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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/infinite-westworld).

**John August:** Today’s episode of Scriptnotes contains a surprising number of F-bombs. So, if you’re listening in the car with your kids, this is your strong language warning. Now this episode was recorded live last week at the ArcLight in Hollywood. It was a great venue for a live show and a surprisingly terrible one for recording sound. So between the wireless mics and a buzzy soundboard editor Matthew Chilelli had his work cut out for him. So we’ve done the best we could.

If anything, I think it’s a reminder of why it’s great to see these shows live in-person, so you can see and hear everything properly. We had listeners coming in from Texas, Chicago, and Sweden. I got to talk to a bunch of you after the show. That is awesome. And so we love to chat with our listeners live and in-person.

Our intro this week is by Jon Spurney and our outro is by Matthew Chilelli. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So we are here in Hollywood. We have a giant crowd here. Thank you all so much for coming out here. Hollywood is in Los Angeles, otherwise known as LA. It is the only city in the world that is known by the initials. Is that correct, Craig?

**Craig:** Not according to the kind folks on Twitter that angrily told us that DC also works.

**John:** DC. Who would have thought of DC? I actually created a television program that ran for four episodes called DC. And I didn’t think of that once.

**Craig:** Well, if it had gone for five episodes possibly.

**John:** Five episodes. If Dick Wolf had given me that fifth episode then it might have been the one. Craig, you are back from a city. You are back from Chernobyl.

**Craig:** I’m back from actual Chernobyl.

**John:** Actual Chernobyl. So, is it safe for me to be standing this close to you?

**Craig:** No. Nah, you’re okay. It’s totally safe…they’ve told me.

**John:** All right. So tell us about your experience being in actual Chernobyl because this has been a project you’ve been working on for so long. What was actual Chernobyl like?

**Craig:** It was kind of amazing. I mean, I’ve been working on this for four years and we’re shooting it right now, largely in Lithuania. A little bit in Ukraine. But I went with the second unit team to scout. So we went to actual Pripyat which is a little town right next to Chernobyl. I don’t know if you guys have ever seen any images of the ghost city next to Chernobyl. And then we went into the power plant itself. I had lunch in the Chernobyl cafeteria.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Not great. I should be honest, not great food. Also, you get what they give you. Still kind of Soviet there. It was remarkable to be somewhere that I felt like I’d been in my – you know, you guys are all writers, right? We have one. So great. I don’t know what the rest of you fucking people do. But things seem so real in your head when you’re doing them and then for you to go somewhere that matches up to that, it’s exactly the same. It’s so strange.

So, it was great. It was very surreal. But it was very safe. We were all taken care of. And, yeah, things are going well. I’m excited for people to see that show. But that’s not for a bit.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Still shooting.

**John:** But tonight we get to talk about the same kind of thing you went through where you’re creating a world in your head and you’re seeing the world come to life. You get to see this imaginary scenario that you’ve built come out in front of you and you have to figure out what are the things you want to see, what are the things that actually happen. We have four people here who I think are remarkably talented at talking about that thing. So let’s bring out our guests.

**Craig:** They may be remarkably talented at doing it. We’re about to find out if they’re good at talking about it. So let’s see.

**John:** I assumed perhaps too much.

**Craig:** Shall we?

**John:** Let’s bring out our guests. First, I want to welcome Lisa Joy who came into screenwriting after practicing law with her 2013 Black List script Reminiscence. That became one of the biggest sales of the year. She’s been staffed on Pushing Daisies, Burn Notice, and is currently set to write Battlestar Galactica for Universal Pictures.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** She created – Lisa Joy – it is a pleasure.

**Craig:** Welcome Lisa Joy. Welcome.

**John:** She created a show called Westworld with Jonah Nolan. Jonah’s credits include the story for Memento, screenplays for The Prestige, Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, and before Westworld he created the CBS series Person of Interest. Jonah Nolan, welcome to Scriptnotes. A pleasure.

**Craig:** Welcome Jonah. Welcome aboard. You’re doing great so far by the way guys. You’re doing great. Nailing it.

**John:** Nailing it.

**Craig:** But we have more.

**John:** We have more.

**Craig:** People. Because that’s not enough. We like to have the best of all worlds. We bring you the best of television and now we bring you the best of film. There’s a small film out you may have seen written by these two folks, Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus. Markus and McFeely. McFeely and Markus, if you would. They wrote three Captain America films, The First Avenger, The Winter Soldier, and Civil War, along with Thor: The Dark World, and this year’s very small failure, Avengers: Infinity War.

And also its untitled sequel: Infinity Plus One War.

**John:** More than Infinity.

**Craig:** Their other credits include The Chronicles of Narnia film franchise and ABC’s Agent Carter. Earlier this year they signed a new deal as Co-Presidents of Story for the Russo Brothers new venture. So welcome aboard McFeely and Markus and Markus and McFeely.

It’s an impressive group.

**John:** It’s a really good group.

**Craig:** All to save lives, by the way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re saving lives. Right?

**John:** We’re saving lives. We’re saving children’s lives. Hollywood Heart. We’re doing it.

So what I was so excited to have the four of you here to talk about to start with is world-building, because you guys all had to come out and figure out what is this universe we’re going to create. And so I want to start by talking – Lisa, I’ll start with you, because you’re next to me – about the literal geography of the place that you’re building. As you’re coming up with your plans for Westworld, you have Sweetwater the town, you have the ranch, you have the mesa. How early in the process were you figuring out literally where things are and how much to show our audience about how stuff is structured, like geographically structured in your world?

**Lisa Joy:** Well, we basically – Jonah and I before even shooting the pilot we sat in a room for about six months, because I think I was pregnant at the time probably, and we just papered it with all the deep mythology that we were talking through. And one of the things that we talked about was the geography of the place. We had this idea that the epicenter of it would be the most calm, idyllic place, Sweetwater. And that the further out you pressed from it, the more wild, dangerous, lascivious the park would become. So it basically created a soft border that kept pushing you back towards the center.

And then we sort of started charting and plotting out the different locations that we thought we would feature. We have weird maps that we drew in that endeavor. But, I mean, as it turns out, you really experience the park through the host perspective, so it’s a very slow unveiling of that. So you only kind of come to see shades of it through their lens. So, we could have slacked off a little bit because it took us a while to get to some of those places.

**John:** And Jonah how much mythology, I mean, how much geography – how big were your Tolkien maps of this? Because in the second season we learn like, “Oh, there’s Shogun World.” And there’s this whatever – I don’t even know if we know the title for the Indian kind of world of it all.

**Jonah Nolan:** The Raj.

**John:** And so there’s bigger spaces, but you guys probably had a sense of that right before – the six months leading up to it.

**Jonah:** Yeah, I’m big on geography. And I think actually we’d gone to see Sleep No More in New York a year before we started writing the pilot. And one of the things – I don’t know if anyone else here has experienced that. It’s a very, very cool sort of live action immersive experience in New York, sort of a mishmash of Shakespearean plays and you got to put on a mask and the audience kind of follows things around. But they laid out the geography beautifully in that experience because you start at the bar, always the most important part of any experience. I will be there in about 45 minutes.

And the geography is really simple. If you got lost, you go back to the bar. The bar was the center of it. So we thought, “Oh, that’s perfect.” And what we wanted with Westworld was we wanted an experience for the guest. We sort of designed the theme park first. How does the theme park work? Where would all the rides go? How would the corporate structure look like? But you also wanted an experience that required no owner’s manual, or no user manual rather. The experience, as Lisa was saying, reveals itself to you intuitively. So the geography was kind of all important.

And then we added five more parks all around, but didn’t tell anyone.

**Craig:** In terms of that concept of geography, geography can either be limiting in the sense that when they stand in front of that holographic dome image you get, OK, the park has an edge to it like all parks do. But we don’t necessarily know – you haven’t shown us all of the area. We don’t know scale necessarily. So we’re not sure how deep in.

But narratively speaking, too, you have a choice as people writing a series, you can say this narrative has an end point. We get to it and it’s over. Or, do you not see the borders of your own story? I’m kind of curious like how you guys conceive of the narrative? Is it ongoing and extensible endlessly? Or do you have a kind of end game in mind?

**Lisa:** Yeah, we have mapped out for the series kind of these tent pole moments I would say. You know, Westworld posits some kind of intellectual, philosophical questions. And we wanted to at least suggest some answers. And also in terms of our characters, we wanted to know where they would go and how we would keep renewing, and refreshing, and exploring different things.

So the really large sweep of their arcs we planned out in advance. But then as you’re writing, as you’re going into series and you’re writing the individual scripts, you know, the fun of it is when you find these opportunities to dance and linger and stay a moment with a character or a place, or you find some great chemistry between your actors and it opens up a whole new world for you. So there’s wiggle room in there.

**Jonah:** And I’ve done broadcast TV, and I’d very gotten very use to the sort of endless churn. I liken broadcast TV to getting a tie caught in a shredder. You’re just fucking all in. The prevailing rule of broadcast television for decades was once you’ve got that magic formula, that franchise of cast and characters and the story of the week, you just keep doing that. And I never had any interest in that whatsoever.

I think with Westworld much more explicitly we set out not using the rules of television, because TV has now expanded to fit so many different formats, it’s kind of the Wild West. We looked more at the rules for franchise filmmaking.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Jonah:** We’d say, “OK, you’ve got a consistent cast, you’ve got a larger story you’re telling, but you’re going to settle your obligations to the audience by the end of each season.”

**Craig:** And that’s fascinating because I feel like you guys – things are meeting. Because when I watch your movies I feel like now more than ever I’m seeing these enormous, very expensive, very elaborate, but really well-crafted episodes of this very big television series. It seems like there’s a series-if-ication of movies and there’s a movie-fi-cation of series. Do you feel that as you’re doing what you do?

**Stephen McFeely:** We do, but Kevin Feige would hate to hear you say that.

**Craig:** Well, that’s why I don’t work at Marvel. He’s not here I think.

**Stephen:** But it’s serialized storytelling. There’s no way around it. And I think that’s why people have embraced it because it treats the audience as if they’re in on something. I find – it’s a little funny that a lot of critics will go, “Ah, that’s too much for me to pay attention to. This movie is like…“ Well, your audience is clearly getting it.

**Christopher Markus:** Well, also it keeps it alive. It makes it not sequel after sequel. It makes it the next episode. So there’s a reason for it to exist outside of commerce.

**Stephen:** It rewards investment.

**Christopher:** Yeah. And I think with TV now there’s a reason to stop it outside of commerce. And people are paying attention. The narrative is done. Done. Let’s stop.

**Jonah:** That’s a good idea.

**John:** Lisa was talking about the moments that you discover where you get to linger, where you get to sort of hold onto a place. And what was so impressive about your film is there’s not a lot of time to sort of linger. You guys have to crank through a tremendous amount of stuff. And even the geography of your movie is really complicated. You’re creating brand new worlds that we’re seeing for the first time and you have basically very little time to establish anything about the world, but I guess the difference is we know those characters so we can see the world through those characters and that’s all that sort of matters. What was that – the new worlds we visit in your movie are extensive.

**Stephen:** Well, they’re actually not that extensive. We have very few choices in terms of what was still available to us, because we’re doing a movie with six MacGuffins, right? And five of them were established. So, we were going to visit places that if you were an audience member that already knew the movies you were expecting. So, the decisions we got to make were where was the soul stone, and where do you hold the third act. So basically we chose what combat and we made up a story about the soul stone and plucked a name of an old Marvel planet and put it there.

**Christopher:** And Thanos’s home town.

**Stephen:** Thanos’s home town. Sure.

**John:** But there are also environments–

**Craig:** Did you know that that was Thanos’s hometown, or did you just find out right now?

**Stephen:** We didn’t make it up. He’s from Titan, which is–

**Craig:** I just feel like he was maybe telling you. Covered meetings.

**Christopher:** You should come to more meetings.

**John:** I want to give you guys credit. There are moments – you can say like, oh, those places are already established in canon, but like we’re seeing them in your movie and the characters are suddenly there and we have to sort of like run with it. OK, we are at these [unintelligible] forages and like just roll with it. That’s brand new. We’re seeing this for the first time.

**Christopher:** Well, I think that’s the confidence that the franchise has built by this point is trust us, you’re going to be OK. This does make sense. We might be jerking you around a billion more miles than we usually do, but we know what we’re doing.

I do, however, miss those lingering moments and look forward to getting back to them.

**Stephen:** I mean, that was one of the things about that movie is that we had plenty of lingering moments in early drafts and it was a three-and-a-half hour movie and it turned out we needed something propulsive that only brought you in when a stone came up or a purple guy came to punch you in the face.

**Christopher:** Captain America’s dissolving relationship with his girlfriend was a great scene.

**John:** It was really good.

**Craig:** You can imagine it.

**Christopher:** Yeah, you can just see it.

**John:** But part of world-making is not just the literal worlds, it’s also setting the rules and the expectations for the audience. And so you guys in Westworld had to really clearly set rules for what the hosts are able to do and pushing past those rules. That’s the journey the hosts are on. But also rules for the universe and our expectations of like what’s happening outside this world. Because the first season we don’t get to travel outside this world to see what the rest of it is like. So, what were the rules you set originally for the hosts and for yourselves about how we’re going to venture into this world?

Was there a deliberate process of figuring out what it is that you wanted the audience to know were the rules of the world? Because in the second season Maeve is able to do things she couldn’t do the first season. So how do you set the rules for powers?

**Jonah:** It sort of came – the grounding in it for me was in working in the superhero film world for ten years with the only superhero who doesn’t actually have any super powers other than money and anger.

Male Voice: And rage [in a Batman voice].

**Jonah:** But the rules in those movies are all important. And we knew that the rules in Westworld were vitally important as well. Not that you want to belabor them for the audience, but I think – I know when I’m watching movies or TV I can feel sometimes when the writers haven’t put in the work. I don’t need to be told what the rules are necessarily, but I need to feel that the writers have spent six months sitting in a room, driving themselves nuts trying to figure out how it works.

2001 is a great example of that. You’ve got Arthur C. Clarke, you read the novelization of it. It’s like, “Oh shit, it all actually means something.” When you watch Kubrick’s film there’s very little exposition, but you feel there’s an underlying thought process that’s gone into – even the most sort of hallucinatory sequence at the end you can kind of feel that there’s a set of ideas that’s been woven into it.

So with Westworld from the very beginning we felt like we got – I mean, I literally we drew the map, maps, and then a corporate flow chart for how people work. And then we were like, “OK, we’ll set aside two days to figure out what consciousness is and then figure out the rules set for that.” Did not quite work out.

But, yeah, you’ve got to put in the leg work on that or the audience sniffs it out immediately. And that allows you to go to exciting places because if you know what their limitations are you can push through them.

**Craig:** I want to talk a little bit about the consciousness thing–

**Jonah:** Oh dear.

**Craig:** Because I got so excited–

**Jonah:** It was all going so well.

**Craig:** Here we go. You guys bring up this concept of the bicameral mind. I took a class with that guy in college.

**Jonah:** Julian Jaynes?

**Craig:** Julian Jaynes.

**Jonah:** Come on, really?

**Craig:** Julian Jaynes.

**Jonah:** Is he cool?

**Craig:** Well, he’s dead now. So no. But then, he was like a wise old owl. He was very cool. The book was incredibly influential on me. I bought it hook, line, and sinker, even though my other professors were like “This is bullshit. There’s no fucking evidence for that.” And it’s true. There is no fucking evidence for that.

But, it’s a fascinating theory and actually weirdly after I graduated I called him up one day, this is before he died luckily, and – because I had this idea that you know when we dream, I’m not high I swear to god. But if you are high this will make more sense.

So, we have dreams and in our dreams there are people that talk to us, and there are people that talk to each other, and we’re constantly surprised in our dreams. I mean, that’s why nightmares work. But that’s all from our own head. And it seems to me like we’re fragmenting our consciousness all the time in dreams. And I said isn’t that kind of evidence of – and he said, “No, I don’t think so.” And then that was the end of that, and then he died shortly thereafter. I may have killed him with that question.

But when I was watching this I couldn’t help but think how in a way your entire show, and specifically that point, is a great description of what it means to be a writer. Because you are fragmenting your mind into these interesting things. You’re hearing voices that are from you. And you’re also the god of creatures that you are responsible for that begin to in a strange way take on their own life. I can imagine only when drunk that this comes up all the time between the two of you.

**Lisa:** We weren’t oblivious to the sort of meta aspect of writing this, which is why we like to make fun of ourselves in it through the character Lee who is just such a high maintenance pain-in-the-ass. So, it was kind of, you know, our way of exorcising our demons through him. I don’t think we’re quite the pains-in-the-asses that Lee’s character is, but yeah, that’s what he’s there for.

**John:** Well, speaking of writers who are pains-in-the-asses, so you guys have a ton of characters that you have to manage in the course of your movie, some of which you’ve worked with before, some of which are brand new. You’re having to deal with machinery that’s been put in place largely through your movies but also through other movies, certainly through Black Panther you’re dealing with Wakanda which is a new thing for you to be touching. What is that like to be stewards of these characters, this story, to be controlling this universe but also know that it’s going on to another thing? What is your, as creators, what is your sense of responsibility to those characters and to those storylines?

**Stephen:** I mean, it’s make the best movie in front of you. Right? That’s always been Marvel’s watch word and it’s certainly ours. We’re selfish in that we’ll try to take everything for our movie and someone will have to pry things out of our hands and say, no, that’s somebody else’s. And I think we’re confident in our place enough now that we can ask for advice, help, and input. So we flew Taika Waititi in and said what the hell are you doing to Thor – we need to talk about this.

Because it was a radical re-toning of the character for the better clearly. But, you know, we didn’t know how far they were going to go with that. James Gunn is very specifically entwined with the Guardian, so we needed to talk to him. That kind of stuff happens all the time at Marvel. For all of its success it’s a very small shop, so that’s really easy to do.

**John:** So what is the conversation as you’re going in to work on this movie and the movie thereafter, you’re describing your overall plans for things and do you know – it feels like if you’re working on one of these movies you have to know not only what’s happening in your movie but what’s happening in the movie before you and happening in the movie afterwards. And that’s a complicated decision. It’s like if Lisa and Jonah were running your show, but somebody else was running another show that–

**Stephen:** Like if you had to know what was going on in Barry or something.

**John:** Exactly.

**Christopher:** And it’s particularly annoying because we were writing movies that we had to start making before they were making theirs, but theirs were going to come out first.

**Craig:** Oh.

**Christopher:** So we’d look like idiots because our movie didn’t mesh with theirs, even though they had to go after us. So there was a lot of, well, a lot of reading drafts and a lot of going just promise me you’ll leave him standing right here. I don’t care how he gets there, do whatever you want, just standing right there at the end of your movie and everything will be fine.

**Stephen:** It was also an opportunity, right? I mean, put yourself in our spot. Three years ago, we’re looking at a board that says Avengers 3, Ant-Man and Wasp, Captain Marvel, Avengers 4. You can either freak out by that or you can go, “Oh well, maybe we can use that to our advantage.” So the tags, spoiler alert, on our movie is a little teaser for Captain Marvel. Undoubtedly you’re going to figure out what that pager device is, right, and that’s a weaving. Ant-Man and Wasp will be the same thing, which means you’ve got to watch both those movies to get what’s going on in the next one.

**Christopher:** Well it’s also a selfish way of getting them to do a tiny bit of our work for us so that in the two movies – it wasn’t just a pause, the story was evolving as it went on.

**John:** Lisa and Jonah, a thing you and I have talked about is how important the “previously on” cuts are for a show. As someone is sitting down to watch an episode of your show, figuring out what it says on the “previously on” so you can set the right expectation about what’s going on there and remind people about what’s important. How early in the process do figure out what needs to be in that “previously on?” Is that a thing that’s happening in the writing stage or as you’re looking at the cut to see like you need to remind our audience that this is stuff that’s happening?

**Jonah:** I don’t think we get writing stage, although you start drawing up maybe a tiny list. One or two things. And then we do – I think unusually we cut our own. We cut our own in-house and we ship the cut to the network with a “previously on” on it. And then they recut it and they say – they have a traditional trailer vendor who makes – HBO puts a lot of money into their shows. And so in some cases you’ll have a really beautifully done piece. But we sort of hauled up the pieces we think are vital for understanding what’s coming.

**Craig:** And it seems like that’s something HBO has to do as one of the few places left that make you wait. Which, you know, as somebody that is doing something for HBO I personally like. I’m kind of old fashioned that way. I like the fact that I have to wait now a week, and a week, and a week to see your show. But it seems to me that the part that – well, at least from my point of view and I’m kind of curious what you guys think about this – and it sort of ties into the trailer—

**Christopher:** I would love for a “previously on”–

**John:** “Previously on” would save you so much time.

**Craig:** “Previously on” would be amazing for you guys. But it’s actually the coming up part at the end that I think is so important because when you’re binging you just go, great, I’ve finished, next, next, next. You can’t binge Westworld if you’re watching it during the season so it’s that little piece. How involved are you in that little hit of crack?

**Jonah:** We are sadly micromanaging lunatics and we’re involved in everything.

**Craig:** I love it.

**Jonah:** If there’s a fucking Westworld napkin under your beverage, we looked at the design.

**Craig:** Good.

**Jonah:** But the partnership at HBO is fantastically collaborative in that way. I’ve had it both ways, fighting tooth and nail to get your voice heard. With HBO it’s a seamless partnership on those pieces. You know, one of the reasons I got into movies is I love trailers. And that’s your little trailer at the end of every – you know, we had a lot of fun this year doing the trailers for our season. I shot the Super Bowl spot. I got to shoot that. And very hands on with all this material. It’s a lot of fun.

I’m also a big believer in – I think the binging thing is very cool, disrupt, etc., but there’s a lot of wisdom in the traditional broadcasting model. We come out for ten, I mean, in the movie business you would kill for ten consecutive weeks of watercooler conversation and articles. No matter how big your movie is, it’s kind of four weeks and it’s gone.

You know, if you get ten consecutive weeks it can be frustrating for some of the audience, but for everyone else it drives that conversation forward. And it gives you a chance to cut a little trailer for next week’s episode.

**Craig:** And there’s that beautiful anticipation that happens. You do feel as if the cliffhangers are cliffhangers. I have noticed that when I’m binging something the cliffhangers are – it’s just “Shut up, cliffhanger. Next episode. You know? I don’t believe in you.”

Which actually brings me to a question for you two, and it’s about death.

**Christopher:** Ah, death.

**Craig:** If you haven’t seen Avengers, fuck you. Come on. I mean, it’s the biggest movie in the world.

**Christopher:** It’s on in this building. Right now.

**John:** Literally walk across the hall.

**Craig:** In this structure, it’s on 20 screens. So, something happened I think, and I think it happened when Ned Stark’s head got chopped off. And in that moment, and it’s many years ago now, there was a kind of end of an era, in a weird way, where everyone always felt safe. The only time somebody would die is if, I don’t know, Jean Stapleton just didn’t want to do All in the Family anymore. And it was sort of like, well “OK, so you know she died.”

But when Ned Stark died I think it was kind of like a burning torch that said we are no longer going to let you be safe. And the ending of your movie is very television-like in that way I think. In that it sort of said you’re not safe anymore. Now I believe any of it. But I believe some of it. Like, I’m not sure. I feel like you guys are fucking with me, but I also feel like you’re not fucking with me, and I think that – so yeah, no.

**John:** They’re negging you is basically what they’re doing.

**Craig:** They are. Black Panther is not dead. That aside, money is money.

**Christopher:** Certainly dead at the moment.

**Craig:** But some of those people I think are dead. And I actually kind of love that. And I’m wondering if television was an influence on that in any way. The notion of lack of safety.

**Christopher:** I mean, yes, in that we’ve all gotten used to it between Game of Thrones and Walking Dead where death has become real. Has become a tool you can use. And I think when they chopped off Ned Stark’s head you went, “Oh, this is about the show. I’m watching a show. I’m not just watching these characters. Like this is a story they’re telling and they’ll kill people.”

And it made me take a wider view of the whole thing. And each time they lopped off the lead character’s head you go – people are thinking. Just like you said. They thought about this and they went, “They thought it through. We can do without that and move on.” It’s not just what are we going to make handsome man do next week.

**Stephen:** But that’s what movies had been for a long time, right? You got a handsome man and everybody went to go see handsome man. We’re going to see Handsome Man 2. We’re going to see Handsome Man 3.

**Craig:** Right. And handsome man could never, ever die.

**Stephen:** Oh my god no. Right.

**Craig:** He might get less handsome eventually.

**Stephen:** Eventually Handsome Man 4 will make less money and Handsome Man 5 won’t make any money. And then he’s done.

And Marvel understands, I feel like a huge shill here, but the success is ridiculous. They’re at 19 movies and god knows how many billions of dollars. So they understand that good storytelling needs endings. I mean, if you just keep giving them Handsome Man 6 you’re going to stop coming. And they also have this confidence that they know what they’re doing now and they’ve got a bench of 5,000 characters. So that you didn’t know you wanted Guardians of Galaxy. They got a ton of Guardians of the Galaxies. They’ll figure it out.

So, I mean, a part of it comes from this ridiculous confidence that they have now.

**Craig:** They really do. And I think it’s – you’d think that other people would learn the lesson. It’s remarkable how no one seemed to learn any lessons. They just learned – how did they not see it? You know what I mean?

**John:** I would also say that in defense of some of the other studios who are working with some of these characters–

**Craig:** Ugh. Talk about a shill.

**John:** So often these studios were like backed up against a wall. If we don’t make this movie within the next year we’re going to lose the rights to things. So they were making things for the wrong reason without a greater plan for how stuff was going to fit together.

**Craig:** That is true. But I do think that there’s a certain bravery that television just naturally has. Like you guys I feel on your show at any point you could kill anybody.

**Jonah:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For instance, Anthony Hopkins happened to make it through season one. But I didn’t know he was going to make it through season one, which is almost as good as him not making it through season one.

**Lisa:** Have you seen the finale, my friend?

**Jonah:** I hate to break your heart, but he didn’t make it through–

**Craig:** No, no, I’m saying, I’ve seen it. He didn’t. But I’m saying he didn’t know that he wasn’t. I thought maybe he would. But I wasn’t sure. And so that’s the best situation is I can’t predict. Television is very good at that. But Handsome Man 3 at a lot of places, I think, they’re petrified to kill Handsome Man because they think that’s why people are coming. And it’s interesting because I personally think that people generally now are coming for the promise of something that is unsafe narratively.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Lisa:** I think – I mean, just to interject, I think you’re right. And I think it’s so great. And as writers we always want to just go for it. And you need stakes. And one of the evolutions that’s happened in the superhero genre, and we deal with robots who are essentially superheroes, you know, is that after a while if they are just completely immune to death you start – it starts becoming really formulaic. And so you need to have stakes.

But just to give credit where credit is due, it’s also we all want stakes because we are adults and writers who are somewhat cynical and have been through and watched this and studied it for craft. A lot of these movies they attract children and families who haven’t gone through that whole experience yet. And so it really is still like a real risk to take in anything, in a feature or in TV, where you create these characters and you love these characters. As writers you love those characters. And to kill them is painful for you, too. You know, it’s not – you don’t do it blithely. Like, “Oh, I love this actor. I love this performance. And now that we have reached the pinnacle of our affinity for this character I’m going to lop off their head.” It’s tough.

**Craig:** I do like it though. It’s exciting.

**Lisa:** Yeah, I mean, it’s rewarding creatively. Because you get to write this swan song and everything. But there’s a lot that goes into that I think. It’s art but it’s also empathy for your audience. And it makes it tough to make the call.

**Christopher:** But also leaving them alive, when you have death leaving them alive has more weight now.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Christopher:** And now they’ve got mileage on them. You know, it used to be about they have to look just as pretty next season. They can’t age. Now, you know, every time Chris Evans comes up I think about, well, we put him through that and we put him through that, and we put him through that and he must be pretty unhappy by now.

**Craig:** Still incredibly good-looking.

**Christopher:** Yeah, he’s doing fine.

**Craig:** Yeah. All that trauma and just a brew grew.

**Christopher:** I don’t know.

**John:** So when we are talking about characters who live or characters who die, naturally spoilers come up. And you guys as people who are making these shows have to be mindful of you don’t want the world to know about what’s going to happen in your piece of product before they are actually watching the thing. So you guys have to be very mindful of how you’re going to protect those secrets.

So this last season on Westworld, between seasons you put out this special spoiler video that spoiled the whole second season as an acknowledgment of the strange relationship fans have with the thing that they love that they want to explore and investigate but also kind of end up destroying in the process of loving so much. Talk about the decision to do that. And also, you know, your relationship to fans and secrecy. Because you guys had the biggest script controls of anything I’ve ever seen. I remember talking with you guys about what you were doing even before the first season had shot about like how you guys locked down scripts. So, can you talk through us like secrecy and fan engagement?

**Jonah:** I just came up with It Runs in the Family. And Chris was psychopathic about script security before anyone gave a shit. I’d be like who’s trying to steal this script for painting houses and shit. I was like no one cares. But then eventually they kind of did. And I remember wandering around with a script for The Dark Knight on my laptop and thinking, “Fuck, like a state secret.”

And I had this insane 264-bit encryption thing, like a secret invisible drive. I’m like we’re doing all this shit ourselves from the beginning.

So we just came up with it that way. I don’t know any other way to do it. I mean, the way that the scripts for those movies work is the head of the studio goes to my brother’s house and reads it there. The script does not exist. Does not exist digitally ever outside of our little computer. And it’s on red paper for everyone else.

In TV it’s a little harder because you have bigger departments. You have – you’re moving faster. There’s a far greater volume of material. I mean, so many stories over the years in terms of every time you let your guard down, right. I’ve emailed one script my entire fucking career. One. And it’s online. And it was the original script for Interstellar. And everyone was like, “Ow.” And that wasn’t even a fucking draft. That was like a half draft somewhere very, very early, and I was in England and the producers were in LA and they were like “We need it now, now, now, now, now.” And I was like, it was literally like Christmas Eve or something. I was like, “Send.”

**Craig:** What a terrible feeling.

**Jonah:** That’s the one script that’s up. And it’s not a draft. It’s filled with mistakes.

**Craig:** Now there are reviews of your half draft.

**Jonah:** 100%. So I was like, well, that story comes up anytime anyone is like, “Just email it to me.” No.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** So, Chris and Stephen, I imagine you just print up copies and send them around.

**Christopher:** Yeah. We just hand them out.

**Stephen:** I took this out of my car today because I didn’t want to leave it in the parking lot.

**John:** So what is that you’re holding in your hand?

**Stephen:** Just a thumb drive that’s got stuff on it. All right? You know.

**John:** Just in case.

**Craig:** There’s so many more of us than there are of you. We could kill you right now. We want to know what it is.

**Stephen:** There’s nothing in my car.

**John:** So, I mean, obviously as much as you’re comfortable talking about it, like what is your process of making sure that the stuff that you’re writing is safe for you, but you obviously have to share it at a certain point. And is there a whole internal procedure for how that goes?

**Christopher:** There was. Sometimes it broke down. You know, sometimes you really would wind up going like “Just come here.” Were anyone to drop that thing, you know, at the waffle house, there’d be trouble.

**Stephen:** We’ll get the waffle house later.

**Christopher:** Once they were printing it and giving parts of it to different people, it got really sort of arcane and there were fake scripts and there were portions of scripts. And people didn’t know how things ended. So it was a very confused crew.

**John:** So when you say there are fake scripts, so these would be in the script there’d be scenes that you knew that you were never going to shoot.

**Christopher:** Or there’d be versions. So in the real version Thanos comes in, picks up an infinity stone, and in the script he’d come and pick up a donut.

**craig:**: That you thought that was going to work.

**Christopher:** You know, the equivalent to bats.

**Craig:** You thought that would throw these nerds off the trail?

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** He’s Homer Simpson.

**Christopher:** They’re making a donut movie.

**Craig:** So Thanos is looking for the five donuts that power the universe. And no one is going to make the connection.

**Christopher:** There was at least one incident where the wrong version went to set deck, or something, and it wasn’t donut, it was the equivalent of a donut, but it was like where are the things. My script says donuts.

**Craig:** It was on the page and you said.

**Christopher:** It’s a fake one.

**Stephen:** You know the last thing you want to do when you’re trying to wrangle these things is write more—

**Christopher:** Oh my god, write extra.

**Craig:** Why don’t you hire one of these good people to do that? They could write fake scripts for you.

**John:** Absolutely.

Male Voice: Our assistant Joey eventually did it.

**Craig:** Oh, you gave it to Joey to do?

Male Voice: Yeah. Joey crushed it.

**Craig:** Yeah, Joey.

**Christopher:** He’s trustworthy.

**Craig:** Joey’s selling your shit right now on the Internet.

**Christopher:** Joey’s dead now.

Male Voice: Fucking Joey.

**John:** So, Lisa, as you’re going into your second season is there more – I mean, obviously you have a crew that you’re familiar with. There’s a little more comfort. Do you relax a little bit more going into it where you’re not so paranoid about every little thing? Or is just the same?

**Lisa:** I was like writers never relax. We’re always just neurotic messes. Actually that also pertains to security, so now, it’s the same level of paranoia.

**Craig:** I would think it should be higher, not to upset you, but when you’re making a show and no one has seen it yet and maybe there’s just an article that says Westworld, people are like, what, like “The Yul Brynner? OK.” Then maybe no one is trying to break into your shit. You know? And now they would be. So, think about that.

Tonight. When you’re trying to sleep.

**Lisa:** We could come up with a scheme where I’ll steal yours, you steal mine, and we sell them back to each other. There could be a real get rich thing here.

**John:** It’s like Ocean’s 4.

**Christopher:** I don’t have a problem with that.

**Craig:** Well how do I get into that? I want a taste.

Male Voice: You’re not required.

**Craig:** Shit.

**Christopher:** How does Chernobyl end? Oh shit.

**Craig:** That’s actually how it begins, to be honest with you. Well, I’m just giving something away, but I just thought like oh my god what torture if you were to watch a miniseries called Chernobyl and you had to wait five episodes for it to blow up. So, it blows up on page three.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Why wait?

**John:** Lisa and Jonah, you both also direct your show. And that has got to be an incredible – there’s a giant train moving and you’re stepping off the train to direct part of it and do the rest of it. So how is that possible? I mean, how does it not go off the rails when you are stepping outside of the writing and producing of the show to direct an episode? What was it like for you, Lisa?

**Lisa:** I mean, I delegated to Jonah. You know, everything from – it was actually a terrible time for me to direct, and if you think about it because I think I had just had a baby a couple weeks before I started prep.

**Craig:** What?

**Jonah:** Another baby.

**Lisa:** Yeah, a different baby.

**Jonah:** They just keep coming.

**Craig:** Different baby.

**Lisa:** It wasn’t like the longest gestation period, like a two season—

Male Voice: That would be one hell of a baby.

**Craig:** Wait, so you had a baby and then two weeks later—

**Lisa:** We have one per season just to really fuck ourselves.

**Craig:** Right. And then two weeks later you’re like, I know what I should do. The thing that kills people that haven’t just had a baby.

**Lisa:** Yeah. Yeah. And we were kind of still writing some of the scripts, so it was truly masochistic. And I actually was going to back out of it, but Jonah, you know, in a moment – actually in this moment in Hollywood it was especially lovely to have this level of support, not just from him, but from my whole crew, cast, from HBO. You know, I’m like, “OK, I’m going to get out of the hospital, I’m going to pump in the scout van. I’m going to write pages at 2am, and in the meantime I’m going to direct this episode. It’s going to be great guys. Don’t worry.”

And they didn’t. You know, and Jonah, there was one point where I was like am I mad because if I mess this up it’s going to be really bad. It’s going to be quite embarrassing. And he was like “You’re not going to mess it up.” And he pointed out that he was going to give me the same opportunity that I gave him for first season when he directed the pilot and the finale, which is I helped with the room, I helped with the kids. And he was like now I’ve got your back. And he did.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** You two! Wow.

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** You guys never do anything like that.

**Christopher:** No, we never do that.

**John:** You guys don’t help each other out like that at all.

Male Voice: I did pump in the van though.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a huge fucking problem, and we’ve got to – we can’t even have a podcast anymore.

**Christopher:** We don’t use a van anymore.

**Craig:** That’s bad.

**John:** One of the things that I like and admire so much about writing teams and partners is that they get to know each other so well. And they can see the same problem and come up with the same solution. Sometimes you can separate them apart and either one of them can do the job.

**Craig:** Like the Newlywed Game.

**John:** Kind of like the Newlywed Game. They know each other so super well. And so I thought we might actually do a version of that.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** And see how well we know each other.

**Christopher:** Weirdest place you’ve ever made whoopee.

**Craig:** That would be in the van.

**Christopher:** In the van.

**John:** So here is what we’re going to do. I emailed each of you separately the start of a little scene or the moment from a scene and asked tell me what happens next. And so I emailed these to you separately and I asked you to sort of email back what you guys thought happened.

**Christopher:** We were supposed to email it back?

**John:** That’s OK. You can just read it. It’s fine. You didn’t actually follow the instructions. That’s fine. So let’s start there at the end of the list here. Here’s the prompt that I sent to Stephen and Christopher. This is somewhere in the middle of a script somewhere:

“Carson ducks for cover behind a parked car. Windows blow out, glass raining down. She’s got to get out of there, but where? Suddenly…”

That is the prompt I gave. Let us here how Stephen McFeely answered this call. No, no, you’re going to read it to us.

**Stephen:** But you said everyone else emailed it.

**Craig:** I don’t understand the rules of this game either.

**Christopher:** I don’t have mine.

**Stephen:** Then I got to take credit for this. This is a terrible thing, by the way. Every one of us thinks this is—

**Lisa:** We are so horrified by the stress–

**Craig:** He does this every year.

**John:** Absolutely. So, with that scene, I’m curious what your scene reads like.

**Christopher:** Oh dear.

Male Voice: Carson ducks for cover behind a car. Windows blow out, glass raining down. She’s got to get out of there. But where? Suddenly…something glints in the side mirror. She leans in, dumbfounded, staring at the reflection of something we don’t see. Over the gun fire we can just make out the sounds of Turkey in the Straw. You have got to be shitting me. She turns as Bethany approaches in the stolen ice cream truck, a string of Christmas lights dragging behind her.

**Christopher:** This is so much longer.

**John:** That was nice.

**Christopher:** You said two lines.

**Craig:** I feel like you were sabotaging yourself.

**John:** That was a good little moment. The Turkey in the Straw. Some good scene work there. I like that.

**Lisa:** They’re critiquing your writing. This is the most high stress thing ever.

Male Voice: He wrote Dark Knight. I had to do something.

**Lisa:** All right.

**Craig:** But you wrote Avengers: Infinity Box Office. I don’t understand.

**John:** Yeah, come on.

Male Voice: It writes itself.

**Craig:** It writes itself. You mean your partner. You described your partner as itself.

**Christopher:** I can’t wait for it to write itself next time.

**Craig:** He’s like I wish I had something to write itself for me.

**Christopher:** Because I’m going home.

**Craig:** All right, this is going well so far.

**John:** Christopher, do you have yours there, or do want to read off of mine?

**Christopher:** Please read it off of yours.

**John:** All right, I’ll read Christopher’s.

“Carson ducks for cover behind a parked car. Windows blow out. Glass raining down. She’s got to get out of there, but where? Suddenly…her phone rings. She answers. Carson: Hello. Hi Honey, it’s mom. Kind of a bad time, mom. I’m at work. Well, look then, call the guy and call me back. We never talk anymore. I miss you.”

**Craig:** Very sweet.

**John:** Sweet.

**Craig:** Very sweet.

**John:** They’re is the heart and the violence.

**Christopher:** Well, you know, I feel guilty about my mom.

**John:** In your actual writing life can you tell who writes what stuff? If you go back to something a year later, do you kind of remember “Oh yeah I did that, or he did that”?

**Christopher:** Some specific lines sometimes. But we’ve grounded down for so many mutual drafts that it’s hard to ID.

**John:** Are you guys both at the computer together or you’re writing separate things and pasting together?

**Christopher:** We’re writing separately, pasting together, then sitting down and rewriting this really shitty script written by this third guy.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** So much self-sabotage. You have the biggest movie in the world.

**Christopher:** What do you want me to take credit for it?

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** Yeah!

**Craig:** Yes! Because you did it. See, this is the problem with guys. Nothing ever is good enough.

**Christopher:** No.

**Craig:** Nothing. Nothing. What’s your dream? To write the biggest movie in the world.

**John:** Duh-duh-duh.

**Craig:** Yeah, doesn’t work.

**John:** All right, Lisa and Jonah, I sent you a different prompt. So this is the prompt that I sent you guys:

“Dave smiles at yoga mom. Just then the bottom of the wet grocery bag rips. He frantically tries to keep everything from spilling out, but one item escapes his grasp.”

Jonah Nolan do you want to take it first?

**Jonah:** This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. I want you to know this.

**Lisa:** This is so bad.

**Jonah:** Not fun at all.

“Dave smiles at the yoga mom. Just then the bottom of the wet grocery bag rips. He frantically tries to keep everything from spilling out, but one item escapes his grasp. His spleen. He had taken out only the pieces of himself he thought he really didn’t need. Just enough to achieve that perfect Kundalini posture. But as he bent double trying to slide it back into the bag, hoping against hope that his homemade stitches wouldn’t give out he caught the glimmer of admiration in her eye. It had all been worth it.”

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Nice. That’s good. He did write Dark Knight.

**Lisa:** Oh man.

**Craig:** He did write Dark Knight.

**Christopher:** This is a very expensive little gag, John.

**John:** It is actually. I mean, how would you charge here? It’s a day rate here.

**Craig:** Millions and millions of dollars for that.

**John:** All right. Lisa Joy.

**Lisa:** Can I say it’s exactly the same? OK.

“Dave smiles at the yoga mom. Just then the bottom of the wet grocery bag rips. He frantically tries to keep everything from spilling out, but one item escapes his grasp. His precious corrective lenses. A complex prescription to treat not only his myopia and a light astigmatism, but also a recently diagnosed and pernicious case of hyper-masculopia, commonly known as the male gaze.

“Yoga mom bends her live form. Her breasts skimming the top of her low neck line. Her stomach taught. She gives him a come hither look as she hands him the specks, which he gracefully places on his nose. And is gob-smacked to see Yoga Mom suddenly transforms into Leslie from accounting. She balances a screaming toddler on her hip with the same ease she regularly balances the messy P&Ls of his company’s financing. He stammers, “Leslie, I almost didn’t recognize you.” She shrugs, “You’d be surprised how much that happens.” Then she turns and walks away, disappearing down the frozen food aisle without so much as an undulation of her hips.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah!

**Craig:** You definitely went over. You went over. But it was pretty good.

**Lisa:** I’m sorry. And I didn’t have the–

**Jonah:** Have you seen our show?

**John:** Both of you guys sort of wrote like a New Yorker little short story, like a one-pager New Yorker thing, which I think is kind of great.

**Lisa:** We normally tell ourselves when we’re carrying on too long, but we didn’t have each other to do that. So, you know, mortifying.

**Craig:** I loved all of it.

**John:** I loved every little bit of it. So, Craig and I are going to participate in this, too, because we’re not a writing team, but we’ve spent 352 episodes – we’re 352 episodes into this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the prompt I gave to the two of us is:

“Katherine awakens in a seedy motel room. Wood paneling. Stained carpet. Dead flies in the overhead light. She sits up in bed, putting her hand to her neck where she discovers…”

Do you want to do yours first?

**Craig:** Sure. Oh god, I got to read that whole thing again, don’t I? Shit.

“Katherine awakens in a seedy motel room. Wood paneling. Stained carpet. Dead flies in the overhead light. She sits up in bed, putting her hand to her neck where she discovers…a Post-It note starting to curl away from her skin. She pulls it free and stares at her boss’s handwriting through bleary eyes. Strike two. Ah, shit. Katherine staggers up on unsteady legs, walks to her cleaning cart, grabs some mini soaps and toilet cleaner, and gets back to work.”

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Poignant that is.

**Craig:** I’ve been writing dramas lately.

**John:** You have been, you. Katherine awakens in a seedy motel room. Wood paneling. Stained carpet. Dead flies in the overhead light. She sits up in bed, putting her hand to her neck where she discovers…a large bandage. She stumbles to the bathroom, squints in the harsh light, carefully peels back the bandage revealing a fresh tattoo. No. No. No, no, no. We reveal the tattoo. It’s Strawberry Shortcake. Not bad, really. Kind of cute. Fuck me. The camera reveals the rest of her tattoos. A flaming skull on her shoulder. A swastika along her bra strap. Finally a grinning Pepe the Frog along the small of her back.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Reversed a little.

**Craig:** Alt-right lady. Got Strawberry Shortcake. I feel like ours could be combined.

**John:** They’re really very close.

**Craig:** She also could be the maid.

**Christopher:** I’d like to say the email said specifically a line or two.

**John:** Yeah, I know.

**Christopher:** A line or two. I’m the only one who followed the rules.

**Craig:** I like to stay within the general boundary of–

**John:** You had a blank, you want to fill the blank.

**Craig:** You want to fill the blank. Hey, John, great game.

**John:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** Everyone loved it.

**John:** All right. Everyone out there–

**Craig:** Everyone out there.

**John:** Everyone here is like you’re making us do work. The last bit of work I want to make everyone do is a One Cool Thing which I was meant to remind you about in the green room. Did you guys remember it? You forgot. Jonah, did you remember? No one read the email. So I think instead of One Cool Things we should skip to–

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** The questions.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** So this is where Craig tells you what a question is.

**Craig:** Hi everyone. If you’ve been to one of our live shows before you’ve heard me say this. You get a chance to ask questions of us, any one of us here on stage, but we do have two rules.

One is your question must be a question. It can’t be a statement and then like “you know” at the end. Has to be an actual question.

Two, do not pitch anything, or even come close to pitching anything. Don’t be that guy. Don’t be that guy. And that’s it.

**John:** All right. And so what we’re going to do is we’re going to position John Gatins and Megan McDonnell, our–

**Craig:** You guys know John Gatins is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. I just want to be clear about this.

**John:** And Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell in this corner. If you have a question come to the end of the steps and they will offer you the microphone and you will ask a question.

**John Gatins:** And Craig, you said that I can beat people, right?

**John:** Yes. If you ask something that’s not a question–

**Craig:** If they violate my rules, hit them hard with the mic.

**John:** Go down and talk to John Gatins, sir.

**Audience Member:** OK, I have a world-building follow up question, for all of you. How much more than what you’re going to write on the page do you have to know about your world. Like ten times more? A hundred times more? How much more do you have to know to not have a total anxiety attack about what you’re offering the audience?

**Craig:** 53 times more.

**John:** There can be a paralysis where all you do is world build and you don’t actually write the real script. So, do you guys have any suggestions for where you stop?

**Christopher:** I don’t know, at the moment we’re having a problem of we’ve got way too much world. And the story is actually much simpler. And we’ve got so much iceberg under the water that it’s fucking up the simple story. So, it can really help having all of this knowledge. This is not Avengers 4. Which is already done.

**Craig:** And perfect.

**Christopher:** Having a ton can really help, but it can also kind of cripple you in that you feel obligated – you become confused as to how much of this shit the audience actually has to know. And you can overshare.

**Craig:** It’s also a little bit of a potential form of procrastinating. I know some writers love to use research – it’s just basically jerking off. I mean, that’s what it is. And at some point, right, it is important. But you know when the research that you’re doing is valuable, and if it’s pure fiction you know when the backstory thinking that you’re doing is valuable. But more often than not I think what happens is you may get to a point in your script where you realize, “Oh, the ice here is a little thin. Let me stop and think a little bit about what I need.“

I would kind of think about it as world-building on demand. Don’t get into the trap of world-building to avoid, you know, type, type, type. Whereas John Gatins calls it click, click, click.

**John:** One thing to add on world-building, so I’m doing the Arlo Finch books. And so there are three books in the series. And I got to a place in the second book and my editor is like, “Great, you need to stop world-building because there can be a situation where all you’re doing is building the world out bigger” and I’ve only got one more book. And I’m not going to be able to pay off all those things. And you’re setting an expectation for the audience if you show these things that they’re going to be meaningful. And I think you guys have similar things.

Like if you’re setting something up it feels like that’s a Chekhov’s gun on the wall. That gun is going to have to shoot. And there’s not going to be a space for that thing to shoot. And so the editing process of this has been, “OK, I need to make sure that I’m only building the stuff I can actually really use in the upcoming book because if it’s more than that it’s not just wasted time, it will diminish the actual read of the second and third books,” which I thought was a smart point.

**Lisa:** I totally agree. I have one little trick that I’ve been using lately, because we’ve been doing a lot of world-building for this and some of the feature work that I’m doing. And you really can get lost in the weeds. And it’s also fun. You’re imagining these wonderful places. But the thing that I’ve done to kind of get myself out of that and make sure it’s not a crutch, but I think it’s also just important for the story anyway is I’ll put it aside once I get really mired into it and say now approach this entire thing from just the character’s perspective.

Like look at what your protagonist and your villain is doing, because a lot of the time the thing that’s most relatable and most wonderful about a film I think is feeling really tied into that person, regardless of what world they’re in. And sometimes the most powerful moments I think are incredibly simple in that way. It could just be one person in a room staring at themselves in a mirror, but you understand what they’re thinking. And so that’s a little exercise I’ve been doing lately.

**Audience Member:** I’d like to ask a question about jeopardy. I wrote a screenplay. And one of the things that a couple readers didn’t like was, well, several things. But one of the things was that my protagonists were in Los Angeles and my antagonist was all the way across in New York. And they kept saying “He’s so far away. He’s so far away.” But my defense was he’s such a bastard and he’s very, very powerful.

My question is do you ever think about the different degrees of jeopardy? Do you ever think about as far as proximity to danger when you’re looking at a character and the situation they’re in? I’m not talking about immediacy. I’m talking about – in other words should I move him to like Covina or something?

**Craig:** Well, it’s certainly an evil place. You guys, sometimes your villains aren’t even on the planet.

Male Voice: Yeah, we certainly had a similar problem where Thanos had six things he had to do and he couldn’t be everywhere at once, even though he had the space stone. He could teleport everywhere.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was going to bring that up. But, OK.

Male Voice: Best we don’t dwell on that.

**Craig:** He had a rock that literally allowed him to break your movie, but go ahead.

Male Voice: Understood. But so in that case he had minions. And so we were able to have a few different scenes that were accomplishing the same thing. But I would also say that jeopardy doesn’t necessarily mean physical violence. It’s a super crutch of ours, but end of act two is always what’s the worst thing that could happen to our main character? And that does not have to be a punch in the face. That could be the loss of anything. That could be failure in any way. There’s lots of things that could be. And that could be a phone call.

And so I would just say that jeopardy is pandimensional.

**Christopher:** And also, I mean, distance can make people more frightening. There are a lot of people right now who are really terrifying who are just people, you know, and they’re in offices. They just happen to be in the right offices to scare us.

I mean, James Bond’s bad guys are inevitably guys he could just punch in the mouth and they’d fall over. They’re big fat guys, or, you know, titans of industry. It’s the power they wield from their chair. So I don’t know. Depends on the villain, but I don’t have a problem with them being across the country.

**John:** One thing I’d point out is in No Country for Old Man, Anton Chigurh from that movie is so terrifying in part because he’s headed towards you. And so you establish how scary he is, and he’s headed in your direction, and that is part of his threat is he’s coming towards you and you don’t know how the hero could possibly survive that threat. So not being right next door is fine. And most horror movies the villain is coming towards you and that is the thing.

But if people are consistently saying it feels just too distant and too remote, then you need to either bring him closer or proximity of emotion needs to be closer. Needs to feel like it’s a bigger threat to this person’s life.

**Craig:** Feeling is such a good way of thinking about these things, because you can get caught sometimes in the trap of trying to out-logic someone. They say “I don’t feel like your villain is close enough.”

“Well, I mean, there are scarier people that are even further away.” That’s a rational argument, but has nothing to do with how they feel. And ultimately we’re trying to make people feel things. So sometimes when someone says I feel like blank, blank, blank, I say OK, let’s talk about your feeling. You become a little bit like a therapist.

It helps if you have this kind of beard. This is very therapist-y. It’s amazing how often as writers we have to kind of, oh, I wish it weren’t so. It would be nice if everybody else had to be our therapist. But I feel like a lot of times we have to be therapists to the people that are reading to kind of help pull out of them what they’re saying. And then we can choose to agree or disagree, but then we’re agreeing or disagreeing about feelings which is different than agreeing or disagreeing about facts, which ultimately at some point fall apart because there are no robots that do that. And there is no Thanos in space. And so on and so forth.

**Craig:** Yes, I’m sorry. He’s not real.

**John:** Let’s go back over to Megan here.

**Audience Member:** This is specifically for Lisa and Jonah. I love the way you guys use music in Westworld. And I specifically love that this season, five episodes in, and there’s been so much hip hop. Very excited about that. But my question is first of all do we have any more hip hop to look forward to? And secondly how does influence your story or how do you choose the right music to use with the story that you’ve created?

**Jonah:** We have a psuedonoymous music supervisor on the show, which represents me. You know, one of the pent up frustrations for me, the wonderful experience of working with my brother for 15 years making movies was that he wasn’t a huge fan of using contemporary music, in the films or the trailers. You know, when you’re working with Hans Zimmer, you know, it’s an understandable impulse. You love the music that they crafted for each film.

And I kept trying to get him to do a Batman trailer with Paint it Black. I’m like “Just once. Let’s do it. People would lose their fucking minds.” And so then when we made the pilot for Westworld I was like I know which song I’m going to use. So this pent up 15 years of – because I love music. Lisa does as well, and Lisa picked the music for her episode which was magnificent. Boxy music and Rolling Stones. And there was this delightful idea very early on in the development of Westworld, we were looking for an icon for the show. Along the lines, if anyone here is a Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner fan?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Jonah:** So the penny-farthing bicycle, right? I don’t know what the fuck it means. I have no idea. There’s no penny-farthing bicycle in the show. I keep waiting for him to get on the penny-farthing bicycle and escape and he doesn’t. But we like the iconography of it.

And so we were casting around looking for an icon. And I’ve been a Vonnegut fan as a kid. And we just though every western town had a robot in it and it was the player piano. It was typically operated almost tragicomically because there’s no electricity in the Wild West. Most player pianos had a set foot pedals on the side and some poor asshole had to sit there pedaling the thing so it would play. We left that detail out.

I think originally you were introduced to Ford’s character in the pilot playing Deep Tracks. We just love this idea – I’ve worked now with Ramin Djawadi for, well, on and off – we collaborated at a distance, at a spooky distance, on Batman Begins, which I was a ghostwriter on and he was working with Hans Zimmer, kind of doing instrumentation. And then we started working together again 2011 on my first show. And we’ve worked together ever since. He’s one of the truly fucking gems. Like one of the greatest people in the world.

And so he loved this idea of “Let’s take contemporary music.” It was a way to fuck around with human programming. This is how payola works. Even if you don’t like a song, if I play it enough times it embeds. So we knew we could take popular music, which is why most of the songs are fairly well known, and we program the audience to make them feel something in it.

**Craig:** And you guys used, correct me if I’m wrong, Nirvana in your big sort of season trailer, right?

**Jonah:** We did.

**Craig:** Which was awesome. And part of the fun of watching your show is sometimes it’s pretty – like Paint It Black, something about the melody where it doesn’t matter how you play it. It’s Paint It Black.

**John:** And this last time you played it in Japanese instrumentation to remind us–

**Craig:** That’s the thing. But then there are some songs we’re like, “Wait, what the fuck is? And then like, oh, this is Black Hole Sun.” It took me like a minute or two, but this is Black Hole Sun. And I love that kind of–

**Jonah:** But you feel it moving around in your own programming.

**Craig:** It’s happening, you’re right, before you’re conscious of it it’s happening.

**Jonah:** The Wu-Tang one I think is our supreme fucking victory. Cleared that a year ago. I had a back and forth. I went to college with four roommates all from Brooklyn and Manhattan and I had to listen to the Wu-Tang Clan for five straight years.

**Craig:** Had to? Got to.

**Jonah:** Yeah. Got to.

**Craig:** I’m from Staten Island. I’m from Shaolin, my friend. That’s where the Wu-Tang – Brooklyn and Manhattan, psh.

**Jonah:** I was a grunge rock fan when I started. Everyone is like this show is set in the ‘90s. Clearly the fucking park is in the ‘90s. No, I just went to high school in the ‘90s. That’s where all the music comes from Wu-Tang, we cleared it a year before hand. Ramin did the instrumentation. And we had a choreographer. I’ve never been prouder. It was fucking glorious.

**John:** All right, question from John Gatins’ side.

**Audience Member:** Hi. This question is mainly for Westworld people.

**Craig:** They have names. We’ve said them over and over.

**John:** Lisa and Jonah.

**Jonah:** We’re OK. Westworld people works.

**Audience Member:** Of course, but it also kind of applies to the Marvel universe as well. And my question is about developing characters and creating characters and the process of making rules for these characters that are so close to human, like the hosts are, but they also have to have these elements of AI and robotic-ness to them. And how do the conversations when making rules for them and making these characters go when you’re trying to balance something that’s so close to the uncanny valley?

**Lisa:** You know, it was something we were very aware of, especially because in one of the drafts – we showed it to a producer who will remain nameless. And Delores gets attacked and murdered. And then they wipe her and put her underneath and they kind of repair and put her back out. And his note was, “Well why does it matter? Why do I care? Because she just forgets anyway.”

And I’m like that’s an argument for people who dose people with roofies. Like that’s really dark and terrible. Like it matters because it was evil and she suffered. And I don’t know that it matters if she remembers it or not.

**Craig:** I love that you were trying to explain that to a producer and they’re like “I don’t get it.”

**Lisa:** And I got really into this debate–

**Christopher:** Still not getting it.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, wait, the roofies is also bad?

**Lisa:** I was trying to – yeah, I was trying to liken the experience, and I really went deep into this debate with him, and I love the guy by the way. He’s a nice guy. It was just he could not get over this thing. But what I did realize then was if I’m having this debate it means that something has to change at least in the alchemy of when it goes to screen. Because god forbid people are having that debate. That’s not the feeling they should have from this. It’s not the feeling I intended as a writer, that we intended as writers. And honestly this is something that goes a little bit beyond script. It’s one of those places where direction, and Jonah directed it, and performance are incredibly, incredibly important.

And so the one thing we did in script to safeguard us on this count was we rooted our perspective as an audience with Delores’s perspective. She did not know she was a host. She did not know who among her were humans or hosts. And neither did we as the audience. So when it was revealed that her lover, the guy we thought was a guest was actually a host and the man in black was the villain, we too as the audience were meant to feel that betrayal. And it was supposed to bridge the empathy that we had with these hosts to make their pain more real and valid.

And then, of course, there’s the performance aspects of it and the direction, which it changes. It changes stuff, don’t you agree, to see it brought to life, where it’s no longer an intellectual debate about, “Oh, does it matter if she forgets?” because you see this heart-wrenching performance of a woman suffering. And you just think this kind of cruelty should not go on.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s amazing how acting eliminates 80% of the – it’s very frustrating as writers when we have to talk about those things, because what we want to say is a little bit like what you guys were saying. “Just trust us. We know what we’re doing. We’ve done it before. We’re not going to overwrite this. We need space for an actor to make it real and human.”

But you guys also, I think, very cleverly built in situations that allowed you to address the uncanny valley thing straight on and exploit it, particularly the interviews. I think the interview sequences are so important in the beginning because you realize how many levels there are. “Lose the accent. OK. Now also – no, stop with the emotion. Stop. Analysis. Why did you say that?” That’s brilliant and it allows the hosts to, A, be robots, and B, be very human actually in the strangest way. So you came up with I think a brilliant mechanism there to do that. So well done. Well done, you two.

**John:** Smart people. That wasn’t a question–

**Craig:** Those rules don’t apply to me. I can do whatever the fuck I want.

**John:** It is time for our actual last question, which I’m so sorry, over on Megan’s side.

**Audience Member:** This is for Christopher and Stephen. I just wanted to ask simply what was it like creating the character of Thanos on the page, because one of the things I really enjoyed about the film is that he had such an impersonal goal to balance the universe, yet you guys on the page made it very human and very emotionally resonant to us as an audience member. And having read Joseph Campbell, you can see that being paid homage to through the character of Thanos. Yet you guys seem like to really throw a monkey wrench into a lot of Campbell’s ideas. So I just wanted to ask what was it like crafting that character?

**Christopher:** It was a lot of fun. He was from very early on the protagonist, the main character of that movie. And that gave us the leeway to touch the emotions of a villain that you wouldn’t ordinarily go to. And he became more and more “human” the more we figured out the cost that he was going to have to pay to get what he needed. It’s not just he’s going to make the world pay. He’s going to pay a cost and it’s going to hurt. And that made him extremely compelling and lovable.

Male Voice: Sort of the secret writing trick we use is – I sort of alluded to it earlier, you know, what’s the end of act two? It’s the worst thing that could possibly happen. And I think a lot of people sort of just if you look at it casually think, oh, we lost Gamora at the end of act two and that’s terrible for our heroes. Not who it’s for. It’s terrible for him. And that idea when we hit upon that, that he would have to sacrifice the person he loved the most to get what he thinks he wants, everything sort of slid into place after that.

You knew what was coming. You knew he was going to collect six stones, or that’s at least what he was trying to do. But if there’s an emotional cost to collecting those things, if it’s not attached to Dr. Strange or isn’t sitting in Vision’s head, or isn’t an exchange required that you’re going to have sacrifice Gamora, then you’re just chopping. And we didn’t want to do that. We wanted it to cost.

**Craig:** It might as well be donuts at that point.

Male Voice: Exactly.

**John:** It could be donuts. That is our show for tonight. I want to thank Stephen and Christopher and Jonah and Lisa, our amazing guests. I want to thank our host, John Gatins, Denise Seider, Hollywood Heart. Thank you very much for having us here. They put together all this event.

**Craig:** Thank all these wonderful people.

**John:** We want to thank our fantastic audience.

**Craig:** You guys did a good thing tonight. You helped children. We think.

**John:** You would think.

**Craig:** We think.

**John:** We think there’s children involved in this. We need to thank Megan McDonnell, our producer. Yay, Megan McDonnell. And Matthew Chilelli who will edit this. And thank you to ArcLight for hosting us here. This was really fun.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**John:** This was nice. Thank you all for very much. Good night.

**Craig:** Thanks for coming out. Good night.

Links:

* Thanks to the ArcLight, [Hollywood HEART](http://www.hollywoodheart.org), and everyone who came out for this Live Show!
* [Lisa Joy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Joy) and [Jonah Nolan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Nolan) are on the second season of [Westworld](https://www.hbo.com/westworld) on HBO.
* [Stephen McFeely & Christopher Markus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Markus_and_Stephen_McFeely)’s [Avengers: Infinity War](http://marvel.com/avengers) is in theaters now.
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* Intro by Jon Spurney and [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilleli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_352.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/full-circle).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 351 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we’re going to be talking about the way that movies tend to bring their stories full circle and what that means for writers trying to figure out their story beats. We’ll also be answering questions about YouTube, arbitration, and skipping credits on Netflix.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is going to be pretty great for our second 350 episodes. This is kind of how I think in 700s.

**John:** Absolutely. You’re a Septcentennial.

**Craig:** That’s right. I work in base 700.

**John:** Absolutely. I wonder if there’s any civilization that was a base seven civilization. Because obviously we have the Babylonians who were base six and 12. You know, we’re in a decimal system. But obviously some system somewhere there are going to be creatures with seven fingers and they’re going to be working on a base seven.

**Craig:** I think it comes down to fingers, right?

**John:** Fingers and toes, whatever. Although, I mean, the Babylonians like they didn’t have six or 12, so?

**Craig:** And we still have base 12 for clocks.

**John:** Absolutely. Those Babylonians they helped us out a lot there. Because I think circle math just works better in six and 12. That’s why.

**Craig:** Circle math works better. 360. But again, you could divide a circle into anything. The truth is you could have divided it into 500 segments. And then you’d be back to base 10.

**John:** I’m so happy we’re staying on theme, our circle theme, for this episode.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** First we’ll start with a little bit of news. So this is a thing that happened this past week. There was a small theater in Pittsburgh that was going to do Big Fish. They decided to cancel Big Fish because some background actors were established as being a same sex married couple during one number. It was silly and crazy and frustrating. So, on previous episodes we talked about what writers should do when there’s drama, when there’s drama out there in the world, and the degree to which you should participate in the drama or comment on the drama.

In this case Andrew Lippa and I, the authors of Big Fish, did jump in to say like, “Hey, that’s not cool. It’s absolutely fine to stage the sequence with a same sex married couple walking in the background.” And it was interesting to see it play out sort of on Facebook and then become a bigger thing.

So if you want to see the actual statement that Andrew and I wrote it is up on the site at johnaugust.com. But it was just an interesting little moment that happened that I wouldn’t have anticipated because Big Fish has been staged hundreds of times across the country and this is the first time that we had to get involved in any way.

**Craig:** Yeah. I read your and Andrew’s statement and I thought it was really well done. No surprise there. I think that you guys probably have more cover to write something like this because you’re not just writers but you are creators of IP, right? So there’s a certain producorial or entrepreneurial aspect of your co-ownership of that show.

The thing that confused me was why – if you have a problem with same sex marriage why are you licensing a show written by two openly gay men? What’s your theory there? How does your mind work? I don’t get it.

**John:** Yeah, so this theater, and in our statement we were trying to be careful to not kind of just slam the theater entirely because the basis of why we get staged so much across the country is we are a very family-friendly wholesome show, with no swearing or violence. And in some cases we’ll even let theaters ask us to change a certain word because they don’t want to say the word penis or whatever. We’ll let that happen because we sort of want the show seen by as many people who want to be able to see it and stage it. I mean, I think the actual experience of staging a musical is so crucial and that’s why in many ways our audience is not just the folks who are sitting down to buy a ticket but the folks who are spending weeks to put the show on.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So we want to make sure that we keep it out there for the folks who want to make it. But I don’t think there was really anti-gay animus behind any of these decisions. And I don’t want to sort of assume that there was. I think there’s often just a fear of controversy. A fear of making somebody feel uncomfortable. And that’s a thing that we need to get rid of kind of overall, especially on the topic of just like there are gay people in the world. It’s a thing we see on network television all the time. There’s that sense of like can we just soften this a little bit. Can we make sure that we’re not going to ruffle any feathers?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, Blackish had it with an episode this season which they pulled completely because they were worried about angering communities especially I think around the NFL. So it’s a thing that people face all the time. And so you wouldn’t say that this theater is anti-gay or that ABC is anti-Blackish, but so often they’re so afraid of upsetting anyone that they’re going to upset the people they need to be supporting the most.

**Craig:** I understand that. I side with your argument against that sort of thing. And curiously I should note that when we talk about being a family show, the people that have the least problem seeing same sex couples being represented on screen or on stage are children. Their generation doesn’t give a damn. Well, at least as far as I can tell. And granted we live here in California. Maybe a little bit different in Pittsburgh, but I’m kind of guessing maybe not. Because culture has changed. And it’s a legal institution in our country. And my feeling is “Get over it.” And if you’re uncomfortable with that then don’t come back.

But we have, I think, a responsibility to be consistent in our positions on these things. If you’re uncomfortable with same sex marriage or you’re worried about people being uncomfortable with same sex marriage then, you know, maybe don’t try and profit off of the work of people that are in same sex marriages. That’s my thought.

**John:** All right. I would say the last thing that’s interesting about this scenario is that as screenwriters, as TV showrunners at times, we have control of our product to a certain point but we’re not getting involved with individual productions down the road. Like if a certain TV station is trying to show our show and we don’t like that TV station we’re not going to get involved with that.

But usually the authors of a play, if they do get involved in a production it’s because that production is trying to change something that is against the text of the show. And so you’re trying to not stage it the way it’s actually written on the page. So it was weird for us to come on board and say like “Listen, no, there’s no characters who identify as LGBT in the show, but there’s also no characters who are not – who identify the other way.”

It was weird for us as writers to be jumping to the defense of the director of a show saying like it’s absolutely fine for this person to choose to stage it this way because that is a valid interpretation of this. And so often as people working in Hollywood we are very frustrated by directors and sort of directors changing things. But here this was an opportunity to say like, oh no, it is the director’s job to provide perspective on this and to bring it to new life.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, I’m fascinated by that job of stage director because you get this pretty remarkable contrast of things. You can see a show and then you can see the same show by a different director, so all the words are the same, the songs are the same, the story is the same, but it’s all different somehow. That’s really interesting. It pulls out for an audience exactly what a director brings.

**John:** And we never get to see that in Hollywood because a thing is made just once. And so therefore that is that vision, so we never see two visions of the same story.

**Craig:** Except The Exorcist. What was it called, The Exorcist Dominion? So there were two Exorcist sequels. It was Exorcist 4 essentially. Paul Schrader wrote and directed an Exorcist sequel. And then when he was done the studio or the financiers, I think maybe Morgan Creek said “We don’t like this, it’s not scary enough. Let’s redo it. Let’s redo it with Renny Harlin. Let’s rewrite it. Let’s bring out Renny Harlin. We’ll keep a few scenes but we’ll redo it. And most of the same cast, so it’s sort of the same story, but it’s sort of not.” And I’ve seen both of them. It’s fascinating.

And Stellan Skarsgård is the star of both of those. I said I got to talk to you about this because I’m fascinated by what happened there and I got a really interesting perspective on it from him. But that’s the one thing I can think of in movie history are two movies of the same thing sort of by two different directors. Very strange.

**John:** Yeah. In film schools you’ll often get an exercise where three different crews will be given the same material and they’ll shoot it and you’ll see how vastly different their approach is to shoot the same material. But agree, in the real world in sort of actually made big things it’s a unique opportunity.

**Craig:** Exceedingly rare.

**John:** All right. More follow up. So, two episodes ago we talked about Highland 2. You and I discussed Highland 2. It’s now out in the world. It worked. It did really well. So I was so terrified as we were launching because it had been beta for three years. I was worried that it would not actually be able to be downloaded and the in-app purchase would work. So, we actually released it in Japan for six hours, so Matthew Chilelli, our editor who lives in Japan, could download it on the Japanese Mac App Store and make sure it worked. And he screen recorded the whole thing. So Matthew who is editing this, thank you very much for doing that. It worked for Matthew and it worked for a bunch of people.

In just the first ten days we’ve almost reached the number of people who had installed Highland 1. Six years it was out there.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** So that’s a remarkable launch. So thank you to everyone. Thank you for people who left reviews. If you haven’t left a review for it, it’s great and it helps because it helps other people find the app and let us know what you’re thinking. Because we’re really happy with this version but there’s a roadmap we’ll put a link to about what’s coming in future versions and you can help us figure out what we should be working on next.

**Craig:** So you guys are going to make some money on this?

**John:** We are making some money. So we’ve made $29,000 so far on it.

**Craig:** Nice!

**John:** Which is good. Which is really good for an app like this. And a couple times we outranked Final Draft in the total grosses, so that’s nice to see too.

**Craig:** God, I love that so much.

**John:** That’s really Craig’s goal behind all this is just to see them suffer a little bit.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s sexy. Oh, you know who loves that?

**John:** Yeah, is he back?

**Craig:** Oh yeah, he’s so back. Tell me about Highland 2. Highland 2.

**John:** Yeah, so he’s really – he’s become a monetary focus person. He’s really about sort of like value and cash flow.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig likes imagining Highland 2 spanking Final Draft. Spank.

**John:** This is not going to go well. In Episode 346 Christina Hodson came on and we talked about race and gender and inclusion and all sorts of things pertaining to Hollywood. It was a really good episode. Following after that the New York Times did a story on her and that and me and there’s a photo of the two of us together. I do not like the photo whatsoever. It looks like I’m giving her instructions on how to fix things. I’m not happy about the photo, but it was a nice story.

**Craig:** Oh my god, you’re right. It looks like you’ve shown up to say, “Hey stupid. Look at what I wrote.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh that’s terrible. Why did they do that? Why did they do that?

**John:** Because we weren’t thinking and Christina and I were both really uncomfortable being photographed. The photographer was super nice, but he had this set us and like, “OK, we’ll try this.” And that was the photo they ran. And I wasn’t crazy about it.

**Craig:** She’s awesome by the way.

**John:** She’s so cool. So I’ve gotten to hang out with her. We like Christina Hodson. We’ll have her back on the show at some point. But you can read the New York Times story about that. And sort of the ongoing discussion over whether these tools can be helpful for people figuring out what they should be thinking about in their own scripts.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** JT in Philadelphia wrote in. Craig, do you want to take him?

**Craig:** Sure. He says, “Your discussion of the controversy surrounding the pronunciation of Los Angeles reminded me of George R. Stewart’s 1975 book Names on the Globe, a wonderful exploration of the origins of place names. Sadly it’s long out of print but used copies are readily available. Anyway, he spends nearly two pages delving into the controversy and the many variations of the pronunciation that were used by one group or another.

“What I found most interesting, however, was the way politicians and others who wished to sidestep the controversy tended to settle on the abbreviation LA, which is why Los Angeles is practically the only city that is universally known by its abbreviation.” I’m smiling as I read this because that never occurred to me before.

**John:** It hadn’t occurred to me either, but it’s so true.

**Craig:** Holy – I mean, people will occasionally say NYC, but only because it’s a little bit of a cutesy thing and there’s a song from Annie. But nobody in New York goes “Oh yeah, I live in NY or NYC.” No one says that. LA is the only one. No one says STL for St. Louis. Wow.

**John:** And I think part of it is because LA captures the idea of bigger than just Los Angeles. In a weird way Los Angeles feels like the city where LA feels like the city and the surrounding region and sort of the idea of LA. So if you say like where do you live, “Oh, I live in LA,” if you live in Santa Monica you can say like “I live in LA.” It’s a general sense of that. But you wouldn’t say to, if you were visiting somebody in New York like, “Oh, I live in Los Angeles.” You more likely say that you live in LA because it’s a wider sweep that sort of counts as LA. It’s a strange thing. But I had never really considered that we speak of the abbreviation as much or more than Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, look, there are places like people who live in Mendocino, they don’t say, “Oh, I love in SF.” They say, “I live in Mendocino. It’s outside of San Francisco. Or I live near San Francisco.” Nobody says SF. I mean, there’s Nola, but nobody really says Nola.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Right. For New Orleans, Louisiana. Nobody says that. We’re the only one. It’s fascinating. Thank you, JT. Great reference to a very cool book.

**John:** All right. Larry writes in saying, “I thought you might like this story from the Washington Post. One space between each sentence they said. Science just proved them wrong. Obviously there needs to be a standard, but do we really want to leave it to science?”

So this is a story about whether two spaces or one space are the better choice for readability in text. This article seems to argue that two spaces is better, at least for certain fonts. Craig, you and I are both now one-spacers. What do you take from this?

**Craig:** I didn’t read it. I didn’t read it because you know what I don’t care. Here’s the thing: I was a two-spacer. Then I became a one-spacer. I have no problem reading anything with one space. Frankly, I have a problem reading things with two spaces. I can understand that there’s a point to say that it might be easier this way or that. It’s too late for me and this is the deal. I’ve just decided I get to be cranky and old about things now. And I think I’m going to be cranky and old about that one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m absolutely fine having switched to one space. I don’t find it easier or harder to read with multiple spaces. That sense that like oh the extra space helps you keep sentences apart, I don’t really buy that. That’s why you have capital letters.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s going to be fine. So I will maintain my one space policy because I can.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because you can. And you will.

**John:** And I will. Craig, you proposed the topic for this week’s episode which is Full Circle. We kind of left it at that, but what I took that to mean was that the way in which our stories, especially movie stories, have an expectation or a natural pattern where characters end up coming full circle at the end of stories. Is that your intention behind the idea?

**Craig:** It is. Exactly right. There is this strange feeling we have about this sense of a return, and generally speaking I think it helps writing. I think it helps us as we go about writing something to think of the ending as the beginning and the beginning as the ending. That they are overlap-able essentially. And that there is a strange echo in the end of the beginning. And you see it very, very clearly as is often the case with structural things in animation, because animation is just pure storytelling.

So when we think about Finding Nemo, and the beginning of Marlin finding this one little egg and then at the end he’s holding his son and he imagines the one little egg we cry. And we cry in part because there is a connection to the beginning. And I’m fascinated by the way the return to a thing is inherently emotional to us.

**John:** Yeah. So as we talked about movie stories and what makes movie stories unique from television stories, a movie story tends to be about a character taking a journey that will be the one time they take this journey in their life. It’s this unique set of circumstances that are occurring to and because of this character. They’re generally leaving their place of safety and comfort and going off into the world. And that we want to see them making forward progress and have obstacles but ultimately getting to a place.

Yet often that place that they physically end up is the same place where they started. So Wizard of Oz, she leaves Kansas, she comes back to Kansas at the end. But they come back to that place changed and that is the crucial narrative the journey the character has been on is that they are not the same person they were at the very start of the story. Other stories, they’re not going to literally come back to the same place, but they will be assembling a new home, a new normal that has echoes of the original normal at this place they’ve gotten to. So that is the full circle. There is a thing that they’ve wanted that has been driving them. They achieved that thing. And in achieving that thing they’ve come back to a place of normalcy that they have created which is echoing the original place.

**Craig:** That’s all absolutely correct. And there is I think layered in there this other magical little thing which is an implication that existence is meaningful. I could make a pretty good argument that it’s not actually meaningful, but one of the things that is wonderful and seductive about good storytelling is that it implies quite the opposite. That there is meaning in life. And that these moments in our lives may indeed be important. And so when we come back around to things and stories we get this little hiccup in our hearts because it means that there’s a sense to all to it. That we’re not just randomly going through moments.

The first person that like really used the word circle with me was Jeanine Tesori who is a Broadway composer and I worked with her on a musical movie. And we were talking about the idea of circle and I want to just point out there’s – you’ve seen Fun Home haven’t you?

**John:** I’ve never seen Fun Home.

**Craig:** Oh, you’ve never seen Fun Home?

**John:** No. It’s a masterpiece by all accounts.

**Craig:** It’s wonderful. So there’s this thing – Fun Home begins with this little girl and she’s demanding that her daddy play with her and she plays this game. She says “I want to play airplane.” This is all in song. “I want to play airplane.” And he sort of does this thing that I used to do with my kids where he gets on his back and he puts his feet up and she sort of gets on his feet and balances and pretends that she’s an airplane.

And then the progression of the show is about how this girl grows up and starts to realize that she’s gay and also starts to realize that her father is gay. And she can handle it and he can’t. And he eventually commits suicide. At the very end of the show you’re kind of broken up, as you might imagine by all of this. He’s committed suicide. She’s in shock. And then they go back to her being a little girl again. And she’s pretending to fly on him again. And the last line of the show is as kind of a grownup version of herself she says, “Every so often there is a rare moment of perfect balance when I soared above him.” And you go, oh my god.

So I thought this show began with a nice moment between a father and a daughter and showing that they were close and that they used to have together. And then all this other stuff happened to kind of pull them apart. And then he died. But really that moment at the end is this much deeper more tragic story of someone who cannot admit to themselves who they are, but because of their love for their daughter she can. And she can go places he never could. That’s profound. And then you cry.

And it wouldn’t work if it wasn’t the repetition of that beginning moment. There is a promise in that repetition that things make sense.

**John:** Yeah. The technique you’re describing is called bookending. So you’re opening with a scene and coming back to the scene. Either the exact same scene or a close echo, a close rhyme of that scene to make it feel like, “OK, there’s intention. That there is a meaning behind things. That these things were put there for a specific reason. That there is a nice clean beginning and end. Weird that we’re talking about circles and we’re talking about beginnings and ends, too, but like that there really is a reason behind all these things being placed out there before us.”

So a bookending is a very classic technique and useful for a lot of situations. But even if you don’t literally have the same scene, you do have I think a natural movie expectation that we are going to come back to a place because movies as we talked about tend to be structured around a central dramatic question. There’s a fundamental question that the movie is trying to – the movie is asking at the start and trying to answer over the course of it and hopefully you’ve gotten that answer by the end. And so when you get that answer that naturally brings you back to the question. Like you’re asking the question again and providing a new answer. That’s what you’re describing in Fun Home and it’s what we see hopefully in movies that are working really well is the thing you’ve set up at the start as the issue you’re going to be tackling, you’ve tackled it and you actually have come to a conclusion about it. And that conclusion by its necessity is referring back to the beginning.

**Craig:** Right. And this helps guide us as we’re putting these things together because first we need to know what’s our actual point. What are we trying to say? And then I think you have an opportunity before you ever worry about anything else like inciting incidents and the middle and the whatever. Pinch points and all the other nonsense they throw at us. You have an opportunity to create a wonderful, terrible, funny, or tragic irony. That the beginning and end have an ironic connection to each other. And it could be an uplifting irony. It could be a touching irony. But irony in juxtaposition like that is giving the audience a thorough satisfaction. That’s almost like dessert, you know. You feel satisfied because the ending is the beginning. You feel as if that is that proper ending.

And when the ending is disconnected from the beginning I think this is sometimes when we will get the note, “There’s a problem with the ending. I’m just not feeling enough at the end.” And if you are getting that note take a careful look and see if there is a – if you have closed the circuit essentially.

**John:** Absolutely. So my first movie Go, that final scene is incredibly important. And it feels like, “Oh, you could lose that little thing.” Like basically all the storylines are wrapped up. But without that final scene where like they’re all back at the car together and Manny asks, “So what are we doing for New Years?” Like, oh, OK, a normalcy has returned. All the questions about like will Ronna have enough money for went. That’s getting paid off there. And then Manny is alive. We didn’t know if we was still alive. And he’s asking what are we doing for New Years. Like, OK, they’re all all right and we’re going to return to a normal space after this wild night and all the stuff that has happened over the course of it.

Without that scene you don’t leave the movie nearly as satisfied, even with all the funny bits along the way, often that final scene is really where you’re sticking the landing and making it feel like, “OK, this was worth your whole time getting through there.”

If you’ve ever been to see a movie and like it breaks halfway through or like there’s a big interruption, you don’t get to see the last bit, even if you enjoyed the movie up to that point it’s not going to be your favorite movie because you just don’t know how all the pieces come together.

**Craig:** And there is the communication of intelligence when you get to the end and you see that the end is an echo of the beginning. Floating above the characters and the things they’re saying, there’s a feeling of comfort. That the storyteller was in control. That everything was carefully done and said to you. I’m a big Guns N’ Roses fan. And one of the things I love about Guns N’ Roses is that every now and again, but not infrequently, they would write a song that was a pretty good song. And then they would just tack on another awesome song as part of it. They didn’t have. They just did.

It was like, you know, November Rain is a pretty fine ballad. That’s a cool ballad. Now here’s an awesome guitar song at the end of it that has nothing to do with the rest of it but it’s amazing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or like Rocket Queen. Well, it’s a pretty decent song. And then at the end let’s just do a different song which is awesome. They would do that all the time and what you would feel was this sense of we’re so good at this we can just do it just cause. We can give you extra. That’s how good we are. We have bonus talent.

And I think sometimes when you’re telling a good story and there’s that, well, unexpected return – because see a good completed circle, the beginning does not imply an ending. You know, I show up and I show up to Fun Home and it’s a story about a woman who – I’m going to watch her grow from a 10-year-old girl into a 35-year-old woman. And I’m going to hear about how she grows up and the story of her life. And how her relationship with her father changes and what happens to him.

So, when I watch in the beginning that she’s a little girl and she’s playing I think, “OK, I have no idea that this is going to mean so much more and yet it’s the same thing at the end.” And so when I get it it’s bonus art. And that’s when we feel loved by the storyteller. We feel taken care of. And I love that feeling.

**John:** So mostly we’re talking here a Broadway musical or a movie, it’s a one-time experience. It’s about two hours going through it. But a lot of the same logic applies to television as well. Only there you’re talking about the course of a season, the course of multiple seasons, the course of a whole series. And so recent conversations – obviously I sat down with Aline and Rachel for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and they talked about how they had mapped out the four seasons. They really knew what the arc of the whole show was going to be. And they were hoping to get the four seasons so they could really complete it out.

And then earlier in the year I sat down with Stephen Schiff to talk through The Americans. He was describing the third season, not spoiling stuff in it, but I have loved this third season and you realize like oh my gosh they have – we talked about Chekhov’s Gun on the wall. Like when you see a gun on the wall that gun has to fire at some point. And you realize like, “Oh man, this is like Chekhov’s 12 Gun Salute.” Like there are just Chekhov’s guns going off all the time because there are so many things they have carefully stacked up along the way. And they’re all just firing and it’s so exciting to see.

Like the things you knew, OK, that’s going to have to happen at some time. Oh no, there’s only three episodes left. All of these things are happening. It’s so exciting to see everything coming. And I have a very strong suspicion that when we get to that last episode it will come full circle. It will answer that question of can you be Russian spies living as Americans here and what does that mean to be sort of a false family within this country? They’ll be able to answer that question because they just so clearly thought through what they’d done and what they could do to answer that question over the course of the season.

**Craig:** Have you ever read The Sandman comics?

**John:** I never read Gaiman’s Sandman. No.

**Craig:** OK. Well, treat yourself. And they have – I think it’s a set of I want to say three or four volumes that have all of them. Neil Gaiman is an absolute master of this. And in Sandman he does this so beautifully and so frequently, circles within circles, that it seems impossible. Like it seems like he must have had some massive spreadsheet because the amount of stories he tells and the nature of them and the way that they roam between sort of regular people to gods of various mythologies, whether it’s European mythologies or African mythologies or Asian mythologies, and then into strange science fiction and then back around. It is mindboggling.

But every time he comes back around, sometimes he would come back around to something that was from like four years earlier. How did you know? This is insane. He’s brilliant at it.

Definitely if you haven’t read Sandman, my god, I’m saying this to everybody not just you. It is such a joy. It’s so literate and smart.

**John:** I will look forward to reading it. So let’s end this segment talking through some advice for how writers can think about this circle as they’re breaking their stories.

You can go to the Dan Harmon sort of – he literally has a circle chart that he goes through as he thinks through his stories which works for Community and for Rick and Morty. And that is his way of doing it. I have never been enamored by that specific approach, but I think the general idea of thinking about like where am I starting, where am I getting to, and to what degree is that ending reflective of where I started? Like does it feel like, OK, it’s answering the dramatic question. Is it getting me either physically back to that first place or emotionally back to that place that that character sought? That is a thing I’m always thinking about right from the beginning.

There’s a project I’m hoping to write next where the nature of it I knew exactly a moment that had to happen and that it was probably the last moment of the story. And so then I had to think like, OK, knowing that it has to be the last moment, what is the first moment that’s going to make it feel like getting there is going to be as rewarding as possible?

**Craig:** Right. And to me that’s the – it’s tough to give practical advice about this beyond “think about it,” but the general guideline is to find something that is in its own way beautiful, and beautiful meaning harmonious and satisfying and delicious, to say you know what the beginning – if I want this remarkable ending, what would be this ironic way to have it as a beginning? And sometimes you don’t know that you’re going to need an ending and so you look back.

I mean, when I was doing the last Hangover movie with Todd Phillips, you know, we could have ended it all sorts of ways, but it just seemed like we should end it where it began, all the way back in that room where Justin Bartha’s character was going to get married and they were having a chat and Alan was trying on a tuxedo. And now Alan is about to get married. And it just felt like that’s – you know, draw your circle.

Now, nobody was planning on that, so that’s not a particularly delicious one. It just felt appropriate. But when you are planning your version of it, think about what would feel so good. Because you know your ending is complicated and insightful and definitive. Your ending is a period at the end of a sentence. So what’s the question version of that to begin with?

**John:** Absolutely. Really establish the question and therefore the answer will have meaning. The other thing I would remind people is that you can’t come to a place unless you left. And so your characters have to leave that place they start, which I think is one of the biggest challenges often screenwriters have is they don’t let their characters move. They don’t sort of force their characters to move and actually take some action.

So, if people are just sitting around not doing anything, there’s no coming back to a place because they never left. You’ve got to get them moving. Most of the time that’s literally leaving their place of safety and comfort, but it can also be, you know, a journey of what they want, what they’re going after, what is normal for them and pushing them into a place that’s not normal.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So you got to leave before you come back.

**Craig:** Hell yeah. Get out.

**John:** Hell yeah. All right, let’s answer some listener questions. Marco writes, “I have been making a low budget pilot for an animated series for the last few years. It will be finished by the end of this month. My question is whether or not to put it on YouTube for all to see, or keep it a secret and only show it to professionals who could be interested in producing it.” Craig, what are your first thoughts for Marco?

**Craig:** Well, if you have professionals who might be interested in producing it then it seems reasonable to begin by putting it say on Vimeo and putting a password on it. A lot of people do things like that. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that maybe you don’t. And if you don’t, then just let people see it, because maybe it gets passed around and you get attention for it.

I don’t see why you wouldn’t.

**John:** In general I am a fan of sharing stuff and letting people discover it and trying to let what’s naturally going to happen happen. But I will, a counter example here, so Megan McDonnell, our producer, she directed this really good short earlier this year and I asked like, “Oh, so you’re going to do the festival circuit with it and get some awards for it?” She was like, “Oh no, we’re actually going to put it online.” And that’s totally her choice and people saw it and she got meetings off of it. But I think there’s also a scenario in which they went out, they won some awards, and got some attention that way where people are looking at it on a big screen with professional attention. Like oh holy cow, here’s a good short with some stars I recognize. And some awards behind it could have been helpful.

So, there’s no one perfect way to do that. But if Marco your concern is like someone is going to steal my idea and do their own version of it, don’t. Because showing your work is good, so show your work.

**Craig:** Show your work, Marco. Lex in LA writes, “Is the WGA going to fight Netflix skipping credits? One of my biggest pet peeves with Netflix and other streaming platforms is that they cut away from the end credits and jump into a trailer for something else or another movie, episode of a TV show, etc. A lot of the time I finish the film and think ‘I wonder who the DP was,’ and I’m constantly let down when Netflix cuts away before it gets to the below-the-line credits. Hell, the ABC app on my Apple TV cuts away during the last scene before the closing credits.

“Is there anything the unions can do to combat this? Shouldn’t it be a given that the credits are allowed to roll in their entirety?”

**John:** All right. This is not an official WGA answer. I will say that the WGA is not a great vehicle for addressing this, because WGA deals with the folks who make things, not necessarily the folks who exhibit things. So it would be a challenging thing for the WGA to implement. Where I think you could see some movement on this would just be a lot of public shaming. So I think if you had a big group of high profile filmmakers and TV makers saying, “Hey, Netflix, cut this out. Hey ABC, cut this out. Show the credits,” then I think you could sort of publicly shame them a bit into doing that.

But I don’t think unions are going to be able to do that. Craig, what’s your take?

**Craig:** Well, I think there is some bearing that the union has on the exhibition of credits and I don’t know exactly how the legal mechanism works, whether it’s that if you’re a signatory you have to require any exhibitor to obey the following rules for credits. In other words we’re obliging you to pass the rules along. I do know for instance that CBS cannot air a show, show you who the director is, and not show you who the writer is. And that they have to follow the order of credits.

So the thing with these credits is that the rules are negotiated by the unions. The two most powerful unions when it comes to credits are the DGA and the WGA. The director and the writer credit are married together essentially. Even on posters if you show the director’s name you have to show the writer’s name in any way, shape, or form. That’s just the rule.

Then the below-the-line credits, those are the purview of various IATSE unions that don’t really have the kind of credit protections that the DGA or the WGA have, nor do they have seemingly the interest to promote those things.

I feel like it’s a little bit honestly of a shrug, because the way we consume that information now is so different than what used to be. You just go online and you have the answer. It’s all there. And I generally don’t stick around for the credits. If I want to know who did it I take a look. To me credits are fine, but I don’t make movies so that people can see the credits. You know what I mean? I just want them to see the show.

**John:** Because of the Marvel movies and their after-credit sequences which I’ve railed against before, there is a tradition of sitting around for certain movie’s credits and not other movie’s credits. On Netflix, yes, I notice that as things go by sometimes I have been frustrated and wanted to see those things and have to sort of deliberately hunt them out. But it’s not that hard to hunt them out. I think Craig makes a good point that like you’ve got IMDb at any point and so you can always look up who the person was behind that.

I will say that growing up, sitting through credits did give me a sense of just how many people are involved in making a movie. And that is a lovely thing to see like “Oh my god it took thousands of people for this movie to exist” Was a good education. But I don’t know that the unions are going to be able to make this happen.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think public pressure on Netflix is by far the most likely way of getting that to happen, or some setting that Netflix allows you to do to like never skip credits.

**Craig:** There will be no public pressure on Netflix to flood your television screen with endless credits. It’s just not going to happen.

**John:** DT in Los Angeles writes, “I’ve been consulting with a distribution company who has recently started doing their own productions. One of their productions currently in preproduction is a historical drama based on real people. In Episode 325, Craig mentioned how he and his researcher had to create an annotated version of teleplays for Chernobyl. Irene Turner also mentioned having to do this in Episode 293 with her screenplay for The Most Hated Woman in America.

“The attorneys for the production company had never heard of an annotated screenplay until I explained it to them based on my listening to the podcast. Could you give me a bit more detail about how an annotated screenplay is formatted? Are they footnotes or endnotes like a college research paper? Or are notes just inserted into the action line? Also, how specific are the sources? I’d imagine if you are citing a newspaper article you have to list the publication, the author, and the date of the publication?”

**Craig:** OK. Well, first of all, DT, the deal is that there are certain things that are our obligations and responsibilities and then there are certain things that are their obligations and responsibilities. Typically what happens is when the company hires you to write your project one of their obligations to us is to indemnify us. Essentially if someone comes along and sues they cover it. And they cover the legal action in our defense. In exchange we promise that we didn’t do anything wrong, that we haven’t ripped anybody off. Obviously if we have then all bets are off.

But one of the ways that they feel that they’re on solid footing with that indemnification is that we provide them with an annotated screenplay. If they didn’t ask you for one, and they are also indemnifying you, you probably don’t want to bring it up because you’re getting something for free there.

That said, the actual physical document, the annotated screenplay, I didn’t even see. We just had our researcher do it and send it in. So, I will get a hold of it. And I can’t publish it for you guys yet, just because I don’t want to give anything away regarding the show. But I can at least describe it. So, I will get a copy of that and in our next show as part of follow up we’ll talk through what that looks like.

**John:** Absolutely. A thing I would also single to DT is that in the case of Chernobyl, especially in the case of Most Hated Woman in America, there were concerns about libel. Are you saying things about people that could create lawsuit situations? If your historical thing is something that happened in the 1600s that’s not going to be a problem for you.

So, the reason why I imagine you might do an annotated screenplay in that situation is if there are certain facts that are not well known and it’s not clear sort of where you’re drawing these facts. There you might want to have some evidence-based, like “This is where I got this thing from” to make it clear that you’re not drawing on one specific source of material. But I think it’s more for recent history that you’re going to be finding annotated screenplays an important thing.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, essentially whatever the time is that covers the possibly defamation that might occur. That’s what you’re dealing with. And, by the way, it depends country to country. In the United States I believe the deal is are they are alive or not. If they’re alive you can defame them, if they’re not you can’t. That is not the case in other countries, for instance Russia. So, depending on–

**John:** Can you defame the dead in Russia?

**Craig:** That is what I’ve been led to understand.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Craig:** That you can and then the family could take action against you. And, you know, we don’t do that in our show. We’re careful to not do that. There’s certainly historical figures that we describe what they did, which is not good, but in a couple places it was a thing that we had to kind of work through. Then the question is where is this airing and who is making it and all the rest. There’s a lot of complicated factors.

Because Chernobyl is a joint production between HBO and SKY, it’s a very European-based production, so there’s multiple country laws that are covering this. So, I think that got a little complicated.

**John:** Cool. Do you want to take our last question?

**Craig:** Yeah, Writer A…ooh, I like the mystery. Writer A in LA writes, “I recently…” OK, this is just really rough, Writer A because of what’s about to happen. Writer A in LA writes, “I was recently Writer A,” were you now, “in an arbitration that involved three other writers. And I encountered a dilemma that I haven’t ever heard discussed.

“In addition to Story by credit, I believe I deserved shared Teleplay by credit with whichever of the subsequent writers contributed the most to the shooting script. But when I attempted to suggest Teleplay by Writer A and Writer Whichever I was told by my attorney that I had to determine which of those writers deserve the shared credit. That is to say Teleplay by Writer A and Writer D. That required me to read all the other writer’s drafts and make a judgement which I felt was best left to the arbiters and was ultimately a decision which I think has no impact on me, or am I mistaken in that presumption? Is my lawyer correct?

“As the original writer why do I have to do anything other than defend my original contribution?”

Ooh, John.

**John:** So this is a valid thing and I’ve encountered this in arbitrations before. So the quick arbitration refresher is because we have a Writers Guild, thank god, we have the ability to determine the credits for our movies. And it’s the Writers Guild that determines that. It is a panel of arbiters who are picked per project. They are anonymous. We do not know the names of the writers involved in the project. They are assigned Writer A, Writer B, Writer C.

In this case the person writing in was Writer A. And so what Writer A is really asking is am I allowed to say “The credits should be me and somebody else.” That you basically don’t care who you’re sharing credit with, but you recognize it’s going to be somebody else. And this lawyer said, no, no, you’re not allowed to say that.

But let’s think about in what circumstance is Writer A saying this at all. It’s in the letter that the writer is submitting along with the arbitration, which is generally a short letter that says like I’m Writer A, these were my contributions to the script. Generally it ends with I believe the proper credit is Writer A and whatever you believe the proper credit is. That is really what the writer is talking about. Am I required to list which of the other writers is the appropriate one. The lawyer says yes. I say kind of basically no. I think it’s generally good practice to sort of say what that is, but it’s also fine to say in the letter like this is a tough case. I don’t know who to say is the proper other writer, but I believe it’s going to be either one of these two.

I think you do yourself a disservice if you’re not actually looking at the other scripts. But you’re not actually required to look at the other scripts as a writer in an arbitration. What do you think?

**Craig:** In the case of Writer A’s lawyer versus John August, I rule in favor of…John August.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** You are correct. The lawyer is absolutely wrong. Writer A, your lawyer couldn’t be more wrong. I wish I could see your lawyer right now to look them in the eye and say, “Dear Lawyer, I know you meant well, but you’re wrong.”

Here’s why: when you write this statement you are essentially saying, “Look, I believe I deserve teleplay credit because I believe I have met the threshold for credit.” That’s how credits work. You hit a certain threshold, you earn a credit. In film we use percentages, which is kind of a game, but essentially what we say is, “OK, if it’s an original project if you’re the first writer your threshold is 33% of the final shooting script. If you’re a subsequent writer it’s 50%.” For other movies that are adaptations everybody’s threshold is the same. If you can show that you have written a minimum of 33% of this movie then you have earned credit. At that point you have a choice. You can say I’ve earned all of the credit, because I wrote 90% of this script.

You can say, you know what, I believe I deserve credit and just because I’m a fair-minded person I also think Writer B should get credit, but I leave that up to you. Or you can simply say I’m not here to tell you anything other than this. My contributions meet the test for teleplay credit.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** I’m not saying they meet the test for sole teleplay credit. You guys can determine how the rest of that is apportioned. That’s up to you. All I’m saying, and the only argument I’m making is I’ve hit the threshold. That is absolutely fine.

So, your lawyer was super wrong.

**John:** Your lawyer was wrong.

**Craig:** And I got to say, people at home, don’t ask your lawyers these questions. They’re not dumb. Believe me, they’re not dumb. And a lot of lawyers are pretty good with our credit stuff, but why would you ever ask your personal attorney whose job is not say to be a lawyer administrating the credit system of the Writers Guild, which is its own subset of jurisprudence, when you can just call up your union for free, the people you pay dues to, and say “I have a question.” And they will give you the definitive answer, which in this case I assure you would be you’re fine.

So, there you go.

**John:** What people may not understand is that Craig isn’t just talking like he sort of knows this stuff. Craig has actually been involved with sort of the instructions that are going out to arbiters and all of this stuff for years, including new stuff that’s coming out to make this process more clear and transparent for people going through an arbitration. So do trust Craig, don’t trust your lawyer.

I will say Writer A one reason why you may want to read through those other scripts is if there really were like four writers after you. In order for someone else to receive credit that writer would need to hit at least a 33% threshold in the final shooting script. And if in reading those things no other writer actually hits 33%, even if you individually your contribution wasn’t more than 50% or whatever, there could be scenarios in which you end up with sole credit even though you only did a little bit more than a third of it because none of those other people actually hit that thing.

So, it may be worth it for you to see what that is. Or it may be fine for you to say like I believe I deserve credit and I leave it for you fair arbiters to figure out who if anyone else deserves credit.

**Craig:** No question. So you can say “I want to figure out if I deserve sole credit or not.” And by the way the 33% probably doesn’t apply here because this is television, this is a different deal. But regardless I want to read everybody’s stuff to figure out am I asking for shared credit, sole credit. Am I sort of being agnostic about it and saying you guys tell me. All I’m saying is I deserve some credit.

Or, Writer A I think it’s reasonable to say, “You know what? I read the final shooting script. I know I deserve credit. The rest is up to you.” That’s the only argument I’m making is I deserve credit. Should I share it? Should I share it with this person or this person? Should I not share it? That’s on you guys. You decide. You tell me. I don’t care. I’m good either way.

As an arbiter, I will tell you, as the person that’s actually making judgements, I am always happy to see writers arguing for their credit. And I am generally less happy seeing writers arguing against somebody else getting credit. Now, sometimes you have to. But, yeah, there’s nothing requiring you – for instance, Writer A says when I attempted to suggest Teleplay by Writer A and Writer Question Mark I was told by my attorney no. Well, yeah, you can absolutely say I think the credits should be Teleplay by Writer A and whichever other writer you think qualifies. No problem with that whatsoever. You can read all of them. You cannot read all of them. Ultimately it’s up to you.

I generally would advise you to read everything, but you know, it’s up to you.

**John:** And now it is time for our One Cool Things. To bring this full circle is 21 Things to Know Before Losing Your Gay Virginity.

**Craig:** Oh, thank god. I got to cram on this.

**John:** This is by Alexander Cheves. It’s written for The Advocate. And what I liked about this article is that it literally just very clearly sort of lays out here’s what’s really happening here because one of my great frustrations in seeing gay sex portrayed in movies is that the first time is portrayed in a completely unrealistic way about sort of how it all works. And I think they basically just took what you would assume from straight virginity and tried to apply it to this and it just isn’t the same. And it’s different and you got to acknowledge that.

And so this is I think a very practical guide. If it’s something you’re going through or if you have a person in your life who you know is going through this I would steer them in this direction because I feel it is a helpful overview of some of the things that you’re going to be thinking through as you’re–

**Craig:** As you’re losing your gay virginity.

**John:** I think it would be helpful for straight people to know some of this information, but it’s certainly helpful for any person who is going to be encountering this themselves to know this going in.

**Craig:** Wow. Yeah. I think that may be the most John August thing of all time. As you’re losing your virginity to go “Let me now consider. Hold on. I’m just running through the 21 things. I’m at thing 14. Slow down.”

I’m going to read it. I want to know. Fascinating. I know – things to know before losing your straight virginity…that’s a pretty short article. It’s going to be weird. That’s pretty much–

**John:** And certainly there’s a huge overlap between the two.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s going to be weird for sort of everyone and of course porn has distorted our expectation of what those situations should be.

**Craig:** It has.

**John:** But there’s specific stuff, and like most kids are not going to encounter in popular culture the way they will encounter all the straight stuff in popular culture.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I think that’s the reason why you have to shine a spotlight on some of these things so that people know it’s actually out there and that it’s not what they would assume.

**Craig:** All right. Well, I’ll take a look at that. I don’t know if it’s going to happen, but I’ll be prepared at a minimum. So my One Cool Thing this week is sort of new to me, so I’m just starting it, but I like the concept of it. It’s an app called Moodnotes and essentially you log your mood. And it’s got a lovely interface. This is the part that I love the most. You know that little pain chart in the doctor’s office?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I love that pain chart because number one is super happy and number ten is just freaking out, but it’s just all smiley faces and you rarely see a smiley face just freaking out and dying. So it begins when you log your mood, and you can do it each day if you like. It’s just a simple screen that says how are you and then it shows you a face, just a very stylized face. And then by swiping up or down you create smiley or sad. And you can do it to various degrees. And when you’re done you can add a little detail and then you can save it. And essentially the idea is by monitoring your mood you can see over time patterns. First of all, you become more mindful of your moods. And you can start to see patterns.

And the reason I think this is potentially very useful is I remember years and years and years ago when I had a lot of – I was having a huge migraine problem and I went to a neurologist and he gave me just a chart and he said every day you have a headache write down, put a little check mark here, and just put the severity with a number. And I did it and then I brought it back to him after a month and he goes, “Oh my god, look at this.” I had a headache almost every day. And it was important to see that because essentially what happens to us on a day to day basis is we forget. We forget what happened yesterday and the day before. And I think you can start to not notice that you’re depressed until you’re really depressed.

And I also think you may be missing certain patterns like I tend to get really moody on weekends or I get – maybe for women I get really moody right before my cycle or something like that. So, it’s really useful I think to just monitor your mood. If nothing else it keeps you mindful. But it may also have some predictive or diagnostic value. And I think it’s $4 or something, which my new jam is like I don’t want free apps. I want to pay for them and be done with it. I don’t want the apps that are constantly like a subscription, blah. So I like it.

Give it a shot. It’s called Moodnotes.

**John:** Fantastic. All right. That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Olufemi Sowemimo. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com.

That is a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Short questions are great on Twitter. We’re happy to answer your questions there as well.

We are on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Just search for Scriptnotes. Leave us a review if you’d like. That helps other people find the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. So it’s links to the things we talked about and other stuff you might want to download or investigate.

We have a few more of the 300-episode USB drives left, but we also have the whole back catalog available at Scriptnotes.net. Every week we check to see how many subscribers we have to the premium feed through Scriptnotes.net and it keeps growing, so it’s very nice that more of you are subscribing to that to hear all those back episodes and bonus episodes. So if you would like to go back and catch up on the early days of Scriptnotes you can at Scriptnotes.net.

And that’s it. Craig, it’s nice to talk with you. I’m going to talk to you next, I guess the day this episode comes out, at our live show.

**Craig:** Oh, I’m excited for that.

**John:** I’m excited for it, too. All right, thanks all.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Our next live Scriptnotes with Jonah Nolan & Lisa Joy (Westworld) and Stephen McFeely & Christopher Markus (Avengers: Infinity War) is TONIGHT, Tuesday, May 22nd at the ArcLight in Hollywood. Proceeds benefit [Hollywood HEART](http://www.hollywoodheart.org), which runs special programs and summer camps for at-risk youth.
* [John’s statement](http://johnaugust.com/2018/on-big-fish-family-inclusion-family) on one theater’s choice to cancel their performance of Big Fish over the inclusion of same-sex parents.
* [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/) is officially out! [This](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/movies/is-your-script-gender-balanced-try-this-test.html) is the New York Times article about our Gender Analysis feature.
* [Names on the Globe](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0195018958/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by George R. Stewart discusses the pronunciation of L.A.
* [One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/04/one-space-between-each-sentence-they-said-science-just-proved-them-wrong-2/?utm_term=.40216d38feb5) is a Washington Post article by Avi Selk about whether to put one space or two after a period.
* According to Craig, [Fun Home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fun_Home_(musical)) is a good example of a moving bookending.
* [The Sandman comics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_(Vertigo)) by Neil Gaiman
* Dan Harmon’s [Story Circle](http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit)
* [21 Things to Know Before Losing Your Gay Virginity](https://www.advocate.com/sexy-beast/2018/5/17/21-things-know-losing-your-gay-virginity#media-gallery-media-13) by Alexander Cheves
* [Moodnotes](http://moodnotes.thriveport.com/) is an app that tracks your mood
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Olufemi Sowemimo ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_351.mp3).