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

**John August:** So, language warning. There are some bad words in this episode, so if you’re driving in the car with your kids you might want to put on some headphones. Well, don’t well headphones in the car. But you might not want your kids in the car while you’re listening to this. Or put on headphones and listen to it somewhere else.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Scriptnotes, Episode 346. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig just started shooting Chernobyl, so he is off in Lithuania. But I am lucky to be joined by Christina Hodson, a screenwriter whose credits include the upcoming Transformers spinoff Bumblebee. It was also just announced that she will be writing the upcoming Batgirl for Warner Bros. Welcome Christina.

**Christina Hodson:** Hello. Thank you for having me.

**John:** So mostly I don’t want to talk about big comic book movies or big Transformer movies–

**Christina:** Why not?

**John:** I want to talk about your experience on things like the Black List. I want to talk about inclusion riders. Characters’ races. Windows and mirrors. Who gets to write blank? The male/female splits in movies. Basically I want to solve the systemic issues of inclusion and representation in Hollywood in the next 59 minutes. Is that OK?

**Christina:** Great. I think that’s very achievable. And between the two of us I think we’re probably going to get it all done.

**John:** We’re smart people.

**Christina:** Yeah. I feel confident. Strangely confident.

**John:** We’re feature writers. So as feature writers, maybe we’ll only solve it for features. But I feel like that will be a good template for extending through to the rest of the industry.

**Christina:** Maybe the rest of the world.

**John:** Maybe so.

**Christina:** Maybe.

**John:** You know what? Because Hollywood is the world.

**Christina:** It’s true.

**John:** If it happens here, it can happen anywhere.

**Christina:** I mean, this is the most important place in the world.

**John:** It is the most important place in the world. I have a little news before we get to that, though. First off, I’m going to be at the LA Times Festival of Books. That’s the big event that’s at USC. That is Saturday April 21 at 4:30pm. I’m on a panel talking about Launch and Arlo Finch. I’ll be signing Arlo Finch copies. So if you want to come and see me and producer Megan McDonnell and producer Ben Adair, we’ll be there. April 21 at 4:30pm. Come to that.

Also, LA Times Festival of Books is great. Christina have you ever been to that?

**Christina:** I have not.

**John:** So they basically take over the USC campus and it’s all book stuff and it’s great. And there’s lots of stuff for kids, but also panels for grownups, so it’s cool for that.

Second off, I made a game. It’s called AlphaBirds. Christina has it in her hands right now.

**Christina:** It is very adorable.

**John:** It is a small red box. It is a word game, so if you are a fan of Scrabble or Boggle or things where you make words it’s like that, but it’s a card game. It’s really good for like two to five people. We usually play on Friday afternoons as we are drinking beers. And it’s good because most of these word games require such intense focus. This requires intense focus while it is your turn, and then you can just chat and drink your beer other times.

So, if you would like to see AlphaBirds it is at alphabirdsgame.com.

Christina, you are mostly a feature writer. Are you only a feature writer? Have you done TV?

**Christina:** I’ve developed one TV show for about five years. And the rights just lapsed. So mostly features, yeah. Features is where my heart is and I only did the TV show because the book that I was adapting was too good to do in two hours.

**John:** So talk me through where you started, because I think you came through development?

**Christina:** Yeah. So I started in London. I’m obviously British. Or I’m just putting on this accent for show.

**John:** It’s a really impressive accent. So nicely done.

**Christina:** Thank you. I’ve been working hard on it. I’m actually from Texas.

So I started in London. I was at Focus Features. I kind of worked my way up from the very bottom. I was a runner at Working Title first and then an intern at Focus. Worked my way up to a junior-junior executive there. Was in development. And then moved to New York where I ran development for a small strange company, mostly features but some TV.

**John:** A Small Strange Company is a really good name for a company.

**Christina:** By the way, it is. Now I’m going to take that and use it for my own company. Small Strange Company.

**John:** For your loan out.

**Christina:** Just to be creepy and mysterious. But I did not love it. I loved working with writers. I loved story. I did not love my job. So I started writing, weirdly actually I also wrote kids’ books. Dark, weird, twisted kids’ books. It was a cautionary tales book written in rhyming iambic tetrameter. I mean, it was–

**John:** It was poetic.

**Christina:** It was poetic. But very cruel and dark and sinister. It was Roald Dahl meets Edward Gorey. And I gave it to one friend. They passed it around. And I got a call from a book agent at ICM saying, “Hey, thank you for your submission. I want to rep you.” And I was like I don’t know who you are, but great.

And then very shortly after that my now husband and I got engaged, married, moved, quit our jobs. Everything within four weeks. Moved to LA. And I had 90 days while my green card was pending. And I was like, well, I’ve got a book agent. Maybe I can write. Maybe I’ll just take 90 days and I tried to write a screenplay. And I got very, very lucky. And my first screenplay was Shut In, which ended up selling and then getting made into a movie that for a while was zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

**John:** Oh congratulations.

**Christina:** Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s a rare honor.

**John:** So what bumped you out of the zero percent? Someone liked it?

**Christina:** I guess. You know what? I stopped looking because they’re not as fun when they’re – the damning ones were really fun. The good ones were – I mean, few and far between, but not as fun.

**John:** So I want to back up here because this thing where you wrote this book and it got passed along and suddenly an agent at ICM was calling you, so often on the podcast this kind of thing happens where it’s a thing that you wrote that gets attention that you didn’t really mean for it. So you weren’t actively out there stumping for it. Just like people liked it.

**Christina:** Yes. I just got lucky. And that’s honestly a little bit what happened with Shut In as well. That script. I didn’t really mean for it to go out necessarily. I sat on it after I finished it for a month because I was too embarrassed to let anyone read it. I finally let my husband read it. He gave it to a friend who – and he gave it to one friend and one agent. And while the agent was reading it the friend slipped it to other people. So the agent then had to go out with it.

So my very first draft of my very first screenplay ended up being the one that went to the town, which was, you know, a weird experience. But yeah, with the book I had no intention of that at all.

**John:** So this script Shut In, that ultimately landed on the Black List. To what degree was it being out on the town was helpful or being on the list was helpful. This was 2013 Black List.

**Christina:** 2012.

**John:** 2012 Black List. So it’s still relatively – the Black List had been going for a couple of years, but it was still relatively new for that. What was the experience of that for you?

**Christina:** Honestly, I mean, I’m a huge fan of the Black List and what Franklin is doing. In my case it didn’t actually make a huge difference just because my script went out to the town I think in February. And we had optioned it by I think March. And I’d already gotten my first – I then got my first studio job in I think May or June. And the Black List doesn’t come out until December. So by the time the Black List came out I was already working and I had already done the water bottle tour.

I was very lucky to be on the Black List the next two years, and that then became a thing that was nice for my agents to be able to say like, “She’s been on the Black List three times.” It was helpful. For the first one it kind of came too late almost.

**John:** Talk me through the 30 days left on your green card, because that’s a thing that I hear from a lot of international writers who are here and they start to sort of panic, like am I going to be able to stay in the country. Like how do I sort of keep this all going?

**Christina:** It’s awful. It’s awful. So it wasn’t 30 days left on my green card. It was 90 days where I was waiting for my green card to come through, where you’re not allowed to be earning money. You’re not really allowed to be seeking employment. Honestly, like a lot of people would have worked through that or would have done cheeky things. I am just so scared of breaking any of the rules. And I’m trying to become a citizen right now. I’m in the middle of the process. I was just always so nervous of that. And my main advice to people that are international people that are coming here: don’t break any of the rules. Once you do it, you can’t go back. And it impacts. So I’ve been through a lot of visas. I started on a student visa. That’s how I came to America. I had all the right intentions. And I started an MA at NYU and just hated it. Mainly because I’d been working in the industry already.

**John:** An MA in English or writing?

**Christina:** In film and TV. It was at Gallatin so it was a very specialized MA. And it was great, and it’s a wonderful school. But I’d come from being a grownup in London and earning money and having a job. And then suddenly being in classes with undergrads, because it was mixed, it was Gallatin so it was MAs and undergrads at the same time. It was too much.

So I started working almost straight away. I think I got a trainee visa. And then I was a consultant for a while. And then I got an H-1B. I went through the whole shebang.

**John:** So you have these 90 days and you’ve written the script during this time. When you sell this script Shut In and then you get hired for your first WGA job, does anything flip? How do you go from there to being able to stay in the country longer? What was the next visa?

**Christina:** My green card just came through because of getting married. It was good timing. That’s why it was lucky that I did everything in those 90 days so I didn’t have to worry about that. It is much harder if you are dependent on screenwriting for your visa. You kind of have to be fairly established in your own country and then come over. It’s tricky.

**John:** So international listeners should know that there are special visas for like if you are a fancy British screenwriter who is already established and you’re coming over on a special talents and–

**Christina:** Yeah, I think it’s a 01 Artist Visa.

**John:** And there are special attorneys here and there who will help you make that all work. But since you already had your green card you’ve just been working on your green card this whole time through?

**Christina:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s lucky.

**Christina:** Yes. All good.

**John:** So marry well.

**Christina:** Marry well.

**John:** That’s a good thing. Going back to the Black List, news came out this last week that Franklin actually secured funding to make movies himself.

**Christina:** Oh. That’s exciting.

**John:** I’ll be curious to see what that next step is. So we’ll have Franklin on the show at some point to talk through what that next thing is.

**Christina:** He is a good person to give money to.

**John:** I agree. So it’s money that comes out of China and James Schamus is also involved with it.

**Christina:** My first boss.

**John:** Absolutely. So, we’ll see what kind of movies they’re able to make. But apparently three to five movies per year they’re trying to either make or invest in.

**Christina:** Very cool.

**John:** That’ll be a new thing. When we first started emailing one of the things you wanted to talk about was race and representation. So, I’m curious, how do you identify yourself racially?

**Christina:** Somewhere in the middle. I’m half-Taiwanese and half-Caucasian. In England I call myself a Halfie. And me and my sisters, we call ourselves Halfies. Here I think half-Asian people tend to call themselves Hapas.

**John:** To what degree has that influenced you think your career in Hollywood? Do you think you are thought about for certain jobs because of that? Do you think it has any impact on sort of the things you’ve been approached about writing or how meetings have gone?

**Christina:** Definitely not in the past. And I would say it’s only shifting in the last six months, probably around Black Panther honestly where I think people are wanting to do things that are more culturally specific. It’s obviously kind of strange because some of the things I’m being sent are about Korean-Americans and I’m neither Korean nor American so I honestly don’t – I know probably as much as you do. You live fairly near to Koreatown. But it’s also like a tricky one because if I could only write the things that I know I would only be writing about British half-Asian girls. So, yeah. I’m somewhere between.

**John:** It’s interesting with writers because to some degree you end up kind of casting a writer for a project. You sort of think, well, who do you want to write this thing. And I always think about actual real casting and sort of what roles do actors decide to put themselves up for. And to what degree do you feel like you are an appropriate person for writing this kind of story or for participating in this kind of role.

And it’s challenging to figure out sort of like what do you feel confident being able to write those things for. And so do you get sent stuff ever that you feel like they just wanted an Asian person to take a look at or take a pass on? Or that doesn’t happen in your career yet?

**Christina:** That has not happened in my career yet, but mostly because I don’t think a lot of people are doing Asian-focused stuff. I really hope that starts to shift and I would love to start being sent more of those things, not necessarily because I’m going to write them but because it means that there’s more of them out there in the world.

I have a few African American screenwriting friends who definitely get sent things because they’re African American. And they’re like nothing in my resume suggests that I would want to write this other than the color of my skin. That can get a bit weird but I understand why it happens.

But, no, so far I’m not getting stuff because I’m half-Asian. I am getting sent stuff definitely all the time because I’m a woman.

**John:** Great. Well let’s talk about that. So you just signed on for Batgirl and other movies you’ve done have had female leads in them.

**Christina:** So far I’ve only written female leads.

**John:** All right. So let’s talk about sort of coming to this last year. There has been increased focus on moving beyond the Bechdel test to really looking at sort of like what are the roles for women in these films, but also what are the roles behind the scenes. And so you’ve been involved in some of these discussions. What is the shape of these discussions and where do you think we are headed overall in the next five years? Where do you think the natural trajectory is and where would you like to see the trajectory go?

**Christina:** Well one of the big focuses of Time’s Up is the 50/50 by 2020 which is just trying to shift in front of the screen, behind the camera, in executive offices. There is a massive imbalance right now. I think one of the pieces of information that came up through a Time’s Up meeting that most struck me was a visual essay that The Pudding did that was a breakdown of film dialogue by gender which was so shocking. And I watched the Stacy Smith Ted Talk that was very famous where she breaks down the number of female speaking characters versus male speaking characters, which shocked me and whatever. But honestly seeing the amount of dialogue spoken in percentages and that breakdown shocked me so much more I think because even movies that you assume are pretty female heavy when you look at them they’re not. It’s really shocking how silent a lot of the female characters are onscreen. Even I think Frozen doesn’t break – I could be wrong – but I think it approaches 50% female dialogue, but I don’t think it breaks it.

Finding Dory was the only movie in the Top Ten in 2016 that was just over 50%. I think it was 52% or something. But it’s kind of nutty.

**John:** It is nutty. That’s the one of the things that writers can actually do. So let’s talk about sort of where you think the writer’s responsibility is in trying to find parity and try to find an appropriate level of female voices in these things. What advice do you have to screenwriters as they’re looking at their scripts, plotting out their scripts in a big way but also looking at the scripts that they’ve written? How do we improve this?

**Christina:** Am I allowed to talk about–?

**John:** You’re absolutely allowed to talk about things you want to talk about.

**Christina:** OK. Well, the reason that I reached out to you in the first place is that I wanted to talk about this issue particularly, and I wanted to talk about Highland because I think that we can be self-policing. And we can be looking at our own unconscious biases, and I think it will really help. I think there’s a lot that needs to be done later down the line with casting directors and executives and making sure that the background characters are all kind of appropriately diverse.

But I think we can be doing a lot of that stuff as well kind of before it even leaves our desk. Geena Davis who obviously has been doing amazing work for gender balance onscreen, one of the things that she said that really struck me is that one of the most effective tactics she’s had is not kind of publicly shaming people for their statistics in looking at their work but going into companies, showing them kind of, look, this is what’s going onscreen from your company. Did you know that it was this imbalanced? And that people want to be better. And self-policing is a good thing.

So I was thinking it would be great if scriptwriting software like Highland, like Final Draft, could shift and have a way of looking at your own work so that you can do that gender breakdown so that it’s not always done after the fact in some depressing study. And you were very magical and did things incredibly quickly. And I’ve been playing with it. And it’s a really fascinating tool to be able to – I mean, you can explain how it works. But I went back and I looked at all of my scripts and I was really shocked by some.

I mean, I write really female-heavy things, but some of the results were really surprising. And it made me think how important it is that we all do this.

**John:** Yeah. So what you’re referring to is based on our emails we went back and looked at Highland 2 which is about to release and we added a gender analysis tool to Highland. And so based on your script while you’re writing it, or when you’re finished with it, or you can even drag in a finished PDF, we can go through and look at what is the split of male and female characters in the story and what percentage of dialogue and what percentage of words, down to–

**Christina:** The words is weirdly the most important thing I think. And that’s why you’ve got to be careful with some of these statistics because number of female speaking characters will include a waitress who says, “Here are you pancakes, honey.” And that doesn’t really count. But it does affect statistics. So looking at number of words spoken was important.

**John:** Absolutely. It was also important to us that you had the fine tune control. That you could take out certain characters who really are not characters. Or if you have robots that are neither male nor female you can sort of account for those as well.

**Christina:** Yeah, unspecified.

**John:** Yeah. So that’s a tool that’s coming out in the next version of Highland. And I would hope to see other software being able to use it, but also just it’s a tool for the industry to take a finished script and just say what is this. Because you look at the analysis that other companies have done sort of after the fact and it’s really hard. If you’re just going through a PDF–

**Christina:** Incredibly hard.

**John:** — with a highlighter and so this is a thing that software can do.

**Christina:** They’re also having to retrofit things through IMDb and character names have changed and the scripts that they have that are often old scripts, not the shooting script. Or even if they are the shooting script the final film is so different than the shooting script. So this I think is an amazing tool to be able to look at your own stuff before it leaves your desk. Or for as you say executives to be looking before it goes to the casting directors.

Like the thing that struck me is how many of my minor characters who I really didn’t care about I was just kind of going Cop, but I was using male – I would check, because I couldn’t remember if I’d done female cop or male cop, and I’d have to go back and check. And often I would just default into like he, his. I was just making them men because they were forgettable. [laughs]

**John:** Exactly. And so it’s being specific in ways that’s helpful. So let’s stick with gender for right now, but I want to get race next which is a more challenging topic. But when you proactively make female cop, when you proactively give a gender to some of those roles, it lets the movie fit into our world a little bit more – not cleanly, but a distinctive choice. It’s showing a female police officer–

**Christina:** It’s more accurate.

**John:** It’s more accurate. It’s also showing a female police officer, it’s showing people in these roles that is important.

**Christina:** It’s so important. Especially with STEM jobs. I think, you know, there’s that saying “If you can see it you can be it.” And I think particularly for young girls, like as a girl growing up I was watching TV and not that I wanted to be Indiana Jones, but I wanted the option of having a hero like an Indiana Jones. And they were all 40-something year-old strapping white men. And I think it’s really important that we see even with tertiary characters where it doesn’t really matter. There was this other statistic that came up that really shocked me which is that you can watch 85 hours of popular TV or movies right now and you would only see a single instance of a black or Hispanic woman doing anything to do with computer science.

Which given how many TV shows we have where it’s a bunch of nerds sitting around tapping away on computers, that’s kind of shocking.

**John:** That is.

**Christina:** And with STEM jobs, particularly like why can’t we make those background doctors and scientists and researchers and computer analysts? It’s so easy to shift that. And, yes, a lot of that onus is on casting. But we can do it often in our scripts by just giving them a name or kind of, I don’t know, we can shift that ourselves I think.

**John:** One of the things I’ve discovered as I’ve been playing around with the tool in Highland is that bumping up those minor characters can sort of give a little bit more parity, but it tends to be more major characters who have more lines that is ultimately going to make a huge difference. And so it gets me thinking about sort of like, “Well what if that character were female. How do those changes ripple through if that character is female?”

And I think so often in our movies we expect that if there’s a man and a woman onscreen that there’s a romance, either they are mom and son or there’s a romantic thing happening. And to be able to say like, “OK, these are just coworkers. These are just people who are on the same team rowing in the same direction” is an important aspect of representation, too. Because we work in workplaces where men and women are not romantically–

**Christina:** Most of the relationships in our lives, hopefully, are not romantic relationships.

**John:** Yeah. So finding ways for that to be possible as well.

The natural segue though then is race–

**Christina:** Segue Man!

**John:** Segue Man. Race and representation. And where I find it very easy, usually, to take a role and say like that’s male or female, sometimes it’s harder to say like, well, this role is Thai. Or this role is Sub-Saharan African. Like trying to figure out where the natural place is to be specific but not so specific that you’re precluding a bunch of other options.

**Christina:** That’s the problem. And you guys talk about this very rightly on the show, a lot of specificity is key. Specificity is wonderful. You want to write characters that don’t just feel like generically Asian but like my Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. That’s a really specific good character that is written as part of that culture, not just generic Asian guy.

But, if we are too specific in our first drafts, are we then limiting roles to a very, very tiny pool of actors when really what we want is just to make the whole movie more diverse? So it becomes really tricky, particularly I think in the kind of movies that we write, you know, bigger studio movies that the story won’t necessarily need to be about the fact that the dad in the movie is John Cho, and is Asian, but it would be great if he were.

So, it’s hard knowing when and where to specify. And one of the questions that I reached out to you with because I was thinking about it is should we – because I know Craig and you have said on the show in the past like you can’t put race just in parenthesis next to age because that’s not a character, as your only character description, which is completely true and fair. That’s not what defines you. But there’s also characters often where you don’t want to waste the lines or the extra words on a bigger character description, but you would like that person to be other.

It becomes tricky because you have to kind of find a standard. If you only name the people who are other than are you suggesting that everyone you don’t name is Caucasian? The answer is no, it shouldn’t be. But honestly there is a problem with the default white read.

**John:** There is. Absolutely. So let’s go back through and talk through some of these issues here. So, one of the ways which a screenwriter can signal that a character is a specific race is to give that character a name that’s just what race he’s from. And so Gutierrez or Chu or Chow or something like that.

Your Crazy Ex-Girlfriend reference is – and people can listen to the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend episode I did with, I think it was a bonus episode I did with Aline–

**Christina:** Yeah. It was great. I listened to it.

**John:** Where they talked about originally it was I think Josh Cho, originally Josh was supposed to be Chinese. And they ended up finding an actor who is Filipino and they said like, well, that’s awesome. We’ll make your last name Chan. And they built out his whole universe as Filipino and they were able to find a great Filipino writer who was going to help them out with all of that. And it worked out fantastic. It was a very specific thing.

And yet if they felt themselves limited by their initial instinct to cast him as Chinese they wouldn’t have gotten to that guy. So finding that flexibility.

**Christina:** Yeah. And what if – I mean, it’s slightly different with TV because Aline is in there and can make changes as she’s doing it and she’s very much in control. With features, imagine if that was a feature and she’d written it just Josh and didn’t specify any race, would people have been able to make the mental leap when they were casting him to be like, “Oh my gosh can he be Filipino?” You know, to go from nothing to a specific race – if she started with Josh as Chinese, would it have then been fairly easy for them to cast him as Filipino and kind of then tweak the script versus if she just left it open, everyone assumed he was white, and then you have to go to Asian. It’s a tricky thing.

**John:** I want to get back to a point you made about specifying a character’s race might make it seem like it’s important that he be that race. That there’s going to be a story reason why that character has to be that thing. And it’s a natural thing we see in features is that every choice seems deliberate, and so therefore if you’re making the choice there must be a reason why you’re making that choice. And sometimes the reason is just because you want the movie to be more diverse.

**Christina:** Yeah.

**John:** So we can flag that by names. I still feel a little hinky when I see the “Chinese, 40” after a character’s description.

**Christina:** Of course, yeah.

**John:** But maybe we need to get past that hinky feeling or find another way to show in scripts like, “These are opportunities for inclusive casting.”

**Christina:** I know. The question is do you have some kind – do you say “open ethnicity?” Do you have some shorthand for it? Some standardized thing that everyone is using? Because I’ve been talking to people kind of since I’ve been looking into this and a couple of studio heads have said, “Yeah, when we send things to casting if it doesn’t specify race, 100% the casting list comes back and it says Caucasian now suddenly next to their name.

And obviously we can’t fix all of that. But maybe there is something that we can do to fix some of it. I just feel like because we are completely in control until we give the script in, it feels like there’s got to be something we can do. And at least having the conversation I think is important because it’s a scary weird messy conversation. And when you first asked me to be on the show I was like, “I don’t think I should.” But I also think it’s time for us to have the messy, tricky conversations. And there aren’t any easy answers. But it doesn’t mean we should stop looking.

**John:** Yeah. Often when I send in a script I’ll have an after page that will give additional notes about things. Like if I’m using songs in a script I’ll add a page that says these are the songs and these are the people who wrote the songs, just so I feel like I’m not just poaching people’s stuff. Or make it clear what was the original song versus what I added and so people know where stuff came through.

And so I can imagine we could come up with some sort of standard thing that doesn’t feel too scary that says like opportunities for inclusion or things like that, because you don’t want to list only the roles that could be non-white, but you want to make sure that you’re flagging–

**Christina:** That it’s clear that things are open. Craig also suggested when we were emailing – his suggestion was he’s always wanted a character breakdown at the front of scripts. I think doing them at the front of scripts in the ways that plays do is probably too much of an ask. It’s like a big change in this industry. I also think it kind of kills some of the mystery and romance of like, “Oh, who are we going to meet later in this script?” But I do think there’s a world where that’s a standard thing that you deliver with a script at the back, or as a separate addendum, which maybe could help there where you could literally have a slot where you’re listing the age range, where you’re listing is race important in this particular – is a specific race important in this role or is it open? And if you say open then it should be open and shouldn’t be white specific.

**John:** The conversation we’re having is really between what we do as a writer and what a director will do and what a casting director does, and obviously producers and studio heads have influence over this, too. But it’s how do we sort of get from this idea of what we have on the page to the actual breakdown. And that literally is the casting breakdown.

This last week someone on Twitter had posted – I think it was a Deadline article that I tweeted about a casting breakdown for a new show. And they were describing the different characters in this – it sort of felt like a Friends kind of show. And the female lead of the show, it was painful sort of how she was described where she’s like, “She’s a girly-girl who can hang with the guys. And she has a tattoo behind her ear.” And it didn’t talk anything about what she wanted or what her goals in life were. It was just like she’s the hot girl next door.

And I do wonder if there’s something that we as screenwriters can do to sort of help get past those casting breakdowns. Because I guarantee you those writers didn’t write that description. It was written by the casting breakdown person. But we need a little intervention there with them about how we’re describing these characters because it’s so frustrating for us, the writers, but also it’s got to be frustrating for every actor going in for that part.

**Christina:** But also kind of humiliating. Just depressing. Yeah, we do need to fix that. I also think that – and you and Craig again talk about this often and it’s so important is good character descriptions in the script when you first introduce a character. That aren’t all about how cute, effortless. Ugh. We need to work on that and we need to make sure that our character descriptions on the page – because by the way the casting breakdowns would love to just copy and paste something from our own scripts if we had great pieces of intro there.

The problem is how many lines you use up. And sometimes you try to pack a lot in and you can’t afford to do that. But also describing someone in a way that does leave it open racially. I wrote one of my spec scripts, where because I’m mixed race I generally am not assuming anyone is white. I’m kind of assuming anyone is anything. But I kept hearing that people assumed that the lead role was white and I couldn’t understand why. And I went through the whole script and I found there was a couple of places where I said that she pales. And they were like, “Oh, she must be pale. She must be white.” And I was like people of other colors can pale as well.

**John:** Yeah.

**Christina:** But little things like that, or comments on color of eyes can subconsciously be really rooting you in a certain race without you meaning to.

**John:** Yeah. A script I wrote recently that I may direct at some point, I wrote one of the main roles in it. And in my head it’s like, well, you know Octavia Spencer who was in The Nines would be fantastic for this. But I didn’t put anything in there specifically that said she was African American. And so it was interesting as I sent it out for – because we were doing budgeting – and I started talking with producers about this is who I was thinking about. They’re like, “Oh, I didn’t realize she was black.” And because I didn’t insist that she be black it did go to a default white.

**Christina:** The default white is crazy. I was in a studio meeting a year or so ago where someone said, “Oh, I’m really worried this script is too white.” I mean, I’m pleased by the way they were worrying about it, but I said, “Why? There’s only two people that are specified where it was important and one was Hispanic and one was African American.” And they were like, “Well, everyone is white.” And I was like, “No they’re not. They’re just not specified as being anything,” because again I don’t want to say that someone is Indian and then block someone that’s Thai getting the part. You don’t – they could be anything, but everyone just kind of – unless you point it out or unless it’s part of the story does kind of default white read most of your characters unfortunately.

**John:** Yeah. We only have about 20 minutes left, so I don’t know if we’re going to be able to solve default white reads.

**Christina:** Dammit.

**John:** I mean, come one, we promised people–

**Christina:** I know. I thought we would be so much further ahead than this.

**John:** I think part of the solving it though is the real discussion of it and sort of recognition of that if you don’t specify people are going to fall into that. Or maybe we can train readers to not slip into that thing so quickly. But it is frustrating.

Have you heard the term “windows and mirrors” used in terms of inclusion in writing?

**Christina:** Only from you.

**John:** OK. So this is a thing I heard a lot when I was doing Arlo Finch because in kids’ books they talk about it all the time, especially for middle grade. And so the idea is that books can serve as windows and mirrors for kids as they’re looking at those characters and trying to fit them into the bigger world.

And so a window is if you have a character who has a certain background or experience and so a kid who doesn’t have that can look through their eyes and see what it was like in their point of view.

A mirror is a person – if a kid who can see themselves as that character. Basically – especially like races or situations that have been underrepresented, they get to see themselves reflected back and they feel like, oh, I am part of that culture. And so often you’ll see African American writers who say, “I loved Chronicles of Narnia and all these fantasy books but there were never black people in any of these stories.”

And so to provide that character in there is a mirror back to their own experience or a specific life experience that they never see reflected back to them. So like Arlo Finch mirrors back that sort of mountain life that I grew up with that I just never see in books. But it is an interesting idea that I think is really popular in kids’ lit right now, but I think we need to start looking at in terms of what we’re doing in movies.

With Black Panther, I think part of its huge success was that it mirrored back something that the African American audience desperately wanted to see.

**Christina:** Super powerful, amazing, exciting way.

**John:** I remember before the movie opened and just people on Twitter or on Instagram people were with the standees and they were just cheering the standees. Just the fact that it existed was a huge thing.

**Christina:** I have to admit, and it’s weird, I cried in the casino scene in Black Panther because it was so refreshing to see this woman be so badass, and she was in a stunning, elegant dress, but she wasn’t like sexy for the sake of being sexy. She seemed powerful and strong and she was kicking all the ass. And it was so exciting to see. And I know a lot of women who had the same reaction in Wonder Woman in No Man’s Land. Just like so happy and overwhelmed.

**John:** I wept openly in No Man’s Land. Yeah.

**Christina:** You can’t believe it. And it’s so strange that we can’t believe it, but we really have grown up not seeing that. We’ve seen kind of the over-sexy, leather pants, skinny hot sidekick girl kick ass. But it never felt real, or true, or powerful in the same way.

**John:** The other thing which really struck me about the casino scene in Black Panther is that when we leave Wakanda we don’t go to Europe or America, we go to Asia. And it’s like we’re not going to the place where all the white people are. We’re going to Asia. And it’s a completely specific place that we’re going to. And I guess Martin Freeman is the one white person who is sort of wandering around in there. But it’s not about “We have to go to the ‘real world,’ the ‘real world’ being white. We’re going to a very specific Asian place.” And that was a really cool moment.

I haven’t seen a lot written about Martin Freeman’s role in Black Panther, but it is fascinating that the white people in the movie, they’re there to see some stuff but not to sort of make anything happen.

**Christina:** They don’t save the day.

**John:** They don’t save the day at all.

**Christina:** Thank god. We’ve seen enough of those movies.

**John:** No white saviors in this.

**Christina:** No white saviors for sure.

**John:** So, going back to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and other shows where in having Josh Chan be Filipino they were able to bring in a Filipino writer who could bring a very specific perspective to that. So often in features we’re the one writer, so we’ve got to write everything. They have a room for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but we are just the one person. Have you ever worked in any room situations in features? Can you talk about that?

**Christina:** So, the Transformers writers’ room was obviously a famous features experiment where we did three weeks in a room together and it was 12 writers, three of them were partnerships. But 12 writers in a room. It was not dissimilar to the TV thing in terms of we learned about the thing that we were doing, we talked about it as one big picture and then we each kind of picked an episode as it were. We kind of naturally gravitated towards different things. It was amazing how naturally we all went to different areas. There was no overlap. And then we each developed our own stories and helped each other brainstorm and it was a very collaborative thing where we would pitch a loose outline and then people would give suggestions or notes or thoughts. But we really kind of had our own pieces.

And then obviously I do, as I’m sure you do, like a ton of roundtables of things. I recently did with Paramount another writers’ room like that for three weeks.

**John:** So part of that seems so exciting because it gets more people and more brains involved on something on topics of inclusion and making sure that the world is fully representative. It gives you a chance because it’s more than one person looking at stuff.

Part of me also is just terrified of the sense of like it’s hard to figure out then who deserves credit for story. Because we’re not really set up to do that kind of stuff in features.

**Christina:** And I think it can get very tricky when – the situation that I have not done on purpose because I don’t like it is when it’s a ton of writers going in and you don’t know who is going to come out writing the job. And it’s one job. That I think can get super murky. And I know writers who have given very fundamental core ideas that have made the movie and that haven’t gotten credit.

So the ones that I have gravitated towards have been the ones where it’s more about collaboration and helping each other, which I think is a wonderful thing because we are such hermits as feature writers, we’re also good together and we like helping each other and we’re good at helping each other.

And as long as you don’t go in with too much of an ego and you’re open to that experience I think it can be a wonderful thing. The competitive bakeoff thing not so good.

**John:** Yeah. I had a friend describing situation where it was this four or five day room and then like whoever sort of did the best in the room was going to get the job.

**Christina:** It’s gross.

**John:** It feels gross. And usually what it is is they have some more powerful high-priced writers and then some inexpensive writers–

**Christina:** Who they milk.

**John:** Yeah, who they milk. But a lot of times it is one of the inexpensive people that they kind of want to give it to because they don’t have that much money. It feels weird. If I were starting in the business now, of course I would go to one of those things. And in some ways it’s no different than to have 12 writers going in to pitch on a project. But rather than doing it serially you’re doing it parallel.

**Christina:** Yes, except that you shouldn’t go in and pitch on things and then they just steal all your ideas. Like that’s also not nice.

**John:** At least you’re getting paid for it.

**Christina:** And, by the way, it’s OK to – like I’ve had an experience with a studio where I went very deep in the, I mean, I got beyond pitching. I was kind of meeting with the director and some of the producers for long periods of time. And they did the honorable thing. At the end I didn’t get the job but they wanted to use a couple of ideas so they gave me a contract and paid me as a consultant.

**John:** Yep.

**Christina:** Like it can be done not that expensively. So the getting people in to pitch knowing that you’re just doing it to steal their ideas, or doing those roundtables knowing that you’re just doing it to milk – ugh – milk writers and then pay someone cheaper. It is gross.

**John:** It is gross. So, hopefully it’s a thing we can move past. But I would say overall as the WGA we’re not well set up to figure out how to handle and treat these feature writers who are in these roundtables. Because during that roundtable you were probably paid like a producer – you’re paid like a minimum?

**Christina:** No. Transformers writers’ room, Akiva Goldsman ran that and was very adamant that we all be paid really well so that we wouldn’t hold back and say that it wouldn’t be kind of using and abusing writers. We all did that room for three weeks and then we all wrote our own treatments. And then if we then were sent to script, which I was and that’s how Bumblebee came about, then we get paid for that script separately. But we were paid for our participation in the room and for a treatment. So it was very fair and good and they did right by us on that one.

**John:** That’s great. I want to listen to a clip – so during the Oscars Frances McDormand said very early in her speech like, “Two words, inclusion riders.” So after she said that in the Q&A room she had a little explanation about what that was. So I want to listen to her explanation and then talk through what we think might be the possibilities and realities there.

**Reporter:** Can you please explain your comment at the end, the two words, inclusion rider?

**Frances McDormand:** Right? I just found out about this last week. There is – has always been available to all – everybody that does a negotiation on a film, an inclusion rider which means that you can ask for and/or demand at least 50% diversity in not only the casting but also the crew. And so the fact that I just learned that, after 35 years of being in the film business, we’re not going back.

So, the whole idea of women trending, no. No trending. African Americans trending? No. No trending. It changes now. And I think the inclusion rider will have something to do with that.

**Christina:** Women aren’t trending.

**John:** Women aren’t trending. Women have always been here. So this idea of an inclusion rider, I can’t envision any screenwriter getting anything like this.

**Christina:** I feel like you could, John. You could do anything you want, dammit.

**John:** Demand it. In some ways we are our own inclusion rider. We can shape the degree–

**Christina:** On the page.

**John:** On the page. And we’ll see sort of what happens. Do you see it working/happening? Do you think this is a thing that we’ll talk about?

**Christina:** Even if it doesn’t fully work we’ve got to try. You know, this is something that Stacey Smith came up with I think in 2014 and they’ve been working really hard on figuring out the legals of it and how to implement it and how to make it work.

And I could be misspeaking, but I think the idea is not that you have to have 50% diversity behind the camera, but that you have to aim to have 50% diversity behind the camera. I think there is such a natural kind of backlash and people freak out that like “under-qualified people are going to steal our jobs,” which there always has been with things like this. And people need to just chill the fuck out.

But I think, yeah, it’s about kind of implementing things like the Rooney Rule. It’s about aiming for that. Interviewing a lot of diverse candidates for the jobs. And trying to get that behind the scenes.

**John:** What is the Rooney Rule? I’ve heard it, but I don’t remember what it is.

**Christina:** I can’t tell if you’re pretending you don’t know or if you really don’t know.

**John:** I genuinely don’t know what it is.

**Christina:** So the Rooney Rule comes from NFL and the idea is that when you’re hiring – in the NFL it was when you’re hiring a coach or someone outside of the – not institution, well, institution – that you have to interview at least one candidate who is diverse. And it’s something that the WGA has talked about a bunch. They were talking about it for this recent round last year. It didn’t end up kind of kicking in. But it’s something that a lot of people are supporting and want. I think it’s hugely important and I would love to see it implemented. I would love to see it be obligatory. Because I think a lot of the time writers aren’t even getting in the room. You know, you’re not getting enough women in the room. You’re not getting enough people of color in the room. Get them in the room. Give them a shot.

Like on Transformers, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Lindsey Beer, and I were probably the diversity aspect. We were the only three women in the room. When they first announced the first four writers in the room they were all white males and there was a huge kind of backlash, like “How can you just have a bunch of white guys?” Thank god there was a backlash. They then hired the three of us, I’d like to hope not just because we’re women but also because we’re talented. But we were kind of probably the less experienced writers in the room. And we all did really well.

Like look at what they’re doing now. Geneva Robertson-Dworet wrote Captain Marvel. She just wrote Tomb Raider. Lindsey Beer is writing King Killer Chronicles for Lionsgate. She’s crushing it. She just spent three days in a room with Quentin Tarantino for Star Trek. Because we had that opportunity we got to prove ourselves. So I think getting people in the door and letting them fight for the job is so important and so worth doing. And it’s a big part of what the inclusion rider will do is give people the chance to get those jobs that they may otherwise not have gotten.

**John:** Absolutely. So in terms of in front of the camera, those changes can be challenging based on the nature of the movie. There are going to be movies where it’s going to be hard to find – if it’s a period piece, it’s a period WWII piece, it’s going to be hard to do that. So you’re going to have to be realistic about those. But behind the camera–

**Christina:** There’s no reason why we can’t.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Christina:** And in front of the camera we also have to remember, I mean, you mentioned Chronicles of Narnia. That’s fantasy. There’s no reason why there should be no black people. Like, if there are leprechauns, I mean, it’s not leprechauns. There are people with goat legs. They can have black people there.

**John:** I 100% agree. And I always get so frustrated when people like will poke at Cinderella for having a black character in Cinderella.

**Christina:** It’s Cinderella World!

**John:** Absolutely. It’s like it’s kind of Europe but it’s not really Europe.

**Christina:** It’s so crazy.

**John:** It’s frustrating. Even on Big Fish, I remember there was one time where we had a circus scene. And this is a fantastical world. And this extra came up and was saying like, “Oh, just so you know there shouldn’t be black people here.” And it’s like, “Yeah, OK, I can understand in an historical context, but remember we are in a fantasy. This is the idealized version of sort of what this world should be.”

**Christina:** It’s not the real world anyway so why can’t we do what we want with it?

**John:** Yeah.

**Christina:** It’s maddening.

**John:** It’s maddening.

**Christina:** Maddening.

**John:** A challenge with inclusion riders behind the scenes, and so I think there’s ways to say this that’s not sort of implying that you’re going to hire less qualified people. Sometimes it’s hard to find enough people, people who have training and stuff. So it feels like it’s also a mandate to make sure that you are giving people the experience–

**Christina:** It’s not going to happen overnight. We’ve got to train the people up.

**John:** Absolutely. So you talked about STEM and representation of STEM people. It’s like, you know, well if we want to hire more black female engineers we need to make sure that they’re–

**Christina:** That they’re going to university for it. Yeah.

**John:** That they recognize that it’s a thing they can do and make sure that they identify it early enough. And support them while they’re going through that.

**Christina:** I also think that’s really important once you’ve hired the person that you keep that support. I have a friend who is a producer who tried to hire an incredibly diverse team for the movie behind the camera. Hired someone in a very key position who was less experienced, but because she was a woman and she was a woman of color and they really believed in giving her a shot. But because she didn’t have that much experience she really struggled.

And I think what’s important is that person who made that decision to hire that person isn’t punished for that decision and that there is some sort of network or system or safety net so that that person doesn’t lose their job but they can be supported and helped and then get the next job, and the next job, and continue their career and continue to become more experienced.

**John:** Absolutely. You don’t want to put people in positions where they’re going to fail.

**Christina:** You want people to win.

**John:** Yes.

**Christina:** So mentorship programs I think are hugely important. But also just like starting on all levels. You can’t just suddenly change the top levels without working on the lower levels.

**John:** The DGA training program seems like it’s working well in trying to get more diverse directors out there, both literally directors and also assistant directors and those crucial roles of actually making the trains run on time.

**Christina:** Yeah. And I think TV can do a lot of help. They can really help out with features as well because you can take more of a risk on one episode of TV. You know, Ava DuVernay has done amazing things with her shows in terms of hiring very female-heavy crews and female directors. More people need to be doing that.

**John:** And the training equivalent for writing in some ways is TV. It is our writers’ rooms. And so that’s why you see an emphasis on trying to make sure that you are getting those diverse candidates in those rooms, both because it’s helping those candidates grow, but also because it’s making those rooms better. It’s bringing in new voices.

A frustration which I’ve heard about through the WGA is that a lot of times candidates who come in, or people who are brought into a show on the lowest level as the diversity hire have a very hard time getting the second job and the third job.

**Christina:** Well, often because they were the diversity hire their job was subsidized. And so then getting paid an actual salary is like, “Oh, but we can’t actually pay her real money.” I mean, it’s mental.

**John:** That has to be fixed.

**Christina:** That’s got to be fixed. It’s craziness. Craziness.

**John:** There’s a question we have from Kate and so let’s wrap it up by talking about her question. She writes, “I’m pondering why some movies feel timeless while others don’t. Why do some things have such staying power like The Princess Bride or Indiana Jones or Singing in the Rain, while other movies feel dated almost as soon as they come out?”

Christina, what thoughts do you have about movies that stay timeless versus ones that feel like, wow, they were of that moment and don’t last?

**Christina:** Interesting. I mean, this is a silly thing to say but one of the things I’m always careful of when I’m writing is not including too much technology if I don’t have to because that–

**John:** 100%.

**Christina:** The person doing whatever doing on their smartphone, that smartphone is going to look ridiculous in five years’ time. And I think that can often really date things.

But I think it’s also just about universal character arcs. Really relatable characters. Stories that feel like they aren’t – they don’t just belong to that one person but they are captivating in a bigger way rather than just kind of this specific girl growing up in very much the ‘90s or the 2000s or, you know.

**John:** A lot of things she references having staying power are fantasies. So, they have some grounding in the real world but they’re mostly sort of taking place out in another space and time and so therefore they don’t feel as anchored into our time.

You mentioned technology or cellphones, which are of course really a killer.

**Christina:** They’re also just a bummer, honestly. Who wants to see anyone texting?

**John:** They destroy us.

**Christina:** They ruin thrillers. They really do.

**John:** They do. But any reference to technology tends to be really time stamping. You know, Sandra Bullock in The Net. It’s like, oh no, you recognize that–

**Christina:** It was so cutting edge…for a minute.

**John:** Yes. But in some ways it’s the movies that ask kind of timeless questions or that have great heroes who feel like they’re out of time. Those are the ones that sort of tend to stay. And the ones that are asking very contemporary questions, in some ways that feels more like TV where it’s like you’re right of the moment. And also just think about the lead time to make a movie. It’s two or three years to make a movie. And by the time they come out it really might be a thing that has passed for us a bit.

So we’re going to hear Craig’s voice for a second because it’s time for a special feature.

**Christina:** Yay.

Craig: John’s WGA Corner.

**John:** So a couple listeners wrote in to ask, “Hey, will you and Craig talk about the thing that’s happening with the agency agreement being renegotiated?” And, yes, we will be probably next episode. But I’m curious, Christina, have you heard anything about the agency agreement or do you know anything about what’s going on?

**Christina:** I know a little bit about what’s going on, but I missed both meetings because I was out of town. And I would like to hear your episode on it because I want the breakdown.

**John:** Absolutely. So we will break that down and talk about what’s happening and sort of what’s not happening and it’s a very different thing than sort of when we negotiated our deal with the studios. So it’s going to probably be a very slow train. But we’ll talk through what that is and sort of why it matters.

And it’s interesting you brought up the Rooney Rule because there’s another sports connection between this is that writers are much more in some ways like NBA players.

**Christina:** I feel very much like an NBA player.

**John:** Yeah. Our relationship with the people who employ us is kind of more like our dealing with teams than it is dealing with the big factory. And so some interesting things happen because of that and because we have agents that represent us there’s actually some good parallels there, so we’ll talk about that.

**Christina:** And who’s working for who.

**John:** Exactly. And making sure that our agents are working for us and we’re not working for our agents. Have you been in any situations where an agency is employing you or some–?

**Christina:** No.

**John:** It’s happening.

**Christina:** It is?

**John:** Yeah.

**Christina:** Oh, of course, because they’re financing movies now.

**John:** Yeah they are.

**Christina:** Which is very tricky.

**John:** It’s very tricky. So we’ll get into a bit of that.

**Christina:** I don’t like that.

**John:** Other little bit is from Stuart Friedel, who is our former Scriptnotes producer, he’s also a new WGA member. Congratulations Stuart.

**Christina:** Ooh, congratulations.

**John:** He had these questions about dues and then he ended up finding a really useful PDF that talks through the process of sending in your dues. Because you’ve dealt with WGA dues.

**Christina:** It’s so old-fashioned. It’s crazy. The system is so hinky and weird and you can just put in whatever you want and make up. It’s crazy.

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Christina:** It’s getting updated though, right?

**John:** It’s getting updated. So, what’s weird about WGA dues, and so for people who don’t know, as a member of the Writers Guild you end up paying 1.5% of your earnings into the guild. And you would think like, “Oh, well that must get taken out of your checks.” It doesn’t. Like you are responsible for filling in a form every quarter saying this is what I earned on this project.

**Christina:** And you better type in all the numbers correctly or you pay the wrong amount and get in trouble.

**John:** And then you send them money. And so they don’t dock money. It’s a really strange system.

**Christina:** Really strange.

**John:** And so people as they do it for the first time have questions, so this little PDF I’ll put a link to helps answer some of those questions. But we might do an episode more about dues down the road because both dues collection has been updated throughout the guild and there are probably ways we could do even better down the road.

**Christina:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool. End of WGA segment. It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Christina:** Oh shit!

**John:** Did you forget your One Cool Thing?

**Christina:** I completely forgot my One Cool Thing.

**John:** How about this? I will do my One Cool Thing first. And then while I’m talking you can think about something that you like a lot that you want people to see. It could be a TV show, it could be a book. It could be something great out there in the world.

My One Cool Thing is a book. It is a book called Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies. I actually met Dawn because she has the same publisher and we were at this dinner together. And so she stood up and she talked about her book and I’m like “That sounds really cool.” So I bought it and I read it. And it is really cool. To describe it, I would say if you’ve read any of David Sedaris’s books, like they’re kind of memoirs and they’re funny, this is like David Sedaris but if you grow up poor in South Florida. And there’s a little bit more sort of holy shit.

What I like about it is, you know, a bunch of stuff happens in her life. It sort of goes from her childhood up through where she is now. And a bunch of stuff happens that would sort of break other people. And it reminds you that so much of who you are is sort of the ways you got broken and healed. And it’s just really great and really funny and really terrific writing. It’s her first book. So I was just super impressed. Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies.

**Christina:** I would love to pretend that I have just suddenly come up with a great One Cool Thing. So I’m going to come up with a One Cool Thing that is a general idea.

**John:** Sure.

**Christina:** Which is – and it’s a piece of advice I think for all aspiring writers – which is my One Cool Thing is my female writer friends.

**John:** Oh, tell me about this.

**Christina:** I think it is really important that you find your – people are so worried I think in this industry about networking and about networking up. And I think honestly it’s the wrong way of approaching it. I think you’ve got to focus – sure, network if you want. I find it gross. But find your peers. Find your people that will stay with you through this industry. You know, I mentioned Geneva and Lindsey earlier. We support each other. We take care of each other. We text each other when we have painful experiences in pitches or whatever. Julia Hart who is a female writer-director. You know, there are days when we have horrible experiences, where we’re really struggling, where the system is misogynistic and painful and awful. And if I didn’t have my girls supporting me and like by my side I would have a hard time just emotionally.

I think it is really important – boys, find your boys, or your girls, or whatever. But I think women in this industry, find each other, support each other. There is this myth that we’re all competing with each other and we want to push each other down. It’s the opposite. And I think it’s really wonderful to – particularly in this moment – women represent only 25% of the Writers Guild. That’s so sad. There need to be more of us. Find young female writers you can mentor if you’re an established female writer. Make there be more of us.

**John:** Absolutely. Screenwriting was invented by women. And it’s crazy that–

**Christina:** I did not know that.

**John:** I’ll have to Google to find out her name, but sort of the first established and known screenwriter was a woman.

**Christina:** Of course she was.

**John:** Because as the screenplay format sort of came into being, because of course originally it was just like they were pointing cameras at things and shooting. But eventually you had to have a plan for what that is. So one of the first sort of credited screenwriters is a woman.

**Christina:** I love that.

**John:** And as the screenplay format evolved, she evolved with it. So, it is–

**Christina:** I bet she had good girlfriends.

**John:** I hope she had good peers. I hope she had a good group there. Yeah, thank you. That’s a very good One Cool Thing.

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 Hunter Christensen. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place you can send longer questions. For short questions, on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Christina, are you on Twitter?

**Christina:** I am not on anything.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Christina:** I literally have no social media.

**John:** That’s very nice. You can find us on Apple Podcasts at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a comment.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. We also have a few of the USB drives that have the first 300 episodes available if you want those for your bunker. As the world falls apart and you just need to listen to Scriptnotes, you can listen to those.

**Christina:** Wear your USB around your neck.

**John:** Absolutely. Just plug it in whenever you need to. It’s very, very nice. Christina, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a pleasure talking to you.

**Christina:** Thank you so much for having me. I really didn’t swear as much as I thought I was going to.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Christina:** Thank you. I’m very proud of myself.

Links:

* Thanks for joining us, [Christina Hodson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Hodson). Her upcoming movies include [Bumblebee](http://deadline.com/2016/11/transformers-bumblebee-christina-hodson-script-paramount-pictures-spinoff-script-1201852869/) of the Transformers franchise and [Batgirl](http://deadline.com/2018/04/batgirl-movie-christina-hodson-writing-bumblebee-1202361134/).
* The Pudding’s [Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age](https://pudding.cool/2017/03/film-dialogue/)
* Premium subscribers can listen to the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend bonus episode with Aline Brosh McKenna and Rachel Bloom [here](http://scriptnotes.net/bonus-aline-brosh-mckenna-rachel-bloom-crazy-ex-girlfriend-qa).
* A [pilot announcement](http://deadline.com/2018/03/bright-futures-emily-ratajkowski-shameik-moore-lilly-singh-calum-worthy-jimmy-tatro-cast-lisa-kudrow-narrates-nbc-comedy-pilot-kenya-barris-1202355863/) that includes this character description: “a girl-next-door type but also with a behind-the-ear tattoo. She can just as easily bro out with the guys as she can be the girliest girl.”
* A [guide to WGA dues,](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/DUES_FAQ.pdf) courtesy of Stuart!
* [Mothers of Sparta](http://www.amazon.com/dp/125013370X/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Dawn Davies
* Female writer friends, like [Frances Marion](http://time.com/4186886/frances-marion/)
* [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 Hunter Christensen ([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_346.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 345 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re doing something a little bit different. We often answer listener emails, but I thought we’d actually have the listener here with us as he asks his email.
So, would you mind asking your question that you wrote in to us with?

**Isaac Aptaker:** Yeah, sure. “Dear John, you are one of the rare few to have both a successful screenwriting career and an accessible email address. I am an almost out of high school 18-year-old planning to pursue a career in TV. Next year I will enroll in the screenwriting program at either USC or NYU. I’ve gotten tons of advice from guidance counselors, family members, even a chatty, slightly overzealous cab driver. I wanted to ascertain whether you believe one school has a significant advantage over the other.

‘I’m inclined to stay on the East Coast for a few years before I make the move to LA for what I assume will be the majority of my working life. And I tell myself that a solid spec and good people skills are what really matter. But then I read those oh-so-persuasive articles about the SoCal-educated Josh Schwartz wunderkinds of TV. The ones who sell scripts right out of college and are helming their own shows before they can get rental cars. And it seems they always throw in a thanks to those Trojans shout-out.

“So, if you can offer any advice I’d really appreciate it. That cabbie made a damn good U-turn, but I’m not sure he knew a ton about scripted television. Thanks, Isaac Aptaker.”

**John:** All right. I wrote Isaac back and I wrote, “Hey Isaac. Both schools are great and more than anything count your blessings. Two questions: where do you want to live and what do you want to do? If you want to live in NYC, go to NYU. While it’s not an easy city to be broke in, you’re more likely to be content in your poverty living there during college than afterwards.

“In terms of Art, with a capital A, if on a given weekend you’re more likely to see the indie movie than the blockbuster, NYU might be the better choice. My sense is that there’s more independent bent at NYU and less of an asking for permission attitude.

“In terms of screenwriting programs themselves, I can only speak to USC’s which I didn’t attend but I visited. I think it’s good but only as good as you make it, which probably applies to any writing program anywhere. If you want to be a Hollywood screenwriter for the good and the bad that implies you’ll get more exposure to that career and the whole film industry at USC.

“Honestly, a lot of what you learn at USC wouldn’t happen on campus but navigating your way through internships and meeting people for the drinks. The film industry is a much bigger part of daily life in LA than it is in NYC. It sounds like your instinct is NYU. Listen to it. If you decide to move to LA after that you’ll have some catching up to do, but that shouldn’t be the deciding factor. Whichever place you
decide to go, here’s my one piece of advice: work really hard. Don’t think about grades as much as becoming the writer you want to be. Josh Schwartz didn’t get the OC because he was lucky. He got it by working his ass off. John.

“P.S. Let me know what you finally decide.”

Now, he also wrote to Craig, so Craig you had separate advice for him.

**Craig:** He did. I don’t see his version of the email that was sent to me. So I’m just going to assume that he also started with, “Dear Craig, you’re one of the rare few to have both a successful screenwriting career and accessible email address.”

I wrote back, “Isaac, I strongly recommend USC.” I just want to point out, I always strongly recommend things. Always.

“I strongly recommend USC. My understanding is that USC’s program is far more vocational than NYU’s, which is a bit more, shall we say, academic. However, don’t make any decisions just yet. I’ve forwarded your question to Howard A. Rodman who teaches at USC. I’m hoping he has a more informative answer for you. Full disclosure: I didn’t go to USC or NYU, so no bias here. Craig.”

**John:** All right. So, Isaac, we have you here with us. We’ve been wanting to know the answer to this question. What school did you choose to go to?

**Isaac:** I went to NYU.

**John:** All right. And has that all worked out OK for you?

**Isaac:** It worked out. It did.

**John:** All right. It worked out so specifically well that here is the twist in all of this – the emails that you sent were 13 years ago.

**Isaac:** Yeah.

**John:** So you were a high school student. You are no longer a high school student.

**Isaac:** I’m not. Unfortunately. Or fortunately. Both.

**John:** You are a writer working in film and television. What are the most recent things we would know you for?

**Isaac:** Yeah, my writing partner Elizabeth and I just wrote the movie Love, Simon and we’re also the co-showrunners of This is Us on NBC.

**John:** So that’s a pretty busy life. Isaac Aptaker, Elizabeth Berger, welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Isaac:** Thanks.

**Elizabeth Berger:** Thank you. Thanks for having us.

**Craig:** This is so cool. Because, I mean, first of all we were so nice.

**Isaac:** You guys were so nice.

**Elizabeth:** So nice.

**Craig:** You have to understand, because this is 2005 when Isaac writes this to us. So we actually don’t even really know each other at that point, or barely. We kind of knew each other.

**John:** Yeah. At this point did he have his website up?

**Isaac:** Yeah, you must have.

**Craig:** So we had talked a couple times on the phone, but we were far from doing a podcast together or anything like this. And we were both actually very – we wrote you back. Thank god. I mean, how often does this work out, right?

**Elizabeth:** You’re inspiring me as I’m sitting here. I’m like I need to write nicer emails back to people. It’s really incredible. And I imagine you really took it to heart.

**Isaac:** Yeah, it was a big deal. It was like, oh, this is so cool.

**Craig:** Well, that’s nice, probably though – maybe John you always write back to people like this, but I generally will be nicer if the email is well written and there’s some indication of intelligence there and I don’t think I’m completely wasting my time writing to this person. So, good eye for talent. We should have signed him.

**John:** We should have signed him then.

**Craig:** Right. We should have gotten both of these.

**John:** Yeah. Little finder fees. So I guess the reason why I did write back the more lengthy answer is because your email was asking one specific question between two different schools. You seemed smart. You had like a whole narrative to like what your story was. The cab driver was a recurring character in it. That was a question I could answer that you would actually maybe take my advice seriously.

And, of course, you did take my advice and not Craig’s advice.

**Isaac:** I did. Yeah. It’s true.

**John:** And went to NYU.

**Craig:** Which worked out.

**Isaac:** It did.

**Craig:** I mean, although, in my defense—

**Isaac:** Who knows what would have happened?

**Craig:** Correct. I mean, no offense to Elizabeth—

**Elizabeth:** Totally.

**Craig:** He could currently be everything.

**John:** Because you’re doing OK.

**Elizabeth:** There is room for improvement.

**Isaac:** I haven’t created a franchise yet.

**Craig:** I think the good news is the worse of his outcomes has been pretty good. But I was at least honest about the fact that I really didn’t know how to answer your question. And so I sent him off to Howard Rodman who obviously blew it.

**John:** Did you end up talking to Howard Rodman?

**Isaac:** I don’t remember. I don’t know if he ever reached out. I do remember it was a little trickier, because I had actually – I had applied to NYU early so I had already signed a contract and committed and then I found out I got into USC. So there was this whole like I would have to break that. There was a whole legal situation to it, too. But I don’t remember if Howard reached out.

**John:** All right. So, what I’m so excited to have you guys on the show for today is to talk about writing as partners, to talk about writing film and TV, and to your role in terms of running a show and what that is like now because this is all stuff that Craig and I don’t know a ton about. So, this is – it’s great to have people on who know more about what the kinds of things that writers are actually facing. So let’s start
back to NYU. So you wrote this letter. You decided to go to NYU because you got good advice from me.

**Isaac:** Yes.

**John:** How far in this process did you meet Elizabeth?

**Isaac:** Oh, I think we met pretty much on day one, right?

**Elizabeth:** Yeah. We were both in – we were dramatic writing majors, which is a concentration in screenwriting, television writing, and playwriting. And we were both in sort of the core class that you have to take which is called The Craft of Dramatic Writing. And we met on day one.

**Isaac:** Yeah. We became – in those classes you have to read your work out loud and people critique it. So we knew we liked each other’s just sort of general sensibility. We became friends. And then towards the end of school we became roommates with another guy in the East Village. And we decided to write a
pilot together about sort of that 20-something pilot or movie that everyone kind of has to get out of their system.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Isaac:** So we wrote that and got a little $10,000 grant from NYU to actually produce it in the apartment we were living in with this very generous third roommate who let us take over. And we didn’t kind of kill each other through that experience of making a show in our home in this tiny little place. So we decided to move out here and give it a go professionally.

**John:** Great. So NYU was undergrad, right?

**Elizabeth:** Yes.

**John:** So it was undergrad so basically you’re 18 years old, you’re in NYC, you’re going through this film program together. You’re also doing all your other college requirement classes. You’re roommates. You shoot this little pilot. How soon after graduation did you move from NYC out to Los Angeles?

**Elizabeth:** Pretty soon. Isaac went pretty much immediately. And I think – thank goodness he did because he sort of – I would have probably dragged my feet longer otherwise. Isaac went. He found an apartment. He found me an apartment in the same apartment complex. And then he was sort of like, OK, I mean, you can tell from his letter who you’re dealing with. And then he basically was like I’ve got everything set up. Are you coming? And then I followed.

**Craig:** I think that’s wonderful. And I think that every time I hear these stories about two people that meet each other in a writing class and then you hear her writing and she hears your writing. And then I hear these other stories of like he goes out and he does the thing. In my mind I’m already working on the psychological profile. What safety and comfort does she bring you and what safety and comfort do you bring her? Because it’s so scary to do these things, to move to LA, to write at all. I mean, John and I, we just like being scared alone. But there’s something that you guys do for each other. And it was like there from the start which I think is amazing.

**Elizabeth:** For sure. And I will say even that first day at NYU, like we are all sort of gathering as freshmen. And Isaac is the one person in a buttoned down shirt and like slacks. And I was like who is this guy. And I think there was–

**Craig:** Who’s this nerd?

**Elizabeth:** No, who is this grown up amongst us?

**Craig:** He’s clearly disinterested in fashion.

**Elizabeth:** From the beginning I could tell that he had a plan. And that was something that was very helpful for me who loved writing but wasn’t necessarily thinking about what’s the most pragmatic way to go about this.

**Craig:** Right. And so he brings the plan and you do all the writing?

**Elizabeth:** I do all the writing. He’s never written anything.

**Craig:** He’s kind of more your agent really is the deal.

**Elizabeth:** No, Isaac does a lot of writing, too.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So a very classic thing has happened here which people are always writing into us about. Basically when should I move to Los Angeles? And you decided to move to Los Angeles right after you finished film school. You had a couple things written together. What was done before you got out here?

**Isaac:** We had written two pilots together. Back then they were like really big on writing a spec of an existing show. They were like you have to write – that was all we did at NYU for such a high amount of money. So we had a 30 Rock spec that we wrote together.

**Elizabeth:** But that was when we came out.

**Isaac:** Oh, we wrote that when we first came out, yeah. And then Elizabeth had a job writing celebrity gossip that she took with her from New York and I got a job working for this movie producer named Robert Cort who produced like all the movies that we grew up, like he had 40 or 50 credits in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Like his lobby is insane.

**Craig:** Bob Cort.

**Isaac:** Exactly. And so I was his assistant at a very small company, just a couple other people, and he found out that I was a writer and was very generous and said “I want to do more young comedy. Come in and pitch me whatever you’re working on.”

**Craig:** I love that you called exploitative generous.

**Isaac:** Hey, at the time—

**Elizabeth:** He was amazing for us.

**Craig:** Listen, you move out to LA and you’re like, “Exploit me. Would somebody please exploit me?”

**Elizabeth:** You’re like, “You want to do anything with me?” Yeah.

**Isaac:** Somebody who has actually made something? So we were writing our first movie at the time. We came and pitched that to him, which was this movie called Lauren Pemberton is No Longer in a Relationship. And it was right when Facebook was just sort of becoming a huge thing. And it was that notion of like what happens when that girl you’ve been in love with forever finally becomes single. And then all of these guys come out of the woodwork in the Something About Mary kind of way and pursue her.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s smart. I like that.

**Isaac:** So we developed that with him for like eight or nine months while I was on his desk rolling his calls and stuff. And then he was cool and sent it out and we got signed off of that. So it was pretty – we were fortunate. It was pretty fast.

**Elizabeth:** We were very lucky.

**John:** All right, we got to connect more dots here. So you wrote this 30 Rock spec. What was the premise of your 30 Rock? What was the A story? What was the B story?

**Isaac:** Oh man.

**Elizabeth:** Oh my god.

**Isaac:** It was called Traliz Jormon. And the premise was that in the cold open Liz Lemon and Tracy are accidentally photographed hugging. And then the paparazzi assume they started dating. And it’s very good for the ratings of the show. So Alec Baldwin forces them to continue this charade and hilarity ensues.

**Craig:** That sounds about right.

**John:** A very good premise for that episode. So you write this spec of 30 Rock. What else were you writing while you were developing this pitch for Bob Cort? Would we even call it a pitch?

**Elizabeth:** No, we were writing a movie.

**Isaac:** We wrote it on spec. We were just writing a movie.

**John:** So you wrote the movie on spec.

**Isaac:** We wrote that pilot about prostitutes in a department store, right? That was not good.

**Elizabeth:** I don’t know. But, yeah, we were mostly focused on Lauren Pemberton.

**Craig:** You do know. You know.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah, that’s very vague in my mind. No, we were writing the movie and Robert was amazing. He was really giving us development lessons. He was really pushing it forward and it really – it took more time because we were learning a lot while we were doing it.

**Craig:** And you guys were – we’re talking 22?

**Isaac:** I was 20.

**Craig:** 20, OK.

**John:** So you went to college early?

**Isaac:** I graduated a little early. And then moved out here.

**Craig:** Did you skip a grade?

**Isaac:** In a high school I did, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, he skipped.

**Isaac:** But I moved out here and I couldn’t get into bars to go to those assistant mixer things. I would like talk to the bouncer, and I was like “I’m running out of money. Please, I’ll have a ginger ale. I’ve just got to go in there and talk to someone.” And eventually it worked.

**Craig:** Just by time elapsing you got to 21 and then–

**Isaac:** Yeah. And then I was allowed to drink legally so it was all fine.

**Elizabeth:** I was like his older companion that would travel with him.

**Isaac:** Elizabeth was 42 at the time.

**Elizabeth:** No, I am two years older than Isaac.

**Craig:** I’m always fascinated to hear these stories about that particular time when people come out here because it just reminds me of when it was me. And it was the same thing. I had just turned 21. Got in my car, drove out here. And everything that happens to you is so vivid. And even now it is still so vivid to me the people you meet, the meetings you had, and the fact that you were late for one. And I still think about it. Getting lost in the Paramount lot, trying to find parking.

**Isaac:** Yeah. All the time.

**Craig:** Everything that happens to you in the first year is so vivid and so panicky.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And sweaty, and terrible, and wonderful. And I just love the – did you have the, because you went to–

**John:** Oh, absolutely.

**Craig:** I only ask if it’s different for you because you were here at USC. So there was kind of already a little bit of a connection.

**John:** There was a little bit more structure around you, but it was still the random people you’d meet out at drinks became important, or not important, or the sense that like, “Oh, that person who I just met now has a giant TV show. And they were just like – I was buying them a drink last week.”

**Craig:** I know. And then you start to analyze. You’re constantly analyzing. OK, what did they do? How did they do it? Why didn’t it happen for me? What’s going on? What do I do? What am I missing? All this thinking, right?

Then, I’m just jumping ahead a little bit. We’ll get back to it. Then you guys end up where you guys are now and you go, “All of that wasted thinking.”

**Elizabeth:** Yeah. The anxiety.

**Isaac:** I know.

**Craig:** Because none of it was really important at all.

**Isaac:** But it’s so important at the time. Every meeting is so important.

**Craig:** Every choice you make. Everything you wear. Everything you say. Everything you do, where you go.

**Isaac:** It’s exhausting.

**Craig:** It’s exhausting. I know, I love it.

**John:** So, you write this script. So Bob Cort is going to be producing this thing. It goes to representatives first, or it goes out on the town? What was the process for that?

**Elizabeth:** Reps first.

**Isaac:** Managers first, yeah.

**John:** So you sign a manager off of that, and then an agent? Or what was the process?

**Isaac:** Yeah. We signed with our manager who is still is our manager to this day, Aaron Brown, who was at Industry Entertainment at the time. And that was like December of 2009, I want to say. And then first thing in the New Year they sent it out to agents and we took meetings, because they wanted us to have a team before they sent it out as a spec. So then we signed with Verve, who was a brand new agency at the time.

**Craig:** Verve.

**Isaac:** Then they sent it out really wide and everybody had really high hopes for it. And we were like, “Oh my god, this is incredible.”

**Elizabeth:** “We’re huge writers.”

**Isaac:** We did it! And it did not sell, of course. But what did happen is we took a ton of generals off of it. They did a great job getting every single person to read that script. And it had enough kind of heat that everybody talked about it. And so we were able just to go out and meet so many people.

**Craig:** That does actually take the sting away. I mean, there’s certain outcomes in this business are final outcomes. A movie opens, it bombs, final outcome. Wah-wah. But those things, I’m sure it was kind of a rough weekend maybe, you know, but then suddenly you have these meetings. People are like, “I loved it. I loved it. I love what you guys do. I love your writing.” They start telling you what you do well,
whether they’re right or not.

And then jobs occur. I assume jobs occurred?

**Elizabeth:** Yeah, and it’s healthy psychologically too, because even though you’re not making any money, you’re at least like I’m in the industry. I’m going to meetings. I’m talking to people. And it makes you feel like you’re on your way to something as opposed to just waiting around.

**Craig:** So a little pro tip for people that are looking to exploit young people arriving in Hollywood, it’s validity that we are so desperate for more than anything. We want validation. We’re so, so desperate for it. And there is an entire psychological maelstrom that is going on in our heads during that time. So it was good that you guys got that. It kind of got you back on the horse.

**Elizabeth:** Yes.

**Craig:** And then jobs.

**Isaac:** And then jobs.

**John:** So I was in the same situation with Go. So like Go went out and everyone read and is like, “This is fantastic. We’ll never make this movie. But write us something that’s like this but that we can actually make.” And so you were getting – I suspect you went into a lot of meetings where it was like the water bottle tour of Los Angeles and you’re chatting about stuff, they like your thing, and they pull out this little card that has all the projects that they’re looking to make.

**Isaac:** Yep.

**John:** And then you go back in and you try to pitch on one of those. Was that the next step for you?

**Isaac:** Yeah. We made so many mistakes.

**Elizabeth:** Because you just want to be working, so you’re just like “I’ll do that one, and I’ll do that one, and I’ll do that one,” and you’re not really thinking it through very carefully. And it’s something that we had to learn was don’t say yes to everything. Like even if it feels like that will move things faster, it actually moves things slower because you end up committing to a bunch of stuff that is sort of half-baked and that you’re not that passionate about.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** What was the first thing you were paid to write?

**Isaac:** The first thing we were paid to write. We were only really pursuing feature stuff, but through the director David Dobkin, because we had sent him Pemberton to direct, he had a pilot that Neustadter and Weber wrote called Friends with Benefits that went to series on NBC. So we weren’t like formally staffing but Jeff Kleeman, who was Dobkin’s exec at the time, really liked our writing and said you guys
should come to the show. You’d be great for the show.

So Ira Ungerleider, who was the showrunner, met us. And it was our first ever staffing meeting, because that wasn’t what we were doing. We were so scared. We were terrified. And he tried to intimidate us a little to see if we could handle a writer’s room. And we got that job. So that was in the spring of 2010. And that was our first – that was our Writers Guild job.

**Craig:** So Kleeman is responsible for this.

**Isaac:** Kleeman, yeah.

**Craig:** That guy is great.

**Isaac:** He is. He’s the best.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah. We love him.

**Craig:** Does he still run the Ellen DeGeneres Company?

**Isaac:** I believe so.

**Craig:** I love that guy.

**John:** Great. So suddenly you’re staffed on a TV show in its first season, correct?

**Isaac:** Yes.

**John:** And it ran 13 episodes?

**Isaac:** 13 episodes.

**John:** Great. So you’re figuring out how to write a half hour. You’re figuring out how to put all that stuff together. And that was a single-camera half hour, correct?

**Elizabeth:** Yes.

**John:** So it was still within the realm of experience of what you’d actually written before. So it was like your script probably.

**Elizabeth:** Yes.

**Isaac:** But it was still scary.

**Elizabeth:** But the experience of being in a room was so different and so terrifying. And we were with real seasoned veterans. I don’t think either of us said a word for about 14 days. And finally Ira called us into his office and was like “You guys deserve to be here. I need you start speaking.”

And then we were like, “OK, OK, OK.” And then we came back the next day and we started to talk.

**Craig:** And then you started speaking. And I bet everybody was like, “Wait, where did these two come from?” Well, because that’s kind of the way it works. I remember definitely being intimidated by everybody that had done the job before because they all seemed very relaxed. And I was not relaxed ever.

**Isaac:** Right.

**Craig:** And over time I started to realize that a lot of them really it’s just that they were relaxed. They actually didn’t have anything else of value to offer. They were just super comfortable sitting. And then I thought, you know what, I think I can do this. I think I can write. I just need to be relaxed now. And then I got it made. So I just had to work on relaxing my body.

**John:** Can we talk about some finances during this early period because–

**Craig:** Do you have receipts?

**Isaac:** Are you going to audit us?

**John:** Absolutely. So you guys had moved out here straight from college. Obviously your expectations of living standards were low because you had just come out from college. So you guys are living separately in the same building. You’re making kind of no money, and then when you start working you’re splitting a salary. Was it lean those first– ?

**Elizabeth:** Oh yes. Yes. Isaac found me an apartment that I couldn’t quite afford, which was a one-bedroom apartment which had like a living area and the bedroom off of it. And we were like, well now I need a roommate, but I don’t have another bedroom. So we found the one person in Los Angeles, this lovely girl named Sara Randazzo who was like, “That’s OK. I’ll live here and I’ll build a wall out of bookcases.” So I basically had this girl living behind shelves with me.

**Isaac:** It was so dangerous.

**Craig:** In earthquake country.

**Isaac:** Yeah. Like nine-foot-tall IKEA Billy Bookcases that were not secured in any way to the wall. Just like waiting to go down on her.

**Elizabeth:** And then I had my freelance gossip job, which I actually could just pay my rent with, which was good once I was splitting it with Sara. But we did not have a lot of – when you were saying that you remember things so vividly, it’s those meals that we would eat are so clear in my mind like with what we would have.

**Craig:** What was your go to?

**Elizabeth:** The two of us combined. I just remember a night of broccoli with breadcrumbs.

**Isaac:** And marinara. Every night. Frozen Trader Joe’s.

**Elizabeth:** Frozen pudding.

**Isaac:** What’s frozen pudding?

**Elizabeth:** I feel like Isaac is pretending he doesn’t know what this is.

**Craig:** There’s frozen pudding?

**Elizabeth:** OK, I think it was pudding and then berries that were–

**Isaac:** Frozen berries that you microwave on pudding. Yeah, yeah.

**Elizabeth:** I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Because they don’t really sell frozen pudding. By the way, they should.

**Isaac:** That sounds delicious.

**John:** Well, there’s pudding pops.

**Elizabeth:** Right.

**Craig:** Yeah. But we can’t talk about pudding pops anymore.

**Elizabeth:** No, it was just pudding and frozen berries.

**Craig:** I remember when I first moved out here I got an apartment in North Hollywood, near the high school, and this is in 1992 when it was bad. Like a guy literally was murdered outside my window. I’m not joking. Like they knocked on my door in the morning. “Did you hear the murder?” And I’m like I didn’t hear the murder. What happened? There was a murder?

And so I had a friend of mine from college who was sharing the apartment with me. And he was Korean-American. He had Korean relatives. And they would just give us this huge industrial shipping crate full of ramen. And that’s what we just – [name of ramen]. That’s what it was. It was like, oh, it was the best. Like five days in a row, awesome. Day six, you’re like, oh man, no.

And where was this apartment building?

**Isaac:** Now it’s really cool. Back then it was East Hollywood adjacent. Now it’s where Sqirl is and all those cool places on Virgil.

**Craig:** This is how it goes.

**Isaac:** Nothing was there when we were there.

**Craig:** But you know, like in New York, too, I mean, it’s insane.

**Elizabeth:** Oh yeah, how different, yeah.

**Craig:** Crazy.

**Elizabeth:** Crazy. Even when we lived in New York, we were on 6th Street between—

**Isaac:** Fifth and B.

**Craig:** Oh, Alphabet City.

**Elizabeth:** And it was just starting to be an OK neighborhood when we were there.

**Craig:** Because when I was a kid you literally couldn’t – Rent – the whole point was like we can live in a building here and light barrels on fire. Like, no you can’t, not anymore.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah. Now it’s so fancy. Now it’s so trendy.

**Isaac:** When we were there a guy died on a bench outside of our building. It was still like that a little.

**Craig:** Death bench.

**Isaac:** Yeah, death bench. It’s still there.

**Craig:** It’s still there. Sorry John.

**John:** No, so you guys were going through – you were working on this show, you were splitting a salary. So I just want to make sure everyone is clear that you guys were splitting one writer’s income. You were paying a manager and an agent and a lawyer.

**Isaac:** And a lawyer.

**Craig:** That’s 25% right there.

**Isaac:** I mean, you can look it up. Back then it was like $3,500 a week minus 25%, split. And it’s for 20 weeks, because it’s a 13-episode show.

**Craig:** And then taxes.

**Isaac:** And then taxes. And you have to pay your Writers Guild initiation which is a lot.

**Craig:** And they found you for that one, didn’t they?

**Isaac:** Oh, they find you right away.

**Elizabeth:** I feel like you have to pay it before you start getting paid.

**Isaac:** Before you get health insurance.

**Elizabeth:** You have to pay it so quickly.

**Craig:** You do. I mean, that was the first thing – that’s how I knew for sure that I’d been hired was that Corinne Tippin from the Writers Guild called me.

**Isaac:** I know. And they keep calling and calling. One guy, another staff writer on our show who was also new was like dodging it, like dodging the draft. He was determined not to – he was going to go to Canada and cut off a finger.

**Craig:** They will garnish your wages.

**John:** They will find you. So, these 13 weeks pass. That show only went one season, correct?

**Elizabeth:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And so what happens next? Do you immediately start trying to staff for another show? Were you guys writing a feature?

**Isaac:** So by that point we had met Dan Fogelman who we share a manager with. He was on the set of Crazy Stupid Love and had a lot of downtime and was looking to read new writers. So our mutual manager sent him that script, Lauren Pemberton, and he really liked it. And so we met up for a drink and he was like, we hit it off, and he said, “I would love to produce your next thing.”

So we started developing a movie that we were going to send to him to produce, and simultaneously we saw on Deadline an article about an MTV show called I Just Want My Pants Back that we thought sounded very cool. And we were both desperate to go back to New York at that point. It was filming in
Brooklyn.

We went to our representatives and said we want to go up for this cable show. And they were like, you’re crazy, you’re getting off of an NBC show. It was different.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah, now there’s no stigma like that. But back then–

**Craig:** But then still it mattered.

**Isaac:** They were like, no, you’re on a network show. You stay in network.

**Craig:** Because streaming hadn’t muddled anything.

**Isaac:** Right. It wasn’t a thing yet. So there was this clear definition. But we really pushed them on it and we said it’s Doug Liman and we want to work with him. We believe in the show. And we got that job. And so then we packed up, after being here not that long, and moved back to New York to do that.

**John:** I never saw the show, but I can imagine a show produced by Doug Liman was chaotic.

**Isaac:** It was so chaotic.

**Elizabeth:** It was chaotic, but it was amazing for us because they kept Isaac and I on. We wrote all of those first and then they shot the show. And they kept us along with the showrunner to be sort of the onset presences. And it was so – it was all on location throughout Brooklyn with Doug grabbing the camera on the fly and sort of running around filming. And for us it was just like this incredible crash course in production.

**John:** That was probably the best part of it. Because doing a normal 13-episode show, there’s a whole bunch of people whose job it is to do that stuff. And with a Doug Liman production, I can tell you that your job is to do all the stuff – pick up all the pieces that fell on the floor.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah.

**John:** In the best possible way. So that was probably as much film school as your NYU experience was.

**Isaac:** Yeah. The budget on the show was so low, so we would film two units simultaneously. So the showrunner, David Rosen, would go with kind of the main whatever bigger scene was happening. But then we would be left with this whole unit and we had never been on a set before. We didn’t know
what we were doing.

And one night we were with Doug. He’s friends with so many people. He had convinced them to turn off the power. We were doing a blackout episode. So we turned off the power in a big chunk of Greenpoint. And I was alone with Doug. I was like 22 or 23. And trying to give him a note on a scene in the pitch
black. And he doesn’t want to hear it from this dumb kid. And I’m like how am I being entrusted with this right now.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** That’s kind of how it works. No one really can prepare you for these moments because they just happen. And when they happen, honestly, I do believe those are the moments where people either stay or go. I really believe it. That at some point the school is over and the safety is over. And then something happens and you are put in a crucible. And I remember my crucible like that was – I was working for this ad agency. It was before I wrote any scripts or anything. And this is when networks used to do fall campaigns. And I was 22. And my job was to write every single thing that every single CBS primetime

star was going to say. And then I had to go into all of their trailers and convince them. They didn’t want to be there. They didn’t want to do it. They were forced.

Had to convince them to do it. Rewrite it if it needed to be. Do it all day. And I’m talking like Candice Bergen, William Shatner, Dick Van Dyke – William Shatner was, no shock, the weirdest one. Angela Lansbury. The best.

**Isaac:** That’s a good one.

**Craig:** She was the greatest. I learned a lot. I learned so much. And that was I think a day where when it was over I’m like, wait, they let me do that?

**Isaac:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s insane. I love that you guys just jumped in like that and did it. It was so smart of you to not
stay safe.

**Elizabeth:** Uh, yeah. You kind of have no choice in those moments. But, yeah, for us it was the best time. It was like film school, except on the streets of NYC making this little show.

**Craig:** I love it.

**Elizabeth:** It was cool.

**John:** So it was a phenomenal hit and of course got like 19 seasons.

**Elizabeth:** [laughs] Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Once again, the show killers.

**Isaac:** Exactly.

**Elizabeth:** We brought our magic touch.

**Isaac:** Just did our 12 and out. Yeah.

**Craig:** You guys are ratings round-ups.

**John:** You guys were able to come back to Los Angeles, and were you on another show after that? What was the next step for you?

**Isaac:** So we had a good experience with MTV, so they wanted to keep us in the fold. So they had a couple new shows at the time and we wound up going on this show called Zack Stone is Gonna Be Famous, this little whiz kid Bo Burnham who was a YouTube star/comedian. He’s so talented.

**Craig:** Really funny guy.

**Isaac:** Created – he’s a genius. And so we did that for – that was really short. That was like a few months.

**Elizabeth:** It was really short.

**Isaac:** Which was a ton of fun.

**Craig:** And you guys killed that show.

**Elizabeth:** We killed that. Quickly.

**Isaac:** Killed that show. Brought that one down. Three shows in under two years we killed.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** You guys did what you do.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah, we brought our little touch.

**Isaac:** Sprinkled our death dust all over it.

**Craig:** By the way, I mean, there is kind of a point though that unlike directing, and I think acting to this, writing – there is – it’s not the show succeeding… – I mean, hits are hits, and they’re wonderful for you, obviously. But you don’t die because the show dies. If you work and you’re responsible and you do good work, they kind of just keep the writers going.

**Isaac:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which I think is great.

**John:** So you’re plowing through, killing shows.

**Isaac:** Just taking them down.

**John:** At what point are you back in Los Angeles full-time working?

**Elizabeth:** That was back in LA. So we did Zack Stone. And then after Zack Stone, Dan Fogelman created The Neighbors, this alien sitcom on ABC.

**Craig:** Which you killed.

**Elizabeth:** We did two seasons on The Neighbors.

**John:** Wow.

**Elizabeth:** That was huge for us.

**Isaac:** Kept that one on life support for a while.

**Elizabeth:** So that was a lot of fun.

**Craig:** But that show ultimately could not withstand your participation.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah.

**Isaac:** Dan elevated it enough that he squeaked out two years as we tried to bring it down.

**John:** Can we talk through your credits, basically what you’re credited onscreen for these things, because it seems odd – so you started in on this first show as staff writers?

**Elizabeth:** Staff writers.

**John:** And then for I Just Want My Pants Back, were you still staff writers? Or what was your credit?

**Isaac:** We were still staff writers.

**John:** Even though you were basically–

**Isaac:** That’s the hardest bump to get.

**Elizabeth:** Yes. It’s a hard bump. And also there were only like four writers on that show. And they were looking for staff writers. That was the only position we went up for.

**Isaac:** What we did get, pro tip for anyone who is listening, for young writers: we were able to negotiate script fees, which is a thing I don’t think people know to ask for. But if you’ve been a staff writer and you’re returning and you’re willing to not take the bump, they’ll sometimes give you script fees, which is a big deal.

**John:** So as a staff writer on a TV series, their staff writer salary that they’re paying you normally would include one or two script fees?

**Isaac:** It’s however many you write until it exceeds what you’ve been paid as a staff writer.

**John:** So essentially you have to be paid scale for the script you’re writing unless the salary they’ve already paid you would be more than that scale.

**Isaac:** So, for example, on Friends with Benefits, we wrote three episodes of the show. But that did not exceed our total pay, so those were totally free scripts. Whereas another writer would have gotten $25,000 to $30,000 for those.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So getting paid your actual script fee on top of your staff writer salary is a great thing to negotiate.

**Isaac:** It’s a big deal. It really helps.

**Craig:** Fresh cash as we call it in Hollywood. Fresh cash.

**John:** Talking up through the hierarchy of titles for television, so you start as a staff writer. You got bumped up to story editor at some point? Or you skipped over that step?

**Elizabeth:** We skipped that. On Zack Stone we were Executive Story Editors.

**John:** Fancy ESE.

**Isaac:** ESE.

**Elizabeth:** It was huge.

**Isaac:** That’s the weirdest title in all of Hollywood.

**Elizabeth:** All of them are sort of bizarre.

**Isaac:** Executive Story Editor.

**John:** Does that actually mean anything different? Or that was just a different title?

**Isaac:** No.

**Elizabeth:** No.

**John:** OK. A lot of people will go from Story Editor to just Producer.

**Isaac:** It goes Co-Producer. There’s so many of them. Co-Producer. Producer. Supervising Producer. Co-Executive Producer. Executive Producer. And then Consulting Producer is this wild card title that nobody understands.

**John:** Consulting Producer is often a person who was an experienced producer from some other show who is being helicoptered in to do a little bit of work on something.

**Elizabeth:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** All right. So, quickly can you talk us through some of the other shows you worked on to get up to where you are now?

**Isaac:** Yeah. So we did two years on The Neighbors with Fogelman, then we jumped over to – we wanted to work with Jason Katims. We were big fans. And he had About a Boy. So we jumped on to that for the second season of the show. And then after that we talk an overall deal to work at 20th and that landed us on Grandfathered, which was the John Stamos sitcom, which was a lot of fun. That Fogelman also produced.

And then from that, This is Us came along. And we jumped over to drama.

**John:** Great. So Fogelman, Katims, you’re sort of bouncing back and forth between the two of these sort of showrunner-y producers. At what point were you not just the folks brought in to sort of help along?

At what point were you more sort of fundamentally involved in the overall direction of a first season? Does that make sense?

**Isaac:** Yeah. I mean, I think we’ve been really lucky where most of the showrunners we’ve worked for were real mentors, starting with Ira. He was on the original Friends when he was very young. So he took a real interest in us and would let us sit in on notes calls. And he would send us off to go try to write a draft without a lot of help just to like push us.

And then Dan was the same way. He really sort of helped grow us and gave us a lot of scripts to write. Would send us to set and send us into editing by ourselves, sort of giving us increasing responsibility, both I think because he’s awesome and was a mentor, and also because I do think at a certain point we showed we could do it and it would make his life easier.

**Craig:** Let me just give you a little insight into this. Dan is a great guy. So I’m not denying that he was being generous and mentoring. However, to have people you can rely on, I mean, if I can say, “OK, I have 14 million things to do today, I am petrified. There’s no one I can trust – oh, no wait, I’ve got Elizabeth. I’ve got Isaac. Hey, you guys, I have a great opportunity for you.”

I mean, it is the most rare and precious thing. This is how you get ahead. How do you get ahead in Hollywood? By being someone that other people can rely on in their moment of need. And every moment that they have is a moment of need.

**Elizabeth:** It’s really true. And we see it now as showrunners. Like if you have that person that you’re like please rewrite this scene for me while we go into editing and it can be done when you get out, it’s the best. It’s like a hug. It’s like really the best feeling ever.

**Craig:** Comfort.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah.

**John:** To what degree are you guys together as one brain – to what degree can you guys split apart and just do your own separate things? Because that’s a real challenge with writing partners is the degree to which “Are they one person or are they two people that can be used?”

**Elizabeth:** In television, we were pretty much together all the time until we became showrunners of This is Us. And then it’s just too massive for it to be possible. So it was actually pretty new for us to be like, “OK, you rewrite this script, I’ll be in editing. I’ll see you in four hours.” But it’s just sort of the nature of the show.

**Isaac:** Yeah. We kind of had to rethink the whole way we work together. Because now it’s like we come in a little early, we have a morning meeting and make a plan for the day, and then usually we go off and don’t even necessarily see each other until dinner.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Isaac:** It’s sad.

**Elizabeth:** But not all the time. I mean, there will be moments where we’ll both have four hours in the writer’s room and that’s fantastic. But just when it gets crazy.

**Craig:** See, the more successful you get, the less time you have to do your job.

**Isaac:** Yes.

**Craig:** And do it the way you like doing it.

**Elizabeth:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s really frustrating.

**Isaac:** There’s so many emails.

**Craig:** There’s so many emails.

**Isaac:** There’s so many. You could do email all day.

**Craig:** Listen, this is my first deal with it now because of this miniseries. Every morning when I’m here, because they’re all in Europe. Every morning I wake up and there’s 40 emails about – and it’s not about any of the things I’m used to talking about, like writing. It’s all like “This wig, is this OK, and this person has decided to move this scout to this…”

It’s a lot.

**Elizabeth:** It’s a lot.

**Craig:** So much. So it’s good that you have two of you.

**Elizabeth:** I know. And Isaac does those well. Thank god.

**Craig:** Well, yes, it’s Isaac, it’s you, it’s Dan. So maybe I’ll just take one of them.

**John:** Pull one away.

**Isaac:** It really is a multi-person job.

**John:** What happens when you guys don’t agree?

**Isaac:** It happens, but it’s not that prominent.

**Elizabeth:** It’s pretty rare. I mean, it would only be related to a script and then we can usually compromise.

**Isaac:** Usually if it’s like we really – it’s whoever is more passionate wins, it tends to be. Like, if Elizabeth feels really strongly about something and I feel sort of strongly, she’s probably right because she cares about this particular point more. That’s usually how it goes.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah. But we don’t have disagreements on like this is the correct way to have a meeting or anything like that. It’s always like very nuanced debates that then, like Isaac said, one person will be like, “All right, you seem to care about this.”

**John:** Now, with This is Us you’ve not managed to kill the show yet. It’s actually incredibly successful.

**Elizabeth:** We’ve been trying. [laughs]

**John:** So can you talk us through the development of an episode of This is Us? And so let’s say it’s not the first episode of the season but episode three. What does that look like? What is the process of going from, “OK, this is the blue sky sense of this is what’s going to happen in this episode” to the room, the board, the outline, the writing of the episode? Like what is that process of figuring out episode three of
the show?

**Elizabeth:** Sure. Well, we break everything as a group. So we would say, all right, this is episode three. We know generally where we’re going in the season by the time we’re up to sort of doing one at a time. And then we just figure it out really as a room for a few days. And sort of slowly start putting down scene by scene what everything is going to be until one writer is ready to go off and do it.

**John:** Are you doing act breaks first? What is the process for This is Us?

**Isaac:** No, on This is Us, it’s weird, the act breaks are not that important. There’s so many stories and an episode is so tricky that a lot of times we completely restructure the episode in post. So we really – we keep the stories all pretty separate and break them and then blend them together. And what’s really important on This is Us, because it jumps through so many times, is finding the transitions between scenes when you’re jumping from past to present so it feels cohesive. So those we look for.

And we do break it with acts, of course.

**Elizabeth:** But we’ll do that later. So we’ll think like, “OK, here are five great Kate beats for our story.” And then once we’ve done that with everyone then we start organizing them and sort of thinking, “OK, this will be an artful way to go from this present day story to this past story.” But that’s sort of next layer.

**John:** So how you’re moving back and forth between them, that’s still done as the group?

**Isaac:** Yes.

**John:** On the big board. That’s not the individual writer who is responsible for the script? He or she will come in knowing like this is the plan at least for how we’re going to get between these two stories?

**Elizabeth:** Exactly. Not that there aren’t occasionally things that are found in a cool way once you’re off. But we try and lock those things down, just because the show is so complicated that the more someone goes off with the more chance they have of being successful.

**John:** Are both of you in the room while these things are happening? Who is responsible for that whole process? And how many writers are in the room as you’re going through this big thing on the board?

**Isaac:** There’s ten writers.

**John:** That’s a huge show.

**Isaac:** Yeah, it is. Because it gets small so fast, because once you get into production someone is always on set, someone is always in prep, someone is always writing. And all of a sudden your ten writers, it’s like “Who works here?”

**Craig:** It’s like three.

**Isaac:** During preproduction we’re both there because there’s nothing going on. Once it gets up and running it’s usually one of us, because there’s set and editing and content meetings and director meetings and so much going on. And then Dan is very involved in the show, extremely. He’ll come in, you know, he’ll come in and hear every story before it goes off to script. And he’ll give extensive notes. He loves editing. He lives there a lot. So he bounces around. But he’s super involved.

**Craig:** And then you just kind of together are on this hamster wheel that moves along. I mean, because how many episodes we’re talking?

**Isaac:** We do 18 a year.

**Craig:** So it’s like slightly under the traditional massive number of network episodes, but it is still far more than the length, so last week I was talking with Alec Berg on the show. So Alec does Barry, he does Silicon Valley. I think they do eight, maybe ten. Maybe?

**Elizabeth:** Yeah. We get so jealous when we hear this.

**Craig:** I know. And it’s like Robert King, because somebody was talking about just how rough it was schedule wise on their show because, I don’t know, the cable network had decided to go from 10 to 12. And he was like, “Oh, did they?”

**Isaac:** Oh, really, boo-hoo. I know. I love that The Good Wife owned that for their award campaign. They were like we make 22.

**Craig:** That’s a very Robert thing to say and do. But he’s right. And 18 is a lot. I mean, it’s a lot.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah. It gets pretty crazy. Because what did we do, we aired 10 in a row this last season. There’s a point where it just becomes you’re just racing against the clock. You’re trying to finish one script and you’re trying to edit something that goes on television in a day.

**Craig:** It gets a little scary I would think, you know, just that thing of, “Wait, is this good anymore? Because we’re going so fast.” But it’s good that you have each other.

When they talk about – I don’t know if they discuss the economics of all this with you, but it used to be that it was really simple. They would do 22 episodes on network television a season. And the whole point was you did 22 a season. Roughly at the end of the fifth season you had enough to syndicate and
everything else after that is – but they don’t really syndicate anything anymore. It’s very hard to rerun shows that are highly serialized like This is Us. So why do you have to do 18 episodes?

**Isaac:** NBC just wants – that’s the number. They want more. But, yeah, the 100 episode thing is not really relevant anymore. Our show is presold into syndication. Hulu bought it domestically right away. And internationally it’s different places. But the whole model is so different. Because, yeah, like you said, with a show where it’s so serialized, it’s not like you pop on an SVU and it’s contained.

**Craig:** No, you’ve got to basically binge seasons.

**Isaac:** So in that sense for the streaming services it’s really valuable because it just keeps you going.

**Craig:** Yeah. My daughter has definitely started mainlining This is Us. She’s all about it.

**John:** So while you guys were doing a TV show, you’re very, very busy. So I think you should add features on top of all this. So let’s talk through some feature stuff, because two weeks ago you had Love, Simon come out, which is fantastic. Congratulations. But why do features on top of TV? What’s the motivation?

**Elizabeth:** I don’t know.

**Isaac:** We’re crazy.

**Elizabeth:** No, I think it’s so different to write a movie. You have this space to create and to write. And it just is such different pace. And we really love it that we kind of can’t resist.

**Isaac:** It’s so nice to write something with an ending also. I mean, network television goes on. You just have to find an engine to keep things going. Just a story that’s two hours and it has a beginning and a middle and an end is so satisfying.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s why I still like – I just never think about true serialized television because I don’t know what the ending is. I’m just dumb. I need to know how it ends. I don’t know what to do otherwise.

**Isaac:** Right. I know. I’m so jealous of what you’re doing. I would love to write a miniseries. Like Big Little Lies. Just that whole kind of template is so cool.

**Craig:** Do it. I mean, do it. You guys can do whatever you want.

**Isaac:** One day.

**John:** When you’re not busy. So talk us through Love, Simon. How does Love, Simon come to you? So it’s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. This book comes into your orbit. What was the process of getting Love, Simon together?

**Elizabeth:** Sure. The producers at Temple Hill brought us the book. And we love those guys. We’ve wanted to work with them on something before and it just had never sort of materialized. They brought us the book and we were sort of like, “Oh, we’re really busy in TV. I don’t know if we want to do this.” And then we read it and we loved the book. And we also then learned that there had never been a major studio movie with a gay teen lead like this before.

**Craig:** I love that they had to learn that. It’s actually a really good sign though.

**Isaac:** It seemed crazy to me.

**Elizabeth:** We thought it was nuts.

**Craig:** When we moved out here if somebody said “You realize there’s never been a gay teen – yeah, no, we realize that. There’s never been gay people onscreen.”

**Elizabeth:** We were like how could that be true?

**Isaac:** We didn’t believe it. Yeah.

**Elizabeth:** But there’s been these amazing smaller movies, but there just hasn’t been this before. And we were just like we want to do that. That feels like that should be done, and we couldn’t resist doing it.

**John:** All right. So you read the book. You figure out your take on it. It’s a Fox/2000 project. You go in, you say like we’re the ones to do this. How are you stacking this work on top of TV work that you’re doing. Because this was before This is Us, I assume?

**Isaac:** Yes. We were on Grandfathered at the time. And it worked out nicely. We were a little bit on the show when we started writing it, but what’s so great about network TV is it does move so fast that you have a few months off. You have a hiatus. You’re killing yourself for eight or nine, 10 on This is US, months of the year, and then you have a couple months to do other stuff. So we wrote that on hiatus from Grandfathered before we went onto This is Us.

I mean, we’ve written a bunch of assignments, and this one was so just charmed. Elizabeth Gabler and Erin Siminoff at 2000 got it. They wanted to make the movie right away before anyone was involved. They said we’re going to shoot this in the spring. Let’s get a director and just do it.

**Craig:** See, it’s one of those movies you can’t stop.

**Elizabeth:** We’ve never had anything like that.

**Craig:** And you won’t again, by the way.

**Elizabeth:** We don’t think so.

**Craig:** I’m serious. But when it happens, it’s crazy. It’s amazing. And not always, by the way, does it mean that the movie is going to be any good, so in this case like everything lines up. That’s fantastic. Are you now sort of tempted to – well, I don’t want to get you in trouble or anything, but it’s fun writing movies isn’t it?

**John:** You guys are doing another Temple Hill thing which I don’t know if it’s announced yet.

**Isaac:** We’re doing John Green’s new book, Turtles All the Way Down with them and 2000, because we just had such a good experience.

**Craig:** Keeping the band together. I love that.

**Isaac:** Keeping the band together. And we’re trying to find something else with Greg Berlanti who was phenomenal.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Terrific.

**John:** Turtles is going to be a really tough adaptation. I don’t know where you guys are at in it, but I read that over the Christmas break. And it’s just delightful writing but it’s so incredibly internal to her experience. And so good luck externalizing some of that stuff.

**Isaac:** Thank you. We just started.

**Elizabeth:** Thank you. That is obviously the biggest challenge of it is it’s such a beautiful book, and how do you take a thought disorder essentially and make it cinematic. So in even thinking about should we do this/can we do this that’s obviously the number one challenge. But we’re excited. We have plans that we hope will go well.

**Craig:** Here’s what you should not do. I’m obsessed with Dune, David Lynch’s Dune. I just have this thing about it. I love it. And one of the things I love about it is it what you shouldn’t do, but it is fascinating and I talk about it every now and then because I just think it’s so bizarre. When people think things in his movie they do their own voiceover while he’s on their face. So they’re having a discussion, like we’re
talking, and then suddenly I’ll stop talking and the camera is still on me and then you will hear me go, “He doesn’t understand.” It’s the craziest decision that’s ever been made in movies and I love it so much. Don’t do that.

**Elizabeth:** OK. We won’t do it that way.

**John:** I don’t think that’s going to work for you. The other challenge, and so I’m not trying to make your road more difficult ahead of you, but obviously what you’re going to see here is that the book sets up an expectation that it’s going to be a mystery that’s solved in a classic way and it’s not solved in a classic way at all. So you guys are going to have to do some work that you’re not going to get credit for in a weird way in terms of like honoring our expectations of like what’s supposed to be happening in a movie versus what happens in the book, and because the book is so successful you also have to meet everyone’s expectations about this is what happens in the book.

**Craig:** He’s telling you to quit.

**John:** I’m not telling you to quit.

**Elizabeth:** I think it’s the challenge of an adaptation is how do you preserve what’s so beautiful about a book, but also make it your own in a way that strengthens it for the screen but still preserves what’s incredible.

**John:** Absolutely. And some of the John Green books have been just remarkably good transitions. Neustadter and Weber did a fantastic job. So just do what they did.

**Elizabeth:** We’re going to try.

**Craig:** Do you know those guys by the way?

**Isaac:** Yeah. We do. Weber sent us a very sweet email like, “Welcome to the John Green adaptation club. Good luck. That’s awesome.”

**Craig:** They are the best guys.

**Isaac:** They’re the best.

**Elizabeth:** They’re the best. It’s actually, it’s kind of a funny story. But when Fault in our Stars first came out, Isaac and I read it. And we were like, “Oh my god, we love this so much. We would love to write this so much.” And we kind of knew, but we didn’t have all the information that they were talking to other people. And they were kind of far along. We didn’t know how far along they were. We wrote 20 pages of
The Fault in our Stars.

**Isaac:** In one night.

**Elizabeth:** Because we were going in to meet with Temple Hill. So we were like what else do we have, we have to try. And we went in and we had our 20 pages. And we meet with Wyck Godfrey and he was like, “Guys, I can’t read that.”

**Craig:** By the way, good for Wyck.

**Isaac:** He felt so bad.

**Craig:** Marty would have absolutely read it.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah, Marty would have. But he was like heartbroken for us. But he was like, “Guys, we pretty much hired these guys. And even if we hadn’t, it’s illegal for me to read that.”

And we were like, “OK.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Marty would have had them writing the other 80 pages.

**Isaac:** I’m like, great, it’s already a quarter done.

**Craig:** Yeah, keep going.

**Elizabeth:** But it worked out because obviously those guys did an incredible job, and I think we were so heartbreaking that Temple Hill remembered us and came to us down the line.

**Craig:** When you have some passion – again, what are people looking for? They’re looking for people that will comfort them. They’re looking for people that they know they can rely on. They’re looking for people with passion. And as it turns out, weirdly enough, I think 90% of the people that are trying to “make it” in this business don’t have that passion, aren’t comforting, aren’t the people you can rely on. If anything they’re here to kind of take.

There’s a lot of people that show up here looking to take, fame and money. And it doesn’t work that way. You guys did it the right way, which is fantastic.

**Isaac:** Thank you.

**John:** To circle stuff back around, so 13 years ago you sent through this email. If some kid were to send you that same email right now and write to you—

**Craig:** Delete.

**Elizabeth:** No, Isaac answers stuff.

**John:** What advice would you give him or her about sort of entering the industry now or sort of like what choices to make now because you guys are much closer to this than we were obviously? So, what advice would you give to a young kid applying to one of these film schools or thinking about how to get started in the industry?

**Isaac:** I actually just got asked this a couple days ago by a kid I used to babysit for who wants to be a writer. What I see so much right now is that people get so caught up with like how do I find an agent, how do I get a job, how do I become an assistant that they don’t leave themselves any time to write.
And so they’re great and they wind up in a position where they have all this access and all these people who are rooting for them and would love to read their script and they don’t have the script because all they’ve been doing is networking and getting writers lunch and all that stuff.

So I think you have to find a lifestyle that allows you time to write the thing and also meet the people who will read the thing. Because without both parts of the equation you’re not going to get there.

**Craig:** So, so true. And I got to tell you, I still don’t really know what networking is. I mean, I know what people describe as networking. I’ve never done it. I don’t know what it is. I didn’t do it when I got out here. I did my job during the day and then I would go home and write.

**Isaac:** Right. Exactly.

**Craig:** And other people were networking. But to what end? If you don’t have anything to show?

**Isaac:** If you don’t have a script no one can help you.

**Craig:** Congrats on your networking. That’s not a job. Really, your job is going places, having two drinks, and boring people with your talking. Which is, again, a wanting. It’s a need. I’m here to see what you can all do for me.

**Isaac:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And I was always just trying to write things to see what I could do for other people. You guys did it right.

**John:** Elizabeth, any other advice for that writer who is– ?

**Elizabeth:** Yes. I mean, tacking on to Isaac, I think it’s write as if someone is waiting for it. I mean, one of the things that was so incredible for us about having a partner is we would set deadlines for each other. And of course they didn’t really matter our deadlines, but we took them so seriously. So if I knew I had ten pages due the next day for Isaac I was staying up late and writing those pages. And he was doing the same.

And I think if you work as if someone is waiting for your work, at a certain point someone will be ready to read it and you just want to be ready for that moment.

**Craig:** Discipline.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Discipline.

**John:** All right. It’s come time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Love these guys.

**John:** Craig, start us off with your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** OK, my One Cool Thing. So, as everybody knows who listens to this podcast I’m a big crossword puzzle guy. There is a collection of crossword puzzles called Queer Qrosswords. I’m going to read their description. It’s a dynamic pack of 22 LGBTQ+ themed crosswords which you can get just by donating $10 or more to a LGBTQ+ charity like the ones listed below, and then they have things like the Trevor Project, and even broader ones like ACLU, and Immigration Equality, and so on and so forth.

I’m a friend of the LGBTQ+ community, but also really mostly I like crosswords. So, I chucked some dough at the ACLU, I got this pack. I’m about halfway through. I do a couple a day now. But there is – I think I’ve talked about Mark Halpin on this podcast before. He’s one of my favorite crossword constructors. And he does this amazing puzzle omnibus meta puzzle madness thing every Labor Day. He has a puzzle in this that is just spectacular. He’s so good at it. It’s really clever. It’s really smart. He’s very good with the meta stuff.

So if you like crossword puzzles, Queer Qrosswords. And this is the annoying part, but we’ll have a link. But it’s Queer and then Crosswords they spelled with a Q. I don’t like that. But it’s QueerQrosswords.com

**Isaac:** That’s tough.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t like it. That’s the one mistake they made. Otherwise, great pack. And, you know, it’s a good cause. $10 to help some people out.

**John:** Very nice. My One Cool Thing is taking Twitter off your phone while you’re on vacation. So I went to Japan for two weeks and I deleted Twitter off my phone and it was incredibly helpful. I find that if I have Twitter on my phone those dead moments I’ll just pull up Twitter and I’ll just become outraged. And it also keeps me too connected with my life here. So just deleting it off my phone, I still had it on my iPad so at night I could check Twitter. But it was great. And so I put a little pin at the top saying “Hey I’m going to be slow responding because I took Twitter off my phone.” And it was really good.

So I put Twitter back on my phone now that I’m back in Los Angeles, but I would just say when you take a vacation take a Twitter vacation as well. And it was a really good thing for me to do for these past two weeks, so I really enjoyed it.

**Craig:** Smart.

**John:** Do you guys have One Cool Things for us?

**Isaac:** Do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Elizabeth:** I have a similarly technology-based one to John’s. I’ve been doing this thing where I’ve told myself I’m not going to be embarrassed to just sit while I wait for someone to show up. Because usually I’m like – I look weird if I’m not on my phone. So even if I don’t want to be on my phone I’m on my phone. But now I’m like, no, I’m going to sit and that’s fine. Like I used to do before I had a cellphone. And you notice the world. Like you notice interactions that you haven’t noticed in a while.

**Craig:** You also have to figure out what to do with your arms.

**Elizabeth:** It’s very unnerving. I mean, I hate it right now. I’m still in the process where I’m trying to break myself out of feeling uncomfortable, but I think it’s good. It’s like we used to have those moments to sort of process things and now we don’t do them as much.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely true.

**John:** Isaac, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Isaac:** Well, related to that. A lot of people already know about this, but Elizabeth introduced me to it. This app called Headspace. It’s a guided meditation app. It is my favorite thing in the world. Do you guys talk about this on the show a lot?

**John:** These two weeks in place of Twitter I put Headspace in the same spot.

**Craig:** So this is me, just so you understand, like This is Us, This is Me. I have it. I have not used it. Every day it sends me a reminder. Get some headspace. Now I’m angry at Headspace.

**Isaac:** It’s making you anxious.

**Craig:** It’s actually making me anxious and angry.

**Isaac:** Oh, it’s so great.

**John:** Isaac, how long have you been doing Headspace?

**Isaac:** A couple of years now. Every day at lunch usually for 10 minutes. I lock the office door and try to get Elizabeth to do it with me, or she answers emails while I do it. But it’s so accessible. I’m not a meditation guy. I’m not a yoga guy. It’s like these fun cartoons. You get levels up like in a video game. And this guy Andy who invented it just has the best speaking voice I have ever heard.

**John:** It’s crazy how good it is.

**Isaac:** And if you’re ever stressed there’s these three minute packs. You just put it on and you just learn how to control your body. It’s great.

**John:** Yeah. The best metaphor that he sort of has done in these first two weeks I’ve done it is essentially there’s all these cars going by and you just notice the cars but you don’t try to hold on to the cars as they go by. And it’s really that same way with thoughts. That thought just went by and I don’t have to hold onto it. And it really is good for that because, you know, as writers we tend to be so worried about like that – what if that idea gets away from me? And it’s like, nope, just let it go.

**Isaac:** It’s the best.

**Craig:** And you’ve been doing it a while and it hasn’t stopped him from writing or anything like that. And he seems pretty well-adjusted.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He’s pretty well-adjusted? You’re the nervous one?

**Elizabeth:** Oh, Isaac? Well, the best is when we both – there are those rare times we’re both doing Headspace in our office, lying on the floor, and praying no one walks into the room.

**Isaac:** Our assistant doesn’t come in and be like, “Oh my god, where do I work?”

**Craig:** They’re sleeping again. Yeah.

**Elizabeth:** We’re pretty creepy.

**John:** Very cool. Guys, thank you so much for coming.

**Isaac:** Thanks for having us. This was great.

**Elizabeth:** Thank you so much.

**John:** Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Travis Newton. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the one Isaac asked.

For short questions, we’re on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. Are you guys on Twitter? Do you want people to tweet at you?

**Isaac:** @iaptaker.

**Elizabeth:** Oh yes. I’m @bergernight.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** She’s so proud and not proud.

**Isaac:** That’s also the name of her company.

**Elizabeth:** The fact that I have to spell both words doesn’t exactly make it roll off the tongue.

**Craig:** You miscalculated.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Berger Night.

**John:** You can find us spelled quite simply on Apple Podcasts for Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a comment. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. They go up about four days after the episode airs.

All the back episodes are at Scriptnotes.net. If you want to see things that Isaac and Elizabeth have made, you should watch This is Us, which you guys are about to go back into the room to start writing.

**Isaac:** Yeah. We’ll be back on September on NBC.

**Craig:** Yeah, get to work. My daughter demands it.

**John:** Love, Simon is in theaters right now. What else should they look for you having done?

**Isaac:** That’s pretty much all we have out this year.

**Elizabeth:** That’s it for now.

**Isaac:** Hopefully Turtles All the Way Down will be out in theaters in a couple years.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Guys, thank you so much. Bye.

**Elizabeth:** Thank you.

Links:

* Thanks for joining us, [Isaac Aptaker](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4170842/) and [Elizabeth Berger](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0074165/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1)!
* [Love, Simon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love,_Simon) is in theaters [now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0cbWdlQg_8)! Isaac and Elizabeth also run [This Is Us](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Us_(TV_series)) on [NBC](https://www.nbc.com/this-is-us).
* [Queer Qrosswords](http://queerqrosswords.com/) rewards your donation to an LBGTQ+ charity with crossword puzzles.
* Taking Twitter off your phone while you’re on vacation
* Not being on one’s phone while waiting for someone
* [Headspace](https://www.headspace.com/) guided meditation app
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Isaac Aptaker](https://twitter.com/iaptaker) on Twitter
* [Elizabeth Berger](https://twitter.com/bergernight) on Twitter
* [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 Travis Newton ([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_345.mp3).