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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/whats-in-the-wga-deal).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 310 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be talking with one of the co-chairs of the WGA Negotiating Committee to learn what’s in the new deal and what work is left ahead. We’ll also be tackling some listener questions.

**Craig:** That sounds pretty good. I mean, I will say, not to give it away, but it’s Chris Keyser. That’s who is with us. Chris is not just the co-chair of the last WGA Negotiating Committee, the one that went through the whole big crazy thing. But he is also a former two-term president of the Writers Guild and you remember that show Party of Five?

**John:** He did that show Party of Five.

**Craig:** I think he made it. I think he created it.

**John:** With Amy Lippman, if I’m correct.

**Craig:** You’re allowed to talk.

**Chris Keyser:** Oh, I’m allowed. I didn’t know. I thought it was just you guys.

**John:** Welcome Chris Keyser.

**Craig:** Chris, would you shut up.

**John:** Chris Keyser, welcome to the program. Again. You actually called in on a previous episode a zillion years ago.

**Chris:** Oh yeah, I remember.

**John:** Yeah, you remember that. But your audio sounds better this time because you’re actually here in front of us. And Craig and I are in the same room for the first time in a year.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Chris:** It’s good to see both of you.

**Craig:** I know. It’s good to see you, too. We want to go through this whole thing because, look, we have a wide listenership. And to be honest with you, I think probably a large percentage of them are not directly dialed in to the sort of things that went on in the Writers Guild negotiations. But I think all of them, or a great majority of them, aspire to be. And we do have, of course, a lot of people that listen here in town, not only writers, but also a lot of executives and assistants and people. So we have people on both sides. And we like talking to both of them.

And this was a very complicated negotiation, not only from an issue point of view, but it was complicated procedurally, the way it went down. I think we should talk hopefully about everything. We can talk about what this deal was. What the problems were that were identified early on. How we went in there. As much as we can hear from you, we’d love to hear how it went. We obviously want to talk about what we got.

And then we want to talk about the future. Just a lot.

**John:** Absolutely. And to take a little burden off your shoulders, back in Episode 289 we did a full hour episode where we talked through the 101 of WGA negotiations.

**Chris:** I know. I read it. I read the transcript.

**John:** So you can assume our listenership has some sense of what the negotiation is like and that it’s two parties meeting in Glendale and they’re occasionally coming together.

**Chris:** You guys know what you’re talking about. You’ve been there.

**John:** We’ve both been there. But let’s talk about sort of what the issues were going in. And I thought we might start with sort of what the outcome was. So on May 2 there was the announcement that a deal had been reached. And there was a press release put out that said like these are the major deal points. And if you can just clarify a little bit sort of what they actually — what it means.

So, in it we made gains for minimums across the board, as well as a contribution to our health plan that should ensure solvency for years to come. So talk to us about the health plan, because that was sort of the spotlight issue six months ahead of going into this negotiation.

**Chris:** Right. The employee contribution percentage, it increases from 9.5% to 10.5% at the start of the agreement, and then goes up to 11% in the second year. And 11.5% in the third year.

**Craig:** That’s for health.

**Chris:** That’s for health. Right. Not pension. It’s specifically for health. Health is where our issues were most acute. Our pension plan is doing well. But the health plan is at risk, as all health plans are, in large part because health costs are rising at a faster rate than we’re actually making money back from we’re putting money in, either through earning money on our money, which you can only do a limited amount because you need that money to be available. You know, it’s not invested — the pension plan — more specifically the amount of — the percentage increase of employer contributions.

So this should help. This is a pretty large influx of money into the health plan. And based on all the projections, and we have projections done by our advisers constantly. They’re revising that. This should put us in good shape for a good long time. It’s hard to say exactly how long, because we’re at the mercy of–

**Craig:** The market.

**Chris:** The market, the inflation rate on healthcare. Although that has been going in the right direction at least.

**Craig:** So, people at home listening to this, the idea of this percentage is that we get paid a certain amount of money and then the companies take a percentage of that, over that amount, and send it to the plan. But that is only applied against the first, what is it, 250, is that still the number?

**Chris:** Yes. 250 — the only increase in caps is an increase in caps for writers who are on overall deals. 14E writers. And that went to 275 from 250 in that they make.

**John:** I love how Craig tried to make things simpler and then just like more jargon got spat out here.

**Craig:** Well, you won’t jargon us. But, listen, we’re the wonks, man.

**Chris:** Look, the real important thing to remember. First of all, yes, they fringed that. But they only fringed minimum, remember. And so it gets awfully complicated. So if you’re a television writer who is making a certain amount of money per week, some of that is applied to your writing services. That is your minimum. And they fringe only that. It is a little bit of a fiction. That’s one of the reasons why–

**Craig:** For television writers.

**Chris:** For television writers.

**Craig:** For us, it’s not. Yeah, for feature writers it’s not.

**Chris:** And that’s, in fact, one of the reasons why we’ve been talking about increasing minimums because — and outside increase in minimums when we went in, the thing that didn’t end up happening, in order to essentially balance the burden a little bit.

**Craig:** John, explain to everybody what the hell we’re talking about.

**Chris:** Sorry.

**Craig:** No, it’s good. We can have this conversation and then he’s going to tell people what we said.

**John:** So there’s a whole meme out there of explain it like I’m five, which is like really simplification. I’m going to try to explain it like you’re an 11th grader. The basic kind of things —

**Chris:** If I’m an 11th grader, I don’t care.

**John:** You don’t care. It all sucks anyway. Who even cares?

**Chris:** Rolling my eyes.

**John:** So let’s say you are a writer working in features, for example. You are hired by Sony Pictures to adapt a project. You come in and you write your screenplay. If they are paying you $100,000, a little extra money on top of that, which is called fringe, is being used to pay for your pension and your health. And so that is money on top of what you’re being paid, which is sent to the Writers Guild for these funds. You pension fund and for your health fun. That is what keeps the fund solvent. It keeps the money in there so we can actually pay for people’s health insurance.

The issue was that the overall fund was being depleted, or the fund wasn’t as strong as it needed to be, so we needed to make sure —

**Chris:** We had enough money to cover our costs, but the projections in the future were that the increasing health costs each year would diminish how much we had in reserve until we went to a point —

**Craig:** Belly up.

**Chris:** Where we had too few months in reserve.

**John:** Yeah. So when we talk about the cap, there’s a certain top limit to how much you’re being paid by one employer which they don’t have to keep paying the fringes on top of those things. And so that cap was at $250,000. And so making sure that they don’t have to keep paying beyond that point, but we want to make sure that we keep getting paid.

**Craig:** Yeah. You get paid $2 million, they don’t have to pay an additional 10.5 or 11% on all $2 million, just up to the $250,000 and then it stops.

**John:** And the other crucial point that was discussed there is that television writers are paid both for their writing services and for their producing services, but only the writing services kick those fringe monies in. And so a writer who is being paid a good amount on a TV show may still only be getting paid a minimum for the scripts he or she is writing. Is that fair to say?

**Chris:** No, it’s not about scripts. It’s about weekly salaries. So that your writing services are the minimum that we negotiate. So, in other words, the minimum if you were working for a normal year up until this contract was around $6,500 a week. You could earn more than that. That would be your above scale income. It was applied to your producing services. But $6,500 a week is the amount of money that fringe was calculated based upon.

**Craig:** That’s an important concept for people to understand. So much of what this negotiation was about and the reason why the Writers Guild was rattling its sword, its collective sword so loudly, is because in television there is two ways to pay people. And what the companies understood inherently was that one way cost them more than another, because of these fringes. It’s not like saying, “Look, I’m going to pay you $100. And I’m going to pay you $20 because I like your shirt and $80 because I like your pants.”

No. Because when you pay somebody as a writer you also have to then pay on top of it, this health fringe and this pension fringe. That costs them more money. So it’s in their best interest to pay the television writers as little as possible as writers and then all the rest, whatever the writers can negotiate for themselves, as producers. Because you don’t have to fringe the producing money.

In features, this is not a problem because they don’t want us to be producers of the movies. See, their desire to keep screenwriters out of the process of feature-making is so strong, they’re OK with paying us more for pension and health. This causes some strange inequities between feature writers and television writers, which we’ll talk about in a bit. But in television, so much of what this was about was handling this problem. That writers who are making a lot, or sometimes not that much, but more than the minimum were only putting into the system the minimum amount of health and pension. And qualifying to receive health. And so we were getting squeezed. It’s a tricky problem and I think you guys came up with a good solution. So.

**Chris:** I’ll say a couple other things about that. One is the money that was put into the health fund is necessary, but it is in some sense our own money, because it came out of minimums. In other words, although we’re not guaranteed a minimum increase contract by contract. Our minimums have been over the last couple of contracts in and around 3%. And, in fact, had we had no health fund increase, I think you might have assumed that we would have gotten a 3% bump in our minimums.

Instead, as I think you can tell, we took money out of the minimums and transferred them — instead of you getting a bump in your minimum salary, you get that money applied to your health fund. Now, that’s a good thing, by the way, because on the one hand not everyone receives the benefit of minimum increases. Because if for example I make $10,000 a week as a television writer, if the minimum goes from $6,500 to $6,800, I don’t see an additional penny, and the companies aren’t spending anything. But everybody has fringe on top of his or her salary. So they’re actually contributing more by contributing into the health fund then contributing into minimums.

But a lot of that is coming out of our own pockets. And part of the argument that was going back and forth is should they be actually paying some fresh new money. We didn’t end up getting that, but we did get a fair amount of money out of minimums into the health fund, and so that was on balance a good thing. But as in all things with these negotiations, it’s a compromise.

**Craig:** It’s great that you actually mention that, because I think a lot of people who follow along get a narrative that is remarkably boiled down. And reduced to very simple things. And when you are — and John knows this and I know this — when you’re on a negotiating committee or you’re on the board and you’re getting reports on it, it’s not just that the devil is in the details. The devil is the details. It’s all details. There is nothing but details. And everything that can go right or wrong happens in the details. We saw it coming out of the 2007 strike. There was a detail problem. And it was a disaster for us.

So, it’s great that you have the command of those details and we need people like you, particularly writers like you. I love staff, but we need writers who understand it. You do have–

**John:** A law degree from Harvard Law.

**Craig:** Harvard, right? Or business, MBA?

**Chris:** No, it’s a law degree from Harvard.

**Craig:** Yeah, I guess that’s better than a business degree.

**Chris:** I’m not going to get into that.

**Craig:** But you went to Haverford or Harvard?

**Chris:** I went to Harvard.

**John:** He went to school in Boston.

**Craig:** I love making that joke. That’s my favorite joke. I do that to David Kwong all the time. I’m like, oh, did you like Haverford? How was Haverford? I’m sorry–

**Chris:** I had a friend and somebody from her hometown saying Harvey University. She called him a Harvey Man.

**John:** He had a giant invisible rabbit who followed him around.

**Chris:** Yeah, we are very concerned with the details. Chip Johannessen who is — Billy Ray and Chip Johannessen were my co-chairs. And Chip is fantastic on the details. He understands it really well. And the writers in the room and the staff are extremely detail-oriented. And, look, we try, I think, as much as possible. One the one hand, to make writers understand what the gains are, but also to be pretty honest about the fact that these negotiations are always both successes and disappointments. And even though this one was talked about as bring ground-breaking in a number of ways, it’s also a disappointment. And we can talk about those things.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, they pretty much usually are. I think the only way to get to yes is if both sides walk away a bit disappointed.

**Chris:** That’s right. But, let’s be honest, in a world in which the money and the business is expanding exponentially and these have been incredible years for the companies, and our contract is valued at somewhat either $100 million over three years or some small multiple of that. We’re always falling a little bit behind as the years go on. So, there’s always a little bit of that frustration that we can’t keep up.

**Craig:** Granted, they would like to pay us nothing. So they–

**Chris:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So they feel like they keep falling behind by not reducing us to nothing.

**Chris:** You know, and when you’re in the room and you know this, that’s a genuine feeling on their part.

**Craig:** 100%.

**Chris:** Because that’s the world they live in. They don’t step outside of it and like let’s be fair.

**Chris:** No question. I mean, like we joke about it, but if they could replace us with machinery, they would.

**Chris:** And the reason why, by the way, that we do reasonably well in an era where labor unions are not is because we’re not replaceable. We’re not fungible.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Chris:** So, that gives us some power.

**Craig:** Some.

**John:** Let’s go back to the press release and talk about this next gain. And so it says, “We made unprecedented gains on the issue of short seasons in television, winning a definition, which has never existed before in our MBA, of 2.4 weeks of work for each episodic fee. Any work beyond that span will now require additional payment for hundreds of writer-producers.”

Talk me through the 2.4 weeks. What is all those?

**Chris:** I’ll go way back to the beginning, although anyone who has been part of the negotiation knows about this. This was maybe the central issue that we were facing when we talked to writers over the last few years, which is the change in the way in which television was being produced, from the traditional long season model, 22, 24 episodes on network television to a time that now which two-thirds of all shows are produced in shorter seasons, 8, or 10, or 12 episodes.

It was giving writers unprecedented creative opportunities but also presenting some real economic challenges. So here’s the reason why. In the old days, if you had a deal, you were on a television show that made 22 episodes, because the season was more or less set, there was a calendar. You know, you went to upfronts at the end of May. They made the decision what shows were being picked up. In June everyone went into a writing room and started writing. You needed to get your shows on the air by September, approximately. And by May those shows were done being aired. You were probably done writing sometime in April or so and then the whole thing started again with new pilots.

Well, that meant that you were working for 22 episodes, approximately 44 weeks. That’s not exact but more or less 44 weeks. And it couldn’t vary very much because you couldn’t start before the shows were picked up and you couldn’t end after the shows were done airing. That was a kind of protection because it meant that if your agent negotiated for you an episodic fee, and by the way, our fees were not always negotiated as episodic fees. They used to be weekly fees, but that was changed to episodic fees in an era in which by definition episodic fee meant two weeks.

If your agent negotiated an episodic fee, it meant that was being divided over two weeks of work. And so in those days whatever salary you were making, not necessarily whatever salary — that probably goes too far — but if you made a reasonable salary it was divided by two weeks and you did fine. You had 22 episodic fees a year. That’s awfully good.

Now, what happens if you only have episodic fees? And what happens if as if often the case, now there is no set calendar and so a studio asks you to spend a lot of months before the show is in production writing all the scripts before they’re ready.

**Craig:** You may spend the same amount of time you were spending getting 22 episodic fees, but you’re only get eight.

**Chris:** Exactly. So, your eight episode fees are now amortized over the same number of weeks. Which meant that what we were finding was that although our Writers Guild minimums were increasing, so that when we recorded Writers Guild earnings, which could only be done over minimums, our earnings were going up. In fact, once we asked writers to respond to a survey that said what’s your actual income, what’s your above-scale income–

**Craig:** Including producing.

**Chris:** Including producing fees. We found that writers were being diminished more or less toward minimum. In other words, what the studios were able to do was say let’s take — particularly for mid-level writers. What’s your salary, your episodic salary? Divide that by more or less by the minimum guarantee. That’s the number of weeks you work per episode. So if you made $19,000, you divided that by three and which was around $6,500 in 1995, that’s what you worked. And so writers were being driven down back toward minimum and that was really a problem because first of all there were only eight fees. They couldn’t take second shows, both because of options and exclusivity restrictions, and because schedules often didn’t permit it because they were working all year long. Writers’ salaries were plummeting. We needed to do something about that.

So the question was could we limit the number of weeks over which an episodic fee could be charged. That hadn’t been contemplated in the MBA. And the compromise we ended up with was 2.4 weeks. And so your episodic fee can now only be amortized over 2.4 weeks. So, if you have ten episodes, your contract for ten episodic fees can employ you for 24 weeks. If you work more than 24 weeks, every additional 2.4 weeks–

**Craig:** They got to pay you.

**Chris:** You’ve got to get paid another episodic fee. There are restrictions. We should talk about that. The restrictions matter a lot. In fact, if there’s anything I really want to talk about it’s why we failed in some ways to do everything we should have done and where that leaves the burden from here on out.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll get to those restrictions. But I want to talk about a couple things that I really liked about this. Aside from the obvious, which is that people are getting paid more. First, the suppression of television writer salaries down towards the minimum had this other dragon’s tail effect on our health plan.

Our health plan works in such a way that people qualify for a year of health care if they hit a qualifying number of income. And I think that’s something like $39,000 in a year. However, the actual cost of providing healthcare to any individual on the health plan on average is closer to like $100,000 a year, or something like that. So, how does that work? In part it works because a lot of people are making much more than the qualifying income, and so they are essentially helping offset the health costs of people who are making right at that minimum amount.

The more we had writers earning down toward that minimum and still qualifying for healthcare, the more strain on the system.

**Chris:** OK, so I hate to disagree with you.

**Craig:** All right. Let’s hear it.

**John:** I love when someone disagrees with Craig. I live for this.

**Craig:** Because you know where I’m going with this.

**Chris:** It sounds so good, but the problem is you only get paid for your healthcare on your minimum. So, in fact, not a single penny in the healthcare plan is lost by writers being reduced toward minimum.

**Craig:** Oh, in television. So that only works that way in features.

**Chris:** That’s right. So nothing is lost. Now, the truth is, one thing that might end up happening is writers will actually end up working more weeks because they’ll be employed for 24 weeks in a ten-episode order, and either they’ll be employed more or people — the show will say you’re gone. Now you can go off and get a second show. And if writers get employed more, it will help us. But week by week, we didn’t succeed in helping the health plan that way. It’s the reason why, by the way, one of the things that we had going in and we talked about this in the outreach meetings was the idea that we wanted to have a meaningful bump in minimums. Outsized as the companies would say bump in minimums.

I mean, one of the reasons why that was going to be good is exactly what you were talking about. So we actually didn’t succeed in getting that. Was one of the things that we left on the table.

**Craig:** OK, so that’s a fair and accurate correction. Interestingly, the thing that you look at as a failure I look at as a great success. As you know, we had discussions. I’m a vocal constituent. I never thought for a second that we were ever going to somehow break the pattern that was established of what the minimums increases actually were. But, what I thought was brilliant and creative and smart was the way that you guys said, OK, the minimums will increase as they have. We’re going to get them more frequently. That’s brilliant. And that is exactly the kind of thinking that we need and the kind of decision-making we need.

And, listen, we can disagree or agree on the probability of how pattern bargaining works in this town. But, regardless, I was really happy to see that we found this brilliant relief valve that allowed everybody to save face and got us — at least it was a sufficient amount. Right? We got a sufficient amount. It wasn’t great. But it was sufficient. So I thought that was wonderful.

**John:** Chris, can you talk through the practical ramifications of this 2.4 week clause? So, if I’m on the show and so it’s ten episodes, so that should be 24 weeks of employment, it goes into week 25, what actually happens? Is my agent submitting a bill saying like, hey, you’re employing him for another week, so therefore he needs to be paid another minimum? How does that actually kick in?

**Chris:** Well, it kicks in automatically. Yes, I suppose your agent can submit a bill, but the studios actually know that. It’s the same as how do they know when your next fee is due. It’s built into the schedule.

**John:** Because they’re cutting checks that has to happen.

**Chris:** That’s right. But each week would be one episode of a fee divided by 2.4. In other words, if you only work one extra week–

**Craig:** They don’t prorate it?

**Chris:** Yeah, they prorate it. So as many weeks as they need you for, they just pay you–

**Craig:** Can they prorate it by the day?

**Chris:** There is language about how to do that. I don’t remember exactly what it is. But as I said, one of the things that goes on now in negotiations is we don’t leave those rooms within a day of leaving the room where everything isn’t memorialized. So, nothing is left to chance anymore.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Good. So question, so you’re also a showrunner. You have a show on Amazon called The Last Tycoon, and we had Billy Ray sitting right where you’re sitting a year ago talking through that. So as you’re doing something like The Last Tycoon, you have to make decisions about which writers you’re going to keep on past a certain point. Which writers you’re going to keep on for the equivalent of the week 25. So that is a decision you’re making along with the studio and the other sort of money crunchers to figure out who you can keep going.

I guess what’s different now under this deal is you can’t just hold on to people because you kind of want to hold on to them. There’s really a cost to holding on to them.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s a really good thing, I think. Yeah. I mean, first of all, as a showrunner, it’s my feeling, and certainly on our show, too little of our budget is spent on writing. You know, that arbitrary number that they claim is the writer budget is about 2% of the cost of the show. That’s really low. It could be higher than that.

It seems to me that one of the problems we’ve been having is companies are willing to spend on things and not on people. So, your VFX budget can go through the roof and you get extra days of production. They do all kinds of things. We build incredible sets. But if somebody says it would be good to have our writers paid reasonably for the number of weeks they’re there, that’s an impossibility.

**Craig:** It’s hard for them. They can’t quantify what we do. So they know, when the VFX guy says I need more money, it’s because I need this many more shots. And the people building the sets need that much more lumber and hours to construct things. And the costume people need glitter. And bangles. And cloth.

When they pay a writer, sometimes nothing seems to happen. Sometimes things get worse. It’s part of the nature of creativity. It’s not our fault. It’s how it works. And it’s very hard for them to wrap their minds around it. It’s not an excuse. It’s just something that I think — I always think that if we understand how they fail in their thinking, sometimes it might help us get what we want.

**Chris:** Right. And I think one of the things they’ve come to think about writers — and this is not good for writers in the way they develop as writers on television. And, Craig, you and I have certainly been in meetings in the committee on the professional status of writers where we talk about the same issue in features. Which is that the assumption now is that the showrunner, or the showrunner plus one other person will take care of everything.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Chris:** Everyone else is actually fungible. We can take them or leave them. They can leave whenever they want. They can submit any script to you they want. Eventually you’ll make it right. You’ll take as many weeks as it takes to make it right and they’ll be fine. So they don’t worry about those things.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because the more you treat staff writers as fungible, or the more you treat say the first writer on a feature as fungible, because we’re going to hire somebody for scale or scale and a half and then work them to death and then get a script out of them, the harder it is to train people. This is a business that requires training. There are a few writers who are sort of born as they are and they occupy their own space and that’s fine. But the vast majority of writers working in film and television learn and grow through experience. And when they don’t get it, because they are treated as fungible and discardable, you’re there to basically put some stuff on a page so that the showrunner can rewrite it or the A-list feature writer can rewrite it.

Then that base of writers is depleted. And then that’s all you’re going to get, because that’s all that’s there. If you treat them like crap, they will become crap.

**Chris:** Right. I think that is a real problem in features. It can be a problem in television. I don’t want to speak for everybody. My feeling about this, when Amy and I — Amy Lippman and I were doing our shows — and Billy and I do the same thing, is that we do as much as we can to make sure as much of the writer’s material stays. Or, I mean, obviously the obligation in the end is to produce something that is as good as it can possibly be. But we also, with all due respect to Damon on your show, send our writers to set. Send our writers to the editing room.

Our feeling is their first job is obviously to help us make sure the show is as good as it can be. But our second job is to prepare them to run shows. That it is a both a job and an apprenticeship. And no one else is going to teach them that. So, one of the issues I have, and you probably don’t want to talk about this now, one of the fears I have about all of this, about the way the world is working is that when you divorce the television show from the calendar, when you can write before you shoot, you diminish the writer’s ability to be part of all the different aspects of production.

**John:** That’s exactly what I wanted to get to. So if a season is written before it is shot, and in many cases a season is written before it’s even green lit. We have friends who have written whole seasons and then like, OK, now we’ve got the green light. Now we go off and shoot it. It ends up being the showrunner plus one other person who is the only person left around to sort of do that stuff. So your case of like a writer being on set or a writer being there in the editing room, that person is well beyond their 24 weeks or however long it’s supposed to be.

**Chris:** Right. And that’s a real problem. So for example, on The Last Tycoon, Billy and I said we want our writers to be employed through the end of production on their episode. We couldn’t get everyone employed straight through the end of all production, as used to be the case. But everyone stay for his or her episode. And if we could, even for a week or so of postproduction. And showrunners have an effect on that. And talk to Shawn Ryan about it. He takes care of his writers. And you see how somebody ought to behave.

It’s a problem. It’s a real problem. By the way, even shows that aren’t completely finished writing beforehand, they’re somewhat finished writing, and if writers have a 24-week span and you’re only partially through the production season then those writers go.

Now, having said that, it is not our job as the Guild to — we can’t tell people how long they need to hire writers except based on the number of episodes. So, what we need to make sure is that — and we try to make sure — is that when you’re working you are being paid a reasonable fee. Then you are free to go out and get another job. It is possible that one of the effects of this new proposal will be that writers will actually work fewer weeks on their shows because — they’ll make the same amount of money, but instead of working 30 weeks or 32 weeks for one show, we hope they’re working for multiple shows. And that is OK, I think.

Look, we’re going through a change, a real change, and there are real stresses on writers because of it. The idea — and I know lots of young television writers because we hire them — the idea that you need to find a job twice a year as opposed to once a year, and that often finding a job twice a year means that your connection to your original show, even if the show is successful, is attenuated. That’s full of uncertainty. It’s not a great position to be in. But that is — we’re not in control of the way the business changes.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But who is responsible for getting you your next job is often your agents. And weirdly they’re not part of this real discussion in terms of the negotiation between us and the AMPTP. Like they’re the ones who are ultimately going to be responsible for getting that person the next gig, and yet they weren’t in that room for this. So, was there outreach before this all started in terms of what the agencies are finding or what the agencies are experiencing with their writers and short seasons?

**Chris:** Well, the agency question is a very complicated one and we could probably have a whole separate hour–

**Craig:** Good, just jump on the third rail. Hug it. Hug it and lick it.

**Chris:** Wait, wait, I’m shaking. The agents are going to have a lot of responsibility coming off of this contract. The good thing for them is that we’ve made it plain now what writers are paid for. And so we will be able to see whether agents are doing the job they need to do to make sure that writers get the extra weeks of work or get onto another show.

Before, I think agents were — and you can talk about whether this was the agency’s fault or not — they were part of this general trend to saying, “You’ve got accept a deal that says you’re working essentially toward minimum. Take it or leave it. We’ll hire a different writer if you don’t say yes.”

**Craig:** Absolutely. Well, agents in general are defined by their laziness. I say this to my own agent all the time, and I love him. But if there’s something — they have this many clients and this much time. If there’s a way that they can make money and it’s less effort for them, then they’ll follow that, even if it means maybe they make a little bit less than they might have otherwise.

So, if they hear like, look, I get you on a show and then I don’t hear from you for a year. I did my job. I got you a job. So now they have to work a little harder. But I actually think that they will enjoy it more. The thing about agents sort of paradoxically is that on the one hand they’re lazy. On the other hand, they get excited when there’s a chase. It’s just the maintenance part that I think they hate so much. Like someone calls them halfway through the year and goes, “I’ve been on this show for 14 weeks. I’ve been paid about what I would normally get paid for three weeks. This stinks. Can you do something about it?”

“No. And this conversation is boring and I don’t like you.” That’s kind of what’s in their heard. As opposed to, OK, I’m coming off. What do we got? Where do we go? How do we get a job? Now it’s a hunt. And I think that’s more fun for them.

**Chris:** Right. Well, I hope we get to the point of the list of all the things that writers and agents need to pay attention to from this point on. Because it changes now once this new contract goes into effect.

But before we do that we have to talk about the other limitations on this new proposal.

**John:** Tell us.

**Chris:** The other limitations are first that it applies only to people writing on shows that are 12 episodes or fewer on broadcast, or 14 episodes or fewer on cable.

**John:** Cable and streaming? Or just cable?

**Chris:** Cable and streaming. And non-network/broadcast network. So here’s a little inside of like how things work in negotiations which is the AMPTP is not a united front. They don’t all have the same point of view. They are different companies with different business profiles. And so for example the 12-episode limitation on broadcast was a limitation that was very important to the constituents of the AMPTP who principally do or still largely do old-fashioned network shows. Who said, well wait, 13 episodes? That’s the kind of order we used to have when you start a show. You only get 13 episodes. You get your nine and your back half if the show is doing well. We don’t want to be restricted — we’re going to solve your new problems. We’re not going to solve an old problem of yours.

Now, we talked to them about the fact why that didn’t really make sense. That in fact when you do your 13-episode first part of your order you’re not actually attenuating writer’s services because you’re always anticipating the possibility of the back nine.

**Craig:** Correct. Actually, I mean, you call it a restriction. It’s sort of an easy restriction to give up because it doesn’t really — it seems mostly overcautious on their part. The point is not to spread those 13 weeks. That’s not how they work. So actually that’s not that bad.

**Chris:** I know. But nevertheless, it was a hobbyhorse of theirs and one thing that you find that’s tough about these things is they really do tend to be more open to solving new problems than old problems. So they said, “Well if that was a problem on 13 episodes, you never told us before. We’re not going to solve it now.” It wasn’t, of course, a problem on 13 episodes.

So, that’s the first restriction. And the second restriction is that it only applies to people who earn $350,000 or less in a season, excluding script fees. So that’s only episodic fees. That means that many showrunners or even co-executive producers will not be taken care of in this. The sort of thing by the way I should say goes into effect May 1 of 2018. So a contract that was signed beforehand does not include that. And for example I know a writer who was applying for jobs once our show went down and one of the studios who was looking to hire her said, “We want you to sign a two-year deal.” Because they’re looking to lock people up under the old terms for as long as possible.

**Craig:** This doesn’t start until May 1, 2018?

**Chris:** It can’t. Because the — you know, people are mid-contract. So it’s got to be new contract, as is often the case.

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t recall an MBA term that was that delayed before.

**Chris:** Yes, it’s not uncommon. The minimums will go up immediately, but certain things that are — for example, our options and exclusivity —

**Craig:** There was a lag on.

**Chris:** There’s always a lag on it because you’re not going back to old contracts or in the middle of saying we’re changing them. This is a way of saying anything past this date.

So, you may want to ask questions or I’m going to dive right into what this means.

**John:** Tell me what it means.

**Chris:** OK. What it means is that we negotiated as much as we could and we got as much as we could out of the companies. And a lot of this was really meaningful. The limitations are really meaningful as you talked about, Craig. And the 350 number on eight or 10-episode orders for a lot of writers is really meaningful.

We know, for example, how much that would have made writers in additional money had it applied to last year. Though there’s no guarantee that that will be true. And we know that it could be substantial. But there was a limit to what we could do. And they were limiting their liability and the $350,000 yearly cap and the episodic cap is a way of doing that.

What it means is that writers and their agents need to be vigilant about this and be able to say, particularly agents, say to companies, “You hired a client of mine as a co-producer and you guaranteed him or her an episodic fee that only amortized over 2.4 weeks. I’m not going to sign a deal for my supervising producer that brings them down to minimum.” That using this begins to change the way people think about the way writers should be paid.

I mean, I had a conversation with somebody at Netflix who said it’s actually changing the way we’re thinking about paying writers because you’ve done this.

Now, there’s no guarantee of that. And there’s no question that studios are going to push back on it. But there’s no way that this is going to work for everybody unless agents begin to use the leverage of their lower rung on the hiring ladder clients as pressure for those above.

I mean, I know as showrunners, and particularly showrunners on shows, many of them are extended many, many weeks beyond their 2.4, into the point where their salaries are getting closer and closer to minimum. The negotiations are going to have to be tougher on those things. And we’ll go back to it again. You know, we’ll go back to it again in three years if the evidence is that people are still being taken advantage of.

**John:** Can I restate this in a way that I think may make it more clear for certain people? So what you’re saying is that this negotiation, we’ll just talk about the 2.4 weeks, these are things that are going to apply to lower level writers.

**Chris:** Not just lower. $35,000 and episode for a ten-episode order is a good–

**Craig:** We’ll call them the middle class and down of — sort of exclusive of the, let’s call it the fancy writers.

**John:** Exactly. But the same way that sometimes top tier writers can negotiate things well beyond the norms, this may change the norms to a degree so that you can push from the bottom up. Some people who are not currently covered by the details of this contract.

**Chris:** That’s right.

**John:** So an agent can say like, “Hey listen, if this were 2018 and these things come into effect, this writer or a writer like this would be qualified for this 2.4 clause. We want that now.”

**Chris:** That’s right. We want contracts in terms of weeks. We want to know what your weekly salary is. It’s no longer okay to express things in episodes and keep our fingers crossed for a showrunner, for example.

**Craig:** I think that’s likely. Now, of course, agents also have to be aware that naturally, I would imagine, companies will say, “OK, well, we’re paying these people more. Who can we pay less? Oh, the guy that’s making more than $350,000. Let’s pay him less. Let’s pay her less.”

So, I always feel like these things are like water. The companies’ greed is like water looking for a crack. And agents’ greed is like water looking for a crack. You know, the way speeders and cops have always had this thing between the radar detectors and the radar gun. This is how it’s going to go.

But at least we’re in the right battle now. Whereas before everyone was just getting hit over the head and nobody could do anything about it. Like the way currently is for feature writers. When are we going to talk about that?

**Chris:** We’ll get to that.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**Chris:** By the way, an analogy to this is the way in which the option and exclusivity clause that we negotiated into the MBA three years ago and extended this year I think has changed conversations. So, I know there was a point at which the idea that — let me explain what that means.

So, what are options and exclusivity? It means that if I am on a show and I don’t have the ability to go off and do something else, I can be held by the company who hired me while I’m waiting for the next season of my show to be picked up. And often, or not often, but many times in the new world you would make your show, it wouldn’t air for six months, they wouldn’t decide for four months. And then they had to go back into production. And so there are lots of terrible stories about writers who are employed for eight or ten episodes and waited for a year. This is the old days.

We negotiated — in addition to which there were also restrictions that said you couldn’t develop for anyone else or do any other work while you were under contract because of the exclusivity.

**Craig:** And this was the negotiation not this past one, but the one prior to that?

**Chris:** That’s right. It also had a bunch of restrictions on it. You couldn’t earn over a certain amount of money and have this apply. But what I think happened, and that number now is bumped way up in this contract. Even still, those provisions are not in and of themselves real protections for writers entirely because for example they include a 90-day waiting period. If people really applied that to writers, the difficulty of finding a second job in a year would be so great that most people wouldn’t be able to do it.

But I think that conversation, the open conversation, changed the way people viewed options particularly. And nowadays it is much rarer for a writer to be help. Certainly we on our show say go get work. You know, you’ve got to go. We hope you’re going to be back here if we get picked up, but we don’t know and you’ve got to survive.

So I hope that the conversation changes fundamentally. Because these things–

**Craig:** The contractual language does have ripples in the general culture of how things are actually done. Because a lot of things in our business are done according to the MBA.

But then there are a lot of things that are just general practices and there’s a sense of an influence. The companies have acknowledged that holding somebody all that time is just wrong. You don’t have to look at the terms. They’ve made that acknowledgment, so now I can use — it’s just part of our deal. And similarly now they have acknowledged that paying people on an episode basis only and ignoring how much time that takes is wrong. So now that’s part of our conversation. And I think that’s great.

**Chris:** In fairness to them, I mean, more to options and exclusivity than the episodic fee, they slid into this. No one was saying is there a way to–

**John:** To really hurt writers.

**Chris:** We keep writers for a year without paying them upfront. They made shows. They didn’t know if they were going to get a pickup for a long time. They were afraid of losing their writers.

**John:** Yeah, it was fear.

**Chris:** It was fear.

**Craig:** That’s actually a really important point. That, look, I’ll talk about the companies being greedy all I want, because they are. And I always feel like if I were to call them greedy to their faces they would say, “Thank you,” because that’s why they’re there.

But, we’re the last thing I think that they think about. What happens is the world changes. They follow the money. They follow a pattern. They look and see what the other guy is doing. She had success with this, I’m going to go do what she did. Then somebody goes, “Hey, do you realize what you’ve done here?” And they go, “No, we don’t care. We’re busy. We’re trying to make money.” And we have to kind of hit them pretty hard with a stick to make them realize, no, no, no, fine, go do what you’re going to do and make your money, but you have to address the changes you made down the line, which you don’t see or don’t care about seeing until we force you to see.

**Chris:** Right. Look, it’s a much more complicated world than it used to be. There were fewer writers employed in the world of a few networks. And the creative opportunities, particularly independent production ended, were much less than they are now. But there was a kind of logic to the work year. You get paid for a year. You take a couple of weeks off during your hiatus and when your show comes back you’re all available because there was nothing else you could do. That’s really nice.

It’s hard for all of us. I mean, it’s weird for the studios who don’t have writers available and showrunners who don’t, who can’t keep their writers around because the writers need to work. It’s even worse for ordinary writers who actually need to find jobs every five minutes. Let’s be honest. If you’re on a 24-episode contract, say 24-week contract, you need to be looking for your next job in the middle of that, maybe ten weeks in, because it takes a while. You can’t wait till the 24 weeks are over.

**Craig:** Oh, I wonder what that’s like. Oh, feature writers have been dealing with that for 20 years now. Minimum. I mean, I’m sorry and everything, but it’s so funny how so many of the problems that television writers are experiencing —

**Chris:** It’s completely true.

**Craig:** We have been dealing with for decades.

**Chris:** Divorcing the television production season from a calendar turns it into a version of essentially feature.

**Craig:** Well I’m glad that you took care of television writers now that they’re like us. But maybe also we should talk about feature writers and how —

**Chris:** Did you want to go to that next?

**John:** Let’s finish up one thing from the press release, because I just don’t actually know what was negotiated or decided. For the first time ever, job protection on parental leave. What happened with parental leave?

**Chris:** We asked for a certain number of weeks off, paid. We ended up with a certain number of weeks off with a guarantee that you get your job back when you come back, if your show is still in production.

**John:** So this is for TV writers who are in the middle of a season and leave because of the birth of a child.

**Chris:** Or the adoption of a child, or a foster child, all those things. And male and female. There’s no distinction made there. You have the right to take time off to do that and then come back. It is a meaningful, small additional step in the right direction. It’s not the same as paid leave to do that, but it’s a beginning. And it was something that we gained in the very last moments of the negotiation. At a time when a few things were left on the table, including our feature proposal.

**Craig:** And they need to come.

**John:** I think it’s worth noting though that everybody else in that room was working for companies that probably already had parental leave.

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** Because it’s really common among corporations in Hollywood for this to exist. So it felt weird that we didn’t have this kind of protection.

**Chris:** And that was certainly one of the arguments that we made. On the other hand, what is also true is it’s a complicated practical thing when you’re working for 24 weeks, for example. You know, it would have been an easier argument strangely if we had been back in the old world where you said, look, we’re all working essentially all year long. If somebody needs to take X number of weeks off, that doesn’t change your production schedule. But, you know, they come back and say we have five writers working. You want to take half — your time off for it comes in the middle of —

**Craig:** As a showrunner, I would imagine that’s a tough one. You’ve got a small staff. And you’ve got the money you’re spending. And you’re not getting more. And then you lose 20% of your staff for let’s say a crucial chunk of time. If you have to also pay them you can’t sub anyone in. It’s tricky on that basis.

**Chris:** And I don’t want to speak for other showrunners. Our point of view was people need to go and take care of what they need to take care of.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Chris:** But not everyone, A, feels that way, or maybe not everyone has that flexibility. Now it’s built in. And the truth is the problem was always, and it came back to us, you know, showrunners should be good about those things. And we say, showrunners could be good about those things, but we don’t want to rely on showrunners to say we want to be reasonable about that stuff.

**Craig:** Strange thing for the Writers Guild to be taking a position on since we represent all of the showrunners.

**Chris:** Right. But we don’t have the ability to say, I mean, you should not need to be reliant on the kindness of your boss to do things.

**John:** Exactly. That’s why it’s important to write these things down.

**Craig:** It’s so odd. It’s like we go in there and part of our argument is our own membership is unreliable and treats writers poorly. Can you treat them better?

**Chris:** Well, no, not in this case obviously, because I think it is a complicated thing — not that there aren’t showrunners who would do it, who would say go home, don’t work, we’ll bill the studio, and don’t worry about that. That’s a complicated position to put people in. We could have a long conversation about showrunner responsibility and the way showrunners do or do not serve the best interests of both their show and the writers at the same time. It’s a really complicated thing.

**Craig:** Well, we don’t have that problem.

**John:** Let’s do something simple then. Let’s talk about screenwriters. And let’s talk about the situation screenwriters find themselves in and sort of what was in this negotiation, what was not in this negotiation, and sort of where the future work is ahead for feature writers.

**Chris:** Well, Craig, you can talk about — I mean, the screenwriter proposal we came in with was one that you talked about at the meeting. So why don’t you talk about —

**Craig:** Well, I’ve been talking about it for a couple of years. And just as an aside, getting the Guild to recognize that there are issues that we can attack with the companies that are feature-based that aren’t as simple as what the minimum is, what scale is, is hard. It’s really hard. I had a long, difficult conversation with Tony Segal who is the outside counsel for the union. But, you know, it worked out OK.

We’ve been dealing with this problem of what we call free rewrites forever. And the problem has started and people got nervous and upset. Then it got worse and people got panicked. Then it got so bad that everyone became sort of overwhelmed and just said, well, that’s the world we live in now. But that’s not acceptable.

The practice is the studio hires a writer. They only guarantee them one step. We used to be guaranteed two steps. A step is a draft. And then a producer comes in and the producer talks to the writer and says show me the script before we send it to the studio. And the writer shows them the script when she’s done. And the producer says, OK, I have a ton of notes. We have to do a lot of work. We get one shot with the studio. This is going to kill it. Blah, blah, blah.

And part of the reason that happens is because the producers get paid almost nothing for the process of developing a screenplay. I literally think they’re down to like $20,000 for the process of developing a screenplay. They make an enormous amount of money, in theory, if the movie is made. They have a fee, a production fee, which is largely millions — million and over. And then they oftentimes have a percentage of profits. There’s a huge upside to them. They want to deliver, they are incentivized to deliver to the studio something that feels like you could just go shoot it tomorrow.

So, they make the writer rewrite it. And then they make the writer rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it. I’ve heard people do nine or ten drafts for a producer. They have been paid once. In fact, they haven’t even been paid once for that.

**John:** They’ve been paid half.

**Craig:** That’s right. Television writers, at least the fee is coming on a weekly basis. They’re paid half. That’s the commencement money. Half. They can’t do another job. They are doing what they should be paid seven or eight times for, per our contract. They’ve been paid one half of a time for. And finally then the script is turned in and lo and behold the studio has notes, and thoughts, and maybe we should get a different writer. Why is the script like this anyway? A lot of times these writers are sitting there going, oh my god, I had it right the first time.

OK, so what do we do about this? The Writers Guild attempted to enforce some sort of legal constraint on this and failed. My proposal was simply this: I understand why the studios don’t want to guarantee two steps to somebody like me, or somebody like John. They pay us a lot for one step. And it’s far more than scale. Fine.

But for the writers who earn, and my proposal was twice scale or less, they should be guaranteed two steps. The guarantee of two steps allows a relief valve. They can write a draft, show it to the producer. The producer, maybe they have two or three weeks of notes, which was common, and nobody has a problem with that. Do them. Then turn it into the studio knowing there’s another bite at the apple for the producer and the writer.

Get the studio’s input. Get everybody involved. Then send the writer off to do a second draft. And in this way this relief valve has hopefully reduced some of the enormous pressure of doing multiple drafts over, and over, and over. And if you limit it to writers who are earning double scale or less, you are essentially saying what we’re doing really is just maintaining our minimums. And the amount of money that this would cost the studios is not very much. I mean, first of all, if somebody’s quote is already double minimum for a draft. Fine. Pay them scale now for two steps. Their life hasn’t changed. They’re going to writing theoretically fewer drafts than they would have.

So, this was the proposal in principle. And I did not expect that we would get it. My great expectation was that we would begin that conversation.

**Chris:** And we obviously didn’t get it. It stayed on the table till the very end. It was not — and by the way, that’s not true about all proposals. We take things off all the time. We’re constantly narrowing our list of demands, as is the company, taking off things that are rollbacks or other requirements, or making adjustments so that when we get toward the end of the negotiations we have something manageable to have a conversation about.

And this was one of the few things that was left on the table in the last minutes. It had been the subject of a lot of conversation in the room. The big room when we were sitting opposite each other. Impassioned pleas from screenwriters on the committee. We don’t always speak in that big room. David does the negotiating, but periodically individuals get to speak on things that matter, particularly in where the power of a writer speaking may hold more sway.

We weren’t optimistic about it, but we were hopeful because the cost of it was so small in the long run. You can figure out why you think they said no, because they said no to some things they could have said no to. They could have said no to family leave and gotten away with it. We were — let’s be honest — not striking over eight weeks of unpaid family leave. Just as we were not going to be able to muster a strike over this.

We talked over there’s a possibility that they might do that. In the long run, the argument that said we want our creative people to make those decisions and we’re not as business people going to do that was an easy out for them.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think, look, I think their great fear is that what we’re trying to do is back door guaranteed two steps for everybody. And I don’t know how to tell them that that’s not what I would want. And, of course, it’s not like I have control over what the Writers Guild might say or do years from now. But the purpose of this is not that.

And I don’t know how to get that across other than to say it’s nice that we’ve started the conversation.

**Chris:** Right. And we are, by the way, internally having a lot of conversation. Look, I’m not on the board anymore and I’m not an officer.

**Craig:** Congratulations.

**Chris:** But I know that there are conversations about new approaches to this, because it’s been a frustration. You want to be able to go into a contract and say we have — it’s beneficial. It’s helpful to say we have something for all of our members. It doesn’t do us any good to say honestly in screenwriter meetings, you know, there is a limited amount we can do in MBA negotiations for you. So we are trying to figure out ways to begin to achieve some of those things.

**Craig:** There’s more than you think. I’m making a list.

**Chris:** Good. These are conversations that we’re going to have. I mean, look, one of the fundamental things is there’s a big difference between the economics right now of the screenwriting business and the television business. There is a —

**Craig:** You know why in part? Because the feature writer needs essentially have not been addressed. And this is just me saying it. It’s not surprising.

It’s not just that there’s a lot more employment in television. It’s that when there’s a lot more employment in television and then a problem emerges, the Guild coalesces as it just did and fixes it.

**Chris:** But we are helped by the fact that the demand is reasonable in relation to the supply. So, in a world in which as you know jobs are hard to come by for screenwriters, particularly the screenwriters you’re talking about, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to actually —

**Craig:** You could let us go. I mean, in all seriousness, the Writers Guild could let screenwriter go. I mean, there is an argument to be made that if a union can’t effectively negotiate for a segment of its employees, its membership base, it should let them go and seek representation that could. Otherwise, what’s the — now, we do as screenwriters we do submit a vastly disproportionate amount of dues, because all of our money is dues-able. As opposed to television writers, which as you pointed out, are getting paid minimum as writers. That’s dues-able. All the rest, not.

**Chris:** But remember, Craig, it’s not just a question of MBA negotiations. It’s also an enforcement of contract provisions that are in there and we have a difficult time enforcing those provisions in the contract in part — at least in part because we don’t have enormous member support for the enforcement of those things.

**Craig:** I disagree very, very strongly. I hear this all the time. It is the union’s favorite excuse. I’m going to give you an example. And I brought this up at the meeting. The Guild in response to an endemic late pay — the reason that John asked, by the way, about OK, if you work that extra week as a TV writer does your agent need to call, because that’s how it works for us.

**John:** That’s totally how it works for us.

**Craig:** For us. Nobody pays you until you go, “Hey, where’s my check,” and then you got to call and send a thing, and a thing. OK. So, the Guild in response to that said, OK, yeah, we’re having a problem here because the rules are that they should pay you on time. And they’re not. So, I’ll tell you what. On your form, when you’re declaring your earnings, so you know how much dues to send in, write when you delivered and the date you were paid.

They have all of that information. They have done nothing with it. They don’t need our help for that. They can just enforce that.

**Chris:** Well, exactly. We began during my term a late pay initiative that actually involves the agents in an attempt to rectify that situation, where we have now gone to agents and said you need to let us know when the day of payment is and when payment actually occurs. And all of that comes from the agent.

In other words, the idea is instead of putting it on individual writers to do that, the information comes back from the agents about delivery of drafts, first drafts, and that triggers the timeline for someone to be paid. I’m not at the Guild anymore, so I can’t tell you where we are with that.

**Craig:** No one has ever called my agent about that. And I’ve never heard anybody’s agent getting called.

**Chris:** Who is your agency?

**Craig:** CAA.

**Chris:** Well, we’ve talked to them plenty of times.

**Craig:** Yeah, but they don’t do it.

**Chris:** Well, that may be true. By the way, and I can’t, as I say, I don’t know what the compliance is. And it varies by agency.

**Craig:** But my point is I brought this up at this meeting and David Young, our Executive Director, was seemingly unaware that that data was there. And Chuck Slocum who is our data guy said, “Oh, yeah, we do have that on every single form from every single feature writer. And a lot of people fill it out and we just haven’t been doing anything about it.”

**Chris:** Right. And remember though the way you’re talking about it is always after the fact. It’s a quarter later at least. I’m talking about a way of doing it in the moment.

**Craig:** I’ll take a quarter later as opposed to what we have now which is never.

**Chris:** Look, the Guild is also in part making strides in its IT and making sure that kind of stuff gets inputted in the right way. I can’t tell you exactly how that works. And I’m not trying to make excuses for what’s going on.

**Craig:** Nor am I putting this on you.

**Chris:** But there have been attempts — there are attempts — by the way, I don’t think this is about the question of whether people want enforcement or not. There’s no question that there are things that we can do in concert with writers and with agents to make some adjustments in the way that late pay is handled. It’s a real problem.

**Craig:** I’ll give you another one. When you directed a movie, was it DGA or–?

**John:** Non-DGA.

**Craig:** So, first time I directed, day one, the DGA shows up. And it’s a nice lady and she talks to me and just sits with me for five or ten minutes and asks me a bunch of questions. And then she left and she was satisfied.

Now, we have a lot of writers. More writers probably than individual directors, although there are a lot of directors working on television, too. But, if a writer is earning less than a certain amount of money, and this is nothing — we can do this today. I don’t think we need approval from anybody. The Writers Guild should have somebody assigned to them. And they are called. And they have a conversation. And they find out who is the producer. And we’re going to tell you now how this works. Let me inform you how it works. Let me inform you what the dangers are of repeatedly doing drafts. Tell me if there’s a problem. I can help. But I am assigned to you. I am your caseworker because you’re new and you don’t make that much money.

Everything that I’m concerned about from that proposal to this is about protecting our most vulnerable feature writers because at this point now there’s a small island of A-list writers and then a large sea of vulnerable. And we are abandoning them. And we are hallowing out our minimums. And I tell Billy Ray this. We earn too much money. John earns too much money. I earn too much money. Because there’s so few of us now left. And they’re not training people. They’re not protecting people.

**Chris:** Right. We know. Yeah. By the way, I’m not disagreeing with any of that stuff. Look, I can’t speak to where a given proposal that you’ve made, if you’ve talked to somebody has gone or not. I think — you know, I found reasonable openness to being creative about this because it’s a genuine frustration on the part of the Guild.

**Craig:** Well, I’m sitting down with David Goodman in a week or two. He’s running, I believe, unopposed for president of the Guild. So, even David Goodman can win that election. [laughs] I love David. He’s a good guy.

**John:** I want to wrap this up by talking about the thing I see both in TV and features. Which is TV it started to become a definition of episodes were not a useful way of looking at sort of how we were doing the work. Because we were really talking about the writer’s time, and that was really the definition.

In screenwriting, for quite a long time, we get paid by the draft, but we really should be paid for our time. The time is the concern. That we’re being dragged out over all of these different months.

It’s also interesting to see that we have these feature rooms that have started up where they’re getting a bunch of writers together for four weeks to break the back of things. In those cases, you kind of are being paid on your time. It’s not about the draft. It’s not about the actual document that you’re creating at the end of it.

So I feel like we’re in this weird transition where we’re trying to figure out whether we’re being paid by draft or by episode, or by our time. By the time we’re spending.

**Chris:** And, in fact, by the way, I mean, the conversation didn’t even begin with television, by the way. I think you were probably there when we first started talking about this idea. I think we went to a CPSW meeting where we go, a small group of writers, to different studios and talk about the issues screenwriters are having. Late pay. Multiple rewrites. Lead behinds. Sweepstake pitching. All of those things.

And we began to talk separately about the idea of being paid for time. And I actually during my presidency made a presentation to the writers. David and I went around and said, look, the measures of our work no longer apply. And we began to talk for a long time about the idea of screenwriters being paid for time. It’s a complicated thing. And we got a lot of pushback from people.

**Craig:** I’ll push back.

**Chris:** It turned out to be more complicated than television. And by the way, television, we didn’t have those conversations. We didn’t even know it was coming at that point. Six years ago, the very beginning of this, it haven’t even occurred to us, or me, yet, that we would have the same problem.

**Craig:** But it’s always been a workplace where people show up on days, Monday through Friday, and they leave. And I know that you’re there doing the work. So there’s all sorts of ways to talk about how you might transfer feature writing, which is very independent and very freelance, to time, but the problems — initially the problems that come to mind: the second you move to time they’re going to take that as an opportunity to push everybody down towards minimums, which is what they like to do. We know that. For a fact.

You could then say, well, also they are going to enforce time limits on your drafts. But feature-length screenplays are not quite like television episodes. First of all, they’re much longer. And they are also incredibly flexible. They do not conform to a certain format. They can be very, very long and very, very short. So you can have a guy that’s writing an 80-page horror movie, just fill up that time. And you can have somebody who is writing a 180-page epic, struggling because they need more time and they’re not getting it.

And, also, there’s a problem, frankly, with writers that don’t deliver on time. And, look, they’re going to be aware of that problem. So, I think sometimes you could back stop it with time.

**John:** I think that’s what I’m talking about is the back stop of time. Because you and I both work on weeklies on projects and the great thing about a weekly is I know when I’m on the clock and I know when I’m off the clock. And if they’re calling me in to say like, hey, can you fix this thing, I’m like, great. Is this a new week? Or is this not a new week? And when we talk about these vulnerable screenwriters, they don’t have that kind of protection of like I’m not on this project anymore.

**Craig:** Well, in part because they’re not doing that kind of work. I mean, the proper weeklies come in when we’re dealing with movies that are in production. They are on a schedule.

**John:** We always get described work to us in terms of weeks. We think this is three weeks of work. And so we already are talking in terms of weeks, so I think —

**Craig:** Well, but not when you’re doing a first draft. I mean, no one talks about weeks then. I mean, I can say, look, I generally take about ten weeks to do this sort of work.

**John:** But some of our most vulnerable writers though are not being hammered on that first draft. They’re being hammered on the inevitable rewrites, or the rewrite of that other script that’s already out there. So I think they deserve the same kind of protections you and I get for the types of work that is a couple of weeks of work. And it ends up being a lot.

**Craig:** If they report it. Yeah.

**Chris:** I’m going to make an argument. You’re going to tell me I know less than you do, which is fine. We’ll just do it. We’ll just do it. So we’re going to make up numbers. You have ten weeks — your contract is back up at ten weeks. You get to the end of the ten weeks and a producer says, “This is so good. But if you did a little bit more work on this I think we’d be in really great shape.” And the Guild says, no, you’re done. And a writer says I don’t care about this because I need this. I’ve got to work my 11th week.

And we begin to, you know, in the same way that drafts don’t work, we begin to have that problem on the margins.

**Craig:** You do not know less about than I do about this. You know exactly as much as I do. And, look, also writers understand as feature writers it’s not like — we’re not like novelists, but we are closer to the novelist notion than we are to the staff writer in a television room option. We are writing something that is us and it is variable length and variable creativity. It is one thing.

It is not meant to be repeatable. No matter how many times I get hired to write sequels. [laughs] And there needs to be flexibility.

**John:** The challenge though, Craig, the argument is over what is the definition of the draft. I mean, so yes we’re writing a screenplay, but the problem comes I think, well, this is the draft. And everyone says, no, that’s not the draft. And so the good thing about time is like time is clear.

**Chris:** I think we’re going to continue to have those conversations and it’s going to be complicated. You know, I always said that one of the things is, I think it’s probably true for you guys in features. And for writers, particularly higher level writers in television in the old days, which is they paid us enough that we were essentially on an all services contract. Make me do whatever you want. Right now I’m feeling more like I’m making something than I’m being employed. And you pay me enough to feel that way, so I’m not going to say to you I’m in the middle of my 17th draft, I’m not going to do an 18th. I want this exactly right. And I want us all to be happy because that’s the way we’re going to make it. That was really great.

It stopped being great for feature writers when they got paid so little for their time and that was extended as if they were expected to do anything to make it right. Although that still comes into conflict with our natural inclination to think of ourselves as artists as opposed to just employees. And it does the same thing for television writers who are now being told you are going to be paid minimum. You can work as much as we want you to, seven days a week.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, I mean, a lot of times screenwriters are being treated like the showrunner for a brief period of time, but then we’re fired.

**Chris:** That’s right.

**John:** And that’s the issue. It’s all of the sort of like —

**Chris:** But the $100,000 screenwriter is also being treated like the showrunner.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And so they’re entrepreneurial and they’re responsible for their little staff in their head. Look, I have lots of things that we can talk about and I want to talk about with folks. You know, John is running for the board, so I’ll yell at him about it if he gets elected. Which, I mean, I’m going to vote for him. Am I allowed to say that on the podcast?

**John:** I’m not sure.

**Craig:** OK, well I’m voting for you anyway. I’m allowed. I have free speech. Landrum-Griffin Act.

**Chris:** We can’t ask you if you’re voting for him, but you can say you’re voting for him.

**Craig:** But I think that probably to start, tiny little bites. Tiny little nibbles of things targeted at the smaller, lower earning writers, would be great.

The CPSW, I don’t know if it’s gone around and had any conversations with the studios since I was last doing it with you and Billy and Susannah Grant a couple of years ago.

**Chris:** And Damon.

**Craig:** And Damon. It would be nice to come —

**Chris:** John, were you there?

**John:** I’ve done CPSW as well, yeah.

**Craig:** I think it would be great to go back and talk to Donna and talk to Shawn and say, OK, remember us from two years ago. Remember the things that you said? Here’s how you did. Here’s your report card. We promised them a report card, which I don’t believe we’ve delivered.

**Chris:** Right.

**Craig:** We need to do better.

**Chris:** One of the reasons why this negotiation worked the way it did, and every negotiation is different, and not a guarantee of future success or any of those things is because writers were engaged in this. They filled out surveys. So we had 1,000 writers in television telling us twice exactly what was going on with them. How much money they were making. How the world had changed. In the same way as screenwriters did with the screenwriter surveys and told us where we were and which studios were taking advantage of them when it was producer versus a studio.

That’s necessary for this process to work well. I mean, part of it is our responsibility to go out and hold those meetings that we do over a period of time. But sometimes when we ask people questions, as we do with these surveys, the more people who fill them out, the more accurate information we have, the better we are at assessing what’s worth fighting for and what’s not. So, that worked well this time around. And it triggered — because you were talking about the studio and the CPSW meetings, which were always on the back of the screenwriter surveys, were telling us what–

**Craig:** Correct. And that’s the frustrating part is we get surveys back from television writers and we mobilize for war. We get surveys back from screenwriters that are arguably worse and we go, “Oh, well…”

**Chris:** Well, we don’t go, oh. We try. And we have more success in the television field.

**Craig:** I haven’t noticed the trying. And I’m just being honest. I haven’t seen the kind of trying that I’ve seen the outreach level. And it may be easier to talk to eight or ten television writers at once in a room, and I get that. But easy is not the cause here. The cause is the duty of fair representation. We cannot keep going down the path of, well, it’s harder to represent screenwriters. It’s harder to go talk to them. It’s harder because of this or that. Then it’s harder, but we have to do it.

**Chris:** Yeah.

**John:** The last thing I would pitch for is that we have to always be mindful that we are representing our current members, but we also need to be thinking about the people who are going to be members really soon. And so a lot of people who are going out there for jobs right now, they’re not currently members, but they’re facing the same kinds of things. And sometimes they’re facing the bad situations before our members are. And so we need to do a lot more outreach to what’s happening to those aspiring screenwriters who have gone in for their 15th pitch at a place and what their life is like.

Because they’re not filling out a survey, but they’re incredibly crucial to our knowing what’s going on.

**Craig:** See, that’s why I would vote for him.

**Chris:** Yeah. We need people talking about those things. And we need people with the experience of coming straight up the ladder of screenwriting, which people are having a harder time doing now.

Look, I might take you on about the level of concern we have and that the Guild’s concern is honest or not. I think what you saw in this year’s negotiations was an attempt, once we went through all of those answers, to come back to membership and also be honest about what we believe we could achieve. In other words, it was a very conscious decision to be able to say, look, the world has changed in these ways since the last time we negotiated. That gives us an opportunity to make some big moves on our side if we can mobilize enough support. That was more true in television than in features. And many more of you are now doing television.

Doesn’t mean that we’re not going to think about that stuff, but we need to both be open and creative and not give up. And then be honest with the membership about what we believe is achievable.

**Craig:** I just think that as a general philosophy, and I would say this to anybody running for the board, like you, John, or David, who I’m going to see, who is going to be our next president, that we are past the point where we can be comforted or accepting of the argument that it is hard or difficult or easier to do this, or this, or this, or more achievable to do this. We have to make it achievable. If we don’t stop what has happened now, it will just erode into the ocean.

We are just letting it die.

**Chris:** Right. So there are some creative conversations going on at the Guild. It’s too early for me to talk about it and it’s not my place to talk about. New ways, really turning things — like you do in a writers’ room. It’s like story is not working that way, let’s turn it upside down and think about a new way of handling this. Because what we’ve been doing so far hasn’t made enough change, which is something you know.

**John:** Great.

**Chris:** I know that’s vague.

**John:** All right, let’s leave it there. So we typically wrap an episode with a One Cool Thing, which is a recommendation of something you think our listeners should be paying attention to, or reading, or watching. So, I didn’t warn you about this, so maybe you can go third, and just recommend something out there that you’ve seen that you like, or you think people should be paying attention to.

So, we’ll give you a few minutes here.

**Chris:** Yeah, because I haven’t seen or watched or done anything. I’ve been negotiating.

**Craig:** Honestly, I have nothing right now.

**John:** You prepared nothing?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** OK. Then maybe I’ll just do my one, because it’s something that you are going to love. It’s a new game. It’s on the iPad. It’s called Poly Bridge. And what you’re trying to do–

**Craig:** Poly Bridge?

**John:** Don’t pull out your phone quite yet. So, what you’re trying to do is build a bridge from one side of a chasm to the other side of the chasm, connecting little Lincoln log kind of pieces. But it’s incredibly well done and the physics behind it is great. So it reminded me a little bit of World of Goo, had a thing like it, but this is really good and sort of better in some really meaningful ways.

**Craig:** Poly Bridge?

**John:** Poly Bridge. So it’s also on Steam. I played the iPad version. The only thing I will say is that if you happen to have an Apple Pencil, it is an ideal use for the Apple Pencil because you’re putting some things in very precise places, so the Apple Pencil is useful.

**Craig:** I don’t have an Apple Pencil.

**John:** Now you need to get an Apple Pencil, because they are really good for marking things up.

**Craig:** OK.

**Chris:** I just started that. I started doing notes on screenplays.

**John:** Isn’t it really nice that way?

**Chris:** It’s fantastic.

**John:** So, when I’m on my phone I use Weekend Read, but when I’m marking up something on a full size script, I find a pencil — and I use PDF Expert which is just terrific.

**Craig:** Should I get one of those huge iPads?

**John:** No, you don’t need a huge iPad. You should get the new iPad Pro. And I’ll show it to you when we go in the house. It’s the 10-inch.

**Craig:** Because I’ve been using the iPad Mini forever.

**John:** No. Stop that.

**Craig:** Stop it?

**John:** Stop that.

**Chris:** I don’t have the new one, but I have the iPad Pro. It’s the perfect size for scripts.

**John:** It’s a great size for scripts.

**Craig:** Oh, and then I’ll get the pencil? And I can just write no.

**John:** We’re close to the Apple Store right here.

**Chris:** I would do this in a second draft if I were given this thing.

**Craig:** The only things I ever write on scripts when I read them is, “No.” That’s it. If I like something, I just think to myself, oh, I like that. But then if I get angry I just write no. So maybe I could do it like a macro where I just tap it with my pencil and the word “No!”

**John:** That’s good. You’ll love it. Chris, your opportunity, if there is something you want to recommend to listeners. You can use this spot.

**Chris:** I have to admit that I haven’t been doing much watching or doing anything since I had negotiations and producing this show. And it’s completely wrong for me to pitch my own show at a time like this. I kind of like this new book called Magpie Murders. It’s a mystery within a mystery. It’s like an Agatha Christie mystery inside another mystery. And she’s loving it.

**Craig:** What’s it called?

**Chris:** Magpie Murders. It’s the perfect summer reading.

**Craig:** I love Agatha Christie. There you go. That works.

**John:** That works. See, that’s exactly what a One Cool Thing should be.

**Craig:** Perfect. Thank you, Chris.

**John:** That is our show this week. Our show is produced by Carlton Mittagakus. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro you’d like us to play, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions.

But short ones are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Chris, are you on Twitter?

**Chris:** I actually am. But I have no idea what my Twitter handle is.

**John:** So he’s not really on Twitter.

**Chris:** Yes, for my new show I’ve been tweeting.

**John:** So you’re having to do all that promo stuff.

**Chris:** Yeah. You can look me up.

**Craig:** I’m looking you up right now.

**Chris:** OK. You’re not following me? Apparently Billy Ray has a lot of followers and he won’t stop–

**Craig:** He doesn’t have a lot of followers.

**John:** No, not compared to Craig Mazin. Oh my god. Craig Mazin, are you over 100,000 now?

**Craig:** I’m close to 100,000. I’m like 97,000.

**Chris:** Oh, I think have over 100.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** Chris, nice work, Chris Keyser. Oh, is that you? Yeah, that’s you. Chris Keyser, you are @chrskeyser. And I’m following you now. You now have —

**Chris:** Three followers.

**Craig:** You have — oh look at that picture of you. You have 345 followers.

**John:** Oh, so that’s good. That’s a good start. You have a blue check mark.

**Craig:** Watch what happens after this. Watch what happens after this.

**John:** Oh yeah. So everyone follow Chris Keyser and tell him what you think. And watch his new show which is called The Last Tycoon. It is debuting on Amazon when?

**Chris:** On the 28th it drops.

**John:** How cow. It drops. That’s so nice. And by drops, all episodes all at once.

**Chris:** All at once.

**Craig:** I’m worried that you think that the words that Billy uses are cool. They’re not.

**Chris:** No, no, no. I had this conversation where Amy Lippman, my writing partner, said, “When’s your program going to…?” And I said it drops on the 28th. And she said, “Are you ashamed of yourself?” And I was.

**Craig:** As well as you should be. That’s great.

**John:** Final bit of boilerplate here. We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can look for us on Apple Podcasts at Scriptnotes. People leave us reviews and that’s just delightful. I get a little slap notification whenever they show up.

Show notes for this episode and all episodes are at johnaugust.com. But you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. It’s $2 month. Plus we now have the new USB drives that have all the first 300 episodes. You can go back and listen to the first episode Chris Keyser was on so many years ago.

Chris, thank you very much for coming in.

**Craig:** Thanks Chris.

**Chris:** It was really fun.

**John:** It was a pleasure.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** Thanks.

Links:

* Scriptnotes, 289: [WGA Negotiations 101](http://johnaugust.com/2017/wga-negotiations-101)
* Chris Keyser on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0450899/), [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Keyser) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/chrskeyser), and on [episode 138](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-deal-with-the-deal)
* [Poly Bridge](http://polybridge.drycactus.com/)
* The [Apple Pencil](https://www.apple.com/apple-pencil/), [PDF Expert](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pdf-expert-6-read-annotate-edit-pdf-documents/id743974925?mt=8) and [Weekend Read](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* [Magpie Murders](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0062645226/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Anthony Horowitz, on Amazon
* [Season 1 of The Last Tycoon](https://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Tycoon/dp/B01G98ZPQU) “drops” on Amazon Prime July 28th
* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-homecoming-show/) for the July 25th Scriptnotes Live Homecoming Show
* [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 Rajesh Naroth ([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_310.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 309 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we will be standing at the whiteboard to look at how story logic in our scripts may function. And then we’ll sit down to tackle some scenes and look at a few tricks to keep them interesting. And if we have time we may even answer a few more listener questions.

**Craig:** I love those.

**John:** Sound good Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think everything you just said sounded fantastic. No notes, John. No notes.

**John:** No notes. Fantastic. I love those. Before we even get started, yesterday as we were recording this the Emmy nominations came out. And I want to rant just for like maybe two minutes about Emmy nominations.

**Craig:** Go.

**John:** Not about any person who was nominated or not nominated, but the whole idea of snubs. I am so frustrated with the concept of snubs, that people who did not get nominations should feel especially bad or weird. That we need to single out the shows that did not get nominated. I find it incredibly frustrating. And I don’t know, how do you feel about that, Craig? You don’t care about awards at all, do you?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t, but you are touching a certain nerve here. And that’s — it’s not enough to say here are a bunch of people that have put their hearts and souls into making things. And when I say a bunch of people, I mean everybody that made something that year. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to pit them all together, make them compete, pick five of the best ones, then make them compete on television. And then one of them wins. It’s not enough for that. Apparently, also then you have to talk about who you said — no — you don’t get it. I’m snubbing you. No.

And now obviously no one is really actively snubbing anyone, but it’s just the media. Yuck.

**John:** Yes. So the problem I have with snubbing is like snubbing implies intention. That you deliberately did not invite someone to the party. A conscious choice was made. But, of course, a group of people all voting independently cannot make a conscious choice as one body. They can simply choose certain shows, but they cannot deliberately exclude somebody.

And so when I see intention applied to any group of voters, I find it incredibly frustrating because all people have is their own individual things. So the whole idea of snubs just drives me just really bonkers. If you’re going to make a list of other great shows that didn’t get nominations, I guess that’s fine. Because if you’re trying to single out that The Leftovers is a brilliant show, fantastic. But if you want to make us feel about The Leftovers, or feel like The Leftovers was less good because it didn’t get on that list, I’m angry with you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. And I think this is really just a manufactured story to sell clicks. That’s all. I mean, the whole thing, look, award shows of course exist to sell advertising. They don’t exist to actually award people. I mean, if you wanted to award people you would just do it I suppose. But primarily this is a business and they’re selling ads and they’re making money off of a show.

The secondary predatory business of making money selling ads off of things that talk about the thing that makes money from selling ads, that’s the industry that creates the snub. And people click, oh, because you know, ooh, someone in Hollywood got a snub. First of all, snub is a great word. Love that word. Just the sound of it is lovely. Snub.

**John:** It is nice.

**Craig:** Snub.

**John:** So that’s my bit of frustration. Let’s get to our actual real show. Some follow up. Our live show is coming up super, super soon and we have another guest to announce. Liz Meriwether. She is the creator and showrunner of New Girl on Fox which is entering its final season. She will be joining me, and Craig, and Megan Amram on July 25 in Hollywood. There are still some tickets left as we’re recording this. I don’t know. I need to check in with the Writers Guild Foundation to see how many are left. But if you would like to come join us, you should come join us in Hollywood for that special night.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So July 25, 8pm. Come there and see us. Talk with these two incredibly talented writers about sort of whatever. We don’t have an agenda yet.

**Craig:** No, but I will say that Liz is fantastic. Obviously I’ve already talked about Megan, my cousin. But Liz is great. You shouldn’t miss this, honestly. This is great. And it doesn’t matter if you write features or you write television. These are just two very smart people who are going to have I think tremendous insight on what’s going on. You know, I like the fact that we’re getting younger guests, also. You know, not that there’s anything wrong with bring Larry Kasdan on every now and again, but younger writers, they’re plugged in. They know what’s up.

**John:** Well, I mean, Liz Meriwether is younger than we are, but she’s also been running an incredibly popular TV show on Fox for five season now, six seasons now. So, she knows more than we do about things. And that’s my favorite kind of guest is someone who knows much more about something than I do.

**Craig:** 100%. Otherwise it’s just the two of us sitting in judgment.

**John:** Yeah. But that’s also good. But it’s not as exciting.

**Craig:** I kind of like those. Actually, those are my favorite episodes. [laughs] Yeah. I like those.

**John:** All right, so our first main topic today is about story logic. And this came up this week because so I just got back from Paris. I’ve been super jet-lagged. I’m over most of my jetlag. But this past week I went to a book signing for my friend. Julie Buxbaum has a new book out. It just came this last week, called What to Say Next. And she did a reading at the Grove, at the Barnes & Noble at the Grove. And it was my first time going to one of those events. It was cool to see how that all works.

And I was talking with another author there who was describing her new book and it’s a middle grade title. And she was wrestling with the mystery, she said. And she was talking about sort of the story logic. And we’ve been focused so much on character and motivation and other things in recent episodes, I thought we might step back a little bit and talk about the things that actually are just kind of plot. It’s the way in which pieces of information get out there and sort of how the overall shape of the plot and story work, which is sort of not always exactly driven by what the characters are doing. It’s sort of decisions that the author is making way ahead of time.

And that can be just puzzle work. It can actually a very different kind of process than sort of the writing on the page. So, today I want to talk a little bit about the mechanics and specifically one thing that I find incredibly frustrating and I think if we can focus on it you can often solve a lot of your story problems this way. Which is the difference between coincidence, correlation, and causation. The three Cs. And how you can use them to your best benefit in your stories.

**Craig:** Well this is going to be good. I mean, I will take a little something you said there and expand on it slightly. When you say it requires a slightly different way of thinking, I think it requires a completely different way of thinking. I mean, there’s this creative work that we do that’s rooted in a certain empathy. We create a human being in our minds. We must empathize with them, walk in their shoes, see the world through their eyes. Imagine how they react to the things that we throw at them.

It’s very emotional and it’s very empathetic. A lot of times we think of that as the creative meat of what we do. But then there is this other stuff that’s math. Story logic and the creation of the hardware of a plot is math. And it is a puzzle and it is a different part of your brain. I think it’s one of the reasons why so many people want to do what we do and yet so few ultimately get there. Because you can’t just be good at one of these things. You have to be good at all of them. And if you can’t quite get your hand around how to machine a plot, you end with a mess. And it is strangely the first thing that people will pick on when they walk out of a movie or they turn off a television episode. They say, “Why did that even have to happen? Couldn’t that person just have talked to the other person and then the show wouldn’t have happened?”

They notice it every time.

**John:** There’s a TV trope called Refrigerator Logic, which is as you step away from a movie and you’re getting something out of your refrigerator you’re like, wait, why did that happen? Like there’s things that sometimes will glide past you when you’re actually seeing the story up on the screen. And then later on you’re like, wait, that did not actually make sense. And so let’s talk about how those things can actually make sense.

And what you’re describing really is the different between — we talked about that metaphor about being on the train. And so as the writer, you’re responsible for like what you’re seeing out the windows, but you’re also responsible for being way up high and seeing where the train track is going. So as you’re laying out where that train track is going, you have choices about what branches and what decisions the story will make. And I was thinking back to a post I did ten years ago on the blog called the Perils of Coincidence. And that came after I watched Spider Man 3.

And Spider Man 3 is not a great movie. And there were some significant issues of coincidence where a bunch of things just had to happen in exactly a certain way. People had to be there at the same moment when this other thing was happening in ways that felt really, really unlikely. And so in that post I sort of broke through these are the coincidences. Here are some maybe ways they could have gotten out of those coincidences. Because when you see coincidences, you can always imagine at the outline phase. Like if they were turning in the treatment for that story there were a bunch of words like “at the same time, accidentally, luckily, unfortunately, meanwhile.” Those are all really signals that something is going on where it’s convenient for these things to happen but they’re not actually causing the other things to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You always get I think one coincidence in a story that can be kind of fundamental. And so a fundamental coincidence to me is like, well, in Spider Man it’s Peter Parker gets bit by a radioactive spider. Anyone else could have been bit by that radioactive spider, but then it wouldn’t be Spider Man. So the audience will always give you that one sort of fundamental coincidence.

In Die Hard, John McClane happens to be in the tower when the bad guys take over.

**Craig:** Where his wife is. Yeah.

**John:** Where his wife is. Yes. But they’ve already established that he’s there because his wife is there, so that all makes sense. If his wife happened to be in the same building, that would be too many coincidences. But it made sense because they were all kind of bundled together in one thing. You wouldn’t have the movie if you didn’t have that kind of fundamental coincidence.

And usually that movie will spend its fundamental coincidence very early in the first act. Like page 10, page 20, page 30 at the latest. It’s interesting watching the new Spider Man, which I won’t spoil, but they use their fundamental coincidence incredibly late in the story. And it was surprising but I think actually really effective. So when you see the movie you’ll say like, oh, wow, OK. And because the rest of the movie works so well they’re able to spend that coincidence quite late in the story and that was exciting.

**Craig:** The notion of coincidence and making things convenient is correct and it is connecting to the convenience of the writer. I think this is why people find it dissatisfying. It’s cheating. I mean, we want to watch these things unfold in a way that is surprising and fascinating to us, but after we are surprised we go, oh, OK, that was — that feels good. I like that this happened. I understand why it happened. It makes sense. I just didn’t see it coming. That’s the fun part.

With straight up coincidence, what the audience feels is you wanted to do a thing, or you needed to do a thing, so you just jammed it in. We don’t mind that first big coincidence because we understand that it is necessary for us to enjoy a thing. I mean, really the first coincidence of any movie is that we have shown up to see it. That’s — you know, so we’re OK with like, OK, we showed up to see your movie. You go ahead and do a thing.

But then the joy of the story is that there aren’t these things that are happening that just cheat. Because what’s the point then? We in our lives do not recognize the drama around us and the things that concern us as deriving largely from coincidence, even though I think strangely it’s probably true that most of the crazy things that happen in our lives are the result of coincidence. But the things that we’re mostly interested in, the passionate affair, the decision to steal, falling in love — these things feel volitional to us and they feel like they are arising naturally from the circumstances around us.

So those are the dramas that we like. We’re not so interested in stories where someone is walking down the street and a piano falls on them. It’s shocking, but there’s not drama to that. It’s just like, oh, how odd.

**John:** Yeah. It is. It’s surprising. And, oh, he happened to be there at that moment when the piano fell on him. And in real life sometimes the piano does just fall on a random person. But usually when we see an unexpected event or really any event, we expect there to be a cause. We expect there to be a relationship between these two events happening that is either causal, like one caused the other. It is correlated, like some outside force caused both events to happen. Or if neither of those things make sense, then it truly is coincidence. I think in the real world we tend to ascribe causal relationships to things that often are coincidence and that’s a real problem.

But in movie logic terms, these are our universes. And so we shouldn’t have to rely on coincidence for most of the work of our stories. So, if we’re not going for coincidence, we’re looking for causality. We’re looking for A causes B. Ideally, something we’ve seen already in the story has caused this effect. And now we’re in this situation and whatever the characters are doing in the situation, ideally your lead characters, not just the villains, whatever they’re doing is causing the next thing.

We talk about actions and consequences. Causality is about consequences. It’s about what this chain of events is leading to next. And how our characters are responding to that and changing their own circumstances.

**Craig:** Yeah. It does seem to me that part of the danger of what we do, the negative impact of what we do, is that we make such a big deal about very dramatic, very extreme events being caused, being purposeful. There are no coincidences, right? In life, almost all these things I think are coincidental. And then we try and put causation — every conspiracy theory that you see out there in some way or another is attempting to make sense of what may be coincidental. Sometimes there are conspiracies. We seem to be currently in the middle of one. But largely, no.

But in movies and TV, well, hey, what can we do? This is what we crave is this sense of causation. And when you think about movies — The Godfather is an incredibly complicated movie in that it’s got dozens of characters, and a lot of moving pieces in the machinery of the plot. A lot of hardware there. But everything is caused. And it all starts with a very simple thing. Someone shows up and says, “I have a business proposition.” It’s not even a coincidence. “You’re a business man. I have a business proposition.” And the Godfather says, no, I’m not interested.

And from that begins a series of caused events. And it is so satisfying to watch. Someone makes a choice. If you don’t give me what I want, I will do this. I did it. I just saw what you did. I’m now going to do this to stop you. And so on and so on. And it builds, and builds, and builds. Everything is caused. And I think it’s important when people are laying out their plots, they at least start from a place of everything — everything that happens here will be caused. Everything.

There are ways to fudge it here and there. But I think that’s probably the best ambition you can have for the machinery of your plot.

**John:** And one of the dangers here is you can fall into a trap of thinking like, oh, this is mechanical. This is a Rube Goldberg device where like once you set this ball rolling down the ramp everything will happen. In some ways that is accurate. But you want it to feel like all the characters are making individual choices that are leading to the next thing. So you don’t want just one series of events kicks off and the characters are just, again, we go back to this metaphor of being on rails. They’re just being dragged through the movie.

It needs to feel like they have volition, that they have the chance to make their own choices. But the choices they make will cause the next set of circumstances. And that can be really tricky to do.

So let’s talk about how you do that. So if I’m standing next to this writer who is working on the mystery of her story, what is some advice that we can give her to tackling the mystery of her story? Well, I would say that if you have the luxury of having a TV writing staff, that’s largely what they’re there for. So, when you see a TV room together, you know, sometimes yes they’re pitching jokes, they’re pitching storylines, they’re pitching ways to get through a scene. But a lot of what they’re doing is figuring out how are we going to get from this, to this, to this, to this. Like what are the natural causes and effects of these things.

**Craig:** Now, if you’re on your own, as I typically am — in fact, as I have always been — I think a general best principle is to start thinking about how you want to end. Because if you don’t know how you end, the danger that you will begin creating this bizarro plot to get from point A to where you eventually end up is high. If you know where you’re going to end, you can machine your plot. And remember, the point of machining the plot is not to be obvious, but rather the opposite. To be surprising. The surprises are not random. They are not derived from coincidence. They are carefully constructed. They are paying off in a satisfying way what you’ve set up.

You can’t really do that well if you don’t know where you end. So I think if you have your ending, you can create that causal chain with interesting reversals and surprises and twists and back and forths so that everything feels sort of meaningful. It is also important if you find yourself laying out your plot and suddenly there are a lot of, well, bends in the pipe. You know, a lot of strange things where you’re going, well, I got to do this so I can do that. Stop. Always stop. You may think you can get away with it. It’s just going to get worse and worse. It’s going to become byzantine.

Sometimes what happens is we fall in love with the notion that something is going to happen. And the problem is what’s come right before that something that we want to happen isn’t leading directly to the something we want to happen. So what do we do? We jam it in. We create a coincidence. Or even worse, we put in a bunch of scenes in between those things so that it will kind of get there naturally, but now there’s bloat.

Sometimes you kind of have to cut the throat of the thing that you really, really, really wanted to do because it’s not laying in properly. It may be able to happen later, but it may be the wrong thing. Your story will want things to happen naturally and then you are going to want things. And you kind of have to get your ego out of it a little bit and let your stories’ wants take precedence over yours.

Because I’ll tell you this. This the last chance you have to be clean. Outside the gate are the barbarians. That’s a little uncharitable to the people that are trying to help us make our movies. But I will tell you, for instance, Identity Thief, after I wrote my second draft, or even my first, there was a note — and it wasn’t really a note. It was sort of an order. “We want more villains.” And I don’t know why. To this day, I’m not really sure why.

And, you know, I did my very best to say that’s not — I don’t think we should. And the response back was, “Do it.” And so I did it. And it created so many coincidenty poor plotty mechanics. That stuff just — and you know, look, happily I don’t think anybody goes to a movie like that for the exciting villain plots, and yet it hurts every movie. Every movie. When there’s obvious bends and kinks because something that doesn’t belong has been put there. And nobody quite has a sense of what does and doesn’t belong to a movie that has not yet been shot than the writer does. I wish people would listen a little more carefully when the writer says that doesn’t belong.

It’s one of our Spidey senses.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s talk about what the actual process might be for you’re the writer working by him or herself and you’re trying to figure out these plot mechanics, the story logic, before you start doing your draft ideally. So, different writers have different approaches. Some make a simple outline. Some use index cards. Some will write out a treatment.

What I would say though is no matter what your process is, if you’re describing it to somebody — basically if someone is looking at the cards with you, or if you are sharing your outline with somebody, watch out for when you’re saying these phrases that signal, OK, there’s something convenient happening here. That it’s not necessarily natural to what should be happening in the story. So when you find yourself saying “at the same time, meanwhile,” which means that you’re cutting away to something else, or “just then,” those situations — they’re unlikely and you can’t have so many unlikely things in your script.

You’re going to be running into problems if you’re saying those kind of phrases a lot.

One of the other things to really be mindful of, and I think this is partly what happened with what you described in Identity Thief is sometimes there’s mechanics happening in the story that won’t be immediately obvious to the reader and therefore the audience. Like there’s behind the scenes stuff that’s happening. And one of the real challenges for writers is all that hidden machinery has to make sense, even though it won’t surface till later on.

So, what the villain was doing those three weeks, or like why that person showed up at that point. Maybe you have a reason for why they got there. Maybe you’ll even be able to say the reason why they got there. But the minute they sort of showed up there or something happened that was not visible to the audience, that’s going to be a surprise. And figuring out how you’re going to balance what the audience knows versus what the audience is going to find out later on can be really tricky.

And so whenever I have stories that aren’t just one main trajectory that can be a lot of my planning work is figuring out how do I make it clear to the audience. Like these people were doing these things in the background. You just didn’t see them. But here we are now and the characters are doing these things now.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just continuing the Identity Thief case, there was one villain — I know, that’s crazy, right? I wrote one villain. What? Anyway, and very early on, in fact, the first time we meet Melissa McCarthy’s character, she’s on the phone with that villain and he’s upset. And she’s lying to him. And then later on when she and Jason Bateman’s character finally confronted each other and he’s kind of got her where he thinks he wants her, the bad guy shows up. It’s natural. She lied. We know she lied. He never got what she said she would send him. And he’s here. That makes sense. Meh. You know.

**John:** Well, in doing that, that initial conversation, you set the expectation that we would meet him and that he would show up. And you’re paying off that expectation. So that does not feel surprising to an audience. And it feels like, OK, this is a thing I expected to have happen. I’m happy that it’s now happening. I’m a smart person because I expected it to happen and therefore it is happening.

**Craig:** It was caused.

**John:** Yes, it was completely caused. It was not just a random fluke.

And even movies that I think are really good, like this most recent Wonder Woman movie, there will be some coincidences in there. And that’s OK. And if the movie is working really well you don’t notice it so much. A coincidence in the new Wonder Woman movie, which is not really spoiler at all, there’s a moment in the story where Diana first uses her bracers and sends off the shock wave. And like, wow, she has sort of supernatural powers.

She heads off and then like literally two minutes later while she’s standing on the cliff, Steve Trevor’s plane comes crashing down. Why did that happen at the same moment? Well, because it was convenient. There was nothing about her doing the bracers that caused his plane to fall. It just happened to happen at the same moment.

We go with it because it’s sort of the mythology and it feels OK and appropriate, but it is a big coincidence that it’s happened at the same moments. They literally coincided in ways that weren’t natural.

**Craig:** Exactly. And, look, when you’re writing, that may be where you end up. But it’s always worth in a moment like that to say am I avoiding a problem or am I avoiding a gift? Can this thing that just happened cause that thing? Wouldn’t that be satisfying? Now, it may not work. You may not be able to make sense of it. Or if you try, it may cause other problems and a ripple effect. And then you abandon it. But try. You know, I think sometimes what happens is these things happen, they emerge, and we get scared and try and run away from them when we should be running toward them.

**John:** Yep. Absolutely. Every problem is an opportunity. So take advantage of those opportunities as they come up. All right, let’s go step away from our whiteboards and go into our actual scenes. And you had a suggestion for the topic of gimmickry and the creative little tricks you can sometimes apply to keep scenes interesting. Take it away.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a little dangerous to be talking about this, because I always worry that people are going to go wee and start throwing ketchup all over their food. But these things can be great. I was thinking about it because I’ve been watching Fargo, the television series, and I should mention that one of the things that Fargo does that’s interesting is they make a little bit of a religion of coincidence. You can get away with a lot of coincidence if your show basically says around here coincidence happens all the time. Sometimes it happens to make things worse. Sometimes it happens to make things better. But that’s kind of the world we live in. We live in coincidence world.

You know, Tarantino lives in coincidence world.

**John:** Absolutely. He just happens to be crossing the street and getting hit by the car.

**Craig:** Exactly. And we’re like, yup, that’s what happens in Pulp Fiction world. That makes sense. Totally.

So, gimmickry. Sometimes you find yourself writing a scene and the general conventional way of laying things out feels a little meh. Feels a little boring. I don’t mean to equate conventional to boring, because sometimes conventional is the absolute best way to tell a scene and it is fascinating. But there are times when you’re going to want to, I don’t know, throw a little glitter on.

So, I just thought of a few of these things that we can do and at least by codifying them we know that we have these tools in our belt. And the first one is kind of radical — I mean, I guess they’re all radical in a way. Change the arrow of time. And we generally think of time as moving forward and it is linear, but of course we have seen lots of movies and lots of TV shows where things move out of order. Sometimes they move backwards. Sometimes we see something that should have happened before the thing we just saw happening after the thing we saw. But we get it.

Do you remember how in Out of Sight he did that interesting — Soderbergh and Scott Frank did that interesting trick of editing and scene design where you had Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney falling in love but we found out about it out of its time in the movie. It was just fascinating the way it worked.

There’s nothing wrong with that. You just got to be careful when you do it. It needs to be purposeful. It needs to evoke something. You can jump time in little steps. You can also jump time in big steps. You can have, you know, a scene where two people are talking at a place and then one of them turns around and it’s 20 years earlier and now they’re children talking in that place. You can do these things. You just obviously have to have a reason why.

**John:** Absolutely. And as the screenwriter, you need to make it clear on the page what you’re doing. Because some of these effects will be really obvious in the film, but will be really hard to see on the page unless you’re upfront with the reader about like this is what’s happening. And you don’t have to explain why you’re doing it, but you have to explain like what it’s going to look like and feel like if you were watching the movie. That you’re acknowledging that you’re jumping this thing. Because when you’re just reading 12-point Courier it’s easy to sort of miss and get confused by these sort of sleights of hand.

**Craig:** Yeah. Similarly, if you change the arrow time, you can kind of change the nature of space by splitting the screen. When we think of split screens, I guess what immediately comes to mind are just bad sitcom split screen kind of jokes where one person is talking on a phone and the other one is also on the phone. And it’s a split screen. Wah wah.

But split screens I actually think can be incredibly valuable when you’re trying to create tension. So, I’ll go back to Tarantino, again. Because, by the way, Tarantino the most — he goes bananas with these gimmicks and he uses them so well. There’s a moment in Kill Bill where we see that Uma Thurman is in a coma and also we see Darryl Hannah’s character coming down the hallway with a syringe to kill her. And he splits the screen. And there’s something beautiful about watching a demon essentially stalking down a hallway. And then at the same time watching this completely helpless human being. And the tension just rises because what he’s telling us is there’s no chance she’s going to open that door and our hero won’t be in the bed. She’s going to be in the bed. You see her, right there.

You can also split the screen where you see the same thing happening from two different angles at the same time, which is a fascinating thing, because in one angle somebody is walking out of a car and they’re walking into a store and they’re quite happy. In the other angle, just because of the nature of the camera, we see that someone is watching them. And they don’t know.

It is the sort of thing that I think screenwriters should be thinking more about because when we don’t there is a danger that the director will. And I don’t mean to say that like directors are bad at it. They’re not. But if the gimmick is only directorial, it will feel more gimmicky. When it is connected to an emotion or a feeling or a purpose, which is our domain when we are writing these things, I think it can be terrific.

**John:** Yeah. You’re describing using these tricks to really enhance or underline the emotion or the story point you’re trying to get there. So it is better for the gimmick. The gimmick is just not there on top of what you’re otherwise seeing. It’s not a conventional scene with a gimmick applied to it. It is a scene that is better and unique because of the gimmick. And once you see it with a gimmick, it would be hard to imagine that scene without that moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think when some people watch these movies, I think critics fall into this trap a lot. I don’t mean reviewers. I mean analyzers of film. They will tend to see these things as style. They will tend to see them as visual style. But when we connect to them, it’s not because they’re visually stylistic. It’s not the aesthetics. It’s what it tells us about the people involved and how it makes us feel. It is actually again an extension of character. And an extension of the empathetic connection that we have with the people on screen.

There’s another thing that happens quite a bit and I think when we watch it we don’t realize how radical it is. And that’s just bending or even breaking reality itself. Sometimes somebody should just talk to a dead person. You can have a scene where somebody is just sitting in their bed and they say out loud to the ceiling, “Oh, Edith, I wish you were here. What should I do? I don’t know what to do. I’m lost without you.” Boring.

Or maybe Edith is just there. The beginning of The Iron Lady did this beautifully. Meryl Streep plays an aging Margaret Thatcher. And when we meet her she’s talking to her husband, played by Jim Broadbent, and the two of them are having the most mundane typical breakfast conversation. And she’s telling him, “You’re putting too much butter on your toast.” I mean, you have no idea that he’s actually dead. He’s not there. He’s not there. And then you realize, oh, he’s not there. Wonderful.

You can also bend reality by just freezing the entire world except for one person. And, of course, there’s the typical breaking the fourth wall, which is always a trickier proposition. But I guess my point is you have the ability to do things that are beyond the pale of what we experience in our everyday lives in terms of reality. And you just have to make sure that there’s an in and an out. And that once we get out of it, we know we’re out of it.

That’s the key. You can surprise people. You don’t have to tell them you’re going into it. You just have to let them know that it happened and now you’re out.

**John:** Absolutely. And it’s the kind of thing which you probably try to do relatively early in your film so you get a sense of like this is the kind of thing that happen in your movie. Because if you do it quite late, then it feels like, wait, you’ve broken the rules you’ve set. There’s a social contract you’ve signed with the audience and now you’ve broken that contract.

And always be mindful of, you know, you are defining your characters and their actions on the page, but you’re also defining the character of the movie. And so the kinds of choices you’re making in terms of the gimmickry, the stylistic choices you’re making, that’s the character of the movie. That’s what your movie feels like.

And so as long as it’s consistent with what the movie feels like, you know, the way that Tarantino movies feel consistent with a Tarantino world, it’s going to be — it’s going to feel right. It’s going to feel like something that can happen in your world.

But if you’re completely straight drama and then suddenly you try to pull this thing at page 80, I think the audience is going to rebel and quite understandably for your not following the basic rules you seem to have set for yourself.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, every time you do this, you are breaking the tone one way or another. In 500 Days of Summer, everyone slips into a musical number. That is a gimmick. And believe me, I don’t use gimmick as a pejorative. I use it as what it is. It’s an exciting, dazzling way of attracting people’s attention. We know, OK, this is the kind of movie where that can happen.

So later when they break reality, again, and show us two simultaneous evenings, expectations versus reality, we understand that can happen here. And it’s all right. Similarly when we watch Kill Bill, the fact that suddenly the movie switches into animation, acceptable. There are also moments sometimes where the break in the tone is OK because the movie is silly. There’s not a lot of gimmickry, filmic gimmicky in a movie like say Woody Allen’s Love and Death, which is one of my favorite movies. I mean, it’s broad. It’s very broad. It’s very silly. It’s wonderful. He doesn’t really mess around with reality too much. But then it does.

Then there’s a sequence that turns into a silent movie, into a silent film, which is hysterical and amazing. But you have to be aware of what John is saying here, those of you at home. Your story has to be able to survive this. And just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

Gimmickry is amazing because it frees you. It gives you like these — like we used to have the box of crayons. I had the box of 16 crayons and someone showed up and they’re like, “I have the box of 64 crayons. I have seven more blues than you do.” OK. Well, gimmicks, those are the extra blues and the extra reds. It’s the big box of crayons. They tend to make us feel more creative. When you read them in scripts, they tend to make the read feel maybe more sophisticated or ambitious. But even then, that is kind of a gimmick. Because it only is ambitious and creative and advanced when it works.

So, do it if it makes something better. Don’t if it doesn’t. Just know that you can.

**John:** Absolutely. The bigger box of crayons will not make you a better artist. They will just let you do some things that you couldn’t otherwise do easily. And that’s important. That can be useful. And I think by limiting ourselves to the simplest things, sometimes you’re able to tell simple, and true, and very strong stories. There’s a reason why you may want to not use the gimmicks, not use the full set of tools that you could use.

But, there’s certainly circumstances where you want to try to do those. And I think those are great. And quite a few of my films have used some of those fancy crayons. Like my first movie Go. It restarts time twice. There’s scenes that you see from multiple perspectives. You ultimately recognize that there’s quite a bit more going on than you first thought. And that’s great.

My movie, The Nines, is sort of nothing but a bunch of crayons melting all over the screen. And it’s very deliberately playing with your expectations of what is the difference between these actors and these characters. And is there any real underlying reality behind all this. It breaks its tone. There are musical numbers. There’s reality stuff happening in there. Melissa McCarthy is playing herself. It’s a very different set of expectations than you would normally have going into a movie.

But that’s not the only way to tell a story. And I don’t try to apply as many effects as I can to every movie. Like you have to be very judicious and see what is right for the story you’re trying to tell.

**Craig:** And I think you’ll know. That’s the thing. There’s a certain sense of satisfaction. There’s a feeling, oh yes, you know, this feels so much better than just the usual way. You know, I remember Todd Phillips and I were like struggling with how to do a flashback. Like, oh, here’s a flashback scene. I was like, yeah, well, I don’t know. And then the notion that in Alan’s mind they’re all children and to do it with children, that’s a gimmick. But it made so much sense and suddenly it was a joy to write. It was exciting. You know?

And I feel like, OK, if we are chaining our hands to the keyboard and going, OK, here we go, blah, blah, blah, then it’s probably going to be a similar experience for the audience. When you get excited and it just flows, then you know you’ve got the right gimmick. But again, word of caution, most of the time it will be flowing and feeling great with no gimmicks at all.

**John:** 100% agree. All right, Craig, let’s try to answer one or two of these questions in our mailbox.

**Craig:** Let’s try, you know. Let’s try.

**John:** We have audio, so let’s first listen to Kate from Phoenix, Arizona, who wrote in with a question.

Kate: My question is about interviewing experts to create more realistic stories. The script that I’m writing deals with a crime and the legal consequences. Although I have a respectable working knowledge of these procedures for a lay person, I can tell it’s not enough. I need to find a cop and a lawyer to interview to get the details right. I found some people online who are more than willing to consult for a sizeable fee. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, but my wallet does. Do you have advice for finding and interviewing experts? Once I find them, is it customary to have them read the script and point things out? Or ask about procedures piecemeal?

Also, for a Murphy’s Law type of situation, if I change story elements based on what they say, can they claim some kind of story credit? That’s sort of the point of asking in the first place, to change the story and make it better. And I’m not opposed to giving credit if it were fair, but I would prefer not to share the story credits if I can help it.

Are there measures I should take to protect the intellectual property of my own work?

**John:** Well, that’s a great question. I don’t have perfect answers for Kate, so I’m going to preface this by saying I bet some of our listeners have good resources they might point Kate towards in terms of finding the cop and a lawyer who she could talk to.

But I can offer some general guidance which is, no, you should not be paying anybody. And, no, they should not be trying to take story credit. What you’re doing is just asking people about their jobs. And you’re asking them how they do their work and asking them some theoretical questions. That’s not story credit. You’re nowhere near that. So, anybody you’re talking to who would want to try to get that from you is not the right person for you to talk to. Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah, no question. There’s not going to be any payment here. I’m doing a project right now that has a lot of research involved. It’s more research than I’ve ever done for anything in my life. And I’ve talked to all sorts of people. But I specifically had to talk to a cop when I was working on Identity Thief, because I wanted to find out how does this all work, and how do you go through your job and deal with this stuff. If you call, I think if you just call, Kate, you say you’re from Phoenix. Call Phoenix PD up and just say, “Listen, I’m a writer. I’d love to sit down and interview an officer or a detective. Would you have somebody willing to talk with me for a half an hour? I just have questions for a story I’m writing.”

I would be shocked if no one said yes. Everybody wants to talk about their job. Everybody wants somebody to get it right. I think people are interested in being a part of something like that. I don’t think there’s any issue with credit because they’re not writing anything. They’re talking to you and you’re taking notes.

You certainly can give them an assurance that you’re not going to use their name. That you’re not going to use anything that’s identifiable to them. And if you are recording the conversation, that the recording will not be played back for anybody other than yourself. That it’s only for research purposes. But I think by and large if you just ask, same thing with law. If there’s an area of law. I mean, you must know somebody that knows somebody that has a lawyer. Have that person ask their lawyer. Who would be a good lawyer who might want to talk to you about this? Somebody sooner or later is just going to say, “I’ll do it,” because people generally want to help.

**John:** They do. So I think Kate’s social network is probably bigger than she realizes. So if she just goes on Facebook, throws it out there like, hey, I’m looking for any cop or any lawyer, does anybody know somebody? Somebody will know somebody who knows somebody who is going to be willing to talk with you about this.

Before I left for Paris, I was in an Uber. I was actually headed to Kelly Marcel’s house. And our Uber driver was from a country who was exactly the right person I needed to talk to about this project I was writing. And so I just started up a conversation with him and said like, hey, this is really crazy but would it be OK if I called you and asked you more questions about the country you’re from and when you came to the US. And he said, of course, that would be fine.

And so you will bump into people in your real life who are going to be helpful and will get you through that kind of thing. I was also years ago I was in upstate Maine doing research for this other project that never got made. And I was staying at this little hotel and whenever I would meet somebody new I was like, I would ask them about their job and I’d say like, hey, do you know anybody else who has lived here since 1970? Did you know any people who are old timers here? Because I’m trying to find out information. And so over the course of three or four days I was able to talk to ten different people about sort of what Maine was like in the 1970s. And it was great. It was fantastic. And it didn’t matter that I had credits or didn’t have credits. They were just like, well, somebody wants to know, I’m happy to talk to you about it.

So, you will find somebody who has the information you need. And if your listeners have other good suggestions for first places that Kate should look, we welcome them.

**Craig:** I talked to a detective at the Beverly Hills Police Department when I was doing research for Identity Thief. And he was describing how they work and how you deal with law enforcement when you catch them. And how you have to deal with it as a victim. And he was great. And when it was over, and I was leaving, he said, “Oh, by the way, what happens to the thief at the end?” And I said, well, I haven’t written it yet. I’m just in the research phase here. But I think she’s going to go to jail. And he said, “She should die.” [laughs]

And I said, what? And he goes, “She should die. These people are terrible.” And I thought, you know, I guess if you deal with the consequences of identity theft every day, day in and day out, and deal with the victims of it day in and day out, that’s probably how you would feel. That makes sense. Yeah.

**John:** So, useful advice for real world, but probably not useful advice for someone writing a comedy about an identity thief.

**Craig:** By the way, also, something to keep in mind, Kate. Reality is fantastic until it is not helpful. And then it is not fantastic. Especially if you’re doing something that is essentially a fictional dramatization of things that needs to be informed by reality. You know, use what helps.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s do one more question. This is Jason from Los Angeles.

Jason: I’ve been living in LA for eight years and I just haven’t been able to break into the business the way I want to. I write consistently. I rewrite. I get notes from trusted friends. I rewrite some more. I’ve made short films. I’ve gotten into a few festivals. I recently posted a script to the Black List. And while all of these things have absolutely helped me to develop and hone my craft, they haven’t opened any industry doors for me.

I’m 33 years old. I’m married. So, jumping into something like an unpaid internship at a production company or spending five years in a mailroom doesn’t seem feasible for me. Which is why I’m considering doing something both of you have often opposed, and even more often with great umbrage. I’m considering going to a writing consultant. So, what I’m not considering doing is going to some online “guru” who has 12 tips for this and eight surefire techniques for that. No. What I’m talking about is basically a teacher. Someone who is all over YouTube. I’ve seen their ideas. I’ve seen them talk about their ideas. And they’re sound. They sound legit. It’s someone who has video testimonials on their website from current writers who are currently working in the business who are staffed on TV shows.

And I’m considering this for the same reason someone might consider hiring a tutor. This is a person outside my circle of friends who owes me nothing, knows their stuff, and best of all can give me notes face-to-face that can help me improve my script. I’ve looked into the cost and one year of meetings would run me about $3,500. Now, that’s not nothing, but it’s also not my life savings.

At this point in my life, that doesn’t seem like an unreasonable amount of money to try something new that can help me get where I want to go. Because what I’m doing right now hasn’t.

So, John, Craig, please tell me: am I crazy?

**John:** Craig, is Jason crazy?

**Craig:** No. He’s not crazy at all. He’s not crazy in the slightest. That’s why the industry of people that take money from folks like him is thriving and well, because they’re not preying on the insane. They’re preying on the sane and they’re preying on people who are scared and to some extent desperate. And I understand it. I mean, Jason has been at this for a while now it sounds like.

And he has a life. He’s created a life for himself. I assume he has a day job. Somehow he’s paying the bills. I completely agree that when you’re 33 years old and you have this life that you set up for yourself, starting in a mailroom or an unpaid internship doesn’t make any sense, and also it’s not necessary to be a writer or a director. It’s necessary if you want to be an agent or studio executive, I suppose.

So, no, Jason, you’re not crazy at all. But I’m glad that you did this — I’m glad you recorded this question because you get to listen to yourself back now. And I want to ask you — who do you sound like? Because to me, I’m concerned that you sound like the guy that’s about to lose money. And the reason why is you’re grasping at straws and I think you know you’re grasping at straws here. It’s not impossible that spending money on some outside help like this might help you improve your script. I think it’s highly unlikely it will help improve your script to the point where suddenly all those doors that have been firmly shut will fling open.

I don’t think it kind of works like that. I am concerned that after all this time it may just be that you don’t write or direct the sorts of things that the rooms you want to be in welcome. You may be a different kind of writer or director. It’s also possible that you’re not supposed to be doing this at all. I have no fear saying that. I know it is upsetting to hear and it’s particularly upsetting if next week you sign on and sell your movie and make a billion dollars and win an Oscar. Then I look like a dumb-dumb.

And I know that that’s the dream. So, I guess my advice to you would be this: think twice. $3,500 isn’t your life savings. It’s also $3,500. Think about who is asking you for that money and why they want it. Think about the nature of Hollywood. Think about predators and prey. And ask yourself if this is what’s right and best for you.

Generally speaking, as you know, I think it’s not. But, I also am aware that when I say these things, they are of no great assistance to somebody that’s trying to get one of those doors open.

John, what do you think?

**John:** Yeah. What I like about Jason, he already is thinking twice. In deciding to write into us and record his question, he is thinking twice. And he’s recognizing all of the sort of pitfalls ahead of him. So, he’s sort of done a lot of our work for us. And he’s further along in the process then somebody who says like, oh, maybe I’m going to start writing a script and I’ll hire this consultant.

So, I’m trying to step back and think about if I had $3,500 and I wanted to spend that $3,500 to improve my writing, what might I do? Well, I might take a class. I might take a UCLA Extension class. I might do something else that would sort of get me in a place where I’m around other people who are writing, who can help me focus in on what I’m doing. And so by that structure, I can’t say it’s the worst use of your money.

But I don’t know anything about this person he’s really going to. He says this person has YouTube videos, has a track record. I guess. Before I would give this person any of my money, I would want to know who has been using this person and what would they actually say. And the good thing about the Internet these days is you will find somebody who has had an experience with this person, positive or negative. Find out what that experience actually was. Because I don’t want you spending your money on just some charlatan who promises things.

I know that early in my career I was lucky to have some people who would read every draft of my stuff and would give me notes and I genuinely did get better doing that. Some of them were teachers. Others were producers who were trying to get my work on the screen. And I did get better. And so while I wasn’t paying them directly, or I was paying them indirectly through the university, it did help.

So, this could help you. I’m just concerned that it’s not the right person. I’m worried that you’re going to be writing in a year from now saying like, “Oh you know what guys? I spent that $3,500 and it was not the right choice. And I’m not any closer to what I want to be doing.”

**Craig:** Well, there is another negative outcome here. I mean, Jason mentioned that the person has testimonials on their advertising, and of course they do. The question isn’t whether or not people enjoyed working with this particular consultant. The question is whether or not this consultant got them their ultimate goal, which was to sell their screenplay or be employed to write another screenplay. And that’s not just sell it to some marginal player. There are a lot of those. But sell it to the kind of company you want to be in business with. Right Jason?

What these people do necessarily requires them to be good to you. When I say good to you, I mean, warm and fuzzy and encouraging because they want you to come back and keep paying them. They are actually less reliable, I think, then your friends in that regard. They will tell you, “Listen, this script has tremendous promise. You have tremendous promise. You can make this great. And you can get everything you want. Work with me. I will get you there.”

They will say that probably no matter what because that’s what’s going to make them the most money. And there are people who after a year or two will say, “I’m going to — I will gladly give you a testimonial because you’ve made my script better and you make me feel good in a world and business that otherwise makes me feel terrible.”

But $3,500 is a lot of money for that. And that ultimately really isn’t going to get you what you want. So, be careful of that praise. And be careful of that encouragement. They probably won’t say to you, “Hmm, I read it. This is no good. And I can’t help you with it. I don’t want your money.” You know?

The whole business is soaking in a certain kind of conflict of interest.

**John:** Yeah. It occurs to me listening to Jason’s question is that I feel like over the course of our 309 episodes we haven’t done a great job of introducing listeners to people who were sort of similarly positioned to Jason who made it. And there are some. And I’m thinking of a friend now who I can’t believe I’ve not had on the podcast who in his middle 30s, late 30, sort of finally got it started and finally got staffed on a TV show and is now running his own show.

It does happen. And because it’s rare doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. And I want to have him on the show to talk about sort of what he did and sort of the choices he made. And what he would do differently. Because he might have better advice for Jason than you or I would because we started at such a different time.

So, in hearing Jason’s question I’m recognizing that there’s probably a group of our steady listeners who we’ve never really directly addressed with how it can work. We’ve always sort of given them negative advice in a way. Like, you know, don’t do these things rather than like these are the things that actually work for people. So, that’s going to be a goal to get my friend on the show in the next couple of weeks.

**Craig:** I think that’s really smart. Because, you know, we do want to help. Obviously we want to help, because we’re trying to help people who are writing. And we’re trying to help them write better. And happily we don’t take — well, John takes their money hand over fist. I don’t get anything. But we don’t have much in the way of saying, “And we also want to help you get that job.”

We keep hitting this thing of write a great script, you’ll get the job. But, there are some practicals. It would be great to hear from somebody who has gone through it, especially somebody who is older than the typical right out of college “here I am, I want to be a writer.”

I will say that Jason sounds incredibly nice. He just sounds like a good guy and that makes me nervous. I’m nervous because sometimes it’s the good ones that end up getting fleeced the hardest.

So, you know what, Jason, talk to your wife. She knows you better than anybody. I guarantee it. I guarantee it. You say to her — I got to think of a good name for Jason’s wife. I’m going to go with Marissa. “Marissa,” so close to my wife’s name. Anyway. “Marissa, tell me something because I don’t trust myself on this issue. Does this sound like a good idea? Should I do this? Should I not do this? Give it to me straight. I know that you love me either way.”

I hope that’s true about Marissa

**John:** Yeah, you never know. Never assume how other people’s marriages work.

**Craig:** You’re right. You’re right. Like he may call in next week and say, “Well, I’m divorced now. I asked her. And apparently that was the only excuse she needed to just pack her stuff up and, yeah. So…and now I have half of that $3,500.” [laughs]

**John:** Oh, community property. California state law.

**Craig:** Ruining lives one podcast listener at a time.

**John:** Let’s move on and go to our One Cool Things before we wreck anymore havoc in the world.

**Craig:** Great idea.

**John:** My One Cool Thing this week is the bus. Which bus? Well, really any bus. But my whole year in Paris, one of my revelations was that as a tourist I was always taking the Metro to get from place to place, because Paris has a Metro, so why are you not taking the trains.

What was so great about this last year is the busses are actually fantastic. And I was always sort of scared to take the busses because I didn’t quite know where they were going, or how to use them, or how it would all work. The huge advantage, the huge change, is that Google Maps now has all of the busses in the map directions. So if you are someplace, you want to get someplace, Google Maps will tell you get on this bus, it’ll take you to the place. And it was fantastic. And the busses in Paris were great. And so convenient. And while I was on my bus I could do my Duolingo and it was a great experience.

So, coming back to Los Angeles I vowed, you know what, I’m going to start taking the bus more often.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So this last week I took the bus to Beverly Hills. It was fantastic. And Google Maps worked just as well. And so the busses in Los Angeles are not bad at all. And people are always kind of afraid of the busses and they shouldn’t be. They were the same as the busses in Paris. It got me where I needed to go. It was easy and delightful. It was cheaper because I didn’t have to park my car in Beverly Hills. So, just try the bus. It sounds so simple and obvious because obviously I grew up taking the bus in Boulder. But a bus in the big city can be really great. And if people took the bus more often, I think they would be surprised.

**Craig:** It’s true that the thing that keeps me from the bus is just general fear of where the hell I’m going. Because these busses pull up and I just don’t know the bus system well enough. Like in New York, I’m here in New York right now, that’s why this microphone sounds weird, I take the subway all the time. I take the subway everywhere I can take it. And it’s really clear. I know exactly where it’s going. And they’ve got letters on them. And they never change. And that’s that with those.

And then the busses come and they have these letters and numbers. And I just get confused. I get confused.

**John:** You know who does know? Your phone knows. Your phones knows everything. And so Google Maps, you punch it in, it will tell you exactly when that bus is coming, when to get on it. It’s great and convenient. And also because you’re not underground you don’t lose service, so you can actually do things on your phone. It’s great.

So I would just recommend people try the bus. If you haven’t tried the bus in years, take a bus sometime this month and see what it’s like.

**Craig:** Following this podcast, bus murders, up by 30%.

**John:** Ha-ha. Always the best.

**Craig:** I mean, let’s face it: our listeners are easy marks. Well, I’ll continue with the transportation theme of One Cool Thing. Hyperloop One.

**John:** I saw that. They tested.

**Craig:** And it was successful. It worked. Now, they were testing — was essentially like a chassis, like a little sled. It wasn’t the full car where you can put people. And it wasn’t at full speed either. They talk about being able to go up to 700 miles per hour. In this case, the test I think was just 70 miles per hour. But it worked. They have a tube. It’s a vacuum. And they got maglev. And it shot down the track and it worked.

So, at least you’ve got this first theory into practice mode and I got to say the way that people are jumping on board with this thing, it feels like it’s going to happen. It legitimately does not feel like bunk.

You know, look, obviously I know that what do they call them, Super Trains? What do they call the — bullet trains? Bullet trains are real. I know they’re real. I’ve ridden on a bullet train. But when California said we’re going to spend billions of dollars to make a bullet train I thought no you’re not. It’s not going to happen. You’re going to spend billions of dollars, but we’re not going to have a bullet train. And we don’t.

We have spent billions of dollars. There’s no bullet train. This thing feels like it’s going to happen. And if they can put it together, they’re saying you can get on board in Los Angeles and be in San Francisco within I think 50 minutes.

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. And that’s 50 minutes without going to an airport and getting in the line. It’s just hope on a tube and you’re there.

**John:** Yeah. So we’ll hope. Yeah. I mean, we’re in a weird time when we have all these amazing things that can be happening even while the world seems to be falling apart. So, it’s going to be a real race to see which future we end up in.

**Craig:** I do believe the world is essentially separated into two tribes at this point. Builders and tearers-down. And builders, the one advantage that builders have is that they’re ingenious. And the one advantage that tearers-down have is they are indiscriminate. They’ll just tear — if it’s standing down, they’ll tear it down. They don’t care.

**John:** Yeah. Just swing that crow bar and you can just knock things down.

**Craig:** Exactly. Yeah. They’ve certainly got inertia on their side, don’t they?

**John:** They do. Gravity works. They have all the stored energy in there. They can just make things fall.

**Craig:** Exactly. And what’s the — entropy. They have entropy. Inevitably, the tearers-down win.

**John:** Well, in the end everything becomes dust. But it’s just how cool things can be before they all become dust.

**Craig:** Before the universe ends in heat death. 100%. Yep.

**John:** As we wrap up, I will remind people that the Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide is available. It’s the first 300 episodes of the show, plus all the bonus episodes. People recommend which things you should check out. So, if you’re new to the show and you want to dig into the back catalog that is a great place to start.

You can listen to those episodes on the new USB drives. So you can go to store.johnaugust.com and get one of those USB drives. They are lovely and sturdy.

And that’s our show. Our show is produced by Carlton Mittagakus.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts. Look for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there, leave us a review.

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

Craig, thanks for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. And next week, same time zone.

**John:** Oh, so nice.

**Craig:** So nice. See you then.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-homecoming-show/) for the July 25th Scriptnotes Live Homecoming Show, with guests [Liz Meriwether](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Meriwether), [Megan Amram](https://twitter.com/meganamram) and more!
* [Julie Buxbaum’s What to Say Next](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553535684/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Fridge logic](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) on TV Tropes
* John on [The perils of coincidence](http://johnaugust.com/2007/perils-of-coincidence)
* The [Fargo TV series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fargo_(TV_series)) makes a religion of coincidence
* Gimmickry used in Kill Bill with [split screens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWI4G9PB31c) and [animation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQM0klOXck8), in (500) Days of Summer with [musical numbers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tJoIaXZ0rw) and [alternate timelines](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fL94BTrFhs), when [talking to the dead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7xeK76cwA0) in Iron Lady, when Love and Death [becomes a silent film](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEETZTs795U&t=0m48s), and when [flashbacks become childhood](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLk9y0RZSGo) in The Hangover 2
* [Go](https://www.amazon.com/Go-Katie-Holmes/dp/B008Y6YKEE/) and [The Nines](https://www.amazon.com/Nines-Ryan-Reynolds/dp/B00164LTUO/) on Amazon Video
* [The LA Metro System](https://www.metro.net)
* [Hyperloop One](https://hyperloop-one.com/) and its [successful first test](https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15958224/hyperloop-one-first-full-system-test-devloop)
* [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
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([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_309.mp3).