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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 560 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we’ll discuss how writers should think about visual effects, both from a creative and budgetary perspective. One of us, Craig, has a lot recent experience in that area.

Craig: Oh boy, do I.

John: We’ll also chat about books, specifically should screenwriters be trying to get the options on them themselves. We’ll discuss formal and less formal arrangements for book options. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we will discuss nightmares. Not metaphorical nightmares like Harvey Weinstein, but actually nightmares occurring during sleep.

Craig, this is your first glance at the topics we’re going to be discussing today. How do you feel about it?

Craig: I feel strong. In particular, I really like this idea of talking about visual effects from the writing point of view, because whether writers realize it or not, they are now as integral to the storytelling process as, I don’t know, lights or microphones.

John: Fundamental. You have lights and microphones upon you, because you were at the Comic Con-

Craig: Segue Man.

John: … presentation panel for Mythic Quest. Craig, how was Comic Con?

Craig: I have no idea, because here’s how it went for me.

John: Tell me.

Craig: Rob McElhenney, he said, “Hey, can you come host this thing? We’re flying down real quick into the little mini San Diego airport. I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” We fly into the mini San Diego airport. That’s a 35-minute flight. That’s enjoyable. There’s a car. The car takes you to hotel. Then you go from hotel to the back entrance of Comic Con, through the massive back area where the garbage is and the delivery is at. You get herded into a little pen. It’s actually a rather large room. A lovely time before the thing chatting with the cast, who are all wonderful. Then you go on stage, you do this thing. If you’re watching, if you do watch it, I don’t know, on YouTube or something, please understand none of us could hear each other. The microphones are so echoey on stage. I would ask questions and then sort of know what people said.

John: Is that why everyone’s smiling and nodding a lot, but there’s no flow to things?

Craig: Yes. It was horrible. We all did our best. Afterwards, we were just laughing. They’re like, “We kind of understood what you were saying.” I was like, “I kind of understood what you were saying, but I couldn’t ask any follow-ups, because I had no idea really what your answers were.”

John: Wow.

Craig: I did get to have a lovely moment with Danny Pudi where we recreated his wonderful viral moment where he told Larry King, “Larry, I’m on Duck Tales.” That was fun. People really seemed to enjoy it. The word from the crowd was that they enjoyed it.

John: Great.

Craig: We were happy about that. Then we all went to dinner and left. That’s what I saw of Comic Con, a backstage garbage area.

John: It was like Hunger Games, and you were just the noble family coming out there and seeing the Hunger Games but didn’t have to participate in any of the Hunger Games.

Craig: I did not participate in the Hunger Games. I know that there will be some sort of conventioneering in my future. That’s for sure. I would like for it to be a little bit more of an experience than I had there. That was very much a Seal Team Six, get in, get out kind of deal.

John: Love it. Next piece is news and follow-up. Craig, when you need to refer to someone’s credits, where do you look at their credits?

Craig: I go to IMDb.

John: I have been going to IMDb for 20 years. Actually, my very first answering your questions about screenwriting happened on IMDb. I used to host a little column weekly on IMDb. I believe IMDb is a great resource that should be treasured. At times, I’ve been frustrated with IMDb, because they’ll make changes to the layout. It’ll just be broken and stupid. I made an extension for Safari at one point that I called Less IMDb that made it prettier and made it work better. This is credits for John Logan, classic credits. Describe what you’re seeing here.

Craig: It says Filmography, and then just a list of blue linked credits, but the television series have sub-credits of episodes. That’s what it has.

John: This is what you’d expect to see. They give you the option now where you could see the preview of the next version of IMDb, what they’re going to be doing. It’s going to be huge improvements, right? This is how credits are going to be shown now. This is the same credits for the same writer. Tell me what you’re seeing.

Craig: Now I’m seeing mostly the one-sheets for those things in chunks, without much information. I guess it’s all the same information. It’s just more visual. I don’t know, it’s all weirdly laid out in a way that makes no sense to me, because it’s a grid.

John: It’s a two-column grid. You can’t tell order of things. Are you supposed to go left to right, or is it going down the bottom?

Craig: It looks like it’s going left to right, top to bottom, which is standard for say a meta-crossword but not necessarily the way our minds are trained to work for this.

John: No. I think it is disastrous, and it’s a really, really bad idea. I’m trying to publicly point this out and maybe shame them and get them to rethink what they’re doing here, or at least make it an option to get back to a normal list view, because this is disastrous. This makes life much harder when you’re like, “What has an actor been in? Oh my God, I don’t want to look at all the posters. I just want to see a list of their credits.”

Craig: Here’s a question for you, as a Webster. The information that IMDb includes is not proprietary. It’s all based on publicly available credits, obviously. Could one create a better IMDb, meaning the layout is better, and simply use a scraper to just start going through IMDb, pulling all the crap out of information, and then re-presenting it in a much nicer format?

John: That would be copyright violations out the wazoo.

Craig: Really?

John: Yeah, it is.

Craig: Why?

John: While it is public information, the accumulation of that and curation of that is a service that IMDb is actually providing. You would run into so many problems there.

Craig: Really?

John: Yeah, you really would.

Craig: If I go, “I want a program that goes over to IMDb and pulls out John August’s credits.”

John: Yep.

Craig: Your credits don’t belong to IMDb.

John: Absolutely true.

Craig: Why can’t I do that?

John: I believe that if I were creating a scraper that went to one person’s thing and scraped out all the stuff, that would not be problematic. If I went and created a bot that went and scraped all of IMDb, which is what you really want to do, that is problematic, because-

Craig: Really?

John: … not only am I taking their copyright information, I am-

Craig: What? What copyright information?

John: The organization of all their credits and the curation of those credits to make sure that they are accurate.

Craig: I don’t think that that’s copyrightable. I just think that they’re simply going through publicly available information and vetting it that it’s true. That doesn’t mean it’s… They didn’t write it.

John: I believe there are problems there. Actually, when I was a summer intern at Universal, my job was to enter stuff into Universal’s own equivalent thing to IMDb. It’s a giant, giant pain in the ass. We were literally looking through Variety and putting credits off of Variety.

Craig: The labor does not necessarily equate to copyright. I would say that this sounds like what we need is for one of our brilliant listeners, perhaps an attorney and/or a Webster-

John: Webster.

Craig: Or a Webster attorney.

John: Oh my God, can you imagine if Webster were an attorney?

Craig: Oh my God.

John: Webster, the little-

Craig: Please can we go back to 1987-

John: Emmanuel Lewis.

Craig: …and write the Webster attorney show?

John: Oh my God, so good.

Craig: Webster at law.

John: So good.

Craig: God, I’d watch that. It would be so good. Megana, do you have any idea who we’re talking about?

Megana Rao: No, I’m Googling Webster right now.

Craig: There we go. Emmanuel Lewis-

John: Emmanuel Lewis.

Craig: … is wonderful. Back in the day, there’s an actor named Gary Coleman, and he was the star of Different Strokes. People who are my age or John’s age just loved Gary Coleman. He was very short. He was short in fact because of a disease. He didn’t have dwarfism. He was just short. His growth was inhibited. While this made him wonderfully valuable for a television show about a cute kid, it became problematic for him as he grew up. Then of course, once he grew up, they need to find another Gary Coleman, and they landed on Emmanuel Lewis, who also was incredibly small, I think again because of a disorder. Emmanuel Lewis played Webster.

John: I don’t even really remember the full conceit of Webster. Was there a butler involved in the show somehow?

Craig: I don’t remember a butler. I just remember that they went as close to Different Strokes as they could, like, “We’re going to take a Black kid and put him with a white adoptive father, and then we’re going to do it again. In fact, change as little as we can possibly change.” You were able to do stuff like that. There was no Twitter, so people couldn’t destroy you within seconds. Oh, Webster. Let’s get Webster back.

John: Webster attorney comes in here and he figures out that you could actually scrape IMDb and put it in a better format. Maybe there’s some version of that that can happen. Honestly, you can also go to Wikipedia, which is genuinely a public service that has this stuff, but it’s just not as thorough and accurate as these other things are, and things don’t link through the same way that IMDb does. I want to make sure we don’t lose what is great about IMDb in this mad quest to make it prettier or make the trailers more accessible.

Craig: IMDb is Amazon’s bad advertising platform. That’s what it is. I think it’s a mess. I hate going on IMDb, by the way. I hate it. I can’t find anything. It used to be that you would put somebody’s name in and you would get everything. Now you have to look for all filmography or you just see the things that they want you to see. It’s a mess.

John: The plugin that we used to make for it, which we actually had to sunset it because it kept breaking because they kept making other changes to it, did make it better on desktop. It couldn’t help out on the web because it’s really an app now. The app isn’t as bad as the web version is, but still it’s frustrating.

Craig: That’s the other thing is if I’m looking at something on IMDb on my phone, it screams at me to use the app and takes up half a page, demanding that I use the app. Why? Why do they need me to use the app? Tell me, from an app guy point of view.

John: Because they built the app. Also, because they can hold you inside the ecosystem better and longer, they’ve discovered, if they are keeping you in the app. That’s why.

Craig: There we go.

John: There you go.

Craig: There we go.

John: Speaking of keeping people in the ecosystem-

Craig: Segue Man.

John: … let’s do some follow-up on Netflix. We’ve talked about Netflix and that they had disappointing earnings, and everyone was up in arms. Their earnings weren’t as disappointing as people expected, so they’re maybe not so screwed. This last week I read an article by Dave Karpf on his Substack talking about re-framing what we should think about with Netflix. I thought it was really helpful, so I wanted to put a link in the show notes to this.

What Karpf is arguing is that we started to think about Netflix as two different businesses. There’s this actual business, which is a subscription video service, and it’s the imaginary business, where it’s a competitor to Apple and Amazon and one of these giant things. What he points out is that Amazon can sell you more and more stuff every month. There’s no ceiling to how much they can sell you. Same with Apple. They can sell you new products. Facebook and Google can sell more ads off of you. Netflix can make about $120 a year off of you, and that’s it. There’s a cap to how much Netflix can make per person. That’s the reality. Netflix may want to say that they’re competing against video games and other things for your attention, but really, they just need you to not cancel the service. When it comes down to that, Netflix will be fine.

Craig: Netflix has a pretty obvious challenge. They became what they are, because they were the streaming service. Now they’re many streaming services. It’s not merely that they are competing with the other streaming services. It’s that the other streaming services took the stuff that Netflix was using to make itself into Netflix. That is to say the library of everything. Very famously, Netflix ran all the episodes of Friends, and people would become obsessed and subscrobe. Subscrobe?

John: They subscrobe.

Craig: That ought to be a word. They subscrobe.

John: It totally could be a word.

Craig: They subscrobe to Netflix.

John: We’ll look it up on Google Ngram Viewer, and it’ll show that subscrobe began rising in late 2022.

Craig: They subscrobe, and then of course, Warner Bros pulled Friends away, because HBO Max now has Friends. What does Netflix do? They spend an insane amount of money to essentially invent a library out of thin air. Some of that library is wonderful. I think like anything, lots of it may be preferably not so wonderful.

John: Any of these streamers would kill to have a Stranger Things, to have-

Craig: They do.

John: … Squid Game.

Craig: They do. That’s the thing. They all have something that people love. The trick is they also have passive income from these massive libraries that generate money over time and have so for hundreds of years. No, a hundred years. The biggest issue I think that Netflix is struggling with is they only do one thing. It doesn’t matter if Amazon takes on some water in a particular quarter over Amazon Prime. They’re also selling everything to everyone. They also are hosting 50% of all the world’s websites and etc, etc. HBO Max is part of a larger empire that includes Warner Bros and all sorts of other things. Similarly, Disney Plus is part of a corporation-

John: It’s part of Disney.

Craig: … that has hotels and cruise ships. Basically, everybody has a network, a publishing business, cruise ships, theme parks, all this stuff that has been built over decades, and Netflix doesn’t. If there’s a downswing in streaming, Netflix will suffer disproportionately. That’s just how it goes. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I have no clue, other than to say that I think that Netflix is either going to have to charge more or spend less or both. From my simple layman point of view, I don’t quite understand how they’re supposed to do stuff otherwise.

John: They’re already going to be spending less. They’ve already announced that they’re going to be spending less.

Craig: There you go.

John: Or they’re going to be spending differently. They’re spending probably more on local productions, which probably makes sense for them, because it helps them grow in markets that they want to grow in.

Craig: You mean local to different areas like-

John: Sorry, so local to India, local to-

Craig: India. Local to Korea. Local to, got it.

John: Great. That’s really good for those markets. They are going to have an advertising-supported tier. I don’t get that. I don’t think that necessarily makes sense. They will also probably raise rates at some point. They’ll also crack down on password sharing. I think my takeaway from this is, listen, they’re probably not going to be the giant juggernaut that they were, but they’re also going to be fine. They’re not going to go away tomorrow.

Craig: No, I don’t think they’re going to go away tomorrow, but I do think that at some point Netflix does become a very tasty target for acquisition, only because, look, they have so many people that have subscrobe over time. The issue is, if they are struggling to keep their business model going without a massive and beloved library, but they have this terrific brand presence and loads of subscribers who subscrobe, if I were a streaming service that maybe wanted some of that, I would just snatch it up. Easy to say snatch up Netflix. This is a company that’s worth so much money. It’s worth billions of dollars, as in $50 billion less than it was worth a half a year ago, I think, which is incredible.

John: I think that really gets down to the distinction between what its actual business was and what its imaginary business was.

Craig: There you go.

John: That’s why it was valued, like an Apple or Amazon. That was probably unrealistic. It was unrealistic.

Craig: That is the one area where I never understood, people’s belief in Netflix’s imaginary business. I just never understood it. I read this article. I think it’s really good. I think it comes down to a very simple thing. For all the glitter and smoke, Netflix needs people to subscribe and keep subscribing. That’s it. Simple as that. Nothing else matters. They’re losing subscribers. After last week’s… Let’s see. We had a Q2 earnings report. Netflix was predicted to lose 2 million subscribers, but it only lost 1 million subscribers. That’s still a lot, where everybody else is picking up subscribers. If your big victory is you only lost 1 million, that’s not good. A million subscribers, that’s a lot of people. Jeez, Louise.

John: The other point Megana and I were discussing is that their strategy of all at once releasing and binge releases, that fundamentally does not make sense in a world where you want to keep people subscribing to your service.

Craig: I can only talk about it from a creative point of view. Of course, like anyone, I have binged shows. Of course I have. From a creative point of view, as somebody that makes a show, I would be so bummed out to just dump. They can say binge or whatever. I call it dumping. Just dump the whole thing there. I think also from a creative point of view, a lot of people have started talking about the tyranny of this algorithm and a sense that it’s all a bit synthetic over there. This season of Barry had a great condemnation of the algorithm and the way the algorithm runs things. It’s a bit terrifying.

I’ve talked to other showrunners and writers whose shows have been canceled. Netflix really won’t tell them why, because also Netflix doesn’t show you any numbers. They’ll just show you matrix readouts of little green digits that don’t make any sense. They will show you bar graphs where your viewership is compared to other people’s viewership, but they won’t show you what the other bar graphs represent, which is awesome. I would love to do that. I just would put that on a placard. “You’re this little thing, and these other things are larger bars. What are those bars? Stuff. Anyway, you’re fired.” I don’t know. It’s amazing.

John: I think the real takeaway here is that Netflix is basically the Scriptnotes podcast, the Scriptnotes Premium feed. Just like the Premium feed, we only get money when people continue to subscribe to the Premium feed. We try to keep our churn down. The difference is, while they’ve lost a million subscribers, we grew subscribers month to month, year to year.

Craig: If we lose a million subscribers, I have a huge problem.

John: We’re in real trouble.

Craig: You’re in real trouble, because that means we had a million subscribers. Then we’d really have to talk. John, it’s so weird, over last few years you’ve bought seven houses.

John: It is crazy what that-

Craig: What’s that about?

John: Residuals. Residuals, man.

Craig: It’s residuals.

John: You write a Charlie’s Angels, those residuals keep coming.

Craig: Look, I want to say to all of the people who do listen to us who work at Netflix or people who write for Netflix, I’m not Netflix-bashing.

John: Not at all.

Craig: I want as many healthy employers as possible. Netflix is this 800-pound gorilla. It did essentially invent the modern streaming business. I want it to succeed. I want there to be as many healthy employers as possible. I do think that Netflix has engaged in some not so wonderful practices that have had a deleterious effect on the way writing is done and the way product is made. I certainly don’t want them to die. Hopefully, they can figure this out, right the ship, and perhaps get us back to the practice of encouraging good shows. Taking some risks would be nice, and paying writers more, in a more transparent way, because Netflix also invented the “we’re not telling you how many people watch your show” method.

John: Agreed. Let’s talk about making those shows. Our main topic here came from Matt Byrne, who’s one of my former assistants, who actually is working on a Netflix show for Shondaland.

Craig: Great.

John: It all fits together nicely. Megana, could you read us Matt’s question?

Megana: Matt says, “I’d love an episode on understanding and approaching special/visual effects. I feel like it would be empowering to understand the menu and cost of everything, from adding leaves to treats to change seasons to creating massive scale space battles, empowering both from the earliest stages of writing, knowing what scale you might be able to achieve appropriate to the project, and also when it comes to fighting for or adjusting scenes during all stages of production.”

Craig: Such a good question.

John: Such a good question from such a good writer. Craig, you’ve gone through this a lot I’m sure on your show. Even just in times when you’ve been Zooming, I can see in the background of your shot, oh, that is clearly visual effects things you’re talking about. That is a prop that you’re having to figure out is that entirely digital. Talk to us about, on your show… Maybe start back to as you were starting to write your script for things. How much were you thinking about visual effects? How much did that visual effects thinking change over the course of actually shooting your show?

Craig: You have to think about it constantly. There are certain things that as writers we are free to ignore. We’re free to ignore budget and any of that stuff. It’s probably best that we don’t. We have a general sense that if I say, “Look, I want to shoot this show on a real boat on the water, and I want the boat to be on fire for real, and I want this and this to happen,” you understand this is going to cost a lot of money. It’s going to take a lot of time. It’s going to be difficult. Similarly, we should have a general sense of how visual effects work will impact our budget and the work that’s done.

You’re constantly asking your visual effects supervisor, is this better than doing it practically, meaning for real, or not? By better, we mean will it look better and will it cost less. Those are the big variables, look better, cost less. Sometimes it will look better and cost more. Then you have to make a choice. If they say this will not look good, it will cost a lot but it won’t look good, that’s also something you need to know. When you’re designing sequences, particularly large ones where you know you’re going to be doing world building or putting characters in a position where you’re not simply able to create it, you need to then talk to that person about where there are these landmines that you the layperson might not be aware of. Little things can suddenly jack up the price and make shots very, very complicated.

By and large, if characters are moving in front of something, and whatever that thing is needs to be a visual effect, even if it’s just a building or a sky that looks different, you want them in front of a blue screen, because that helps the visual effects department essentially have nothing but those people. Then they can put other stuff in. If you don’t, now they’ve got Roto, which means going through frame by frame and cutting them out. The expense goes way up. You’re always looking to avoid Roto-ing, if you can.

You are also, as much as possible, encouraged to have real elements from which to build visual effects around. If you’re lighting something on fire, if you have a building that’s burning, you want some real fire. You want to work with the special effects department to create practical fire, even if it’s not engulfing a building, because that would be unsafe, but some controllable fire that gives the visual effects department something to work with like natural light and sourcing. It gives the cinematographer a chance to work with real light as opposed to imagining what digital light would be doing.

All of these questions will inform what you do. At some point you must be ready for people to come to you and say, “We can’t, for the budget we have or the time we have,” or you get to choose this or this. Then you need to make your choices. You can’t get caught in the game of turning into an accountant for your own show. You don’t want to be the guy that just wins the victory for saving the most money. No one cares in the audience. On the other hand, you can’t be someone who doesn’t give a damn, because in the end, you’ll only hurt yourself.

John: I was talking with a showrunner this past week about a project she’s working on. She was talking about how even in the writers’ room she will sometimes be nixing ideas, just saying clearly on a budget level, on a visual effects level, that is going to be an idea that is going to kill us. It’s going to take away too many other options we need to have for the show. Those are hard things to do. It’s only with some experience, having made other things, she could see, okay, that is going to be problematic. I know that it’s going to be too expensive for the value we’re going to get out of it. I want to be able to save money to do this other big thing that is going to be better for the show. Those are tough calls to make. She has some experience, but it’s tougher if you’re a brand new writer who’s never been through that kind of production experience.

Craig: It is. You need to constantly ask questions. It’s probably better to check before you kill something, because there are times where between the art department, which is responsible for building the real sets, and the visual effects department, which was responsible for building things that aren’t there in reality, a solution may occur. Very important to us that we did a shot in Chernobyl where we see this power plant worker emerging from the exploded building to see that he’s actually outside. The roof is gone, and we can see that we’re exposed. He’s walking in front of this stuff. The production department built this environment up to a line. The line was basically where we would see someone moving. The person would never move above that line. Everything above that line gets replaced. At that point, you don’t need a blue screen above there. They can just digitally wipe it out and replace it, because nothing’s moving in front of it.

That concept of set extension is fundamental now to writing. If you can, in your mind, start thinking about creating these large places that don’t exist, but stage the scene in such a way that your real characters are moving in front of real things up to a point, and then the rest is set extension, that may be cost-effective. That may be more doable than you think.

John: The other classic thing you’d see in addition to set extension is when doors are opened, the space beyond that door. You’re on a stage, and so therefore the door is not looking outdoors. You’re putting a green screen, a blue screen behind there to replace that background, the window behind that door, so that the interior stage set actually feels like it’s the real exterior location.

Craig: We do that always.

John: That’s fundamental. Let’s talk about these from the very start decisions about where this show is going to be set, because visual effects is also going to determine what locations you’re going to be picking or even where you’re going to base your show. You based it out of Calgary, presumably because it gave you enough real visual stuff, the things you needed for your show, but you went in knowing that there’s going to be times where we’re going to have to replace backgrounds. We’re going to have to put trees where there aren’t trees. We’re going to have to put mountains where there aren’t mountains. How early on in the conversation or even as you were writing were you thinking about, okay, given what I’m going to have in Calgary, what other choice am I making on the page?

Craig: We were pretty far in on the writing before we landed on shooting in Alberta. Alberta wasn’t informed primarily by the writing. I think it’s good to start with dream. Let’s go ahead and dream our story. Then someone can say, “Look, here’s are the environments we have where we basically get free visual effects.” The Canadian Rockies is free visual effects. They’re amazing. These beautiful landscapes, they’re very… This is where they shot The Revenant. It’s gorgeous. That stuff is incredibly valuable, especially in stretches of your story where you know you’re going to be out there in the wilderness. Now you have wilderness. Where you think, “I’m going to need to create a bombed-out post-apocalyptic city,” those don’t exist. Then it’s simply about finding some locations that you feel gives your characters enough to be standing on and moving through, dressing that around them, and then talking about how the set extensions work from there.

You’re absolutely right. You need to be talking about that from the beginning, because there are things that are easier than other things. As writers, we don’t always know. I can’t tell you how many times I will walk over to our visual effects supervisor, who has been with us since prep, through shooting, and now here in post-production, to say, “Hey, difficult or hard to do this?” Difficult means time and money. He’ll say, “No, that’s easy.” Sometimes he’s like, “That’s actually harder than you would think.” There are times where I’m like, “I did not anticipate that.” You just don’t know. I will tell you that when you’re shooting, so many people who are invested in keeping the day moving will say to you, “We can fix that with visual effects.” They can do that. They can erase that. They can do this. They can do that. Then I’ll turn to our supervisor and say, “I’m being told that that’s easy.” He’ll go, “Ah… ” I’m like, “Okay, it’s not. Let’s fix it now.” Try and fix as much as you can now.

I think we should have a visual effects supervisor come on our show, and we should talk through the fundamentals of how visual effects are done, not the exciting stuff like spaceships blowing up, which is actually easy, but the really boring stuff, the stuff that basically you don’t know is happening, the invisible stuff. That’s really important for us as writers to know about.

John: On a show like yours, is the visual effects supervisor the person who’s also deciding, “We’re going to do a practical and we’re going to supplement it,” or is there a second… Who is responsible for getting the people together to talk over where this is going to split? Is it the director? Is it the line producer? Who’s involved with that conversation?

Craig: Everyone. The director, the showrunner of course, the physical producer, the visual effects supervisor, the visual effects producer, who’s handling the budgeting for all that and then the bidding, and the art department. Very important that the art department, the production designer is working hand in hand with the visual effects people, because that’s where digital and reality meet, and trying to figure out where the line is and what the best way of skinning the particular cat is. Everybody comes together and agrees we want to do this thing, but there are times…

Early on, there was a sequence that Neil and I were talking about, and it just became outrageously expensive to do and wasn’t necessarily… The part that was expensive wasn’t the part that we loved. Those are great targets for re-conceiving. Just do it in a different way, because we’re not going to get massive amounts of love and adoration for the fact that, I don’t know, whatever it is is happening in the background. It’s not important. It comes down to creative judgments. The creative judgments are set against the backdrop of what things will cost and how hard they’re going to be, just like everything else that we do. Knowing your options, crucial.

John: Let’s move on to our second topic. This is a listener question. Megana, can you set us up?

Megana: Travis wrote in and asked about optioning a novel. He says, “The novel is an old bestseller from a well-known writer, but one of their minor works. After weeks of back and forth with the author’s publisher, then being forwarded to their agent, I’ve learned that the rights are available. However, in my last email from the agent, they simply said, ‘We’ll look forward to hearing more about your interest.’ Now I’m feeling a bit naïve. I just assumed they would give me their terms and I could take it or leave it. Do they want me to present an offer? It is extremely amateur for me to ask if they have a standard agreement or what their asking terms would be for an option? Should I contact an entertainment attorney and get them to draft a proposal? To further complicate things, I’m currently in the process of signing with a manager. Should I wait until that is finalized and get the management team on board for the option?”

Craig: Why would you ever talk to an attorney about something as complicated as this?

John: As optioning. Craig, have you ever optioned a book?

Craig: No.

John: I have optioned one book. It was a good experience. Ken Richman, my attorney, ended up doing the option agreement. The short version of it is I read this book, I loved it, I reached out to the author. No one else was chasing the rights at this point. I said, “Hey, could I option this? I’m not sure I can get this set up, but I think I would love to try.” He said, “Sure.” It was a very low-cost option, a couple thousand dollars for 18 months or beyond. I never ended up doing anything with it. I let the option lapse. Still friendly with the author. It was my first time optioning a thing. I’m not sure I should’ve optioned it. I want to talk about what options are, but also what options are for somebody like Travis.

Craig: First let’s just say we’ve talked about options before, which is essentially you control the ability to make a movie or to essentially turn one thing into another, adapt the work into another work. You control that for a certain amount of time. Nobody else can turn that novel into something.

John: It gives you the option to buy out the rights to something. Rather than paying the full purchase price, you’re getting a hold on those rights for a period of time.

Craig: Exactly.

John: Eighteen months is common, but it could be a different amount of time.

Craig: I’m going to give you $500 for the right to buy your car within the next 6 months. If I don’t buy the car within the next 6 months, you’ve made $500.

John: The right to buy the car for a specific price.

Craig: That’s right.

John: That’s really crucial too.

Craig: Exactly. I’m going to give you 500 now. Within the next 6 months, if I give you 5,000, then your 1999 Toyota Tercel is mine. By the way, do not spend that much money on a ’99 Tercel.

John: Although in this car market these days, it’s all crazy.

Craig: I will say, Travis, you’ve answered your own question. First of all, certainly when they say, “We’ll look forward to hearing more about your interest,” what they’re saying is, “What are you talking about here, buddy? How much money you want to give us?” Why would they give you a term. Oh, no no no no no. No no no no no no no. You tell me. What do you want? You called me. How bad do you want this thing? That’s what they’re wondering is… If you are super interested in this and you have a lot of money, you take the first shot.

What that means, of course, is that you’re already outclassed, because that’s a business, and you’re not. Yes, you need an attorney now. Anything you say at this point they could turn into a warrant of something important. You’re not warranting anything. You’re just trying to find out what this costs. You need an attorney to do all your talking for you. Ideally, that attorney would have a decent sense of what these things generally option for based on market comps. Your manager may also have a sense of that. I don’t think you need to wait for a manager necessarily. I also don’t think that you need to option this at all.

John: I don’t think you do either. Let’s talk through a little bit more options and then get into why Travis probably shouldn’t be optioning this. Whenever you’re setting up an option, what your attorney will be looking to do is set up what are the terms of the option agreement, how long does it go, is it renewable, which is crucial, can you keep renewing it at the same price, keep that option going, what the price is for the option, it could be a dollar classically or it could be a lot more than that, what the final purchase price will be. That might be contingent on what the budget for the actual movie or TV show is. Three percent is common, but it could be a big range. I think the one I optioned, it was 3% of the budget. What rights are you optioning? Is it just the film rights? Is it the TV rights? Is it stage rights? Is it everything? You’ve got to be specific about that.

This is also crucial, as someone who’s had books where people tried to option. Does the author have any controls? Does the author control anything over casting or director approval or script approval? Those are things that are going to be in this first option agreement. That’s why you’d have an attorney do this, if you were to try to option this book, which I think we’re both saying you probably shouldn’t.

Craig: I don’t see what the great value is here. It doesn’t sound like it’s something that a lot of people are chasing. If you write a script that other people are interested in purchasing, if it’s a studio, and you say, “Look, it’s based on this novel, and the rights are available,” then the studio will be like, “Oh, okay, we’ll just go get those,” because they’re going to have to get them from you anyway. You wouldn’t lose any leverage, because they’d still want your script.

John: Two choices Travis has here. He could go back to them and say, “Fantastic to hear. As I sit down with other producers, I’d like to bring this up as a thing I really would very much want to write.” That is an indication, “Hey, don’t be shopping this to other people.” As I go in and have my general meetings at places, there’s always this thing like, “Hey, what do you want to write? What are you interested in?” I can say, “There’s this book that I really love. I’ve talked to the author, and the rights are available. Here’s how I’d do it.” You get someone else to buy the rights for you. That’s a possibility. Could they swoop in? We’ve had other listeners on the show who have said, “I mentioned this book, and someone else bought it and scooped it out from under me.” Could that happen to Travis?

Craig: Yeah, it could.

John: Yeah, it could. It could. Absolutely.

Craig: It could, but I don’t think that… Let’s say you option this thing for a standard term, which is about a year and a half. It’s pretty typical. If you don’t sell this within a year and a half, and somebody else wants to do it, then they’ll just sell it to that other person. The odds of you going from no script to something in a year and a half is not strong.

John: Travis could also decide to write this script based on this book without controlling the underlying rights. That’s risky, but it does happen. That script will at least be a writing sample for Travis that he can show out on the town if he doesn’t control the underlying book. Maybe it turns out great, and somebody wants to buy the script and the book. They can do it. It just becomes a much harder thing to set up and sell that way, just because the rights holder is going to say, “Great. You bought that script, and you want the rights to this book? Great, now they cost $5 million.” They can hold things hostage.

Craig: I agree. I think you probably don’t need to get this deep into it. First start writing and see if you even want to do it. That’s the other thing. You haven’t written anything yet, so who even knows?

John: We have a follow-up question here from Hannah that I think ties in well.

Megana: Hannah from Minneapolis asks, “For loose adaptations like 10 Things I Hate About You and Taming of the Shrew or Clueless and Emma, do you need to obtain rights for the source material? I’m thinking no exact lines or character names, but modernized versions of the characters and plot. The book I have in mind was written in 1920 and is not in the public domain.”

Craig: Hold on. She switcheroo’ed us there.

John: She did.

Craig: You started with a thing that was in the public domain, a thing that was in the public domain, a thing that was in the public domain. If it’s in the public domain, you don’t have to worry about it. If it’s written in 1920 and it’s not in the public domain, then you do.

John: It could be simpler. To say loose adaptations, strict adaptations, for things in public domain, you could do a very direct adaptation. You don’t have to worry about any of that stuff. Just do what you want to do. If it’s in the public domain, it’s in the public domain. It is free for you to use. This book that she’s thinking about that was written in 1920, that’s not in the public domain, it’s going to be in the public domain really soon. It’s not going to be forever before it becomes public domain. If it’s not public domain now and you want to be working on it, I’d think about what is it about that book that is appealing to you and is there a way you can do something that is like that but is not directly based on it, because you probably can. Just don’t take it directly.

Craig: No exact lines or character names is not necessarily going to save you from copyright infringement. The question that will be asked is would the people who do control the rights to that book, I assume an estate, would they recognize in your work that you have adapted their work? One of the rights that copyright infers is a right to make derivative works, including adaptations. If it’s recognizable as an adaptation, you got a problem, because clearly you’re pulling more than just an idea. If it’s not recognizable as an adaptation, then I guess the question is really are you adapting the book at all.

I think John’s making an excellent point. The book was written in 1920. Odds are, unless the book was written by a seven-year-old, that this is going to be in public domain soon enough, because public domain essentially is conferred by a particular period of time after the death of the author. I don’t know which book it is. Generally speaking, when you’re getting back into 1920, you’re talking about 100 years ago, see how you do.

John: The F. Scott Fitzgerald books are becoming public domain now.

Craig: Agatha Christie books are going to start going to the public domain. There’s already the very first one. I think a few more will be following.

John: This is also the point in the podcast where we remind people that our copyright laws and our extensions of copyright laws are bullshit. Things should be public domain much sooner than they currently are.

Craig: They are constantly changing. Basically, every time Mickey Mouse approaches public domain status, the copyright in the United States seems to get extended again.

John: Kick that can. Maybe we’ll just let Mickey Mouse just have eternal copyright and let everything else go. I don’t care about Mickey Mouse. Fine.

Craig: I don’t care either. I don’t even think Disney cares. At this point they’re like, “Whatever. Whatever.”

John: We have one short question here on shorts. Megana, do you want to take this one?

Megana: Leah wrote in and said, “I’m a filmmaker who lives and works in Los Angeles. I’ve been fortunate enough to find a financier to fund a few short films of mine. I love making short films. They’re fun, rewarding, and meaningful. Most importantly, my cast and crew are paid decently. I’m using short films as a way to hone my skills as writer/director/editor and as a calling card for features. When I get more established in the feature and TV world, I don’t ever see myself not doing short films. I’m astounded by how many directors and writers who have, quote, ‘made it’ don’t make short films. At a certain point, is filmmaking a job instead of art? Is asking a director or writer to do a short film the equivalent of asking an off-duty dishwasher to do the dishes? In essence, why am I not seeing more short films from P.T. Anderson, Greta Gerwig, or Debra Granik?

Craig: Because they don’t want to do them. Just a wild guess.

John: My first instinct is because they don’t have to make them, so they’re not making them. Then I think about maybe it’s just no one’s asking them to make them. When I think of filmmakers who actually do shorts, they’re usually for a purpose, like New Yorkers asking Wes Anderson to make a short film about something.

Craig: An ad, usually.

John: Basically an ad. That’s the thing is advertising videos, other stuff like that become the equivalent of short films. That’s why big directors will do those rather than do a narrative short film that is just a reason to make it. I think it’s because, at least in the US, there’s not really a market for short films, there’s not really a purpose for short films, other than as calling cards. Once someone has made it, they don’t feel the urgent need to make a calling card.

Craig: Ultimately, when filmmakers make films, they are looking for an audience. There isn’t a tremendous audience, at least in the US, for short films. People don’t necessarily seek them out. It may be fun, rewarding, and meaningful to you, the filmmaker, Leah, but they don’t seem to be fun, rewarding, and meaningful to most of the audience. It’s just a fact. People just don’t go seeking them out. They don’t love them. They tend to like episodes of television which are… Certainly half-hours are like many short films. Or they like full features. That’s what they prefer. That is also how most of us were raised culturally. That’s how most of us think, including P.T. Anderson, Greta Gerwig, and Debra Granik. I think your premise is that everybody loves them, so why aren’t we making more of them, and I dispute your premise. I think you do, which is wonderful.

John: That’s great.

Craig: I think you should keep doing it. That’s fantastic. When you say, “I’m astounded by how many directors and writers who have, quote, ‘made it’ don’t do short films,” you mean like almost all of us? At that point you should not be astounded. At that point you should just think, “I’m into something that’s sort of niche,” because that’s what it is. John and I don’t do short films. Also, a lot of writers don’t write in that format. If you’re a non-writing director, there’s also just a lot less material out there for you.

John: Craig, I’ve done two short films.

Craig: What?

John: I’m actually really proud of both of them.

Craig: Which ones?

John: I did God, which was my initial thing with Melissa McCarthy.

Craig: I thought that was The Nines.

John: No. God is the short film I did before Go, with Melissa McCarthy.

Craig: Pre-Go.

John: That set up Melissa McCarthy. Incredibly helpful for me. It was a calling card, really useful for that.

Craig: Was that when you were in school?

John: We’d shot Go. It hadn’t come out yet. I used the short ends of film left over from Go to shoot the short film with Melissa McCarthy, who was delightful.

Craig: It was called God?

John: It’s called God. You’ve never seen God?

Craig: I love the fact that you made Go, and then you were like, “I have some extra film and the letter D.”

John: “I will add it on there.” Craig, after this, literally, you have to watch it, because I think you’ll find it delightful.

Craig: I will.

John: It’s literally the first time you’re going to see Melissa McCarthy on film.

Craig: God.

John: God.

Craig: God, writing it down.

John: You will understand me better after watching this short film. I made a short film during the 2008 writers’ strike, which was a premise pilot for a series we never ended up shooting. It’s a short film, but it’s also a pilot.

Craig: It’s a pilot.

John: It’s a pilot. It’s a web series pilot. I’m also reminded, back on Episode 287, my One Cool Thing was this short film called Vale done by Alejandro Amenabar. I thought, “Wow, I don’t understand why this short film exists with Dakota Johnson, but it’s just absolutely delightful.” Then a listener pointed out, “No, it’s actually an ad for the beer they’re drinking in the short film.”

Craig: Bingo. There’s been quite a few of those. Martin Scorsese has made one. Every now and then BMW will hire some wonderful filmmaker to make a 20-minute thing. Anyway, point being, Leah, keep doing what you love. That’s important.

John: 100%.

Craig: The fact that you’ve been able to find financing for it is wonderful. I’m hoping that there is, even if it’s not a massive audience, it is a dedicated audience to your films, but I don’t think your premise that other people are somehow missing out on something wonderful is correct. If you love that, you do it. If other filmmakers don’t, they do what they do.

John: Exactly. It has come time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. First off, for screenwriters, if you listen to this podcast and enjoy people talking about screenwriting, you’ll probably enjoy Jonathan Stokes’s little video series called Raising the Stakes, where he talks about stakes in movies. The series of videos is about different themes on stakes in screenwriting things. Take a look at them. They’re delightful. They’re on YouTube. If you’re a person who plays video games, which is a lot of people who listen to the podcast, you might enjoy Stray. Have you heard of Stray?

Craig: I have.

John: I’ve been playing it. I think it’s just delightful. In it, you are a stray cat who is wandering through this post-apocalyptic, empty city. You’re just a cat. You can do cat things. You can’t talk, can’t do anything else. You can scratch against trees. It does a really good job with the controller and using the rumble in the controller and also the speaker, to really make it feel like you’re doing the things that you’re doing, which I was impressed by. I just really like it. I also like that the cat cannot miss jumps. If it looks like you can jump on it, you can jump on it. If you fall, it’s because there’s a narrative reason why you’re supposed to fall. Cats are really good at jumping and landing. It just has perfect jumping.

Craig: I’ve been looking at that one. I think I might grab that myself. I’ve been playing Cyberpunk 2077, a game that I purchased when it came out, played for about one day, and went, “WTF this POS.”

John: So broken?

Craig: It was so broken. The very first quest line just wouldn’t function for me. I was like, “I guess I’m stuck.” A guy I follow on Twitter named Hutch, who’s a big professional gamer, was mentioning that he’s been playing it lately and that it’s way better than he thought it was based on all that, the disastrous launch. I was like, “All right, Hutch, I’ll go back in.” I’m playing it on a PS5. It is fixed. There’s been a few glitches. I’m not going to lie. There’s been a few moments where I’m like, “Oh, come on,” and yet still it’s been a lot of fun. I’m about halfway through the main line. It’s a lot of fun. Tip of the hat.

John: Great.

Craig: It started so poorly for me way back when, but I’m enjoying Cyberpunk now. That’s not my One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing was actually sent to us on Twitter by a guy named Daniel Green, @dgreenmusic. It’s not a new thing. It’s an older video from 2017, which seems like it was yesterday but in fact was five years ago. It is a video called How to Make a Blockbuster Movie Trailer. It’s fantastic.

John: It’s really good. I think we have discussed it. I think it’s worth a rewatch because it’s really, really good.

Craig: It’s so good. It just nails every single moment. Why I think it’s important to actually watch this thing is to see behind the curtain and realize how easy it is to manipulate us and also how strange it is that we don’t immediately notice how repetitive and imitative these trailers are to each other.

John: I think it’s terrific. By the way, Craig, you know Dan Green, because Dan Green was your accompanist at the New York live show.

Craig: Oh, that Dan Green.

John: That’s Dan Green.

Craig: He’s wonderful. Thank you, Dan Green. Thank you for being my accompanist when I sang on Broadway. That’s a very, very stretchy fact. I was on a Broadway stage, not in a Broadway musical. I did sing. Dan was my accompanist. He’s wonderful. I remember he had just gotten married, I think.

John: He’s still happily married.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: They have a kid.

Craig: Wonderful.

John: He’s running some half-marathons. We’re proud of Dan. Love it.

Craig: Thank you very much for sending that in, Dan. That’s great.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: You know it.

John: Our outro this week is by Adam Pineless. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re terrific. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all of the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on nightmares. Craig, Megana, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you.

Megana: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, do you suffer from nightmares?

Craig: Suffer is a strong word, but I certainly have them.

John: You encounter them. Megana, are you a nightmare person?

Megana: Oh yeah.

John: Are you a nightmare person.

Craig: Megana is such a nightmare person.

John: A nightmare person.

Megana: On all levels, I’m a nightmare person.

John: Megana, I’m guessing you do have nightmares, because you are the most easily startled person I’ve ever met in my life. I think they’re probably related.

Craig: Megana is really easily startled.

Megana: Yeah, I am. It happens in my sleep too.

John: Not good. Are there circumstances that you can trace back to, “Oh, I’m having nightmares because of X, Y, or Z,” or is it just random for you?

Craig: Why do I feel like this is definitely a robot trying to learn about human behavior? “Tell me about these nightmares.”

John: “Tell me about feelings.”

Craig: “How do they function?”

Megana: I think that’s what’s so unsettling about it is that they just come out of nowhere. Sometimes I’ll be feeling really good about things, and then I’ll have this horrible nightmare. Sometimes I have really realistic where I’m having conversations with people that go terribly, and then I wake up and I’m so mad and upset at them. It was a total lie. Do you guys experience that?

John: I absolutely do. I’m a very vivid dreamer. I feel like probably my time in dreams is much longer than my time awake. I feel like I have whole other lifetimes in dreams, in an Inception way. Luckily, very rarely do dreams because actually scary nightmare situations. They can be annoying dreams, but I rarely get things where I’m scared for my life.

Craig: As life goes on, I feel like I either have fewer nightmares, or when I have them, I have a general sense of… It’s not that I’m fully aware that I’m dreaming, but I know it’s not real, whereas when I was a kid I would have nightmares all the time. They were very vivid. I believed them. They were terrifying. I would even have repeat nightmares where it was the same one. As I was in it, I knew that the bad thing was going to happen. Happy that I’m out of that. I think in part it’s a function of a vivid imagination and a mind that has just creative… I think creative minds come up with really interesting and terrifying nightmares.

John: I’m always surprised in dreams how complicated and how thought out they are. Sometimes they feel plotted in a way. Dreaming is your brain doing its maintenance cycle. It’s cleaning out all this stuff. It’s rewiring things so that you’re trying to create logic that isn’t necessarily going to be there. I am struck when it does feel like it has a story and a plot and things are moving forward in ways that would happen in real life.

Craig: Megana, are your dreams incredibly thorough and complicated?

Megana: Yeah. Then sometimes I’m like, “Damn, I just wrote a movie in my head.” Then I try to write it out, and I’m like, “Oh, this is garbage.”

Craig: Garbage. It’s another garbage movie from a nightmare person.

John: Getting back to scary things happening at night, have either of you had sleep paralysis, where you wake up but you cannot move?

Craig: I have not.

John: I’ve had it.

Megana: I have had it a couple of times.

John: My experience was it was the absolute scariest thing, much scarier than a scary dream, because it will generally happen if I take a nap, because I’m not generally a napper. I kind of wake up, but I don’t fully wake up. Then I cannot move any part of my body. I’m aware of some dark force is usually just beyond where my feet would be. I can sometimes see the thing. I could feel it. I cannot move. I cannot speak. Eventually, I’ll be able to get some sort of gurgling scream out and Mike will wake me up.

Craig: Gurgling scream.

John: It really does feel like you’re just trying to force the thing out and you cannot do it.

Craig: Wow. You’re lucky you’re not married to me, because I would just watch you. I would see gurgly screams, and I would just be like, “Interesting.” Like Christopher Guest in Princess Bride. “Fascinating.”

John: Recording starting on a phone, videotaping the whole thing.

Craig: “You seem to be caught in a nightmare.”

John: Megana, was your experience of sleep paralysis at all the same?

Megana: Yes, that feeling of trying so hard to scream or to move, and then also just the feeling that there was someone else in the room that I couldn’t see, but they were just right out of the corner of my eye, and I’m trying to look for them.

Craig: That’s me.

Megana: Just recording us screaming.

Craig: That’s me watching.

John: What I’ve read, and I think last time it happened it was successful, is the only way out of it is you have to relax out of it, and eventually you will fall back asleep and your body will come back out of it. It’s really tough to chill out when you feel like that.

Craig: I had a nightmare last week. I will spare you the details, because as we all know, nothing’s more boring than hearing somebody describe their dream. There was one moment that encapsulated my fear. It was a dream where I was driving, and it turned into a car crash. I was driving, for whatever reason, I understood that I was, A, drunk, B, driving backwards, and C, the car was turning towards the right, but my eyes could only look to the left. I understood I was going to crash at some point, but I didn’t know when that point was. That was the scariest thing of all, just not knowing. Then the crash happened. I was fine. I woke up. It was no big deal.

John: A common thing for me is that I do wake up right before the actual injury would happen. I never feel the actual impact of it. I wake up in that, so I’m not feeling the actual pain.

Craig: This whole dream thing, it’s really weird, the concept of it. It’s bizarre. Just our bad brains barfing out neural crap.

John: As I look at my dog sleeping here, he has dreams too.

Craig: Of course.

John: I see him chasing and barking.

Craig: So cute. Little twitches.

Megana: I also had a question for you guys, because I had had a nightmare, and then I was trying to talk myself down in the middle of the night. I was like, “Okay, self-soothe.” I was like, “How did my parents help me deal with this?” Maybe this is why I’m so bad at dealing with nightmares, because it was awful. My dad would sit me down, and he would be like, “Megana, think about logic.”

Craig: Oh, Dr. Rao. You know what I would do? My daughter would have the full-on night terrors when she was young.

John: Night terrors where she wakes up screaming and [inaudible 00:59:31].

Craig: What would happen is she would walk out. I was staying up late working. She would come on out of her room. She was in tears. I would understand, okay, she had a terrible nightmare. First of all, I would make her go pee, because that’s 90% of it. I would put her back to bed. I would make sure to spray my anti-monster spray, which is the opposite of what Dr. Rao did. What Dr. Rao did was just deny your feelings, just invalidate your experience completely, and not help you at all.

John: Craig, where do you get the anti-monster spray?

Craig: I would tell her that it was quite expensive and it was precious, and I had to keep it hidden and safe, just so that it was always there. Of course, she understood there was no monster spray, just as she understood there was no monsters. Nonetheless, again, unlike Dr. Rao…

John: You were validating her feelings.

Craig: Validation and soothing. I would say, Megana, what you ought to do next time you wake up from a nightmare is just spray some anti-monster spray around you.

Megana: Maybe I’ll do that, get some lavender aromatherapy spray or something.

Craig: No no no no no no no. You don’t understand. You hold an imaginary thing in your hand and you shh. That’s how you do it. I don’t understand what you thought… The lavender was not going to work. You need monster spray.

Megana: I see. You weren’t even holding anything.

Craig: Lord, no. If I had been holding something, she would’ve been like, “That’s not going to work.” You need to understand that there’s something supernatural in my hand that’s going to work, and therefore it must be invisible.

Megana: I see. I see.

Craig: God, you’re a nightmare person.

John: Thank you both.

Craig: Thanks.

John: Bye.

Megana: Bye.

Craig: Bye.

Links:

• Craig went to Comic Con 2022 to Moderate a Mythic Quest Panel
• Will Netflix be Alright? by Dave Karpf
• God John’s 1998 short film
• Stray Annapurna videogame
• Raising the Stakes videos
• How to Make a Blockbuster Trailer
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
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• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/why-now).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 561 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, why now? We’ll ask the question every development executive asks at your second meeting and why writers need to think about it in their own work. We’ll also talk about reversals and answer a bunch of follow-up.

**Craig:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll discuss when to engage with stupid people and when to just ignore them.

**John:** That is crucial advice.

**Craig:** I have thoughts.

**John:** You have thoughts.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Also, our Premium Members, we should say we sometimes send out emails to Premium Members, and one of the emails that Premium Members will be getting pretty soon is about upcoming live shows.

**Craig:** Live shows are back.

**John:** If you would like that information about when those live shows are coming out and how to get those first tickets, it’d be great to be a Premium Member. Little tip there that those people are going to get the first notice. The venues are not huge, so they could sell out.

**Craig:** Just remind people, because it’s been a while. We are the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts. We sell out stadiums. You people, take heed.

**John:** That’s so interesting, Craig, that now we are the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts, but we used to just be the Bon Jovi, like Bon Jovi the band. Now it’s come down to the singular-

**Craig:** I feel like people are showing up for Jon Bon Jovi. No offense to the other guys. We are the Jon Bon Jovi. I’m changing it. Hey listen, man, the pandemic happened.

**John:** It did.

**Craig:** Changes had to be made. Simple as that.

**John:** Our world shrunk a little bit during that time, and we really focused on the individual rather than the group. I get it.

**Craig:** We’re the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts.

**John:** Very nice. A much less fun topic to start off our show this week is abortion and abortion rights and abortion access. Two pieces of news to talk about as related to writers. First off, the WGA Health Plan announced this week that they will be covering travel for abortion-related expenses. If you are a person who is working, a WGA member who’s working in a state the restricts abortion, and you need to have an abortion or someone who’s on your health plan needs to have an abortion, the WGA Health Plan will reimburse the travel expenses for getting you to a state where you can have an abortion.

**Craig:** This is becoming fairly common for a number of businesses as well. What do we do? We can’t pat ourselves on the back for doing this, because we’re all soaking in the shame and stupidity of what has happened. At a minimum, our health plan is doing what they can. Personally, I think we got to get out of any place that is banning abortion, because it’s gross. You have to plant your flag somehow. We just can’t keep doing business with these places.

**John:** That’s a nice segue to the other thing that happened this last two weeks was that first a group of 400 mostly female showrunners signed a letter to the studio saying, “Hey, we are demanding answers for how you’re going to handle production in states that are outlawing abortion,” and asking for specific guidance on what they were going to do to address the problem. Another 600 or more showrunners, including you and I, signed onto a follow-up statement saying yes, we really do need these answers. As we record this, we don’t know what the individual plans are going to be for different studios. The WGA can talk about its members, but the writer is one or five people on a production. Productions have hundreds of people who are all facing the same problems. We need to have a bigger conversation about how we’re going to handle these situations when they occur on sets that are shooting in Georgia or some other state that could restrict abortion.

**Craig:** I think it’s probably best for us to say that while abortion immediately impacts people with a uterus, abortion fully impacts everyone.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** That’s why ultimately so much of what was happening… A lot of women in our business came together and raised a lot of money and did a lot of work on this behalf. Aline Brosh McKenna, the Joan Rivers of our podcast, was key in that, and then a lot of guys. They asked. They said, “Guys, step up, because this is about all of us.” It’s true. I don’t think anyone thinks that, for instance, breast cancer is a problem that guys don’t have to think about. I had to think about it quite a bit when my wife had it. It impacts everyone’s life. Prostate cancer impacts everyone’s life. This is something that is about our human nature and about the people that we are and the people we love.

I’m not comfortable going to a state where the legislature has decided to be cruel and stupid. You have to put your foot down somehow. You just do. This is crazy. We’ll keep raising money for abortion, by the way, not for choice, because I hate that word. For abortion, which is an excellent and necessary health procedure that saves lives and preserves the rights of individuals. We will try and do what we can as individuals in our business to advocate getting away from people who don’t see it that way.

**John:** Obviously, we’re going to continue to follow the story. We should have answers back from what the different studio’s plans are for this, not only in dealing with travel situations if those need to come up but also the privacy implications of this. It’s weird that you’re going to have to tell your employer specifically why you need to do X, Y, or Z. That just doesn’t feel right in the situation that we’re in right now. To be determined how it all sorts out.

**Craig:** Just crazy.

**John:** Let’s go to a less dire topic. Let’s talk about Netflix and Stranger Things. This was an article that was a nonevent. In the Stranger Things canon, I guess a character’s birthday had been set at one date, and years later they moved it to a different date. They went back and retroactively changed a line in an earlier episode to make it match, which has echoes of Lizzo changing a lyric or Beyonce changing a lyric, realizing that there was an ableist slur in there. That feels innocuous. At what point do we say no, this art is finished and we should just leave it as it is?

**Craig:** It is innocuous. I think it reflects the way that people absorb culture now, which is all as a piece. They like to pick it apart, especially things that they obsess over like Stranger Things. You mentioned the word canon. Canon used to be preserved for literary works and religion and classical music. Now it applies to television shows. It’s clear that people take all this very seriously.

I’ll give you an example that I was involved in. On Mythic Quest, I wrote the episode called Backstory, where we learn the backstory of F. Murray Abraham’s character. We go back in time. There is this big deal that had been made. In the first season he kept boasting about his Nebula Award. In the episode I wrote, we see how he came to get that Nebula Award. There was a photograph in the first season of him winning the Nebula Award. They just took a shot of young F. Murray and PhotoShopped it in. Josh Brener wonderfully played young F. Murray Abraham in Backstory. They went back and they changed the photo in the first season, which I thought was completely innocuous and fine. It just didn’t seem like somebody was making the smile on Mona Lisa a little bit bigger.

Little things like that for consistency I think are actually fan service and show a little bit of respect to people, because sometimes stuff happens. The last thing you want to do is say, “Oh my god, we can’t do this storyline, because some dumb picture was… ” It doesn’t work that way. We have to call it as we see it. Very famously, Spielberg took the guns out of ET.

**John:** ET, yeah.

**Craig:** Replaced them with walkie-talkies. I don’t agree with that. That feels like a very different kind of thing.

**John:** Let’s pull it apart, because I was also thinking about that. In both cases, it is the creator of the actual work itself going back and saying, “I think that the choice they made at that point wasn’t the right choice.” It feels like a Lizzo or Beyonce changing the lyric more than a studio coming in and sanitizing it. Tell me about why you think that’s a bigger change.

**Craig:** Beyonce and Lizzo were not aware that a particular word was offensive to a lot of people. The song came out, and people went, “Hey!” They were like, “Oh, okay, didn’t know. I’ll take the L, and I’ll go back in there, and I’ll change it.” It was immediate. It was essentially immediate feedback, which again is a modern cultural phenomenon.

**John:** It’s like they had an edit tweet button. They could just go through.

**Craig:** Basically. It’s the cultural version of the seven-second delay where you get an oopsie. We never had that kind of feedback loop before, so this is a new phenomenon. In the case of ET, decades, I think, after ET came out, Spielberg made the choice to say, “You know what? My opinion about things has changed. I’m going to go back in and do this.” The issue is it had been out there for so long in that way, and it’d been seen so many times in that way that it felt a little pointless, because ET is beloved. If nobody cared about ET, it wouldn’t have mattered. It was beloved. It was studied. That change was not to do fan service. That change was not to coordinate the canon. That change was simply because he had an opinion about something. It just didn’t feel very good or reasonable. Similarly, the decades later, “Oh, now I have the money to do that the way I really wanted to do it,” Lucas style adjustments. I just find you could it, it’s your movie, but I don’t think anybody was applauding it. Anyone.

**John:** In both these cases, with ET and with Star Wars, the question of ownership becomes a little bit more forefront, because at a certain point, yes, they are the creators of the original work, but they feel like they’re owned by culture in general. We all own Star Wars. We all own ET. It feels like a bigger violation to make a change to a thing we feel like, “Oh no, I already have this in my house. This is a thing I own, and you now are changing it.” Maybe that’s what it comes down to.

**Craig:** This, by the way, is why I’m not a huge fan of director’s cuts or other things like that, because even though on occasion the director’s cut is vastly better than the movie that existed otherwise, usually when the studio has chopped it up completely, and so you never really did see the movie at all, but most of the time it’s like, “Oh, we threw back in a bunch of crap that we cut out.” There’s stuff that we cut out of Chernobyl that I really liked, but it just didn’t ultimately fit. We were better off without it. I’m not putting that stuff out there as an extended edition or any of that stuff, because the show that I did is the show I did. That’s the one people watch. That’s it. You get one show.

**John:** Last bit of news to talk through, this is happening right as we’re recording, so we don’t know all the details. Batgirl, which was a $70 million Warner Bros movie, was announced it is never going to come out to be released.

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** It’s not going to release on HBO Max. It’s not going to release in theaters. I cannot think of another example of a movie with that kind of budget that has just been killed in post-production. It’s already shot. It’s already done. It’s a big move to not release it.

**Craig:** It’s pretty crazy. Obviously, people can take a look at the way movies are made and make an argument that we’ve spent, let’s say, I don’t know, what have they spent on this thing?

**John:** 70 they said.

**Craig:** $70 million has been spent. It’s easy to say, oh my god, just put it on fricking HBO Max and forget about it, but do get something out of it. The issue is it’s probably not done. There’s probably more work to be done. Then there’s marketing. Obviously, if they wanted to put it on streaming, they wouldn’t have to deal with the expense of a theatrical release. It seems like there’s this weird financial thing going on based on the merger and stuff before August 15th. Do you know I know less about accounting than basically anything else?

**John:** Thank you for saying that, because I really don’t understand accounting.

**Craig:** Nothing.

**John:** Or cost-based accounting or depreciation. Right over my head. I can do a lot of mathy kind of stuff, but I don’t get that.

**Craig:** The term write-off, I’m 80% on it. I think it means that they just say it’s a business expense that we can then, as a loss, discount from the taxable income or something. When they say these things like the books, like when they talk in movies like, “Oh, there were two sets of books,” I’m like, what does that mean? I really don’t know what… Megana, are you better at accounting than we are? I hope you are, because we don’t know anything.

**Megana Rao:** Oh my god, I tried to do math in the office, and we left it on the whiteboard for a while.

**Craig:** The whiteboard of shame?

**Megana:** Yeah, so absolutely not.

**Craig:** Wow. No one should be hiring the Scriptnotes gang to do their books. I don’t even understand what a book is. All I can say is this is pretty nuts. I don’t recall anything like this in all my time in Hollywood, where an entire… By the way, John, you and I both, I know this for a fact, have been asked to work on movies that are in post-production that are so bad that I have said at least three different times on films that have come out that they should not have come out. I have said three different times, “Don’t pay me. Don’t hire me to do anything. Take this and just put it away.” They didn’t. They spent more money, and they put it out there. In each of those cases, they would’ve been far better off financially by putting it away. I guess in this case, this feels more like a merger thing. I just don’t understand it.

**John:** We don’t know if the film is good or bad. We just know that they’ve decided not to release it. It could have relations to other things in the DC universe. We don’t know. I feel bad for the writers, directors, everyone who worked on that movie for a year, because yes, you got paid for working on a movie, which is great, but to not have the movie come out… We’ve talked about this before on the show, is that some of your pay is generally based on the movie actually coming out, so delivery of the finished negative or a box office bonus. When it’s released theatrically, if it hits $100 million, you get this bonus, residuals. None of that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** That’s right. The director’s almost certainly fulfilled their obligations by delivering a cut, and they will be paid. You’re correct, whatever residuals have become will obviously no longer be a factor. It’s an interesting question for the screenwriter. Almost always there is a bonus for screenplay credit. The credit may have been determined for this movie, but may not have been, because the credit is determined by a process that begins with the studio submitting a notice of tentative writing credit. If the studio hasn’t submitted that, there is no writing credit for this, and then there is no bonus. This is a really weird one. I have to just hope that this is a weird eclipse shooting star moment here that won’t happen again.

**John:** I will say though it’s unprecedented for this to happen in movies or television. I guess there have been some TV series that have shot and never aired. The pilot process is a form of this, where we shoot a pilot, and most pilots never air. Other industries, they will just do research and development. Apple will spend a billion dollars developing a car and say, “We’re not going to do a car.”

**Craig:** That’s right. The difference is that the car would need to still be manufactured over and over and over. They’ve manufactured the single car that is then required to show people. That’s the business we’re in. We build one thing, and everybody comes, stands around, and looks at it. To not put it out there is a very surprising decision, but I think this is one of those stories that’s tailor made for the phrase “above my pay grade,” because I don’t understand this stuff.

**John:** Let’s do some follow-up here. Last week we talked about IMDb. I was complaining about the new IMDb redesigned. We agreed that the redesign was terrible. You said, “John, why don’t you just scrape IMDb and make your own website?”

**Craig:** Scrape it.

**John:** I said that was completely impossible and that copyright law would prohibit that. A bunch of people wrote to us who know more about this than we do. We’ll start off with Cory Doctorow, who is an author and online person who said that I was… He’s an online person.

**Craig:** He’s an online personality.

**John:** He’s an online personality.

**Craig:** He’s very online, as Aline would say.

**John:** Who’s very strongly said that I was wrong. He pointed to court cases that would indicate that you could get by with scraping IMDb. Chris Reed, who’s an actual copyright attorney, wrote in and explained why that’s true and also there’s other complications along the way. Craig, where are we standing now with your fantasy of scraping IMDb? Where do you think we’re at now?

**Craig:** I think that we’re in a decent place. I think that you have to be careful when you’re scraping IMDb to not scrape up the wrong stuff. Basically, if you work at IMDb and you create anything for that site that isn’t just a fact that you scraped yourself from credits of a film, that may be protected. In fact, it likely is. Basically, IMDb is a service that already scraped another service. It scraped all the credits from all the movies. I think a re-scraping feels like you’d be on solid ground.

**John:** Chris, the copyright attorney, says that, “John is correct that there is copyright protection available for compilations of data and databases, but Craig is correct the facts are not generally copyrightable.” It goes down back to the phone book. The information in the phone book is not copyrightable. The argument would be is the organization of facts in IMDb and how it’s put together and is there essential stuff in it that is copyrightable that is not just the facts themselves. That would be the live court case.

Interestingly, there is a case that’s similar to it, which is that LinkedIn sued a company called HiQ. HiQ was scraping LinkedIn. It went through a bunch of iterations, made it to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court kicked it back down. HiQ won or has been winning this live challenge for its ability to scrape LinkedIn to get information off of public-facing pages for that. That seems relevant, except that HiQ is not a direct competitor of LinkedIn, which is Craig’s service. Craig movie database would directly compete with it, which feels like that could be another live issue there.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I don’t know why. Basically, whether I’m competing or not, either what they have is ownable or not ownable. I do think that if you were scraping IMDb and then your website looked a whole lot like IMDb, you’d be in trouble.

**John:** There’d probably be trademark and trade dress and all those kind of problems too.

**Craig:** Even the general design and layout of tabs and things, these are trademarkable but also copyrightable I think is more important. The layout itself is probably protected. I’m just talking about the raw data. I’ll just come back to IMDb itself is a scraping service. You point out here in our notes that IMDb has a term of service, which says, “Robots and screen scraping. You may not using data mining, robots, screen scraping, or similar data gathering and extraction tools on this site except with our express written consent as noted below.” Lol. Lmao. Unenforceable. I don’t believe that. What does that even mean? You violated their terms of service. Who cares? What are they going to do, kick you off? It’s free. That’s the thing. It’s not like terms of service are a law where you go to prison. They’re just saying you’re not allowed to use their service if you do this. I did it, and I guess I won’t use your service anymore.

**John:** What Chris points out though is that by violating the terms of service, they might be go after you criminally for, it’s called CAFA, computer abuse and fraud, that you’re using their service, that you’re potentially stealing. That’s a stretch, but that’s what they would try to do.

**Craig:** Sure, they could try to do it, and they would lose, because you’re not doing what that law was intended to do. Generally speaking, it’s not all technicalities. Everybody understands what the intention was. You’re not breaking into their website. For instance, one of the terms of service might be you can’t violate our security layers to steal the information of other users. If you do that, it’s not just a violation of the terms of service. I could see where that goes into CAFA. This, I’m just copying stuff that’s on the screen. Anyway, we’re armchair lawyers, but I’m pro-scrape. I think our service should be called scrapey.scrape. I think people would love it.

**John:** To clarify for our listeners and for Amazon’s lawyers, we are not actually planning on building anything here. This is never going to happen.

**Craig:** John has already built it. He’s already built an Amazon. It’s in his backyard, getting ready to launch.

**John:** It got me thinking about… Craig, you’re of course familiar with the Fermi Paradox, which is basically it feels like there should be other alien civilizations out there, and why have we not seen alien civilizations. I think there’s a similar thing that you can think about with a movie service that is like IMDb, is that if it were simple and easy to do just by scraping, someone else would’ve done it, which leads me to think that there’s probably some reasons why there’s not a big competitor to IMDb. The fear of litigation, that it’s actually technically harder to do, to actually run the site than you think, that there’s no way to make it profitable might be factors.

**Craig:** That’s the big one, I think. I think that IMDb is a decent platform for advertising, but it is not a business that… They try, but it’s not really an expandable business. It’s more of a public servicey kind of thing.

**John:** That’s probably why my frustration is so pointed towards the UI changes they’re making to it. It’s because I think they’re trying to make more money off of it, and by making it actually worse for people who need to use it.

**Craig:** They’re like, “What are we doing here with this thing?” Really, IMDb or whatever its eventual competitor or new form would be should probably be more of a public utility like Wikipedia is.

**John:** I want that to happen too. Let’s talk about the alternatives that are out there, because we didn’t talk about this last week. The one that you and I both agree is probably the closest to what we’d like to make is a TMDB.

**Craig:** It’s nice. TMDB. I don’t know where they got all their information from.

**John:** They say it’s user supplied. It feels like it’s a little bit more homegrown. It felt accurate.

**Craig:** I assume they have the same kind of publishing structure that Wikipedia folks have. They have regular contributors. Then they have editors, and they have uber-editors and people above them. These things sometimes, they just grow and grow and become amazing. I find that there is often this weird cultural moment. I remember the cultural moment where Google was a thing, because prior to Google, most people were using Yahoo or Alta Vista or Lycos. Then I started using Excite.

**John:** I remember Excite.

**Craig:** Excite was way better. There was a brief Excite moment. Then people started talking about this Google thing. The moment you used it, you were like, “This is so much better.”

**John:** “This is so much better.”

**Craig:** Then it just happened. It happened so fast. Until it happened, there was no Google. It was just a stupid, silly word. That may happen with… Who knows? Maybe this is the beginning of TMDB’s moment.

**John:** It could totally be there. I’ll also point out that Studio System, which is their other credits thing, they pay money for it. It’s a paid service. Variety has Variety Insight, which is a paid service. There are alternatives there. Realistically, everyone you and I know is using IMDb and begrudgingly going through it.

**Craig:** Yes, and IMDbPro, which I subscribe to, which has some interesting information at times.

**John:** It does, but not-

**Craig:** It’s not worth it.

**John:** It’s not worth it. It’s not as good as it should be.

**Craig:** No, I’m passively subscribing to it at this point. I wouldn’t suggest anybody actively subscribe to it.

**John:** Really the reason why I think we subscribed to it in the first place, to fix mistakes in our own listings or friends’ listings.

**Craig:** I don’t do a ton of that. What I use it for mostly is when we’re having casting discussions. They do have a decent searchable actory thing that then organizes people by their stupid star meter, which is not a reflection of anything at all. If I say I’m looking for an actor between 45 and 65 who is between this height and this height, whatever I put in, it’s a decent spit back for me. Maybe TMDB will offer that as well.

**John:** That’d be nice. Hey Megana, can you give us some follow-up on dating your writing partner?

**Megana:** Dangerous wrote in to us with an update. She said, “I wanted to say thanks so much for discussing my letter and all the thoughtful advice. I was genuinely touched. I have a darkly funny updated. While I still haven’t decided what to do on a personal level with this complicated situation, though I’m leaning towards Megana’s none of the above advice, I did pitch this idea to a producer dressed up as a sexy rom-com, and they loved it. I’m now getting some development money. While my therapist probably wouldn’t approve of how this is being handled, at least I can sort out some of my crazy emotions through art, and hey, that’s something, right?”

**Craig:** That is something.

**John:** That is something.

**Craig:** That is the most screenwriter resolution ever. “I’m in a terrible spot. How can I turn this into a movie and get a lot of money?” That’s a thrilling update.

**John:** Craig, you don’t listen to other podcasts, but on The Writing Life podcast, they talk about using the drama in your own life to channel your writing and use your daily writing to sort through your problems. It feels like Dangerous has taken that advice, in addition to our advice, and made gold out of this.

**Craig:** I never would’ve recommended you do this on purpose, but you did it, and I’m so happy you did. Congrats. I hope that this all works out well for you, both for the movie that you’re writing and also however you wish your relationship to go.

**John:** Let’s do one more piece of follow-up here from Annie. This is about Rodney Stotts, which is one of the How Would This Be a Movies.

**Megana:** Annie wrote in and said, “I’m Annie Kaempfer Brooklyn, New York. I just listened to your new episode, big fan, and was so excited to hear about Rodney Stotts in How Would This Be a Movie, because I recently made the feature documentary, and yes, there’s a bird trapping scene.”

**Craig:** There you go.

**Megana:** “Your discussion was so interesting and spot on. I especially appreciated the point that this could easily become a paint by numbers story we’ve all seen a million times before. It was a lesson I learned the hard way, cutting the film down from full length to make it a one-hour TV version. It made me realize my story arc/Rodney’s life story was in a lot of ways the least interesting part of the film. The parts you lean into were the portrait film scenes, Rodney’s stance on parenting, why he’s not interested in romantic relationships, his poetry, etc, anywhere where he’s just being himself and talking about his views on the world, because he really is an amazing character.” Then we’ll link in the show notes to the film and the trailer.

**John:** The film is out on Amazon right now. People can see it if they want to see it. Watching through the trailer, one of the questions you and I had, Craig, was what is his voice like, what does he actually sound like. His speaking voice is cool. His accent is interesting. He carries himself with a cool energy, which I think is going to be great.

**Craig:** I’m excited. I have to say this is very gratifying, because I think you and I wanted to see a version of this, and it turns out it already existed, which is great. We maybe need to go back and ET style rename that segment How Would This Have Been a Movie.

**John:** You definitely wanted the documentary for this. Someone who’s curious about making this movie obviously as a feature, as a narrative feature, you’ll look at the documentary to get a sense of who that is as a character. I think you’re casting Mahershala Ali in that role. I think you’ve got a winner if you’re going to make this movie. I’m excited to see the documentary first.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Let’s get on to our marquee topic. This comes from a question from Matt. Maybe Megana could read us the question and set up the issue of why now.

**Megana:** Matt wrote in and said, “I could be wrong, but I don’t recall you guys discussing the question of why now. I’ve been pitching new TV ideas for the last few years and often struggle working out what my characters and story are saying about the world we live in and why this show needs to exist beyond its entertainment value and my enthusiasm and need to work. How much does why now inform your choices and development of new ideas? Did Craig have discussions about why the Chernobyl story needed a TV show in 2019? If yes, at what point in the show’s development was it considered? Developing/discovering a why now feels different to a theme or central dramatic argument, which has universality without necessarily commenting on the world in 2022.”

**John:** What a smart question.

**Craig:** Yeah, although I must admit I’m a bit confused, because this is not what I think of when I think of the why now question.

**John:** Tell me what you think of with the why now question.

**Craig:** For me at least, typically the why now question is never about why are we making this show or movie now for the public. The question is why are these things happening to this character now. What is the relevance inside of the story? I would rephrase this as why should we make this.

**John:** I see that. Let’s talk about this why now in terms of the development is a question of-

**Craig:** Why should we make this?

**John:** Why should we make this now? Also, you could think about it from the writer’s perspective, like why is this a story that I’m drawn to telling now?

**Craig:** Which is very valid.

**John:** I think we’ve talked in other episodes a lot about why does the story start now, why is it starting for this character right now, why is this change happening right now, why are we starting it.

**Craig:** This would be why should we make this now.

**John:** Why is this worth my time and energy to be making this? Let’s think about it from the development side, because this is coming up a lot, this stuff around, that I’m involved with, is something else just happened, some other movie just happened that was a huge success, and so therefore looking around, saying, oh, so another movie in the same genre or the same basic idea feels right and relevant. If there’s a bunch of zombie movies that are hits, okay, this feels like a good time for a zombie movie, or if suddenly two Westerns hit, then we’re making some more Westerns.

**Craig:** I think we have cautioned writers before to not try and time the marketplace this way, because you’ll probably be late. By the time you hear about it, it’s too late. Often what happens is a studio will be well aware that let’s say a Top Gun: Maverick is going to be huge. Other studios immediately start moving into position, because they’ve heard and buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz. The movie comes out. It confirms it. Then they go, “Great, these 300 other things that we have that we’ve copied,” and obviously that’s an exaggeration, “let’s start moving them forward.” By the time it filters to you at home, it’s too late. They’ve already shut the door on the Top Gun: Maverick kind of things. This is why they will occasionally do this, but it’s not necessarily going to be information that’s useful for us as writers.

**John:** I would say the lesson people are taking from Top Gun: Maverick of the summer is not like, oh, we need to make more movies with fighter jets. It’s that, oh, maybe it’s a good idea to make Legally Blonde 3, because we’d be curious to catch up with that character now 20 years later to see what’s up in her life. There’s still that nostalgia, but a new chapter of it can feel right. You can take the same lesson from Creed or other movies like that.

**Craig:** Absolutely. It’s a bit of a revision of the way we used to do things where we would just remake stuff. When you and I were starting out in the ’90s, they would come to us and say we want to remake blah blah blah from a movie, or a television show into a movie. That’s when they were trying to do things like My Favorite Martian into a movie. You’re like, “Who remembers this?”

**John:** I remember pitching My Three Sons.

**Craig:** There you go. My Three Sons, Flubber, and all that. Now they’re like, “You know what? Let’s not remake these things. Let’s just bring back that person but older and see what it’s like now.”

**John:** Extend, yeah.

**Craig:** Exactly. It’s the same vibe.

**John:** Another reason for a why now would be it’s related to a current cultural moment. I was thinking about Jordan Peele’s Get Out and the idea of good white people and the sense of oh, they couldn’t be bad white people, because they voted for Obama. That felt like a very specific moment to make that movie, that you couldn’t have made that movie 10 years earlier, 20 years earlier. It was specific to that moment. There was a thing going on in culture that is like, “Okay, this is the right time to make this kind of movie or this kind of perspective on this kind of movie.”

**Craig:** I will probably repeat this a few times as we have this conversation. That’s not a cultural moment that studios tend to recognize as existing until a movie like Get Out comes out and surprises them all. Nobody behind Get Out, other than Jordan Peele and the filmmakers that were doing it understood quite what was going to happen, because they just didn’t. I’m not surprised. Sometimes in the best way, movies announce that there is a cultural moment.

**John:** Absolutely agreed. Another reason for why now is just there’s a notable filmmaker who wants to make it. There’s really no reason other than that person wants to do it, so therefore we’ll do it. I’m thinking back to one of the streamers came to me with a book that they wanted to make into a movie for their service. They had this director attached. I read the book. I’m like, “Oh.” I was pretty candid on the phone call with them. I was like, “I don’t understand what it is about this book that you want to make.” It’s like, “Oh, she wants to direct it.” Like, “Oh, okay, that’s the whole reason.” This wasn’t the movie that needed to happen right now. There wasn’t anything about this relevance to this, particularly time. It was just simply, oh, this is a thing that she wants to make, so therefore we want to make it.

**Craig:** There are definitely things that come into existence because of ego, whether there is a big star attached, or sometimes it’s just the pet project of the person who runs the studio. I will not say what the movie is. I will not say what the studio is or the name of the studio executive. I will tell you a little story.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** There was a film that had been in development for over 20 years. It had been green lit. It was a month away from shooting. The person who ran the studio asked me to work on it and to do a lot of work on it, because it needed a lot of work, and to do it fast. I said I could not, and in that discussion, just said, “Hey, why are you still making this a month from now if you know the script needs to be completely rewritten?” This person said, “Sometimes the best way to make a movie is to just start making a movie.” I never forgot that, because I actually understand it. It wasn’t like I went, “You idiot.” I get it, but also, oh no, and spoiler alert, it didn’t turn out well. Generally, it doesn’t. That said, sometimes it does.

**John:** Sometimes it does.

**Craig:** When you watch Heart of Darkness, the documentary-

**John:** Chaos.

**Craig:** … about Apocalypse Now, you can’t believe that they ever agreed to do it in the first place. They just started making a movie and ended up with something incredible.

**John:** Last reason I’ll give for a why now is that there’s a chance to change formats. Look at Lord of the Rings. We’ve done those as movie trilogies. Now you can do Tolkien as a series. Changing the format feels like, oh, there’s a really new way to explore this material by going to a different format. I think a lot of times the why now is just because there’s a new place for us to do this thing and to do it differently. That could be a valid reason.

**Craig:** Primarily, I would say to Matt, this why now thing is not our problem, because most of the things we’re talking about are justifications that executives will have to give to each other and to the person above them, because they often do need a why should we be making this, because they’re the ones that are spending all the money. What we do ultimately is probably best when there isn’t an obvious why now, but rather people tell you the why now. They appreciate it for what it is. Quality itself is the best justification for existence. We probably should just work on that and be less concerned about the why now, because it changed constantly anyway.

**John:** There’s the why now of who’s going to make this movie and why are they going to make it. I think there still is a valid why now question for a writer to ask before they’re even sitting down to start working on a project or to really think through a project is to ask themselves… Matt was talking about theme and dramatic purpose and dramatic question.

I think it’s worth asking yourself just for your own purposes what is it about this film that speaks to me in this current moment or this America right now or the world right now that would be different than if I were to do this 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Is there something that feels relevant and interesting to me about setting the story right now that this film can comment on? Those are valid questions to ask. Are there cinematic techniques that are going to be different and interesting because they are modern cinematic techniques? How are the female characters used? How are you looking at race and gender overall in your film? What’s your perspective in this film on policing and authority? Are there 2022 issues that are interesting to you in this film that you think you can expose? That’s worth asking. It’s not the same kind of why now question, but it’s really asking what is the current relevance for the story you’re thinking about telling.

**Craig:** A lot of stories, movies, and television shows demand a discussion of relevance. If you’re going to adapt X-Men for instance, X-Men is just an obvious allegory for racism and genocide and all that. Then it got even more obvious as it went on. You can’t really ignore that. You need to have that kind of commentary. There are also stories that are simply about universal relationships and experiences that are not about relevance. In fact, they transcend the why now because the answer is because always. For instance, death, love, betrayal, greed, all the good Bible stuff, that’s always why now.

**John:** Timeless.

**Craig:** It’s always why now. The question is really not why now, but what will be different about this. How will this connect to us in a different way? What will be teaching us something about ourselves in a way that we didn’t have before. Then there are other shows, where you’re like, yeah, of course you have to think about why now.

**John:** When I first got pushed to do Aladdin, I asked myself, is it a really good idea? Is there anything to do that is important to do that will be than the animated film, because I love the animated film. What else we came down to is there were a couple things I felt like were contemporary things that could be different and would be better served doing this movie in 2018, 2019. Giving Jasmine agency, because in the animated film, she doesn’t talk to anyone other than her tiger and her father and Aladdin when he finally shows up. Giving her some control over the story, so that decision that she is going to become the sultan and therefore wants to learn how the world works, because she’s been so cloistered, and giving her someone else to talk with. Changing Genie from being the crazy cocaine uncle to a bro, and what that dynamic would shift, and what it’s like to be at fraternal levels. How you position a fantasy world within existing cultural frameworks, because that’s a tricky thing to do. How you land this Agrabah in a place that feels like you could see the connections to existing cultural things, but you’re not stepping on landmines. Those were the things that were interesting to me before I even went in to pitch to Disney what we were going to do with the film.

**Craig:** Honestly, I would put those under how now as opposed to why now-

**John:** That’s a smart framing.

**Craig:** … because if you look at what you have there, that you were saying, “Hey look, this needs to change,” those are actually arguments against why now. Then you provide a how now, and you can see the method in front of you. How now is probably the more important question for adaptations and remakes, I would imagine, because the world has changed dramatically, and generally for the better. You do have to ask these difficult questions that back when you were pitching My Three Sons probably didn’t have to worry about.

**John:** For sure. Let’s get to some reversal. This comes from a question that Leah Saint Marie, or Leah Welch, asked you on Twitter. You said, “Oh.” You flagged me, like, “Let’s talk about reversals on a podcast.”

**Craig:** She said, “Is there anywhere regarding Scriptnotes,” 403 how do you write a movie, “Is there anywhere you specifically walk through the scene-by-scene thesis to antithesis to synthesis creation process, and how these sub-theses generate from the overall theme and then cascade towards the protagonist’s embodiment of that theme?” That’s a good question. I thought, “No, there isn’t. I guess maybe we should do that.” The easiest way for me to do it is to do it with something I’ve written, because I can say this is how that worked.

**John:** We’re going to take a look at two related scenes from Chernobyl. This is Episode 3, I think.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Talk us through what happens in these scenes, because we were going to try to pull audio, and the audio was going to actually be more confusing than just talking through the scene. Tell us what’s happening in these scenes.

**Craig:** In this first one, Legasov is with Schcherbina, the Soviet bureaucrat. They have a problem. They need to have miners dig under this nuclear power plant that is burning and install a heat exchanger so that it doesn’t get too hot and doesn’t boil down, melt down into the groundwater. The problem is they need miners to do it. They have to ask the head of the miners to do this without having him go, “No,” because they already have gotten information that these miners are tough and have no problem saying no.

**John:** Let’s talk about the reversals, what you’re setting up and what you’re reversing in the scene. There’s a payoff scene later on that’s a traditional reversal to it. What are the dynamics going into this that need to get flipped?

**Craig:** In the context of what Leah’s asking about, the big theme is about lying. It’s about lies and truth. Legasov is self-professed, says right at the beginning, “I’m not good at lying.” The implication is, “I’m going to need to, because there’s no way we’re going to get this guy to do what we’re asking him to do without lying to him.” Shcherbina is cautioning him that that’s not going to work. He says, “Have you ever spent time with miners?” Legasov says, “No.” He says, “My advice, tell the truth. These men work in the dark. They see everything.” There’s the warning shot. Legasov is warned. He is going to attempt to lie in a different way. He’s going to fire that bullet. “I’m going to lie somehow.”

This guy walks in, Glukhov, tough guy. The first thing he says without saying hello or anything is, he holds up this gas mask and says, “Do these work?” Legasov says, “To an extent.” The lying has begun. The problem that Legasov is going to find is that this guy keeps hitting him back. He hits him back by saying nothing, weirdly, but just asking for a cigarette. When Legasov offers him one cigarette, Glukhov takes the entire pack, which is him saying, basically, “I’m actually tougher than you even thought. Go ahead, keep lying to me, buddy. Let’s see how that works for you.” He asks him what the job is. Legasov explains it without telling him why it’s a problem. He just says, “We have to do this. We can’t approach it from the interior. We have to come in it from underground.” Once again, he is lying with a scent of omission. Glukhov questions him, “What’s above the pad?” Shcherbina says, “Tell him the truth.” Legasov tries a different tact, which is to tell him the truth.

Then Glukhov asks for the dimensions and eventually gets to this question, “How deep do you want the tunnel.” Legasov says, “12.” Glukhov says, “12 meters. Why?” Legasov says, “For your protection. At that depth, you will be shielded from much of the radiation.” Legasov things again that his… He’s gotten to a place where he lied. The guy called him on the lie. He told the truth. We’re in a new place where now we’re okay. He’s gotten where he’s like, “Okay, I’m able to tell you enough truth, but I can still leave stuff out.” It doesn’t work. He tries it, and it doesn’t work. This guy fires more at him. “The entrance to the tunnel won’t be 12 meters down.” Very smart. “No.” “We’re not 12 meters down right now.” “No.” Aha. There we go. Glukhov stands up, says he’s going to do it, but he knows what the truth is. He knows that Legasov was lying to him.

Then the final thing that he says, which is the final synthesis, is he looks at the gas mask and said, “If these worked, you’d be wearing them.” He goes all the way back to the beginning, the very first thing he asked when he walked in, which was, “Do these work?” He might as well have been saying, “Are you a liar or not?” At the end he says, “Aha. Through batting this thing back and forth, we have now established you’re a liar.” That’s how he leaves him. It is a little battle over what the truth is and how to get somebody to do something. In a way Glukhov essentially says, “I would’ve done it anyway if you had just told me the truth, but you didn’t. I don’t respect you.”

**John:** Craig, great scene. We’ll applaud the scene.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** It fits very well into the overall theme of the series. The dynamics within the scene itself are terrific. Obviously, this is not the most efficient version of the scene. The most efficient version of the scene is like, “We need you to do this thing.” He says, “I don’t want to do it, but I’ll do it,” and then he walks out the door. There’s a two-eighths or three-eighths of a page version of the scene that does the same plot purpose. It doesn’t do the actual dramatic purpose, which is to move our story along and to create rhythms within scenes that feel like they are part of the DNA of the whole series. Talk to us about in writing the scene and figuring out the flip within this, how did you approach the scene?

**Craig:** I thought about how frustrating it is to talk to somebody who doesn’t need you, who doesn’t need anything from you. We had created this character and already established that he was completely immune to the normal Soviet stuff. He couldn’t be bullied. He couldn’t be threatened. Furthermore, what he did and what his men were capable of doing was essential work no one else could do. He’s got you. Now what do you do to get that guy to do what you want? To me, everything should always be about the main character in one way or another. Legasov is meant to learn a lesson at the end of the scene that Shcherbina already knows, because Shcherbina’s been around these guys. He knows the deal. Legasov is an academician, an academic. What’s the difference between academic and academician? I don’t know.

**John:** A couple letters, but I don’t actually think it makes a difference.

**Craig:** He’s from the academy. He is struggling with his own need to be a truth teller and also to get things done. He is learning how difficult it is to move through the world telling the truth, that there is always a cost to telling the truth, and so there is fear of telling the truth. In the end, that’s exactly what he conquers, his fear of telling the truth. In the eventual ending of the whole thing, he’s there in a courtroom, his life or his freedom is at stake, and he makes the bold decision to tell the truth. In this moment, which is pretty much smack dab right in the middle of the five-episode run of this show, he is not yet capable of doing it. He gets a little glimpse of how it could’ve gone otherwise if he had. He’s meeting a guy who embodies the truth. Glukhov is literally incapable of lying or he’s guileless. He just wants the information.

**John:** Now we often talk about what rights you need and what rights you don’t need and using real people, using not real people. Of the people who are in this scene, who’s real, and how much of the situation is as it happened? I’m guessing that the miners actually did that work, but no real life moment happened which is the scene.

**Craig:** No. Shcherbina was a real person. Legasov was a real person. This is entirely a dramatic invention that I made. I have no idea if they ever even met with any miners. It’s a work of historical fiction. This task that they were given is correct and is true. Furthermore, the fact that most of them did not understand how dangerous it was was true. The fact that a bunch of them understood it was dangerous but they were still doing it is also true.

I thought it was just fascinating that, this is a very Soviet thing, they did have to dig the tunnel deeper to protect themselves from the radiation that they would experience the second they walked out of the tunnel. Very Soviet. Very strange. A weird kind of denial. If you’re mostly at 12 meters, then maybe it won’t matter that you’re not going to be at 12 meters a lot. All that stuff is correct. Also, the attitude of the miners was something that I took from research, that in the Soviet system the coal miners were incredibly tough, knew that they were essential to the operation of the Soviet state, and in fact gave Gorbachev massive problems with strikes and things like that. They were not afraid at all.

**John:** Obviously, all of the Chernobyl scripts are available at the library, so just johnaugust.com/library. You can read all of them. We’ll put a little pdf snippet of this scene and also the corollary scene, which is 335, which is the payoff of what the miners actually did at the moment, and a funny payoff to that. If people want to see those scenes, there’s a link in the show notes for that.

**Craig:** Hopefully, that helped you understand how I do these things, Leah. It’s always different from scene to scene and moment to moment and show or movie to show or movie. That’s the general idea, watching somebody confront their basic fear and failing at it, but maybe making some incremental gains or learning a lesson or seeing somebody else be truer than they are and learning and finding a new place at the end of it.

**John:** Love it. It’s come time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Woo.

**John:** Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing to share?

**Craig:** I do have a One Cool Thing to share. You know I love The Room, the games, The Room games. There hasn’t been a new one in a bit, although I’m aware that probably to the people who make them, they’re like, “Oh my god, we just made the VR one. We’re working on it.” Work faster. There is this other game called House of Da Vinci.

**John:** I’ve played that.

**Craig:** There’s been House of Da Vinci 1 and House of Da Vinci 2. They are shameless copies of The Room, and yet also I have to give them credit for being good. You can make a copy of something that just isn’t very good. It’s just a bad knockoff. If you make a copy of something and you clearly put a lot of time, thought, energy, and care into it, then I have to say, enjoyable. House of Da Vinci 3 has just come out, last week I believe. I am currently playing it. It’s tough, but it’s good. Again, it has a lot of those Room elements that I love, great sound design, interesting puzzles, and very simple but satisfying UI. If you are a fan of The Room games or if you’ve played the House of Da Vinci games, give House of Da Vinci 3 a shot.

**John:** Very nice. My One Cool Thing is an article by Katherine Wu in The Atlantic. It’s about antlers. It’s about why deer grow antlers, and elk also grow antlers.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Are you aware of antlers and what their deal is and why they grow?

**Craig:** I’m going to give you a huge no on that one, John.

**John:** I grew up in Colorado, so I’ve been around deer and elk and giant antlers all this time. They grow every spring. They are bone. They are bone. They’re not just like keratin. They’re not just like fingernail stuff. They can grow one inch per day, which is incredibly fast. That’s faster than any other bone can grow in your body. It’s faster than cancers can grow. What the article makes clear is that the male deer and elk are spending a tremendous amount of energy, of bodily resources, to create these giant racks to fight other men for breeding and dominance. It seems to wasteful evolutionary-wise, and yet it persists. Scientists don’t quite know why it happens. They don’t quite know why the racks are shed at the end of the season, because some animals don’t shed them. It is fascinating.

Again, this is not a How Would This Be a Movie, but I think it’s interesting to see that biologically, giant, wasteful male displays have always been there. It happens to peacocks. It happens with these running deer. I thought it was just a cool looking sort of thing, the biology behind it, but also the questions that still remain about why these giant things are possible.

**Craig:** Animal behavior is fascinating to me. That’s a really interesting concept of how much energy is required to create these things just so they could fight each other. I guess the point is that toxic masculinity is very much a part of our existence. It’s weird, I hear this and I actually feel slightly better about being a human man, because even though I have a lot of man things in me, violence… I don’t go around punching people, but I feel violent at times. I’ve punched a wall or nine. My general ability to manage the innate toxic nightmare inside that testosterone creates is pretty decent. I’ve done a decent job. I definitely behave better in real life than I do in, for instance, Cyberpunk 2077.

**John:** For sure. One of the points that she makes is that it’s possible that wasting all this energy on these giant antlers actually does serve a purpose because it proves your dominance over other people. It proves, look how much energy I can afford to waste, that I am so powerful and so much bigger than everyone else. Don’t even try to fight me. It may be good for the herd overall to be doing this crazy stuff. I just thought it was fascinating.

**Craig:** Women dig antlers.

**John:** They do. That’s what it comes down to.

**Craig:** I’m going to grow antlers.

**John:** For my Bambi remake, it’s all about antlers.

**Craig:** Oh my god, that would be great. Bambo. He’s just a guy.

**John:** Bambo.

**Craig:** He’s just an angry man. The rabbit comes in and just is instantly gored by Bambo.

**John:** Love it. Good stuff.

**Craig:** Dark.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** The outro this week is by Nico Mansy. You have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. We have show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments and emails about when we’re going to do our live shows. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Our bonus topic here is about when to deal with really annoying, stupid people. Maybe set us up with a question, Megana. We got this in from a guy.

**Megana:** Bald at an Early Age asks-

**Craig:** Love him already.

**John:** That’s me.

**Megana:** “I work as a manager at a running shoe store. Today I got a customer who came in, and I literally don’t know how the topic came up, but he started talking about how all of the bombing in Afghanistan has shifted the axis of the earth, resulting in mass tornadoes and environmental hell, specifically north of Kansas. I’m not sure how that detail helped his case, but I like the specificity. All the while, my soul was melting out of my ears. Of course I wanted to say, ‘That’s not how physics works.’ However, I felt like I was about to poke a bear. He was fairly large, and I’m also certain he was chewing tobacco in the store. Not to mention he was a customer. All I could manage was a silent smile. My question is, how do you both deal with stupidity in the workplace? To be sure, this example is mostly humorous, but I’ve had more serious examples with employers as well.”

**John:** I think one of the things that he’s helping set up for us is that the relative power balance thing can be a real factor here in terms of how you deal with these people. If this person is outranking you or if there’s a structural reason why you have to be polite to this person, you may not say something, as opposed to another customer in the store could more easily say, “That actually doesn’t make sense. That’s not actually possible, what you’re describing.”

**Craig:** Bald at an Early Age, you have probably a good, innate amount of disagreeability, which sounds like a bad thing, but I think it’s a good thing. It’s basically defined as your willingness to disagree in situations where other people might simply go along to get along. I think it’s important to be disagreeable to an extent. Otherwise, things go unchecked. We love the guy in the movie who stands up like Henry Fonda and says, “No, I’m not going to vote guilty.” Very disagreeable and ultimately is correct. That’s it. Disagreeability only functions when you’re dealing with somebody whose mind can be changed or who’s at least sane or arguing in good faith or has the intellectual capacity to understand reason.

Now, if someone talks about how the bombing in Afghanistan has shifted the axis of the earth, you can rest assured you are not dealing with somebody whose mind you can change. There are things going on in there far beyond your capability. Therefore, you should relax. Relax your body. Relax yourself. Just imagine that you’re watching a video of somebody else dealing with this person, because when you watch videos of other people dealing with this, you laugh. When you’re in the middle of it, of course you can get very frustrated. You have to just give yourself the pass. There is no point in correcting this person. It’s not going to work. Wait them out patiently until they leave. That’s all you can do in that situation.

**John:** I largely agree with you. The thing I do want to point out though is that sometimes it’s not just those two people. It’s also other observers. If someone is saying idiotic things or racist things or homophobic things, and you don’t call them out or acknowledge that they are doing that or call them on their behavior, other observers, may be sensing it’s okay to do that or it’s not okay for me to… I am not safe in this situation.

You also have to be mindful of who else is in the environment and it’s not saying something actually hurting other people around you. As the kid who’s heard homophobic things around me a lot of my life, that no one was challenging those things kept me in the closet longer. That’s just a reality. I think you have to be mindful of what the kind of content is and who else could be listening, because if it’s just you and this guy, it doesn’t matter. If there’s someone else there who could be influenced by the thing that guy’s saying, sometimes you do have more responsibility in my opinion just to speak up.

**Craig:** That’s a good way of delineating a difference here, because if somebody is saying stuff that’s just stupid and ultimately pointless, you let it go. If somebody’s saying something that is hurting somebody else, then you don’t. Now I will say that as a guy with antlers, who occasionally runs into other guys with antlers, that anybody, any boy I think probably has some sort of built-in mechanism that says this is probably going to go poorly. You have to make some judgments in the moment, including this difficult judgment, how willing am I to be beaten up, because as I like to point out, 100% of men have been physically assaulted by a man. 100%. We know what it feels like to lose an antler battle. It can be very dangerous. It is a very uncomfortable, miserable calculation to make.

I know that on the other side of the gender coin, women are making very uncomfortable, difficult decisions to make about men to trust, whether they should or shouldn’t, because your physical safety is at risk. You do have to also protect yourself physically. If you get the sense that this is an incredibly volatile person, then sometimes deescalation and getting them out and away is the best thing to do. Then turn to the person who’s been hurt by what they said and talk them through that and listen to them. Getting your ass kicked is probably not going to make anybody feel better.

**John:** I want to turn back to the simpler version of this, when someone’s just an idiot. When do you call them on their idiocy versus letting it roll by? This is a good example. This happened a couple years ago. An agent that’s not my current agent, who was never my current agent, but an agent at this agency, we were talking at dinner, and basically this probability question came up. It’s like, let’s say you flip a coin. You flipped a coin nine times, and it’s come up heads every time. What are the odds that the 10th flip is heads?

**Craig:** 50%.

**John:** I think he said, “I would bet all my money on it, because it’s absolutely due for heads and [inaudible 01:03:34] tails.”

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I said to him, “It’s 50/50, or the other alternative you could say is it’s more likely to be heads because something is really goofy about the flipping that it’s happening 9 times in a row.” He could not understand that. I was like, “He should not be making my deals.”

**Craig:** Probability is a concept that eludes so many people.

**John:** It’s true.

**Craig:** It’s a little bit like an optical illusion. It’s an intellectual illusion. We really struggle with it. Not only do regular folks struggle with it, but even very smart people struggle with it. There’s a very famous Marilyn vos Savant case of the Let’s Make A Deal. We talked about this, right?

**John:** I was just going to bring up the Monty Hall problem.

**Craig:** The Monty Hall problem. Megana, are you familiar with the Monty Hall problem?

**Megana:** I’m not.

**Craig:** It works a little bit like this. In Let’s Make A Deal, a game show from 90 years before you were born-

**John:** It’s still on the air.

**Craig:** It’s still on the air. Fantastic. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but the basic idea is there are three doors. Behind one of the doors is a brand new car, and behind the other two doors, useless goats. For whatever reason, the goat was the loser prize. You didn’t actually get the goat. Basically, behind one door is a car, and behind two doors, nothing. Door one, two, and three. Go ahead and pick a door, Megana, one, two, or three.

**Megana:** Two.

**Craig:** You’ve picked door number two. I’m going to show you that behind door number one is a goat. Now do you want to stick with door number two, or would you like to switch to door number three? What do you think the probability is that’s influencing your decision?

**Megana:** I want to stick with door number two.

**Craig:** What’s the probability there, do you think?

**Megana:** I have a 50% chance.

**Craig:** That is what so many people think, and in fact what a lot of incredibly smart people thought. They got into big fights with Marilyn vos Savant. It turns out Marilyn vos Savant is correct. You want to switch to number three. The reason why is because while we think we have a 50/50 chance, in fact when you picked door number 2, you had a 1 in 3 chance of being correct. Showing you what was behind door number one didn’t change that at all. Because you had a one in three chance of being correct when you picked door number two, there’s a two in three chance that you will be correct in picking door number three, because he’s showing you information you didn’t have when you made your choice. This is very hard to understand. If you just think about it as the only way that sticking makes sense is if you think you got it right, and the only way you could get it right is 1 out of 3 times, then suddenly you start to understand, I should switch, and that in fact the probability is now 66/33.

**Megana:** We already established that I’m not very good at math.

**Craig:** I think you are.

**Megana:** This is making my head hurt.

**John:** You aced AP Calculus.

**Craig:** You’re doing great.

**John:** You’re doing great. It doesn’t feel intuitively right.

**Craig:** No, it feels wrong.

**John:** We’ll look up whether it’s actually two out of three things. I know you absolutely change it. I’m not sure it actually works out to two thirds, one third.

**Craig:** It has to be. It has to be, because your odds are one in three when you pick it, and that never changes.

**Megana:** Now I have two options left. One is going to have nothing, and one’s going to have a car. Whether I pick door two again, how is that…

**Craig:** When you pick door two, you’re choosing between two options. When you picked door one, you were choosing between three options. The fewer options you have, the higher the chance is that you’ll be picking the car. If you run this every time, you think about it, if I never showed you that first door, if you just picked door number 2, and you did this over and over and over and over and over, then basically 33% of the time you’d get the car. If I remove that door number one and ask you whether you want to stay or switch, if you switch, you will be right therefore two out of three times, over and over and over. I know.

**John:** It’s only when you do a zillion simulations of it that you see it’s going to work out to be this way. It’s like doing the bell curves of it all. It works that way.

**Craig:** It’s really mind-bending.

**John:** Part of the reason why it doesn’t feel right to us is that we have all been in lines at the grocery store and like, “Oh, should I switch to this line which seems to be faster [inaudible 01:08:00]?” We always suffer for it. It feels like I should just stay put always feels like the right answer. Mathematically, with the Monty Hall problem, it doesn’t happen. I’ve seen versions of the Monty Hall problem in a lot of other game shows and other contests where you get those choices and that the right choice is to switch, although people who don’t switch and get the right answer makes it feel like I shouldn’t have switched. It’s still gambling.

**Craig:** People get frustrated with this stuff. I guess to tie it back into the idea of talking to people who are stupid, there are people who get incredibly frustrated with me when I challenge them on their belief in ghosts or homeopathy, which is a big one.

**John:** Astrology.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** People who believe in science and astrology.

**Craig:** I think that those people really can’t possibly actually believe in astrology. I think it’s more like a fun game. It has to be, because come on, although I run into them all the time.

**John:** Yeah, you do.

**Craig:** With astrology conversations, I just go along with a grin, because it’s so patently and obviously ridiculous. Homeopathy is dressed up as real science. That’s what makes me crazy about it. It also makes me frustrating for people when they say, “It works. That’s all I can tell you is I took it and it worked.” All I can say to them is, “No, it didn’t. It’s placebo.” To the extent that placebo works, yes. To the extent that you’re spending money on a tiny sugar pill that should cost one penny, you’re a sucker. Homeopathy is a bad thing that keeps people from actual effective treatments. People get very frustrated with me, but I make my choices. If there’s somebody who has a very large rack of antlers, I’m probably not going to get really mouthy about it, because I don’t want to get my ass kicked. It’s a tricky one.

To even these conversations up in terms of gender, all women should be allowed to be pointing a gun at a man during all conversations. It would just make things go more equitably, I think. Just as a law. As you start talking, the woman goes, “Oh wait, I’m so, so sorry, give me one second,” and opens up her purse, pulls out a small handgun, points it at you and goes, “Okay, go on.”

**John:** “Make your point.”

**Craig:** “Make your point.” I think then guys would be as gentle and careful with women as they are with men with large racks of antlers.

**John:** It all pays off.

**Craig:** I don’t know. Megana, do you like my idea? Do you like my idea of arming all women in conversations?

**Megana:** I carry pepper spray, so I feel like that does help even things out for me a little bit. Yeah, I think some sort of-

**John:** Maybe every 10 days, you actually take out the pepper spray and aim it at me while we’re having a conversation. Most of the time it’s just a tacit threat that it’s there.

**Craig:** I feel like, Megana, you need to have the pepper spray out and aimed from the start of the conversation or in meetings with people.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Megana:** Most of our meetings are via Zoom.

**Craig:** In real life, I’m just saying if a guy starts talking over you, again, just wiggle the pepper spray, just to remind him it’s in your hand.

**Megana:** I do love that.

**John:** A little bear spray could really speed up development.

**Craig:** Just trying to bring some equity to these situations.

**John:** Thank you guys so much.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

Links:

* Lots of exciting updates for premium members coming up, [sign up for a membership here!](https://scriptnotes.net/)
* [WGA Health Plan covers travel for abortion-related expenses](https://www.wgaplans.org/info/health/forms/TravelExpensesNotification.pdf)
* [More Than 400 TV Showrunners Demand Netflix, Disney and More Offer Safety Protocols in Anti-Abortion States](https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/tv-writers-demand-safety-protocols-abortion-bans-1235327815/)
* [Batgirl Shelved](https://deadline.com/2022/08/warner-bros-batgirl-1235083809/)
* [Netflix Retroactively Editing Stranger Things](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/stranger-things-netflix-retroactively-editing)
* [The Falconer](http://www.thefalconerfilm.com/) by Annie Kaempfer, [watch here!](https://www.amazon.com/Falconer-Rodney-Stotts/dp/B09RTSQSND/)
* Follow along with this discussion on reversals – [Chernobyl scene here](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/CHERNOBYL_561_Reversals_Scene.pdf), full script [here](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Chernobyl_Episode-3Open-Wide-O-Earth.pdf).
* [Antlers Do What No Other Bones Can](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/08/deer-elk-shed-antlers-hunting/671021/) by Katherine J. Wu for The Atlantic
* [House of DaVinci 3](https://www.bluebraingames.com/the-house-of-da-vinci-3) video game
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nico Mansy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
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