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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/adjective-soldier).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Mazin is name Craig mine.

**John:** This is Episode 325 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we’ll be answering a bunch of listener questions on topics ranging from montages, to life rights, to passive heroes.

**Craig:** That should be pretty good. That’s a nice spread.

**John:** It’s a good spread. So essentially what happens is people write in with these great questions ,and we always have a few of them on the outline to get to and we just don’t get to them.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, because we like chit-chatting.

**John:** We chit-chat. So how was your week, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, you know John, since we’ve entered the chit-chat mode, I have to tell you I’m still just every day I feel like I’m being smashed in the face with the news. It’s relentless. And dispiriting.

**John:** I guess I would take some inspiration. I feel like a bunch of stuff that has been percolating for forever is now getting out. And I do think we will emerge from this in a better place. It’s just you open up Twitter each day, it’s like who was the terrible person today?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And sometimes they’re the people you knew would be the terrible person. And sometimes it’s a brand new person. So, we’ll see.

**Craig:** I feel a little bit like, did you see Team America?

**John:** I did see Team America. We’re going to reference Team America later on.

**Craig:** Indeed. So there’s that moment where the lead puppet, I can’t remember his name, just gets super drunk and he starts vomiting in an alley. And the vomit just keeps coming. That’s basically me. Every day I wake up, I look at the news, I get on my hands and knees in a dirty alley and I start vomiting.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a natural feeling.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You are in the middle of casting your project, and a question for you is – obviously you don’t need to name any names – but do you feel that the discussion of casting has changed at all just with the revelations of this past month?

**Craig:** Yes. For sure. I mean, we have not encountered anybody that we’ve been considering who has at all been on the radar for any kind of problem. So it hasn’t come up in a specific sense. But we’ve had a ton of conversations about it, obviously. And I think what’s clear now is that anyone that’s now casting a show or hiring a director for a show is just not going to hire somebody that there’s even rumors about. Because the damage that is done – it’s fatal. These are fatal blows to projects. And naturally our first concern should be with the human beings who were victimized, but we know that businesses by and large tend to think about things in terms of money. They’re not people, they’re businesses, no matter what the Supreme Court says. And they don’t really have feelings.

There is an enormous amount of damage that is done when these things happen. So I think right now – I mean, look, you and I, we’ve heard some rumors about people and we don’t necessarily report on rumors, because we’re not journalists, and I guess journalists don’t either. But I would be shocked if any of those people were hired at this point.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s an interesting time we’re moving into because traditionally when you go into casting you get really nervous casting somebody who you worry is going to screw up in the future. That they’re going to screw up during the course of your movie, or they’re going to screw up before the movie comes out, and there will be a liability. And so those are the people that make you nervous.

I think a change that has happened is that people who worried like, oh, something is going to come out about them during the time that we’re making this thing or when we’re trying to release it, and then we’re going to have to scramble or it’s going to taint this project. And so anybody who could potentially taint the project is a liability.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you know, this is actually a great study in sort of a before and after as the world has woken up to the reality of what’s going on. And I include myself in there because I didn’t understand the depth of the predation that was occurring. My concerns prior to all this stuff, we’ll call it pre-Harvey, was will this person be nice? Will they be difficult? That was basically it. Are they going to be nice or difficult? And now it’s this whole other thing.

And I think Hollywood – I don’t think we’ve quite yet processed or even have the capacity to process how this is going to change our industry. It is going to be a profound change in our industry. Profound.

**John:** I think you’re right. So that will be one of the topics I hope we will discuss at our live show December 7 in Hollywood. So, this is the official first announcement of that. December 7 here in Hollywood we’re doing a live show. We do our annual sort of Christmas-y holiday show. We don’t know who our guests are going to be yet, but we’re going to be looking for fascinating people to talk about these topics and other topics. We usually get into sort of the big movies of the award season, but also great TV. So we’ll have some amazing guests on stage, me and Craig, at the LA Film School. An event sponsored by the Writers Guild Foundation, our friends there.

So, if you’re in town, come join us for that.

**Craig:** And this event benefits the Writers Guild Foundation.

**John:** It does indeed benefit them. So, when the page is up where people can buy tickets, we’ll put a link to that. But just mark it on your calendar so you don’t double book yourself that night.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Cool. Let’s answer some questions.

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s do it.

**John:** Let’s start with a question from Anonymous who writes, “I’d like to get your take on the thought that all lead characters must be active, not passive. I’ve gotten the note about a passive main character numerous times, but it’s almost as if the passivity is essential to who this character is as he reacts to some of the absurdity and misfortune the world places upon on him.

“My script is a comedy and heavily influenced by pieces like Swingers and the TV show Louis where the main character is mostly passive and forced into action against his will.” So, Craig, let’s talk about some passive main heroes.

**Craig:** Well, the problem with passivity isn’t necessarily passivity, I think. I think the problem with passivity is that it generally is a symptom that your character doesn’t want anything. So, our lead characters are people that want something. And what they want can change. It very often does. But they are driven to achieve a goal. That is in a feature film.

In comedies, particularly episodic comedies, but we’re talking about sitcoms really where the idea is you’re watching things unfold over time, you can have cases of a show where the characters are reacting to the world around them. In Seinfeld the characters were often passive. Not always, but often. And were simply commenting. And it was a kind of dramatized version of stand up in a weird way. A show about nothing, so to speak, and that’s all right because you understand you’re visiting with these people for 22 minutes and there isn’t a beginning, middle, and end that has some sort of meaningful closure or growth for the lead character.

But for a feature, your character needs to want something. If you’re getting the note that your character is passive, it may be in fact a symptom.

**John:** I think you are correct. I think passive can be fine. Aimless is rarely a good quality in your hero, your main character. Aimless in the sense that we don’t know what that character wants. You’re not making it clear what the character is going for, either in the someday down the road future, the immediate future, or even like right what they’re trying to do within the scene.

If those kind of motivations are unclear, then there really is going to be a problem. You can have a character who seems to be stuck in a situation and is not driving the story. That can work as long as we understand what that character is trying to do. What this character is being prevented from doing. Even the character isn’t making like huge outgoing efforts. As long as we can see what they’re hoping for. What their aim is.

If we can see how that character imagines themselves in the future in a better place, that’s going to get you something. But I agree with you also that in movies you tend to have characters who take an action that changes their life forever over the course of that movie. Like a thing that could only happen once happens to them in the course of that movie.

In television, you know, it’s a repeated cycle. So you have so often in television comedy that main character is sort of the straight man who is reacting to the wacky characters around him or her. So you have, you know, the Frasier Crane character on Cheers is a more extreme character and is driving scenes by being sort of extreme. But when you take Frasier and you move him as the lead of his own sitcom, he calms down a little bit and everybody else around him gets a bit wackier. So, that’s kind of natural in comedy.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think if Anonymous is getting this note over and over and over it may be that he or she is working in the wrong genre, or the wrong format. It may be that Anonymous belongs writing episodic comedy as opposed to feature comedy. There’s nothing wrong with that. You kind of have to write toward where your voice is. It’s probably not so much about the passivity. I think you and I both agree – I think your word aimless is exactly right, because what else is an aim if not a want.

**John:** Yeah. I would also just look for conflict overall. Make sure there’s conflict happening within your scenes and overall between characters. I think so often newer writers tend to be afraid of conflict or putting their characters in bad situations. So, put them to the fire. And you may also just be new to the form. And so when you first have characters on the page talking to each other, you end up doing a lot of quotidian chit-chatty stuff. And that’s not a movie. That’s not TV.

**Craig:** No, I think you’re right that new writers will engage in the chit-chat because it’s a way for them to find a path toward naturalistic dialogue. And that’s fine. I mean, you have to learn one way or another. But the problem is if you include that in a screenplay what you’re also saying is “My training exercise to figure out how people speak naturally to each other is now also something that you are forced to sit there and watch because I also think it’s entertaining.” That is typically not the case.

The goal of the craft is to, A, write dialogue and exchanges naturalistically, and B, have them be purposeful and entertaining and fascinating and challenging and smart and clever and funny and sad. Whatever it is that you’re going for. So, these wandering kind of discussions are very common for early writers. I always feel like they’re grasping. It’s like they get proud because they say, “Look, this actually does sound a legitimate conversation.” Correct. Now, you have to just write one that people would actually care to listen to.

**John:** Yep. I just typed down purposeful but natural, which I think is an incredibly key thing you identified about good dialogue there. It feels the way characters could actually speak in that moment, and yet there’s a purpose behind it.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Next question.

**Craig:** Next question. We’ve got something from RJ. I like that – it’s hard to tell – I’m just cheating ahead, the people that have written in. We have quite a few where you just don’t know the gender. It’s a mystery. I like it.

RJ writes, “How many montages are too montages?” How many montages, John? How many montages does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?

**John:** How many montages must a man climb before he’s, you know, seen the world?

**Craig:** Is there a number? I think the answer is 42. [laughs]

**John:** So back in Episode 268 of Scriptnotes, the episode was titled Sometimes You Need a Montage, we talked a lot about montages and different kinds of montages, but I think we didn’t really answer RJ’s question here, which I think is a good question. I’m going to say three?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, three is a lot.

**John:** Three is a lot. But, here’s what I would say. It really depends on the kind of montage there is. So let’s just see if we could list different kinds of montages because they’re very different. So, we have to start with the classic training montage and when we say that we are required to play a snippet from Team America World Police. So let’s play that here.

[Snippet plays]

All right, so that’s talking about classically where a character starts learning how to do something. They get better at it and stuff goes along. But so that’s an important thing. But there’s other montages that aren’t quite so egregious or sort of montage-y. So there’s these sort of passage of time, where literally you’re just moving from one season to another season. I feel that will be a montage of shots, but it doesn’t feel like a montage. It doesn’t feel like a bunch of little short scenes. It’s just like you’re showing a passage of time.

You could have multiples of those in a movie and you’d be fine.

Changing into various clothes things, you get one of those in a movie. If you get two of those, you’ve got to be commenting on the absurdity of having two of those kind of montages.

And I would also just look for why you’re using montages. If it’s just because you don’t know how to do it any other way, or you’ve just got a bunch of stuff to stick together, that’s probably not a good reason for using a montage. There really has to be a purpose behind why you’re choosing to show it in that form.

**Craig:** You’re the best around. I think that there’s a certain kind of montage that we think of as a montage-y montage. So, the changing of the clothes, the training. Those things I think you get one of. I don’t even think you get one of each. I think you get one.

**John:** I think you’re right.

**Craig:** The other kinds that aren’t really noticeable as montages, so someone is driving through a new town and looking around at the churches and the restaurants and the houses, that’s just sort of – often times those will play under a kind of relaxed song or something, but I don’t think of those as montages where you’re trying to show growth, or change, or any of those silly things. It’s just the stick-outty montages. You get one, I think.

**John:** Yeah, I think you’re right. Here’s the other kind of montage which I think is appropriate in different genres can make it is sort of the heist montage, or the moving through a series of small steps that get you into a place or out of a place. That can be valid, too. So if you’re making a heist movie, you’re making one of those Now You See It movies, that you’re going to have multiple montages because that’s just the nature of it. Or there’s going to be some bigger event that you are going to compress into smaller sections. I get that for that kind of movie.

But for most movies, I’m going to say three. I’m going to stick with three. And only one of those can be a training or changing clothes montage.

**Craig:** Right. And we would like to get that training or changing clothes montage number down to zero. That would be good.

**John:** That would be good. You know what? I’m still going to allow them, but I would say like you have to be aware that you are entering into cliché territory and either be better than most of them, or be commenting on the nature of it to really work.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Cool. Christopher writes, “I’m working on an adaptation of a book. What is the etiquette on using direct quotes or lines from the source material?”

**Craig:** Well, I’m going to presume some things here, Christopher. I’m going to presume that the book is fictional, and I’m going to presume that you do not have the rights to the book, or else you wouldn’t be asking the question, I don’t think.

**John:** Oh, well maybe he would own the rights.

**Craig:** Well, if he owns the rights, there’s no etiquette. The etiquette is take whatever you want. And if there is some great dialogue, great quotes or lines in the book, by all means use them. If you don’t have the rights and you’re sort of doing this on spec and hoping that you can get them, then again I would say go ahead and take what you want as long as you acknowledge when you’re showing the screenplay to people that you don’t have the rights. And that the rights would be necessary. Which they would be regardless, whether you took lines of dialogue or not.

No one thinks of that as plagiarism. The whole point of adaptation is you’re taking a book and you’re taking a work of art, and you’re transforming it into a related work of art, but you’re taking the characters and the plot points and all sorts of stuff. So, yeah, you’re free to use whatever you want.

**John:** Yeah. Legally, morally, ethically, you know, owning the rights to a piece of property and adapting them into another work, what you have there that is usable you’re allowed to use. I’ve adapted many, many books, and rarely is there much that you get to take directly from the book. But if there’s something that’s great there, you use it.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was sort of an exception in that in that case I literally went through the book with a highlighter and I would save even like little bits of scene description as much as I could, just so it would be as Roald Dahl-y as possible. But most of the things I’ve worked on, there hasn’t been really a single line of dialogue that I’ve been able to take over just because dialogue in movies and dialogue in books is so different. So, you’re unlikely to be able to use that much of it.

**Craig:** Unquestionably. Same experience with me on the project I’m doing with Lindsay Doran. There is a novel and there’s not really much in the way of specific dialogue. There are a couple things here and there. There’s one line – really it’s a description of an object – and we loved the way the character described the object and we just lifted that exactly. So, it’s your choice. It’s entirely your choice.

Well, we’ve got our next question from Chris here in Los Angeles. Chris writes, “I have a question regarding the writing of screenplays based on documentaries. There are a few docs I’ve seen that have interested me so much that I have wanted to write a screenplay based on them. Because these documentaries are based on true events, are the stories public domain? Or are the rights to the documentary needed before writing a screenplay?”

**John:** So documentaries are not in the public domain. So you’re not adapting public domain material. You are adapting this documentary. It sounds like you are so entranced by how this documentary presented this material that you think that the documentary needs to be adapted into a screenplay. That is source material. That is a source material you would need to get the rights to in order to sell or make a movie based on that.

Now, it could be that you watched a documentary about some historic event that happened 50 years ago, 100 years ago, that you think is fantastic. And you don’t necessarily think it’s any one particular thing about that documentary that is fantastic, but you think the event itself is fantastic. So then you’ve gone out and watched nine other documentaries about it and you’ve read books about it and you’ve done research and you’ve taken notes and you are ready to write your own version of a movie based on these events. Then you’re free and clear I think both ethically and morally. But show your work. Show that you’ve actually done this research to create your own take on what this historic event was, or events were, and real life people.

But, yes, if you are thinking about adapting a documentary into a movie, that’s the same kind of getting of rights as working off of a book.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, tell me your thoughts.

**Craig:** If there is a certain kind of narrative structure to the documentary that you want to convert into a screenplay form, then I think I’m completely onboard with you that there is something specific about that documentary and its narrative structure. The way it kind of moves around in time or the way it reveals things and how it reveals things. But the actual information in a documentary is not any more protected than information in a news story.

People who appear on a documentary and tell their story, and documentaries are always nonfiction obviously, they’re telling their story. That information is now fact. And people can’t own facts. So, if I watch a documentary about something that even happened a month ago, and all I want to do is take the information that I’ve learned from that documentary and then make a movie about it, then I can do it. However, there are some areas where you have to be careful.

If you are now creating fictionalized characters of people that you saw in the documentary, well for starters you can’t do anything to defame them, obviously. You can’t take somebody from a documentary and then present them as a drunk when they’re not a drunk. And you’re only really limited to the information that you can get through a documentary or news articles or any other nonfiction sources. So the documentarian can’t own the facts about those people. They can’t own what those people said onscreen.

But, you know, if you were to make a movie you would have to maybe think about going and getting some life rights so that you could actually speak to those people and get more information. So, it’s a little tricky.

Generally speaking, I agree with you though, John, that in the casual day-to-day affairs of doing business, if a documentary comes out and it really grips people and somebody wants to make a movie of that documentary, a fictionalized movie of that documentary, they would probably go and get the rights to adapt it so that there wouldn’t be any question.

**John:** So, let’s make up a documentary, and I’ll show you sort of the counter examples of what you’re describing in terms of it is based on real people so you have to go do it. Let’s say you watch a documentary about this chess prodigy in Northern Canada. He’s an Inuit whose grandfather learned chess in WWII, and it had a transforming effect in this village that he grew up in. You see a fantastic, compelling documentary about this.

If you want to go off and make the feature version of this, and this is the only sort of source you have for this. This is how you found out about it and there’s really nothing else written about it other than like articles about this documentary. If you want to go off and make the feature version of this without trying to get the rights to that documentary, I think you’re in a really dicey place morally, ethically, legally to try to do your version of it.

Because maybe all these people are now dead, so there aren’t even life rights involved.

**Craig:** Well, if they’re dead there’s even less of a legal issue.

**John:** I still think there’s a legal issue because you’re adapting the work of the documentarian who made this specific film and sort of put together this whole package of an idea in terms of what this chess prodigy Inuit living in a remote Canadian village, how he was able to transform the town. I think your framing of the story and what the impacts were could very well be legally if not just morally bound up in that original documentary.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll give you moral on that one, for sure. I mean, if there’s one documentary, there’s nothing else, and you just take it and you just do a fictional version of it, A, that feels wrong. B, like I said, if you’re following a documentarian’s narrative structure, then I do think that there’s a real case for infringement there.

The part about the facts, that’s coming – I’ve been having conversations with lawyers recently, just you know I was starting to talk to the folks at HBO just to make sure that everything in Chernobyl is OK because I’m just pulling this all from many, many, many sources. You know, tons of books and articles and documentaries and everything. And so I’ve been getting an education, and I’m in great shape. But I’ve been getting an education on how it works and it’s actually far more permissive than I thought.

**John:** OK.

**Craig:** Only in the sense that people can’t own facts.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** That’s really the big one. Is that they can’t own facts and they can’t own – if you film a real person saying a thing, so that person said, “Yes, you can film me saying this,” then that film in the world, that is now not ownable. The film is ownable, obviously. You can’t project that film. But what they said now is a matter of public record. And anyone can use it.

**John:** Absolutely. I’d also direct people back to — Irene Turner was on the show last year and we talked through things she was doing when she was making her movie based on Madeline Murray O’Hair. And the challenges that she ran into with the legal rights advisers for that because there were places where they had to sort of prove the sourcing on where stuff was, both in terms of not libeling and defaming people, but also just where these facts were coming from.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I’ve had to do a very, very, very extensive annotation, which I was helped with by our researcher, and then that annotation went over to HBO. And then they have their person who does an independent annotation of everything. And then we have a large discussion going through and making sure that everything is appropriate. So companies actually do quite a thorough job on these things. And for good reason.

**John:** Yeah. And so going back to Chris’s question, if in doing that annotation you were to find out that like, oh, almost everything is coming from this documentary, that’s probably a signal that something needs to be figured out in terms of how you are approaching the rights to that documentary.

**Craig:** It’s also a bit of a strange thing to do, I mean, we haven’t actually mentioned that. To turn a documentary into a non-documentary is a bit of an odd move. I’m trying to think of an example of it.

**John:** A few years ago there was an adaptation of Serial that was going to happen for television. And that was a case where it was moving from a documentary series about the case in the first season of Serial to a fictionalized show. And that, you know, that stuff does happen.

**Craig:** Well, that’s more of a branding thing, isn’t it?

**John:** I guess it’s a branding thing, but you know–

**Craig:** Because they weren’t going to tell the story that they actually told on Serial, right?

**John:** I don’t think it was ever quite clear.

**Craig:** Oh, interesting.

**John:** I remember getting the call about doing that. I’m like, “I don’t know how to do this.”

**Craig:** I say that all the time. How many times a week do you say that? I feel like I need a recording of myself saying, “I don’t know how to do that.”

**John:** Yeah. Actually just this last week I got sent a book that is based on a real life event that happened in a city historically – well, that narrows it down. But I was sent this and I was like, yeah, I get why that’s a movie and I totally get how that can be a movie that wins awards, but I don’t know how to do it and I don’t know how to sustain my interest in doing it for the three years it would take to make this happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. No one seems to care about our interest in things. They’re always just like, “No, no, no. We’re offering you a job. That’s enough, right? You say yes. I say here’s money, you say yes.” That’s the way it used to be with me, by the way. [laughs] And I was like, “Yes, I’m sorry did you say money? Yes, the answer is yes.”

Shall we proceed on to our next question?

**John:** Yes, let’s do it.

**Craig:** All right. We’ve got Josh in Enceladus City. Enceladus?

**John:** I’m wondering if it’s a joke. I’m wondering if this is a made up thing and it’s a reference we’re not catching?

**Craig:** Oh my god. Well, I’ll just ignore it and pretend it’s real. Josh in Enceladus City writes, “If I want to make a web series loosely based on someone’s life, a life,” oh, this is sort of a related question, “a life I know only through a Twitter feed, how would I go about doing this to protect all parties involved? The person in question is not famous or even Twitter famous. He’s an amusing blue collar guy who has a particular set of life circumstances that would make a great series. I’ve exchanged emails with him and basically said, ‘LOL, man, just go do it. I’d love to see that.’

“Initially this would be just a web series. Of course, we would hope that we’d follow in the steps of a web series like Broad City and eventually turn it into a TV show. So for the web series I’d be asking for a very low cost option on his Twitter account. But I would want to protect him so that if we were able to transition to a proper television show he would get paid a fair price or percentage. Obviously I want to protect myself as well, but the last thing I want to do is take elements of this guy’s life and screw him over.”

All right, Josh, well your heart is certainly in the right place. John, what advice do you have?

**John:** First off, I like Josh. I like that Josh is thinking not only of himself, but this guy as well. And he’s thinking about the future. And he’s thinking big. He’s thinking Broad City. So I hope all these things can happen.

When I first read the question I had skipped over the fact that he only knew him through Twitter, so I thought it was a real life friend, which doesn’t change the calculation that much, but the person you know on Twitter is basically a stranger, so you don’t know what kind of all the dynamics are going to be.

I would say that Josh is looking for an agreement that would say I am authorizing Josh to write a script and literary material – don’t even call it a script, don’t call it a television series – to write literary material based on my life and things that have been portrayed in this Twitter feed. I understand that the characters and circumstances may not necessarily reflect actual things. There’s going to be good legal language you’ll find for that. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to the NOLO legal guide for rights and rights purchases, which I think could help him out there.

But basically you want some letter that you’re both signing that states like, “Hey, here’s what we’re trying to do. Here is how we’re sort of overall framing this.” I wouldn’t get into the compensation or producer credit or anything like that in this first go around. I think this guy who you’re writing about, you know, he’s going to probably want some protection in him saying that it’s a non-exclusive option on these rights, so that you’re basically paying him no money. You don’t get to hold on to the rights to his stuff for forever, or do whatever you want for a long time.

Craig, what would you say to Josh?

**Craig:** I agree with you that Josh is a good guy. And so here’s the thing. Most of these things get worked out by the company. The company will want the most leeway possible. So they’re going to want to, A, pay him off one time. They’re not going to want to pay him a percentage of anything. And, Josh, I have to tell you, if you work on this show for five years and it becomes really, really successful, you’re going to get tired of paying this dude, too, every week.

Because he’s not doing anything. You’re doing it. You’re making the show. And the character is going to develop and evolve over time away from the inspiration and into what it is which is your creation that was initially inspired by somebody. So they’re going to want to do a payout. And the buyout means they are going to own the rights and life rights in perpetuity forever across the universe. For now, for you, I think the most important thing is that you actually have an email from him saying go ahead, do it. Believe it or not, that matters. He’s essentially given you permission. And you haven’t done anything yet to damage him.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** See, the damaging part, so this is how this works. People can sue you if you have damaged them. If you start to portray him using his real name and having him do things that he wouldn’t do that are embarrassing, hurtful to him, hurtful to his reputation, then he can come after you. But that’s not going to happen until a studio gets involved. Right? It doesn’t get produced and therefore cannot cause damages until a studio is involved.

They’re going to handle this. So, I think you’ve actually done what you need to do.

**John:** I think there’s a case to be made for getting something a little bit more in writing before you go off and shoot the web series. Because a web series could be that you’re spending a thousand dollars, or it could be that you’re spending $100,000, and you want to have some protection for yourself there. And some sense of a structure before you do that.

I agree though that it’s not until you get an actual series or feature deal or something else that it becomes important to do something bigger than this.

**Craig:** Well, yes. Look, Josh, if you’re the money behind the web series then you’re the company. Now you’re the company that means you need a lawyer to do the buyout. And you buy it out. And here’s the thing. The guy is going to get some money that he never thought he was going to ever get in his life for that. And he has a choice to make about whether he wants that money or not.

And, again, I’m not sure an ongoing percentage is fair. I think a lump sum and a buyout is a fair. In talking with an attorney, you may both find that it makes a lot of sense for you to change the name, because his name doesn’t mean anything. Rather than expose yourself and this man to any kind of potential harm, you just use him as an inspiration but you change the name and therefore you’re really well protected.

**John:** Yeah. I think you’re right. I’m curious, I haven’t looked up the backstory of Cosmo Kramer on Seinfeld who is based on/inspired by a real person, so every once and awhile you see stories of the real Kramer. But I don’t know what he was paid or sort of how he was acknowledged in the genesis of the show. Our friend, Dana Fox, her show Ben and Kate, the Ben of that show was Ben Fox, her brother. And so I think he got some payment for that. But he was sort of the inspiration of that character and sort of the thought behind that character. But he wasn’t literally the actor on screen. It wasn’t exactly what himself was onscreen.

**Craig:** Obviously if it’s your brother it’s a bit different. Kramer, the real life Kramer, did file a defamation lawsuit against a former Seinfeld writer, but I don’t really know. It didn’t go anywhere. It was dismissed.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** So, but I don’t think it was about the show. I think it was about something that that writer had written in a book. I mean, if you are inspired by a real life person, but you create a character with an entirely different name there really – and you never talk about the fact that it was inspired by that person – the real person really has no damages. They kind of create the damages themselves by saying that person is based on me.

**John:** Anybody who enters into a writer’s life kind of – there has to be some sort of general acknowledgment that if you’ve enter into a writer’s orbit, you know, you may be portrayed in a fictional version somewhere down the road. And I think a bigger discussion to have is sort of what is a writer’s moral and ethical – and legal – responsibility to inform the person that they are taking that one little aspect of a character or there’s a person who does that, but essentially if you’re a married man writing about a wife there’s going to be some aspect of your own relationship with your wife that’s going to be portrayed there. That is just natural.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. And listen there is obviously the legal stuff that we’re talking about and then there’s the ethical stuff. And any time you write something, I mean, I hear these stories. I know people write something and then they hand it to somebody and someone goes, “Oh my god, that’s me.” And sometimes the writer says, “What? No it isn’t.” Those people are like, “Yes it is.” And they’re like no it isn’t.

And now there’s a problem. Sometimes they’re like, oh yeah, that story you told was so funny and so I used it for this. And this person is like, “Yeah, but I didn’t want anyone else to know that story, even though it’s not associated with my name, or it was mine.” So, you can create interpersonal problems. And you do have to be aware of that when you do these things.

**John:** I had a friend who wrote to me about an executive that he had an interaction with that’s like, “Hey wait, was that character in that one movie you wrote, was that based on her?” I’m like, “Oh no, god no, that wasn’t her at all.” I could totally understand why he might have thought that, but it wasn’t. It was just a general composite of that kind of person that I’ve met. But he was convinced like, oh no, no, no, you wrote exactly that person. And a couple times in my life I have had people feel like, “Oh, that was based on this person.” And I was like, yeah, I can see why you say that, but no. It’s just my own take on that kind of person.

**Craig:** Exactly. There’s only so many different kinds of people.

**John:** Indeed. All right, Travis in Santa Monica wrote to ask, “What happens to the copyright of films and film universe specific content that is based on source material when the source material enters the public domain? For example, Ian Fleming’s James Bond character has become public domain for those adhering to the Berne Treaty, which is 50 years after his death. So, can Canada make a Bond film?”

Craig, absolve all these legal issues for us.

**Craig:** Well, I will do my best. So, there are two different kinds of copyrights we’re talking about here. One is a copyright on source material and one is a copyright on a movie that’s made of the source material. And these things expire at different times because they’re created at different times.

So, basically what we’re saying is, OK, Sherlock Holmes, perfect example. That’s long now in the public domain. That means anyone can create a derivative work from the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories. But you can’t take things from say the recent Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies because that’s still copyrighted by, I believe it’s Warner Bros.

So the copyright of the movies doesn’t change at all when the source material enters the public domain. All it means is now other people can make such movies. This is why for instance there are 14 billion different kinds of movies set in and around the world of Oz. But they can only draw on the public domain material, which is what L. Frank Baum wrote. So, for instance, very famously when Disney was making – what was it called, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the one with James Franco?

**John:** Yeah, Oz, Great and Powerful.

**Craig:** There you go. And at one point they have the witch turning green. Well, I don’t believe the witch is green in Frank Baum’s books. Warner Bros. I believe holds the copyright on the 1939 film which is still in copyright. And basically what it came down to is they were like when all the law dust was settled it was there is a shade of green that is our property. If you want to turn your witch green, she can’t be our green. So, it comes down to stuff like that, which is sort of fascinating.

Similarly with Bond, yes, so in Canada you can make a movie about James Bond. You cannot take any single element that has ever been in any James Bond movie.

**John:** Well, any single element that’s been in the movies that is not already in the book.

**Craig:** Correct. So, and you’d have to really make sure. And it probably couldn’t even look quite like it was in the movie, even if it’s a common element. And the truth is the movies are different than the books. And there have been so many since. So, it’s not quite so simple. And, of course, when it’s based on work that is not in the public domain in another country, like say the United States, I’m not sure how that exactly works. You may not be able to release it in the United States. So, tricky.

**John:** I have a half memory of an adaptation of 1984 done zillions of years ago that could not be released in the US because in the US 1984 was still under copyright. There was some problem with 1984 that it couldn’t be released.

Another thing I would point out – and I don’t know if this is the case with Bond, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is – trademark and copyright don’t line up necessarily.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so certain big characters are trademarked, even if their copyright has expired. And so, again, I don’t remember what happened with Tarzan, but for a while Tarzan was a trademarked brand. And so you could do a story that sort of uses the underlying novel of Tarzan but you couldn’t call him Tarzan because Tarzan was a trademarked character name.

So, there can be issues like that that are thornier than you would expect. I wouldn’t stake your house on trying to make your Canadian James Bond film when you move from Santa Monica back to the north.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I would say that there is an interesting thing you can imagine where some of these things, like Bond for instance, let’s say the Fleming novels go into public domain globally. And eventually they will. To do a James Bond movie that is just a complete deconstruction would be fascinating. The truth is you can do that now anyway. I mean, really in the end what are you getting? You’re getting the name.

By the way, this happened because – so the Broccolis, I don’t understand the providence completely, but the Broccolis, the greatest of all names–

**John:** They are the producers of the Bond films.

**Craig:** Correct. The control that property. Somehow the copyright lapsed one way for one reason or another on Thunderball, which is one of the earlier Bond movies, and the book – I guess the rights on the book lapsed early before it this public domain stuff happened. And another company went and made – they brought Sean Connery back for I think it was called Never Say Never Again, or Never Say Death, or something like that.

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** And that was just Thunderball. Again, it was the same story, I believe, they just retold it different, just using the book. It has weirdly happened.

**John:** I should also say that our explanation of this whole copyright stuff is in no way intended to be a defense of how we do stuff. How we do stuff is genuinely crazy and needs to be sorted out. As writers, we want copyright because it protects our work. It helps us get paid. It’s fantastic for those reasons. But the way that copyright has morphed into this bizarre thing that sort of never ends and keeps getting extended is potentially really damaging for people who try to make art. So we want to make sure that we are in no way trying to defend what’s happening now. Just try to explain it.

**Craig:** There has been a trend in the United States to extend copyright over and over and over. And in weird way the big motivator is Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse should have gone into public domain some time ago. It is not. And so obviously the Disney Corporation has lobbied quite effectively to extend copyright protection in general. It is now longer than it has ever been before.

The Sonny Bono Act, I believe it was Sonny Bono, representative in Congress, who had his name on that particular extension. At some point it does need to be curtailed. I mean, the purpose of copyright ultimately was to be able to get works created in such a way that they would end up in the public domain. The copyright, the idea there – copyright is written into the United States Constitution. The idea is we’re going to create a system whereby people who want to create things will be so sufficiently rewarded in an amount of time that they will do it so that eventually it’s free.

**John:** Yep. Copy Right. It talks about the right to copy.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** The right to distribute stuff. So I read an interesting story this past week about Charles Dickens who was really frustrated because at the time in the US copyright protection for British works was not enforced. And so essentially his work in the US was being pirated wildly. And so he was not seeing any money coming out of the US. And so he lobbied to sort of get the laws changed in the US, unsuccessfully. Ultimately he ended up doing a big speaking tour across the US and making his money that way.

But it was just so weird to think of a situation where American copyright law was weak and so therefore this person was not getting paid properly. And so this has become so, so flipped.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** All right, let’s go to Brett in Portland. Do you want to ask his question?

**Craig:** Yeah. Brett from Portland writes, “I’m writing a western that takes place just after the Civil War. I have several different scenes that feature military troops and numerous soldiers. I’m having trouble distinguishing between the different soldiers. I’ve given more important characters higher rank and names obviously, but what about the soldiers who are just being given orders and such? Does giving characters numbers, for example, Soldier 1, just work from scene-to-scene? Or do those numbers continue throughout the entire script?

“I don’t want to have Soldier 1 through 10. Any advice on how I can differentiate between these smaller characters and keep them from running together on the page?”

**John:** Yeah, it’s brutal and there’s no perfect solution to this. I’m never a numberer of characters thing. I just find that so annoying and frustrating. And I hate reading it in the script. I find it confusing to follow up on those things. So I’ll always try to find some adjective to stick to the soldier to differentiate them from other people. Try to find some way to let us be able to track them over the course of the scene and hopefully over the course of the movie, if they do appear in multiple scenes.

If they do appear in multiple scenes, probably give them an actual name so that you can remember that. And so it becomes clear to the people. But it is truly frustrating. I would say one of the other pros to like doing the adjective name versus the numbered name is that it forces you as the writer to think something about who that character is and sort of be just a little bit more specific than giving a person a number.

**Craig:** 100%. Thinking about this, Brett, you say that some of these characters are just being given orders and such. Well they don’t need names at all because theoretically they’re not talking. They’re just getting orders. And in that case, I don’t bother distinguishing. You know, he turns to a soldier, gives him an order. OK, that’s fine. I know that then in the next scene so-and-so turns to a soldier, tells them to run. That’s probably a different soldier.

It’s really when they’re talking. And when they’re talking, well first of all, if they’re talking and they have one line, do we need that line? And then if we do, then I’m in complete agreement with John. I don’t like to do the number thing at all.

I just went through this actually with the production department on Chernobyl because we have like 102 speaking parts in this thing. And there’s a whole bunch of soldiers. And so a lot of the questions were, OK, we’re pretty sure these are all different soldiers, but is this soldier the same as this soldier? And so I just had to clarify, yes, this is the same soldier as this solider.

And then they get numbers, but those are production numbers. So now the production understands that what we know as soldier is actually actor number 73.

**John:** Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I was thinking back to Go and there’s a scene early on in Go where Ronna is in a van with some high school kids and she’s selling them fake drugs. And so each of those kids, they’re basically only in that scene. They sort of appear outside at one other point. But I didn’t want to just – I wanted them to be individual specific. And so like one of the kid’s names is Spider Marine, which in the Smashing Pumpkins song there’s a lyric, “Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in the cage.” For whatever reason I heard that as – I heard despite all my rage as Spider Marine. And so I had been singing Spider Marine for like a year. And so Spider Marine was the name I gave to that one character.

And what’s nice about it is it kind of feels like — I don’t know why his name is that, but it gave the hair and makeup and wardrobe departments something to focus on. And so they picked something that spoke to them as Spider Marine. And it was useful. And so I’m always fan of just giving a descriptive name for those minor characters. Also so that when they scroll up in the end credits you can sort of figure out like, oh, it must be that guy. Like Overheated Customer in Bar.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That makes much more sense.

**Craig:** Yes. No question. I mean, with soldiers, they’re in uniform and so then really if they’re just meant to go run off somewhere then they’re a soldier. If there’s something important going on, then you do. You have to think about their face, their age, everything. And then a name may be called for.

**John:** All right. Let’s do our last question. This is from Carrie who says, “I’ve recently gotten to Episode 109 and I was wondering whatever happened to the first song Craig recorded on the podcast with the guitar? The episode should include it at the end, but then suddenly it’s not there. I’m assuming there may have been some legal issue, but if not, where can I find that song?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So Craig recorded a song called Killing the Blues. Who was that by originally?

**Craig:** It was written by someone named Rowland Salley and most famously recorded by John Prine. And then by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

**John:** So it is a fantastic song. Craig did a fantastic version of it. And the reason why we didn’t stick it on the USB drives or put it on Scriptnotes.net was really a rights thing. I was genuinely worried that the rights holders to the song could come after us and say like, “Hey, you’re selling the song without paying us royalties” and they’d kind of have a point.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So on a podcast in general like if you’re using a snippet of music or especially you’re talking about a song, so you’re basically critiquing this little part of it, or you’re doing something where that song is used in context for a specific thing, you’re generally kind of OK with that. If you’re using a lot of it, there’s a point at which you need to be buying the rights to be using that song, just like you would if you were using that song in a movie. And I did not want that sort of liability to come back and hurt the podcast.

So that’s why we snipped it off of the USB drives and off the Scriptnotes.net. But, Craig, it got me thinking there’s a place where people do song covers all the time. Like YouTube.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, that’s true. And, by the way, you can – again, it’s about damages. If you record a cover of a song and you put it on anything for free, there’s no damages. If you’re selling it, yeah, sure. But you could stick it on your website.

**John:** Yeah. So what I think I wanted to do, Craig, if this was OK with you, is we’ll upload it to YouTube, because YouTube can actually track the rights on that thing. And if there’s any money to be made off of it it would go to the songwriter for your cover of that song.

So, we’re going to stick a snippet of that as our outro for this week, but if you want to hear the full version we’ll have a link in the show notes where you can listen to Craig’s really good cover of this song. I found the original file and it was great. So, we’ll put that up there for Carrie and for everyone else who has written over the years asking where the hell is that song that Craig was supposed to sing.

**Craig:** Very good. Very good. Well, I guess it’s time for One Cool Things.

**John:** You start us off.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing this week is a videogame, South Park: The Fractured but Whole. That is the best title ever.

**John:** It’s a good title.

**Craig:** Ever. It’s great. I played the first South Park videogame, The Stick of Truth, which was spectacular. The big surprise with that game was, OK, so it’s South Park and it’s got Matt and Trey doing all the voices. And all the writing. And all the directing. Great story. But also the game play itself was really, really good.

So, you kind of ended up getting a great game and also just this incredibly long and very, very screwed and funny South Park episode. And they’ve done it again. More of the same, but with a great twist on it. And just really, really good. So, I would strongly recommend South Park: The Fractured but Whole.

You know what my trigger warning for that is? All possible trigger warnings. Every possible trigger warning in existence for everyone. Everyone. Including white people. Everyone is going to get it in this game. And does.

**John:** That sounds very fun.

**Craig:** But it’s really, really fun. It is.

**John:** Cool. My One Cool Thing is the Adelante Shoe Co. And so this was recommended to us by other writer friends, mutual friends. So it’s this company that makes shoes, and they make nice looking shoes. I’m wearing a pair of their boots. I like them a lot.

What’s different about them is they work with shoemakers in Latin America, largely Guatemala, and they work with them to try to figure out how to pay them a living-well wage, which is basically a price that’s well above what minimum wage should be so that a person who is working for them who is making these shoes can do this and actually sustain a family on their salaries.

So, their website is cool. I’ll send you there. They talk about sort of their transparency, their accountability, and sort of what their mission is. I dig them. It reminds me of Kickstarter and some other B corporations, those sort of public benefit corporations that have objectives beyond just making the most money possible. So, I am wearing the Havana Boot. It’s really good. But all the stuff there has been really good. So, Chris Nee I think was the one who first turned me onto them. So, I would recommend you check them out for your boot and shoe needs.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Some housekeeping. Next week is the Three Page Challenge from Austin. So we recorded that a couple weeks ago, but you can listen to that. If you would like to read ahead, the entries for that episode are up in Weekend Read. They’re also at johnaugust.com/Austin2017. So you can read through the four different Three Page Challenges we read through and then listen to the episode and hear from the writers themselves, which is one of the best parts of doing that show live in Austin.

And that’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yeah, and whoa.

**John:** Matthew moved to Japan and actually just this week put up a video about his first two months in Japan which is well worth watching, about how his apartment is not haunted but sort of seems like it probably is haunted. But he was living in Akita, Japan, which I knew nothing about, and it was fascinating to see sort of what his life is like up there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from Craig Mazin. But if you have an outro for us to play you can write into ask@johnaugust.com with a link to that. That’s also where you write in with questions like the ones we answered on today’s podcast. Short questions, I’m on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We’re on Facebook. Just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Again, leave us a review if you are there because that helps people find the show.

We have all of the back episodes up now at Scriptnotes.net. We have transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with show notes.

We also have more of the USB drives. So people were asking for those. That’s the first 300 episodes, plus all the bonus episodes on one little handy dandy USB drive that you can carry with you as you make it through your day.

**Craig:** But the t-shirts are gone?

**John:** The t-shirts are done. So thanks to everybody who bought a t-shirt. So those t-shirt orders have closed. And they’re shipping out really soon, so maybe by the time people are listening to this podcast – or at least by the time they’re listening to the Three Page Challenge they can be wearing their brand new t-shirt. I’m so excited to have those on hand.

**Craig:** Wonderful.

**John:** Cool. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you soon.

Links:

* Tickets available for the [Holiday Live Show](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday-live-show-john-august-craig-mazin/) now!
* Team America: World Police’s defense of [“Montage”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I_5Bw1U4s4)
* [NOLO’s Getting Permission: Using & Licensing Copyright-Protected Materials Online & Off](https://store.nolo.com/products/getting-permission-riper.html), a handy legal guide for rights and rights purchases.
* [Cosmo Kramer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmo_Kramer), from Seinfeld, is based on [Kenny Kramer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Kramer), who [sued a writer for defamation](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/seinfeld-writer-beats-kramers-defamation-718728)
* [James Bond](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bond) and [the Berne Convention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention)
* [Trademark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark), [Copyright](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright), and a snazzy (https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-getting-started/trademark-basics/trademark-patent-or-copyright) on the difference between them from the USPTO.
* The [Copyright Term Extension Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act), AKA the Sonny Bono Act, AKA the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.
* [Charles Dickens’](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens) struggle with piracy in the US is illuminated in [Fifty Inventions that Shaped the Modern World](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0735216134/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Tim Harford.
* [Go](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139239/)’s character, Spider Marine, comes from John’s mishearing the Smashing Pumpkins lyric [“despite all my rage.”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-r-V0uK4u0)
* Craig’s [cover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEHWE-pcK2A) of “Killing the Blues,” by Rowland Salley.
* The [South Park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park) video game, [South Park: The Fractured but Whole](https://southpark.ubisoft.com/game/en-us/home/) (a sequel to [The Stick of Truth](http://southpark.cc.com/games/stick-of-truth#))
*all possible trigger warnings apply
* The [Adelante Shoe Co.](https://adelanteshoes.com) makes shoes for the discerning global citizen.
* Next week’s episode is the 2017 Austin Live Three Page Challenge — you can check out the pages [here](http://johnaugust.com/aff2017) or on [Weekend Read](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/).
* Matthew Chilelli’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSNzEBS_KW8&feature=youtu.be) about his definitely-not-haunted apartment in Japan
* [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 Rowland Salley, performed by Craig Mazin ([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_325.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/all-of-it-needs-to-stop).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 324 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today, it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at stories in the news and figure out how to make them into feature films.

**Craig:** Exciting.

**John:** Exciting. We’re back doing our normal show. I like our live shows, but it’s good to be back on Skype with you, not in the room.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is sort of like coming home to your own bed, right?

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** Sleep in our little jammies, and we get to be in our own bed. But it is fun to stray away and do those. And that live show, I have to say, was outstanding. If for no other reason than Jason Fuchs’ story about Star Wars and Battleship.

**John:** It was a fantastic episode. And if people have not listened to it yet and would like to download and listen to it now, we’ve actually put an updated version in the feed because there were some weird clips in it that basically somehow some of the cross fades got turned into blunt cuts. And so Matthew fixed it. So, Matthew, thank you for doing that. But it sounds delightful.

**Craig:** It was a really good one. And rather than list them all by name, we’ll just say thanks to the – how many – 12 people that were on the panel with us?

**John:** There were a lot of people. It was great. It was a good show. Just shows what some planning can do. Some planning. Some organization.

**Craig:** Well, you know, I don’t want to be a jerk, and as you know–

**John:** You don’t want to be a jerk.

**Craig:** Of course, I do actually both am and also want to be a jerk. Three people came up to me and said, “Love the show. Last year’s was better.”

**John:** Oh, OK. I heard the same thing from other people, so–

**Craig:** Listen, you know what? Some people like chaos. Some people like planning.

**John:** Absolutely. I mean, that’s why you have the grid of all the alignments and all the different possibilities.

**Craig:** Yes. All of my fans are chaotic neutral.

**John:** That makes sense. I got the lawful good.

**Craig:** No doubt.

**John:** Sewn up. Before we get into show today, Craig, you wanted to talk about predators, and not the Arnold Schwarzenegger-defeated kind.

**Craig:** No, no. and I guess this will – we’ll file this under chaotic evil. You know, we’ve all been absorbing an enormous amount of news about Hollywood, people that are inside of it. People that want to be inside of it. And also people that are outside of it and are just casual observers. And what we’re seeing is a cascade of people being accused very believably of terrible behavior, both sexual harassment, sexual assault. And it seems like every day brings a fresh delivery of some kind of predator.

Some of these people are people that we know and we’re shocked by. Some of them, I think, the folks that maybe get a little bit less coverage outside are people that maybe those of you at home don’t know and nonetheless have terrible things.

I was reading an account of a manager, for instance, who was recently accused by multiple people of rape, Cosby-style, drugging of drinks and then rape, and then threats afterwards to keep it quiet. So naturally I think a lot of people may be terrified of our business right now, and with good reason.

So I wanted to talk a little bit about some realities here. First of all, I believe that the great majority of people in the entertainment business are not violent, evil, manipulative human beings. What we’re seeing right now is an exposure of the many who are. And there are many. And I’m glad for it.

So, on the one hand, I don’t want people to be scared away. I specifically don’t want good people to be scared away. We need more good people. We need to increase our percentage of decent human beings in this business. On the other hand, I do think it’s important that we talk a little bit about what to be on the lookout for. Everybody has a sense, I think, of how to protect themselves against a predator. And yet, I think, some of these people are really sophisticated. So I wanted to just talk a little bit about what to look out for and how to protect yourself.

**John:** That sounds good. Because I think all of us have some training in sort of safety and awareness. You’re outside, you’re walking on the street. These are things to be watched for. But it’s a strange thing when you get invited into what seems like it should be a safe place to make sure that you’re actually safe.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a moment in the – I may have even mentioned it on the show already – a moment in the American remake, the Fincher remake of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo where Stellan Skarsgard’s character says, “It’s amazing how people are more afraid of being impolite than they are of being in pain.” And I think that’s sort of at the heart of a lot of this and that is what a lot of predators are relying on.

So, for starters, if you find yourself in a situation where you feel like things are going wrong, or heading towards a dangerous place, and the only thing that’s keeping you from extracting yourself from it or expressing that this is not at all the way you want things to go for yourself, the only thing in between that and what’s happening is a concern that you might be impolite, dispense with that concern. I don’t think anybody is going to get in trouble for expressing their need to feel safe.

So, right off the bat don’t worry so much about offending or being impolite. If you say something that is neutral and firm and dispassionate like, “I’m sorry, but this is uncomfortable for me and I don’t like the way this is proceeding. Can we please stop doing this, or this, or this?” The one thing you don’t have to worry about is offending someone. The only people that will be offended by that are people that were planning on doing something bad.

**John:** I agree with you. So that could be about the situation you’re in in terms of physically or sort of that there are not other people around, that you’re being pressured in some uncomfortable way. Extricate yourself from that situation and don’t be afraid to and don’t feel bad about it. You have the right to your own safety.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And you may find yourself in a situation where it’s not that someone is doing something that you are outwardly concerned about as much as you have a feeling about somebody. In that case, there’s actually no risk of being impolite because there’s nothing to actually say overtly. However, trust your instinct about this person. It’s not that you are always going to be right. You may, in fact, not be right, which is why – obviously you don’t want to end up in a situation where you’re constantly getting up in the middle of a meeting or interrupting in a phone call to say this feels like harassment, or there’s something about you and you sound rapey to me. That obviously won’t go very well.

But if you have a sense inside, listen to it really carefully. Let that guide you about how you’re going to interact with that other person in terms of being alone with them, etc. And most importantly talk to people and let them know this is how you feel. And ask them if there’s anything to support that concern. Because, look, there are some people that are just odd. We are a creative business. Some of us are odd. And we can sometimes misinterpret people as being creepy when maybe they’re on the spectrum, for instance. Right? But heed your concerns, that inner voice. Don’t push it away and definitely don’t start engaging in one-side bargaining with yourself that this is sort of what you have to deal with in order to get ahead. You actually don’t.

Nobody has to actually deal with this stuff to get ahead. That’s just the lie they put out there.

**John:** Absolutely agree with you. I think one thing that’s also important to remember is that some of the situations that come up could be prevented if we just had some better rules and structures and codes of conduct in place, not to sort of stop the predator, but to help the person who is vulnerable to it from getting into that situation. I think about things like a rule like “no meetings in hotel rooms.” Or rules about whether PAs are allowed to be in trailers or not allowed to be in trailers.

If you have a system where you set up some rules about what can happen and what can’t happen, those could protect people because it gives them a reason for saying why they’re not doing certain things. So I look at some of these things that have happened, you know, the recent incidents. If there were some structures in place there, I bet the people involved would feel more empowered not to have gone into those situations.

**Craig:** I completely agree. And it may sound odd to say that we need the kind of rules that govern, for instance, the way doctors deal with patients. But we have to acknowledge that there’s something about our business, film and television, particularly for people that want to be performers in front of the camera, but I think just as vitally for people that want to write or want to direct, there are so few jobs. The business is so glamorous. It is – well, it’s the dream of a lot of people.

And what this means is there is an enormous amount of desperation. There is a desperation to get a job and succeed in this business in a way that there is in almost no other business at all. And that desperation is the most fertile possible ground for predators to flourish in and to do what they do.

So, for instance, if you have a male doctor and he’s going to be doing some sort of physical exam on a 13-year-old girl, then there needs to be a female medical professional like a nurse in the room with him, or even another doctor if possible, so that there is no question or concern. It is for everyone’s protection. And I do feel like our business needs to acknowledge the amount of desperation. Acknowledge how vulnerable everybody is.

By the way, if you’re following along in the news, men and women – this is not just about women. We’ve seen an enormous amount of reports now from men who have been preyed upon. So, everybody is potentially a victim here. And if the business codified itself in such a way as to acknowledge that there is fertile ground for bad behavior, I think you’re right. We could actually avoid quite a bit of it.

**John:** I agree.

So, I also want to talk about – there’s kind of a spectrum of terrible things that are happening. And so right now we are talking about the predators who are doing these criminal acts – rape, and sexual assault, attempted rape. But at the other end of the range there’s just kind of boorish behavior in rooms. And people behaving stupidly. And that’s kind of more what we talked about with Daley and Dara when they were on the show was what do you do when it’s not, you know, a physical thing, but it’s kind of a constant small little cuts of things. They’re both big things, and they’re both important, and we need to be talking about all of it, because I worry about by only focusing on these big spotlight predators committing identifiable crimes we’re going to overlook I think a more pernicious problem that’s really out there which is this problem of sexual harassment, problem of gendered bullying that’s going on.

And I worry that that kind of stuff that’s going on could end up really costing us a generation of women and minority writers who sort of eventually they check out. They ask themselves, “Is it worth it? Am I actually any good at this? Maybe I should just leave, because everyone is sort of telling me that I’m good enough at this. Maybe they’re right.”

I’m worried that if we only focus on these big spotlight things, the things that have criminal charges and lawsuits, that we’re not going to be focusing on the stuff that I think is really more addressable by all of us. By writers.

**Craig:** I couldn’t agree more. I mean, the one thing you don’t want to do in the middle of a murder epidemic is ignore the stabbing epidemic, right? And you have people in the room now who perhaps would be subject to a statement like the following: “What? I’m not Harvey Weinstein. I’m not raping anybody. I’m just repeatedly saying things that demean you all the time.”

So, from our side of things, let’s say we’re talking about decent folks who are in these rooms, for starters if you feel like your work environment is demeaning to you, then you need to listen to that. There is a general – we’ve talked about this on the show before – a general motivation by the industry to demean writers in particular. All writers. Of any race, color, age, gender. Because it is I think, well, it’s good for them. It’s good for their power dynamic. They like keeping us down. Particularly in features.

So, when it’s happening, particularly if you’re a writer, since we’re a show for writers, one thing you need to be aware of is it may not always even be gendered. It may be vocational. But regardless of why it’s happening, when it’s happening I think it’s important to start reaching out to people that might also be feeling like you. Not everyone is the same. Some people are OK with some kinds of jokes, and some people aren’t. Some people go to a show where a comedian is sort of famous for being really dark and really on the edge of things and really transgressive and they love it. People of all walks of life.

And then there are people who would never go anywhere near that, because it just makes them feel bad, right? So you may not find that everybody is in agreement. You may be the person that thinks this is not good for me. That’s enough. And then you got to kind of figure out how to get yourself out of there and get to something else.

And I don’t mean to sound glib about that. I know that people are desperate for work. They’re desperate for jobs. But we have one trip around. And if you put yourself in a position where every day you feel terrible, I can assure you that two things are going to happen. One, you will not succeed at that job. It is not possible to succeed in a job where you feel emotionally devalued. And, two, it is going to have long-term effects on your desire to keep working anywhere. That whole business and craft will start to become tainted to you. Even I, as the straight white male, going through my Bob Weinstein experience, coming out the other end, felt about as demotivated and disinterested in writing as I have felt in my life. And for good reason. And I had to dig myself out of that with tremendous effort.

So, I should have stopped much, much, much, much earlier. And I guess that’s my advice to you. In the short term, it may seem like a grave cost. I believe in the long term it will have benefits. But, seek out allies. Even two. Even two people. That’s more serious than one. Two people saying we’ve got to change this culture is good.

**John:** Well, let’s talk about allies, because sometimes you’re not the person who is the focus of this bullying or whatever you want to call it. Sexual harassment. But if you see something, say something. And that may be saying to the person who is being harassed, like, “Hey, I saw that happen and that wasn’t cool. What can I do? Do you want to do anything?”

Don’t assume that there’s a logical next step. But just being there and sort of acknowledging that this is a thing that happened, that’s good. That’s helpful. And that lets that person know that not everybody around you is doing that same kind of stuff or supports that kind of stuff.

Write it down. If you see these things that happen, write it down, just so you have a contemporaneous record of what happened. And, also, I’m really curious. I’ve talked to some writers in rooms who have codes of conduct for their writing room. Basically, everyone agrees that these are the rules of the room. And sometimes it’s about “You can say anything, but don’t direct it towards a person. Like you can talk about a kind of person, but you can’t talk about that one person in the room.”

But if you are a writer on a show, and you have some sort of code of conduct or writer’s room rules, I’d love to see those. So if you feel like sending them into ask@johnaugust.com, we’d love to talk through them on a future episode.

**Craig:** That would be great. And I also – one last bit of advice. If you are contemplating joining any kind of joint writing situation, typically a television room, I think a smart question to ask is what kind of culture is in the room. And ask it without any implied judgment. Just say, “Look, I’m a certain kind of person. I tend to do better in a culture like this as opposed to a culture like this. What sort of culture is in your room?”

If you are somebody that needs a certain kind of culture and, well, they say, “Listen, we are really free-wheeling in here. We let it all out. We have no boundaries whatsoever,” then you may not want to work there. And if you do, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be a big shock to you when you start to feel bad. They didn’t make a mistake. Nor did you. It was just a misfit.

**John:** Yes. I think that’s absolutely good advice. I will say that show that is so free-wheeling and anything goes, they may be making a mistake because there could be great writers who they are not getting because of their culture.

**Craig:** It’s true. It’s in comedy, really. We’re not talking about drama. There are comedies that live and die on their outrageousness. And what I don’t want to end up happening is ignoring the many women who are brilliant at being outrageous actually. I don’t want those outrageous shows to say, “You know what the easiest thing is let’s skip women and just stick with the dudes and we’ll be fine. And we can talk about whatever we want.” There are a lot of women that flourish in those situations. And what’s frustrating is I think that there can be a situation where things are outrageous and also not demeaning towards individuals in the room.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** It’s doable. The one thing I will never make an excuse for is a free-wheeling room that starts to break down and demean individuals inside of that room. So I think that goes back to your code of conduct. And it’s really important.

**John:** Yeah. Put some guardrails on that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our big feature topic, which is How Would This Be a Movie. So, for people who have been listening to the show for a while, every once and a while we take a look at stories that are in the news and try to figure out like “Is there a movie there? And if there is a movie, how would you do the movie?”

So, some recent examples, some follow up on previous thing. We talked about this Danish submarine adventure.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** And so the journalist he was with–

**Craig:** This guy needed some – what did you call them? Guardrails? He needed a lot of guardrails.

**John:** His name was Peter Madsen. He’s accused of murdering journalist Kim Wall on his privately built submarine. He continues to deny killing her, but he now says, yes, he did dismember her.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** He says she died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

**Craig:** I’m sorry for laughing. It’s just this guy sounds like – he just sounds like Dr. Evil working his way through this really tortured confession where eventually he’s like, “OK, I ate a little bit of the head, but listen, hold on everyone. Don’t judge me.”

**John:** And so carbon monoxide poisoning, well, it’s his submarine. He did kill her. I mean, I guess he’s saying he didn’t intend to kill her. It was an accidental death, or like negligent homicide rather than just capital H Homicide.

**Craig:** I mean, look, when you are in a small enclosed space, and there is a carbon monoxide level high enough to kill one person, it’s fair to say it will also kill the other person, or that person will show some indications of carbon monoxide poisoning. But more importantly, John, if somebody were to suffer from some kind of carbon monoxide poisoning incident in your home, I presume your first instinct would not be to call 911. It would be to dismember that person and then bury them somewhere in the ocean.

**John:** Well, yeah. But to be fair, I’m not Danish. So it’s hard to say.

**Craig:** Great point.

**John:** Another international story we talked about was the French train bros. So these were three US service men who were on a train in France and stopped a terrorist from doing despicable things on this train. So, we talked about this. We knew that, I think last time we talked about this Clint Eastwood was attached to direct it. He did direct it. The movie is called The 15:17 to Paris. It’s written by Dorothy Blyskyl and you and I just coincidentally met her this week.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a little WGA screenwriting outreach, which you were kind enough to run as a new board member, and you were brilliant at it. Thank you. And we met the very excellent Ms. Blyskyl, who is really new and maybe this will frustrate some of you out there. I think this is pretty much the first thing she ever wrote. And it’s like, great, now it’s a movie and Clint Eastwood is directing it. I personally love those stories. I always feel like those people – you know, when you have enough right at the jump to write something that people want to act in and produce and spend money on and direct, I think you’ve got the goods. So I’m really excited to see where Dorothy goes as she begins her journey here.

I’m pretty sure that you and I both agreed that that should be a movie, right?

**John:** Yeah. We agreed it should be a movie and it now is a movie. So that’s kind of awesome.

**Craig:** Exciting. And coming out, I believe, in February, right?

**John:** Yeah. So Dorothy is so new she hadn’t even been through the new member training. So this was her very first WGA meeting. And she got to hear all about the future of screenwriting. So that was good.

**Craig:** It was good. Sort of a happy thing. She also just mentioned that she felt at least that she was treated very well on that project. And I’ve heard that Clint Eastwood is very respectful to writers. So that’s good to see.

**John:** Good to see. All right, some new stuff. And so these are all pitches that came in from our listeners, except for the last one which you actually pitched this morning. So, the first story is about female inmates who battle wildfires in California. Essentially there are these conservation camps that are run by the Department of Corrections which inmates are on call 24/7 to fight fires. So, a fascinating fact is that inmates make up 14% of firefighters in California. And three of these 42 camps are for women. So this all comes from an NBC News video made by Matt Toder. Let’s take a listen.

[Video plays]

Reporter: California’s fire season has been particularly fierce this year. One solution is to use inmates to fight fires. Nestled in the posh hills of Malibu, California is Camp 13.

Female Voice: Camp 13 is an inmate firefighter camp where we are on call up to seven days a week. We can be called out at any time, day or night.

Female Voice: You get to save people’s houses and you get to help people. It’s really gratifying and empowering when you’re driving by and people are holding up signs saying thank you firefighters and they’re crying because you just saved their homes.

Reporter: Camp 13 is one of 42 conservation camps run by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Inmates must volunteer for the program. And must pass physical evaluations. To be eligible, they also must have a record of good behavior and have been convicted of a nonviolent crime.

Female Voice: It’s definitely a challenge. When I saw actual live fire I got scared. I was like, “Oh my god, we’re actually in the fire.”

Female Voice: We’re the ones that carry the hose out. We’re the line of defense.

[Video ends]

**John:** Craig, what do you think of this as a movie topic?

**Craig:** I believe that by the time this episode airs this will have already been optioned to be developed into a movie. It’s the most movie-ish movie I can think of, frankly. I mean, particularly because you have a fascinating collision of something that is very current, a bunch of current things, and then something that is classically good in cinema.

So you have topics of incarceration, imprisonment, women inside the prison system. You have a discussion about nonviolent offenders. They must all be nonviolent offenders. I suspect that this connects also to things like drug policy and whether or not these people should be in prison at all. And you have just the general topic of humans who have struggled. My guess is almost all of them are lower or middle class people who have struggled. And now they have this chance at redemption, but maybe they shouldn’t have even had to been there in the first place. Maybe some of them do deserve to be there and what will this do for them and their character?

And all of that gets imposed on something incredibly movie-friendly which is fighting fires. Because your structure, your plot, you know it. You don’t have to reinvent that wheel. You know that they’re going to go through training. They’re going to go into prison. They’re going to meet each other. They’re going to have some trouble in prison. They’re going to be selected for this program. They’re going to go through training. There’s going to be a fire. It’s not going to go well for them. And they’re going to be questioning whether or not they should still be a part of this. And maybe one of them recommits a crime, whatever it is.

And then the third act there is a massive fire and they have to go. And they do brilliantly and maybe one of them dies. I mean, it’s got everything you need. All of it. It’s sort of like a make-your-own movie kit. I mean, surely somebody will make this into a movie.

**John:** I would be surprised if no one makes this into a movie. I want to focus on sort of the women that Matt talks to in this video, because it’s almost all done sort of first person, just people telling their own stories. And they’re really good. I liked all of those women so much. And they were so different. And they had sort of an emotional honesty which was really cool. And they’d actually been at this camp for a while, so you can imagine that there was an arc that they sort of went through where they’re mistrusting and sort of getting up to speed, but then they had a real pride in their work. And that was fantastic to see.

It reminds me a little bit of some of the stuff around WWII where you see like Swing Shift or where women are going into traditionally men’s things and finding a sense of empowerment by being trusted to do these incredibly important jobs. And maybe these women hadn’t been trusted enough and that’s what led them to this point. But I really – I got goosebumps listening to them.

**Craig:** I did, too. And I love their faces. They all had these great, great faces. And the general directive from studios is if you’re making movies now about groups of people you want to try and be as diverse as possible. Well, you don’t have to force it here. I mean, kind of in a weird way it almost felt like the prison system had cast these women. I mean, they were interviewing women from a particular firefighting, a DOC firefighting camp. So it’s not like they chose them for this report.

You had white women. You had black women. You had Asian women. You had Latina women. And you got the sense that what was uniting them, it was all separate – even gender wasn’t really uniting them. It certainly wasn’t race. It was their circumstance. And I think that that is beautiful. That you could tell that there was a sisterhood there of circumstance. And you have such a great opportunity to invent some amazing characters and some of them are mothers and they’re talking about their children and what this means for them when they get out.

One of them, her own mother was a firefighter. It’s just remarkable. Like that’s a great story right there. Your mom is a firefighter. You maybe felt like you were forced to follow in her footsteps. You rebelled. You had a difficult childhood. You got into trouble. You ended up in prison. And now what are you doing? Fighting fires and suddenly discovering that you’re good at it on your own terms.

Again, it’s sort of like the kit is right there. I think some movie studio would be nuts to not just immediately put this into development and make it, because it just feels so ready to go. And, by the way, this is one of those movies where when I see them I don’t mind predictable. I want predictable. The plot should be as predictable as possible. The characters should be surprising. Their circumstances should be surprising. I love that part.

**John:** I agree. And to me I think this is a mid-budget. Hidden Figures is really the template for how you make this movie. You cast people – some people you recognize. Some people who are unknowns. You make it with a good but interesting director. And from the trailer you probably have a pretty good sense of what’s going to happen in the movie and you’re really happy that the movie sort of follows that path. And I also like that it’s present day. It doesn’t have to have that shine of history and nostalgia. No, this is happening right now.

I think, you know, it’s a PG-13 movie and I think it works.

**Craig:** 100% somebody should make this immediatement.

**John:** All right. Second story we’re going to take a look at is a story by Beth Mole writing for Ars Technica. And so some dead bodies donated to research in the US end up in warehouses of horror.

**Craig:** Neat.

**John:** Neat. So here’s what happens is that people donate their bodies or their loved one’s bodies to science. And sometimes there’s a discount on funerals down the road, or they have the expectation that it’s going to be used for medical training for medical students. But this new study found that the whole business of human corpses and cadavers is really kind of messed up. And so a lot of times these bodies are used in ways that families never anticipated. Like they’re used to test impacts of different things on the body.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** They’re cut up with chainsaws or they’re sold piece by piece, because sometimes bodies are worth more in pieces than they are as whole cadavers.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But a lot of times they’re also just kind of forgotten or left over and they’re stuck in piles in a warehouse. But the thing is it’s basically legal, so there’s not like law enforcement is going to come in and do something. Craig, what do we do with these dead bodies?

**Craig:** I don’t know. I mean, well, first of all just from a personal point of view, I would be the worst person to hire to write this movie because I have no problem with it. Because I don’t believe in God or the soul. So, I think that when you’re dead, the one person for sure in the world who does not care about what happens to that body is the person that used to live in it. They’re dead. So I kind of don’t care. I’ve actually never really, because I’m such a weirdo about that I guess, I don’t understand why people spend all this money on fancy funerals and cemeteries and burial plots. There’s this – I don’t know – thing, and people get really worked up about what happens to people’s bodies and stuff.

And I just remember when I was in high school and I was planning on being a doctor and I did a summer internship at the Mammoth County Medical Examiner’s Office, and I would – I’m 16 and I’m there helping out on autopsies. I wasn’t doing anything important, but of course, if you screw up on a dead body, well, not so bad.

Nothing, I think, teaches you more about what a useless chunk of meat we are when we’re dead than watching some autopsies. So, putting my weirdness aside, for anybody the problem with this movie is there are literally zero stakes.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Stakes are the things that movie studios are primarily concerned with. If our hero fails, what happens? Obviously they keep pushing it towards the universe explodes, like that’s their ultimate – they love the universe exploding. They’ll settle for galaxies. Used to be the planet was fine. And way, way back when one person dying was a big deal.

But let’s say it never changes. What’s really at stake?

**John:** There’s really nothing at stake. And so what I find so interesting is it’s a really macabre setting. And so like you could envision some really gross stuff happening. So it’s a backdrop or it’s a place you go to in the course of another story. But I don’t think it’s really a story in and of itself.

I share your same sort of frustration with people’s fixation over bodies and funerals and all that stuff. It really is frustrating when you’re buying this really expensive casket to bury in the ground inside the concrete memorial. It’s like, oh my god, it’s just so much wasted time and money and energy. Especially families that really could use that money to do something else but–

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** That’s off-topic. Craig, well, a little on-topic. Craig, are you going to be cremated? What’s your plan?

**Craig:** Yeah. Whatever’s cheapest. Honestly. I’ve often thought about donating my body, so it really depends. I don’t think I have a specific donate my body thing, although my wife knows me well enough where it’s up to her. I’m assuming that I croak first. You know, she can do whatever she wants with the meat. I don’t really care. Literally. Anything.

I mean, she knows that if she wanted to she could just lacquer it, stick it on a pole, put it out in front for Halloween. I don’t care. Because I won’t be there. It’s not my problem. My watch is over at that point. But, yeah, cremate. Whatever’s cheapest, honestly. A nice home cremation.

**John:** A nice artisanal cremation?

**Craig:** Or just bury me in the backyard. I don’t care.

**John:** I’ve always been pro-cremation, but apparently it actually is a tremendous energy cost to do them.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, there’s this wonderful – there’s like a strange sect of – not that strange to me – sect of Buddhism, I believe. And I think it’s Japanese. Where when – and very traditional – when people die, they’re asked to be – their bodies are just left in a field and they’re eaten by whatever animals come along.

**John:** Yep. Sounds good to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. The other one that I love is there’s a body farm. Did we ever talk about the body farm?

**John:** Oh, I don’t remember the body farm. Tell me about the body farm.

**Craig:** Body farm is – there are a bunch of them. Most of them are under the – I think all of them are under the auspices of some sort of law enforcement agency, like say the FBI. And they’re there to teach forensic investigators about dead bodies.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And the states of them. Because a lot of times what’s happening is they’re digging up corpses from murderers. And they’re trying to figure out, OK, how long has this person been dead? How did they die? And, you know, there are all sorts of things that you can learn, like at what stage are the larva that are feeding on the body. And what color is the body? And can you tell if a body was dismembered or was torn apart by animals?

So, yeah, I think that would be fun. [laughs] I think it would be fun if that were my purpose after I were gone.

**John:** Absolutely. For the study of maggots and their lifecycle.

**Craig:** Yeah, man. Whatever. Honestly, I would be OK if people ate me. I really don’t care. I really don’t.

**John:** I don’t care either.

All right, our final story is one that you found this morning and, Craig, talk us through what’s happening at Reed College.

**Craig:** Well, you know, you and I have been talking a bit about some of the things that have been going on on campuses across the country, and most notably we talked about what happened – was it at Evergreen or was it at Reed? Was it at Reed?

**John:** I think it might have been at Reed.

**Craig:** At Reed. Where Kim Peirce, the filmmaker who made Boys Don’t Cry, among other movies, was subject to horrendous treatment by students at Reed, not because they were homophobic/extreme right-wingers who were disgusted by her gender neutrality or her pro-trans work, but rather the opposite. They were far left and they didn’t think she was, I guess, far left enough. And they were terrible to her and insulting and crude and eventually she just left.

Well, one of the things that’s been going on at Reed College apparently is that there is a group of students, I think they’re called RAR, Reedies Against Racism, which seems like, yeah sure, you know. I’m against racism.

**John:** I don’t want to meet any pro-racists.

**Craig:** Yeah, like I’ll join that. That sounds good. Except what they do, because by the way, I can’t imagine there are too many racists at Reed. Like Reed which is known for being the most liberal college/university in the nation.

But what they’ve been doing is just occupying classrooms regularly, like maybe a dozen of them, and they just stand around the professor holding up signs in silent protest about whatever it is that they’re protesting about, which I think sometimes has to do with what’s going on in the class, and sometimes doesn’t. And it is a bit shocking. And what happened is they took over a classroom, a freshman year humanities classroom, and the teacher just stopped teaching because it was just overwhelming. And the protestors began talking to the students about why they were there and why they were doing what they were doing. And the freshman fought back. And it was quite invigorating.

Because what it really came down to was they were saying, “We’re here to learn. Can you please just let us learn? That’s why we came to college. We’re paying money so that this teacher can teach us. Get out. This isn’t your time. This is our time.”

And it was really fascinating to watch. There is some kind of war on campus thing to be done, the problem I see with it – and I’m curious to hear how you would address it is – how to tell a story like this without feeling like you’re just picking up some very clumsy left-wing or right-wing club and hitting people over the head with it.

**John:** I think it’s really tough to do this, but I read a script, a Sundance script, called Social Justice Warrior that Brett Weiner and Emma Fletcher did which is great and super, super funny and exactly sort of on point with this. And I remember thinking a lot about that sort of as this last year has happened and sort of as the world went crazy. Because it was such a great mocking of PC culture gone too far, which felt sort of weirdly irrelevant after Trump. Like, you know, the world was on fire in a different way, so why are you – it felt out of date already.

And so this reminded of like, oh that’s right, this thing still does happen. What I found the most fascinating about this article, so the one we’re talking about is by Chris Bodenner writing for The Atlantic, is that sense that RAR started probably with really good intentions. But good intentions, plus a charismatic leader, plus continued success can lead to some really weird places.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I recently reread Animal Farm and this reminded me of that where like, you know, we’re going to have a revolution and we’re going to take over the farm and it’s going to be better and it’s going be better for everybody and this is what we’re going to do. And inevitably it sort of becomes this weirdly oppressive, bullying system. Where, you know, they started going after the people who weren’t speaking up with them about racism. It’s like, well if you’re not speaking up with us then you’re against us.

Well, no, maybe I’m not speaking because I think you’re kind of idiots. But I’m too terrified to actually say that out loud.

So, I think that is the really interesting thing to approach. It might more be a play than a movie. There might be reasons why it works better in a situation where you can kind of close it in like on a stage rather than sort of breaking it out to a movie. But I thought there was a fascinating chart of you follow the person who has this idea and goes down this path and sort of leads this charge and kind of becomes the thing he or she was fighting against at the start.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that’s great – and I love the fact that it was a comedy. I think comedy is a great tool for something like this because if you do it – I’m just speaking craft-wise. If you do it as drama, it is really hard to not be hitting people on the nose scenes and plot. So I agree with you. I think Animal Farm is a perfect analogy. By the way, it’s a book that for sure that the RAR folks would hate because it’s part of the white man canon.

There is an interesting thing about how the people on the right have routinely failed to acknowledge what happens if their position extends out too far. We see that in this country now where a number of people have taken their position out too far. And now there are Nazis marching around Charlottesville and elsewhere. And the people on what we’ll call the regular right just don’t seem to want to deal with it. And I think it’s really important for people on the left to be aware of what happens when they go too far to the left. Anything in those directions, you find that we’re all on a circle and the circle meets. And over on the far left and over on the far right, in the end what is the difference between Hitler and Stalin? Uh, not much.

**John:** They both become totalitarians.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think I don’t want to make the comedy because I want Brett and Emma to be able to make their comedy. So I want to give them space to make theirs. I hope they do.

**Craig:** Fair.

**John:** I think I might go for the Sorkin-y kind of drama. I feel like there’s a way in which you can – you have really hyper-intelligent people who can talk in hyper-intelligent ways about why they’re doing the things they’re doing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think that’s really fascinating. And I wonder if there’s a way to sort of do Social Network of digging into what’s motivating these people and the degree to which they recognize what they’ve become as it is happening. And how little small things can snowball sort of beyond their control.

**Craig:** Yeah. It could be a very interesting 2017 version of The Paper Chase. Do you remember watching that show, which came from a movie? Where you do, you know, an eight or ten-episode season. And you’re following students as they move through. So you’re seeing different groups as they collide and people changing their opinions and changing sides. And you’re dealing with professors and it’s quite an extraordinary time. I mean, you have – in the article I believe there was a reference to a professor who at this point is just petrified. She’s petrified. And she’s black, or she’s mixed race. And she is gay. And she’s petrified about talking about any of the things that she wants to talk about like women and race and gender and politics because she’s afraid that she’s just going to step on some sort of landmine that people have buried there. Or, what a lot of professors are perceiving is the entire debate has been rigged for them to fail no matter what they do.

But that’s kind of the point is that they’re wrong. And they’re not good enough. And the do better – the favorite slogan, the one that you see on the signs over and over is Do Better. Meaning no matter what you’re doing now, you’re no good because you could do better. It is a fascinating time. And as somebody who is preparing to send his first child off to college fairly soon, I am extremely aware of it and concerned about that.

**John:** I think what’s also about making this kind of movie in 2017 is that generational shift and the sense that this generation is going to college approaches it much more like a consumer than like I’m just so lucky to have gotten in. They have an expectation of customer service that’s different than when you and I went to school. And so if things aren’t going the way they want them to go, they’re not sort of fighting necessarily the institution. They’re fighting for the things they want because they think they should get what they want.

That sounds sort of simplistic because of course there’s always been student protesting and I think student protesting often leads to some of the big protests throughout the United States. But it feels like a slightly different thing. A slightly more narcissistic than we had when we were in school or even in the ‘70s. So, I think it’s a different movie now and I think you could talk about some different things.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was an article I read about, John McWhorter, who I think is brilliant, linked to this article that another professor had written about some protests that happened at an event at Rutgers. And the entire panel was made up of academics and thinkers who are on the left. It was meant to be a panel about how to approach progressive policies as we move forward as a country. They were also protested terribly. It’s just like they weren’t left enough.

And one of the things that really I just kind of loved, but I was also really startled by, was one of the older people on the panel was a professor who had been really active as a student activist in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And he was listening to these protestors and he told them – and his whole thesis is what I want to do is win. What I want is for these progressive policies to be enacted. That’s the most important thing to me. And what he said to them was you are doing this and he said, “I have seen this movie before. I know how it ends. And how it ends is you achieve nothing.” And that was chilling and I think very accurate.

**John:** Yep.

All right, so let’s talk about these three potential movies. Of them, I think we have a clear winner of which one could and should get made. It’s the firefighter movie.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** Second up is – do you think it’s Reed?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think it’s Reed.

**Craig:** Because I think Reed could be maybe a TV show. I think it would be a really interesting TV show.

**John:** Yeah. And I don’t think we’re making the corpse movie, although like your body farm, I would take your body farm over that. Body Farm is a great title.

**Craig:** Well it’s a great title. I’m sure Joel Silver has that registered already.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Among his many registered titles. I think that the dead body thing could be an interesting place to go if you needed a bizarre thing for some side characters to be doing. It’s a very Coen Brothers-y thing to imagine that you meet a couple of people and their day job is dealing with the corpse exchange business and it’s all business. That’s sort of fascinating and funny in a side trip way.

**John:** Oh yeah. That’s a way we didn’t get into. That’s just the backdrop of sort of a comedy or something else – a business comedy that the business is dead bodies.

**Craig:** Exactly. But it couldn’t be the main part of the story. It has to be a side thing. It’s just too gross.

**John:** I agree. Thank you to listeners who sent in these stories. So people have just been writing in to ask@johnaugust.com and saying, “Hey, how about this?” Or they’ll tweet at us and say, “Hey, how about this.?” I like that we’re getting people out there thinking like How Would This Be a Movie. So, let’s keep asking that question.

And now we’ll get to some actual listener questions.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** First off we have Ben in the UK. He writes, “I’m from the UK, so I write in British English, but I’m wondering if there are moments where American English would be more widely understood. Specifically, I’ve written, ‘A trainer smashes the puddle into pieces.’ But I think trainer to describe a sports shoe is very British. It might mean something else to readers from say the US. I’ve tried sneaker, but it sounds false in context and too American. The setting is particularly English. I thought about getting more specific. ‘A battered Reebok Classic smashes the puddle apart.’ Which would kind of work fine here.

“But what about instances where I don’t want that kind of specificity?” So, Craig, let’s talk some British vs. American English and things he should be looking for.

**Craig:** I’m dealing with this right now, actually, because Chernobyl — I’m American obviously. And Chernobyl is going to be largely a cast of UK actors, with some Scandinavian actors as well. The story, of course, is a European story. So, the nice thing is because our production is based in London and one of my fellow EPs is British, they can kind of go, “OK, here’s some things that you don’t do.”

For instance, one that I had no idea of – saying, “I’m done.” If an American goes, “I’m done,” that means I’m finished. In England they don’t really say that that way for I am completed with something, or I’m out, or I’m not interested anymore. That’s almost more like I’m dead. So, we have to go through and kind of police some of that stuff.

If you’re British and you’re writing a movie about British things, then I think you’re fine to be British. And in action it’s OK. You can also do a version of your script for the readers. So if you know you’re going to be sending your screenplay to both British and American readers, I think it’s perfectly fine to change something like trainer to sneaker for the American readers. It may seem out of place to you, but I guarantee you very few Americans know that in the UK these kinds of shoes are not called sneakers. They’re called trainers. So I think it would be OK to kind of do two versions there. But also people are generally forgiving.

They kind of get it. The most important thing is that you’re not throwing stuff in there that’s super idiomatic. Or there’s just going to be no chance of people understanding it. But, I think people get – I mean, you and I, we’ve read Three Page Challenges that we’re like, oh, this person must be English. And we don’t freak out.

**John:** No, it’s absolutely fine. I ran into the same situation just this past week. So we are in previews – actually as people are listening to this, Big Fish will have just opened in London. And there’s a few words which we had to actually change to make sure that British audiences could understand. So, the word panhandler, like Craig what is a panhandler?

**Craig:** That’s a beggar.

**John:** Yeah. And that is a word that is common in the US and so the production had written to ask like, “Hey, is it OK if we substitute a different word for panhandler? Because we don’t know what that word means.” And so I asked on Twitter, like hey British friends, do you know what panhandler means? And they said that if they did it was only because they had watched it on American television. It just wasn’t a word that existed in their language.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so beggar didn’t really work in context. It’s a line of dialogue, so it has to make sense. It’s part of a joke, so it has to make sense in context. So I went with homeless guy, which is just – everyone gets what that is and it doesn’t sort of jump out. But it does matter. So I would caution that like it matters in dialogue. If what Ben is describing is just an action line, he can say sneaker, he can say trainer, it doesn’t really matter. But I would change trainer to sneaker in a line of dialogue because that would be false for a British character.

**Craig:** Right. And that’s the thing. That’s what matters the most, because that’s what people are going to see. So, in Britain for instance the word “punter” means customer. If you have “punter” in your action description like, you know, “The bartender is busy filling drinks for the chatty punters,” that’s perfectly fine. But if you had an American referring to fellow bar patrons as punters, no. That’s right out.

**John:** That would not work at all.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** All right, let’s do one more question. This is an audio question, so we don’t even have to read it. Let’s listen.

**Joe:** I’m writing a crime thriller based in the ‘80s and ‘90s and I recently found a very old New York Times article on the topic. I emailed the author and we had a great Skype conversation, but I realize that I’m talking to a guy with over 30 years of journalism experience. My interview skills are just not as sharp as his. He’s recommended that I speak to three other stringer journalists, all with incredible resumes in global field work.

When I pitch them to have that first conversation, how can I best lure them in? To those people outside of the film industry, I’m just some guy who says he’s a screenwriter. I don’t even have an IMDb page. Can I offer them an executive producer credit if it ever becomes a movie? What exactly can I do to best appeal to them to have that first call? And any best practices once I have the call. Thanks.

**John:** Craig, can he offer them an executive producer credit?

**Craig:** [laughs] No. So, I was listening, Joe, I’m listening to your question and I’m like, this is a great question, totally reasonable, I have my answer. I’m feeling good about this. Then you got to the part where you’re like should I offer them an executive producer credit. And I literally jumped in my chair like it was a horror movie. Like a monster showed up.

For god’s sake, no, Joe. Here’s the situation. First of all, those aren’t your credits to offer anyway. You’re writing a screenplay, ideally you’re going to want to sell that screenplay to a movie studio, some kind of financing entity. And executive producer credits in feature films are typically reserved for people that are either running the kind of mini-major or who are part of the financing scheme of things. So, it’s not really yours to hand out.

But more importantly, it doesn’t matter if you have an IMDb page or not. Generally speaking, if you are coming to somebody and saying, “Listen, I’m writing a screenplay about blank. I am trying to do a good job. I hear that you did some great work and I would love to take 10 or 15 minutes of your time and talk to you,” people will be, generally speaking, happy to talk to you.

If they’re not, it means they didn’t want to talk to any screenwriter. They weren’t going to talk to John, they weren’t going to talk to me, they’re not going to talk to you. But there is actually no difference between you, Joe, or me or John, when it comes to just asking somebody if you can get 15 minutes to ask them questions about something they spent work on.

It’s flattering to people. They want you to get the story right. You can certainly say, “Listen,” and I have said this before, “I’m not necessarily in charge of the credits, but I will certainly advocate that you get a Special Thanks To, you know, in the credits somewhere. That’s the most of it.

**John:** 100% agree. So, I think what’s crucial about what Craig is talking about is that you’re asking for like 15, 20 minutes, like put that in the initial email. But I would also lead with the fact like, “Hey, I just got off the phone with whoever that first guy was you talked with who was so helpful giving me information about this. He recommended that I talk with you because you have so much more insight into how this one thing works.”

That provides context. It says like you’re not a crazy person. He can check back with that other person to confirm that you’re not a crazy person.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You’re only asking for 15 minutes. I think you’re going to get some yeses out of this. And hopefully get some good information.

Now, in terms of your interview skills, I would just stress like go in there with questions. Go in with things you’re curious to know, but then let it be a conversation. Because most of the really good stuff you get out of these is hearing people talk about their lives. Hearing them sort of lead the discussion in terms of what’s interesting and what’s fascinating.

Because that’s how you get beyond the 15 minutes because they like talking about themselves.

So, Joe, good luck. Get those interviews. Write your script.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an interactive piece by Joel Eastwood and Erik Hinton for the Wall Street Journal, looking at the rhyme schemes in Hamilton.

So, Craig, we all love Hamilton. But what I loved about this page is they do a very great job of looking at sections of songs and figuring out how the rhyme schemes work inside that. Because it’s derived from a lot of modern hip hop and really sort of the last 20 years of hip hop, but really sort of systematically breaks down how the rhymes are working, the internal rhymes, the near rhymes.

It’s really great. And it sort of shows how sophisticated and how clever it is. And there’s a real logic to it. There’s a reason why those lines fit so nicely together. And it goes in and sort of looks at the Velcro that makes it all work.

So, I thought it was a really great piece about a show I already love.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s wonderful. And the emergence of internal rhyming, you have to just tip your hat to hip hop. I mean, they elevated internal rhyming to a true art form. And what Lin-Manuel Miranda does in Hamilton is sort of the Holy Grail of it because it is both entertaining and it’s smart. It’s just really, really smart. It just feels so educated and so informed. He’s making references to history that you’d think like, geez, it would be really hard to do internal rhyming here, and he does it. And he moves the rhyming pattern around in unpredictable ways. It’s just fantastic. So, very, very cool article.

**John:** One nice thing I learned about internal rhymes from doing Big Fish is when they’re set up well they can also help you not only remember the lyric, but to hear when something goes wrong in the lyric. There’s a line in the first act where “He’ll be with me until he’s dead,” and that be-with-me-until-he’s-dead, the actress had flopped it in her head, so like “I’ll be with him until I’m dead or we’re dead.” And like, no, no, he’ll be with me. That internal rhyme helps the line stick. So, they’re very useful tools.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I was extremely influenced by Miranda when I was working on my songs with Jeanine Tesori. And I was also influenced by Sondheim. I mean, he also gets credit. He definitely engaged in some remarkable internal rhyming. You listen to, in particular the songs from Into the Woods, sort of recently I was listening to this, I’m like, god, there’s so much going on in these lines internally that’s pretty complicated. And I love that.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** All right, well my One Cool Thing, is it cool? It’s like One Diverting Thing. This is one of those things where you’re bored, you’re sitting waiting. It’s an app called Tens. It’s a simple dice game. And the idea is you’ve got a grid. I think it’s a five-by-five grid. And you get random configurations of dice. Sometimes it’s a single die. Sometimes it’s three that are connected in an L-shape. And your job is to place them on the grid and in either a horizontal or vertical line have them add up to ten. And when they add up to ten, whoop, then those are gone.

And the goal is to hit a certain score before your grid is so cluttered that you can’t fit your new dice that are coming in into the grid. And it gets more and more complicated as you go. There are blocked out spaces you can’t put any dice onto. There are spaces that shift the die when they land on that space, all the way to the right, or all the way up. There are some spaces that destroy the die. So there is some strategy involved. But really it is just the prototypical sort of mindless time-waster that makes standing in line at the post office a little less horrifying.

**John:** So, Craig, the link you put in the show notes is to an article that says, “Tens, Sudoku-like Game has soft launched on iOS in the Philippines.” Do you know why that happens?

**Craig:** No. I don’t.

**John:** I do. I actually have the answer for you.

**Craig:** Why is that?

**John:** So as an app developer, I’ll tell you that when you submit things to the Mac or the iOS App Store, you can choose what territories you want to release in. And often a strategy has been you release in Australia or the Philippines or Brazil, Argentina, because they are markets that are big enough that you can actually see what’s working, but you can not sort of launch everywhere and especially not launch in the US or in Europe before the game is really ready.

So it passed the beta test, but you’re seeing what’s working. And if there’s in-app purchases, it’s a great place to test like what will people actually buy. How do I get them to go through it? So, sometimes you need it out there in the market to test it. And so you test it in places where it’s not as crucial.

**Craig:** Makes total sense. You’re looking for a place with a large population base, lots of smartphones, but culturally aren’t going to destroy you if maybe you stumble a little bit out of the gate.

**John:** It’s a way to test what your advertising strategy is going to be. Like what ads are you buying? What ads are going to be successful in getting people to click through and actually install the app. So that’s why you soft launch out in those markets.

**Craig:** I included this link only because typically when you find a link for an app like Tens, what you get – obviously that article is from a few months ago. It is now here. It’s everywhere. But you get the iTunes link which just hurdles you over to the iTunes app on your computer or on your phone. Then you don’t get any information about it really without launching another app.

**John:** I appreciate your thoroughness.

**Craig:** I knew you would.

**John:** All right. That is our show for this week. So our show is produced by Megan McDonnell, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth.

**Craig:** Oh. By the way, can we – at some point does Rajesh Naroth just become our official composer?

**John:** Well, here’s the thing. So Matthew did the bulk of our original stuff, but now he’s in Japan and he’s not writing as many outros. Rajesh has stepped up. And Rajesh I think actually lives here in Southern California, so he’s local. He’s our local composer.

But if you have an outro you’d like us to play, send it in. We haven’t gotten any new outros for a while. So send it in to ask@johnaugust.com. Send us a link. That’s also the place to send questions like the ones we answered. We love it when people include voice memos that have their questions so that Megan doesn’t have to email you to say like, hey, would you mind recording that. Just record it the first time through.

On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Look for us there.

You can actually look for me in London on Tuesday and Wednesday, so the day this comes out and the next day, because I’ll be there for the opening of Big Fish. So if you want to see me, I’ll be there. I’ll be in front of the theater, nervous.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a review. That helps.

We have a Facebook page. We kind of update it every once and a while. Megan does post all of the episodes.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. You’ll also find the transcripts. They go up about a week after the episode airs. And all the back episodes are available at Scriptnotes.net. The first 300 episodes are also available on the USB drives at store.johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** So thorough.

**John:** Craig, it’s good to be back on Skype with you.

**Craig:** Good to be back on Skype. And the good news is you go to London, and then I go to London, again. So, let’s see how screwed up it gets. But, for now, ahhh.

**John:** For now, ahhh, so good. Take care.

**Craig:** Thanks man.

Links:

* Last chance for [Scriptnotes T-shirts](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)! We’ve got [Classic](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-classic) (in light and dark mode), the [Umbrage Strikes Back](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-the-umbrage-strikes-back), and [Umbrage & Reason](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-umbragereason).
* Peter Madsen [admits](http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/30/europe/denmark-journalist-dismembered/index.html) to dismembering, but not killing, Kim Wall. This is a follow-up to past How Would This Be a Movie article, [Famed Inventor Says He Buried Reporter ‘At Sea’ After His Homemade Sub Sank](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/21/545029872/famed-inventor-says-he-buried-reporter-at-sea-after-his-homemade-sub-sank?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=npr&utm_medium=social&utm_term=nprnews) on NPR
* [The 15:17 to Paris](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6802308/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_1), written by Dorothy Blyskyl and directed by Clint Eastwood, is a former How Would This Be a Movie come to life.
* [On the Line: The Female Inmates Who Battle California’s Deadly Wildfires](https://www.nbcnews.com/video/california-on-fire-these-female-inmates-are-fighting-the-blazes-1068589123744) by Matt Toder for NBC News.
* [Some dead bodies donated to research in US end up in warehouses of horrors](https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/how-much-for-your-head-unregulated-us-brokers-make-killing-on-donated-bodies/?amp=1) by Beth Mole for Ars Technica.
* [The Surprising Revolt at the Most Liberal College in the Country](https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/11/the-surprising-revolt-at-reed/544682/) by Chris Bodenner for The Atlantic
* An [interactive piece](http://graphics.wsj.com/hamilton/) by Joel Eastwood and Erik Hinton for the Wall Street Journal looking at the rhyme schemes in Hamilton
* [Tens](http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPhone/TENS%21/news.asp?c=74488) dice game app.
* [Big Fish](https://www.theotherpalace.co.uk/whats-on/big-fish-the-musical/booking) in London!
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