say is – and you know this because we’ve been in a lot of negotiations – you really don’t know until the last few days whether you’re in an actual negotiation or not. Even as we went back in with the companies, and they were being very, very difficult, there was always a possibility that at some point a week before or five days before, something would kick in, and instead of the posturing and this is all you were going to get or some stuff around the edges, we would begin to have a real negotiation. It never happened, but you don’t know that. I don’t know for you. For me, it was probably only three or four days before that I began to think, oh, they’re never coming around.

**John:** No, they’re just toying with us. I do remember you saying in the room that we have to prepare that they’re going to come to us with a deal that’s going to make it really tough for us to say yes or no, then we’ll have to debate that. That never happened. They didn’t come to us with anything even remotely close to that.

**Chris:** That’s right, because it turned out, going back to the same thing, their playbook was their playbook. You have to assume that in some ways the AMPTP was perfectly okay with us going out on strike, because they assumed that their strategy is to push us to the side right now because we were going first, get to the DGA, make a deal there, make a deal with SAG, come back to us, and say, “Now you’re alone. You’ve got this big, overreaching agenda,” as they might put it. “We’ll do a little bit here and there, and then you’ll settle pretty quickly.” That obviously did not happen, which was their fundamental mistake in all of this. I think we realized at some point, oh, this is not a real negotiation that’s going on up until then.

**John:** We did go out on strike. Not a shock there. The next speech we’ll look at is from the Shrine Auditorium. The premise in your first speech was on Page 1. The premise in this speech I think actually comes quite a bit later on. It’s on Page 9 here. Do you want to read through this section?

**Chris:** Sure. “But now as we move to close the deal with the companies, we must speak in the language of power. Power is the only thing that moves them. Our employers give up nothing in negotiations out of fairness or compassion. They say yes only when they are made to understand the cost of saying no. They say yes only when they are made to understand the cost of saying no.”

**John:** Great. An example of repetition there, to make sure people actually heard the point.

**Chris:** Exactly. Pretty obvious [crosstalk 44:00].

**John:** But talking about this is going to be a power negotiation, that we basically have to show our power, so the power in the SAV but ultimately then the power in the strike, and that this wasn’t about what is right and what is fair and what is honest and what is true. This is about our power versus their power.

**Chris:** It’s important education for new people on the Negotiating Committee as well, which is to realize that for writers the story has to begin with a truthful recitation of the problems in the industry and what we need to survive. Truth doesn’t end up mattering very much in all of this. In fact, David Goodman made the joke in the later meetings that at some point one CEO said to me, “Stop with the speeches. I don’t want to hear anymore why it’s true.” That’s really the case. We had to say that to the members. We had to say to the members, “Look, at this point you and we know that we’re right in asking for these things, but that doesn’t matter anymore. We need your vote now, because all they’re going to respond to is the risk of a strike and what that means to them. That’s our power. Our power is the only thing that’s going to move them closer to their bottom line.”

**John:** Now, ultimately, we do go out on strike. I think the counterargument to that is that truth doesn’t matter to the companies, but truth matters tremendously to our membership and our transparency.

One of the great things we did, which I don’t think was all that well planned in advance, was when we went on strike we put out this two-pager that listed this is what we are asking for, this is what their counter is. That did so much work for us in terms of letting our membership know this is why we’re out on strike, these are the issues. What do you know about the two-pager? Because I perceive the two-pager as something that Sean on staff generated for our own internal purposes. When did it become an external document? What was the decision to make that a public document?

**Chris:** I think the staff had it pretty clear in their head that they were going to do that as we got to the last-

**John:** Day or two.

**Chris:** … day or two or so. Remember again, it’s a very complicated negotiation. It’s much more complex in some ways than some others. You can’t just say, “We didn’t get jurisdiction of the internet yet, so we’re still on strike.” You had to make clear exactly what we were asking for. The favor the companies did was the opposite of what you were talking about your fear would be, what happens if they get awfully close to what somebody will say is good enough. They were so far away-

**John:** Exactly.

**Chris:** … from what anyone would say was even plausible that this very clear recitation of how far they were away from any kind of reasonable deal really gave us a lot of power moving into the strike. It’s one of the most important days of the entire process from February to the middle of September is the release of that document. I don’t even remember it being a debate. It just seemed like it was a given.

**John:** The other thing I think was so powerful about the two-pager is it mirrors your initial speech in terms of we heard from the screenwriter, we heard from the middle-level writer, we heard from the lower-level writer, we heard from the showrunner, and each of those people could see themselves reflected in the things we were asking for and were not receiving and could also remember, “Oh, that’s right, that’s what the comedy variety proposal is. That’s what the issue is here.”

Of course, the issue that we… This may be a good time to talk about it. Going into this negotiation, the AI stuff was just a tiny little footnote at the end. I remember in those initial meetings with the Negotiating Committee, we have all these other things, and then there’s also AI. Like, “Really? Are we going to talk about AI?” I would explain why I thought it was important, but it didn’t seem that important. Then it became much more important really during the time we were in negotiation. Then we went out on strike, we could say to the members that they did not even want to talk to us about AI, and that that signaled that they were looking to do things with AI, and that became a real centerpiece flashpoint. It became one of the most important things we were fighting for in this.

**Chris:** It reminded me of a few things. First, let’s put AI aside for one sec. I just wanted to talk about one thing. It’s interesting. One thing that the two-page document pointed out though is exactly how complicated this negotiation is, and in some ways how even really attentive members don’t necessarily understand things intuitively, immediately.

It’s a conversation that I had with Ellen and that we had to have with members repeatedly afterward, because the two-pager included, for example, our opening proposals on minimum room size. Tell me if we did not spend the next two months explaining to our own members this was just an opening proposal, it was not the number we expected to end up at. We understood there would be a negotiation. You get caught in those things because our sense of negotiation has not been internalized by every single member. There was that. That was a little bit of a pressure that got put on us by the two-pager. It was way outweighed by the honesty of it, but we had to go back and explain all of that.

AI turned out to be a gift in some ways, because I think we were somewhat focused on it. They made us afraid of it in ways that we hadn’t been before. It required us to dive into it. I know we had a working group, or that the board had a working group. You had been working on it all the way through. But we didn’t quite know all the implications of what it would be. What it ended up doing though during the strike was it made the story even stronger, because it dovetailed with other things we were saying about the drive toward efficiency and productivity and how that would eventually undermine writer employment, how they could replace original creativity or well-distributed creativity amongst a reasonable number of writers with very few writers and a machine.

All of a sudden, all of these things we were arguing about – this may be a part of the bumper sticker – began to feel like, in ways that we didn’t really understand at the beginning, were coalescing into a single, larger argument that the membership really understood.

Look, we didn’t overhype AI. We didn’t try to turn it into more of a nightmare than it was. But the membership and the rest of the world began to fear it really intuitively. It also linked us to labor across America, because everyone’s worried about the idea that they don’t matter anymore and that they can be replaced by a machine. Maybe not everybody, although maybe everybody should. It was a fascinating moment and a huge mistake on the companies’ part.

**John:** They’ve largely acknowledged that, I think, because if they’d dealt with it early on or at least not ignored us completely, it wouldn’t become a flashpoint for the DGA even. The DGA, who didn’t seem to have an interest in it at all, suddenly had to have an interest, and then they had to get an AI proposal on there. They got really insufficient language, which angered us, angered our membership and riled us up and created even more attention on the issue. It was foolish.

**Chris:** In the months that we had to think about it, with your work and the work of the staff and everything, resulted in a much more sophisticated, I think, AI …

**John:** A hundred percent.

**Chris:** … standard proposals than we had at the very beginning.

**John:** We didn’t have anything on consent, basically that they had to tell you if they were handing you stuff generated by AI. Those were not part of our initial proposals there. Those were not any crucial gains.

**Chris:** Look, it was certainly an education for me, I think also an education for our members, thinking, for example, about training AI, to distinguish between uses of AI, those parties, Open AI, Google, Microsoft, who don’t own our copyrights and whose use of our material will be an issue both for us and for the companies who do own it. But in our relationship with the companies who do own the copyright over our material, it’s much more complex, because they have certain rights, and we have certain contractual rights, and the balance of those things is going to have to be worked out. But I didn’t understand that going in.

**John:** We are now out on strike. We have this big meeting at the Shrine Auditorium. That’s where I think we really established some individual characters in the strike, which I wouldn’t have anticipated. Obviously, Ellen became a superstar, and people just loved her sense of humor and her deadpan affect. You and David Goodman, you were familiar to people in the old history. People knew you guys. Lindsay Dougherty suddenly came out of nowhere. I’m thinking, she’s not even in our Guild, and then she became a superstar.

Then Carol Lombardini. The speech at the Shrine is the first time you mentioned Carol Lombardini by name. It’s in reference to things she said in the room, basically making sure that our membership understands that they were hearing us but also ignoring us at the same time. That was crucial. You said before we don’t do ad hominem attacks, but you do mention Carol Lombardini by name. What was your thinking about that?

**Chris:** John, I think it was around the time we began to understand what was going on here, which was that there was probably a split inside the room we had hinted at between the legacy companies and the streaming companies based on their varying business models, and that one of the factors impeding the legacy companies, for example, from coming to terms with what was happening was the way the AMPTP functioned. It became very useful to have a villain in the story.

It was good to have the villain be the AMPTP, because I think we knew – I say we knew and it all turned out this way – but in fact we had some experience and did know that this would get solved eventually when CEOs from the companies would engage in the process. It was a thing we had tried to have happen from very early on. They were resistant to it. We can talk about that if you want. It was a way of saying we’re not going to identify those people who will eventually be, I don’t want to call them the heroes, but will be our partners eventually, to spare them from that, and yet still identify, for the membership, the antagonists.

**John:** I think it’s good to stress that on our side, we did nothing to try to vilify David Zaslav, but just a series of things happened with David Zaslav, that he became a public figure for other stuff he was doing, but that wasn’t our doing.

**Chris:** It wasn’t. I don’t even think it was beneficial to us, to be honest with you, because he wasn’t the villain in this story. I don’t want to identify anybody. But we needed him to be part of the solution, and so hyper-identifying him with what was looked on as some flubs didn’t really advance our narrative particularly well.

**John:** Now, the narrative at this point is much less about… You had speeches along the way. Occasionally, a video would come. A new Chris Keyser video would drop. Everyone would stop what they’re doing and watch the Chris Keyser video. But the messaging and the narrative at this point was much less about you and what you were saying, as consistent communication from the Guild to members, from the Guild to press, just telling the story consistently and honestly and openly, and with good framing, to everyone to make sure we are all on the same page about what was happening there.

Let’s talk about message discipline. One of the things that people may not understand is that as board and Negotiating Committee members, we get some talking points, usually from Rebecca, about like, this is what we want to say about these things, and we can say those things.

If there’s a member email, we can generally say what’s in the member email, but we shouldn’t go much beyond that. We have discretion about what things we can say to individual members, but not say to groups, or certainly not to say to the media. That was so useful on our side, both for us individually as NegComm members, but I also think for members. They knew what we could talk about, what we couldn’t talk about with the negotiations. We could listen and pass that word up, but it felt like it was a good way of keeping this all together, keeping the story one story.

**Chris:** I think that’s true. It’s true, and yet there were risks inherent in making that work. The reason why it did was not something that we might have, I don’t know about predicted, but we couldn’t have counted on. There were two sides of that. The first was, I’d say it was a pretty remarkable Negotiating Committee and board and council. They were very, very good at telling the story and making it a story, not just a series of talking points. Broadly speaking, we really fanned out across the city or cities and told that story over and over again, and told it with very great discipline and some power.

Then, because I think the story we were telling was true, the members, who were much more important than had ever been true before, even in the agency campaign, as advocates and storytellers as well, also repeated that story, sometimes in ways that were very funny but always on point. You just didn’t get those people who were going off on tangents and misidentifying what our key proposals were, whatever it was. We couldn’t have known that until it happened. But it turned out that we had 11,000 members on point.

**John:** Yes, and it was really impressive to see. I’d also say that a lot of the discussions that happened in 2007-08 on the Deadline Hollywood comments section, instead, those member conversations were happening in smaller forums. We weren’t as public, which I think was really, really helpful. If there was misinformation or issues coming up that way, we could talk to those members individually. We could address those things. But there weren’t big public fights happening, which I think was great.

**Chris:** Yeah. Members really did also internalize the idea that union conversations have to be internal conversations. You can disagree, push back, ask questions, but that ought to be inside the union, because otherwise it can be very dangerous. Obviously, we had the advantage of a much more favorable press.

**John:** We really did. What theory do you have for that?

**Chris:** One thing is the journalists know what we know. They’re also members or want to be members of unions. They have seen this in their own lives, the way in which their working conditions have been degraded over time. I think there was some sense of that amongst the reporters. Not everybody. Not every reporter was that great. We still had some who seemed to take the companies’ side no matter what. By and large, again, there was a sympathy and empathy for writers that I don’t think we had before. I don’t know if you have other theories as well.

**John:** Certainly on the AI issues, because I did a lot of the AI press, they would stop recording and say, “I totally get this, because that’s exactly what’s happening in my industry.” They’re afraid of AI, because they’re just as vulnerable as we are, if not more vulnerable.

**Chris:** Right, and then probably the fact that this caught on more broadly amongst the public and other labor unions. We always tell our members very early on, the only people who need to hold together are writers themselves. Don’t worry about public opinion. Don’t worry about any of that other stuff. If we’re strong together, we can win. Turns out the truth is broad-based public support and, even more important maybe, real support amongst guilds and unions, particularly those in our own industry, were critical to the success of this. But once that builds, once that’s the story out there, I think it also engenders more support. It’s very difficult to push against that quite as hard and just take the company line.

I think there was, broadly speaking, just a general acknowledgement, except on the part of some people. The companies were just wrong about this stuff. I don’t mean wrong on every single point, but I mean broadly speaking, they had broken the business. Something had to be done. It wasn’t going to undermine their business model in order to do that. They all had to work through their problems. They can’t work through their problems by leaving their workers behind. That’s not a path forward. People got that in a way then.

Remember also, by the way, without going on, in 2007 and ’08, we’re talking about the internet. It’s a thing that hasn’t quite happened yet, and a lot of people don’t want have happen.

**John:** Exactly. The internet was our AI.

**Chris:** Right, but we were trying to control it and use it as if it were something good. Writers were thinking, “Oh my god, I don’t want to write in seven-minute segments or whatever on the internet.”

**John:** Webisodes. All webisodes. We also have to consider that the companies had their own narrative. They had to have their own internal narrative about what was going on, how long this was going to last, that the writers’ demands were unreasonable, that these things were close. And they didn’t have the message discipline to keep it together. They didn’t all have one story.

As little things would come out, it became clear they were just denying reality. It was frustrating to watch at times, because little bits would come out. I remember being in the room with the AMPTP one day, and we were getting these texts saying, “I hear there’s a deal. I hear that you’re already signed and you’re about to announce it.” We were nowhere close. This was in August when nothing was happening. It was clear that either that’s the story they were telling internally, and that it had leaked out, or they were trying to sell the story. But it never worked. They just kept tripping over themselves whenever they were trying to sell a story to the broader public.

**Chris:** That’s right, yeah. First of all, nowhere was that more apparent than in the fateful day when somebody anonymously decided to tell the press that they were trying to starve us, in fact. We took strength from all of that, because they misperceived how things would play. I’m not quite sure why they made those mistakes over and over. I think in some ways there was competitive PR going on, that different companies were trying to position themselves, and that led to mistakes being made. I don’t know whether it was ever being run through some central communications department there or not, but they seemed to do that over and over again. I have a feeling sometimes some of these companies had to tell stories to their own employees.

**John:** I think so too.

**Chris:** Yeah, that were not necessarily what was going on in the room.

**John:** No. It’s tough. Let’s think about the narrative going forward, because while we’ve just had the ratification vote, so that chapter is done, the story continues, because looking back to 2007-2008, the story of what happened in that strike kept changing and evolving. You heard a narrative like, oh, we lost things in 2007-08 or DGA won the internet in 2007-2008.

I want to think about the narrative going forward and some things we’re going to probably start hearing over the next couple months, couple years about stuff. The New York Times’ The Daily Podcast was talking about the wrap-up of the strike. And they said, oh, don’t be surprised if streamers start raising their prices, because they’ll have to pay for these writers. Price increases are your fault, Chris Keyser.

**Chris:** Yeah, exactly. One of the things that became true in the negotiations is that the CEO said to us, “This has nothing to do with our bottom line.” We made that argument to them. I know television very well. You could talk about features. But these adjustments in the writers’ budget are just internal conversations about how to reallocate inside a budget that used to much more highly favor writers and has ceased to do so. This is not going to raise their costs. Even some of the proposals, by the way, like what they call success-based residuals, are so small in comparison to what’s really going on.

We had lots of conversations with CEOs or other people in the business, who would just repeat to us, “You know, these companies have enormous problems. They have cost problems. They’ve thrown all this money out. They’ve chased the Netflix model of unlimited spending with no requirement of any kind of revenue on the other side. They’ve got too many upfront costs, and they’ve eliminated backend, and it’s all become disastrous. There’s no relationship between pay and results.”

We kept saying, “We get it. You’re going to have to take care of all of those things.” That’s what’s actually driving the changes in the business. This is not about that. This is just about the fact that when you hire us, and you only hire us when you want to spend the money, you have to pay us fairly.” This is at minimums also. This is not over scale. This is not what the highest paid screenwriter gets for a movie. This is really what the entry-level screenwriter and television writer and Appendix A writer can expect in a contract. It has nothing to do with the overall macro changes in the industry.

**John:** The price of Netflix or Disney Plus will go up. It has nothing to do with this contract or SAG-AFTRA’s contract. It’s all about how much money they think they can charge consumers for this and how much money they want to make. That’s what it’s all about.

**Chris:** That’s right. Look. They’ve got a problem in streaming obviously in particular, because they decoupled what they spent from what they got back. At some point, my guess is, and you can talk about this – I’m sure you have – that streaming is going to resemble some hybrid between broadcast and basic cable of subscribers and advertising and resale to secondary markets. That’s going to be a balance that the more successful company’s going to make work. It’ll take them some number of years to do that. But that’s going to be okay. We’re going to suffer in the meantime.

**John:** It’s going to be okay. Fewer shows will be made. Fewer writers are going to be employed. Both entirely possible.

**Chris:** I think very possible, because that peak TV era of anything goes is probably over. But people were talking about that well before. If you go back to the very first speech I made, I talk a lot about all the things the companies are saying before we go out on strike, about how the business is changing and they can’t spend the money and they’re not making money anymore. This is all over the place well before the strike happens. Decisions about what the proper number of shows is or writers being hired because of that, that’s all built in to the system.

**John:** It’s correlation versus causation. Yes, these things are happening at the same time, and they have the same underlying causes, but we didn’t cause this.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s exactly right. Look, it’s going to be complicated. Individual writers are not going to know going forward exactly what the cause is of any given period of difficulty. I think there will be even people in our guild who will say, this happened to me because of the strike. I can’t say it’s not true for anybody. I don’t know what specific effect that will be. But broadly speaking, as with the recession of 2007-08, corresponding to that strike, unfortunately, the ups and downs of the business, the inherent uncertainties exist outside of remarkable but not business-plan-changing gains that the writers have made.

**John:** I think coming out of this strike period, we’re not going to have that intense focus and member-driven messaging about what things are. We’re not going to have that instinct to push back against, “This is the narrative that they’re trying to sell you.” Some of that stuff is just going to come up. You’re going to hear these stories and these accusations that, oh, this is going to make it harder for new writers to break in or that more production is going to go overseas. These things can be true, but they’re actually not caused by what we just did and the gains that we made.

**Chris:** Exactly right. There are some risks with that. Look, I think there are some really excellent agents who are engaging with the guilds more directly and who will take on all of the challenges, and the less good ones will repeat the message that exonerates them and the whole business from it and say, “You’re not being hired because of this and that.” We become an easy scapegoat in all of that, and we’ll have to deal with all of it.

**John:** Yeah, we will. We have two listener questions that I thought might be appropriate here. Drew, hop in here.

**Drew Marquardt:** Allen writes, “I was curious if the new WGA agreement has any impact on foreign levies payments. I saw a lot of material about an increase in foreign residuals but wasn’t sure if that included the levies as well. I’m a non-WGA writer, but I’ve received foreign levies for several years now and wasn’t sure if those amounts would increase with the new agreement or if it was a completely separate thing.”

**Chris:** I am really the wrong person to be asking this question. As I understand it, and John, you may know it better, foreign levies are based under European law. That essentially has something to do with distributing some piece of the value of selling tapes and DVDs because they might’ve been used to copy your programs. That will have nothing to do with-

**John:** It’s not part of this contract at all. Foreign levies will continue the same way that they always have. The Guild receives money on behalf of writers and other artists that get sent from Europe. The Guild is not the main collector of that. It’s not part of this contract.

**Drew:** The next one comes from An Anonymous Young Writer. They write, “With the strike over and the writers returning back to work, how is our relationship with the studios that we spent the last couple of months outside their buildings striking? I feel like there were some jabs back and forth, with us chanting, ‘Pay your writers,’ and waving our taunting signs, while they were okay with waiting months to give us a fair deal, and even Universal cutting their trees to make it harder for us to strike. How are we supposed to work together again, knowing that we just endured the last couple months fighting against them?”

**Chris:** Here’s what I hope and what I think is going to be true. I think that the creative executives with whom we work day to day understand the business, understand what we were fighting for. They may have supported us, more or less, to some degree. None of them I think should or do feel as if they were the target of this conversation. I think we tried to make that clear in our messaging all the way through, that they would be our partners again.

You can’t say never. You can’t say nobody is going to get pissed off about it. But I think broadly speaking, and John, you can speak to this as well as I can, the creative relationship between writers and their executives is going to go back to where it was before. If anything, we just miss each other and can’t wait to get back to work.

**John:** Absolutely. In the spirit of getting back to work, a thing that I keep trying to stress is that all of the energy, enthusiasm, and drive we showed on the picket lines these last five months needs to be channeled back into the thing we’re actually really, really good at, which is we are the best film and television writers in the world.

As we get back to work, what I’d love to see is, in a couple years down the road, looking back at this period, why did film and television get so good in 2024 and 2025. It’s because we had all these writers kept from doing a thing that they are so amazing at for five months, and came back with this incredible burst of passion and enthusiasm and wrote the best things that have ever been written. I think that’s going to get you past these weird feelings about the studio executives. We’re going to write these amazing things, and they’re going to pay for them, and we are going to make great TV and film.

**Chris:** I think that’s right. I also say, by the way, it’s a very writer thing to get worried about how people feel about us and think that somehow if we ask for something, we’re going to get punished for it. But the CEOs with whom we negotiated ended this on a note of respect. I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish, but phone calls that said, “Listen, you guys fought hard for a thing you needed, and you got a deal, and that’s good. And we know that the thing is broken, and we should have conversations about how it broke and what needs to happen.” I don’t mean just the business itself, but I mean the system of negotiating new deals. I think all the way up to the top there is, I hope, some level of mutual respect back and forth.

**John:** That would be great. Wrapping this up, so talking about the narrative of the strike, the storytelling of the strike, what things did you learn as one of the showrunners of this crazy writers’ room?

**Chris:** Look, I think as is true with history in general, you have to do the best you can, and you have to be lucky in some ways. We got lucky.

**John:** We got very lucky.

**Chris:** We got very lucky in a lot of ways. A lot of things came together in the way we needed them to come together. It’s an odd thing to say, because we got so unlucky for the years before in the business. It’s not a lucky place to be right now. But the membership, its youth, its facility on social media, the mistakes the companies made, the extent to which they made it very clear in the way they communicated with us, the fact that the staff was so good at ascertaining exactly what was in the members’ hearts, in their 7,000-response survey, really set us up well. And I think we executed it nicely.

I do think that we learned a lot from 2007 through 2017, in the agency campaign to now. But some of it just has to break in your favor. We take good lessons from it and realize we’re just going to have to get lucky again the next time we do it.

Here’s a thing that we did know though, which is that writers are committed to each other. They are brave. They do understand. They are willing to stay together. I think the relationship between writers and their guild is different from what it was before this strike and will help us going forward. Success breeds success, and we need to use that. I guess that’s one thing I learned is you got to keep that going, keep that momentum. We’re not going to fight the next fight immediately, but we need to talk to each other constantly, all through the next two and a half years, to whatever happens. What about you?

**John:** I think it’s a good lesson in what is possible. I remember there were times throughout this campaign I would feel frustrated or just I couldn’t see what was going to happen next. I remember you saying at some point that you yourself did not know how this is going to end, that all you could know is the principles of what it is you were going for and to try to keep moving forward on those principles.

The fact that we ended up at this place where we really did get the things we needed to get was just a good lesson in being ready for hard things, embracing some of the uncertainty, and also just counting on each other. I think I felt it in the room with the Negotiating Committee, but I also felt it on the picket line. I felt it in the big rooms. Even in the most difficult member conversations, when I’d have phone calls with people who were kind of flipping out, if I could get back to the place of what it is that we’re going for here, what it is that we need to achieve, that does a lot of the work.

**Chris:** Yeah.

**John:** We have a tradition on Scriptnotes where we do a One Cool Thing, something we want to share with our audience. My One Cool Thing this week is called One Revolution Per Minute. It’s this animated short film by Erik Wernquist, which is set in a space station that has artificial gravity, because it’s revolving. It’s revolving around a central axis, so a very classic way to create artificial gravity in science fiction movies. It’s gorgeously animated. But what it’s mostly showing is that in order to create even .5g gravity, you have to be spinning really fast, and it’s actually really uncomfortable. This thing has big windows, so you can always see the thing you’re looking at. It’s like, oh, it’s too fast. It’s really uncomfortable.

**Chris:** You really feel like you’re inside of it, essentially?

**John:** Yeah, but it’s also gorgeous. Just watch it, because it’s a gorgeous video and really shows what a space station could feel like. You really wouldn’t build it this way, but it’s just very impressive. Take a look at it. It’s called One Revolution Per Minute. We’ll have a link in the show notes. What do you got for us, Chris?

**Chris:** It really shows how you’re looking forward and I’m looking backward. You’re fun, and I’m less fun. I have to admit that I’ve been so burdened by this thing, and not in a terrible way. I have a one-track mind. I re-watched yesterday one of my favorite movies, my favorite documentary, which is Barbara Kopple’s American Dream. If you haven’t seen that, you have to go watch American Dream, which is about a strike at a Hormel meatpacking plant, and it is devastating.

**John:** I know of the movie, but now I need to see it.

**Chris:** I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s all labor all the time. I’m going to stop. If you had asked me two days from now, maybe it would be something else, but that’s where we are.

**John:** I did an AI panel yesterday. It was a good panel for the FTC. I was happy to do it. But also I’m happy not to do those for a little bit. I think it’s going to be fine. I’m happy to go back to-

**Chris:** Dear FTC, not home right now. Call somebody else.

**John:** Absolutely. There’s so many talented people on the Guild who can do those panels. I don’t need to be the person doing them now.

**Chris:** It was one of the wonderful things, wasn’t it? All these people we met on the Negotiating Committee, incredible people who are going to take over and do the work.

**John:** When I look at the folks who have won on the board or won on the council, they’re so smart and they’re so great. Go, go, lead the way.

**Chris:** One of the things that happens when the Guild is successful at fulfilling writers’ needs is that people say, “I want to be a part of that. Why would I not want to be a part of that?” You get really great people, because you have to love writers after all of this.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.

You can 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’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 debate. Chris Keyser, thank you so much for coming on this show again to talk through this whole crazy thing we did.

**Chris:** You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here. This may be the last time I get to talk about it for a little while.

**John:** You won’t miss it.

**Chris:** No. I will be okay moving on.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Chris Keyser, can you talk to us about debate? To set this whole thing up, I have to play this clip that’s going to embarrass you. This is a clip from, I think it’s 1984. You were dressed in a tuxedo. You had a bow tie. Let’s listen to it.

**Chris [in old clip]:** There’s much that is lousy on both sides. The world is a lousy place. It’s also a crazy place. I’m 23 years old and no less than any one of you who has antipathy for the United States. I’m sick of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in. Still, it seems to me that we do ourselves no good to deny what is good in a system which is not all good, to deny what is good in a system which can correct itself, and that is the United States. I think one political analyst in the United States put it best when he said, “Critics say that America is a lie because it does not reach its ideals. America is not a lie; it’s a disappointment. But it’s a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” I beg to oppose.

**John:** Chris, you got huge applause there, rapturous applause. This looks like it’s off of PBS. Was this the highlight of your debating career? Talk to us about debate and your experience with debate.

**Chris:** My experience with it. Yeah, that probably was my highlight of my debating career. I wasn’t a really good debater most of the way through. I debated in high school and then in college, but not for very long in college. I used to do a kind of debate called policy debate, which is very fast speaking and like speed chess or something like that, which was great and one of the formative things of my youth. My friends, my decision to go law school, the way I thought about the world was all, I think in some ways dictated by the fact that I was part of the debate world. I loved all of that, but I ended up not caring very much about the competition in some ways. I moved into more public debating, which this is an example of it at the Oxford Union. By the way, Boris Johnson was there-

**John:** Wow.

**Chris:** … and Andrew Sullivan. I debated against William Hague. They were all in this path, I guess, not all them, the Eaton through Oxford to leading their country down the terrible path. It’s a straight line in the UK. That’s broadly speaking. I don’t mean it that way necessarily, although there are a lot of examples of it.

Anyway, that was really fun to do. It was just a way of seeing the world and talking about important things. I did a couple of these at Oxford that PBS broadcast. That was sort of fun. Then I put debate away for a really long, long time.

Debate more importantly became a part of my life again because my son started debating when he was in fifth grade, in elementary school. I guess like the dad who gets pulled into being the first base coach, because his kid says, “My dad played baseball once,” I ended up being a debate coach for about 10 years or so, but mostly for young kids, for elementary school kids and then for middle school kids, just because I really believed in the way in which debate gave kids a sense of their own selves and their own voice and ability to understand the other side of the question, to listen well. There were so many things. I can’t think of any activity outside the curriculum in a school that’s better for, broadly speaking, developing an analytical and compassionate mind than debate, so I’ve believed in it for a long time.

**John:** That’s great. I confessed to I think it was Rachel on picket line at Paramount that I get very intimidated by your ability to spontaneously speak so eloquently. She’s like, “You know he was a national debate champion.” I’m like, “I did not know he was a national debate champion.”

**Chris:** Do you know why you didn’t know that?

**John:** Because you don’t talk about it?

**Chris:** Because I wasn’t the national debate champion.

**John:** You debated on an international stage, as we just heard.

**Chris:** I did, periodically. I think it’s probably a 10,000 hours thing, whether that’s true or not. It’s just a skill you end up developing.

**John:** Here I was. You’re a professional athlete. I was saying, “Why can I not play basketball as well as Chris Keyser can?” It’s like, oh, because that’s something he does.

**Chris:** That’s like Scotty Pippen saying, “Why can’t I play basketball like Michael Jordan?” You do fine. You’re okay. I don’t mean to say I’m like Michael Jordan. That sounded obnoxious. I was trying to compliment you, not myself. Very careful of these things.

**John:** Roll back the tape here and see what you actually said. Talk to me about how you teach a fifth grader debate or a high schooler debate. What is the fundamental structure that you’re learning as you’re learning to debate? Is it about how to put together an argument and supporting arguments? Is it about the literal performance aspect of it? What are the things that are crucial for debaters to learn?

**Chris:** All of that stuff. Those topics are often announced in advance. It depends on the format of debate. There are a lot of different ones. I did policy. There’s Lincoln-Douglas. I coached in middle school parliamentary debate. The first part of it is research. It’d be a little bit like paralleling our negotiations. It’s the months we spent trying to figure out what our position was going to be and what the world suggests and understanding it from both sides, knowing what somebody else might say, and generating arguments that may work and understanding the power of arguments and how to answer them. Then it’s about being in a debate round itself and under the pressure of having to listen and take notes and understand what the other side is saying and respond immediately.

I’m just picking a few things out, because it’s too long of a conversation, but there are lessons that I think you learn in debate if you do well, one of which is don’t shy away from the places where you’re vulnerable. Lean into where you’re vulnerable. You can’t be silent on that stuff. All the stuff that we are talking about in this labor action, about preempting other arguments, understanding where our weaknesses are, trying to figure out what the other side might say, that all is well practiced in debate.

There are some kinds of debate where performance matters a lot, where eloquence matters. But there are some forms of debate where it doesn’t at all. It’s just about the very quick application of arguments and being able to cover all of them and understand all the nuances. I did different kinds of debate, and it gave me different skills. Some of them are about picking up on that stuff and generating arguments and answering arguments. Some of them are about convincing other people. I went to law school afterward. People who know me probably make fun of me about this, but I end up then thinking about writing scripts as making emotional arguments.

**John:** I want to tie that in. To what degree is screenwriting in general related to debate? How useful is that as a skill? Obviously, you’re anticipating there’s a dialogue between two people, that the people are going to come into a scene or a moment with opposing opinions, and then one person’s going to win the other one over, or at least reach an understanding. How does it apply?

**Chris:** I don’t think of it quite that way. I think running a show has something to do with organizational principles and beating out series and the structure that’s required in a screenplay or a television script are all related to that. In some sense, not to overstate it, it’s all like debate.

It’s got that element of poetry in the sense that you’ve got to be as efficient as you possibly can. Debate is all about time limitations and getting as much in as you possibly can do. You need to know in some ways the precise, right number of words and exact words to use in the moment. I don’t think of it that way. Getting to the heart of something I think is much more what I say it applies, is to think not that you have to approach it in the obvious way. You don’t want to write the scene that everyone expects. No one’s looking to me for advice on how to write right now. But I think that’s it. In debate, arguments have inherent power. They have weight. You have to know what that weight is. The same thing is true, in some ways, in writing. It’s like, where’s the weight?

**John:** I was a journalism major and essentially was advertising. It is that ruthless efficiency, like how do you get this down to an idea that people can grasp so clearly? Style and presentation, all that stuff matters a lot, but if you don’t have that central core idea, the whole thing doesn’t land. It doesn’t work. People respond to that core idea more than anything else.

**Chris:** Right. But for me, I continued to do it more because I thought for kids that the ability to think clearly and to appreciate both sides of an argument, to listen really well and to feel confident in your own point of view matters. That’s why I think I probably focus more on debaters who are entering into adolescence and right at the cusp of that, because that’s when that becomes particularly important.

**John:** How objective is the judging, scoring of debate?

**Chris:** It’s subjective.

**John:** It’s subjective.

**Chris:** Subjective. That’s, by the way, the other thing that’s really good about debate. You lose a lot. You lose sometimes for reasons that are not fair, and you have to deal with all of it. John Meany is the head of the middle school public debate program that I worked under. He always said, “Human communication is imprecise and fallible, and you have to learn to live with that.” You have to learn to live with taking your audience as you find them and convincing them of what they can understand when. By the way, it goes back again to what you and I and everyone else did in this strike, is that you can believe whatever you want, but unless the people to whom you are speaking perceive that, it doesn’t really matter.

**John:** It matters much less what you say versus what they’re hearing, what they’re actually taking in. If you’re not getting through to them, it doesn’t count.

**Chris:** Right. Academic debate is fairer than politics, where no one listens to anybody, it doesn’t really matter, and no one changes their mind from where they started. But it’s full of uncertainty.

**John:** Excellent.

**Chris:** That’s the way it is. Anyway, I love doing that, and I haven’t done it for a little while, because I got pulled back.

**John:** You’ve been busy doing things.

**Chris:** I’ve been a little bit busy. It was really great. It was a great way to do something with my son. We had lots of kids of that generation.

**John:** Chris, thank you.

Links:

* [Chris Keyser’s speech to members at the start of negotiations](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Member-Rap-22.0.pdf)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 389 – The Future of the Industry](https://johnaugust.com/2019/the-future-of-the-industry)
* [One Revolution Per Minute](https://erikwernquist.com/one-revolution-per-minute) by Erik Wernquist
* [American Dream](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099028/) on IMDb
* Christopher Keyser on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0450899/?ref_=tt_ov_wr)
* [Chris Keyser at The Oxford Union Society vs. The Harvard Debate Council, 1982](https://youtu.be/mS2Zi6u95pg?si=L_R7ZdlXIH_dih_3&t=2283)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

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