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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/room-spotlight-and-the-big-short).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August. And this is Episode 231 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we will be looking at three movies that are getting a lot of attention this award season — Room, Spotlight, and The Big Short. And we will discuss how they work on a story level. We’re also going to discuss what we learned in 2015 that we’ll be carrying with us into the New Year.

Craig is off on assignment. He’s in New York finally seeing Hamilton, so he can stop talking about Hamilton. So to fill in today we have two special guests from previous episodes of Scriptnotes. First off, Aline Brosh McKenna is the co-creator of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and the screenwriter of so many movies, including The Devil Wears Prada.

Welcome, Aline.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** Woot-woot.

**John:** Next up, Rawson Marshall Thurber is a writer and director whose credits include DodgeBall, Mysteries of Pittsburgh, We’re the Millers, and the upcoming Central Intelligence. Welcome back, Rawson Marshall Thurber.

**Rawson Marshall Thurber:** Thank you, happy to be here.

**John:** I have to use all three of your names because —

**Rawson:** [laughs]

**John:** Aline, do you always use your three names?

**Aline:** Professionally, I do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** Me too, professionally.

**John:** You do, too? Yeah.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**John:** I was always surprised when I heard that Marshall part of your name.

**Rawson:** It’s strange. It’s definitely strange. I didn’t realize how strange it was until I did it for the first time on DodgeBall and then I got made fun of a bunch and I think it was too late and so I just sort of stuck with it.

**John:** Do you ever say Marshall aloud or only as a printed credit?

**Rawson:** Almost only as a printed credit. But I do use my initials, RMT, when I’m signing something off or stuff like that.

**John:** Sounds good.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**John:** So before we get into these three movies, I wanted to talk through some stuff about the year that just passed. So we are now in 2016, which seems impossible. So a bunch of movies came out in 2015, but a bunch of movies came out in 2014 and I thought we might play a little game where I’m going to ask you the title of a movie and you can tell me if it came out in 2015 or 2014.

**Rawson:** Oh, wow, okay.

**John:** Do you think you can do this, Aline?

**Aline:** Hmm.

**John:** All right. So do you want to start? I’m going to ask you.

**Aline:** Sure.

**John:** The Cobbler.

**Aline:** It came out this year.

**John:** All right, you’re correct.

**Rawson:** Wait a minute now.

**John:** Yes.

**Aline:** Because I think Adam —

**Rawson:** You mean this year, you mean 2015?

**Aline:** ’15, yeah.

**Rawson:** Okay.

**Aline:** Because I think Adam Sandler had three movies come out this year.

**John:** Yeah, he did. And this was one of them.

**Aline:** Cobbler, the nine whatever — what’s that movie? The Magnificent Nine — the Ridiculous 6.

**Rawson:** Ridiculous 6.

**Aline:** The Ridiculous 6.

**John:** Ridiculous 6 and then he also the Drew Barrymore one, or was that the year before?

**Aline:** No, there’s one more and it was —

**John:** Oh, Grown Ups 2. Yeah, so it’s all confusing.

**Aline:** Okay.

**John:** The Cobbler is also directed by Tom McCarthy who directed Spotlight, so that’s part of the reason why it’s so interesting to have that movie come up.

**Rawson:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So we’ll answer ’15 or ’14.

**Rawson:** Okay.

**John:** All right. Focus, Will Smith.

**Rawson:** Oh, ’15.

**John:** Right. Horns. Aline Brosh McKenna, do you remember Horns? That’s the Daniel Radcliffe grows horns movie.

**Aline:** Never heard of it.

**John:** Rawson, do you know the answer? Can you steal this one?

**Rawson:** I think I know that movie. I believe it was — I think it was ’15.

**John:** It was ’14.

**Rawson:** Ah!

**John:** Oh! Black or White with Chris Rock. Rawson Marshall Thurber.

**Rawson:** I don’t know this one. Aline?

**Aline:** That’s not the movie that he did that was —

**John:** I think it was Julie Delpy who directed it.

**Aline:** Oh, I don’t know that one. The last Chris Rock movie I saw was the one with Rosario Dawson. And that was ’14, I think.

**John:** Yeah. Black or White was 2015. Yeah. Or it could be I’ve got the title completely wrong and it’s not even the right movie.

**Aline:** [laughs]

**John:** The Boy Next Door. Rawson Marshall Thurber.

**Rawson:** The Boy Next Door?

**John:** Jennifer Lopez.

**Rawson:** Oh, that was my — just a guilty pleasure. I knew this one. Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** ’15 or ’14?

**Rawson:** The Odyssey. Right, ’15.

**John:** ’15 is correct. Ouija, Aline Brosh McKenna?

**Aline:** ’14.

**John:** You’re right.

**Rawson:** That was good one.

**John:** Stick with you with Horrible Bosses 2.

**Aline:** ’14.

**John:** Correct.

**Rawson:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Rawson, The Hundred-Foot Journey.

**Rawson:** The Hundred-Foot Journey, this is the —

**John:** Helen Mirren.

**Rawson:** Yeah, Helen Mirren. It’s not the hotel one, right?

**John:** No, it’s not —

**Rawson:** It’s essentially the same —

**John:** Essentially same idea.

**Rawson:** I’ve got a 50-50 shot, right? I’ll say 2015.

**John:** It was ’14.

**Rawson:** Am I winning?

**John:** I don’t know. We —

**Rawson:** I think I’m losing. I think I’m down at least a point at this point. Wait, you’re not even keeping score? [laughs]

**John:** I’m not really keeping score.

**Rawson:** Why are we doing it then?

**Aline:** We’ll have to go back. We’ll go back.

**Rawson:** Why are —

**John:** We’ll go back and check the transcript and figure out who —

**Aline:** I’ve seen the prize. It’s really good.

**Rawson:** Have Stuart figure it —

**John:** It’s pretty amazing.

**Rawson:** Because I want to win.

**John:** Aline, Hot Tub Time Machine 2.

**Aline:** ’15.

**John:** You’re right.

**Rawson:** That’s a good one.

**John:** Was it a good movie?

**Rawson:** No, no, I mean it’s a good question.

**John:** It’s a good question.

**Rawson:** That’s really —

**John:** Yeah, it’s really on —

**Rawson:** Because when you asked Horrible Bosses 2, that’s a tough one because that came out Thanksgiving 2014.

**John:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** So that’s like right in the danger zone of —

**John:** That dangerous pocket.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**John:** Rawson, Annie.

**Rawson:** Oh, 2014.

**John:** You’re right. Aline, you worked on Annie, so you —

**Aline:** I did.

**John:** You would know that one, so I gave it to him. Final one, Run All Night. Do you know it?

**Rawson:** Yeah, I know it. It was 2015.

**John:** It was 2015. What is that movie?

**Rawson:** I don’t want to say it’s a Taken knockoff. But it is essentially that. I think it does have Liam Neeson in it and I believe a very sort of talented director whose name escapes me. And I think he’s not an American. And it’s a thriller chase piece where Liam Neeson needs to, I believe, clear his name and/or rescue someone. And it’s at night time.

**John:** Oh, because —

**Rawson:** And there’s a lot of running. I saw pieces of it. And it’s beautifully shot.

**John:** All right. According to Wikipedia, Run All Night is a 2015 American action gangster crime thriller written by Brad Ingelsby and directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, starring Liam Neeson, Joel Kinnaman, Common, Ed Harris. It was released on March 13th, 2015.

**Rawson:** Wow.

**John:** Wow.

**Rawson:** Okay.

**John:** So before we get into these movies —

**Rawson:** I won, though.

**John:** I think Rawson may have won. I don’t know.

**Aline:** No. I think I was just in there going ’14, ’15.

**Rawson:** [laughs]

**Aline:** ’14.

**John:** All right. So we’re going to have Stuart check the transcript and figure out who won that game.

**Aline:** Okay.

**John:** Before we start with our movies from this past year, I want to talk over sort of general lessons we may have learned from 2015 or things we’ve noticed in the industry or the business that we are in and sort of what they might indicate about where 2016 is headed.

And so, something I noticed from my side is I feel like we may be nearing the end of sort of classic studio development. So when I started as a screenwriter, it was common for a film studio to have a big slate of things in development. And there might be 30 projects that were in different stages. I just don’t know that that’s going to happen or continue to happen anymore because as I go in and pitch on projects, granted there’s some selection bias, it’s the kind of things I’ve being brought in to pitch on, feels like they’re not even going to bother developing these movies because they have no spot to release them.

You look at, you know, the Disney label, it has all the Marvel films, it has all the Star Wars films. There’s no more spots to develop for. And I feel like, increasingly, all the studios are going to be in a similar situation. Aline, Rawson, do you notice anything like that?

**Aline:** I mean, I remember around the time of the strike people were saying the whole movie business is going to move towards branded entertainment and, you know, theme park kind of movies. And I was always the person saying that’s ridiculous, that’ll never happen.

The people that we know, you know, who we came up with, our school of screenwriters, by and large are working on some kind of branded entertainment. It’s much more difficult to get things through now that not that that are original scripts. The ones that are getting through that are originals are writer-directors like Rawson’s movie, you know, some other people that we can name. And, you know, now that business is dominated by your David Russell, your Alexander Payne. You know, writer-directors, I think, are developing the kind of character-driven, smaller movies that I came up writing, you came up writing.

But I often think about my friends who are so brilliant, so many of them are taking their genius and kind of using it to really elevate these genre pieces and these branded pieces. And that’s great in certain respects because those movies now are much better than they have any business being. But I miss the movies that those men and women would have made if they were focusing on or at least alternating those movies with the more personal original pieces.

**John:** Rawson, I see you setting up projects left and right. And you probably, at least since We’re the Millers, at least six new projects got set up someplace.

**Rawson:** Yes, it’s in that ballpark, yeah.

**John:** So it is still happening. You’re the kind of person who’s getting these things set up.

**Rawson:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And We’re the Millers was a long time development project.

**Rawson:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I just wonder if right now We’re the Milllers would have sold and if it would have gotten made.

**Rawson:** That’s a great question. I don’t know. I mean, it’s been a while since I’ve been on the spec market in that regard. So I really don’t know who’s buying and necessarily what they’re buying. I think your take on it is pretty accurate, that each of these studios sort of following — I mean, frankly, following Marvel’s lead, are desperate to create what they would call a cinematic universe, even where one doesn’t quite exist.

And you look at Disney of course and they’re buying cinematic universes, right? They buy Marvel, they buy Lucas. And even like Universal, right, they’re trying to do that with their monsters, right, with Dracula and Werewolf, the Mummy, et cetera. And Warner Bros. is playing a little catch-up in the DC cinematic universe. So I think you’re absolutely right. Like the opportunity, the slots, I think is what they call them, available for a true spec or something that’s not based on IP, I mean, that bull’s eye is getting smaller and smaller and further and further away.

You know, I just had a really interesting meeting at this sort of new insta studio called STX, run by Adam Fogelson and a few other smart folks. And their whole model is we don’t develop, right? [laughs] Their whole model is, “Bring us a script that you love and if we love it, we’re going to make it. And we’ll tell you how much we’ll spend on it and we’ll tell you how we’re going to market it and we’ll tell you what we’ll put in it or who we need to put in it.” But, yeah, the sort of traditional, “Hey, I got an idea for this or what about this script,” I’m not sure that exists in the same way that it used to.

**Aline:** Well, it exists in a very different way. You know, when we’ve been getting the screeners and we have two piles, we have the Fast and Furious pile and the Infinitely Polar Bear pile.

**Rawson:** [laughs] Yeah.

**Aline:** And those are the two kinds of movies now. And it’s shocking how much you get a screener and they go into one of those two piles. It’s very rare, you know, those movies like The Martian, Argo, a few years ago, which are big studio movies that are character-based, not IP-driven, very, very small pile.

**Rawson:** Mm-hmm.

**Aline:** Very small pile.

**John:** Well, if you want to look at whether it would be The Town or Black Mass, like Warner Bros. makes one sort of like Boston crime thriller a year.

**Aline:** [laughs]

**John:** That’s a slot. I mean, it’s basically like it’s either Ben Affleck or somebody like Ben Affleck making that movie.

**Rawson:** Right.

**John:** They’re going to do one of those per year. And so they’re sort of done. They’re not going to make another big character drama that’s going to, you know, go in the fall. That’s their one thing.

**Rawson:** Right. And they’re not making that movie without Ben Affleck. And they’re not making that movie without Johnny Depp. So, you know, it’s not a big roll of the dice for them. I mean, they’re paying, you know, a reasonable number by their estimation for a movie with a big star that could break out. I mean, that’s not chancy.

**John:** But let’s talk about the things you set up recently —

**Rawson:** Sure.

**John:** Because were they all based on IP or were some of them just ideas?

**Rawson:** Well, let’s see. A couple of them were IP and one was an original idea. And I think it does help when, like on the one that was an original idea, I had a very experienced producer, Scott Stuber. I had a great screenwriter named Pete Correale and we had a really commercial sort of high concept idea. And I was — am and was attached as the director, so we sold that to Lionsgate.

So when you come in with sort of your bases loaded like that, it’s an easier thing for I think a studio to say yes to. And we weren’t trying to sell something that was obscure or difficult. You could kind of, as they say, sort of see the poster on it. So it was an easier sell there.

The other thing I sold, it was based on a very kind of obscure tabletop game. When I was eight years old, I used to play like this and I think the people I was selling it to felt the same way. And it was a relatively inexpensive purchase on the rights side for them. But at least it had some IP, which I thought was kind of interesting because it’s not an IP that most people know, and yet it still has value.

**Aline:** And if 10 years ago I told you that you were selling movies based on tabletop games —

**Rawson:** [laughs] It would be hard to believe. Hard to believe.

**Aline:** Yeah. I’m taking out a Cribbage pitch. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. It’s going to be great.

**Rawson:** My favorite games.

**John:** Yeah. Like don’t get pegged. I mean, you know, is one of the characters named Peg?

**Rawson:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** It’s going to be good. It’s going to be a race.

**Rawson:** Yeah. You’re going to get skunked.

**John:** You’re going to make your 15s, your 5s and all that, yeah.

**Rawson:** Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it was a combo. But I think your earlier point on the We’re the Millers, because that was a script that existed — it was sold 10 years before I came on, roughly, eight or so. And I think there’s still room for high concept comedy on the spec market and on the pitch market just because it’s something that you’re essentially selling on the pitch side that you’re selling a knock-knock joke, right? You’re selling a clean premise that you get with what’s funny about that or what the friction is in the pitch.

And those aren’t particularly expensive to make. You know, if I was starting now and I wrote some sort of galactic space opera as a spec, not based on an IP or a YA novel, I mean you’re sliding uphill. I mean, that’s a real, real tough one.

**John:** I agree. Speaking of sliding uphill, one of the classic ways to get one of these movies made is to have a big star attached. But this was also the year where a lot of movies with big stars in it didn’t do anything. And we’ve always had some, you know, big star vehicles that didn’t work but it was surprising to me this last year how many movies came out that’s like, wow, I can’t believe that person can’t open that movie.

So you see that with Bradley Cooper in Burnt. You see that with Julia Roberts and Billy Ray’s movie, Secret in Their Eyes, a few other examples. I mean, Mortdecai —

**Rawson:** Mortdecai, you have it with Our Brand is Crisis. So the same weekend, right, Sandra Bullock in Our Brand is Crisis, right, and Bradley Cooper in Burnt, both came out the same weekend. They both did not perform as hoped for. And I was baffled. I asked everybody, like what is the lesson from this weekend. I asked, you know, the smartest people I know. And the response that I got was really interesting. It was like, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. That doesn’t count.” And I was like, “Well, why doesn’t it count?”

**Aline:** Well, I think it goes back to the William Goldman thing of, you know, the picture is the star. And I think, you know, some of the stars I’m, as a fan, desperate and hungry for them to make the movies that they made their names on, but as we’ve been discussing, it’s harder to get those movies made. So those character-driven dramas and comedies which, you know, a lot of the people you mentioned, you know, be it an Edward Scissorhands or an Erin Brockovich or The Proposal or, you know, those movies that those stars made that we loved, so much harder to get those made.

So again, I think those movies that we’re talking about that didn’t work were a little bit more in the Infinitely Polar Bear grouping of the, you know, smaller, more prestige movies. They went up for that ball because the big studio films are largely dominated now by superheroes. So the stars who don’t have a superhero franchise tend to not be in the bigger movies.

So this is particularly acute for women now because they’re just not making the movies that women became stars on. Jennifer Lawrence or Scarlett Johansson are really, you know, in my mind to be admired and rewarded because they are stars in interesting genres and are seeking out interesting work and — but it’s just difficult now to mint these stars in these movies I think when people do movies that are sort of in the shape that we enjoy seeking them in, then, you know, it does work.

**John:** Well, Our Brand is Crisis, when I saw the trailer, it’s like, “Oh, that’s totally going to work.” I mean I saw the materials for it. It’s like that’s a Sandra Bullock in a good Sandra Bullock role where she is the smartest person in the room but sort of overwhelmed. It felt like the right kind of movie. And the reviews didn’t help it certainly. And the reviews didn’t help any of these movies.

**Aline:** But it’s still, it’s a small political satire. So it’s in the small genre. I don’t think it was trying to tick the boxes of the — it was trying to tick the boxes of the kind of prestige, political —

**John:** A George Clooney kind of movie.

**Aline:** The George Clooney kind of movie. And so that’s just a very narrow needle to thread. And I think that people who are hardcore Sandra Bullock fans are kind of waiting for The Blind Side or The Proposal.

**Rawson:** Yeah. I had the same reaction that you do when I saw the trailer for it. I thought it looked good. I wanted to go see it, then the reviews certainly didn’t help. And that’s a David Gordon Green who’s a fantastic director. And then you also look at In the Heart of the Sea, right? It’s Chris Hemsworth and Ron Howard who’s, you know, First Ballot Hall of Famer. And that didn’t work. I loved that movie. I went and saw it with my family and just loved that picture.

But I think what Aline said is right which is — and it’s this sort of this cop out and kind of the answer that I got from the, you know, I asked a studio head and I asked a big fancy producer like what’s the lesson from this weekend, right? Our Brand is Crisis and Burnt, both underperforming significantly with two big stars, two of the biggest stars. And they both said essentially what Aline said which is like, “And those aren’t the right movies for them.” Like they’re stars in the right movie. If you put them in the right “vehicle” and the thing that we want to see them do, then they’re stars.

**John:** Yeah, but see I would say — I don’t think that’s fair. Because I think if you were to describe Bradley Cooper in that movie, Burnt, it’s like a comedy about a burnt out chef who’s like trying to get his business back together. It’s like, yeah, I could see Bradley Cooper’s charisma carrying that movie. And it didn’t seem to work that way. I feel like Ryan Reynolds gets slammed a lot for like, “Oh, he wasn’t able to open that movie.” It’s like, well, lots of stars aren’t able to open certain movies.

**Rawson:** Right. But yeah, what’s the old saying about stars, right, they’re parachutes where you pay them to open. And if they don’t, then what are they?

**John:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** You know. And so then you look at someone like Chris Pratt who’s super, super talented and really funny and he’s in two of the biggest films, you know, of recent memory.

**Aline:** But again, I would say and I adore Chris. I adore Chris Pratt, but the picture is the star.

**Rawson:** I guess that’s what I’m saying.

**Aline:** And so he’s in movies that, you know — but if you put Chris Pratt in the movie about the charismatic chef —

**Rawson:** Right.

**Aline:** What’s your result? So I think the audience is still looking for the movie to excite them. But I do think because we’re missing those kind of mid-range movies where — I mean if we go down the list of the biggest stars, Tom Cruise and Julia and Sandra and Brad Pitt, they all broke in these mid-range movies. I mean the first time I remember seeing Brad Pitt is in Thelma & Louise. And, you know, we just —

**Rawson:** Tell me about it.

**Aline:** [laughs] And we just are not — it is hard to mint these. And now the place we mint them is in the superhero movies. And so if you’re a star who doesn’t want to do that — I mean the other thing about stars I think is interesting is that they now have become products in a way that they weren’t before having to have a franchise, having to have some sort of corporate deal, you know, all the — they’re all modeling watches and, you know, expensive products and face creams because they are now sort of businesses in a different way than when they were our people.

**Rawson:** And what’s interesting about that is a star as being brand as opposed to actors, right? But I think that’s even become a bigger element I suppose now with Twitter and with Instagram that that connection, a star’s connection with his or her fans is so much more direct and such a big part of their connection with their audience and also how they sell a movie. Like sincerely like I’ve got Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson in Central Intelligence which is the movie that —

**Aline:** And Dwayne is one of the biggest, most famous.

**Rawson:** They both are.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** They both are.

**Aline:** All right, they both are the top 10 for Instagram and Twitter.

**Rawson:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** And it’s amazing what they do to kind of connect and communicate with their fans. And that’s a huge, huge thing. And I think that speaks exactly to what you’re talking about of actors now becoming — movie stars becoming more willing to openly sell product. I’m not sure exactly what that connection is, but I think there is one in terms of like I’m not just an actor that you pay, you know, $13 to go see twice a year. You also get to interact with me every single day. And now I’m a human being with you and now you get to see me at my house. You get to see me, you know, walk my dog, et cetera, et cetera. Therefore, maybe that barrier to selling is less.

**Aline:** Well, it’s interesting because it’s also in the area of era of reality television.

**Rawson:** Right, that’s a really good point.

**Aline:** We’re expecting 360 access to these people.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**Aline:** I then become a little nostalgic for the days of, you know, Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman —

**Rawson:** Right.

**Aline:** And Al Pacino and Sissy Spacek and, you know, showing up to the movies with this wonderful mystery about people.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And I think that might swing back.

**John:** I think it may swing back, too.

**Rawson:** But I think that’s a really, really good point because the actors of yesteryear as it were, they kept mystery about them, right? So that when you went to see them in the theater, when you went to go see them perform, they could be somebody else. They could transform into a different character —

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** Because you didn’t know anything about them.

**John:** Well, look at Oscar Isaac who’s been in so many great movies this last year, but I don’t know anything about Oscar Isaac. And so the reason why I think he looks — he seems so different in every movie is because I just don’t know anything about him, so I have no baseline for sort of what he normally is. And so I can’t tell what’s acting and what’s actually him.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s a really useful thing about the actors who we don’t know who they are, is that they can be just — we can project anything on to them.

**Rawson:** That’s an excellent point.

**John:** Any last observations from 2015 that you’re carrying with you into the New Year?

**Aline:** About the overall movie business?

**John:** The movie business, television.

**Aline:** I mean I was — you know, I think we got to say from our point of view is that everyone we know has migrated to television in some way, shape or form.

**John:** But this was your big year of television.

**Aline:** Yeah. I mean it was for me —

**John:** You have one of the most critically acclaimed shows and Rachel has a Golden Globe nomination.

**Rawson:** Congratulations.

**John:** It’s really amazing.

**Aline:** Thank you.

**Rawson:** Well earned.

**Aline:** But it was — you know, I was the last person to get on that bus because I had done TV early in my career and I kind of knew what it entailed. I didn’t gravitate towards it, but, you know, every screenwriter now that I know pretty much has some kind of television in development. And those sophisticated character-driven dramas and comedies by and large now are on television. And so it’s not surprising that a lot of writers are migrating there because they can tell the kinds of stories that movies used to tell routinely. And now you just struggle to get them made. And the TV business is hungry for those kinds of stories.

And one thing I’ve noticed which I think is interesting is that the difference between film executives now and television executives is that film executives are approaching their job much more like corporate executives. My husband works at a big mutual fund. And I’ve noticed that when I talk to movie people, they’re much more conscious of their stuff as product, how it’s going to work in the marketplace, how it’s being marketed, how it’s being monetized.

And television because there is so much niche stuff going on because people can go and make an excellent show on a streaming or cable in particular where they don’t have the same kind of financial exigencies, the executives in those businesses are much more driven by love of material, we’re doing this, I know this is outside of the box. I mean we’ve certainly benefitted tremendously, our show, has from people who just love the story, love the show. And that has been I think kneaded out of movie executives because they have to think now in these more corporate product terms. So in a funny way like the ’70s have moved from movies to television.

**John:** Something that I think you’re going to hear more about much more about this coming year is the reality of television, you kind of can’t lose money. And so one of the reasons why you see some low rated shows that stay on the air is because —

**Aline:** We’re trying to prove that wrong.

**John:** All right. [laughs] So your show is critically acclaimed but it’s not a big giant hit. And I think in another year, it would be much harder for you guys to have kept your back nine.

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** And just keep going.

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** But I thing which some much smarter people than I sort of showed the numbers on is that your studio and your network, they’re making money off your show even though it’s not a giant hit. And, you know, it’s worth it for them to sort of —

**Aline:** Well, we’re still in the network business so we have some of these exigencies really still pressing on us. But for the streaming and the cable things, I mean what’s interesting is that particularly for streaming, their programming is, you know, can function as a loss leader because it’s not their core business.

So it’s almost like a — it’s marketing. You know, it markets the rest of their business. And that comes from cable, but that’s particularly true in streaming. And so those show creators are really left to do what they want to do and what they’re encouraged to do is things that are provocative and —

**Rawson:** Make noise.

**Aline:** Make noise and nobody really looks at the numbers. I mean in the case of Netflix and Hulu, we don’t really even know what the numbers are.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** That’s just really a seismic sea change. I can’t point to anything like that in the movie business because the studios are so squeezed with trying to make these kind of big IP movies and then if you’re trying to make an independent movie which was the path I was kind of going down before the show happened, in a funny way, that’s a more money-driven business even in the studios because those people need some assurances. They need cast, they need the budget to be low, low, low. So, you know, if you’re talking about making a prestige-driven or character-driven or, you know, something that would have been a Sydney Pollack movie, you’re now making that movie for $11 million with financing that you’ve cobbled together from six different entities and you’re shooting it in Croatia.

And so the TV business now has that thing of sort of, you know, people wanting to take chances and spend a little money on that. So that’s why you’re seeing this giant migration of people over there. That is just I think just an enormous trend for our business, as somebody who really only wrote screenplays for, you know, the majority of my career.

**John:** One of the things I’m curious about for 2016 is whether we’re going to finally just break and there’s for me like there’s so much television that you couldn’t possibly catch up. And so I feel like on a weekly basis, someone will bring up a new show or something new that I need to catch up on. And I have to just basically decide like, “Is this going to be part of my life or not part of my life at all?” because otherwise I just can’t — I just have to acknowledge I’ll never be watch that show because it’s not going to happen.

Most recent thing is Making a Murderer, the Netflix show which is apparently brilliant and I really want to watch it. But it’s a choice between watching that and watching —

**Aline:** But how great — I have to say, I totally, and the FOMO is insane.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And it’s, you know, you feel like I can’t — I didn’t watch that show. I have to opt out of all these conversations. But how great is it that we walk around with people saying, “You have to got — oh my god, you haven’t seen this? You have to — oh, stop what you’re doing. You have to watch this.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And I just want to stop for a moment and think about the last time there was a movie that felt like that where everybody you knew was talking about it and saying you have to — now, obviously the Star Wars movie. But it’s just rare to have people saying, “Oh, I can’t — you got to go, stop what you’re doing. Run out and see this movie.” And with TV shows, it’s just this like —

**Rawson:** It’s endless.

**Aline:** it’s endless and it’s just — you know, look at the list of the sort of the top 30 best reviewed TV shows, that could be your whole life.

**Rawson:** Yeah. I have the exact same feeling that you have, John. Like it’s — you know, Making a Murderer, I heard the exact same thing.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** I’m dying — ha-ha — to see it. And there’s just no time. Like, you know, I’m so far behind on everything else. Like The Man in the High Castle which was my favorite Amazon pilot, so excited. Watched the pilot. I wanted to binge watch all of them. It wasn’t even made, right? And a year later, I was waiting, waiting, waiting for it to come out. It finally comes out, I still haven’t watched it.

**John:** Oh, Rawson.

**Rawson:** It’s terrible. It’s terrible.

**John:** But it’s not terrible because like —

**Rawson:** I could do a whole list of shows —

**John:** Yes.

**Rawson:** Starting with Friday Night Lights that I have not seen that I’m dying to see. There are truly, truly not enough hours in the day.

**John:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** But I agree with Aline that it’s — what a wonderful time to live in.

**Aline:** But I just want to circle back to, you know, there’s — when I think of, you know, John’s breakthrough movie was Go and your breakthrough movie was Dodgeball, which is the McKenna family movie, and my sort of breakout movie, Devil Wears Prada, tough going man now to get those through. I mean if you came to me with Go, I would say that’s a Netflix show. If you came to me with Dodgeball, I would say that’s an FX series. If you came to me — somebody came to me with — the Devil Wears Prada was a pre-established — you know, it was a hit book, so maybe that would probably go the movie route again.

But, you know, other things that I’ve written like 27 Dresses, I think I would say try and get $5 million and shoot that, you know, in New Orleans and hope for the best. Those movies are really tough to get through. And if you’re in a movie meeting and you’re saying, this is totally out of the box and insane and doesn’t make any sense, and if you’re my friend and you’re telling me you have that kind of idea, I would recommend, you know, five or seven cable, streaming and in some case broadcast network places that, you know — I think of Ridley’s doing American Crime, and he’s doing it on a big network, wouldn’t that have been a movie 10 years ago? Wouldn’t that have been like a big Oscary movie? So aren’t we going towards the thing also where my kids don’t care so much what platform it’s on, you know?

**Rawson:** Yeah, I think they’re platform agnostic.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** From what I can tell. But John back to, not your kids specifically, but the kids today, the Millenials. But yeah, but John, to your point, the sort of glut of gold, right, of the television gold, you know, we have to be at some point hitting peak drama, right? There’s just too much. Too much great stuff, you can’t keep up.

So on the TV side, that feels like what’s going on. On the feature side, it is cinematic universe is robust, right? Everything else can take a hike. And it’s a really strange difference between the two, right, where one is — we’re creating an interlocking set of $150 million movies that all feed each other and inform each other and make $100 million on the opening weekend. And we don’t really care about anything else.

**John:** And there’s FOMO to those movies. Like that’s why, you know, you have to see Star Wars the first week or else it’s all going to be spoiled for you.

**Aline:** Right.

**Rawson:** Sure. And then the other side to what Aline is saying is on the television side, it’s just be interesting, we don’t really care. We don’t even know what the numbers are. If it’s kind of cool and different, that’s great. So it’s a very — like it’s so —

**Aline:** I think it depends also what drew you into the business. Because a lot of my friends who were big genre writers or producers, like the stuff that drew them into the business, you know, was Star Wars, were these kind of bigger, you know, it’s like Star Wars, Die Hard, you know, those kind of early, big franchise-able things. You know, for me, personally, I was — I was drawn into the business by — this is really quaint — movies from the ’30s and ’40s. And Sydney Pollack and James Brooks —

**Rawson:** That’s adorable.

**Aline:** Elaine May. Yeah, it’s really — it’s like saying, you know, you grew up playing with the dolls with the real hair and the lace dresses. It’s like I didn’t grow up playing with collectible. In fact, some of the stuff I’ve not heard of. Like people will say, “We’re working on this line of toys from the ’70s that was like cool robots who are, you know, like” — and I’ve never heard of it, you know. And it is also very male-driven by and large.

So I think the way we’re wicking people into the business now is different because of the kind of things that we’re making. And I think if I were starting out again and I came to myself for advice, I’d probably say, “Go try and get a job writing, you know, You’re the Worst or something.”

**John:** Yeah. Good shows. All right. So we’ve been talking about how much great TV there was this year, but there’s also been a lot of great movies. And so we want to focus on three of those movies that are up for awards this season. We’ll start with Room.

So Room tells a story of five-year-old Jack who has spent his entire life in a single room because his mother was kidnapped at age 17. The movie tracks her life inside the room and their attempts to escape and reintegrate with the world outside. It was written by Emma Donoghue, based on her best-selling novel.

Rawson, you just saw this movie last night.

**Rawson:** I did. And I loved it. I had — I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know what you just said about it. I didn’t watch a trailer.

**Aline:** That’s great.

**Rawson:** I knew nothing. And I was blown away. I wonder if I would’ve liked it as much if I had known anything. Because when they were — I guess there will be spoilers in this episode.

**John:** There were be spoilers. We can’t avoid it.

**Rawson:** So I had no idea why they were in that room. You know, I was like, you know, is it — is this a post-apocalyptic thing? Can she not go outside because of radiation? Is it, you know, is she hiding? Did she kill someone? And, you know, obviously, as it goes along you kind of puzzle it together.

So that, just the opening experience of just sort of being drawn in and trying to figure out what the puzzle is or what the reasoning is for them not having left the room was fascinating and unlike anything I’ve seen in a long time in the theater. And then, of course, as it — as it unfolds, you know, the escape sequence was — I haven’t felt that way in a movie theater in a long time. I was writhing in my chair and so nervous.

**Aline:** I was sobbing so loudly. I was barking.

**Rawson:** Oh my god. [laughs]

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** Yeah. It was something else. And then the other part that was so interesting to me, which I guess I wouldn’t have expected was, we have to talk spoiler again.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** So after they escaped through the — after they escaped the room, I guess I just — because I’m, you know, a studio hack. Like I was just like, “Oh, well, that’s the end of the movie, they get out and they hug, it’s a thing.” And that’s the midpoint. Like the — some of the most fascinating stuff is what happens after that and sort of recalibrating and what is the world like if you’ve never ever, ever experienced it. And I just thought it was a beautiful piece of cinema and expertly told. And some of the best performances I’ve seen in a long time. Man, what a fantastic picture. A-plus.

**John:** Yeah. On a story level, what was so striking to me about it is that it doesn’t sort of follow any normal rules. And so in terms of like who’s the protagonist, who’s your antagonist, that it’s three acts. It’s really a two-act sort of movie. And the two acts are very, very different. And you sort of think like, “Oh, she’s the one who’s going to change, and she’s going to have to save this kid.” But it’s not really that.

And it was — I found myself frustrated in the second half of the movie where I was like, “Well, where did the mom go?” There’s moments where she disappears from the story. And it wasn’t until, you know, the credits rolled that like, “Oh, wait, it was actually the boy’s story.” And so —

**Rawson:** Oh. Oh.

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah. And so if you look at it from the boy’s point of view —

**Aline:** Yes. That makes perfect sense.

**John:** Like some of the moments that didn’t actually make a lot of sense to me in the second half I think were because it’s really based on what the boy’s understanding of what these adults are actually talking about and how these are working. Like William H. Macy’s character, I didn’t really believe or buy, but I think I buy it more if I see it from the kid’s point of view. And it’s like —

**Aline:** Yes. Great point.

**John:** He has no idea what the — why this man is saying these things.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**John:** And it makes more sense with that.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**Aline:** I mean, it’s by far my favorite movie that I’ve seen this year. And it’s probably for me the movie I was most excited about since Frozen, which sounds strange, but remember I had like a big freak out over Frozen.

**John:** I did. And you can listen to that episode in the premium feed of Scriptnotes where Aline and I talked with Jennifer Lee about Frozen.

**Aline:** I mean, I’m obsessed with this movie. I think it’s a clinic. I think it is — I don’t know why everyone’s not talking about it. It feels like to me the movie everyone should be talking about it. I will say that a lot of people I’ve talked to have a weird idea of what it is. Like even Rawson was saying, “Is it really scary? Is it going to upset my life?” And I just keep saying to people, “It’s just good.”

I just want to say two things. One is, as a writer — and this is one of the reasons I love Frozen so much — you know what’s hard and what’s not hard. You know what things are difficult writing-wise and what things are not. And there’s just sometimes I see a movie and I think, “Well that’s wonderful, but I know that the level of skill it took to do that is not that high.”

The level of skill that it takes to pull off Room is extremely high, extremely high degree of difficulty. You’re telling such an intimate story, such a character piece. But it’s also a thriller. It’s also like a great propulsive story. It plays with genre. It upends genre. I just thought from the point of view as a craftsman looking at a table, you know, as someone who makes tables examining another table, I was really effing —

**Rawson:** It’s a hell of a table.

**Aline:** Impressed.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And then the other thing I want to say is that, you know, it’s a story about a woman and a child, and her mother, primarily. And I got to say, you know, there’s a lot of great movies out that are getting a lot of attention, but part of me has to think that if it wasn’t about women and children it would be getting more acclaim. And I’m kind of turning into this guy. I’m kind of turning into this person as I get older and I see what happens in the world. I just think stories about women and children, which is really all this movie is and what this — it’s the best movie about parenting I’ve seen ever.

**Rawson:** Oh, yeah.

**Aline:** And their relationship is so real and so gritty and so interesting. I just think — I just want more people to see it. I’m desperate for more people to see it because I think we’ve seen a lot of terrific movies this year but the level of achievement here in terms of storytelling, character work, and performances. I mean, the very last moment, when Brie looks back at the room and she says goodbye to it and she whispers, she doesn’t say it, she doesn’t make any noise, it’s — I think it’s stunning.

**John:** So this is Emma Donoghue’s screenplay based on her book, and that to me was a really fascinating thing to look at because we’ve had other novelists adapt their own books. Gillian Flynn did a great job adapting Gone Girl.

**Aline:** That’s who I thought of, too.

**John:** But what struck me about this is that, you know, looking at the book Room, you have the ability to have character introspections, so you get to know what the characters know, you get to see inside their thoughts. She had to do this without any voiceover, without any sort of ability to sort of get out what’s happening inside these characters’ heads other than dialogue.

**Aline:** Which is, again, why I say clinic.

**John:** Clinic. And so this first half of the movie, you feel like, “Well, that could be a play.” You theoretically could stage that first half of the movie as like a play. And then when it actually breaks out, it clearly has to be a movie, because the only way you get that suspense and that tension is by going outside in that world and, you know, it was brilliantly directed and really brilliantly shot. And then just keep going to these new environments, it really did ultimately become a film. But to able to understand both like how to do all the very small chamber character work and then break out and do the suspense was remarkable.

**Aline:** You know, for some reason, one of the moments that has stuck with me so much is the moment where Joan Allen’s boyfriend builds this bridge to the kid. And, you know, he’s not a major character. He shows up two-thirds of the way through the movie.

**Rawson:** In kind of a creepy fashion, by the way, just standing in the hall.

**Aline:** Right. And he’s sort of — yeah, you don’t really know what to make of that.

**Rawson:** He did a great job.

**Aline:** But you really — it’s such a testament to the power of human connection that these two characters reach out across each other. And it’s exactly what you said, so smart. It’s the boy’s story and it’s about how he learns to start making connections in the world that are not his mother. And so I think that’s the reason for me that is such a big victorious moment, that you feel like this kid’s going to be okay because he can learn to trust somebody. And it’s really great that it’s not his grandfather, it’s somebody else.

**Rawson:** I think that’s an excellent point. And like — and it is surprising that that character, Lee or something, I think, is the one who sort of connects with Jack, right? And he’s the only one who doesn’t have, doesn’t carry any baggage with him toward Jack, right? He is essentially a stranger. And I thought that was surprising and wonderful.

But John, back to your point, like she does use — Emma does use voiceover. And she uses Jack’s voiceover in the picture.

**John:** You’re absolutely right.

**Rawson:** Throughout, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** And so like to me. And then what was interesting about what you said of, you know, whose story is this? And to me, really early on, it seemed like it was really clearly Jack’s story because he’s the one explaining what room is, right?

**Aline:** Yes.

**Rawson:** And then when Nick — Old Nick shows up, he — Jack goes into wardrobe and stays there —

**Aline:** And we see it from his perspective.

**Rawson:** And we’re in there with him.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** So something that you talk a lot about, which I steal all the time when I’m writing and thinking is like who do you give the storytelling power to, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** That’s so critical, and something I learned from you. Really, I thought it was — as I think Aline might say, you know, a master class in specifically that, right? This is only Jack’s story. It clearly is his and we only see it through his eyes and from his perspective. So when he’s rolled up in the rug and taken out, we don’t — we never see Brie Larson again until —

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** Right.

**Rawson:** Until she comes running out toward the cop car. Which heightens the tension, right?

**Aline:** Yes, so much.

**Rawson:** Because we don’t know what’s happening.

**Aline:** We don’t know what’s happening there. I just want to say one more thing about the movie which is —

**Rawson:** Sure.

**Aline:** If we’re talking about trends for me in 2015 is that it’s the best movie I’ve ever seen about rape and the aftermath of rape and how confusing and damaging it is. And this is the year where I watched The Hunting Ground which I cannot recommend highly enough. I watched it with my kids who are teenagers.

**Rawson:** Is that the CNN documentary?

**Aline:** It’s not CNN. But yeah, it’s the people who did the documentary about rape in the military, did a documentary about rape on college campuses, and it is blistering. I also read the Missoula book, Krakauer’s Missoula book about the college rapes in Missoula. And then, obviously, we have the Bill Cosby thing.

I am hoping that as a culture our view and our understanding of rape and rape victims and what happens to them starts to change now, has to change now. And this is the best microscopic examination of what a rape survivor goes through and, you know, her triumphs and her defeats, and what’s complicated and how it’s imprinted on her and how it affects her mental health and how she becomes suicidal.

**Rawson:** Absolutely.

**Aline:** And, you know, you can be brave and you can, you know, work through these things, but it damages you forever. And I think we still don’t understand that as a culture. And so I really have to applaud the movie for depicting that in a way that’s not homework. It’s not spinach. It’s not vegetables. It’s just human.

**Rawson:** Yeah. I thought Emma Donoghue did an incredible job adapting her own work. I haven’t read the book but I can only imagine the challenge. And it seems like it would be even more difficult if you were the author of the novel to be — to sort of what I can only assume is to hack and slash your own work up to make it fit into 120 pages. But —

**Aline:** Yeah. Hats off to her.

**Rawson:** Yeah. But then the last thing I wanted to say about Room was — and it’s connected, Aline, to what you were saying, which is this sort of clean line, the clean premise of a 17-year-old girl who gets abducted and kept in a shed. She’s raped. She has a son from that rape and loves that son, right? The clean idea of a mother who loves her child even though that child was the offspring of a horrific and violent act is so ripe for drama and ripe for investigation. Like, you know, there were very few times in my life where I’ve sort of stumbled across or come up with a clean dramatic construct like that that you just get so excited. I mean, it’s — I mean, I can almost picture Emma Donoghue when that idea struck her. I feel like, “Oh my god, of course. What a great idea to explore.”

**Aline:** It’s funny it’s in the same year that Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt came out.

**Rawson:** I was going to say that. [laughs]

**Aline:** Which is sort of, you know, it’s sort of — it is a great idea. It’s a gonzo weird comedic take on Room that —

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**Aline:** That they’re a great double feature.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And it’s, you know, Kimmy Schmidt is so intelligent and bizarre.

**Rawson:** It’s fantastic.

**Aline:** And it takes a completely, you know, through-the-looking-glass view of the same topic. But I could really go on and on about Room just as a craftsperson. I really —

**Rawson:** Not as funny as Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

**Aline:** Not quite as funny, no. But it did have some great moments of humor I have to say.

**Rawson:** It does.

**John:** So while Room was a very small story with a very tight group of characters, Spotlight is a much bigger story. It follows this team of journalists working at The Boston Globe, working to expose widespread sexual abuse, again, of children by Catholic priests in the Boston area. It’s written by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer. It was listed on the 2013 Black List of unproduced screenplays and now it’s a movie up for a lot of best pictures.

What struck me about Spotlight, and I — again, I really enjoyed Spotlight. It’s almost exactly the opposite of Room. It’s like where Room was so detailed and charactery and it’s all about sort of these very intimate feelings like silent moments, Spotlight was sort of all talk all the time. It’s all business.

Aline, I heard you describe it once as sort of like The Martian but like with journalists. And so it’s very sort of technically detail-oriented.

**Aline:** Yeah. That’s something I wanted to talk about and see how you guys felt. Because I have noticed, you know, that both of those movies — and it’s something I’ve noticed in movies more and more is the characters in both of those movies, they’re really work procedurals. And the character development is, you know, is — I think they deliberately underbaked the buns there, you know. They kind of pulled it out of the oven without overdoing.

Like in The Martian, you really don’t know a lot about the backstory of this guy who you’re spending a lot of time with. When he talks about his parents, I thought, “Oh gosh, I don’t really know anything about his home life.” And then in Spotlight, each character has like one little scene, you know, going to the neighbor’s house, eating pizza for Mark Ruffalo, loading the dishwasher for Rachel McAdams. I mean, they have little, tiny character grace notes, but they really work procedurals about characters whose function in the movie is to do things and not to kind of exhibit character behavior.

And I think it’s really interesting in light of what we’ve been talking about with TV. You know, TV is all about these interesting, naughty, complicated characters where you’re really delving into them. And I feel like it’s interesting to have a movie where you have two prestige films that are excellent and I think are going to get a lot of awards, where the character stuff I think is deliberately a little, you know, pencil drawn, maybe to make the functioning of the work stuff more prominent in a way.

**John:** So you’re talking — that these two movies being The Martian and Spotlight. In both cases, we don’t know a lot about the characters’ backstories. But even when the movie begins, they’re not given a big arc to sort of — to conquer. There wasn’t a like there’s a thing which they as a character couldn’t do at the start of the movie that they can do at the end of the movie.

**Aline:** Their arc are obstacles.

**John:** Yeah. And so they just like, stuff gets in their way and they have to keep knocking down these things that get in their way but it’s much more sort of — it’s procedural. It’s just like, are they going to be able to unscramble this puzzle that will get them out of this movie successfully?

**Rawson:** Absolutely. I mean I think the only real sort of character quandary or challenge is from Michael Keaton’s character, right? Because in that picture, in Spotlight, he gets sent the box of like, “Here’s the damning evidence, do something about it,” and he ignored it for whatever reason, right? It’s the right choice for that story, right? Because what’s most important in Spotlight is what these guys did, what these priests did, what the Catholic Church did. And I think the choice of telling the story that way of just the facts ma’am and not delving into character backstory or tropes as you say, is precisely the right choice because that’s not what’s important about that story. What’s not important about the story is —

**Aline:** Exactly.

**Rawson:** Oh, gosh, the relationship between the journalist and her boyfriend and are they going to make up?

**Aline:** Right.

**Rawson:** Like, who cares?

**Aline:** Right.

**Rawson:** That’s not what it’s about, it’s about —

**Aline:** This is what happened in the world.

**Rawson:** That’s exactly right.

**Aline:** And in Martian, it’s about science and it’s about the importance of iteration. You know, I think it’s — if you don’t process emotions very well then you’ll really enjoy the Martian because [laughs] —

**Rawson:** I really did.

**John:** There’s not a lot of emotions there.

**Aline:** Because — no. Because it’s such a great tribute, to — I mean, I thought it was a great movie for my kids to see because it’s like try again, try again, try again. It’s a really great movie for writers, too, because it’s “How do you skin this cat?” You go back, you try again. He tries everything.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**Aline:** I mean, I never thought I would be so excited about seeing plants sprout in a hothouse.

**Rawson:** Yeah. I mean, yeah, The Martian was — I mean, Drew Goddard did an incredible job.

**Aline:** Incredible.

**Rawson:** What was so — one of the things I love about The Martian, though we’re not really talking about that, is the way that Ridley and Drew use humor in that film.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** Humor throughout and how important that is to keep — at least to keep me and I think the audience, engaged in the story, because it could have been a really bleak, hopeless slog.

**Aline:** And also Spotlight. I mean, you know, Keaton, Slattery, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo —

**Rawson:** Liev Schreiber.

**Aline:** They’re all — Liev, yeah. They’re all great dramatic actors but they all can be funny. And they bring — there’s a kind of lightness to that movie in a funny way.

**Rawson:** Stanley Tucci, also.

**Aline:** Right.

**Rawson:** Right. Kind of stealing the show.

**Aline:** Yeah. So exactly, kind of steal — yeah.

**Rawson:** I want to say one thing about Spotlight which is my friend Blye Pagon Faust produced it, and I didn’t know she produced it until I saw her name on the screen.

**Aline:** Wow. So you guys are close then?

**Rawson:** Well, we’re not that close. But I know her pretty well and I sent her e-mail. I didn’t realize until — well, actually I saw. I knew before I went to see the movie but I didn’t realize until I think she posted on Facebook, “Go see my movie,” and I went “Oh my God.” And I was — it’s always kind of fun when someone you know, a friend of yours, even lightly, kind of comes out of nowhere and has a big, big success. It’s just like exciting.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, let’s take — let’s take a look though at Spotlight and, I guess, The Martian as well. Both these movies have a noticeable lack of conflict, and generally, like if your movie doesn’t have a lot of conflict between the characters, I’m just not going to care. And what both of them do have, which I think is maybe a very new kind of thing, they have really competent characters. And so this is sort of a thing called competency porn where it’s like —

**Aline:** Totally.

**John:** It’s really fun to see people who are really good at their job, and see people doing a really good job at their job. And so for The Martian, it’s —

**Rawson:** I don’t want you to watch me work.

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Aline:** But it’s funny. I actually think this might also be a little bit tinged by reality shows and by the extreme like excitement of watching people cook things and build things.

**John:** Or survive out in the wilderness.

**Aline:** Yes. I think there’s a thing now where, you know, some character work can seem — backstory stuff just can seem corny, tropey, and so —

**John:** Mark Ruffalo had a couple of corny tropey moments for me in this movie. There’s sort of one moment where he blows up at Michael Keaton and it’s like I didn’t really kind of buy it. And there are a few moments where it’s like I felt like he was getting angry to get angry because it’s a thing that a character in this movie is supposed to be doing, is getting angry. But no one else in the movie was doing that, and so it felt a little strange. It was so fascinating for me to see like Stanley Tucci or Liev Schreiber, actors who generally can get kind of big and kind of emotional, be really tamped down.

**Rawson:** Yeah, it’s my favorite performance from Liev in a long, long time.

**John:** Yeah. It’s exciting. All right. Let’s look at our third and final movie. It’s The Big Short. It’s based on the non-fiction book by Michael Lewis. The Big Short tells the story of three groups of investors who foresaw the collapse of the US Housing Market in 2007. It’s written by Adam McKay and Charles Randolph.

This is, again, a movie with a zillion people in it and a lot of talking, but also, structurally, just bizarre, and point of view, bizarre. It breaks the fourth wall consistently. Characters will turn to the camera and speak and then resume their scene. It took a lot of really ambitious narrative choices. And I really dug what it did.

**Aline:** I loved it. I mean, I think Adam McKay is kind of interestingly one of the most subversive brains in Hollywood. I don’t know that he totally gets credit for it because even his mainstream comedies have some crack going on in them, all of them. He’s so super smart and it comes across.

And I just — I loved what he did formally with this movie in terms of being so free and the way they shot it and the way it was edited. I mean, it’s a long time since I’ve seen a movie edited in a way that I was like, “Wow, we’re holding here. We’re hanging out here,” you know. So I thought, formally, it was — it was fantastic.

I had two thoughts about it that maybe prevented me from like completely immersing myself in it. And one was that it’s about people who are trying to exploit the crash, but you root for them. And they see that it’s all screwed up, but they’re still all betting against the common. Now it’s kind of a genius move on the part of the movie that it was able to get you to root for and care about people who are playing against everyone and playing against the system, so that’s — but that’s a tricky inside out kind of thing it’s doing.

**John:** Yeah, it has the structure of a heist movie in a way and like “Are they going to be able to get away with it?” And yet you know that the end result is a really negative outcome for the universe and for all humanity. So it’s a strange sense. And to McKay’s credit, I thought he did a nice job of letting you both feel some victory in that it happened and the characters themselves acknowledge the very bad thing that happened. So Steve Carell, his character, you know, really feeling despondent even as he’s become a billionaire.

**Aline:** As he becomes a billionaire.

**Rawson:** Yeah. And that — yeah. Look, I love the movie, I loved the book. I thought McKay did an incredible job. But you know, just as someone who makes comedies myself, to get to see someone who’s a titan of studio comedy work creating the opportunity for himself to do something that isn’t that and doing such an exceptional job was just really heartening and exciting for me.

**Aline:** Yeah, it’s great. And it was interesting because it’s funny but it’s still — so it’s still — I felt like it had the DNA of an Adam McKay movie in some ways, but obviously it was going off into these other directions.

**Rawson:** Sure. I mean especially with what John was saying, breaking the fourth wall, like I think it’s three separate times where McKay uses that device to help explain a very complicated idea. And it seems like there’s two real big challenges going into the adaptation of that book. One is, of course, the complexity of the derivatives market, right? Which Michael Lewis does a brilliant job of explaining in the book, a fantastic book if you want to get angry. And McKay I think chose a really McKay-like way of doing that, right? Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, Anthony Bourdain, I think it’s Vanessa Hudgens —

**John:** It’s Selena Gomez.

**Rawson:** Selena Gomez, my fault. Selena Gomez at a blackjack table, which I thought were all super, super clever. So one challenge is the complexity of that.

And then also, like you were saying John, like it is a heist picture, so trying to keep all those dishes spinning and keep that tension going. And heist pictures are incredibly difficult to write and execute, but the last piece of it is the most important which is, “How do you root for these guys? How do you root for these guys who are essentially profiting off of the corruption of the system and making those billions of dollars that Johnny and Jane taxpayer are going to have to foot the bill?”

**Aline:** Yeah, that’s what I was saying. Yeah, and the people who are going to get wiped out by these things are satirized.

**Rawson:** Yes, right.

**Aline:** Right? Like the boneheads in the, you know, who sell the —

**Rawson:** Yes, Max Greenfield. Fantastic. [laughs]

**Aline:** Yes, amazing. And the stripper and, you know, they’re sort of depicted as yahoos on the other hand, you know, they’re victims. I actually thought, you know, the guy who’s been paying the rent but the landlord hasn’t been —

**Rawson:** Yeah, that was so sad.

**Aline:** That was so sad and he appears again later in the movie —

**Rawson:** And he’s okay.

**Aline:** Yeah. And that was the most kind of humanized thing. It’s interesting. It does go back — it goes back to sort of what we were talking about.

**John:** Well, let’s talk about how he actually did make you feel sympathy for our lead guys who theoretically could be schmucks for, you know, what they’re doing to everybody else. You create bigger assholes around them, and so like they’re standing up to bigger assholes who are openly mocking them.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** So when he’s going in to try to pitch the portfolio like —

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** “Will you sell me this thing?” And they’re like snickering. “Oh my god, we’re going to make so much money off this idiot.” That’s the way to sort of make our guys feel like the underdogs.

**Rawson:** That’s right.

**John:** And we’re going to root for the underdogs.

**Rawson:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** And consistently with all three storylines, we’ve let them be the underdog, so like —

**Aline:** Yeah, smart.

**John:** Our young guys aren’t even allowed to go upstairs and so they have to sit in the lobby and they get talked down to you by an assistant.

**Rawson:** That was a great scene.

**Aline:** That’s my favorite guy.

**John:** Yeah, the guy who plays the —

**Rawson:** The little guy is so good.

**Aline:** That little guy is the greatest.

**Rawson:** Whoever he is, good job little guy.

**John:** That’s one of the moments where you break the fourth wall and they pick up this prospectus and one of the actors turns to you and is like, “This isn’t actually how it happened — I didn’t get it here.”

**Aline:** It’s great.

**John:** And it was such a smart choice because it reminded you like, “Oh this is a real story.” So even though we are playing fictional characters, this really did happen to a degree. It reminded you like, “Oh, that’s right. This is all real.”

**Rawson:** I loved that scene because as soon as they picked up the prospectus, I’m like, “This is bullshit.”

**Aline:** Right.

**Rawson:** And I was like grabbing my pitchfork, and then he turns to the camera and I’m like, “Oh, bless you heart, Adam McKay.” But you’re exactly right, John, that you create bigger assholes and you make our heroes the underdogs, which is almost impossible not to root for. And then there are two other critical scenes in that film that very clearly are there in an attempt to make you like our heroes, right?

One is when they’re leaving, I think it’s Vegas, and the two young whipper-snappers who couldn’t get past the lobby just placed their bet and they’re super, super excited and they’re dancing. And Brad Pitt, of all people, right, the biggest star in the picture, turns around and says “Don’t dance.”

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** “This is what this means, this is what you’re betting on,” right? And it’s fine, but don’t dance, right?

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** Which is precisely the right tone and note to hit for the audience to go, “Okay, I’m glad you acknowledged it. Now, we’re cool. We can root for your guys.” And then of course the end piece where Steve Carell, who does a beautiful job in the film, you know, hems and haws, and is tortured about becoming a billionaire.

**Aline:** Well also, he’s been given — Steve Carell has been given what we would think of a more traditional thing which is that his brother committed suicide. And so that’s something that would be a more traditional piece of scene where —

**John:** I could have lost all of that. I don’t know how you felt about that.

**Aline:** Although the scene where he was in the support group and just comes in as really disruptive and leaves, I just thought it was amazing.

**John:** If you we’re going to lose —

**Rawson:** I loved that scene.

**John:** If you’re going to lose that plot line, you basically lose Marisa Tomei, you lose sort of any other woman you recognize, which is a challenge, but —

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** But that scene where Steve Carell’s character sort of talks to Marisa Tomei about it, the way that that’s edited, I thought was just beautiful.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** And really one of the few moments in the film where I felt pathos, right? I felt really attached and understood his struggle. You know, I was angry at the bad guy — you know, at everybody.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Rawson:** But like that was the one time where I felt like an emotional connection. So I can understand very easily cutting that scene out because it’s sort of, you know, off book a little bit. I think it does what it’s supposed to do which is make you understand that this is a person who has gone through real trouble in his life and that you care about him and want him to come out the other side of that. And I guess this sort of vindicates —

**Aline:** I mean, you know, it’s a good kind of segue into one other thing I wanted to say kind of in general about this time for me every year when you look back on these movies is, you know how you can judge — they say you can judge a country by how it treats its women, that that’s a good hallmark of how free it is and how much democracy it has. I feel the same way about movies, and I feel like every year there’s movies that I really like but I wish they had drilled down a little harder on the women. Because I will judge a movie differently if they managed to get in an interesting complicated female character.

And there’s a thing which I didn’t realize was a thing until last night which is there’s this thing where there are leads in movies now, particularly in these genre pieces, where the women just are spunky and they have moxie, but they don’t have characters. And you know what I’m talking about.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**Aline:** So this is a thing. I was talking to someone about this at a party last night because that is the overwhelming in the genre big movies, these women who are like defined by — they just have a lot of spunk and pluck but they don’t really have flaws or things to overcome. And if they don’t have flaws, if they’re not 360, or if they’re not just frankly in the movie at all, a lot — some of these movies, just if you look at the, you know, best reviewed movies of the year, some of them just don’t even have female characters in them or have very minor ones.

You know, to me, I just — it’s harder for me. And again, I told you, I’m turning into this guy, this lady. If you can’t invest in, you know, all genders in the same way and you can’t invest the female characters with the same kind of humanity, it’s just tougher for me to fully embrace the movie.

**John:** One thing I’ve noticed about all three of these movies, and I think part of the reason why they all succeed, is in each case the writer has great sympathy for all of the characters in the story. So looking at The Big Short, there’s an African-American woman who’s Steve Carell’s —

**Aline:** Yeah. She was the best female character in that movie. Also because she was just wrong.

**John:** She was wrong, but also, the movie had sympathy for like when everything was falling apart, you really could see like, “Oh, everything is falling apart for her, too.” And the movie allowed you to have sympathy for her.

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** So you understand her both being angry at the start and sort of being, you know —

**Aline:** Yeah, I preferred in a fun way — I mean, I love Marisa Tomei, but Marisa Tomei’s character was a thing we’ve seen before.

**John:** It’s just functional.

**Aline:** Which is, yes, functional. Whereas that lady was, she’d also gotten like opened the door and the snow had fallen in on her.

**John:** It’s such a great example of like Steve Carell like at the very start acknowledges that she’s pregnant and sort of says nothing more. And then it’s like, all this time has passed and now she has a baby and all that stuff. And it was a great recall on the character.

Another examples of sort of sympathy for characters, in Room after the boy escapes, just the police officer, the cop, who like figures out like where it is, and like, had such sympathy for like that’s a character who only has a very limited window of time but like just drilled down and exactly nailed who she was and sort of why she was the right person to be in the backseat of the car with him, just brilliant and genius.

And then sympathy, I think even in Spotlight, where you get to like Jamey Sheridan’s character, who has been protecting the church. And you know, we suddenly are showing up at his doorstep and sort of ruining his Christmas. I still had sympathy for why he was doing what he was doing. And so it’s so easy to make terrible villains, but to have sympathy for these villains too in some of these cases is a huge achievement.

**Rawson:** Yes. I mean I agree. The one thing — I mean on your point of, you know, not having fully-baked female characters in these pictures. But if you look at like The Big Short, I guess my question would be, that’s a non-fiction novel. And so the characters in that novel are all men. Do you think that McKay should have made one of them a woman? Or is that — or I guess that’s like what are you supposed to do when the story is about dudes doing these things?

**Aline:** Yes. I mean but then we’re just pointing to the fact that he invented a female character. Or I don’t know, maybe that character exists.

**Rawson:** I can’t remember.

**Aline:** But, you know, he created some. So that’s, you know, obviously some stories are that. Again, those tend to be the stories that we’re telling more and that we’re privileging. So if you make more movies with just a more of a diversity of characters, gender-wise and frankly race-wise.

But I’m just, you know, I’m sitting here again with you guys, like your movies always have female characters that are interesting and weird and Go is — and you do, too. I mean, you’re also, you do a thing which I enjoy and which Craig does, too, which is, you’ll write female characters who are just kind of assholes.

And that’s, you know, we deserve to have — I mean, my favorite thing about Identity Thief is that she’s an asshole. And then she’s not, of course.

**Rawson:** Right.

**Aline:** And she’s that great. But men get to be assholes, men get to be flawed, men get to be messes, men get to be complicated. And I sort of feel like, you know, for women, we just — between the genre movies and the smaller movies, I think we’re restricting ourselves a little bit in that regard.

Obviously, if it’s a movie where, you know, it’s about men — if it’s, you know, if it’s all about the — you know, the basketball championship. But I still think that to really depict a 360 world, you have to include their voices in it and do a good job with them.

**Rawson:** Yeah, absolutely.

**John:** All right. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a gift that my daughter got for Christmas. It’s called Compose Yourself and it’s these clear plastic cards that have measures of music on them, just like simple notes on them.

And what’s smart about it is, because they’re clear, you can flip them over and turn them around and look at the measures different ways. And it goes to a website and you punch in the code number on each of these cards. It builds a song both into sort of simple note melody, but also like full orchestration. And so it’s a great way of sort of like looking at this is what notes look like on the card, this is what it actually sounds like when you put it together.

So for, you know, anybody who’s interested in sort of music theory, or sort of like sort of the call and response of measures, it’s really, really cool. So I really dug it.

**Rawson:** What’s it called?

**John:** It’s called Compose Yourself. It’s by a guy name Philip Sheppard and there’ll be a link to that in the show notes.

**Rawson:** Cool.

**Aline:** Great. What do you got?

**Rawson:** I have a game that I love that is not out yet, it’s called The Division.

**John:** All right.

**Rawson:** Tom Clancy’s The Division. It’s for Xbox One. It will be PS4 and PC platform. It comes out in March. I played the Alpha. December 9th to the 12th is a very small window. I’ve been waiting for this game for about three-and-a-half years. I’ve been going to E3 and playing it and waiting and waiting and waiting.

And it is fantastic and super fun. It’s a third person RPG shooter, set in kind of post-viral outbreak Manhattan. And your job with your friends, up to three friends, is to get services back online — electricity, water, paramedic, police, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s a super fun game to play. But it’s so beautiful. The light and weather effects are incredible and some of the best I’ve ever seen.

And if you like video games at all, The Division, Tom Clancy’s The Division, comes out in March.

**Aline:** Wow! Can I just take this moment to say I’ve never played a video game?

**Rawson:** Oh. Aline.

**Aline:** Never.

**John:** Never even on your phone?

**Rawson:** Never once?

**Aline:** No, on my phone. But I never like sat down with a remote.

**John:** With Xbox controller.

**Aline:** Yes. My kids do it constantly and I wouldn’t even know where — so I guess I did Wii back in the day and I can do some Guitar Hero. So that counts.

**John:** My daughter first learned how to play NBA 2K14 from your sons playing that game.

**Rawson:** NBA 2K16 is supposed to be the best sports game ever made.

**John:** I completely agree. I remember watching your kids playing it with Amy and I thought they were just watching basketball. That’s how good it looks like.

**Aline:** Yes. The graphics are insane. You know I often think they’re watching basketball, too.

I’m going to do again because I’m turning into this guy. I’m just going to beg everyone to go and see The Hunting Ground. I know it’s been out for a while but they just aired it on CNN again.

It’s so good. And it’s so important. And it’s so infuriating. And it’s so interesting. And it’s super well-made. And I would really just go see The Hunting Ground and then go to the website. And they’re talking about something that was, you know, I went to Take Back the Night marches when I was in college and it’s still going on. And it’s time to do something about it. And it’s just so worthwhile.

**John:** Cool. Great. That’s our show for this week. So as always, our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Aline:** I don’t see Stuart Friedel anywhere here.

**John:** Stuart Friedel is off on assignment. No, he’s off — just —

**Aline:** Stuart?

**John:** Stuart — where’s Stuart? We’re recording this on New Year’s Day, so Stuart has the day off.

**Rawson:** Happy New Year!

**John:** Happy New Year to everyone. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week. A reminder that we are doing a live show on January 25th with guests Jason Bateman and Lawrence Kasdan who wrote a little movie called —

**Aline:** Well done.

**John:** Yes. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and The Empire Strikes Back, and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

**Aline:** Where are you doing that?

**John:** We’re doing that downtown in Los Angeles. So you should come see it.

**Aline:** Fantastic.

**John:** It’s a benefit for Hollywood HEART so you guys — we can get tickets for you. But if you, as a listener, would like tickets, there’s a link in the show notes where you get them. You can also just go to hollywoodheart.org/upcoming.

Our show is available on iTunes. So click and subscribe in iTunes so everyone knows that you’re subscribing to our show. Leave us a comment because we like to read through those comments.

If you’d like to listen to one of our back episodes, like the Frozen episode with Director Jennifer Lee, you can go to scriptnotes.net. There’s also an app which you can listen to all those back episodes. On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig, who’s not here, is @clmazin. Rawson, are you on Twitter?

**Rawson:** I’m at Twitter. I’m on Twitter @rawsonthurber.

**John:** Aline Brosh McKenna is not on Twitter but she’s on Instagram but not even publicly.

**Aline:** No.

**John:** You’re secret on Instagram, too. No. She’s unreachable.

**Aline:** I live on a desert island.

**John:** But if you have a question for any of us, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com and we’ll try to answer your questions. And thank you all very much and thank you Rawson and thank you Aline.

**Rawson:** Thank you.

**Aline:** Thank you.

**John:** All right. Bye.

**Aline:** Bye.

**Rawson:** Bye.

Links:

* [Rawson Marshall Thurber](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1098493/) on episodes [100](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode), [101](http://johnaugust.com/2013/101-qa-from-the-live-show), [123](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-holiday-spectacular) and [124](http://johnaugust.com/2013/qa-from-the-holiday-spectacular), and [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/RawsonThurber)
* [Aline Brosh McKenna](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0112459/) on episodes [60](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes), [76](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice), [100](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode), [101](http://johnaugust.com/2013/101-qa-from-the-live-show), [119](http://johnaugust.com/2013/positive-moviegoing), [123](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-holiday-spectacular), [124](http://johnaugust.com/2013/qa-from-the-holiday-spectacular) [152](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-rocky-shoals-pages-70-90), [161](http://johnaugust.com/2014/a-cheap-cut-of-meat-soaked-in-butter), [175](http://johnaugust.com/2014/twelve-days-of-scriptnotes), [180](http://johnaugust.com/2015/bad-teachers-good-advice-and-the-default-male), [200](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-200th-episode-live-show) and [219](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-one-where-alines-show-debuts)
* [Room](http://roomthemovie.com/#/) on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3170832/) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_(2015_film)), and [the novel](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0316098329/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Spotlight](http://spotlightthefilm.com/) on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1895587/) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(film))
* [The Big Short](http://www.thebigshortmovie.com/) on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1596363/) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short_(film)), and [the book](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393338827/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Compose Yourself](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00W3SREPG/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Tom Clancy’s The Division](http://tomclancy-thedivision.ubi.com/game/en-us/home/)
* [The Hunting Ground](http://www.thehuntinggroundfilm.com/) on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4185572/) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunting_Ground)
* [Get your tickets now for Scriptnotes, Live on January 25](http://hollywoodheart.org/upcoming/) with [Jason Bateman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Bateman) and [Lawrence Kasdan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kasdan), a benefit for [Hollywood HEART](http://hollywoodheart.org)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/scriptnotes-holiday-show-2015).

**Malcolm Spellman:** This is Malcolm Spellman. I’m a guest on Scriptnotes this week. I swear a lot, so don’t listen to this podcast in the car with your kids, or the old folks in your family, or they’ll hate you. Craig and John August made me say this. Merry Christmas.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 228 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and…

Audience: Things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Is that right?

**John:** We have some pros. Yeah. Craig, welcome to our third holiday special I believe.

**Craig:** If you say so.

**John:** All right. So, people who are listening at home don’t have a sense of where this is. So, can you do some really great scene description so people reading at home get a sense of what this movie feels like?

**Craig:** Interior.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Generic auditorium. Stadium seating. The crowd is — the theater is packed.

**John:** Which is nice, yeah.

**Craig:** Everyone looks vaguely writerly. Not too attractive, but not horrifying, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** A lot of J.Crew and Gap.

**John:** Yeah. I would agree so.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the two hosts are at the front of the stage welcoming their audience to what’s going to be a really great night. So usually on the podcast we can have like one guest, sometimes two guests. These live shows, we can cram up to four guests into an episode, and that’s what we’re doing tonight.

We should just start with our first guest because —

**Craig:** No banter?

**John:** Well, we can banter.

**Craig:** That was it. Okay, first guest.

**John:** That was our banter. We just started. We didn’t plan this at all. But we should start with our first guest because he’s probably been our most popular single appearance guest —

**Craig:** Disturbing.

**John:** In history.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So this gentleman, he first appeared in Episode 185. He is a producer on the television program called Empire. And he’s the one and only Malcolm Spellman. Malcolm Spellman is right here.

So, Malcolm, you have your name big up on that screen right behind you. How is that? How does that feel?

**Malcolm:** I’m winning.

**John:** You’re winning? How does it feel to have your name in the credits every week on a television program like Empire, like a huge hit?

**Malcolm:** Fifteen years working, three credits, two of them on Empire is good. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It does feel good.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, it took a long time.

**John:** So, welcome to our show here. And part of why I wanted to have you here is because I have so many things I want to ask you about because I have just no sense of what your opinion is going to be. And so I have a list of like random topics. It’s like, “Ask Malcolm about this topic and it’s going to be great, is my hunch.” So this is our last episode we’ll be recording before Star Wars comes out. So I want to know, what does Malcolm Spellman think about Star Wars?

**Malcolm:** Hey, I’m really, really excited about it. And, you know, it’s one of the most important movies for me. it’s a visceral memory, you know what I’m saying? They fucked up the last three, so I’m primed up. [laughs] I’m primed to be there.

**Craig:** They did fuck up the last three. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** They did. They did.

**Craig:** They, by the way, I like that we’re saying they, like it wasn’t one guy.

**Malcolm:** So, no, I’m excited to get in there. I think it’s the most important. And similar to Marvel, it is a mythology for movies. Like it’s super specific. Everyone’s imitating whatever but it’s the most important one out there.

**Craig:** Did you see this thing in WIRED? They said something like, “We will not live to see the last Star Wars sequel. There are going to be so many of them, assuming this works,” that’s kind of incredible. Like it’s never going to stop now.

**Malcolm:** Do they know your relationship to number nine?

**Craig:** My relationship?

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was my idea. That?

**Malcolm:** With Rian, but —

**Craig:** Oh.

**Malcolm:** It was funny like when — he’s friends with Rian Johnson and when that —

**Craig:** Wait, you’re friends with Rian Johnson.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, but he’s better with you all, you know —

**Craig:** Okay.

**Malcolm:** You guys. You know how it is.

**Craig:** He’s Swedish. A little Swede.

**Malcolm:** I’m his black friend. [laughs]

**Craig:** You are. By the way, you literally are like totally —

**Malcolm:** Everybody is. Everybody. [laughs]

**Craig:** Like from top to bottom.

**Malcolm:** But I remember when it came around, I actually was with him before any of you guys. He was taking me to a Godzilla screening and he was blushing and levitating. And then you realize when you’re talking to him — again, that’s why I’m saying about, important to the mythology, there isn’t anything else out there like it, you know what I’m saying? And, yes, so they’re going to keep pimping until it’s done.

**Craig:** Don’t you think like if Star Wars had been, instead of a movie it had been written down as a story 2,000 years ago, we all would be going to Jedi church.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s actually better than the Bible. It’s more exciting, I think.

**Malcolm:** Definitely better than scientology. [laughs]

**Craig:** Scientology makes no sense.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Scientology, they literally make you pay like you want to see a sequel, you have to pay for like extra —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It is. It’s mythological.

**John:** They want you to pay for the sequels on Star Wars movies but like you get to experience it for free and like —

**Craig:** Wait, wait, we have to pay for those? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. There’s no Netflix equivalent of scientology, I believe. You can’t just sort of like, you know, buy once and watch it forever.

**Craig:** You can’t get a subscription to jump right to Xenu. You got to really work.

**John:** Yeah, again and again.

**Craig:** Meanwhile, we’re literally in the middle of scientology world — I mean, they could, right?

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] Absolutely. Or like Stuart and his parents, like you can actually like just get their subscription to Netflix and not actually pay for it yourself. [laughs]

Can I have a show of hands here in the audience —

**Craig:** Stuart!

**John:** Who is watching Netflix or another streaming service using their parents’ login?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Wow. See, I had a hunch. We have a connected audience.

**Malcolm:** That’s why we’re broke. [laughs]

**Craig:** Alan, we’ve got a problem.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’ll talk about that when you’re —

**John:** Yeah, indeed.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So it’s great that people are watching these shows but they’re not —

**Craig:** They’re sponging.

**John:** They’re sponging a bit.

**Craig:** Off their parents.

**John:** Off their parents. How dare they.

**Craig:** It would mean I’d have to talk to my parents.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s totally worth the subscription.

**John:** Malcolm, I have another question if you’re ready for another question.

**Malcolm:** I’m ready.

**John:** Okay. So we were talking about the Marvel Universe and so now they’re busy getting ready to do Black Panther and they have a director on board —

**Malcolm:** Ask me the black questions, right? [laughs]

**John:** I’m going to ask you the black questions. I want to know your opinion on —

**Malcolm:** It’s going to define my career. [laughs]

**John:** I want to know your opinion on hiring a sort of targeting, you know —

**Craig:** It’s the black question. It’s happening.

**John:** Targeting minority filmmakers to make the one minority character in a franchise.

**Malcolm:** I think it’s all part of a growing narrative, you know what I’m saying? So obviously, this discussion of diversity and black folks and black filmmakers particularly has become more and more relevant and important. And because of shit like Empire and Black-ish, whatever, and we’re winning, they’re like, “Oh, fuck.” And you look at something like Creed and that’s immediately where you’re like, I hate to say this, no white people were going to think of that story, you know what I’m saying? They just wasn’t because they don’t — none of them was going to imagine what the fuck is Creed’s son doing. And that is why you need —

**Craig:** I’m sorry. That is undeniable. There isn’t one of you white people in here that would have thought of that. It’s a fact.

**Malcolm:** It didn’t happen in how many years.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. It was always like you were closer to probably like Rocky’s — like remember when he had a robot? The robot would have happened first.

**Malcolm:** Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s, I think, a great example of why Marvel doing this, whether they’re following a trend, I’m sure the reason they’re doing it is because they don’t want to get shit because, you know, they didn’t have any black filmmakers involved with the project. But the ancillary benefit of that will be that you get this perspective which is the most potent voice in pop culture.

And we forget that because we haven’t been able to do our thing in this medium. And everything else, we kill it and make it hot for everybody. And now they’re about to discover, like you look at what happened with Creed and there’s a good chance Coogler will do the same thing for Black Panther, like add something new and vital —

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** To the shit. So I was —

**Craig:** I mean, I honestly think that maybe there is a part of them that thinks we better do this to avoid some kind of pity.

**Malcolm:** I agree.

**Craig:** I think though, I mean, don’t they just smell money? I mean, isn’t that — you know.

**Malcolm:** They’re mostly scared.

**Craig:** Really?

**Malcolm:** They were just going out to all the black folks. They were like, “We just don’t want to get yelled at.”

**Craig:** Oh, because if we make Black Panther, we can’t make it with a white guy actually.

**Malcolm:** That’s right. And what they will discover is, “Oh, shit, this dude had some original ideas that no one else was going to have and gave it a freshness, you know what I’m saying, and they’re going to win with it.”

**John:** Right. So you are our TV friend. So John Landgraf who runs FX Network had a famous quote this last year. He said like, “We’ve reached peak TV. There’s too much television.” As a person who makes television, is there too much television out there?

**Malcolm:** It definitely feels like that, but it’s growing. There’s more people getting in with people more — like the real players are just emerging. Like Google wants to get involved, you know what I’m saying? [laughs] And SoundCloud and Spotify.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** I just had this big meeting with the digital folks at the agency and there are ways like you know how we were coming up — the last five years whatever was feeling like how is anybody making money off this shit, right? They now know these people are making money. And they were saying Apple has this really detailed complex layout on how, like they know who’s going to pay this much in the first window. In the second window, who, for free, will let you feed them all kinds of ads and stuff.

I just watched a standup comedy show on YouTube and I spent $1 on it, right? I think once that gets cracked open, there’s going to be a whole — like once you can start billing a show to your cell phone bill for $1 or whatever, there might be so much more money out there than anyone can fucking imagine.

**Craig:** I think there is.

**Malcolm:** That all this shit can be supported.

**Craig:** I think there is. And what I think about sometimes when I look at the landscape now and I see, I don’t know, hundreds of channels just through the wire and then God knows how many if you include just things that are on the Internet, and the fact that people are still making money and then I think back, once there were three. How much money were those — oh, my god.

**Malcolm:** I know.

**Craig:** They must have been making so much money. It’s like the fact that they ever canceled anything is insane.

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why would you even cancel it? Don’t show anything. It doesn’t even matter.

**Malcolm:** No. They were making so much money it made them stupid. They were like, “Fuck, let’s don’t keep all this money right here.”

**Craig:** It’s so true. It’s so true. It made them stupid and it also made stupid people think they were smart because they thought it was them. No, anybody, anyone, you could have shot someone and put their dead body in a chair and NBC would have made money in 1963.

**Malcolm:** That’s right. That’s right.

**John:** That’s the new primetime special. It’s called “The Dead Body in the Chair” and it’ll get good ratings.

What is TV though? So you had a meeting with these digital folks of your agency. What are they even talking about with TV? Because like the digital stuff used to be like, “Oh, that’s the extra bonus. Like it’s the webisodes for The Office.” But now, like what’s the difference? I mean, if you’re making money somehow, that’s — if these people who are in the audience who are aspiring writers, what do you tell them? Should they be trying to write for, you know, Fox like you are or should they be trying to write for, you know, YouTube?

**Malcolm:** I think, well, what it feels like is right now, most of these companies are still thinking — like Netflix and Hulu, they’re still called digital companies even though they’re doing traditional formats, right? But that shit is about to change. Like I think it’s about a year or so away. I’m working with some folks on trying to change it. And once that happens, I think it’s going to all happen organically, right? I think the big gap right now in digital that I see, I almost don’t want to say this shit because I’m like, man, fuck, I might get rich off of it but — [laughs]

**Craig:** Well, if you say it in front of me, I will absolutely get rich off of it.

**Malcolm:** I think like what hasn’t happened yet is people like us, right, who are doing well and creating — when I say high-level, whatever, right, I’m saying the shit people pay for. Whether or not you guys like the shit we work on or whatever, that’s what I mean by it, right. The people who are creating high-level content are all like, “Yeah, fuck, digital could be awesome but I’m not passing up.” I know what your quote is, you know what I’m saying, I’m — you’re like —

**Craig:** How?

**Malcolm:** Because you’ve been bragging motherfucker. You be like, “Malc, guess how much money I just made.” [laughs]

**Craig:** I forgot about that. That’s how.

**Malcolm:** So there’s no way they’re going to really get you, right? Not yet.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** But what’s going to happen is there’s going to be people like me who aren’t quite where you’re at but make more money than the average person going there. And if I go in there and do high-level shit, and when I say high-level I mean the same level what you’re getting on FX and HBO, but it’s whatever format I want and it’s funded, that’s when you’re going to start getting to the shit where it’s like, well, what do you do with a 15-minute pilot, right? You put it on fucking YouTube and if you got hot motherfuckers in it, it gets 30 million fucking views and if you’re charging people $1, you’re like, “Oh, fuck,” you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** We should mention that there may be some language in this podcast.

**John:** There’s a possibility, so —

**Craig:** If you’re in the car with your kids.

**John:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** But I think that’s the new frontier. I think there’s going to be some people like me who are going to be willing to, for creative freedom and the potential for huge upside, pass up — because, you know, I’m in that weird level where it’s like I’m not getting Mazin/John August money, but I’m getting enough money that it might make me feel a little bit scared to go in here and do this shit for free.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** But if I do it — you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Well, but the upside to it, I mean there’s ownership opportunities —

**Malcolm:** That’s right.

**Craig:** That happen at those levels. I mean, I think there are a lot of people that make a lot of money that it’s guaranteed money, it’s employee money, but then who do take these risks. I see it all the time. And then, you know, some people can do both. They can say, “All right, well, I’ll do a job but now I’m going to try something that’s mine.” And I think that’s really exciting. I mean, there’s more opportunities now than ever before.

I mean, for people out here thinking about television, I mean, would it be fair to say from your perspective, as somebody that’s, you know, now at the top of the heap of a network which is still a thing, that it doesn’t make any sense to write for a network or write for a not-network but rather to write something that’s exciting and see who grabs it.

**Malcolm:** By the time you get done, yes, that will be a thing. That’s going to be the big breakthrough. Like if your fucking idea had to come in at 17 minutes to be perfect and awesome, people are going to start reading that shit and there’s going to be people like me out there or whoever who are like, “Oh, I know what to do with this.”

**Craig:** It’s amazing how long the structure has lasted from —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just the fact that there’s a season that’s based on when they used to roll new cars out. That’s why we had the whole, you know, September — and then the 30-minute/hour format is back from old days.

**John:** It’s arbitrary. Malcolm, what you’re describing sounds amazing but it doesn’t sound like a thing that just a writer does. It sounds like you are going to create stuff. And so it’s not just like writing a script. It’s not writing a spec for somebody. You actually have to make the thing that’s going to be — like the reason you have ownership is because you’re going to make the final product.

**Malcolm:** That’s right.

**John:** You’re just not writing the script, so —

**Malcolm:** Yes.

**John:** It’s taking ownership of the whole process. And that’s a lot to ask of somebody. People just want to like throw Courier around on a page and that doesn’t sound like it’s enough to be that new kind of television thing.

**Malcolm:** But I think it’s going to be move so quickly that entities will exist by the time — I mean because you’re looking like how fast does it take to mount this stuff, is entities will exist that know what to do with it. Meaning, if you just write some stuff in Courier and the people I’m working with have now got four or five projects going that are proving to be lucrative or whatever, I can’t write everything, you know what I’m saying. You’re going to look around and be like, “Oh,” you know what I’m saying? I think exactly what we grew up doing is going to happen. And the digital space is just going to be way more free and open.

**John:** We’ll hope. Tonight’s theme is basically all creators who created TV shows. So we’re going to have answers to some of these questions for people who are doing the kind of stuff that you’re talking about doing. And we should get to it, I think.

**Craig:** Yeah. So we have to get rid of Malcolm is what you’re saying?

**John:** We have to get rid of Malcolm.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Malcolm, thank you very — you’re going to come back at the end.

**Craig:** All right, Malcolm.

**John:** Malcolm. Our next guests are the co-creators — well, Malcolm, he’s like family. He’s not a guest. Are the co-creators of Another Period. We’re going to show a clip from this but I want to set it up because it’s even better if you sort of know the setup on this. This is about the Bellacourt sisters. They are trying to enter high society. They have invited Helen Keller over to boost their standings on high society and they’re trying to impress the Marquis de Sainsbury who’s keeper of the social register. And so keep this all in mind as you watch this clip from Another Period.

**Natasha Leggero:** And it takes place in 1902.

**John:** Oh, 1902. You’ll see that by —

[Video Plays]

**Female:** More cocaine wine?

**Male:** Yes.

**Female:** A little bit more won’t hurt.

**Male:** Any lady in Newport society needs to know how to hold her liquor.

**Female:** Well, I can hold my liquor better than anyone.

**Female:** Me, too.

**Male:** Oh, my goodness, that sounds like a challenge. Shall we see who can drink it the fastest?

**Female:** Oh, yes. Yes. Helen, other person. Let’s race.

**Male:** One, two, three go.

**Female:** Wait. I have to tell Helen we’re doing a contest.

**Female:** Ahhh. You are all piles of trash. I am a mountain of gold. I won. I took the egg. Argh.

**Female:** I won, you dumb haybag. You don’t count.

**Female:** Second place. Why am I always second place?

**Female:** You’re not second place. Lillian’s second place. I’m first place. I won.

**Female:** No one asked you to play, whore. You’re fat. Other person? Other person? I’m the one that taught her to communicate. Without me she’d be nothing. You’re nothing without me, Keller. Nothing.

**Female:** I love you, Annie.

**Female:** That’s a Ming vase, you deaf bitch. We only have 17 of those.

**Female:** I wasn’t totally sure what was happening. But I knew I wanted to stab someone.

**Male:** Let go of my sister. You heathens. What is this, Baltimore?

**Female:** Intruder.

[Video Ends]

**John:** Can we welcome up Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome.

**Riki Lindhome:** Hi, guys.

**John:** Good lord, how did you make — this show is — oh, I love your show so, so much.

**Riki:** Thank you.

**John:** And, Craig, have you watched the show?

**John:** He doesn’t watch anything.

**Craig:** Nothing.

**Natasha:** He’s been sending us emails all week with his favorite lines.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Ah.

**Craig:** I’m like, “No, this is my favorite line.” So I don’t watch shows, as you guys know, and John said, well —

**Natasha:** That’s a thing? You just don’t watch shows? [laughs]

**Craig:** It’s not like on purpose. I’m just lazy as fuck and —

**John:** He plays Fallout 4. That’s basically —

**Craig:** I do. I play Fallout 4. Look, it started bad where I was talking about crossword puzzles with Natasha and she was like, blech. Now we’re talking about Fallout 4, it’s like —

**Natasha:** No, you were talking about crossword puzzle like chat rooms.

**Craig:** That’s cool. I don’t know why anyone’s laughing. So I started watching this show and I’m obsessed. I mean, honestly, in a fair and just world, they would be talking about the show the way they talk about Mad Men. I’m serious. I’m dead serious.

**Riki:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Because I have this thing having gone through in my life times where I was working on pure comedy. Just comedy that is completely pure. It is the hardest thing to do. In fact, I want to —

**John:** Yeah — !

**Craig:** That’s fucking pathetic. [laughs] So I want to actually start by asking you guys a question about process because — so your show is, I mean, I guess you could say it’s loosely a parody of Downton Abbey but not really. It’s kind of its own thing.

**John:** Can you tell us how you pitched the show? Because I mean, it’s so specific and the voice and the vision is so specific. What was the genesis of your show?

**Riki:** Well, we had a few glasses of wine. [laughs]

**Craig:** Cocaine wine.

**Riki:** No, just regular wine.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Riki:** Natasha and I, we decided we wanted to make something. I mean when —

**Natasha:** Yeah. You know, we had this idea for this like fake reality show about these like dumb idiots and then I had this other idea about this other thing that took place in 1902 and Riki was like, “Well, why don’t we combine them?” And so we did that. [laughs]

**Riki:** But we kind of knew the idea was too weird to pitch. And so we went out and made like a 15-minute short. We spent real money and made a real short. And there was actually a scene from the short in the pilot.

**Natasha:** And I had read a book about Newport at the turn of the century before they introduced income tax. Like 90% of the wealth in America was all in Newport, Rhode Island. So it’s like a really fascinating place. And if you go there, you can still like go to all these house museum tours and see the whole world there. And people were living like it was bananas.

**John:** Yeah.

**Natasha:** And it’s American history because everyone loves — you know, Downton Abbey, it’s not our history, so.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, I think it’s a brilliant choice actually because there’s something inherently funny about wealthy aristocratic Americans because Americans don’t really — it’s not like we deserve it, you know. We’re not nobility.

But I want to ask you guys about the relentless and exhausting nature of writing stuff like this because your show is, I guess it’s what, like 25 minutes, I mean when you take out commercial and stuff?

**Natasha:** No, it’s 20.

**Craig:** It’s 20?

**Natasha:** Yeah, it’s so short.

**Craig:** Twenty minutes is a lot.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because it’s 20 minutes, every page is like five or six jokes a page. But more importantly, you never get a break because nothing can be ever taken seriously in the show, that’s the magic of it. So there’s no point where anyone can just stop and be reflexive or —

**Natasha:** Nope.

**Craig:** I mean, how do you survive the pace of it, of writing it?

**Riki:** You’re making it sound so hard.

**Craig:** Maybe it was just hard for me. [laughs]

**Riki:** No. [laughs] I mean, we work really, really hard at it. I would love to say like, “Oh, it’s just natural and we just come up with this stuff.” But we, like, kill ourselves to make this show. We think about it from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed.

**Craig:** Right.

**Natasha:** But it’s also the rhythm of a show that’s inspiring to us. So we want to be doing something fast-paced and funny and finding the funniest people we can to try to make that happen.

**Craig:** The cast is amazing.

**Riki:** We got so lucky. And that was part of it is we had all the cast, we had their pictures at the end of the writing table and we would be like, “Okay, Brett Gelman is so hilarious. What’s the funniest stuff he does?” And we’d watch clips of Brett and we would write specifically for him and then it just makes it easier and fun.

**Craig:** That’s my part, by the way, if he croaks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Riki:** You’re Hamish?

**Craig:** I’m stepping in. Yeah, for sure.

**Riki:** Hamish, the outwoodsman?

**Craig:** yeah.

**Riki:** Yeah. [laughs] Slash abortionist?

**Craig:** Yeah. Slash Jew hunter. Don’t forget that one.

**Riki:** Yes, yes, yes. [laughs]

**John:** I would love to see the show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So you shot this sort of presentation pilot. So it’s 15 minutes and is it sort of like the first episode that we saw? Was it like the pilot or just different scenes from the show? What did it feel like?

**Natasha:** We hadn’t really done any of the downstairs. We were just doing the upstairs. And then I think Comedy Central wanted to see more downstairs. And then we all got very inspired by the downstairs people because —

**Craig:** They are amazing.

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Garfield.

**John:** Garfield and Chair.

**Riki:** Yeah, it’s —

**Natasha:** With Michael Ian Black and Armen Weitzman and Christina Hendricks and —

**Riki:** Yeah, Christina Hendricks is hilarious in the show.

**Craig:** She’s really funny. And you never know. Sometimes those people aren’t. Those people like dramatic actors —

**Natasha:** Those people.

**Craig:** The dramatic actors sometimes don’t fit in with that kind of comedy. And she does brilliantly.

**Riki:** She was so game to do anything. She had so much physical comedy. She was just totally fun.

**Natasha:** And I think she used to do comedy before.

**Craig:** Ah-ha.

**Natasha:** You know, or like in theater or whatever in college.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** So David Wain is on your show and is also from Children’s Hospital. He’s been a guest on the podcast before. But Children’s Hospital is a show that it’s like every episode is just completely brand new and there’s no continuity episode to episode. But you guys actually have a lot of continuity. So talk to us about figuring out how to be funny in an episode but also have arcs that sort of cross episodes. What was the plan? Did you know that Chair’s back story would be revealed in episode 6? What was the plan?

**Riki:** Yes. We map out the entire season. We have the luxury, I guess. Some people don’t like it but I think it’s a luxury to write the whole season at once before we start filming. And then we cross-board every episode. So we shoot all 10 episodes kind of at once.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Riki:** Yeah. So if we have an actor in two episodes or five episodes, we can shoot them out in two days or three days or whatever.

**Natasha:** That’s why it has to be kind of fast-paced because you have to be able to jump plot lines, if you have to. [laughs] Like figure out —

**Craig:** But it’s incredibly helpful, I would imagine, that you can — I mean, I guess part of it is you’re forced to by budget and all the rest of it, but that you know the whole season. That means you can go back. And I assume you do a lot of backwards, retrofitting, because it really does feel so well-machined. I mean, there’s so much craft in it. I’m really amazed by the show, I got to tell you.

**Natasha:** Oh, that’s so nice.

**Riki:** Thank you.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**Riki:** Thank you. We love it, too, but we’re biased, you know. [laughs]

**Craig:** Like I don’t believe your —

**Natasha:** No, it’s sweet. This is a very sincere, serious podcast. I love it.

**Riki:** But, yeah, we map out the whole season and we really think about every character and their arc and where they’re going to end up in episode 10. And then we have it, you know, just all up on our little board and then —

**Craig:** Sorry, I really love the show. That the character of Garfield is insane. Every character is either insane or so stupid as to be profoundly retarded.

**Riki:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** Or both. Your character particularly —

**Riki:** I’m both.

**Craig:** Is both profoundly retarded and insane.

**Riki:** Yes, and violent.

**Craig:** And violent.

**Riki:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** And yet, I actually managed to care. Like when Garfield comes back, I cared.

**Natasha:** Well, Garfield’s nice.

**Craig:** But he’s also crazy. I mean, he’s insane.

**Natasha:** Right.

**Riki:** I mean he’s best friends with a towel.

**Craig:** He puts the potato — yeah. And then the potato is like the new thing. Like that’s his new towel.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, you don’t have to see the show. You get it now, right?

**Natasha:** He might be the only nice person in the whole show.

**Craig:** Peepers has his moments. He is a man of honor.

**Natasha:** Right. That doesn’t mean he’s nice, though.

**Riki:** Peepers has his principles.

**Craig:** Yeah, he has principles.

**Riki:** I wouldn’t say he’s nice though.

**Craig:** Actually, he’s quite mean.

**Riki:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** So can you talk to us about the music because one of the most striking things and the reason why I love the Comedy Central, the blip at the end is because you have like this sort of heavy, hardcore rap soundtrack underneath it all. So there’s obviously a Downton Abbey influence, the upstairs, the downstairs, the striving for society. But then at what point do you figure out like, oh, we’re going to have cutaways like on the Kardashians, we’re going to drip — nail drops throughout it. When did that come? Was that part of your presentation? Was it always in the script?

**Natasha:** I don’t know. We always kind of like saw it that way somehow and then we asked Snoop Dogg to do the credit.

**Riki:** Natasha did the Roast with him, so —

**Natasha:** And so he did it and so him singing the song, like it kind of made it feel this reality vibe that we wanted and —

**Riki:** It just made us laugh so much when we had the cold open and then it would go into this hardcore rap song. We were like, “That feels right.”

**John:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Riki:** And so we just kept it going. And then when we had little bumpers at the end of each act, it’s like we just — I don’t know, it’s just funny, I think more than anything. You know, there’s no deeper meaning behind it other than that it made us laugh. [laughs]

**John:** All right. It feels like an incredibly challenging show to shoot. So is this shot here in town?

**Riki:** Yeah, in Silver Lake.

**John:** In Silver Lake, great. So —

**Craig:** Oh, I live really close to Silver Lake. So I’m just saying, if the guy dies —

**John:** If you need an extra in the background or a double.

**Craig:** Or if somebody kills him.

**Natasha:** It’s this old mansion in Silver Lake.

**John:** Right. And so, you’re basing out of there and you cross-board and cross-boarding means that you have all the scripts, you figure out what scenes you need and you’re shooting all those scenes with those actors no matter what episode they’re in.

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**John:** But do you just go mental? As actresses, do you go crazy with the responsibility of like, “Here’s what I need to do,” versus also, “I’m creating the show and responsible for the writing,” how do you balance all that?

**Riki:** Well, we have to work really hard. On Sundays, I memorize my dialogue for the whole week and I have someone come over and drill it with me so that I don’t feel, you know, like the last minute trying to memorize. So I have it down by the time we start our week. And then usually like two to five minutes before each scene, I’m like, “I need some time.” Like I need to just relax. I need to like be in a free space for a second. I can’t answer any wardrobe questions. I get no fires. Like someone else has to put them out in the next, like right before the scene. And that seems to help.

**Natasha:** That’s interesting because I feel like I use the energy of the stress and maybe just lash out as my character.

**Craig:** That makes absolute sense because your character — I mean, so your character is kind of a monster.

**Natasha:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** And your character is nuts and incredibly stupid. Her character can’t read.

**John:** Yeah.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So that’s like one of the basic —

**Natasha:** But that was common in the turn of the century. They thought if a woman read college level books it would shrink their ovaries.

**Craig:** There’s also the constant referral to weird like late 1800, early 19th Century or 20th Century understandings of medical science. I mean, the scene where the tension — like Chris Parnell plays Dr. Freud releasing their tension with this fucking vibrator, it’s —

**Riki:** That’s from the turn of the century. There’s so much real stuff in our show you wouldn’t believe it. Like cocaine wine was real.

**Craig:** Cocaine wine was real.

**Riki:** Like so many things are real, but yeah, Freud masturbating women to relieve hysteria happened. And so, of course, we’re like, “Oh, let’s all get masturbated together.” I don’t know if he did a group session but —

**Craig:** Like, you know, the mom’s there with her daughters and —

**Riki:** As a family. [laughs]

**Craig:** As a family, right. It wasn’t enough. She needed like a dildo machine. [laughs] This brings to mind a question.

I don’t have to tell you guys that we live in a time where people get in trouble constantly. Not for massive violations of taste but minor violations of taste at times. You guys kick the door down. You light stuff on fire. You don’t care. This show, while it’s lampooning racism and sexism and classism, it’s also like parallel with it. It’s like making fun of it and it’s with it.

Has there been a lot of backlash? Are you getting in trouble or you good?

**Riki:** I can’t believe how little backlash there’s been. We have a rape scene in episode 2 where —

**Craig:** I know.

**Riki:** One of our male characters gets raped and we were like just waiting for the, you know, backlash. We didn’t get it. You know, everyone on Twitter has got an opinion, but like it wasn’t like a mass, you know, hundreds of people. You know, there’s always one or two people who say something but —

**Craig:** A mass, by the way, is not hundreds of people. It’s like 100,000 people.

**Riki:** Sure.

**Craig:** Like if you say smoothing about like, I don’t know, a female superhero character —

**John:** As an example, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, as an example, you might get a thousand people that hate you in the news feed. But —

**Riki:** Yeah. I mean, we had a puppy hanging scene.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. The puppy hanging scene is great.

**Riki:** There’s so many —

**Natasha:** Yeah, like at least they PETA people can come after us. [laughs]

**Craig:** Somebody just —

**Riki:** I know. We have —

**Natasha:** I mean, they’re desperate for something to talk about.

**Riki:** Your character dressed in Mickface which is making fun of Irish people —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Riki:** It’s white makeup with freckles and a red wig. [laughs] And she did an anti-Irish song in her pageant.

**Craig:** It’s amazing.

**Riki:** And nothing. I don’t know. People don’t seem to get mad at us. I don’t know why.

**Craig:** I also love how the show brings in —

**Natasha:** Oh, because we’re in those fancy costumes.

**Craig:** I know. The customs basically do it, right? Like that covers everything.

A lot of times, though, in the show they’ll bring in characters that are historical of the time, roughly. So her character’s former lover is Ponzi, the guy that invented the Ponzi-scheme. And he’s basically trying to get money. He’s a total cad. He left her at the altar. And he’s back and she talks about how she spent a summer with him making love when she was 11. And there’s a picture of Ben Stiller man with 11-year-old girl and she just like — no letters, nothing. It’s amazing.

**Riki:** Nothing. [laughs]

**Craig:** And you guys are bulletproof. I love it.

**Riki:** I don’t understand it.

**John:** Maybe it’s the period that may help you though because it feels like, “Oh, well, it’s a period show.” It’s like, of course it’s different mores for that time. Yes, you’re making a joke —

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** I be if you tried to do the same joke that was meant to be set in present day times, people would be less comfortable with it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think they’re just magic.

**Natasha:** Like when I started doing standup, I realized if I wore a dress and gloves I could be meaner. And people wouldn’t get as mad. So maybe that’s kind of part of it.

**John:** Can you talk to us about the difference between writing for yourself as standup and writing for a character that you’re playing or for all these other characters? Is the process of coming up with a joke, of coming up with how you would actually get that idea across different based on who’s going to have to say that line.

**Natasha:** Yeah. Well, it’s very collaborative, our show. And we really think about every person and what they would be funniest doing.

**Riki:** Yeah, this is not a show where the leads take the — or the writers take the best lines. Like we make sure everyone is funny. We will do our best to make sure everyone is funny. [laughs]

**John:** Do you have table reads before you shoot? Or is that even possible with the block shooting you’re doing?

**Natasha:** It’s not possible, but we do have them.

**Riki:** Yeah. It really —

**John:** All right. Yes. Yes and yes.

**Riki:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah, yes.

**Riki:** But it’s also not possible, but yeah, we do have them.

**John:** And talk to us about improvisation because it feels like it would be much harder to improvise in a show that’s taking place in this period of times where and it’s also so serialized. Characters can’t go off and just do anything. Do you do those, you know, random last takes to try to get other —

**Natasha:** There are certain actors that we let do that like Tom Lennon and Mike Ian Black and David Wain and Brian Huskey are kind of made to do, you know —

**Riki:** 1902 dialogue.

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**Riki:** But most of us are not made to do that because we lose the affect. Or we’ll be like whatever or we’ll say something modern.

**Natasha:** You can’t say that. Like when she called her whore, it’s because her name is Hortense. Like you wouldn’t just call someone whore, right?

**Riki:** But Tom Lennon would be like, hot pudding, it’s a scandal. And you’re like, what does that mean? You know, you’re just like, okay.

**Craig:** Something like it was like butterscotch or scotch bucket.

**Riki:** Scotch frog hat.

**Craig:** Scotch frog, yeah, like what the fuck does that mean?

**Natasha:** He could do that for hours.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Natasha:** Just act surprised in 1902.

**Riki:** Yeah. We said some line to him and he goes, “What Christmas?” And it just sounded normal. And we’re like okay. But I personally cannot improvise like that, so I don’t.

**John:** Where are you guys at with a second season? What’s going on right now?

**Natasha:** We’re writing it.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** So it’s definitely, it’s going. It’s going to happen?

**Riki:** Oh yeah, we start filming in January.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Just down the street from Craig.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah, so —

**Craig:** And have you settled on all of the cast for the —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Settled? Settled on that?

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No Jews? No, like a Jew character? Like a funny — okay.

**Riki:** I mean I don’t know if we’ve thought of it that way.

**Natasha:** Are you an actor?

**Riki:** We’re not like no Jews. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yes. Yes, I am. I am an actor, of course. I’ve never done any acting, but right now —

**John:** Yeah. Craig Mazin just grew this beard by the way. And he will shave his beard —

**Craig:** Why would I — no, no, this is very —

**John:** It is a period beard.

**Craig:** I just want to be in the show.

**John:** We want you to have 18 seasons of your show.

**Riki:** Thank you.

**John:** So please keep writing your show.

**Natasha:** Thank you.

**Riki:** Yeah, everybody watch it.

**Craig:** Yeah, no. You guys really should watch it.

**Riki:** Maybe we’ll get more people to be mad. It would be nice to have a controversy because then it would get more attention.

**John:** Absolutely. So reference like green female superhero and you’ll get a lot of controversy. That’s our advice to you.

**Craig:** I’ve got in so much trouble. You don’t even want to know because I don’t wear dressing gloves. And boy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Natasha:** You guys should all access your parents’ cable provider and put in the number and watch it on Comedy Central on their website.

**Craig:** Yes, you guys go home and do this.

**Natasha:** It’s not on Hulu anymore.

**Craig:** Another Period, awesome, awesome show.

**John:** Natasha and Riki, thank you so much for coming here.

**Natasha:** Thank you.

**Riki:** Thank you for having us. Thank you.

**John:** Craig has a mild crush as you can see on —

**Craig:** On the show.

**John:** He has a talent crush. We also have a bit of a crush on this next show as does a lot of America. It is a show on Netflix. It is called —

**Craig:** Oh, you don’t know?

**John:** I know what it’s called but I want to see if —

**Craig:** Master of None.

**John:** All right. And we want to show you a small clip of this program so you can see what it’s about.

[Video Plays]

**Alan:** I got to say, out of the 15 X-Men movies that I’ve seen, that was definitely top nine.

**Aziz:** Yeah, there was, like, 30 heroes and 40 villains. There are just too many people in these movies now. Text from my dad — “Please come and fix my iPad. Now it won’t stop dinging.” Does your dad always text you to fix stuff?

**Alan:** I don’t think my dad knows how to text. He also hates talking in person. He averages, like, three words a week.

**Aziz:** Our dads are so weird. I told my dad I got to call back on The Sickening.

**Alan:** Oh, the black virus movie? That’s great.

**Aziz:** Thank you. I told him. He’s like, “Uh, okay. Can you fix my iPad?” How about, “Hey, son, great work,” or, “Hey, son, I’m proud of you”?

**Alan:** I have — I have never, ever heard my dad say the word ‘proud’. It’s always like, “That’s it? So that’s all you’ve done?” Like, if I went to the moon, he would honestly be like, “When are you going to Mars?”

**Aziz:** Yeah. “Oh, Brian, you went to the moon? That’s like graduating from community college. When are you gonna graduate from Harvard, AKA, go to Pluto?”

**Alan:** I just feel like Asian parents, they don’t have the emotional reach to say they’re proud or whatever. Have you ever hung out with a white person’s parents, though? They are crazy nice.

**Aziz:** Yeah.

**Alan:** I had dinner once with my last girlfriend’s mom, and by the end of that meal, she had hugged me more times than my family has hugged me in my entire life.

**Aziz:** Yeah, dude, most white families, they’d be so psyched to adopt me.

[Video Ends]

**John:** All right. Let’s welcome the co-creator of this wonderful program, Mr. Alan Yang. Sir, congratulations.

**Alan Yang:** Thanks, man.

**John:** I remember talking to you, we were both wearing aprons. We were at this crazy meat-filled event where they were roasting things. And you’re describing the show that you’re going to make with Aziz. I was like, that sounds cool.

**Alan:** Yeah. I wear that apron everywhere, though. Yeah, so it’s been kind of a long time gestating and evolving since we came up with it, but yeah, it got made. [laughs]

**John:** It got made, congratulations. So when you described it, you said it was going to be an eight episode — sorry, 10-episode series for Netflix and it was all going to be in New York and it was going to be Aziz and sort of individualized stories. He said it was Louis-like. And it’s that but it’s also so much more. It feels like it’s such an amazingly 2015 show.

**Alan:** Yeah. You know, we put kind of a large priority on making it hopefully feel different and fresh and hopefully original too, you know. So we kind of have this rubric of, “Hey, if you could see it on another show, maybe push harder and do another topic or do it in a new way or make it stretch over a longer time period.” Just anything we could do to make it feel original. And we had this idea from a long time ago where any characters we wanted for the episode, just the ones that we needed, we would use. So we wouldn’t have the same repertory cast in every episode because you know in real life, you know, if the three of us are buddies, we still don’t spend 24 hours a day together. So like not every story I go through involves you and Craig.

**Craig:** John and I do spend 24 hours.

**John:** Yeah, it basically is that.

**Alan:** Yeah, so you can have an episode with Aziz and alt person or Aziz and his parents or whatever and you might not see Eric Wareheim or Lena or whoever.

**John:** Cool. Give us a sense of your back story because I don’t know sort of how you got — I know you’re from Parks and Rec, but I don’t know you from before then. So how did you get started in this?

**Alan:** Yeah. So I majored in biology in college and that was just a rocket ship to comedy, just like right into — [laughs]

**Craig:** I did that, too. I did that, too. Were you pre-med?

**Alan:** I wasn’t really anything. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I loved writing and I loved comedy growing up, but that didn’t really seem like a real possibility, right?

I grew up in Riverside, California which is like an hour from here. And, oh, someone from Riverside, sorry about that buddy. [laughs] But yeah, so it’s just — I read a study that said it ranked all the cities in America in terms of how Bohemian they were by sort of a metric of how many people worked in creative fields or, you know, did kind of, you know, things that we do I guess. And number one on that list was LA because there’s a lot of entertainment people so they counted that as artistic for some reason. And the last place city on the entire list was Riverside which is crazy, which is like it’s an hour from here but I guess if you wanted to do something creative, you just get the hell out of here.

**John:** So you started at the bottom and worked your way up here.

**Alan:** Yeah. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s like that Drake song. [laughs]

**John:** Your life is a Drake song.

**Alan:** Yeah. So I went to school and, you know, I was doing biology and I kind of hated everyone. And I didn’t really like — like I felt like I didn’t fit in. But I found a couple of things I liked to do. And one of them was I played in a punk rock band which is really fun. And so I got out of the campus and was able to tool around. And I started writing for this comedy magazine. And the comedy magazine was called Harvard Lampoon.

**Craig:** Did you say Haverford Lampoon?

**Alan:** Yeah, it’s called a Howard Lampoon. I went to Howard University.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Alan:** No, it’s a —

**Craig:** That’s the best way to work at Harvard ever. I was working at…Harvard Lampoon.

**John:** I was in Boston and yeah.

**Alan:** Yeah. So it’s an oftentimes horrible magazine that is not funny at all, but there’s a lot of funny people there. And basically, all I wanted to do was hang out with funny people and be funnier. So I grew up, I was watching the Simpsons, and Seinfeld, and SNL, and Mr. Show and I was like, wow — when I started working on The Lampoon I was like this maybe is a job in some way. Like I didn’t know that it was a job.

So after I graduated, I moved out to LA and just started writing scripts and was broke and unemployed and trying to get an agent. So that’s how that started.

**John:** So my perception of The Lampoon folks who move out to LA is they basically like just load in a van and everybody moves out to an apartment and just start working together. Was that the experience?

**Alan:** The van part is not accurate, but what’s great about it is you just don’t feel so alone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Alan:** So you move out. And there’s not that many people on the magazine, so my year for instance, there were probably six writers or something, five or six writers. So yeah, a few of us moved out to LA and what you do is you move out here and you just don’t – you’re all broke together, right? So you feel less like a crazy person and, you know, I respect the hell out of everyone who does it and comes out alone because that’s really scary and intense and it’s a huge risk and that’s tough. But it was cool to have like a couple of buddies who could be your roommate or you could go have a beer with or something when you’re all struggling growing up.

**Craig:** I was struck you when you were talking, you were saying you grew up with The Simpsons and Seinfeld, so I’m guessing you’re quite a bit younger than John and I are, but the show has this really interesting ’70s vibe to it. And even like the credits remind me so much of like Woody Allen. So I assume this is intentional?

**Alan:** Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. You know, again, that was another thing where we just wanted the show to feel different. And one of the things we had been doing recently while we were coming up with the show is watching a lot of these ’70s comedies, you know. Hal Ashby, you know, obviously The Graduate, Elaine May, Heartbreak Kid.

And what was really cool when watching those movies was just the realism and how they let scenes breathe and how it wasn’t necessarily, you know, 100 jokes a page, like a lot of these sort of network comedies are.

**Craig:** I like those.

**Alan:** Well, yeah, those are great. Listen, like there’s no better show than 30 Rock, right? It’s an amazing show, but we just didn’t want to necessarily do that show.

**Craig:** Right. But you like that pace?

**Alan:** Yeah. It was like, you know, we have scenes where there are no jokes.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** We have scenes where there are ton of jokes. We have scenes that are a little broader. But for the most part, we were trying to do things that felt a little bit like a conversation that you might have with your friends.

**Craig:** Well, speaking of that conversation, there’s something really interesting. You know, so I’m watching, you know – I watched these episodes of your show and pulled out — like there were a lot of moments like this where I thought, I wonder if you and Aziz ever found yourselves in this weird dilemma where on the one hand, part of what the show is is presenting this perspective of what it means to be Asian-American in Hollywood and you’re sharing a unique perspective. That’s part of the unique voice. On the other hand, you don’t want to feel like, “Oh, now I’m representing four billion Indian and Chinese people and that that’s what I have to do.”

**Alan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like do you ever feel like, “Okay, we’re kind of ping-ponging back and forth between these two things. We want do it, we don’t want to do it.”

**Alan:** Yes and no. So that’s actually — that’s a very astute question because you do feel that way, right? You feel like, “Man, there is one show with an Indian guy as a lead like in the world right now?” [laughs]

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** Like this one, right?

**Craig:** So we can probably —

**Alan:** Yeah, so you feel responsibility be like, you know, you don’t want to — but the number one thing is we just want the show to be good, right? So you want the show to be good and this is a thing I actually talked about with my friend last night who’s half Asian and I’ve worked in really, really fun rooms and very, very open, very, very progressive like really, really fun places. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with another Asian writer. [laughs] You know, it’s like I’ve been working for 10 years, you know. So you’re always — so if it ever comes up — and you know on my last show on Parks and Rec, it was a very diverse room, you know, oftentimes majority women or at least half women which I thought was great.

But there were times where, oh, we had one black writer like my old roommate, Aisha Muharrar, was a writer there. And we had an issue where it’s like, “Okay, is this offensive and like, we have to ask Aisha?” Like you don’t want to ever put a person in that position, but you have someone who is black or someone who is Asian and you’re going to ask them. So it’s just a tricky place.

And what we ended up doing was, anytime there was this sort of interesting or controversial or an issue that might be offensive or sticky in that way, we just have the debate. We would all yell at each other in the room. And our room was, you know, some Asian people, some Indian people, some white people, too. [laughs] But oftentimes, we put that conversation in the show. We would just put it in the show.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** So, you know, there’s some literal like transcriptions of arguments we had in the writer’s room —

**Craig:** I love that.

**Alan:** And they just go in. Yeah.

**Craig:** I love that. Because there is a certain fearlessness to your — and that’s kind of what’s required especially for comedy, even when it’s comedy of this — which is very — you know, this tone is a really unique tone. I think the second you start kind of, I don’t know, crafting it and being careful about it, it feels like it’s fake.

**Alan:** Yeah. We weren’t in the business of like, “Well, we don’t want to offend people.” Like we don’t really care about that. [laughs] It was like —

**Craig:** Good for you.

**Alan:** Yeah.

**John:** But I think what’s working about your show and Another Period, even though the tones are just so vastly different, is they’re both incredibly specific. They’re not the same version of the everyone in a kitchen set kind of show. It’s a very specific way of looking at this world and characters who want things that are not the common things we’re expecting to see characters want.

**Alan:** Yeah. I think there’s a fallacy that it’s like, “Well, we have to make this character sort of as generic and relatable as possible like an everyman.” I think Aziz wrote a good piece in the New York Times or something where he was interviewed where he said the everyman isn’t always like the most common person in America. It’s not always a younger white guy or, you know, whatever. When you get relatable is when your specific emotions and motivations and characters, you felt that so strongly yourself that you know how to put it into the script. And when you do that — I think we discovered that while we were writing the show, it’s like, “Well, these characters are us.” So we know how we felt when that happened and a lot of these experiences are ours, you know. A lot of that stuff in the parents episode, that stuff all happened with my dad. You know, he killed this chicken when he was young. And I’m an ungrateful shithead.

But yeah. So that’s real. So that’s real.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alan:** And so I knew how to write that. So when you’re able to do that, the specific becomes universal and it becomes relatable.

**John:** You’re also able to write a version of yourself saying things that are like the kinds of things you would say, but specifically to that scene to what point you’re trying to get across and so it’s not an everyman because it’s you.

**Alan:** Yeah, exactly. So, you know, my white ex-girlfriend or whatever, her mom loved me. [laughs] Like, you know, that’s why that’s in there. But it’s like, you’re right, you know, when things become personal, I think that’s often times when they become really good especially in comedy.

**Craig:** I’m kind of curious. I’ve written with actors before. You’re in a really funky little situation here. I mean I’m sure it’s — I mean these two are both acting, so they can’t really — they can kind of neutralize each other if one is like this scene is about me. But your co-writer, your co-creator is the star of the show.

**Alan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he is also not just the star of the show, his character, Dev, is basically it’s him. I mean his parents are his parents, right?

**Alan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So have you ever looked Aziz in the eye and said, “Nah, Dev wouldn’t say that.”

**Alan:** [laughs] In those words, no.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Alan:** But, you know, in the writer’s room, he needs someone to tell him — he does need someone to tell him no.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** And he respects that. I mean we’ve known each other for so long now. You know, we met first season Parks and Rec so we’ve known each other for seven, eight years or whatever. Yeah, I’m not scared of that guy. [laughs] But, you know, and it’s good because when we have conflicts, that makes the show better generally.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** You know, and it’s like we’re such good friends. You know, we hang out so much outside of work. And we’re going on a trip to Europe tomorrow. [laughs] But that means also like I can yell at him on the set. Like if it’s like, “Hey man, like I don’t think — I think you should do it this way.” And then ultimately, usually we shoot it both ways and we see it in the edit room or whatever.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** Or in the writer’s room, I think it’s good for a person in his position who has such a strong point of view and who generally knows what his character would do. You know, I put 100% faith in that. But at the same time, there’s so many other concerns when making a show like how the story is shaped and the structure of the episode works and what the series arc is.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** All those things need to be taken care of as well. And so, you know, we have conflict but we always resolve it amiably and I think it’s generally worked.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Awesome. Alan Yang, congratulations on your show yet again.

**Alan:** Thanks so much.

**Craig:** Awesome man.

**Alan:** Thanks.

**John:** And stay put. Now, can we have everybody back up here because we’re going to do our One Cool Things. All right. So traditionally on the podcast, we do the thing at the end of the show called One Cool Thing and Craig always forgets his One Cool Thing and we sort of stall for a time and I do mine first. But tonight because it’s a holiday show, I thought we would do sort of a secret Santa kind of One Cool Thing.

So what I asked everybody to do is to put their One Cool Thing on the back of a card and it’s going to have someone else’s name on the front of the card and that’s who’s going to get that gift of the One Cool Thing. So we’re going to pass these out. So hold on one second.

**Craig:** [laughs] Malcolm is so excited for this. That’s a show I would totally watch, by the way.

**Malcolm:** It’s so John August.

**Craig:** Like you and August together is going to be an amazing show.

**Malcolm:** Grand closing.

**Craig:** It would be so great.

**John:** I will read aloud what someone is giving me and then I need to figure out who is giving me this gift. My gift to John is the magical power to give everyone in America at least one Muslim friend or at least a barber or a dentist or something, so people are a little less scared. You’re welcome, John.

**Craig:** Well, you know, that wasn’t me.

**John:** No. I don’t know, Malcolm Spellman. Did you give me a Muslim friend?

**Malcolm:** No.

**Craig:** Are you kidding me? You thought that was Malcolm? Oh my god, never. Malcolm doesn’t want anyone to have anyone —

**Natasha:** That is clearly someone who went to Harvard.

**John:** Was that you, Alan?

**Alan:** Yeah, it was me.

**John:** Oh, I have a Muslim friend. Thank you very much, Alan Yang.

**Alan:** Great hand. Great hand.

**Craig:** She nailed it.

**John:** How do I get a Muslim friend? Is there like a —

**Alan:** Yeah. I don’t know, I didn’t really understand the assignment but, so I just wrote down a bunch of words.

**John:** Yeah.

**Alan:** No. But, you know, that was just a thing that I was thinking about the show a little bit because I knew I was going to talk about it. And one of the things we realized when making it was like, man, like, for all these episodes we did research like when there is an episode about old people and we had — we spent the day with a bunch of older ladies in New York and I had lunch with them and learned stories.

And it’s like, man, the more you meet people and like they become your friends or at least your acquaintances, you’re a little bit more empathetic. You just know them a little better and whatever, not to get political — I don’t really care about politics. But, you know, if they didn’t let Muslim people in America, Aziz’s parents wouldn’t have been able to come to America. And he wouldn’t have been born.

**John:** Yeah.

**Alan:** And I wouldn’t have been able to do the show with him.

**John:** Yeah.

**Alan:** And you guys wouldn’t have gotten to hear me say all this amazing shit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Alan:** So that would have been a huge tragedy. [laughs]

**Craig:** It all boils down to you.

**Alan:** Yeah. Like it’s basically about, do they get to listen to me or not.

**John:** Yeah. Well thank you for the gift of understanding.

**Alan:** You’re welcome.

**John:** Thank you very much. Riki, what did you get?

**Riki:** I got a KRUPS F23070 Egg Cooker.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** You got to know who that’s from. It sounds like a robot talking, so who could it be from?

**John:** Yeah, it’s me. [laughs]

**Craig:** That literally sounds like robot talk. KRUPS 01243 Egg Cooker.

**John:** So here is why I’m giving you this specific egg cooker, because it’s the best egg cooker. So over the summer, we were staying at an Airbnb and the person showing us around was like, oh, and there’s an egg cooker. I’m like, “Well, that’s ridiculous. Who needs something to cook hard boiled eggs? You just boil water and you have hard boiled eggs.” But it was like I woke up early one day, I was like, “I’m going to try the egg cooker.” And it’s amazing. So essentially, it cooks seven hard boiled eggs at once and like cooks them perfectly. So you don’t have to like set a timer. You don’t have to do anything. It’s just like you have hard boiled eggs.

**Natasha:** How many hard boiled eggs do you eat a day?

**John:** I eat one a day. So you do a whole bunch at once and just keep them in your fridge.

**Natasha:** I eat like one a year.

**Riki:** It would be the first egg I’ve ever cooked, so —

**Alan:** It’s been a decade.

**Riki:** I don’t cook eggs at all.

**Craig:** I eat one a year.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s egg day.

**Alan:** You celebrate egg day. Yeah. Yeah, June 20, right? June 20th?

**Craig:** It’s egg day! Yay.

**Alan:** You guys don’t celebrate that?

**John:** I think you’d actually genuinely enjoy it.

**Riki:** I think I might. I mean, I think I might. I’ve never cook anything, so it would be a welcome change.

**John:** Yeah. I mean it’s easier than using a hairdryer. Like it’s how simple it is to make.

**Riki:** Wow. But then I would have to buy eggs as well.

**John:** Yeah. Or you can have —

**Riki:** It’s like another step.

**John:** Or you can have someone buy you the eggs.

**Riki:** True. [laughs]

**John:** True. All right. Natasha, what did you get?

**Natasha:** I have a question, though, do you peel it? Like you just eat it with toast or do you just like carry it around with you, the egg?

**John:** I would advise you to peel the egg before you eat it because like the shell is crunchy and —

**Natasha:** But you just bite into it like that and eat the dry yolk and just eat it?

**John:** Yeah, it’s fine. Yeah.

**Craig:** Bite into it, eat its nutrients.

**John:** Or rip it open. Yeah, it’s delicious, it’s healthy.

**Natasha:** Okay, cool.

**John:** Natasha, what did you get for your Secret Santa gift?

**Natasha:** I got Postmates. Well, I think this person probably also like me and Alan didn’t really understand the assignment. So I feel like this is maybe from Malcolm and he just discovered Postmates. And he wants me to know about it, too. But I already know about it. But thank you.

**Malcolm:** No. I’m the king of Postmates. Like —

**Natasha:** You can order from many different restaurants at once.

**Malcolm:** I’m on the level where I order that shit while I’m driving home at the same time.

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**John:** But I don’t know what this at all. So talk us through. Sell us on this.

**Malcolm:** It changes everything.

**John:** All right.

**Malcolm:** They are — it’s Uber for everything else particularly food. So any restaurants you want in LA, you just tell them, you know, you do your order, whatever, and they bring it to you and it’s not like — the difference between this and delivery is when you order food from delivery, they’re stopping at other people’s house, your food shows up cold. They order your shit for you, go pick it up, bring it straight to your house. And again, once you get really good with it, that’s when you start ordering in your car at a red light. You try to —

**Craig:** God.

**Natasha:** And also —

**John:** How did Malcolm Spellman die?

**Natasha:** We should also be clear, this is an app for rich people.

**Alan:** Yeah. It’s like $40. [laughs] No, it is good.

**Natasha:** And also, one of the other amazing things about it is you get things delivered that don’t deliver. So it’s not just like your Domino’s Pizzas is hotter. It’s like —

**Craig:** What about like say, egg cartons? Do they do the eggs?

**Natasha:** Your Mr. Chow’s crispy rice sushi.

**Craig:** So it’s like a messenger service for food basically.

**Natasha:** For restaurants.

**Craig:** Or for restaurants.

**Malcolm:** But they’ll go pick up your ink cartridge from Staples, all that shit.

**Natasha:** Oh really?

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Alan:** Any object. It’s great. It’s an object delivery. Yeah. Or you push the limits.

**John:** Alan, will they bring me a Muslim friend?

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

**John:** They can do it, because that’s an object —

**Alan:** Here’s your Muslim friend and the egg cooker, John.

**John:** Fantastic, it’s all —

**Alan:** One car.

**John:** Backstage, we were talking about actors who do voiceovers for commercials. I feel Malcolm Spellman might be the right voice for this delivery service.

**Alan:** Yeah, he’s got a great voice.

**John:** You’d buy it from him, wouldn’t you?

**Craig:** Oh yeah, this place will pick up your shit.

**Malcolm:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That was a pretty good impression.

**Malcolm:** Charges on Postmates.

**Alan:** Yeah.

**John:** Alan Yang, what did you get for a Secret Santa gift?

**Alan:** Oh yeah. I got, I would follow him on all social media as a Christmas present.

**Natasha:** I didn’t understand the assignment.

**John:** So do you follow him on any social media?

**Alan:** Do you not follow me, Natasha?

**Natasha:** Well, I thought like if you are were on some deep —

**Alan:** Oh no, no, you think I’m — you think I’m young person, I’m not that young.

**Natasha:** Oh okay, I thought you were on like Snapchat.

**Alan:** I am on Snapchat actually. [laughs] You’re right.

**Craig:** You are that young.

**Natasha:** Okay, so I’ll —

**Alan:** I should make up a bunch that don’t exist.

**Natasha:** Are you on Periscope?

**Alan:** I’m not on Periscope. I don’t do any broadcastings. You’re on like Twitter and like what do you —

**Natasha:** Of course, I follow you on Twitter.

**Alan:** Instagram, of course. Yeah.

**Natasha:** But Instagram, I don’t follow you. But I’d like to.

**Alan:** Follow me, man. Some great pics up there.

**Craig:** Christmas is getting weird.

**Natasha:** I’m going to do that tonight.

**Alan:** I can’t wait. I can’t wait for that follow. This has actually have been a good moment for me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alan:** I get an additional follower. Everyone follow me, AlanMYang. [laughs] No, it doesn’t matter.

**John:** Alan is going to spend half an hour on any person, trying to get each person in this audience to follow him.

**Alan:** Yeah.

**Natasha:** But Alan’s aesthetic, I bet his Instagram is good. I bet it’s kind of anal-retentive.

**Alan:** Yeah.

**Natasha:** But you have some good like, you know, visuals up there.

**Alan:** Yeah, it’s not bad. It’s not bad. It’s not great. It’s not bad, though. [laughs]

**John:** Malcolm Spellman, what did you get from Santa?

**Malcolm:** Kitchen Hacks: How Clever Cooks Get Things Done. I’m going to guess Mazin.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** I’ll tell you why I knew it was Mazin, ‘get things done.’ If you know this dude, the authority in that.

**Craig:** Yeah, you got to get things done. Quite a great book. It’s not appropriate for you because you don’t cook anything, you order your shit from Postmates, but if you were to chop a vegetable for once in your fucking life, it’s amazing, Cook’s Illustrated is my favorite because they’re, you know —

**Riki:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Why? I mean I just feel so degraded.

**Natasha:** No, Cook’s Illustrated. I just never heard of that. Sounds cute.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s the best. They’re like the scientists of coking. And they give you all these tips of the best ways to cut things like how do I cut this. Oh, we figured out after a thousand cuts of a pepper, this is the way you do it. And the way you’re nodding —

**Natasha:** No, that’s cool. I have no talent in the kitchen, so I’m just — I’m inspired and intrigued.

**Craig:** Then it could help you if you ever did try because —

**Natasha:** Oh, no interest either, but —

**Craig:** Just making sure.

**Natasha:** But I appreciate it in others.

**Craig:** If you fuck something up, there’s a whole chapter on how to fix your fuck up.

**Natasha:** Oh, that’s cool.

**Craig:** So it’s wasted on Malcolm.

**John:** And I really think that could have been the title of the episode, Wasted on Malcolm.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it should be the title of every episode.

**John:** Yeah. We had fantastic guests and a fantastic venue, but we did not have a fantastic recording. And we lost Craig’s gift. Craig did not get to open his gift and discuss it. And it was a pretty great gift you got.

**Craig:** Yes. So I got my gift from Riki Lindhome and it was something that I’ve already put on the show as my One Cool Thing which is the Hamilton soundtrack. And so Riki and I bonded over our obsession and memorized love for the Hamilton soundtrack and then — you see, this is why people need to come to the live show because the two of us then did an impromptu version of the opening song. We made it through a good like 30 or 40 seconds of the lyrics of the opening song. [laughs] Just together, doing a duet, it was lovely.

**John:** I have a hunch that our technical glitch was actually the Broadway League sneaking it and shutting it down so that it could not be recorded because that’s, you know, Lin-Manuel Miranda is like he’s very adamant that he’s not going to want bootleg recordings. And you guys were so magnificent singing that song.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That he had to stop it.

**Craig:** Well, I get it. I don’t want to — look, I don’t want to mess with Mr. Miranda. It was something to see, man. It was something to see.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And unfortunately then after that, we did have some pretty good questions and answers that got eaten, so —

**John:** Yeah. And often, we tape the questions and answer and put them through as a separate episode in the premium feed, so we won’t have that for this time. But there were some interesting questions asked. So I thought we’d just summarize kind of the things we talked about and do the short version of what those were.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So the questions that came up at the microphones were about writing staffs because we had these great TV people there and they were able to answer questions that Craig or I could not normally answer.

A question about the diversity on writing staffs and sort of spring boarding off what Alan Yang had said about being like the Asian guy on the staff. And so the question was like, well, what if you are the black guy or the Muslim guy, what does it feel like to be the person who has to answer the questions of like, is that offensive?

And so Alan actually had a really interesting answer about how in Master of None, stuff would come up, there was specifically a situation where the women on the writing staff were describing what it felt like to be a woman at a restaurant who wasn’t introduced and they had a big discussion, a big argument kind of in the writer’s room and that made it into the script.

And so he was arguing in favor of diversity on staff just because you got that diversity of opinion and that diversity of opinion was what led to this some really great dialogue and scenes in the show.

**Craig:** Yes. So he was sort of saying that rather than assign or not assign the role of representative of race, gender, sexual identity, whatever category, that rather it was just, let’s have a discussion. If a discussion is a debate, let’s have a debate. Then let’s actually portray the debate which on his show, I think, is very doable. On a lot of shows, it’s not quite like that because the show maybe isn’t about relationships in that sense.

But having the debate, I think he was basically saying having the debate is worth it. It’s actually more important to have a debate than say to isolate individuals and say you are now the arbiter of what is acceptable for this topic or that topic.

**John:** Absolutely. Okay, next up. Riki Lindhome fielded a question about how she assembled her writing staff. And we actually asked all the show creators how they assembled their writing staffs. And Riki Lindhome said, well, I would read the first three pages of the script and if I didn’t like the first three pages, I would toss it aside and start reading the next one.

And to be clear, Riki Lindhome does not listen to the Scriptnotes podcast, so she has no idea about the Three Page Challenge. She was just speaking honestly of like how she put her staff together. And I thought that was actually great because it’s such a testament to this is why your first three pages are so important because if they don’t like three pages, it’s not that — they’re not going to read page four, they’re not going to read page 20. They’re just going to stop reading and they’re going to go on to next one.

So be it a TV spec or spec script you’ve written, you got to hook them so quick.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, there’s a test that you and I apply when we do our Three Page Challenges here on the show and mostly because I assume 99 percent of the people sending them in are not professional working writers yet. The test that we’re applying is basically, “Can you do this? Do you have the fundamentals down? Are you making certain rookie mistakes? Are you making blatant mistakes?” Our test isn’t, “Is this wonderful?” Our test isn’t, “Is this really great?” Our test isn’t, “Would I hire you?”

Now, for Riki and for Natasha, when they’re looking at potential people to work on their show, you’re making a show. These are the people that are your life-support system. So they’re not looking to see if you’re avoiding problems. They’re looking to be inspired.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think specifically, Riki said something like, her test is, “Do I care?” Not just, “Is this good?” but do I care about it? Do I remember it? Do I want to tell other people about what I just read? That’s on a whole other level of existence. That’s about being inspiring.

So just be aware. I want people to be aware that when we do this, don’t think like, oh, if they can get through those guys that they’re, you know, they’ve got it made. We’re kind of only doing a very fundamental first pass look at these things. What’s waiting for you out there is Riki going “Mm-hmm.”

**John:** Mm-hmm. Doesn’t care. So it’s really, we’re setting a pretty low bar, like, “Do they clear this low bar?” Like, this person seems like they can kind of do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And we’re also taking a lot of time to talk through various things on the page that tripped us up. Riki is not. She’s just basically like, “Did I laugh? Did this click with me? Do I want to meet this writer?” And that’s a very different kind of standard than what we’re doing when we’re doing a Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** So it would be fascinating to have somebody who does a lot of staffing come on and be a guest on a Three Page Challenge because I bet it would be brutal.

**Craig:** Oh, well, because they don’t really do anything like what we do. I mean, there is that, you know, the book, Blink. I mean, everyone is using Blink when they’re doing this. There’s too many — I mean, I think Alan said they get 300 scripts, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, so staffing season is like this swarm of piranha in the water all trying, you know, to grab this one tiny little thing to eat. So everyone is getting inundated by these scripts. I think they open them up and, I mean, she says three pages, I guarantee there’s some where you don’t even make it to half a page. Because just, you have that blink moment you’re like, “Nope, not for me.”

**John:** Yeah, I don’t think we’ll ever do this but a fascinating exercise would be to take a big bucket of the scripts that come in. And sit down with somebody who does this for staffing and just all of us spend an hour just like going through and reading those first three pages and at the end of it discuss which of these scripts would we even want to read page four.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, and you could also, while you’re doing that with this person, have them take — give them a red pen and have them make a little mark on the page where they stopped reading.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** Because I think that would actually be fascinating to see.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And sobering.

**John:** Yeah, after we did the Q&A we had a few announcements. And so I need to have those announcements down so that everyone who wasn’t in the audience can hear them. First off is that on Monday of last week, so a week ago, as you’re hearing this podcast, I sat down with Ice Cube and Andrea Berloff and F. Gary Gray and the filmmakers behind Straight Outta Compton. And so that was a special Q&A in Hollywood. And so I got to ask them questions. So it was about a half an hour of Q&A with those folks and it was great and it was — I loved that movie. I loved sitting down and talking with them about it. So if you are a premium subscriber, you can listen to the audio from that. It’s up in the Scriptnotes premium feed. So you can subscribe to that at Scriptnotes.net and listen to that. We should have one or two more writer interviews up there before the end of the year as well.

We also had a very big announcement about our next live show. Craig, tell us.

**Craig:** So this is something that we’re doing for a charity organization called Hollywood HEART and I admit that at the time that we did the show last night, I wasn’t quite sure exactly what the charity did. In my mind I knew it wasn’t about actual cardiac health. But there was a representative there from Hollywood HEART who came up afterward to explain that it’s about helping kids here in Los Angeles. And it’s a terrific organization.

So we have wonderful guests. This is going to be a live show on January 25th. We’re doing it downtown. And who’s coming? Well, we have Jason Bateman, star of screen and also a filmmaker in his own right now. And we also have the screenwriter of the small movie that is coming out. It’s like a prestige movie coming out in December. It’s called —

**John:** Yeah, it’s one of those sort of “remakey” kind of like, you know, some people may have heard of it.

**Craig:** Right. It’s called Star Wars: The Force Awakens?

**John:** Yeah, I think so. I think you got it right.

**Craig:** Or is it “The Force Awakens”.

**John:** Either one I think would work. It’s translated from French.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you could try it either way.

**Craig:** Star Wars, and his name is Larry Kasdan. He also in the past, he has written another Star Wars film called The Empire Strikes Back.

**John:** I saw that one. It was really good.

**Craig:** And then he wrote a side movie called Raiders of the Lost Ark.

**John:** Yeah, we discussed that movie. Do you remember that, a zillion years ago, we discussed that?

**Craig:** Oh, that’s right.

**John:** We did a whole episode on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

**Craig:** Yeah, yes. And he’s also written Body Heat. And he’s also written Big Chill. And he’s also written The Bodyguard. And, and, and, and — perhaps the greatest living screenwriter. I like to call him that.

So Lawrence Kasdan, co-writer of the — what will undoubtedly be the biggest movie of all time — Star Wars: The Force Awakens, will be with us on January 25th along with the very funny, very brilliant Jason Bateman. That’s a show you definitely want to come to and the proceeds do benefit Hollywood HEART. If you want tickets and you want to learn more about Hollywood HEART, go to HollywoodHEART.org/upcoming.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And that’s how you get tickets and so forth.

**John:** So this ticket apparently includes cocktails as well. So, come on, it’s bargain.

**Craig:** It includes cocktails?

**John:** That’s what it said on the thing. I’m only going with what I saw on the website.

**Craig:** Wow. So, just to be clear because I said it was about kids, I think that’s a little vague. It’s specifically, it’s designed to nurture creativity and community through the arts and it’s targeted at at-risk kids who either have HIV or AIDS or who are homeless or who are in foster care or the judicial systems. These are kids that are definitely in trouble. They are in trouble and they’re using the arts to kind of help get them out of trouble. And I’m a big believer in effective charity. That’s my, you know, like I get very angry when I see ineffective charity because it feels like such a wasted opportunity. I know that this is a great way to get through to kids who are in trouble. It’s a great way because the arts are part of everyone’s life. It is instantly attractive especially to kids. So I think this is a great idea. There is a camp that they run. So you should totally buy tickets for this. I mean, if you don’t buy tickets for this, you’re just a bad person.

**John:** [laughs] So the carrot and a stick, the guilt, the love, all of it together.

**Craig:** Everything.

**John:** The Craig Mazin special holiday gift.

**Craig:** I just hit you with everything I could.

**John:** The last announcement was that on the previous show we talked about how an upcoming episode will have us talking about advice for things that are not screenwriting-related. So advice about anything. So we’ve gotten more than a hundred questions in about that.

**Craig:** Wow, my god.

**John:** But keep sending in those questions. And we will plow through them and we will answer as many of them as we can on a future episode. I’m really looking forward to that. Off air, I’m going to talk to Craig about a potential guest to join us to help answer those questions.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** Ah. But we should wrap up this episode with a lot of thanks. So we need to give thanks to the Writers Guild Foundation. Its wonderful volunteers who helped staff that event and Chris Kartje for putting it all together. Thank you so much. LA Film School for hosting us. Leon who did all our tech stuff. We had clips up there. We had clips on a big screen. It was like we were a real show. So thank you for that.

**Craig:** Like a real show.

**John:** Matthew Chilelli, as always, did our intros and outros and edited this episode. And Stuart Friedel, our producer, our long-serving, long-suffering producer was there along with his parents and his grandparents who got to hear Malcolm Spellman —

**Craig:** Oh, my god, that’s so great.

**John:** Swear so much. Yeah. And so —

**Craig:** Oh, my god, Bubby was there. She must have been like, “Oy”.

**John:** “Oy”. Yeah, so —

**Craig:** Even the way you say “Oy” is Christian.

**John:** I know. I can’t help it. I come from a Christian heritage.

**Craig:** You do.

**John:** I knew where they were sitting in the audience but as I looked up there I thought I still saw like the paper on the seats. So I thought like, “Oh, well, the grandparents didn’t come.” But it just turns out they were so small that the paper on the chair backs behind them was still visible.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s so cute.

**John:** So cute. So it was a cute fun night. We had amazing guests. So in the show notes at johnaugust.com you’ll see the links to their Twitter handles, their other bio information about them. You’ll also see links for most of the things we talked about on the show that we could squeeze into the links. As always, subscribe to us on iTunes if you’ve not already subscribed. That helps us a lot. Leave a comment. We were not one of the top podcasts of 2015 for some reason, so let’s make that a life goal for 2016 to be one of those top-rated podcasts on iTunes.

If you have a question for me or for Craig, write to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can write your question about, you know, non-screenwriting advice for our special episode. On Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. And thank you everyone who came out to our live show and thank you all for listening.

**Craig:** Go buy tickets for January 25th.

**John:** Cool. Thanks, guys. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Malcolm Spellman on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1173259/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/malcolmspellman), and [Scriptnotes, 185](http://johnaugust.com/2015/malcolm-spellman-a-study-in-heat)
* [Natasha Leggero](http://www.natashaleggero.com/) on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1641089/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/natashaleggero)
* [Riki Lindhome](http://www.rikilindhome.com/) on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1641251/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/rikilindhome)
* [Another Period](http://www.cc.com/shows/another-period) on Comedy Central
* Alan Yang on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1520649/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/AlanMYang)
* [Master of None](http://www.netflix.com/title/80049714) on Netflix
* [Harvard Lampoon](http://harvardlampoon.com/), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harvard_Lampoon)
* [KRUPS F23070 Egg Cooker](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00005KIRS/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Postmates](https://postmates.com/) will deliver you stuff
* [AlanMYang on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/alanmyang/)
* [Kitchen Hacks: How Clever Cooks Get Things Done](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1940352002/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Cook’s Illustrated](https://www.cooksillustrated.com/)
* Hamilton, the Original Broadway Cast Recording on [iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/hamilton-original-broadway/id1025210938) and on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013JLBPGE/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Scriptnotes, Bonus: Straight Outta Compton](http://scriptnotes.net/bonus-straight-outta-compton)
* [Get your tickets now for Scriptnotes, Live on January 25](http://hollywoodheart.org/upcoming/) with [Jason Bateman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Bateman) and [Lawrence Kasdan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kasdan), a benefit for [Hollywood HEART](http://hollywoodheart.org)
* [Scriptnotes, 73: Raiders of the Lost Ark](http://johnaugust.com/2013/raiders-of-the-lost-ark)
* [Email us](mailto:ask@johnaugust.com) or tweet [John](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) or [Craig](https://twitter.com/clmazin) for advice on things that have nothing to do with screenwriting
* Thanks to the [Writers Guild Foundation](https://www.wgfoundation.org/) and the [Los Angeles Film School](http://www.lafilm.edu/) for hosting us
* [Intro/Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))