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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/we-had-the-same-idea).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Ho-ho-ho, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 331 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the final episode of 2017 we look at what happens when two writers seem to have written something very similar. What are the legal and ethical responsibilities for those writers, but also for everyone talking about those writers? We’ll also be answering listener questions about slug lines, conservatives, and what impact the new tax law will have on writers.

**Craig:** Hmm, exciting. Everyone get ready in your cars and at home because we’re going to talk about taxes.

**John:** Taxes! At least as much as we know about taxes so far. We won’t have all the answers but at least point you in the right direction.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it’s safe to say that this episode will not have any explicit language.

**John:** No. It’s going to be a very safe episode. So listen to it with your kids, with your older parents, your grandparents. Do it. Taxes.

We don’t know everything, and one of the things we did not know – this is the follow-up segment – we talked a couple episodes about How Would This Be a Movie, these female inmates who were firefighters, we thought this is absolutely a slam-dunk for a movie, how is this not already a movie? And, of course, it already was a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Obviously. You know, I know probably people think that we would be somehow embarrassed or ashamed by this. Quite the contrary.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Listen, nobody can know everything that’s been made. And I think it’s actually very encouraging and very confirming that we picked something to be a movie and we were right. It’s just we were late.

**John:** We were late. So, in 2012 there’s a movie called Firelight. It stars Cuba Gooding Jr. It was made for television I think for ABC, or ABC Family. Ligiah Villalobos wrote it, who is actually a former WGA board member. She won the Humanitas Prize for writing this script. So, it’s a movie that’s out there that you can see. The log line on IMDb says, “A group of young inmates are given the opportunity to turn their lives around by becoming volunteer firefighters.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** But I would say, Craig, my prior belief holds, I don’t think this precludes someone from making another female inmate firefighter movie.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** This was made for television. And I’m sure it’s great, but I think there’s a big feature version here you could totally do.

**Craig:** 100%. Look, you can tell the same story multiple times. We certainly know that. We tend to see it with classic works of literature. I mean, we’re on our 4,000-version of A Christmas Carol. But even for these things, these events, they can be told and retold in different ways because sometimes the major difference is money.

If you’re making a feature film, you get more money to spend, make it look a certain way. Just you’re able to tell the story in a slightly different way. And now with all of our different formats, you can also tell stories just using different segments of time. So instead of a TV movie, which I think you said ABC or ABC Family, traditionally broken up by commercials. You can do a version that doesn’t have those kinds of breaks, which definitely impact narrative. You can do a version that’s spread over four episodes. You could do whatever you want these days. So, yeah!

**John:** You could do the R-rated version of this. The other thing which has changed is basically your perspective. Like who are you telling the story through? Ligiah made very distinct choices about how she was going to tell her story, but you may make different choices.

You look at the difference between All the President’s Men and the new movie The Post, they’re both telling the same section of history but from very different perspectives. So, I say go for it. If you want to write that movie, write that movie.

**Craig:** Oh, of course. Yeah, there was a BBC docu – no, not a docu. I don’t know if you call it a docudrama. It was about Chernobyl. So BBC, this was a few years ago, did a movie about the Chernobyl incident and I watched it, of course. And they did a fine job. But it was – it was what it was and it was compressed into a certain amount of time and it wasn’t at all the way I wanted to do my version of the story. And at no point did I ever think, oh well, someone has told a part of this story, sort of, therefore I can’t. That’s crazy.

**John:** I say make that female firefighter. Make Chernobyl. Maybe don’t make a five-hour Chernobyl drama right now, because Craig is just about to start doing that.

**Craig:** Yeah, that would be stupid.

**John:** But other than that, everything is open and clear.

**Craig:** 100%. Go for it.

**John:** Other follow-up. Sam wrote in to ask, “I have a question about Episode 235.” This person is listening to the back episodes which we applaud. “Craig mentioned on that live show that he was privy to the original Game of Thrones pilot which according to him was deeply flawed. So what was that ‘massive problem’ the creators had and what did they do to fix it? I’m curious what the pitfall was and how to avoid it as I write my own pilot.”

**Craig:** You know, I’m happy to talk about what I perceived. I’m going to do it carefully because that pilot has been seen by about three people – I think just myself, Scott Frank, and Ted Griffin. And no one else outside of the production or HBO. So I don’t want to get into specific things, because then there will be a hundred click-baity articles about it.

And, Dan and Dave are my friends. And what’s the point? That just seems silly. But I’ll talk about it at least in terms of the spirit of your question which is, OK, what screenwriting problem could there have been and what can I avoid.

The massive problem that I was talking about was I remember saying to them, “You guys have constructed this enormous, tall, beautiful building, but you forgot to put in a lobby with doors. There’s no way in.” The way they had done it, I think because of their closeness to the material, and also their tremendous knowledge of the material, there wasn’t much of a point of entry. You were immediately confused by everything. You were confused by who was talking. You were confused by the relationships between the characters. You were certainly confused by the allegiances and the conflicts.

And so when it was over the overwhelming sense that I think all of us had in the room was there was a lot of quality there but I don’t know what any of it means. And as we talked through things I could see them realizing, “Oh, go d, you didn’t know this? Oh, you didn’t understand that? Oh boy.” And so my general feeling about it was that there was writing to do. It wasn’t just about reshooting or recasting, but it was about writing.

And they did. They rewrote. And they rewrote brilliantly. It’s a great story, by the way, of not just of how brilliant, creative people sometimes need a take two, but also a brilliant story of a company supporting artists, at great risk. And obviously with great reward.

So that was the massive problem that particular day. So if you’re writing a pilot and there’s a lot going on, unless you are OK with people being confused because it’s sort of the chaos of war or something like that, just remember they know so much less than you. In fact, when the show begins they know nothing.

**John:** Absolutely. The general phenomenon you’re describing is what we often call the curse of knowledge. Is that you as the writer know why everything is there. You know how it is all going to fit together. But it’s that process of forgetting everything you know so if you just started on page one and had no priors, what would you think is going to happen. Or, sort of assume different priors, where a person is going to have assumptions about this kind of a genre but might not know what you’re going to do with it. You have to just be able to wipe all that clean. And working on something for two years probably by that point they’re showing this to you, they had a hard time wiping that all away. And so showing it to trusted people you think are going to be smart about what you have and what you’re aiming for was exactly the right choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this dilemma that I’m constantly rolling around in my head and I bet you are, too. And it’s a little game. And the game is too much or not enough. I don’t – nobody wants to pander. Nobody wants to overfeed the audience. Certainly nobody wants to hit the nail on the head or be obvious.

So, we tend to try and craft things in such a way that the audience can play along and they get invested and they can tease things apart and they can draw their own conclusions. But you want them to draw the conclusions you want them to draw. So, then you start to think have I taken too much away? Are they unmoored? Do they not have enough? It’s a little bit like I guess designing one of these escape rooms that I’m so fond of doing. You have to build it in such a way that it can be escaped. Or else it’s just not much fun for the audience.

And I think sometimes we overcorrect one way or the other and I think for writers we probably have a tendency to overcorrect in the direction of supplying not enough because we are constantly getting notes from studios and networks whose default position is “tell everyone everything five different times.”

**John:** Yeah, the challenge of the notes you get from the studios and from networks is make things explicitly clear but also make everything shorter and simpler. Those contrasting notes of like they’ve read 14 drafts so they sort of know what’s going to happen. And so they keep going, “Could we cut this out? Could we cut this out?” So, that’s why I think so often it’s important to show it to people like you, people who are want you to succeed but are not invested in all of the politics of that particular project.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s why I think those showings are the most terrifying. Because you don’t have to worry about them burying you on purpose. You don’t have to worry about them overpraising you or going easy on you. You know you’re going to actually get the truth, which is hard. It’s hard for everybody, you know?

I don’t like giving it any more than I like getting it.

**John:** Yeah. All right. Final bit of follow-up questioning comes from Kinsey, which is a great name. “In the recent episode on pitching you guys made a pretty clear cut distinction between pitching features and pitching TV. But considering that platforms like HBO, Netflix, and Amazon Prime are beginning to blur the lines between the two, would you say that studios or producers are now generally more open to the miniseries format? And what distinctions would you make between pitching a classic open-ended TV series versus pitching a miniseries like Craig is doing?”

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know if either one of us can safely say that producers and studios are more open to miniseries formats than they were two or three years ago. It seems that way, just based on how many are hitting the airwaves.

**John:** Yeah. I think the evidence is just in how many you see. And they don’t even call them miniseries anymore. Like Scott Frank’s show I sort of assumed was a series, but then it’s like as we talked to him it’s like, oh no, it’s just this is what it is. These are episodes. And I’ve heard that of people going to Netflix is like they’re like, “Oh, it could be ten episodes. It could be four episodes. It’s sort of whatever makes sense for the thing.”

So, yes, there are places who like to have a series so they can come back and do more things down the road, but I think you’re going to see more and more projects like that. The services want people to keep subscribing. So, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have to keep subscribing for that one specific show. They want you to subscribe so that you can see the next thing that they’re going to be able to make.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think the phrase limited series is probably as descriptive as any. The idea being the purpose of the series is to end. As opposed to a regular series as he’s describing it, which the purpose of the series is not to end. And I would even extend that to something where, OK, technically speaking the purpose of Game of Thrones was to end after seven or eight seasons. That counts as an ongoing series.

I think that they want both kinds. I think if they had their choice they would love someone to come in with an open-ended series that would keep people coming back week after week. That’s kind of the golden goose, right?

**John:** Yeah. There was a project over at Sony that I was considering doing that was meant to be – I pitched it as a limited series and they said, “OK, yes, maybe, but could we also think about doing it as a dot-dot-dot,” so it wouldn’t necessarily have to finish up and end there, or we could do more anthology-like where it could come back as another season as a different thing. So, I think there’s some openness there.

You know, something that is made strictly for Netflix, they don’t necessarily need to have that ongoing basis because they’re not trying to sell foreign rights off to somebody else. Everything for Netflix just sort of stays inside Netflix.

**Craig:** Exactly. But you can see that Amazon in their massive purchase of the Tolkien properties, minus I think the properties that people really like, well sorry, now Tolkien fans are going to go crazy. I like The Silmarillion, too. I’m just saying generally.

Anyway, Amazon purchased all of that because they do want an open-ended series. They do want something that is must-see-TV that people talk about and obsess over and tweet over and turn into endless reaction gifs just like they do with Game of Thrones. I mean, it’s a naked attempt to replicate Game of Thrones. And we know this because it’s obvious on its face and it follows the head of Amazon Television saying I really want my own Game of Thrones. So, no mystery there.

**John:** Nope. All right, let’s get to our main topic. This is something you proposed because it came based on a series on tweets and just set us up.

**Craig:** Sure. And I pulled this because it happens a lot. It happens a lot, and I want to talk a little bit about why I think it happens and what you at home should be doing if you find yourself in one or the other pair of shoes. So, this started with a journalist whose name is Sarah Sahim. And she tweeted, “I’m never going to pitch anything ever again.” And along with that she included two screenshots. One was a title of an article she was pitching to write to the New York Times and the title was Bertrand Cantat and the toxic masculinity of the “tortured male artist.”

Then she includes a screenshot of the title and sub-header of an actual article by Amanda Hess which I guess appeared in the New York Times. How the myth of the artistic genius excuses the abuse of women. To some assessing an artist’s work in light of his biography is blasphemous, but it’s time to do away with the idea that they’re separate.

Well, she clearly and strongly felt that Ms. Hess’s article was a direct rip-off of her pitch. She went on to tweet, “My heart is f-ing pounding with anger. I lost money because my ideas were handed to a white woman.” And then she asks people to put money in her tip jar. And I don’t mean to demean her whatsoever, because I actually understand how she feels. I think anybody who has ever written anything understands how that feels.

But, here’s another thing I understand because I’m a writer and it’s Amanda Hess’s response. “Hey Sarah, I have hesitated to say anything about this publicly and I’m sorry for the delay. But since people keep tweeting and emailing me, falsely calling me a plagiarist, I felt that I should. I have never met the editor that you pitched. Before I saw your tweet I had never even heard of him. Thousands of people work here. I’ve since learned that the editor works for the Opinion section. I work for the Times’ newsroom. We operate totally independently of one another. My editor in the newsroom, Mary Suh, assigned me this story after she noticed a tweet I wrote in October responding to revelations about actors and directors accused of sexual harassment and worse. She asked me to expand on it and I did.”

And she goes on making the general case that, hey, these aren’t really the same thing at all and I don’t talk about Bertrand Cantat or musicians and I’m talking about film and TV and so on and so forth.

So, here’s the thing. I get how it feels when you think you might be ripped off. John, I think it’s safe to say you and I encounter people complaining about this a lot.

**John:** Yeah. A couple times a month.

**Craig:** Couple times a month. Yeah.

**John:** And we find it in sort of the feature realm, or sometimes the TV realm, but it’s a similar kind of situation. So, Sarah Sahim is a freelancer so she’s a person who is going in to pitch stories to big publications very much like how we’re pitching ideas for a movie. This is a story I want to write for you. Would you pay me to write this? That’s kind of like a feature pitch. You’re going and saying like, “Hey, I have this idea. Do you want me to write up the story for you?” That’s how she makes her living.

And so when she sees this article coming out that feels like, to her, the thing that she was pitching, she’s furious because a job that she didn’t get that she sees someone else wrote that story.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I get that because we have a natural bias toward our own writing. It’s not necessarily just a bias of favorability. It’s a bias of – I guess I would call it a bias of completion. When we have an idea in our minds, when we write something it is fully fleshed and formed and it is alive and vibrant. And when we read somebody else’s it’s words. And it is easy, I think, to see, OK, I pitched something to someone at the New York Times and then someone else at the New York Times did something that is similar and obviously took from me because how else could they have done it.

Therein is the mistake.

**John:** Yeah. You’re drawing a causal relationship between a correlation which is that you pitched something and something else existed, but the actual cause behind both of those things was the cultural moment that was the genesis for both your idea and the idea for the story.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, I wanted to talk about this mostly because I want to – I actually feel for Sarah, and we’re all Sarah. We’ve all been Sarah. And I want to figure out how to kind of come up with a general code to avoid ending up like Sarah did in this situation, which wasn’t great, because people basically saw what Amanda Hess said and then kind of went and turned on Sarah. As is the case on Twitter, relatively little happens with moderation.

**John:** Yeah. Well, there was a pile-on on Amanda originally, and then Amanda responded and there was a pile-on on Sarah. And we would like there to be no pile-ons. And so how do we get to a no pile-on place in these situations?

**Craig:** Yeah. And it was particularly rough because they’re both talking about articles about toxic masculinity and now two women are beating each other up in a public forum about who is responsible for it and it all just felt bad. I felt bad for everyone. So how can we avoid this?

So, I came up with a little checklist, John.

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Craig:** So, you’ve opened up the paper, you’ve turned on Twitter, you’ve seen something and you go, “Oh no. I believe, I have the feeling, that I have been violated. Someone has broken into my house and stolen something of mine.” Of course, when it comes to writing some houses are a lot alike and maybe they didn’t break into your house at all. So, let’s just stop for a second and ask some important questions on our checklist, even as we’re feeling violated, even as we’re angry. And the most important and first question is “Did this person theoretically take an idea from me or a unique expression?”

**John:** Let’s unpack those. An idea being the sense of there’s a cultural moment happening there with auteurs and how we’re treating male auteurs is part of the problem. Maybe that’s the general idea in Sarah Sahim’s situation?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you have a topic. You have a take. You have an issue. These are ideas. These are subject matters. They are not in and of themselves unique expressions. They are not intellectual property. Two different newspapers can write about the same topic and they do every day. So, even if you believe someone has actually read your pitch and went, “Ooh, great idea, but I don’t want to have her do it. I want to do it,” the truth is no crime has been committed other than an ethical one. But in this sense if you believe that that is the nature of what’s happened, you kind of also have to just shrug and say I didn’t own the thing that I’m claiming got stolen. It’s not mine any more than it is hers. I can still write my article. Nothing will stop that.

So if you get to this part in your checklist and you say, OK, they haven’t taken my unique expression. That is they haven’t lifted paragraphs, sentence structure, et cetera, and people have been caught doing that, especially in journalism, then stop. You’re done. But let’s move on.

Next. Is it about specifically a title and words in a title or execution, which is a little sub-chapter, because I think sometimes you see a title, and in this case Sarah looks at a title, right. She had one. Bertrand Cantat and the toxic masculinity of the tortured male artist. Toxic masculinity. Tortured male artist. And then in Amanda’s headline we see artist, and I think maybe OK, is that enough? [laughs] Right?

And sometimes you key in on certain words and you feel like this is meaningful. It is evidence of a violation. It’s not. It happens all the time.

**John:** Absolutely. This is also the place where I jump in and remind everyone that the feature writers often do not write their headlines, or they may write a bunch of headlines, but it’s ultimately not their choice what the headline is. So, Amanda Hess may have had nothing to do with the headline that was actually assigned to that.

On features and in television, you know, you might have a great title like Asteroid. And this is my movie Asteroid. And someone else sells a script that’s about an asteroid about to hit the planet. Just because it says asteroid does not mean it has anything to do with the movie you wrote called Asteroid. And I can understand the emotional frustration of like, “Oh, but I had this perfect title and now someone else is using this perfect title.” But sorry, that doesn’t mean that they stole your title.

**Craig:** Exactly. I mean, let’s say for instance you and I independently had an idea. We both wanted to do a movie about the Easter Bunny versus Santa Claus.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** And I’m sitting there going and, you know, it’s arch, it’s ironic, it’s funny. I’m going to call it Bunny vs. Claus. There is a fairly decent chance that you’re going to do the same. It’s not particularly clever or brilliant. It sort of is what’s there, right? People can have the same idea. People can have the same title. But, if I sell my script after you ran into me at a party and you go, “This is what I’m working on.” And I sip my drink and inside my head go, “Oh, dammit, I better sell mine before this dude sells his.”

And then I sell mine. Yeah, you might be like, what? You stole my….but, no.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So, title is just not enough.

**John:** I guarantee you there are at least 15 thrillers out there on the market called Escape Room.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, for sure.

**John:** Because the idea of an escape room that turns out to be like a, no, you really will die if you don’t get out of it, that’s a fine idea. A bunch of people will write that movie. And that movie can be original in the sense that you’re not basing it off of anything else. But the sense that no one else will ever have that idea of writing a movie about an escape room is crazy. And my frustration when it gets to actual lawsuits, which we will talk about later on down the road, is writers tend to think that they are the only people who could ever have that idea. Like oh my god, I wrote a thriller that’s set in an escape room. That’s not a great idea, but it’s certainly a good idea done properly. But it’s not – you’re not the only person who could have had that idea.

**Craig:** And you aren’t.

**John:** You are not.

**Craig:** Exactly. And that brings us nicely to our next item on the checklist. Is this my original creation or is it something that I’m putting together as a result of a public record or observation of real life? And in this case, it is both, when we talk about the escape room idea. It’s both my original creation, but it is also based on an observation of the real world around me. And similarly when you look at what Sarah was proposing to write and what Amanda did write, they were writing clearly about the world around them and about matters of public record.

At that point you’re done. Stop. Don’t go forward. Do not pass go. You’re not ripped off.

**John:** 100% agree. So, if you’re basing something on actual events, if you are going back to write a great female inmate firefighter movie, yes, absolutely a valid idea. You can write a great version of that, but you can’t claim that you’re the only person who ever thought about writing about female firefighters because Ligiah wrote it and wrote it great. And we talked about it on the show. So, it’s not an original idea there. All that can be protected is your original expression of that idea.

And so in this case is the characters, is the way the story actually proceeds.

**Craig:** Exactly. And that is why you can have two articles written by two different journalists at two different periodicals about the exact same topic. And the only way you can show that one author, one journalist, infringed upon the copyright of the other is if they are duplicating unique form – sentences and sentence structure and word choice and word arrangement. Right?

OK, and then lastly, and this is the one that really blows my mind because people fail to check on this time and time again. It happened recently with somebody who was like, huh, I wrote something that’s a lot like Scott Frank’s Godless. Interesting. Well, turns out after Scott Frank wrote Godless. Timing counts. Chronological primacy counts. More often than not, when people make an allegation that someone has ripped them off, more often than not what I see happening is somebody like for instance Amanda coming back and saying, “Uh, guess what? I’ve been working on this since before your evidence that I ripped you off. So technically if there’s any evidence at all of being ripped off, it’s evidence that you’ve ripped off me,” which obviously Sarah didn’t do.

But the point is chronological primacy is crucial. If you don’t have a sense of it, hit pause and figure it out. Find out. And remember this, too, especially when we’re dealing with topic matters. I’ve seen this a lot in the comedy world. A comedian will do a joke. Another comedian will accuse them of ripping – you ripped off my joke. And then somebody else eight times out of ten will show up and go, ah, you both ripped off this guy who was from 30 years ago.

And so there was a joke I think Louis C.K. accused Dane Cook of ripping off, but then Steve Martin had done the same joke about 20 years earlier on The Tonight Show. So, the problem is even if you are chronologically ahead of the person you’re accusing, you may be behind somebody else you don’t even know about. At which point you just got to really think carefully.

**John:** Yep. Especially something with jokes. It’s like we’re all living in the same culture, so the odds that we’re going to come across similar kinds of things, like we’re going to have online dating frustrations, is pretty much 100%. So, yes, you need to write original jokes, but you also need to be aware that other people are going to be writing original jokes about the same universe that you’re living in.

**Craig:** 100%. So, let’s talk now about those rare circumstances, because they do exist, where somebody’s rights have been infringed. You go through our little checklist here and you’re like, um, I’m covered. They did in fact lift my unique expression. I was the first person to make this expression. It’s not about idea, or title, or subject. Nor is it about a matter of public record. It’s about my unique expression in fixed form.

So, OK, congrats, you’ve passed the checklist. So what do you do? Should you now publicly accuse that person on social media, John?

**John:** You should never accuse that person on social media. That is not going to win you anything.

**Craig:** Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. It is the weak person’s move. It is a person-who-has-no-leg-to-stand-on’s move. If you believe and can prove and have substance to an allegation that someone has ripped you off, you call a lawyer. And you sue them. And, ideally, you win. But going after people on social media backfires almost always with this stuff. Because in the end what you look like – and you’re not – but what you look like is nuts, or ignorant, or petty, or jealous, or stupid, or amateurish. And these words get thrown around willy-nilly on Twitter because people love it. And that’s not who you are. Who you are is somebody who got upset in an understandable way.

So, what you don’t want to do is turn your initial honest and completely understandable emotional reaction into a target that people are pasting on your forehead because you decided to behave in a way that was ultimately self-destructive.

**John:** I completely agree. So, if you are in this situation, you’ve past through Craig Mazin’s checklist of was I ripped off and you can tick affirmatively on all those things, yes get a lawyer. Yes, I think it’s fine to discuss privately with friends what you’re doing and maybe they can help talk you through some of what’s going on, but going out to the broad wide world of social media saying this thing that happened to me is not going to serve you well.

Now, if you see that there’s a pattern of this kind of thing happening particularly with a certain person or a certain kind of employer, I can see the reason why you might want to speak up for that. The same way you don’t want to stay quiet about harassment and other things, it’s important to not feel like you have to keep everything to yourself, but to go after the individual in something like this, writer versus writer, I don’t see being good for you or for any writer around you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think even in situations where perhaps speaking out publicly in advance of some kind of legal action would be called for, I would still want to do so on the advice of legal counsel. So, I’d seek out the help of an attorney and the attorney says to me, “You know, this is something where I think we need to apply pressure from two different avenues. I’m going to file a lawsuit and I want you to go and say to people what’s happened here, because you have stuff to say.” And in that case what you don’t have is somebody tweeting and equating feeling violated with being violated, which are two different things. Particularly when we talk about intellectual property and copyright infringement, it’s a matter of law. It’s not a matter of feeling whatsoever. And there are a lot of people with hurt feelings who have sued and lost or been sued and lost who still walk around with hurt feelings feeling violated. But unfortunately the law was the law and that’s how it worked.

So, if you have legal advice, and I do, I strongly suggest getting it in a case where you honestly believe you’ve been violated and they say that it’s a good idea to go public, then go public. But otherwise I just don’t see the upside.

**John:** I agree with you. So let’s talk about situations where you’re not filing a lawsuit, you feel frustrated, you don’t feel like maybe you could tick two out of the four checkboxes. What do you do? You’ve got to move past it. And that’s I think a crucial thing is that if you fixate on this one moment where you feel like your idea was stolen but you don’t think there’s a lawsuit, you don’t think there’s any sort of way to rectify the situation, you got to keep moving. Because with this one New York Times story, or with a pitch that you went in with that they end up doing a different movie, you got to keep moving. Because I see writers who get fixated on this one big score, like this one thing would have changed everything for them, and they don’t move forward. They just stagnate on feeling bitter about this one thing.

And that does nobody any good. So, you’re there to write. So, write something else and that’s the power that you have.

**Craig:** And also take charge of your circumstances. You know, if you believe that your fate is completely determined externally from you, then this is going to hurt even more. But I think if it were me, and it has been, and I see that somebody is doing something that I wanted to do or was doing, my instinct is not to say, “Oh my god, you ripped me off.” My instinct is to say, “OK, A, good news, I’m on the right track. I’m thinking of things that these people are paying other people to write. So, A, good. B, maybe I should reach out to the woman who is writing this article and say, ‘Hey, great minds think alike. Ha-ha-ha. Awesome job. Love your article. Was wondering if I could grab a coffee with you and you could give me some advice, or you can get on the phone and give me some advice, because I’m like you and I’m thinking the same things like you. And I want to write about the same things like you. So, hey, let’s…’” Can we turn this into a positive? And not turn it into an accusatory thing, which ultimately gets you nowhere.

Even in success, what do you get? Nothing?

**John:** You get nothing. So, I want to talk about the third party involved here. So we talked about the two writers in a situation, but I want to talk about everybody else. Everyone who is seeing this thing on happen on Twitter, or someone comes to you with a story, if you came with just Sarah’s initial story, that instinct to be outraged. Like I can’t believe they’re stealing this thing. My general advice, which I’ve given before, is just be generous. Be generous in your assumptions. Be generous in your assumptions with the original writer. Be generous in assumptions with the writer who claims to be ripped off. That everyone may be acting in good faith, they’re just feeling very different things. And they’re acting out of a place of emotion rather than sort of what the real reality of the situation should be.

So, in talking about both the writers in this situation, but all writers who feel like their work has been stolen from them, be generous in how you’re taking in the situation that they’re presenting. And try to look at people in their best light and not make assumptions that they’ve done something horrible just because one person says so.

**Craig:** Well there you go. I think that what used to be a worry about jumping to conclusions is now a worry about jumping to alliance or jumping to condemnation. We are presented with a narrative in which a great injustice has been done by a bad person to a good person, which is a very seductive narrative. There’s an entire religion based on it. And we naturally start like rats who have been fed cocaine hit the bar again for more cocaine. And our hearts leap out for the person who has been hurt because we’re empathetic or we’re sympathetic.

And we get in there and I think in our zeal to be good, and to be comforting, we forget that we have completely accepted the notion that another human being is bad. And now that person is easy to kick around because boo them. And then we turn around and now I see people accusing the first person of somehow betraying them.

Whoa, everyone, let’s always as best we can try and get some facts. And if at all possible, at all possible, can we get some information from a third party. You know, it is one thing for someone to say, “This person did this to me.” It’s another thing for a third party, disinterested party, like a journalist to say, “This is what I have learned about what this person has done to this person.” That is just generally more credible. So, let’s just slow down.

**John:** Yeah. Slow down. Don’t hit that retweet button so quickly. I thought back to a moment that happened earlier this last year. This was a tough, horrible year on just so many fronts, but I remember there was a tweet that came through my timeline where someone said that the Trump White House had replaced the word person with citizen in their explanation of the Bill of Rights. And that’s an outrage. Basically they’re trying to divide us into real Americans versus fake Americans. And so this person on Twitter was outraged about it.

And I was like that’s horrible. And I was about to retweet it. And then I was like, but is that really true? And so I went and I pulled up the page and like it’s true. It said Citizen rather than Person. So then I went to Internet archive and I pulled up that same page from previous years. And it turns out it said Person the whole time through. So it wasn’t a change that had been made. It was just like that’s how it actually said it on that White House page. So it wasn’t Trump who did that.

And so rather than retweet it I tweeted back to the original guy saying like here is what’s wrong about that, and here’s the actual link to it. I think I helped stop that little meme from spreading for about an hour. And I think if we all did that and just took a step back and looked at the actual reality of the situation, do a little research yourself, you might find that the world is not so – the world is outrageous and awful in many ways, but not everything is bad. And not everything is the way it is being presented on Twitter, certainly.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So take a step back.

**Craig:** This way you get to earn your outrage.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** If you have an impulse to outrage, then train yourself to recognize it, stop, make sure you have earned it, because the thing that you have been presented needs to be tested. OK. Let me check. Let me make sure. Verify. Snopes. Et cetera. Good. Outrage.

**John:** Outrage. Full outrage.

**Craig:** Correct. Outrage free-wheeling, unfettered outrage.

**John:** Sounds good. All right, let’s get to some more questions. Eric in NYC writes, “I read in the New York Times that ‘a deduction that is disappearing is one for fees paid to agents, other outside managers, or headhunters who take a commission on a salary directly from an individual.’ This sounds quite a bit like the deduction that affects working writers, so I wonder why we haven’t heard more about this as the tax bill has been debated. Or perhaps we have and I haven’t been listening close enough. To the best of your knowledge, how does the tax bill affect writers who pay a commission to agents?”

**Craig:** I have no idea. I mean, the thing to remember about a lot of working writers in Hollywood is that once they hit a certain level of steady employment, and I think this would cover most of your steadily working professional writers, they create pass-through corporations, S-Corps usually, sometimes C-Corps, in order to better take advantage of the byzantine tax laws.

And one of the things that that means is things like agent fees and manager fees become business expenses from your business and they are not a personal expense. So I don’t know exactly if this is true. I don’t know what it means, per se, and I don’t know how it is going to affect a lot of writers.

The truth is, I don’t know what the hell is going on. And you know what? Neither who the ding-a-lings who voted yes on it. Because they didn’t even read it.

**John:** Yeah. That’s what’s so frustrating. I mean, everything is so frustrating. But I want to be able to provide a good answer saying like if you’re an S-Corp it’s going to affect you this way. If you’re a C-Corp it’s going to affect you this way. If you don’t have a corporation it will affect you this way. So therefore you should arrange certain things certain ways. I would love to be able to provide you those answers. And so once stuff shakes out a little bit more, hopefully the WGA will be able to provide guidance on how this will affect writers moving forward.

But right now we just don’t know. I’ve read conflicting reports about what changes for S-Corps versus C-Corps. It’s all just kind of confusing and murky. Certainly writers tend to have a lot of student loan debt. That gets affected differently. So, it’s a challenging time.

Sorry. [laughs] Yeah, so I would say that the best guidance would be to do things the way things have been going for a while and then listen for changes as stuff comes through. Because it may make sense to make an S-Corp earlier, because the threshold used to be if you were making reliably over $200,000 a year than an S-Corp made sense. Maybe that will drop down lower. I just don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t know either. I think this is one where you just have to talk to your tax people. I mean, I’ve been speaking to my tax guy and running various rumors I’ve heard past him and he’s like, “Ah, I wouldn’t do anything right now. We’re still all figuring this out.” So whatever happens, some strategy will be employed, but it also may just be that what is is what is.

I mean, the truth is if in fact the government said nobody can deduct agent expenses anymore, whether it’s a corporation doing it or a person, well, we can talk about that, but generally the conclusion is there is no action item. That’s the law.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Sucks for us.

**John:** Yeah. It could be more people going without a manager, or making some other choices based on that, but I doubt that would really change that much.

**Craig:** Who the hell knows? All right, let’s go to Mark in Encino. He says, “I’m curious about your thoughts on the polarization of our country and how it affects writer’s rooms. Many of your showrunner guests have indicated that they’re looking for talented writers that see the world differently than they do. But I can’t help think that most of these showrunners would balk at hiring a new writer who didn’t have a progressive/liberal stance on most issues. I’ve been in too many rooms that are openly hostile toward conservative or libertarian viewpoints and I know some closet conservatives in town who don’t dare speak about their party affiliation for fear of losing opportunities.

“What would you say to a talented, hard-working, intelligent writer in this town who happened to hold conservative views? Bit your tongue and go along with the room? Considering that roughly half the country holds conservative views, wouldn’t it make sense to populate writer’s rooms with a few more conservative voices? I don’t mean to belittle the hard-earned gains of people who have endured discrimination because of their race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, et cetera, by placing political affiliation within the same sphere of diversity. That said, it still feels like Hollywood is working to keep certain people out, even though the criteria for what makes those people different has changed. Thoughts?”

**John:** Well, neither of us are staffing TV rooms, but it’s true we’ve had a lot of guests on the show and the thing we hear consistently is they’re looking for writers who are not like them. They want some different voices in there, so that’s why diversity in rooms becomes so important so they’re not an echo chamber of their own thoughts and they can see things outside beyond their little bubble.

So, in general I want to agree with some of Mark’s concerns and this instinct to make sure that you’re not excluding a huge chunk of the population by your choices, but I guess we just have to decide what we mean by conservative, or sort of what those views are. Because your views are like a fiscally conservative take on how we should be doing tax policy, I don’t think that’s necessarily going to hurt you much in your ability to staff in a room.

If your conservative values are going to church every Sunday, I think that’s awesome. And that’s the kind of thing which actually could be an asset in a room because you might have experience about sort of what a very religious life is like. Those are things that I think could be assets for you as you’re going into a writer’s room.

Where I think you’d have a harder time in some of those rooms is if you felt like I don’t think those people should have rights, or I don’t think those people should have healthcare. There’s certain beliefs you could have that would come out naturally in the conversation which could be challenging in a room.

Craig, what are you thinking?

**Craig:** I’m pretty much right there with you. I mean, look, if the point is that diversity in a room and the principle of different kinds of voices is helpful for writing, then – and you want to take advantage of that, which I think is fair by saying, “Look, I am also different in a way from all of you, so I would have a different viewpoint,” that is absolutely fine and I do think would be welcomed, unless your different viewpoint is intolerant. Because then unfortunately what you’re saying is you need to tolerate my intolerance. And it just doesn’t work that way.

In general, these rooms need to function on tolerance. And so everything up to intolerance I think is fair play. Like you said, libertarianism, a way of viewing taxation, the notion that private interests may be better at doing things than the government, foreign policy, you know, how aggressive should we be? Should we be supporting this or supporting that? That’s all I think fair game. I don’t imagine people getting emotional about those sorts of things.

What they get emotional about is intolerance. And I don’t think that you would find any welcome room in our business if you are harshly intolerant or even mildly intolerant of the things that generally speaking we are tolerant of. We are a community of artists, and artists have always been, I think, more tolerant than most people of these things. And also we have a great tradition, and we have a lot of friends and a lot of coworkers, and a lot of heroes who are not white, who are not straight, who are not gender binary, and all of that stuff.

So, if you can sort of be tolerant than I don’t see any reason why you should be – I think sometimes some people get a little dramatic. Don’t forget, when you say like, “I know some closet conservatives in town who don’t dare speak out about their party affiliation for fear of losing opportunities,” you know, there are always people who are going to come up with some excuse for why they’ve lost an opportunity. Anything other than, oh yeah, it’s super freaking hard to get these jobs. It’s super freaking hard for everybody. And so, yeah, you can go home and say that wasn’t my fault. It was the fact that I’m a Republican. Or you can go home and say these are very, very difficult jobs to get. The odds are against me. I must prevail. I must work harder and go on harder. Isn’t that the whole conservative thing anyway? Right? Not to be a snowflake.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** There you go. Don’t be a snowflake. [laughs]

**John:** No snowflakes. All right, Ann writes, “A couple weeks ago my feature script was trending on the Black List site. It’s still trending now. I’ve had an interested production company contact me and I’m meeting with another production house this week. It’s all been very exciting, but I’m grappling with how to handle these meetings. After an hour-long call with one of the LA companies, they said they’d love to develop a project with me one day and asked for any treatments, outlines, or ideas I have. They also sent me a ‘top secret’ script they’re developing and asked for my feedback. I sent my notes. And they said they were very impressive.

“On a second call, the exec said he liked one of my treatments, but felt it needed more plot. And to keep sending him material. I don’t have a manager or an agent and basically I’m wondering about the dos and don’ts of these kind of meetings and relationships.”

**Craig:** Well, I think Ann it sounds like you’re doing it just fine. It’s always a scary thing when you, after a period of time I presume, where you’re not getting any attention but you’re really struggling to get some, finally get some, then I get it. You sort of tense up and go oh god. I kept asking for people to look at me and now they’re looking at me. What do I do?

Well, it seems like you’re doing it right. I mean, you’re meeting with them. You’re talking to them. You’re kind of being a participant in their lives. You’re sending notes back. These are the sorts of things that don’t really qualify as working for free. It’s more like being a kind of collegial friend of the court. And I think they’ve said basically we’re not up to the point yet where we want to pay you for what you’ve written, but send us more.

And I think maybe at this point other than what you’re doing I would suggest the following. One, express to them your willingness, if it’s there, to work on other things as well. In other words, the thing that you sent notes on, if you can be an active participant and actually be paid to work on that, that would be lovely.

And, two, say hey, you know, if you guys are aware of a terrific manager or agent that you think would be a nice match for me, I’d love for you to make an introduction.

**John:** Absolutely. So, if these are bona fide producers and they are really working in the town, they’ll have contacts with other agents and managers and stuff like that. And they may be able to bridge those gaps.

I also agree that what you’re doing so far is not spec work. You’re reading something, you’re giving some notes, it’s basically just kind of feeling each other out. That’s fine. Don’t do a ton of it. But it’s sort of like you’re kind of an intern, sort of wandering around through there. And that’s fine. That’s totally normal. Don’t do it for six months.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just sort of build out a relationship. That’s great. Take more meetings. Don’t feel exclusive to these people or to anybody. And just keep trucking.

**Craig:** Yeah. All right. We’ve got something from Daniel in Sydney who writes, “My writing partner and I are working on an original pilot that starts with our hero coming into some notoriety. We currently have outlined two interview scenes with well-known celebrity hosts who run their own shows. It is a bad idea to have celebrity ‘characters’ included in the script? Even if we’re not wedded to the specific celebrities we’ve chosen, and wouldn’t necessitate them being cast if the show were to be made, we found them useful for telegraphing the tone of the interview. And since a Seth Meyers interview is generally understood to be very different in kind to a Joe Rogan interview, et cetera. Or, are we better served coming up with obvious stand-ins for these celebrities, say having our hero interviewed on Later Tonight with Marty Klein? Are we just being lazy?”

What do you think, John?

**John:** I think it’s fine to use Seth Meyers if it’s just like a one-off scene. Where like Seth Meyers is just interviewing the character and there’s not big, long, elaborate scenes with Seth Meyers. That’s fine. You will see that in scripts where it’s just like they talk to Katie Couric or whoever and it’s just clear that it’s a placeholder person, that you’re not relying exclusively on getting that one person in there. It’s not like it’s William Shatner and he’s in the whole movie playing himself. That’s fine.

It’s also fine to do the second suggestion, which is basically just give us a type. And then if that character does have to recur again then you actually sort of own that character and you can do specific things with that character. So, I wouldn’t get pulled too much by a real person showing up as long as it is clear how we’re using them.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have to be honest, I do find it a little jarring when I see it in scripts. It does feel – it doesn’t feel lazy. It feels a touch gimmicky. What it does is it disrupts the world that you’ve created. I want to believe that I’m in a world that is my world, but it’s also not my world. And so it’s a special world I’ve gotten to go in to watch this movie. And obviously some topics require this kind of thing. But others don’t. Comedies tend to lean on these things quite heavily and sometimes it can be a little, I don’t know, cheesy.

I do think if you’re going to write somebody to replace somebody, so you don’t want Seth Meyers, but you want a Seth Meyers-like person, change the name plenty. And maybe even change the venue. And maybe even change the time of day. In other words, make it your own thing. It will feel fresher and more connected to that world than either something that’s from our world, like Seth Meyers, or something that feels almost like a parody or knock-off of something from our world, like Later Tonight with Marty Klein.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with that. And I think it comes back to tone, also. Like there’s a tone of movie and certainly a tone of comedy where you do have those real callouts, where you see real people. And that makes sense, especially if it’s part of a montage of things, like they’re being interviewed a bunch of different places. Just saying like Seth Meyers, blah-blah-blah, that is fine. But in a drama or something else than you’re going to a real person, that always feels weird to me.

And I think I may have complained about this on a previous episode, but I would like to call out for CNN and sort of all the news networks, like stop letting your anchors be in our movies. I think it does a real disservice to your anchors, to your Anderson Coopers, to have them be in our fictionalized stories to provide verisimilitude when the asteroid is about to hit us. Maybe just stop that. I think that could be a good thing for 2018 is if we stopped having CNN in our movies.

**Craig:** I agree with you. I think it cheapens them. And look, the old school news folks would never do it. And I think a lot of the – I think a lot of people today wouldn’t do it just on principle. It’s one thing I suppose if you want to do, you know, a send up of yourself, or appear in a late night sketch. That’s fine. Everybody understands you’re doing a goof.

But, yeah, when you essentially trade on your own authenticity and authority for cash, it just cheapens the whole thing doesn’t it?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m with you.

**John:** Just stop. All right. One simple question here. Mackenzie from Michigan writes, “I know about the ‘one-page/one-minute’ rule, but my script doesn’t have any dialogue. Is there a separate rule for scripts with no dialogue? Or is it a guessing game on how long it will turn out to be?”

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s a guessing game. You don’t know.

**John:** You don’t know.

**Craig:** It’s the god’s honest truth. The person that will figure it out is a First AD. And they will do so by relying on their experience. So you’ve written this happened, and then this happened. Well, that should take about this much time to shoot. That should take about this much time to shoot. And then this should be this much time on screen.

**John:** Yeah, the script supervisor will do a report like that, too. So he or she will sit down with a stop watch and literally read through the script and usually in consultation with the director figure out how long would this scene be and just basically add it all up.

So, this is a thing you could do yourself, Mackenzie. You could just go through your script and just really kind of read through it and figure out how long do I really see this playing. Just play the whole movie in your mind, add it up, and you’ll get some sense of what that would actually feel like.

**Craig:** Correct. That sounds great. We have time for one more?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** All right. Well let’s go with – this one is a good one. This one will get me all angry. Jesse writes, “I’ve been approached by a director to co-write a script with him and he’s asked what I would charge as a work-for-hire. I’ve heard 2% to 3% of the production budget, but do you know of any resources to find a good starting point? Or have you any suggestions on how to decide on a figure? That would be greatly appreciated.”

John, do you see the big red flag?

**John:** Ah, yeah, work-for-hire is the problem here. So, work-for-hire is a term – and so all I know Jessie may have just put that in there because it sounds like a big official term, but work-for-hire is a way of working for somebody where they own everything. They’ll own the copyright. You’re basically just writing for them and you have no claim to it whatsoever.

You really don’t want to be doing this right now. If you want to write something with him, great. Write something with that director. That person could be paying you or not be paying you, but don’t sign over everything to that director at this point. That doesn’t feel like a great choice.

**Craig:** No, it’s a terrible choice. I mean, look, so John and I, when we write we write work-for-hire, but we’re writing work-for-hire for movie studios. And then we have an arrangement with the movie studios via the Writers Guild that says the Writers Guild will figure out the credits. So we have the ability to credit on the movies that we write, even though we don’t retain the copyright. The legal author of everything John and I have ever written for screen is a studio.

What this director is saying to you, if he is saying work-for-hire, the real question I have is why. Why work-for-hire? What does he get out of it? Well, what he gets out of it is you never existed. Your name doesn’t have to go on the movie at all. The author of the movie is him. Because he’s the commissioning author. And then you worked-for-hire. Work-for-hire goes all the way back to the revolutionary period when silversmiths used to hire people to make silver out of the molds that they created and so it was a work-for-hire. You’re not really the author, I am, because it’s my shop.

So this is what ends up happening. So you’re concentrating on how much money you get paid. I’m concentrating on the fact that this guy is potentially getting set to shaft you.

Now, I don’t want to get ahead of my skis here. If this director is saying, “OK, no, it’s a work-for-hire for someone else. We’re both going to be writing work-for-hire for somebody else,” that’s different. As long as you have parity with the director here in terms of credit, and copyright standing, then I’m OK. Then we can move on to the money point.

And on the money point, you know, I don’t really know how to advise here. Because I don’t know what the budget is. Yeah, there are some people out there who say things like 2% to 3%. Some people say 10%. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know. I think that you need some help and really what I think you should say to the director is, “You know how much I should be paid? Half of what you’re getting paid. How about that? Like whatever you want to get paid, I also get paid that. We have perfect parity. That’s what it means to co-write a script.”

**John:** Yeah. Perfect parity in the sense of the amount being paid to that person as the writer versus the director. I know it can get confusing because if that is the writer-director and he or she has made other movies, they may have previous credits, there may be some reasonable case for why you’re getting less money than that person is. But, a work-for-hire is not the real situation you’re talking about there. You want some sort of contractual agreement where if this movie happens, we are a writing team with an ampersand and this is how it’s all going to work out.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** I will say I talked to a writer this last year while I was living in Paris who does a lot of basically what Jesse is describing where he goes in and helps writer-directors with their scripts and basically gets no credit and just gets paid by this writer-director to basically rewrite their scripts. That’s not uncommon in Europe. It’s not a situation I would want to emulate here in the US.

I believe in Writers Guilds and writers getting credit for the things they do. And residuals.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s really weird in Europe because they don’t have work-for-hire in Europe, so really what’s happening there is that’s just straight up ghostwriting. That’s somebody essentially taking money to not exist.

**John:** Yep. That’s what happens.

**Craig:** I don’t like that.

**John:** All right. We answered a bunch of questions. We still have more questions. But if you have a question for us, write in to ask@johnaugust.com and we will try to get to them on a future show. But now it’s time for our One Cool Things.

Craig, I’m so excited to see yours, so talk us through yours first.

**Craig:** So, mine is the Nokia Thermo. John, I hate thermometers. I freaking hate them. There’s so many different kinds – here’s the problem with thermometers. There’s the dinky digital kinds, and then you stick them under your tongue, or you lose them and they go, meep-meep, and you have to hold them in your mouth. And you’re never sure if you’re getting them right under your tongue. And especially if you have a kid, are they holding it under their tongue?

And then you can put it under the armpit, but that’s a different reading because the body temperature is different than the blah-blah-blah. And it goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on. I hate them.

And then, you know, when you and I were kids they had the glass thermometers with the mercury that inevitably somebody would drop and then there was deadly mercury on the floor. So there’s that problem.

So, the Nokia Thermo, I love this thing. It is an electronic thermometer. On their website they’re charging $100 for it, but on Amazon I think it’s $80. And, yes, there’s an app. And it syncs with the app. And you can record, oh, Craig’s temperature, and Melissa’s temperature, and Jack’s temperature, and Jessie’s. Yeah, whatever. Whoop-tee-do. That’s not the point.

Here’s what’s fascinating about it. It uses essentially a scan of your temporal artery and your temporal artery is sort of located in an arch across your forehead and then up under your hair. And so what you do is you glide this thing, you sort of place it in the center of the forehead, and it’s got this very – you know that super soft kind of silicon? Yeah, so it’s like being caressed with a whisper. You place that right in the center of the forehead and you just slide it like you’re swiping. You swipe right. You slide it to the right, towards the hairline, and just like that, boop, it’s done and it gives you an instant reading. And it is really accurate because I tested it against a bunch of thermometers and it was just spot on.

And I loved it. And it was fast. So, I’m a big fan of the Nokia Thermo.

**John:** So, I’m looking at the picture here and I’ve seen this exact thermometer before. So I don’t remember who originally had this, but obviously Nokia makes it now. And I was curious about it. So I’m so glad that you liked it and now that I know you like it we will buy one immediately.

**Craig:** You’re going to love it.

**John:** I’m going to love it.

**Craig:** So much fun!

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a very good blog post by Justin O’Beirne about Google’s Moat, he calls it. Basically it seems to be obsessed with Google Maps and Apple Maps and sort of how they compare and how they grow over time.

So, his blog seems to be just entirely about digital maps. But this article I thought was especially great because he takes a look at the same areas and how Google Maps maps it and how Apple Maps maps it. And the differences but also some of the new technologies and sort of speculation about why Google Maps is ahead and how they are going to continue to be ahead.

So, it’s really fascinating. A thing I had started to notice but I hadn’t realized that it was just on Google Maps is as you zoom in closer and closer they now show the outlines of buildings. So they always had like the satellite view, but now they very carefully trace the outlines of buildings and they use those traces of outlines to sort of show the larger density within cities.

It’s a very smart bit of both computers crunching things hard, but also designers really thinking about what is the right level of detail to show you at different levels of zoom in. It’s impressive. And he speculates on why they’re doing this and sort of where it’s going next.

**Craig:** Where is it going next?

**John:** Well, one of the things that’s so fascinating is if you go into Google Maps and you zoom in really close it shows the outline of the buildings. And it shows where the bay windows are on buildings. So like it’s really detailed. And his theory is that Google is doing this all because down the road when they have cars going around they want to be able to take things to a specific door. Or really know buildings in such detail they can see like someone is going to come out of that door versus that door.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so they want to know where all the doors are. And so they have the satellite imagery, they have existing maps, they have their street views. And they seem to be doing a very good job of combining all that data to really know exactly what businesses are where. Basically where everything should be so that if they down the road want to send an autonomous vehicle someplace they’ll know exactly where to send it within like feet.

**Craig:** That’s fascinating. It’s scary, but it’s fascinating.

**John:** Yeah. It’s good. Just today I’m in Boulder visiting my mom and we looked out the window and we couldn’t figure out what this one thing was. And it was some sort of like giant enclosure, sort of like how you know practice fields have those big tent enclosures over them. But we couldn’t remember what was there. And so we pulled up Google Maps and like, oh, those are tennis courts because we can see the tennis court.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** Everything is at your fingertips at all points these days.

**Craig:** Everything.

**John:** Everything. That is our last show for 2017.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Craig, there was some good stuff that happened this year, but on the whole I’m just ready to sort of put 2017 aside and be excited about 2018.

**Craig:** Let me just remind you, let me just be Jewish for a second, John, that’s what we all said about 2016. [laughs]

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I just want to caution you that we may be fondly remembering 2017.

**John:** There is that possibility. I think 2016 ended really badly, but 2017 was really bad the whole time through.

**Craig:** Well, you know, the fun part of this all now is that people can hear us. As the world changes they can go back and listen to what we said before and after these things. And it’s very touching actually and people are like, oh John and Craig seemed so happy right up until the election. [laughs] They were so happy.

**John:** There was that little extra episode we put out which was like–

**Craig:** Shell-shocked. Yeah.

**John:** Everything will be OK.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well. Yeah. Look, this may get worse before it gets better.

**John:** That’s absolutely true. Or it may not get better. But we’ll hope it gets better.

Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Matthew and the Children’s Bell Choir of Akita.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send these longer questions like the ones we answered today.

On Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We’re on Facebook. Just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. Look for us on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts.

Show notes are at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. They go up within the week. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net, or on the USB drive which is at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, have a great New Years. And I’ll talk to you in 2018.

**Craig:** Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. See you next year.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Firelight](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2281241/), the How Could This Be A Movie that is, indeed, a movie
* Amazon’s [deal](http://deadline.com/2017/11/amazon-the-lord-of-the-rings-tv-series-multi-season-commitment-1202207065/) for The Lord of the Rings TV rights
* Amanda Hess’ Twitter [response](https://twitter.com/amandahess/status/943318750094417920) to Sarah Sahim’s accusation of plagiarism
* [Nokia Thermo](https://health.nokia.com/us/en/thermo)
* [Google Maps’s Moat](https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat) by Justin O’Beirne
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](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 Matthew Chilleli and the Children’s Bell Choir of Akita ([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_331.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/a-cops-cop-show).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 330 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, it’s a special episode. This is left over from the Austin Film Festival, but it actually has its roots before then. At a live show we did in Los Angeles we played this little game show thing. And the guy who won the game show had the opportunity to have us read his script. And this is us talking to that guy whose script we read.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So, his name is Andrew Thalheimer. It is a pilot. And so as we’re recording this Craig and I have read his first script. He’s gone back and done a revision based on what we talked about. If that script is available we will link to both versions of the script.

**Craig:** I hope it is. That actually would be kind of interesting for people to see.

**John:** Yeah. But it was a really good discussion. So, we were just chatting in Austin about sort of what he’d written and sort of why he wrote it. Andrew’s background was really interesting. He’s a former police officer. He wrote this police comedy-drama. It had a really interesting tone. I think a lot of our conversation was about the tone. So, this is that conversation. I hope you enjoy it. And we’ll be back with a more normal episode next week.

Andrew, welcome to this little special edition.

**Andrew Thalheimer:** Thank you very much for having me here.

**Craig:** Welcome Andrew.

**John:** So, tell us about yourself as a writer. You sent through a one-hour pilot. Is this the first thing you’ve written? How much other stuff have you written?

**Andrew:** This is the first complete one-hour pilot I’ve written. I’ve been writing my whole life. Screenwriting for a few years. I actually went to graduate school in Boston for screenwriting.

**Craig:** You went to graduate school for screenwriting?

**Andrew:** I see you jumped in on that.

**Craig:** That must have cost a lot of money.

**Andrew:** It didn’t.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**Andrew:** Yeah, I got all the assistantships and all that kind of stuff. Otherwise a very terrible decision.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So talk us through a little bit more. You grow up. What did you do for undergraduate? What was your degree?

**Andrew:** So I’ve bounced around the country and also bounced around colleges. I started out pre-med. Didn’t last for long. Journalism. Didn’t like the who-what-when questions. Realized I liked the why and how questions. Eventually got my English degree, which is completely worthless also. But somewhere along the way I found screenwriting. That was in Albuquerque. Their film industry was getting pretty big at the time. And it was just a format that I enjoyed the medium, the visual of it. And not that I was a die-hard movie fan growing up. But I liked them enough and the fact that I was writing things that could be seen instantly excited me.

**John:** And so why graduate film school? Why this particular program? Which program did you go to?

**Andrew:** I went to the Boston University Screenwriting program. I was living in Boston, for some reason doing construction. Just like renovating 250-year-old homes. And driving home one day in December in Boston and I said this is terrible and I don’t want to do this for three more months even, let alone the rest of my life.

So, I applied to that program. And I had still been writing all that time but I guess in my warped mind that the comfort of going back to school was going to make it all right.

**Craig:** Sure. I think that’s exactly what they offer. And there is value to it. I mean, it’s a scary prospect because the world of professional screenwriting has no ranks, no paths, no milestones. It just is this weird thing and you sometimes don’t even know if you’ve made it or not. I mean, we’ve talked about like nobody really makes it exactly. It’s really amorphous. And so there actually is great value, at least early on, in having some kind of regimented path for yourself. And sounds like you managed to get through it without it costing you any real money.

I mean, that’s the most important thing.

**John:** So, was that one year, two years? How long was the program?

**Andrew:** They have a four-semester program and optional semester out in LA, which I did that as well. And I’m fortunate enough to have a wife who is a teacher to support my–

**Craig:** Screenwriting habit.

**Andrew:** Stupid endeavor.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that.

**John:** So after Boston you moved out to Los Angeles and you’re living on the West Side now. Your wife is a teacher?

**Andrew:** Yeah.

**John:** And are you working as well?

**Andrew:** I am working for a development company, yeah. So reading scripts, running bizarre errands.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** That’s good actually. The reading of scripts I think is probably quite enlightening.

**Andrew:** Absolutely. Absolutely.

**Craig:** I mean, you did that, right?

**John:** I did that, yeah. So, I read for a company called Prelude which is based out of Paramount. I read for TriStar for a year. And you end up recognizing a lot of patterns of like these are things I don’t like, things I never want to do, things that would never work for me on the page.

So, what you’re reading, is that mostly features? Is it TV? Is it everything?

**Andrew:** It’s everything. Probably more TV now. And the thing probably that I’ve learned the most being there, besides getting into the scripts and seeing what I like and dislike is how they go through the development process. Even just in the idea phase, which has always been a struggle for me. Finding – you were calling it the central dramatic argument yesterday.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Andrew:** It’s always very vague for me. I have it there, but bringing it out has always been a real struggle. So, being in the development – in a development company has really helped with that.

**Craig:** You start to see how it’s important for other people’s work.

**Andrew:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And what it does for it. Good. Great.

**John:** Cool. Let’s talk about this script. So it was written by Andrew Thalheimer. Story by Robert Kulb and you. Who is Robert Kulb?

**Andrew:** He’s a friend of mine from Philadelphia. We went through the Philadelphia Police Academy together in 2004. I lasted three years as a cop. And that was plenty for me. I actually worked in the neighborhood that Rocky lived in in the first couple of Rocky films. It was a lot nicer 40 years ago than it was when I was there.

He’s still there. He’s a sergeant in Philadelphia. But we were friends from the beginning because we talked about books and writing and bizarrely that’s not what most cops talk about.

**John:** So this feels like a crucial piece of bio that you sort of gave short-shrift to, because your background as a police officer going through the academy is so helpful for like framing context around this. So, if I read this script without knowing this, and knowing this, I think it changes my perception of the read. It changes on sort of like what I’m going into with expectations. And I think it helps to know that you are a former cop going into this, because it makes me sort of – I don’t know, it gives me a little more benefit of the doubt of some of the things that could seem unlikely.

And it also helps frame for me that we’re going over the course of a night and it’s sort of like the routine, but also the surprises that happen over the course of the night.

**Craig:** I agree. It is good context to have. In my mind I presumed that your dad was maybe a cop. That you had a police officer in your family. But it’s really interesting to know that you were the police officer. I do think that’s very helpful for people to know. I mean, I don’t know how you exactly convey that information when you send this script around, but hopefully you do. Because it will add a legitimacy to things. No one will ever pause and go, “Has this guy done his research? Do cops really do these things?”

**Andrew:** It’s super bizarre.

**John:** So talk us through where you’re at right now. So, you’ve written this script. Do you have an agent, a manager, any of that stuff? Has that happened yet?

**Andrew:** No. It hasn’t happened yet. I’ve been in LA just about a year. Sort of second year goal is to see if I can some kind of representation.

**John:** All right. Well let’s get into it. So, as I was about halfway through the script I realized it was a different thing than I thought it was going to be. And I thought it was going to be Jack and his original partner and then I realized, oh no-no, it’s actually in a weird way kind of like Hill Street Blues but in a world where Training Day exists. So, it’s about the routine life of police over the course of a night but in a world where bigger, badder things have happened and can happen. And where language is more realistic, the heightened way that we sort of do our things right now.

And if I keyed into that a little earlier I think I would have been more on for the ride. I don’t know about you, Craig, but I had a hard time sort of getting placed within the story at the start. I like the frenzy, I like the partner and sort of how wild and weird stuff was at the beginning, but it was so disorienting I didn’t know kind of what movie I was in, or what kind of pilot I was in for probably quite a ways into pages. You?

**Craig:** Yeah. There definitely is some tonal confusion going on. So I want to know how I’m supposed to feel about moments. I mean, really that’s tone ultimately does. It gives us a sense of the rules of the universe we’re stepping into. Obviously in this room there’s a certain tone that we have. And then when you’re out with your friends at a bar there’s another tone.

When this opens up, there is almost a kind of – I guess I would call it a black comedy kind of tone to it, because these are two cops. One of them is under surveillance. And it feels like a comedy. The way he’s reacting to the way the cops are and suiting up and getting hit with the bean bag and going in and going out. And meanwhile there’s gazpacho going on. All of that stuff feels very broad actually.

So, what the rules of the beginning are telling me is this isn’t really serious. It’s not Police Academy goofy, but it’s somewhere in the middle like a Raising Arizona version of a police story.

**John:** To me it almost felt like a Bad Boys. That sense of like – and you’re making a terrible face at that – but the sense of like it almost felt flashy and exaggerated in ways that the rest of your script doesn’t really get to that place. So like he’s pulling a flashbang out of a plastic jack-o’-lantern. That doesn’t feel like the rest of your script at all. And so because it’s the very first thing we’re seeing, that’s what I kind of expect the world of this universe to be.

So, talk to us about sort of your decision to open with the former partner and getting arrested and that stuff rather than starting on Jack and Daniel.

**Andrew:** Can I go pre starting the script just for a little context? I don’t like cop shows. I guess I liked them a little bit before I was one, and then I didn’t. And then after being a cop I despise them. I always thought that the realest cop show was Reno 911! I think I have a line in there about the absurdity of policing and I can’t remember the other word I use there. But it really is. Nothing really makes sense. And narrative tries to make sense of it in movies and TV. And then it’s not real.

And I know we have to entertain and we experience it through narrative, so that beginning was my effort at giving a story engine to this series and to this world that is very episodic and bizarre.

**Craig:** Well, it’s really interesting because part of the beginning, you were at the Scott Frank thing, right? So Scott and I talked about the first ten pages and how important all of that stuff is. So part of the beginning is you’re educating me about the way this is going to work. So the first thing I think it’s really important to do is put yourself in the shoes of everybody that knows nothing.

And we have expectations. One of our expectations is we’ve seen a whole bunch of cop shows. If your purpose, and I think it’s an admirable one, is to say I don’t like cop shows. They actually all suck and they’re not true to reality. Reality is bizarre. I think first though you need to put me in a cop show. And then you need to go, wah. Right?

So the opening is this ain’t your dad’s cop show, but that means first let’s set up some – put my feet up on the ground first. Because I start this way without my feet on the ground, I have no idea what I’m in. And I don’t know if the point is this is how reality works or just this is a broad show. Because when I watch Reno 911! I take it as a comedy that doesn’t look like reality at all, because that’s how they intended.

So, in your script here what’s the moment where you go that’s this tiny thing that epitomizes the real bizarre absurdity of being a cop?

**Andrew:** This isn’t really crime related, but the scene with the newspaper chicken man. Today actually my friend Bob Kulb sent me a screenshot from Facebook, this is the four-year anniversary of when he actually experienced that–

**Craig:** The guy making the chicken in the empty newspaper?

**Andrew:** Right. And he was a guy that my friend encountered on the street regularly and they got into conversations, got to know each other, exchanged recipes.

**Craig:** See, OK. That was a very cool moment. But then that moment to guide me in – by the way, that’s a more interesting beginning to your show, I think, than what you have, crazily enough. And to guide me in, I see a cop pulling up on a homeless guy and there’s a fire. And you’re like, oh boy, here we go. Right? And he gets out of the car and I think this is going to be a show where a cop harasses a homeless guy. Maybe the homeless guy has started a fire. Who knows what’s going on?

And he walks up to him and he’s like, “So what’s it tonight?” And they have a discussion and we see then he’s cooking the chicken and they have a discussion. He’s like, “All right man, take it easy.” And he gets back in the car and drives away with a wing or something. You go that’s what policing actually is like. But it has to start, literally the first shot has to I think welcome me into something I’m familiar with before you pull the rug out. I guess that’s how I would put it.

What do you think about that?

**John:** I get the idea of the inciting incident being that the original partner is gone, but with the original partner gone I didn’t know sort of who was important in that twosome and so then when the partner is gone I didn’t know that I was supposed to be focusing on Jack, because I thought maybe I was supposed to be focusing on the other guy. And I got confused where I was at. By the time – like within this first initial sequence, then this badge gets pulled out, and then there’s a graduation. And that all felt like at such a different scale than sort of like the people are storming down the castles that I had a hard time believing that moment right then.

You know, it’s interesting that on page four is the first time that he said like, “If we weren’t cops, if we weren’t white cops, then this would all be going very differently.” But before that point I assumed, and I think you kind of wanted me to assume, that these were bad guys. That these were somehow genuine criminals in that sense. So start – finding a different way into it that feels more like your show I think is going to help you, because the rest of your show doesn’t feel like that first initial thing.

And I get the drive to have something big and exciting to have some sort of scale at the start, but I don’t know that that’s especially going to help you. And it’s not setting you up for the contract that you’re going to make with your audience which is basically we’re going to follow in largely kind of real time, or at least continuous time over the course of this day, and all the things that will happen along the way. And things will be set up and payed off, but sort of sequentially. And that there’s a central twosome that we’re going to follow, but there’s an ensemble of other characters who are going to keep recurring throughout this night.

It’s a more familiar pattern, but it’s also within that familiarity, within that expectation you can sort of show all the things that are different from the normal.

**Andrew:** It’s actually unsurprising to me that you guys got so caught up on that opening, because I wrote I think eight openings, completely different openings. And, you know, this is my first finished TV pilot. So, how to actually write a successful pilot is tough.

**Craig:** Well, the beginning is sort of the big advertisement for what you are and what you’re about. Think about how The Shield began. That sort of established exactly what you needed to know about that show, right? We’ll begin with a regular cop show. Uh-oh, pull the rug out from under you and that’s going to be your series from here on out. This is a bad cop. We get the deal.

And so I think you just – of all your eight openings look at the one that you think kind of does the best job of selling the heart of your show and what’s special about it which is the natural viewpoint of a realistic day on the beat.

Now, you have certain requirements. So we talked about how translating real life into movie life can sometimes just turn into boring movie, right? So, you have so many things going on here. I feel like you kind of were like, oh my god, I’ve got 20 freaking great stories. Let me shove in like 17 of them. You don’t have to do it quite like that. I think you can pick your two or three favorites.

Then there is this traditional narrative you kind of have to move our heads toward. Because we love the little stories, we love the touches, but the traditional narrative is the thing we’re going to stick with. Something has gone very wrong in the beginning. And I think a police officer getting arrested for some kind of crime is serious. And being paired with your own son is kind of crazy. And how that pays off at the end. That narrative, which is all fictional, I think needs to be the focus. Not all the stories. Those stories are great to be informative, but I do feel like sometimes you’re working really hard to get them all in.

**John:** Yeah. I do wonder if you’re asking us to take two big leaps right at the start. The first is that this guy’s partner is being arrested and that he’s under suspicion. The second is that he’s going to be partnered with his own son. Both of those things feel unlikely. And two unlikelys together is a big ask of the audience.

So, there’s an argument to be made for we don’t see the partner. You know, the partner is set up and that he’s gone away, but we don’t see that as being a big focus. We don’t establish him as an individual character we’re going to meet. That the only ask you’re making of the audience is he’s getting partnered with his son and there should be maybe a little bit stronger a story point for like why they’re doing that. There’s a specific thing. So the guy who is making the assignment is doing it for a very specific reason. Essentially he knows that Jack won’t be able to do certain things because his son is going to be with him. Or some logic for that. There’s a reason why they got stuck together. And that creates a good tension.

Because I don’t see Daniel ever really asking the question like how did we get partnered together? Because it seems unlikely and I don’t see Daniel ask at any point in the story how this happened. He just sort of rolls with it.

Is it natural to be partnered with a family member?

**Andrew:** It’s not. And that was actually the original premise of the series. But as this is not enough to drive a series. And so I imposed the partner thing. And then I created a whole series arc for that.

**Craig:** Well, you know, the series is about an experience of a world, because this isn’t a miniseries right? It’s meant to go on and on right? So it’s like Hill Street Blues, you are creating a world of characters that have a soap opera relationship with each other. And I never mean that in a bad way. I mean, Hill Street Blues is a great, great show.

And then each week stuff is happening. And I think that John’s right. You have these two major shifts in this man’s life. One is losing a partner. And one is being partnered with his son. A traditional narrative way to do this, which isn’t always the worst thing in the world, is in the beginning of the show his partner is arrested. He goes to see his son graduate. He and his son have clearly a difficult relationship. The two of them split up. The son is now on the beat with some other person as a rookie. The father is starting to investigate what’s happened with his partner. And the two of them intersect. And by the end of the show they decide they should be partners, or they are told they are going to be partners for some reason that’s logical. So, your show ends with a big “Oh God” this is the new real.

When we start it that way you’ve immediately let a lot of air out of the balloon I think. Because we’re like, wow, god, we get it. This is the series. Father and son on the beat together. And…there they go. Right?

You have I think probably cheated yourself a little bit of some great conflict. The other issue with the father and the son right now is you’ve done I think an excellent job of conveying believably the reality of life on the street for a cop. But then there’s the reality of the life between two human beings you have fictionalized. And I’m not quite believing the relationship there between the two of them.

They don’t really seem like they have a history together. They don’t feel lived in. Fathers and sons have very complicated relationships. There is so much to say about a father who is a cop and then a son who decides he wants to be a cop. There’s a lot to say about that. Particularly if maybe they don’t get along. Now I’m all ears. Because I love that stuff. I don’t like you but I’m trying to be like you? Oh, this is good, right?

But that history, that lived in thing, their discussions, their reference points. I know the way it is with my son, who is 16 now. At some point you teach them, you teach them, you teach them, and then at some point they’re like, “Stop telling me how to do things. I’d rather just fall and fail on my own.” Well, now we have a father and a son. The son is grown. He’s a man. He’s a cop. But the father knows way more than the son does. How does that work? All that stuff is really juicy.

And that I think is more interesting to follow. It’s like what Scott was saying, the character part. That’s ultimately what will keep people watching.

**John:** If I had skipped over the part where it explained that they were father and son and just like if I did that thing that they talked about on the Three Page Challenge where they read the first few pages and skipped and read the middle pages, I would have guessed that they were uncle and nephew. Because it honestly felt a little bit more like what their relationship was in the sense of they knew each other, but they weren’t close. They were family but they weren’t – I didn’t feel like the father authority kind of thing very much happening in here.

And I felt like they got along fine. I didn’t feel the tensions I would expect to see between a father and a son. I’m not saying that’s a better pitch for that, but I think right now it feels – I’m not feeling the father and son. And I never got a sense that Daniel was ever going to turn on Jack, or could turn on Jack. And in a weird way because he’s his father it would be very unlikely that if he found information that Jack really was dirty that he would turn on him.

I would say just be thinking about where you want the audience to be sitting in terms of their feelings about each character. And I think it’s great that they have some real questions about what Jack has been up to and what Daniel is really doing there. If we found out that there’s a second conversation happening with Daniel about keeping an eye on Jack, that’s really interesting, too.

**Craig:** Like IA suddenly gets their hooks into Daniel. I mean, look, the son and father being teamed up as partners on the street is really interesting. The fact that the father might be dirty and the son is super straight-laced is really interesting. The fact that the father is innocent and maybe keeping his son out of trouble and we think it’s the other way around – there’s so many things you can do with that.

Do you have kids, by the way?

**Andrew:** No.

**Craig:** OK. But you had a dad?

**Andrew:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And still do?

**Andrew:** Yeah. Who is not a cop.

**Craig:** Got it. But you have a dad is my point. So you know how you are with your dad. And if you guys were on a job together just imagine that day. And there’s just stuff. There’s a whole lifetime of stuff. And I think it actually is great. I think the concept of it is great. It’s really fertile territory. You just have to now start planting seeds and growing it. And concentrating on that.

It’s so much more important for us to believe that and find what’s fascinating about that than for instance some of the kind of interesting garnish that comes on about people trading food for beer for favors. Which is all fun, but the father/son story is where this is at I think. So that’s where I would start. I would dig in hard on that.

**John:** Yeah. Because if you think about it, this is going to probably be the most time they’ve spent together for quite a long time. To be next to each other for an entire shift, that’s a lot of time to be spending with your dad. And so I think that could be an interesting dynamic you stick in there, too. Because you know your partner should be a confidant but also your coworker and all that stuff. But when it’s also your dad, it puts in a weird extra pressure on it.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Yeah. Typically when we put two people together like this neither one of them likes the idea of it. And for good reason. If you’re going to put a father and son together on the job, I want to know that both of them are going to say, “You’re out of your mind. Absolutely not.” And why are they being put together? Two reasons. One, the reason that you cook up in your show. Two, you’re the writer and you’re forcing them together because this is what needs to happen with these two. And that is where it gets fun.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about the words on the page. Because the writing reads fine. It reads really well. And so I had no trouble getting what you were going at and your descriptions of actions were really good. But I had a hard time though, sometimes I finished a scene and I’m like, wait, what was that about? And some of that I think is a deliberate choice you’re making that the world is just sort of chaotic and stuff just kind of happens. And that’s good, until the point where I can’t sort of figure out why did you show me that thing.

And there were definitely times along the way where I was like I don’t know quite why you showed me that thing and I didn’t have enough connective tissue to understand why that scene was there rather than three pages earlier or three pages later.

An example of something you come back to rhyming a couple of times is the stuff with the pools and the guy who drove through and smashed the pools and then coming back, replacing the pools. I felt like there was an opportunity to take an event that happens at the end with the Vietnamese restaurant.

**Craig:** It was like a convenience store.

**John:** The convenience store. I felt like that might be a useful thing to sort of layer in earlier on. Like this is a place we either visited earlier on and then there’s a thing, so then when it gets to the end that whole sequence, which is bloody and gory, it’s something we’re surprised by but also expecting. I mean, that sounds contradictory, but it’s a place that’s familiar to us and it was in one context at the start of the show and it’s a very different context now. Where if it was just a place where this is the place where my dad and I had this annoying fight about this stuff and then suddenly this is actually a place where like a guy is bleeding out, that’s really interesting.

And that also gives me some confidence as a viewer and a reader that there’s a reason why the writer took me to these places earlier on.

**Craig:** I mean that’s really important. The kind of notion of deliberate plotting. So the things that happen are paying off things that we have seen. And it does kind of come back to this question, the thing that you said you’re still kind of digging into, which is this theme or the point. We don’t have to say central dramatic conflict. That’s just my baloney lecture term.

**Andrew:** That’s very guru-y.

**Craig:** Very guru-y. What is the point of this? What are you trying to infect in my head with this?

**Andrew:** So the point of this, the theme, is what I started with. I never wanted to write cop dramas. But with all the police stuff going on, don’t even have to elaborate at all, something that was very intense in policing and you hear about the brotherhood is just loyalty. And it’s a great value and you know you hear it with Trump and how important loyalty is and how it’s above everything else. But it’s also total garbage sometimes to put that above every other value and I saw that as the reason for so many issues in policing.

And not even this major external stuff like covering for a partner who has committed crimes. Continuing with the way the institution does stuff, being loyal to the institution, being loyal to other people who are loyal to the institution. And I don’t know how that changes.

**John:** So let’s try and get that down to a single statement and see if we can get that down to–

**Andrew:** Here’s the theme. Here’s the theme–

**John:** So you actually have a dedication page where you talk about how cops are essentially all lone wolves, or it was better phrased than that.

**Craig:** They’re a pack of wolves, but–

**John:** But they’re all lone wolves. And you’re trying to get to that loyalty point. Is your central thesis or your question like is loyalty toxic, or loyalty is toxic. Loyalty is a corrosive force. Loyalty will drown us all. Like I think those are all really fascinating things and you’re actually well set up to explore those things, particularly with the bond of are you loyal to your family. Are you loyal to this oath you’ve taken which is sort of internal loyalty? Are you loyal to your fellow cops? That’s really interesting and compelling. And I think that is a great thing to build all these branches off of.

**Craig:** I agree. I think that now that I hear you say that it seems to me if I were working on this episode, this pilot, and I know that’s your intention, I have a father who has a very nuanced, experienced, muddled up understanding of loyalty because he’s had to live it, right, is to walk the line. And he knows he has made bad choices and he’s made good choices. He’s not a bad guy, but he knows he’s covered for bad guys. Right? He’s in, he’s up to it to his waist. He’s not in over his head but he’s up to his waist.

And here’s his son who doesn’t want to put up with any of it. His son who believes that – who is modern. Who has come into policing in the midst of a policing crisis and who believes that his loyalty is to oath and justice. And at the end of that episode if that son lies to cover for his own father, I know why I watched this episode. Because I have now seen a little bit of the mud rise up and now I’ve seen the father realize what it’s doing to his kid and I’ve seen the kid realize that he has the same problem inside of him as his dad. And now it’s universal and I totally get it.

If that’s what came through. So that’s what I talk about like in the structure thing. If I can go from that, I can go backwards and now start engineering things. So I know I want to end in this bloody mess at Tran’s, right, then in the beginning there’s going to be something where that kid is saying to his father, “You’re doing this wrong.” And his father saying, “This is kind of how it has to be.”

And at the end the thing the kid warned him about has come true. People are dead. And even so the kid backs up his dad. Now I have unity. So it’s really thinking through from that point. Let that point guide you.

And then you have – once that point has kind of driven you through and you understand how this story is serving that, then you have the gift of all your knowledge, of the things you have that nobody else has. Lindsay Doran always says, “What can our movie do that no one else can do?” Well, what can your show do that no one else can do? Chickens in the empty newspaper box. Right?

So do that. For sure. But that’s your thing, right? That’s what makes your show special. But, got to drive to that point. And then I think you will find yourself far more organized. And you won’t have that feeling that John has where he’s like why did I just watch that scene exactly, because you’ll know why it’s there.

**John:** So this morning you were at my lecture on want, right? This is only a couple hours later, so you probably haven’t thought through everything in terms of that, but I’d ask you to look at especially Jack and Daniel in terms of what they want. And what they want in the short term, but what their overall goals are.

So I think I hear Daniel articulate a bit about sort of his vision for what he sees the role of a police officer to be. I’d love to know that a little bit more clearly. Again, I always say like if this was a musical what would the song be? How would he express what he’s hoping for someday to get to a place? And I want to hear the same thing from Jack. And especially what does Jack want for himself but also in terms of his son? And sort of what choices is he going to make to get himself closer to those things?

There were times where I think I was confused in scenes because I didn’t know what they wanted literally in the moment. What were they trying to do? And so I would see them do things and I guess that’s a thing that a police officer does, but I didn’t see what their ambition was or motivation was right in that moment.

And then I would finally say the degree to which you can show us some private wants, things that each of them wants individually that the other one doesn’t know about, that’s also super helpful. So that may be just layering in the conversation with another character that one doesn’t hear, or the thing which we as an audience can see that the other character doesn’t see, so we get a little bit closer to them. And we get some insight that nobody else in this world has. That’s really helpful when you do that.

**Craig:** You know what I was just thinking, I really like that – I assume this is part of your realism that there’s a stolen car, they see the stolen car, they pursue the guys who flood the stolen car. They catch the guys. And when they come back someone else has stolen the car. I assume that really happened. Ish.

**Andrew:** To that effect, yeah.

**Craig:** That’s great. And I believed it. Like I saw that and I’m like, yeah, I bet that happens all the time. That’s, now put that in the context of the relationship between these two people. It’s the old bull and the young bull. And here’s the son saying, “No, we got to do this right.” And the guy is saying, “Forget it. Let it go.” And the end of that scene is, “See, dumb-dumb,” except that in the end-end if the guys they let go – and I know you bring it back, you bring the car back, but it’s almost like a random thing that came in. And I wanted it to be meaningful. I wanted it to be like that car kills someone.

The point being you can’t let it go. Right? But you just have to sort of deal with the insanity of it and keep trying. Just finding the relevance of these things so that it all fits and knits together. And what John is saying is 100% correct. You can’t get there unless you know from the start what it is – like I know what Daniel wants, I think. He wants justice. He wants to be a good cop. He wants to make a difference. Make the world a better place. Right? But what Jack wants – that’s where it gets interesting. And I’d love to know.

I’d love to know. And I think then you get him out of just comically cynical old cop who has seen it all and into a human being who has an agenda and unfortunately his job and his agenda don’t always match.

**John:** Where is your head at, Andrew? What do you see Jack wanting right now?

**Andrew:** So you had mentioned earlier how you sort of give away the series premise like seven minutes in, or I give away, and my reason for that was to immediately put Jack at a crossroads in his life where his way of being a cop for 20-plus years was just loyalty to cops, to copping. And now he has got a son who is idealistic, questioning his every past conception of how things should be done, and it’s dissonance for him.

**Craig:** That’s how he feels.

**Andrew:** Right.

**Craig:** And, by the way, he can feel that way prior to actually being teamed up with his son. In other words, the fact that his partner just got busted I think is a huge crossroads for him, or is about to be busted. And the fact that his son is now a police officer to me puts him at a crossroads, even if he’s just wandering around. But what does he want?

**John:** Does he want his son’s respect? Does he want his son’s admiration? Does he want his son to be partnered with somebody else so that he doesn’t have responsibility for him? Does he want his son to not be a cop?

**Craig:** Does he want something that has nothing to do with his son? Does he want to retire with money?

**Andrew:** I would say all of those things he wants and there’s not that clear driving want in this episode.

**Craig:** Well, I think there has to be a clear driving want. And I think it has to be sitting over his entire existence in a sense. Because make the world a better place is something that sits over your entire existence. And it predates the show. Because Daniel graduates from police academy in this episode which means he’s already been there for a while. This has been going on for him for a long time.

Jack has been a cop for 20-plus years, right. And he now wants something for sure before this episode starts. Something big. Retire. Get out. Maybe he, too, wants to make a difference in the world, make the world a better place, and he’s trying. And he just doesn’t quite know how. Maybe he’s trying to get off the hook for something.

It could be a hundred different things. Maybe he’s trying to make up for a mistake he’s made. Whatever it is, it has to drive him. And then what happens is you put these two people back together who have helped make each other. And you watch as they begin to interfere with what each other one wants. And then you got a show.

**John:** Let’s talk about next steps for this. Because I feel like this show coming from a former police officer is much more meaningful than this show coming from some random writer. So I think your bio is always going to be part of this show. In the next draft of this, in the draft that’s good and tight and sort of thematically works for that I think it’s a really interesting sample and I think it presents really well as you’re trying to find managers and stuff.

What else are you writing? What’s the other things that are high on your list to get written?

**Andrew:** So you had talked earlier about the tone being different at times, which is really just a combination of the different tones that I write. So, dark comedy, some supernatural thriller, a little magical realism in there.

**John:** Magical realism like in a Guillermo del Toro? Or a Tim Burton?

**Andrew:** Guillermo del Toro. Maybe a little toned down. I’m not having a whole lot of monsters, but curses and that kind of thing.

**Craig:** Well, this is the time when you should be writing as much as possible. Especially because you don’t have kids. You may one day have kids soon and they, as John and I have mentioned many times, they do sap away your life force, because the universe is aware that you’ve replaced yourself.

So this is a wonderful time for you to write-write-write. And, look, you’re reading during the day, you’re working during the day which is super important for your own mental health and sanity and economic viability in the world. But then you have time before you go in, there’s time after you go in. And I would say be really rigorous now with yourself and just keep going ahead.

**Andrew:** Absolutely.

**John:** Who else has read this script that we read?

**Andrew:** You are the first actually.

**John:** Well, Megan was the first, but we’re second and third.

**Andrew:** When I won I was like let me see how fast I can get something out that I care about. Because the best thing I’ve written is the thing I’m about to write.

**Craig:** By the way, true for us all and it never changes. And it’s important to actually appreciate that. That you keep getting better. Every single one of these experiences changes you and makes you better.

John and I have both been in this bucket before. I’m telling you, Scott Frank left me in a curled up ball one day. And it was remarkable. There’s a kernel here of something fascinating. There is a world that you’re on the verge of that’s fascinating. Really thinking about how you begin and just these two people. And let all the rest of that stuff go away and just think about how do I begin and who are these two people. Just them.

And you heard Scott talking about how he’ll just write that isn’t screenwriting but notes and things and we were saying you need to know more about the world than what you’re showing, because it will always inform everything. All the little cracks will feel weirdly filled in, even if you’re not spelling it out, because you know more. That’s the kind of work that needs to be done.

And then when you have that done, then you move onto your next most important character. And then you really start doing it with them. And you just work it, work it, work it.

**John:** Yeah. I would really focus on mapping out that central relationship and what’s going to be fascinating. And just take a step back and ignore the plot and sort of police world of it all, because you know all that stuff. And that all felt really, really true to me. Just focus on what we want to see from them.

It might be useful because you’re thinking of this as a TV show, think about sort of where this would go over the course of eight episodes or something and then what would be the most interesting thing to see in that first episode. And what would really lock you in. Because with a pilot writing sample you’re trying to show really great writing and really great development within the course of that one episode, but also that sense of there really could be a show here. He actually understands what – this isn’t just a short movie. This is actually something that can keep going. That you gave us a lot, but there’s still a lot more to give. And I think you’re going to have that stuff. World-wise, you definitely have that stuff. Make sure we feel that character-wise you’re going to have that stuff and that we’d want to keep coming back to see what was going to happen next to these two guys.

**Craig:** Exactly. Like here’s a great example from your script. At one point they go to talk to the guy that does the police horses in the stable. Interesting side trip. Felt educational. Felt sort of like here’s a bunch of stuff that you didn’t know about horses, like why they wear the wagons and stuff, why police horses have the blanket stuff. Not helpful to the relationship, the world, the character, the building.

If it came out through something that mattered, and it was impacting their relationship, or their purpose, or their connection, anything, if they grew up riding horses. If he used to put him on top of the horse when he was a little kid. Do you see what I’m saying? Suddenly it’s about them. Like then I get it.

But if it’s not about people stuff that is universal to all people, not just cops, then it becomes a little show and tell. And that’s interesting. It’s not dramatic. You know what I mean? That’s the key.

**John:** The other thing I would say is as you’re talking to people about this pilot and sort of what your intentions are, we have an expectation of police procedurals that they are going to solve a mystery, and you don’t seem to be interested in solving a mystery at all, which is great. So it’s about policing, which in a weird way is just like keeping a tamper down on things, making sure it doesn’t get crazy. As you describe to people I would make sure you’d describe what kind of show this is. So in your pitch that I was a cop, I don’t like cop shows, so I wanted to write something that was more true to what I thought was fascinating about this universe, that may be a useful thing to talk about is it’s not about the mystery of the week, it’s about how do you navigate through this insane world.

**Andrew:** You know, throughout the writing of it I really felt like it’s not possible to write a police show about cops on the street without having the larger, The Shield, or The Wire, the larger stuff going on. So, if anything it was an experiment in seeing if that’s possible.

**John:** So I think what we’re pitching here is essentially that central dynamic, which is the heroes, it is that father and son, that is what we’re pitching as being the unique thing–

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s what’s unique. I think that that’s what – look, if you’re going to have a cop show that means occasionally cop things will happen. Sitcoms will get away with it. Like you can have a sitcom like for instance Wings. Remember Wings? They’re in an airport. There’s very little travel-related plot stuff going on. Because it’s really about what happens in between the job. So, you’re not doing that. You’re doing an hour-long show, single-camera show, you’re following them around. Yeah, police stuff is going to happen, of course.

But what you’re showing is first of all the realer police stuff that goes on. And the little pieces of things that are fascinating like a jerk cop, you know, driving down the street and ruining things and another cop quietly coming up and making it good. But you’re also showing the relationship between these two people. And then I’m kind of into that.

So I wouldn’t panic so much about reacting to other shows, or standing apart from other shows. You just write your show as best you can. And I think your show is a show about a father and a son who are doing a job that puts them both in very difficult moral situations vis-à-vis their work, the law, and each other.

**John:** A good way to start in terms of figuring them out might just be to have – let them have a conversation. And so that’s sort of writing off the page. You’re not trying to stick them in any given scene. You’re just hearing them talking to each other. And just let them talk for pages, and pages, and pages and hear their voices separately. Hear where stuff is digging in. That might be a useful exercise for you getting a bit of their voice in there and understanding how they’re going to approach different stuff. And sometimes you’ll end up copying and pasting out some of those great moments for later scenes, but mostly it’s just getting yourself really good at writing those two guys in their voice so you can stick them anywhere.

**Andrew:** Cool.

**John:** Andrew, thank you for showing–

**Craig:** Thanks Andrew.

**Andrew:** Thank you for all the abuse. I mean, it’s super helpful.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s what we do.

**John:** All right. Thanks.

**Craig:** Thanks.

Links:

* [The Harrows (original draft)](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/9-13_Thalheimer_pilot.pdf) by Andrew Thalheimer, Story by Robert Kulb & Andrew Thalheimer)
* [The Harrows (rewrite)](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/12-17_Thalheimer_Pilot.pdf) by Andrew Thalheimer, Story by Robert Kulb & Andrew Thalheimer
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
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* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Andy Roninson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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