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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/dating-your-writing-partner).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name’s Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 559 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we will ask the eternal and perhaps most important question, How Would This Be a Movie? We’ll look at stories in the news and from history and discuss how to move from facts to film.

We’ll also answer a bunch of listener questions, because that’s another thing we do on podcasts quite frequently.

**Craig:** Yeah, and for good reason. People are curious.

**John:** They are. For a Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, we have to figure this out live because we did not discuss this ahead of time. Some possibilities here. We have one additional story we can talk about, which is about live action role-playing in Poland. We could talk about retirement. We can talk about fandom, perhaps that new Zack Snyder article. What do you want to talk about for the Bonus Segment?

**Craig:** How about we don’t talk about the Zack Snyder thing? How about we just live our best lives?

**John:** I was going to say we could put that in the Bonus Segment so it’s all behind a paywall.

**Craig:** Eh.

**John:** Nothing’s really ever safe, is it?

**Craig:** No. I’m okay not going near that. I’m cool.

**John:** You know what we could talk about, and this is a thing we talked about just before we started recording, is how do you keep track of all the people you meet?

**Craig:** That’s a great question.

**John:** I’m dealing with it now. You’re dealing with it now. Best practices we’ve learned so far for keeping track of people involved on a project.

**Craig:** I think that’s a great idea, because ideally, we are talking to a lot of people who not only want to sell some work or be hired to write things, but want to be in production. When you get into production, or even if you just get into a writers’ room, there’s a lot of people.

**John:** A preview of what I want to talk with you about is really showing up on a set that first day, and there’s like 50 people, and you’re like, “Oh my god, I’m never going to remember everybody’s names.” We’ll figure that out.

**Craig:** Exactly. You won’t. That’s the big secret. We’re going to get into tips and tricks on how to remember as many as possible.

**John:** We’re going to start off this episode on a down note. Eric Webb. If you’ve ever come to a Scriptnotes live show over the past 10 years, you probably saw Eric Webb, and hopefully got a chance to talk with him. He was a jolly guy, a bigger fella, always wore I guess you call it a pageboy hat.

**Craig:** It was a cabby hat or a newsboy hat kind of thing. That sort of thing.

**John:** Big round face, always smiling. A really great guy. We learned this last week that he passed away actually in June. He was great. I’m so sorry that I’ll never get to see him at one of our live shows again.

**Craig:** He was a lovely, sweet man. We’ve talked on the show before about… Megana introduced us to the concept of parasocial relationships. Back when we would have live shows, and I would imagine perhaps we will be there again soon, you would see some people over and over, and some for better, some for worse. Eric was such a sweetheart and just a lovely guy. It’s sad. I think he would’ve gotten a kick out of us talking about him this much on the show. I think he would’ve enjoyed that. Adieu and RIP to Eric Webb.

**John:** Absolutely. I want to send our sympathies along to his family and his fiance. To get on to the main meat of the show, I thought we might mix it up and actually start with listener questions before we get to the How Would This Be a Movies, because we got some good listener questions here. Megana, would you start us off?

**Megana Rao:** Dangerous wrote in and asked, “On a recent episode, you discuss breaking up with a writing partner, a friend one. My question is, should you date a writing partner? My writing partner and I have sold features and pilots together and have been a team in rooms. He’s a great friend. The problem is I’m married, but things with my husband are in a really rocky place and have been for months. Now my writing partner swoops in to tell me that he’s in love with me and thinks we should give it a shot. He listed coupled/married writing teams as an example of how we can make it work. We could be writing partners and romantic partners. WTF? We have a great thing going as this productive, work-focused team. I really don’t want to lose that. I’ve seen firsthand what can happen to a close relationship and how it can become petty and bickery and horrible. Hello, my marriage. But would it be amazing? Have you guys ever seen it work out? If you were staffing for a room, would you ever staff a couple, or would you run from the drama that could ensue?”

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**John:** This could be a whole episode by itself. I could think of several writing partners that became couples and are still in very happy marriages. Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa are friends of mine who’ve done that and have had a very successful career and marriage and family, which is terrific and fantastic. I also know writing teams that have broken up when romance entered, or they got married and they split apart. That also happens as well. I think no matter what Dangerous decides to do here, something is going to change, because she’s going to have to talk with this partner, talk with the husband about what it is she actually wants in life. Craig, what’s your first instinct here?

**Craig:** I agree with you on the factual basis. There are lots of married couples that write together.

**John:** The Wimberlys.

**Craig:** I myself am so thrilled that I don’t have that, that my life partner and wife partner does not write with me. I think that would be a disaster. It depends on the people. It depends on the couple. Would it be amazing? That’s the question that’s most concerning to me, because you’re in a rocky place with your husband. I don’t know if it’s going to make it. I don’t know if you guys are going to get divorced. When people are in rocky places, they are rocky inside. When people are rocky inside, that’s when stuff happens. You are vulnerable. You are probably feeling quite a lot of things all at once. Your writing partner clearly is feeling a lot. You are looking perhaps to go from a boat that’s sinking to a boat that looks fresh and shiny and new. That doesn’t mean you’re going to like that boat that much in a month or a year. It doesn’t mean the boat won’t sink. I think probably most people would caution you about getting into a new relationship while your current relationship is unraveling, especially if it might re-ravel, but even if it doesn’t.

You have a productive writing partnership. I got to be honest. I think this dude has thrown a rock into that pond. It is no longer the same pond. When you ask, “Would it be amazing?” you should know the answer to that. I’m worried that you’re grasping, Dangerous. It feels like you’re grasping. You’re grasping in hope, like hey, maybe this is the answer to the things that are making me sad or miserable. It might, but I wouldn’t make that change now. I think if there’s any way you could pause on that and punt it down the line a bit, that would be great, but probably your writing partner has made that impossible. I don’t know what’s going to happen here, but I am concerned that, much like a narrative, your writing partner has introduced an inciting incident, and now the narrative must proceed to a conclusion.

**John:** Inciting incident feels right because this does seem like a plot. It seems like a romantic comedy plot or some other kind of drama plot. You are now the protagonist who has to make a difficult choice within this. You have to have two conversations. You have to have a conversation with the husband where things are not going very well and figure out what’s not going very well. Is there counseling or something else that can get you to a better place? Because you did once love this person and things were once good. Is the problem related to the writing partner? Is it related to some other things? Does your husband sense that there’s another man encroaching there? Possibly. Figure out what that is. That is a conversation that needs to happen.

Obviously, you have to have a conversation with this writing partner to acknowledge his feelings. I would say don’t commit to any next step with him on that romantic pathway. Just say, “Listen, you’re going to figure out your own stuff.” You hear this, but you’re not willing to pursue anything with him at this moment, because I agree with you, it seems so tempting to just like, this isn’t working, so I’ll jump over to this safe place with a guy who I get along with, who we seem to have good chemistry. That’s not going to ultimately solve having this problem.

**Craig:** Any time someone says, “Maybe that’ll make me happy,” all of the hackles rise. Where are your hackles, by the way?

**John:** I think my hackles are down my back, but I’m not really sure. Where do you think your hackles are?

**Craig:** I thought maybe the back of the neck.

**John:** I was thinking neck down to mid-spine. That feels like where my hackles are. If you see some dogs when they get angry, it puffs up there. That feels like hackles.

**Craig:** I’m looking at it now. Indeed, hackles are the erectile hairs along the back of a dog or other animal that rise when it is angry or alarmed, although you can also get hackles on the neck or saddle of a domestic rooster or other bird. I think probably the other one. We were right. It’s the back of your, if we were dogs, what would be our necks and backs.

**John:** Hackles feels like it’s a defensive, it’s a postural, it’s a sense of aggression. Hackles are not nervousness. It’s something like ah. I’m going to be itching to fight.

**Craig:** Dangerous was probably really into this until we started going off on some etymological discussion of animals, and then she was like, “Wow.”

**John:** “This is not helpful for me at all.” Let’s get back to her actually question. “If you were staffing a room, would you ever staff a couple, or would you run from the drama that could ensue?” I would absolutely staff a couple if I felt like they were the right people for the room, had a good vibe for it, they seem like good writers, they seem like they have something really cool to bring to it. I’m not going to discriminate against a married couple.

**Craig:** No, certainly not. When you hire a writing team, you’re hiring a couple. There’s drama that can ensue with any partnership, whether it’s a romantic and professional partnership or just a professional partnership. Also, I think there’s honestly drama that’s going to happen regardless between everyone, because drama people are dramatic. I’ve talked to enough people who run rooms and have heard enough stories. There is a certain aspect to it that is the proverbial herding of cats, dramatic cats that sometimes love each other, sometimes hate each other. They feel very strong feelings that come and go. There’s collisions of cultures and work styles. There’s always drama. Frankly, a nice, stable married couple, if they had been married for 15 years, that sounds like a dream, honestly. They won’t be dramatic. They’re just going to sit there and do their work.

**John:** The last thing I want to point out about this question, this thesis put out here by Dangerous is I don’t see anywhere where Dangerous says that she’s attracted to this writing partner, that she feels a spark there, other than that she feels like she can trust him. Is their chemistry really there? That’s a question worth asking, because if he’s a nice guy, but he’s not a person you would date otherwise, that’s not going to be a match.

**Craig:** I noticed this too. That’s why I really zeroed in. Her question, “Would it be amazing?” You should know that already. I love that the writing partner did make a case though. “He listed coupled and married writing teams as an example of how we can make it work.” This is a very debate style wooing.

**John:** 100%, like, “Let me list the three things.” If it was a PowerPoint presentation, then I’m completely sold on the writing partner. Megana, I’m honestly curious your perspective on this, because you are probably encountering some of these situations in your own life or friends who are going through this kind of thing where romance and writing partnerships are entangled. What is your instinct, if this were a friend who was coming to you?

**Megana:** I’m just trying to think, because my instinct is to not pursue at all, but I also really empathize, because I think finding someone that you have chemistry with is rare and special and wonderful, but it sounds so messy. As Craig said, dramatic people are dramatic, and this just feels like so many chaotic red flags to me that I just want to send this woman on a yoga retreat somewhere.

**John:** I respect that very much. I think we’re all in agreement that she needs to focus on what she wants first, rather than going to jumping into this new relationship. Work on herself.

**Megana:** It’s that thing you guys always talk about when people give you notes or stuff. If you are writing to the negative, that is a much less helpful note than writing toward something positive.

**Craig:** That’s a great point that works here as well. It sounds like she’s running from something, not necessarily toward something. I’ll tell you what, Dangerous. Obviously, we are therapists. We’re just not licensed or educated. Of course, we’re fake therapists. We’re also fake lawyers, people know that about us, and fake doctors. Let us know, let our fake selves know, how this all turned out. It doesn’t have to be next week. Take a few months. Take a year. Let us know how it worked out, because there’s a world where you and this writing partner end up having the most incredible life together. There’s also a world where you blow it all up, where you blow everything up and you’re left in the rubble. I’m excited. You have begun a movie, and we need to know how it ends.

**John:** Absolutely. The inciting incident happened, and now we need to know where the story goes.

**Megana:** It seems like there’s two options, but I do just want to remind her that there’s option three, which is none of the above.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Girl. I love it. She ends up with a totally different person or solo permanently.

**John:** Also valid.

**Craig:** We’ll see what happens.

**John:** Let’s do something that’s actually a little bit more screenwriter-focused. Can we get another question, Megana?

**Megana:** Yes. Peter from Berlin asks, “I recently relistened to Episode 152 where you talk about the importance of tone in screenplays, and it made me wonder about something. We all know movies that have fallen apart in development because key people had competing creative visions that were at odds with each other. In that regard, how important do you think the voice or tone of a script is in aligning those different visions? Do you feel a script with a clear, strong voice is more resilient against directors, producers, actors, other writers, etc who try to introduce new elements that are tonally incongruent with the rest of the story?”

**John:** I have a strong answer. I’m curious what Craig’s answer is. I think tone and voice are incredibly important to attract people to a thing, but once the trains start moving, tone and voice will not be any defense against the whims of the people involved.

**Craig:** That’s right. There’s no bulwark, there’s no great wall you can build of tone. The whole point of other people coming in is usually to adjust the tone to some extent. What will happen is you may get a call and say, “Okay, I need you to come in and just make these scenes better.” In that case, you often stay within the tone. You’re just trying to give the scenes more structure and more interest. You’re trying to make them more clever. You’re just trying to make the writing better, literally the dialog, that it should be more poetic and more captivating. A lot of times when things are in trouble, what they’re saying is this is too cheesy, it’s too funny, it’s not funny enough, it’s too broad, it’s too subtle, we need it to appeal more to families, we need it to appeal more to women, we need it to appeal more to blank blank blank. Then your job is to adjust things that always go to tone. Development hell has many different kinds of fire, but the fire of destroyed tone is a hot one that burns bright.

**John:** In my experience as a screenwriter, never has a studio executive or producer said, “No, we can’t touch that, because the script is perfect.” No one has ever [inaudible 00:16:27] the A-list talent and said, “No no, you can’t change that. The script is perfect as it is. This has a strong voice. We cannot change that.” No, they will change the thing, because they’re trying to make the movie. They’re not trying to make the script. They’re doing whatever they need to do in order to make the movie happen. That could be changing fundamental things in the script or changing tonal things or adding a scene that maybe doesn’t really need to be there or making a character shift.

Also, the fact that you have to cast people in those roles changes those roles. Sometimes you’re adjusting things because what worked on the page for one theoretical actor doesn’t work with the actual actor who was cast in that role. It’s hard to both say… Tone and voice are so crucial. They absolutely are. At a certain point in production, they become much less important, much more about how we’re going to get this movie to actually happen.

**Craig:** It’s why there are a lot of questionable films.

**John:** Another question, Megana.

**Megana:** Learning to Treat Yourself writes, “How do you celebrate or reward yourself for finishing a first draft? I’ve recently finished writing the first draft of my first feature film. I enjoyed the process, but by the end, I didn’t make much of it. I took a week off before working on the second draft. I think it’d be nice to celebrate a project getting through a certain stage, and would love to hear what other writers do, if anything.”

**Craig:** That’s a really interesting question. I have a terrible answer. You probably have a great answer.

**John:** I have a terrible answer.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** You go with yours first, because mine’s not going to be better. I promise.

**Craig:** I don’t do anything.

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** I do nothing. I do nothing. You know what I do? I worry that maybe it’s not good enough. Also, finishing, what a lie. I think actually I tend to get slightly down when I finish things. There’s a postpartum period there where I don’t feel very good. I’ve always envied people who go on Twitter and they’re like, “First draft done, the end,” going out with friends, getting drunk, doing this, having fun, “Treating myself to a day at the spa,” blah blah blah. I’m just like, “I deserve nothing. I deserve nothing.” You can’t have a worse answer than that. There’s no way.

**John:** Panda Express.

**Craig:** Oh, shit.

**John:** That was my treat for finishing a draft as a young guy with a studio apartment and no bed. When I would finish a draft, I would treat myself to Panda Express, the two items plus egg rolls if I had actually finished a draft. It’s generally a Friday treat. This is me driving out to Century City shopping mall, going to Panda Express there and getting that. That was like $11 to spend on a lunch, which was a lot. That was treating myself for having done the work.

**Craig:** When you went to Panda Express, what did you get? Two items is not clear enough. I need more information.

**John:** I’m sorry. I would get half white rice, half chow mein. That’s the base. I would get Buddha’s Delight, which is the tofu thing, and then mixed vegetables, because at that point I was a vegetarian.

**Craig:** Wow. Wow. I am disgusted. Look, here’s the thing. In my mind, that is more self-abusive than what I did, because you went to Panda Express, which the whole point of it is orange chicken, and then you got the two healthiest things there were there. You just didn’t do it. You went there. You were like, “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to go to a sex club. I’m going to go to an orgy, but I’m just going to stay in the vestibule where you just check in. I’ll check in. I’ll read the rules. I’ll give them my credit card.”

**John:** “I’m going to make sure everyone’s coats are well taken care of.”

**Craig:** “I’m going to think about going in there, and then I’m going to leave.” I’m outraged.

**John:** Sometimes I would also like to see an afternoon movie, which also feels like cheating, to see a movie in the afternoon.

**Craig:** Megana, save us, please, for the love of god. Please tell me you do something that’s good.

**Megana:** I just ran into this this last week. I like to get an ice cream cone.

**Craig:** There you go.

**Megana:** I realize that I go before I finish the draft.

**Craig:** That’s just called eating ice cream.

**John:** It’s a pre-warning.

**Craig:** That’s just called depression.

**Megana:** I had two scenes left to write. I was like, “How am I going to do this if I don’t have energy? I need the ice cream now.”

**Craig:** You’re not using it as a reward, but really more of a motivation.

**Megana:** Yeah, but then after I finished, I felt so proud. I was like, “I need to celebrate.” I was like, “Do I go back to Salt and Straw?” Then I was like, “No, you’ve don’t his wrong, Megana.”

**Craig:** I see. You didn’t go for the second ice cream.

**Megana:** I didn’t.

**Craig:** I’d like to point out that what you didn’t go is go to Salt and Straw and ask for a cup and a spoon and no ice cream, which would be the John August method.

**Megana:** If I asked for some sort of sorbet, that feels like the equivalent of Buddha’s Delight.

**Craig:** “I got the nondairy whipped air.”

**John:** It’s delicious. Delicious whipped air.

**Craig:** “With natural orange essence in it.”

**John:** This actually came up a few weeks ago. I set up a project that’s not been announced yet. Megana did point out, “Wait, are you going to do nothing to celebrate?” I was like, “I don’t know. I guess I’m not.” It really was that the deal finally closed. That’s one of the things too about our business. It’s not like you win the lottery, and so they’re like, “Oh, you won the lottery.” It’s like, “Oh, they’re going to buy this thing.” It’s like, “Okay.” Then take nine weeks to make the actual deal. The deal finally closed. I was like, “I could go out and celebrate that the deal closed.” I was just like, “I got other stuff to do.”

**Craig:** You’ve had too many deals that closed. That’s the problem.

**John:** That’s what it is. It’s all the success. Success [inaudible 00:22:01].

**Craig:** It’s actually quite a bummer. We’re now going to wander into annoying successful guy chat, so everybody just-

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** … close your ears for a second. When I was young, back in the day, John, you remember that Variety was a physical publication.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** There was a website called variety.com. When you would have something happen, there would be a usually very tiny blurb in Variety that said so. I would buy the Variety, which cost like a hundred dollars a copy then, so stupid, and then cut it out and frame it, because I didn’t know if it would last. Now my goal in life is to not be mentioned in Deadline, ever. That’s my goal. There is a joy in the early celebration. Now John, congratulations on whatever this is. I assume you’re going to… You did announce it. You just announced it.

**John:** Yeah, but I’m not going to announce what it actually is. I announced a thing that is potentially happening, but the actual announcement is being saved for some future time, for reasons outside of my control, which is great, I’m delighted about.

**Craig:** We will wait patiently.

**John:** Anticipation.

**Craig:** Anticipation.

**John:** Let’s do one more question before we get to our How Would This Be a Movies.

**Megana:** Max from LA asks, “My question relates to character chemistry and connection. A note I often receive is that the chemistry between two characters who are love interests is, quote, ‘not on the page.’ The characters have banter, incidental physical interactions. Maybe they tease each other. Once actors are involved, I think their connection will come through. How do you put this more on the page? Are there certain types of interactions that show a connection between characters, that set up the will they, won’t they dynamic? Other ideas I lean into are things like remembering details about the other person, going out of the way to do something the other person would appreciate, or causing that person to laugh. What other tools do you use to show the reader that people are falling for each other?”

**John:** That was a nice question. My instinct here is that folks who are reading Max’s screenplay, they’re not seeing the whole movie, because if they actually saw the scenes as filmed, we’d see those little interactions between people, like the glance that they don’t really notice the other person is there. These are little, small moments. I think Max may not be putting those literally on the page. He may not be scripting those of those moments in, so they could be bantery dialog. We’re not seeing the small, little moments in the scene description that are really showing there’s a growing connection and chemistry here, even if the characters themselves are not aware of it.

**Craig:** There are things you can do that are simple. For instance, in action description, you can describe things that you want there to be, them getting closer, then someone touches an arm. Also, part of writing is writing scenarios and situations where we go, “Oh my god, they’re into each other.” That’s not really anything to teach. I will say, Max, that the things that you’re listing are romantic, but they’re not hot. Do you know what I mean? Remembering details about the other person, it’s all a bit sappy, but it’s not hot. It’s called chemistry for a reason, because we can’t see it. It feels hormonal and pheromonal and in the air. The two people that have it are living in their own weird bubble. You have to create situations where we can be part of that bubble like a little fly on the bubble wall.

**John:** Here’s a good exercise for Max to try is to take a look at some scenes or movies where characters have real chemistry, like body heat or some other-

**Craig:** Out of Sight.

**John:** Out of Sight, fantastic. Looking through those scenes, and don’t look at the script, just look at the scenes, and then figure out how would you script those scenes that you just watched. How would you call out the things that are happening in there that let us know on the page this is what’s happening between those characters? That may be a good exercise for you and just give you some hints for what’s going to actually be helpful to be thinking about script-wise for showing that chemistry.

**Craig:** Sounds good to me.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get to our marquee topic here, this How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at stories that are in the news, stories from history that our listeners have suggested to us, saying these could be filmed entertainment, either a mini series or a live-action feature or an animated feature. We got a bunch of suggestions that came in. Thank you to everybody who sent those in. So many people suggested the backstage drama at Funny Girl.

**Craig:** You know what? I’m so proud of our listenership for being into that story, a very Broadway story.

**John:** It’s a very Broadway story. Are there any heroes in this story? I’m not sure there are.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s Broadway.

**Craig:** It’s Broadway.

**John:** It’s Broadway.

**Craig:** It’s Broadway.

**John:** Broadway. It’s a warm hug and long knives. That’s Broadway.

**Craig:** That’s Broadway.

**John:** People are also talking about the January 6th hearings. No, that’s not a movie. That’s not a movie.

**Craig:** That’s not a movie. Just refer back to All the President’s Men. That’s the movie version of something like that. The hearings are a part of the plot, but they are not the plot. The plot is investigation and intrigue and risk and exposure.

**John:** First story suggestion was by Kay McCue sent this in. This was Phil Hoad writing for The Guardian about the mystery of the buried owl. I liked this one. I Googled and Googled, but I could not find it. I think we talked about a similar kind of thing before where a person had buried a thing and hidden it, and there was a huge treasure hunt trying to figure out this thing. This is the French version of it, I guess.

**Craig:** There’s been a few of these. There’s one I know that was in the US that got solved. There was one that’s referenced in here, that involved I think it was a hare, H-A-R-E, that inspired this one. This one is the story of a French puzzle creator who buried a small bronze owl somewhere in France in April of 1993, and then he and another author put a book together that included I believe it’s 11 riddles. If you could solve the 11 riddles, which they list as, “A combination of fiendish linguistic games,” which I love, “cartographical ciphers,” interesting, “historical illusions and mathematical brain teasers,” then you would be able to find the small bronze owl sculpture. At that point you would win an identical sculpture made of actual stuff that’s worth, in today’s money, 150,000 US dollars. I know that because it says 150,000 Euros, and as of today…

**John:** Parity.

**Craig:** Parity.

**John:** There’s lots of angles into this. Obviously, you could imagine a bunch of different characters, a big ensemble movie with people trying to find this thing. It could be wacky and fun. You can imagine something about what’s really behind the secret of the owl, whether the whole thing was some sort of scam. The guy who created this whole thing and buried the owl has now died, and so there’s a whole controversy over the other author and should the person reveal the secret, is there actually an owl to be found. What’s your instinct, Craig, for a movie? Is it a movie or is it a multi-episode piece of entertainment?

**Craig:** I’m struggling for it to be either, and I’m the puzzle guy. I love puzzles. That’s the problem. The problem is puzzles are fun to solve. They’re not so much fun to watch other people solve, because inevitably what happens is you’re just waiting, and then someone goes, “Wait a second. Hold on.” You can do a few of those. The National Treasure movies were a string of those things. You could do a few of them in that regard. Note that with National Treasure, so much of it was about character, relationship, redemption, reclaiming your good name, plus villains and all that, and looking for something that was inherently important to our nation’s history. This is not. It’s arbitrary. A guy buried a thing and then said, “Try and find it.”

The other issue is this is not a good puzzle, because it hasn’t been solved. That’s my honest opinion. There was a very famous sculpture in front of the CIA that included a cipher that took many, many years to crack. I get that. That’s like, hey, you’re the CIA. This isn’t for entertainment. Let’s see which one of you is the best. This is for entertainment, and no one solved it in 30 years, which means it’s too damn hard. When somebody finally does, it’ll be like, okay, got it. Either when you’re watching the movie, you’re going to say, “I don’t know what any of these things mean,” and then someone will be like, “Wait, I know what it means,” and you’re like, “Okay, I guess the script told you that,” or it’ll be too easy. Then you’ll be like, “Why are they having a hard time figuring that out?” You’re just watching people walk around and digging. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is a fun movie. You would have to invent so much that I don’t think you would need any of the details of this.

**John:** That’s what it really comes down to for me, because right now in the story, there are no stakes. There’s money, but that’s not really stakes. You’re going to have to create stakes for the characters. Why do they need to win this thing? What is it about them that either winning that money or the achievement of having solved this unsolvable riddle will change their life in a meaningful way? That really comes back to focusing on who are the characters we’re following. The article that we can read has some people in there who could be interesting characters, like a pregnant woman who was obsessed with it and couldn’t stop focusing on it, even though she was about to have a child. There could be some interesting characters that do that or someone who’s just ruining their life to do this thing could be meaningful.

Just last night we watched The Dawn Wall, which is this amazing rock climbing movie about this ascent on one of the most difficult El Capitan faces. It was a years-long quest of this guy to do this one thing. It was meaningful to him because of stakes that were clearly set up in the course of the film. Yes, you could maybe do this with this, but I don’t see why using the real story is going to be more helpful than creating your own quest here.

**Craig:** Put your finger on the possibility of a good documentary. That could be terrific, because then it is about the quirky, weird people who are trying to do this. It’s about their obsession and not at all about where the damn thing is. I could see that. Documentaries are really good at that sort of thing. I don’t see a fictionalized version of this being particularly captivating. I can certainly see a fictionalized story about a treasure hunt being interesting, but easier said than done.

**John:** Our next story is about Rodney Stotts. This is sent in by Jeff Myers. This story actually ran in The Washingtonian. It’s an excerpt from Rodney Stotts’s book. Basically, Rodney Stotts grew up in DC in the ’90s. He started selling drugs, needed a legitimate job to get a lease, and so he ended up working at this Earth Conservation Corps cleaning up this river and became really involved in preservation and conservation. He ultimately was sent to jail for a drug-related charge. When he got out, he wanted to become a falconer. The article goes into what falconry is and how you train to become a falconer. The details I thought were really cool, because you have to be an apprentice to an experienced falconer, and you have to catch your own bird. He seemed like a really fascinating character. Craig, is there a story here that could be a movie, a series? What did you think of the Rodney Stotts story?

**Craig:** It could be a movie. I think a robot could write that movie, because that movie is required to follow a very well-trodden path of inspirational story. He’s written his own story. The thing about individual inspirational stories is that they are inspirational. Once you get into movie-ville, you start to get into inspirational movie as opposed to inspirational person, which is different. You can just see how this movie goes. It would be not particularly satisfying. I would much rather again see a documentary about this. Also, falconry is not…

There was one thing that really made me lean forward, that I didn’t know, that I thought would be a great scene. That was to become one of these falconers, you need to trap a falcon or a hawk or something. Good luck. You drove around. On his days off, he drove around rural Virginia and Maryland, trying to trap a falcon. Then there was the day it happened. That was an exciting scene. I was really into that scene. Then he just did falcon stuff. He’s a great guy. He works in this really great program. He turned his life around. I think that’s lovely, but we’ve seen that movie. I just don’t know how to make it different.

**John:** We haven’t seen the exact details of this movie, but we know the shape of the movie-

**Craig:** We know the shape.

**John:** … and the classic thing of it. Thematically, there are some really nice things. You have a person who feels trapped, who was literally incarcerated, who then has to trap a bird. The bird adds a symbol of freedom and being able to fly free, but also rules and restrictions and navigating within the system. We have issues of racism and prejudice. Basically one of the only Black falconers out there. All those things are cool elements to a movie. I do worry that it can be too predictable. I’ve never seen falconry this way. I’ve never seen the relationship. I’ve seen so many men and dogs. I’ve never seen a man and the falcon. That could be cool.

**Craig:** There’s the great character on Saturday Night Live, the Falconer.

**John:** There’s the Falconer, yeah. Will Forte played him.

**Craig:** So good. The trick here is how to do this without… Honestly, it’s a movie. Yes, it’s a movie. You could write the movie. You could write it. I could write it. Anyone could write it, because you would just follow the paint by numbers method of how these movies go. Here’s the issue. I’m not really sure how to do it not paint by numbers. I don’t know what the other way is, because ultimately, there’s not a lot here beyond the inspirational story of a guy who used to sell drugs and went to prison and then came out and got into this other thing. You can write the scene where the racist falconers, which seems like it’s a redundant comment, because who else gets involved in falconry? Now I’m tarring all the falconers as racist. You can see a bunch of white men like, “What? You, falconry? Don’t be ridiculous.” I’m already tired of this movie, because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen that scene a billion times.

**John:** It’s a weird situation where the movie’s both obvious and incredibly execution-dependent, because to not be the obvious version of it, you need to have a really great execution. The one thing I think we’re missing here is, because this is told from his point of view, because he’s actually writing the article that we’re reading here, we don’t have an outside perspective on what’s interesting about him as a character. I don’t get a sense of what his voice is, how he carries himself. There could be other details that are really specific and interesting. I think back to King Richard. If you’d just told me the story of Venus and Serena Williams’s father and what he did, I’m like, “Great, that’s impressive that he did that,” but his actual background and his weird voice and his strange approach to things is what made the movie scene by scene interesting to me, rather than just being the paint by numbers story.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. We don’t necessarily know what Mr. Stotts sounds like. We know what he looks like. He’s very thin.

**John:** He’s got a great, great face.

**Craig:** He’s got a great face. He’s very thin. He’s got a falcon on his arm, which is cool. I love the way that he had his little falcon children and how one of them was his favorite. The details feel stock. That’s a weird thing to say about somebody’s life, because he’s lived it. Of course that’s why he has a book deal, because the details are… They fit into a certain kind of story that people do appreciate. I do think it can be a movie. The trick is can you make it better than what we think it’s going to be. You can. There are movies in this genre of inspirational stories, particularly when it comes to race in America, where they’re better than you think they’re going to be. Hidden Figures was better than I thought it was going to be, because it transcended its genre and was just really, really interesting and good. That’s what would need to happen here.

**John:** Agreed. In this case we are saying you do buy the book. This book is Bird Brother. It’s written by Rodney Stotts and Kate Pipkin. If you’re going to make this movie, you obviously buy this book, because that’s how you get entrée into his life, 100%.

**Craig:** For sure. You need all the notes. You need the life rights, so you can get more information and etc.

**John:** 100%. Our next story comes from Erin Brokovich. We know Erin Brokovich. She was the lawyer. She wasn’t at the start a lawyer, but she became a lawyer, who did all the things with the water pollution, that became the movie Erin Brokovich, written by Susannah Grant. This is a story that she wrote called “This lawyer should be world-famous for his battle with Chevron, but he’s in jail.” This was sent in by David McPherson. It ran in The Guardian. It tells the story of Steven Donziger. He’s an attorney who specializes in going after oil companies, most notably Chevron. He was able to win this giant $9.5 billion settlement against Chevron in Ecuador. Chevron turned around and sued him and basically got him disbarred and all sorts of bad things and put under house arrest. All sorts of bad things are happening to Steven Donziger over the course of this. I thought there was some really interesting stuff here. Craig, is this a movie? Is this a series? Where do you think this lives?

**Craig:** This was interesting. I think this could be a series. It could also be a movie a la The Insider. It was less this article that Erin Brokovich wrote that interested me as much as then just going, “Something’s not quite adding up.” Even if you postulate what I think is a fair postulate, that American oil companies are dreadful, Chevron seemed to be going completely ham on this guy. You’re like, “It can’t just be pure evil. There’s got to be something else going on.” Then you read a little further, and you’re like, “Steven Donziger may have actually done all those terrible things.” It doesn’t look good. It’s not clear, but it’s not good. Even his friends are like, “Eh… Steven, why?”

The thing is, it sounds like it could a really interesting limited series, where you start by going, what Erin Brokovich is saying, which I think is the blunt end of the tool, evil corporation goes after crusading humanitarian attorney. Then halfway in, you’re like, wait, humanitarian hero attorney may be a very bad guy or is doing very bad things, and maybe the oil company isn’t so evil. Then you come back around to everyone’s bad, and nobody really effectively represented the poor people who were suffering. That’s intrigue.

**John:** Absolutely. You and I don’t have enough background to really say the other side of this. We can only look at… I’ve read the Erin Brokovich thing and the Wikipedia article. Wikipedia should be kind of neutral on this. I agree with you, there’s something really fascinating, because it looks on the surface like, oh my god, this is Erin Brokovich, but what if they put Erin Brokovich in jail. Then clearly, there’s more stuff that’s happening behind the scenes here.

I think the real interesting thematic question I would want to dig into as the writer on this is to what degree is Donziger… If he does some of these things which are criminal, is he doing them for the greater good of the Ecuadorian people or to win the suit or for some other reason? To what degree is the ambition to win this potentially corrupting? Those are fascinating questions, which I think you could do as a movie, you could do as a limited series. Both could work. You could do it as Liz Meriwether did for The Dropout or you could do it for a two-hour movie. We’ve seen some really good versions of that story.

**Craig:** Of note, Erin Brokovich was not endlessly pursued by the corporation she was going up against and then thrown in prison, for good reason. She didn’t do any of the things that would normally have that happen. Look, she’s written a very one-sided point of view here. I hope no one takes this as me going, “Chevron’s nice.” They’re not. They’re terrible. They’re horrendous.

**John:** To stipulate, they clearly did bad things.

**Craig:** Of course. They’re Chevron.

**John:** They are Chevron. That’s right.

**Craig:** They’re doing bad things today. By literally existing, they’re bad. They did bad things, no question. The fervor with which they pursued this was not a mistake. I guess it was not random that there was something going on here which with the way this guy handled this what was… In reading more about Steven Donziger, it started to get shadier and shadier. That said, perhaps I’m just a victim of Chevron’s incredible PR machine. I don’t know.

**John:** Let’s talk about Chevron’s incredible PR machine and legal machine and why some outlets would think twice before publishing this story, because you don’t want to anger this company that obviously is incredibly litigious. Either as an independent producer or going to a streamer, you might have concerns going into this. Those concerns might be ameliorated by just doing very careful research and being able to document everything you’ve done. Obviously, you were able to do it for The Dropout and for other projects. I think it’s worth noting that some places are going to be very skittish about doing this just because of the size of the company involved.

**Craig:** Sure, but movies and television have gone after large corporations before. The Insider had no problem going after Philip Morris. I could certainly see a case where the studio might say, “Let’s not call them Chevron. Let’s call them OilCo.”

**John:** GasCo.

**Craig:** “Let’s change Steven Donziger’s name to something else.” I think the spiciness is the real people and the real company.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** I think that movie companies and television networks have loads of attorneys who do nothing but deal with this sort of thing all the time. Part of it is making sure that when somebody writes the script or the limited series that everything is annotated and all the research and the claims and things are based on stuff that’s out there, at which point they really have no case. They can waste their time, and then the studios can waste theirs. They all own lawyers that can do this. I think if people really wanted to make it, I think actually they would get excited by the thought of the free publicity.

**John:** Absolutely. There’s a Streisand effect if they get sued over stuff.

**Craig:** If I were a lawyer at Chevron, I would say, “Let’s just not comment on this and hope that it just stinks and goes away,” because it sounds like a homework movie anyway.

**John:** In this case, you’re not buying Erin Brokovich’s article clearly here.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I don’t think you’re buying anything.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** If there was an incredibly good book that had reporting about stuff that you just couldn’t find other places, that would be a compelling book to probably buy. Otherwise, I think you’re doing research and you’re making your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, unless you really wanted to tell the story from Steven Donziger’s point of view, in which case you would go to him, get life rights, and deal with it from there. I think you would be opening yourself up to trouble.

**John:** I agree. This last one I think is just delightful, and I want to see this movie. I applaud the pluck of the people involved. This is a story suggested by Michael Weinreb. The article ran in the New York Times, written by Sameer Yasir. Here’s the lead. “There are floodlights, high-definition cameras, and umpires with walkie-talkies pinned to their shoulders. The cricket players wore colorful uniforms. The broadcast had the voices of recognized commentators and a logo of the globally recognized channel The BBC.”

This is a cricket match that is being televised, or people are watching it on YouTube. It’s in the Indian Cricket Premier League. Unfortunately, that league does not exist. They were trying to confuse people with the Indian Premier League, which is an incredibly successful league. Brought in $6.2 billion in broadcasting rights. Basically, these guys in India staged a series of fake cricket matches of Russian betters who thought they were betting on actual legit, big cricket matches, when they were not. They were betting on a bunch of farm boys playing in the field.

**Craig:** What a weird scam. I watched some of it on YouTube. It’s weird. I’m not sure how anyone got fooled. The crowd noise is absurdly fake, and they never show the crowd.

**John:** Let’s give a sample here of the crowd noise. Let’s play this here. I didn’t fade down the crowd noise. The crowd noise fades down every 30 seconds or so, because it’s just a sample of crowd noise. If you’re watching this thing, you should notice, hey, why did the crowd suddenly get quiet and then suddenly come back at full volume again?

**Craig:** Why is there one camera? Why is it so far away? Why do the cricket players seem so low-energy? It’s really remarkable that this fooled anyone. Then again, based on the money that there was, it wasn’t like it was a super successful scam either. They were I guess just really fooling the dumbest of Russian betters. It does imply you can absolutely be inspired by this to write what I think could be a very fun and again super paint by numbers comedy in the vein of Cool Runnings, where you have a group of guys in let’s call it rural or semi-rural India, who are down on their luck.

There’s a wonderful tradition of movies where a town loses a factory or tries to gain a factory, gung ho and so forth. The town is in trouble, and they need something. They come up with this scam. The scam doesn’t work very well at first. They find down on their luck former cricket players who were good or are good except they’re held back by something. Hello, Major League. Then they get together to do this, and suddenly it’s a big hit. They get good. They get challenged by somebody. Then the problem is if they rise to the challenge of actually playing for real, then the whole thing will be exposed and everybody will go down. What do you do? That movie again almost writes itself, and someone should make it.

**John:** I think Samuel Goldwyn or Gold Circle is the financier behind that. We see it. It’s delightful. It’s playing at the Sunset 5. It gets some buzz. I think there’s definitely a version you could make, with just an approximation of this story, shot in India or shot in a country that plays cricket, where you’re keeping the basic vibe there. I do wonder if there’s a version of this where you could move to the US or Mexico or someplace more domestic, where our heroes and some people we’re following are still trying to pull something over on the Russians, who I think are a great foil for this. They’re staging a sport to make it seem that it’s Major League Baseball or that it’s some sport that we are more familiar with than cricket, because one of the challenges of cricket is that you have to teach the audience everything about cricket. Maybe that’s part of the joy of the movie. I think using a sport that the US already knows could be helpful.

**Craig:** I can hear someone saying that, for sure. I’m sure somebody would. To me, the fun is the fact that I don’t know it. I didn’t know… What was it in Cool Runnings? Was it the toboggan? What the hell was it?

**John:** Yeah, bobsledding.

**Craig:** Bobsledding, luging. I didn’t know any of the rules, and so learning how it worked was part of the fun, that there was something exotic about the sport itself. Also, cricket is a massive and emerging sport, especially in Indian Pakistan. I don’t know. There’s a much larger audience for movies there than here.

**John:** It’s true.

**Craig:** This is something that I would think about wanting to do as a co-production with an Indian company probably, an Indian studio, and to release it as a film that’s largely international. I think it could catch on. It’s not expensive to make.

**John:** It’s not expensive to make.

**Craig:** I think it’s easy to make.

**John:** I think you make a very good point. All of the streamers have their own local language production kind of things too. Netflix India makes it, and it turns out great and it’s a big hit in Netflix India, but it also comes over to the rest of the world, just because Netflix is global. The right version of it can be a breakout hit.

**Craig:** I think everybody’s global at this point. Every streamer at this point has some ability to reach around the world. Maybe because it’s not inspirational, it’s just fun formula, I think this could be fun.

**John:** In this case, I don’t think there’s anything to buy. We don’t need this article. You just need a bunch of research on what happened there. You’re making up most of it anyway.

**Craig:** Exactly, you’re making most of it up. You would be inspired by this, but I don’t think you would need to buy anything.

**John:** Craig, in the history of How Would This Be a Movies, I think this was the most movies we’re actually going to probably get made out of here. At least we had the highest hit rate of things.

**Craig:** I think so too.

**John:** The buried owl I don’t think is happening.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Absolutely valid to make a movie in this vein, but we don’t need to make this specific one.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Rodney Stotts, someone is going to buy the rights to that.

**Craig:** Someone’s going to buy the rights. I don’t know if it’ll ever turn into a movie.

**John:** The Steven Donziger Chevron movie or mini series.

**Craig:** If only because Erin Brokovich is the person that wrote it, it’s certainly going to get a lot of attention. Somebody will buy the story in one way or another for a limited series or a film.

**John:** Fake cricket, I think we both agree someone should do it.

**Craig:** Fake cricket, we’re just lobbing it out there to the world. Somebody should try that movie.

**John:** Here’s a free movie. Take it.

**Craig:** Here’s a free movie idea. Why don’t you go ahead and write it. Let’s see how much influence we have, John, because this is a little bit like when there was that massive blackout in New York in 1977, there was a baby boom that occurred about 10 months later. Let’s see if about 10 months from now, Hollywood is flooded with fake cricket scripts.

**John:** That’s what we want to see. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Listeners of the show know that Craig is an accomplished puzzler, solver. He is a screenwriter at times as well. He plays video games. What people probably don’t know is I think his true calling is to be the host master of ceremonies for games of Mafia. I’ve witnessed one of those. They are things of beauty. He’s really, really good.

If you don’t have Craig Mazin to do it, I would recommend you try out this game that we tried here in the office last week called Werewords. It’s the game Werewolf, which is of course a variation of Mafia, where you’re trying to figure out who is the werewolf among all the different players. It’s a social deception game. The clever thing they added to this game Werewords is that the mayor of the town is choosing one secret word shown on a phone. The mayor of the town and the werewolf and the seer all know what this word is, but the rest of the players have no idea what the word is. You’re trying to guess what the word is. It’s a 20 Questions-y kind of thing to guess this. The social deception aspect of it is really important, because you’re trying to not reveal how you got to what the secret word was. I thought it was just a very brilliantly designed game for a group of 5 to 10 people probably.

**Craig:** I love this game mechanic that one player knows who the werewolf is, or the word, sorry. One player knows the word. That player you’d think can just say it or just obviously guide the other players toward it. The problem is if the werewolf knows who that person is, then they win the game just by identifying them as the seer. That seer has to be-

**John:** Very careful.

**Craig:** … very careful and not obvious. They have to seem like not the seer while guiding people towards the thing that the seer knows. That’s very clever. That’s a smart idea.

**John:** Smart idea.

**Craig:** Werewords.

**John:** A good game. Inexpensive. For your next game, I recommend Werewords.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a recipe. I made tiramisu for the first time.

**John:** Tell me, how’d it turn out?

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I’m not surprised. Did you make your ladyfingers from scratch or did you [00:56:22]?

**Craig:** No, I don’t think any sane person would do that. Yes, maybe some people do it. That really is unnecessary. The reason it’s unnecessary is because the ladyfingers are going to be very quickly subsumed in some espresso and a little bit of rum, at which point it becomes semi-mushy. In fact, you have to work very quickly so it doesn’t fall apart in your hands. It’s no longer a crispy little biscuit. It’s something else. The one thing you don’t need to do, I think, is make your own ladyfingers. They’re available in packages at most stores. The New York Times has a recipe that worked gorgeously. It seemed like tiramisu would be super damn hard. It’s really not.

**John:** Basically it’s like a trifle essentially. Ladyfingers are soaked in stuff. Then is it whipped cream, or what’s the cream base of that?

**Craig:** There’s a little bit of a debate. There are two ingredients that everybody agrees need to be in there. Three, sorry. Sugar, of course. Egg yolks and mascarpone cheese.

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** Those things must be in there. Then the question is… Some people are egg whites, a meringuey kind of thing. Other people are a whipped cream kind of thingy. The New York Times went with a whipped cream kind of thingy, which is maybe less of a purist, purist method, but it sure tasted like regular and excellent tiramasu to me. You just do your layers. Honestly, it’s really easy. Then just shake a little cocoa powder on the top. Suddenly, you feel like you’ve made something that you’ve seen in a restaurant. The one bit of advice I will give people, if they do make this recipe… In the recipe they have you mixing the mascarpone cheese into the whipped cream, which a lot of commenters mentioned was a disaster.

**John:** The textures are too different.

**Craig:** It basically broke the whipped cream. Commenters suggested strongly that you whip the mascarpone into the egg yolks and sugar, which worked great. That’s what I did. It did end fact work great, because then you end up combining it all together anyway. I will throw a link on there to the New York Times recipe for tiramasu. Way easier than they think. The one thing to keep in mind is that you do want to make this at least 24 hours ahead.

**John:** It’s one of those sit in your refrigerator, congeal kind of things.

**Craig:** Sit in the fridge and have the flavors combine. That’s the big deal.

**John:** I have to say, the New York Times recipe section and the recipe box and how they do stuff, they’re really good. They’re well-designed recipes. I’ve enjoyed most of the things I’ve tried making out of the New York Times.

**Craig:** They are good. They are nice enough to allow comments. You can read through the comments. Invariably, a few people will trial and error their way to something better.

**John:** I love the comments that are just like, “Can I make this with shortbread? Can I make this tiramasu with Oreos and cottage cheese?”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** “Will that work?”

**Craig:** There are always people who are like, “I tried it and it didn’t work. I followed the recipe. The only thing I did was instead of using egg yolks, I used ham.” You’re like, “Idiot. Of course it didn’t work.” The vast majority of people seemed to enjoy it when they made it. Like I said, to me, if you can find a recipe that is easy and awesome, go for it.

**John:** Go for it. Love it. That is our show, which was easy and delicious.

**Craig:** It was easy and delicious.

**John:** This was the tiramisu of episodes for us today. It was produced by Megana Rao, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Owen Danoff. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You could find the 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. They’re great. You can 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, like the one we’re about to record on how not to forget the names of the people you’re working with. Craig, I’ll never forget your name.

**Craig:** Aw, thanks, Jim.

**John:** Megan, it absolutely is a pleasure.

**Craig:** Megan Arao.

**John:** Megan Arao. We’ll see you guys next week.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Bonus Segment. Let’s talk about the people you’re working with and who are showing up in your emails, who are calling, who are on Zooms. You have to remember who are these people. Craig, what is your strategy? What was your strategy on Last of Us for all the people you’re meeting, so the studio executives, the production folks? When you go on a set, how are you remembering names?

**Craig:** You can’t. There are too many people. When you’re making a production, any kind of production, there’s too many people. A large production, there’s absurdly too many people. You can’t try too hard. If you try too hard, suddenly all day long all you’re thinking about are people’s names. More to the point, no one expects you to know their name, certainly not early on. Then later down the line, if they don’t interact with you frequently… There are people that I probably never talk to. There are definitely people I never talked to on our set, because they were busy doing other things. I didn’t interface with them, so I don’t know their name. They’re professionals. They don’t walk around saying, “I can’t believe that the guy I never talk to, who never talks to me, doesn’t know my name.” It takes time. The God’s honest truth, what happens is it takes time, and you start to learn. It’s weird for me to think about how many people I know and how many names I know from the crew of the Last of Us and how I knew none of their names in the beginning. In that first week, if I need help with a prop, I don’t know who to talk to. Hey, how about this? Everyone’s wearing a mask. You just do the best you can. That’s it. I am considering that for my next production, whatever it is, that maybe for the first couple of weeks we do name tags.

**John:** I believe in name tags. I think it helps everybody. It ask the truth that you cannot remember everybody’s names. I like name tags. I like that as a thing. Would you have name tags that are stickers on people’s shoulders or on a badge kind of thing?

**Craig:** We had badges. The problem is the badges would flip around, inevitably. They would always show the wrong side. Also, you just didn’t want to, “Excuse me, hold on, I need to see your badge,” because it’s in a weird spot.

**John:** Then you’re looking down, so it’s clear you didn’t remember their name.

**Craig:** My point is we all don’t remember our names. I want to give everybody freedom to not know each other’s name. Wear the name tag and also what your job is, because I don’t know. I’m meeting a lot of people for the first time on day one. Oh my god, our dimmer board operator, Jameses. His name is James and then S and then something. It was a whole thing with the gaffer calling him Jameses. We love Jameses. I don’t know who Jameses is on day one. I don’t know his name, and I don’t know what he does yet, because I just see him walking around. Now if he gets behind the dimmer board, then yeah. Is that a special effects guy, or is that a props guy? Is that an electrician or is that a grip? You don’t know. Name and job. Do the best you can. You’re going to say “bro” and “buddy” and “pal” a lot.

**John:** It’s going to happen.

**Craig:** You’re going to say “sir” and “madam.” Generally speaking, people forgive you. If you are saying to your A-camera operator after four months, “Sorry, I don’t know your name, but can you get tighter?” then you’re an idiot. Otherwise, yeah, just give yourself a little bit of a break. It’s not possible.

**John:** I’m not in production yet, but I am in a lot of Zooms with a lot of people. They’re the kind of Zooms that will happen every two or three weeks. I’m not seeing people all the time. I’m seeing people enough. I need to remember, oh crap, who is this person? What I’ve taken to doing is, for this project I just have a page in Notion which is basically who’s who. It basically lists the names. I’ll grab a photo off the internet so I remember what they look like, and a few things about them, what their job title is at this company, anything that’s interesting I know about their history or a thing, just so I’m not starting from absolute zero every time a Zoom starts up here, because sometimes I’ll have a follow-up call with my agent, say, “What did you think of this person?” I’m like, “I have no idea if that person was on the Zoom or not.” This way, at least going into it, I have a little bit better sense of like, okay, these are the people.

Other thing I’ve found really helpful is that with Zoom invitations, you see who is invited to the meeting. I can just take a look through that list. It’s like, do I know who these people are? If there’s a person who I don’t know who they are, I will Google them to see what is this person’s function on this project. Otherwise, I can forget, oh, that’s actually a high-ranking network exec, and I just didn’t know.

**Craig:** Certainly, you want to know who the quote unquote important people are.

**John:** If this were a physical meeting, whose office would I be in.

**Craig:** There are people that when you’re dealing with let’s say the studio or network, especially when you’re in larger meetings where it covers multiple departments, then there are going to be people on there that you don’t know personally. They also don’t expect that you know them personally. To me it’s okay to know the names of the people that you’ve been dealing directly with. If other people break through the name barrier, then I say well done, name barrier breaker-througher. I’m also perfectly happy to play these… We’re older now, John. We can just be slightly doddering about it.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Megana, you can’t get away with that. You’re in your crisp 20s. You can’t not know people’s names.

**Megana:** I do know people’s names.

**Craig:** See? Look at that.

**John:** See? Absolutely, because she’s met so many fewer people than you and I have. Here’s a plead. Can I just ask all of Hollywood and all of the world? On your Zoom, put your actual name as your name. Don’t put some little short thing they can’t pronounce. Put your actual name there. Mine says John August, because my name is John August. It doesn’t say august75007. It says John August. People can remember, “Oh, that’s John August. He’s the writer guy.”

**Craig:** Carolyn Strauss, at some point someone changed her Zoom name to something. She was involved in some kind of charity that was benefiting Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Her Zoom name was something like HBCUFoundation4. Now, I know who she is, but every time I see her, I’m like, “What’s up, HBCUFoundation4?” Somebody needs to fix her Zoom, for the love of God. Also, I’ve been on Zoom with friends and changed my name to something horrendous and then forgot.

**John:** I love that.

**Craig:** You go on Zoom later, and it’s still your name. I think Zoom should have a thing where it just resets back to your regular name each time.

**John:** 100%. For D and D, we use our characters’ names for our Zooms, if we remember to use our characters’ names for Zooms. Thank God I’m using our iPad. It resets and it doesn’t remember that I changed it.

**Craig:** That might’ve been it. I was in a meeting, and someone’s like, “Why is your Zoom name God of Vengeance?” or something like that. I was like, “Oh, right, so I’m a Dungeon Master. Long story. I’m a dork.”

**John:** Megana, you’re meeting with everybody in town. You’re going off on tons of meetings. Are you doing anything to keep track of who you meet with?

**Megana:** I feel like this is revealing such big gaps. I have the email communication with my agents though.

**John:** That helps, because back in our day, when I was first taking those meetings, it was before emails. I would get phone calls. I’d go to this place, and there was just no record of what it was. Or I’d get faxes. I remember faxes.

**Craig:** Faxes.

**Megana:** I guess something I learned from you also is afterwards I’ll send a summary of what we talked about to my agents and then have that all searchable by email.

**John:** That is another big help. If I have a general meeting, if agents set up something, afterwards I’ll send an email saying, “We had a great meeting. We talked about these three things. I really liked this person,” just as a reminder. It’s helpful for them, but it’s mostly helpful for me when I want to search back.

**Craig:** My whole system was just writing words on small scraps of paper that piled up on my desk.

**John:** Then you eventually threw them away.

**Craig:** Then I eventually threw them away, and in throwing them away learned an important lesson. It’s fine.

**John:** It’s all fine.

**Craig:** You know what? If someone’s going to give me money, I learn their name real fast.

**John:** Funny how that works.

**Craig:** If they are relying on me, they’re going to learn my name real fast. Everybody else, whatever. By the way, I’ve met people before and then subsequently, some time later, I run into them at something, and they don’t remember meeting me. That’s fine. I never say, “No, you know me. What?” I just go, “Nice to meet you,” because why make them feel bad over something that’s incredibly human? It’s my fault. I didn’t break through.

**John:** I was at a party over the weekend. There was a guy who worked at a studio. I said, oh, blah blah. He’s like, “Oh no, we actually have met before. It was five years ago. I was the junior person in the room.” Thank you for taking the spin off that, like it was my fault for not remembering him, because he was the junior guy in the room. I only focused on the decision maker in the room.

**Craig:** That’s totally fine. If someone says to me, “Hey, I did meet you once with so-and-so,” I’ll just be honest. I’m like, “I don’t specifically remember that, but I hope that I was pleasant.”

**John:** There was a case where on a Zoom, they made a big point about like, “I used to work for,” insert name here, “and I learned everything from here.” I wanted to say, “I will never work with you, because if that’s who you hold up as your ideal and your model, that’s bad and dangerous, and you’re a terrible, terrible person.”

**Craig:** I would admire the absolute gall of somebody who said, “I used to work for Harvey Weinstein. I learned everything from him.”

**John:** “He’s a hero.”

**Craig:** “He’s my hero.”

**John:** Good stuff. Craig, thanks for the tips.

**Craig:** Thank you for your tips. Thank you, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Eric Webb’s Twitter](https://twitter.com/salaciousscribe) and [Memorial Fundraiser](https://www.gofundme.com/f/lay-a-beloved-writer-friend-and-partner-to-rest)
* [Mystery of the Buried Owl](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/may/13/the-mystery-of-the-buried-owl-the-30-year-treasure-hunt-baffling-french-puzzlers) by Phil Hoad for the Guardian
* [Rodney Stotts Used to Hustle Drugs in Southeast DC. Now He’s One of the Few Black Master Falconers in America](https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/02/09/rodney-stotts-one-of-the-few-black-master-falconers-in-america/) by Rodney Stotts for the Washingtonian
* [This lawyer should be world-famous for his battle with Chevron – but he’s in jail](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/08/chevron-amazon-ecuador-steven-donziger-erin-brockovich) by Erin Brockovich for the Guardian
* [It Really Wasn’t Cricket: The Strange Case of the Fake Indian Premier League](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/world/asia/fake-indian-cricket-league-russia.html) by Sameer Yasir for the NY Times
* [Werewords](http://werewords.com) Game
* [Tiramisu](https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018684-classic-tiramisu) Recipe in the New York Times
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Owen Danoff ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/559standard.mp3).

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

**John August:** Bonjour et bienvenue. Je m’appelle John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Je m’appelle Craig Mazin.

**John:** [French language]. Craig, we’re back. You’re back from Calgary. I’m back from France. We are back in our native home city of Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Correct. We were both in countries where things on wrappers are printed in French.

**John:** That’s true, yes, and French rappers rap in French.

**Craig:** French rappers are the best. I assume you were there for fun.

**John:** For fun, yes.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Spent some time touring the UK, looking at some schools for our daughter. Then we were just back in France for the first time since the pandemic. Longtime listeners will know that I used to live there. It was nice to be back and seeing my old haunts. The boulangerie which was our favorite place to get pastries every day was still there, but slightly less good than it was before.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Something happened.

**Craig:** Life happens, John. Life happens. It must’ve been nice to return there. It must’ve been nice to be overseas and not working. I can’t say I was overseas. I was over-border. I was over over-border.

**John:** You were over-border, yeah. I did no Scriptnotes work at all.

**Craig:** That’s wonderful. That’s great. Look, wasn’t it nice?

**John:** It was so nice.

**Craig:** Let’s just say, without freaking anyone out, I will simply say sometimes it’s nice to not do Scriptnotes.

**John:** It really is.

**Craig:** It really is.

**John:** [inaudible 00:01:23] not be thinking about it.

**Craig:** If you don’t realize that you’ve got… Oh, it’s not a big deal. It’s just that there’s this splinter. It doesn’t hurt. Then one day 10 years later they take the splinter out and you’re like, “Oh, wow. It’s actually way better without that splinter.” Nobody should get nervous or anxious.

**John:** Don’t worry.

**Craig:** Don’t get anxious.

**John:** Everything’s fine.

**Megana Rao:** I am really anxious.

**Craig:** No no no. Megana, sleep.

**Megana:** I don’t like where this conversation is going.

**Craig:** Sleep.

**John:** Let’s get to today’s episode so that Megana gets less nervous. Today on the show, effing magnets, how do they work? More specifically, how do you create characters who both pull in the viewer and pull themselves through the story? We’ll look at techniques for adjusting the magnetic fields. We’ll also catch up on a lot of news on animation writing, the CW, and more. There’ll be no Bonus Segment at the end for Premium Members, because instead, they just get a whole Bonus Episode we just created, where we talk with the creator of Wordle and the author of 50 Years of Text Games about ways to use words for fun and profit. It was a good conversation, yes, Craig?

**Craig:** It was fantastic. I think everybody will enjoy it. Naturally, the two of us make sure that it is of interest to everyone, including people that don’t play word games, because there’s universal things that need to be examined, and they were.

**John:** Craig, I think we had one text exchange during my entire vacation, which was Craig writing, “Hell froze over.” I had no idea what the context was. We can now say that hell froze over because Craig Mazin was invited to join the Motion Picture Academy.

**Craig:** If you’re a longtime listener, you know that was something that was never going to happen, and it happened. I was invited to join the Motion Picture Academy. I am now in the Motion Picture Academy. I’m a part of a very exciting and interesting freshman class.

**John:** Craig, you are now an Academy member. I’m so excited to be attending Academy events with you and such and making fun of speakers and-

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** …doing all the Academy business.

**Craig:** I will say that the number of emails that I receive per day has shot up dramatically. I guess I’ll have to figure out how to manage the email influx from the Academy. It’s nice. I am excited to vote for the Oscars. That sounds like it would be a fun thing to do.

**John:** It’s fun to do. It’s actually a really well-designed voting system. Of course, you’ll be a part of the Academy app, which is where you’ll see all the screeners, which is actually really well-designed.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It’s good stuff.

**Craig:** I think it’s wonderful. I think it was our own Aline Brosh McKenna, the living Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes, who may have put my name forward. I should thank her for that. It was also gratifying because you can become a member of the Academy simply by being nominated for something or you can become a member because people think you ought to be. In my case, it was the latter. That was nice. It’s always nice to be wanted. Yay, Academy.

**John:** Hooray. A bunch of news happened, Craig, while you were getting your Academy membership and I was overseas. The Animation Guild ratified their new three-year contract. We’ve talked about animation writing many times on the show. Animation Guild represents all folks who work in animation in different fields, a lot of artists, a lot of different people. They also represent some writers who work in animation.

There was a long and vocal campaign to try to improve the conditions of writers working under Animation Guild contracts. This contract did some things better. It established new job tiers for promotion. There’s a Level 1, Level 2, a supervising animation writer, all who got some pay bumps. There’s a new more junior level called associate animation writer, which is lower paid. It looks like some progress. It also looks like not very close to what an equivalent writer would be getting under a live-action WGA deal. It can both be significant progress and not what these writers should be receiving.

**Craig:** That’s right, nor will it ever be. Because of the circumstances surrounding the Animation Guild, specifically that it is part of IATSE and not a writer’s guild, they will not ever have the kind of bargaining power we do. They don’t have as many members by far. Also, their strike threat is essentially de minimis, because IATSE’s not striking so that animation writers do better. They will always struggle to do the best they can. They do, I honestly think, do the best they can. The people who work there care a lot. They are not defensive about the fact that their collective bargaining agreement is not as good as ours. They are aware of it. They don’t deny it. They do the best they can. That’s the most important thing. They did get a pretty decent turnout, which I think is really important. Member turnout apparently tripled compared to the last vote.

If there’s one thing that I guess we could look at as a decent thing, it’s just additional codification of what IATSE got, which was an enshrined 3% minimum wage increases annually over the course of the contract. That used to be the standard across the industry, and then suddenly it went down to two and a half. Hopefully, we can all return to the 3%. Anyway, I think all in all a successful negotiation for Animation Guild. Well done to the folks who run it and all the folks who voted.

**John:** I also just want to commend the animation writers who kept speaking up very vocally about how important it was and how their jobs are different than other folks who are working in the Animation Guild. They’re the first people on board in a project. They have very specific needs that are different from other folks. I think it’s great that they spoke up and were so insistent throughout this. This is not the last we’ve heard about animation writing and making sure that animation writers are paid what they should be paid.

**Craig:** I expect that we’ll be hearing about this every three years, as well we should.

**John:** Other news, so Craig, you and I have not talked very much about the CW, but we should probably explain for international listeners, because the CW is just a weird situation. Way back in the day, we had two different networks called the WB and UPN. Shows on the WB that were so famous were Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel.

**Craig:** The Buffyverse.

**John:** All the Buffyverse, but also Dawson’s Creek was a WB show. My own show, which lasted seven episodes, only four of which aired, called DC, was a WB show.

**Craig:** Great four episodes though.

**John:** It was really just a phenomenal four episodes. UPN, which was another Paramount-based network-

**Craig:** United Paramount Network.

**John:** Yeah, which had a bunch of shows. Those two merged, and they became the CW. The CW is the home to things like Supernatural, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It’s owned jointly by Warner Bros and CBS. It’s always been a strange partnership. They are trying to sell the CW now. It looks like it’s going to be bought out by a group called Nexstar, which represents a bunch of the stations that actually broadcast CW shows.

**Craig:** This is the I guess natural fallout of the move to streaming, because basically Warner Bros is all in on HBO Max, and CBS is all in on Paramount Plus. Then the question is what exactly will the… By the way, what is with the the?

**John:** The CW?

**Craig:** Yeah. We don’t say the NBC, the CBS, the ABC, the HBO Max.

**John:** We don’t say the CBS.

**Craig:** It’s just there for whatever reason, the CW. I guess they started with the WB, because it wasn’t WB. It was the WB.

**John:** I guess, yeah.

**Craig:** The weirdly named the CW will try and fit into this forgotten, perhaps neglected spot, which is the independent network. It’s possible that it could work. I just don’t know what their programming exactly will be, because all the programming they had is owned by these other entities. They’re not buying the programs. They’re just buying the name.

**John:** They’re buying the name. They’re buying the network and the ability of the network to brand shows. Warner Bros and Paramount will still own a part of it. I think the reason why I want to talk about this on Scriptnotes is that the CW shows were an important birthplace for a lot of writers. They were shows that ran 20 episodes a season or 22 episodes a season. There was a lot of work there. The CW canceled a bunch of their shows. That’s a bunch of writers who don’t have jobs suddenly.

I think we forget about the nature of seasonal employment. These were shows that would start early fall and go through into the spring. In this streaming era, we see much less of that. Those were really good jobs for a bunch of people. I’m concerned that whatever this new network becomes, it’s not going to have scripted shows to the same degree. We’re going to lose out on a great training ground for a lot of writers.

**Craig:** It won’t be. Don’t be concerned. Just deal with it as reality, because they will not be making scripted television the way that the CW or the WB or UPN even did, because it’s too expensive and because you can make a lot of money with unscripted programming at lower margins. That’s how you compete. Look, ultimately, all of the networks are going to go away. They’ve been around forever or what we imagine forever to be. They’re going away. We’re not going to have NBC, CBS, and ABC at some point. They’re just going.

**John:** I agree with it.

**Craig:** Then it’s just going to be Disney Plus and Paramount Plus and Peacock and then all the other streamers we know, HBO Max and Apple TV and Amazon and so on and so forth, Hulu and etc. There’s not going to be network television anymore. There’s a redundancy there that everybody can see. Everybody. We all know it. At some point, I think NBC… Honestly, Derek Haas is keeping NBC on, as far as I can tell.

**John:** The Chicago shows?

**Craig:** Yes. When the Chicago shows run their run, which probably will be 40 years from now, then and only then will NBC finally be like, “Okay, we’ll just be Peacock.”

**John:** Some follow-up. On our bonus topic a couple weeks ago, we talked about adulting, basically what are the things that made you realize that you are now an adult and what those felt like. I proposed on Twitter, “Hey, what are some useful markers you found of adulthood?” Our listeners sent through some really good suggestions. I thought we would read through some of the listener suggestions for things that mark you as possibly an adult. “Getting excited about water filter speed.”

**Craig:** What? Water filter speed.

**John:** Yeah, like getting a home water filter or how fast your Brita pitcher filters.

**Craig:** I see. Yeah.

**John:** “Throwing out plastic cups and replacing them with glass.” Yeah, so getting permanent things rather than temporary things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “Hiring professional movers.” That is a real mark of it, when you’re not relying on your friends to drag you through. My friend Andrew Lippa said, “A mark of adulthood is initiating conversations that will likely invite conflict.” Recognizing I’m going to say this thing, I know this is going to make you mad, but I’m not going to actually avoid saying it because I know it’s going to make you mad.

**Craig:** I’d consider that also part of my adolescenting, to be honest, but that was me.

**John:** That was being provocative though.

**Craig:** I think that’s what “initiating conversations that likely invite conflict” is.

**John:** I think it’s recognizing that it’s not being afraid of conflict.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. You’re not starting something, but you’re not avoiding it either.

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** That’s how I took Andrew Lippa’s-

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** Knowing Andrew the way I do, that’s how I read that. Chuck Wendig, who’s a very smart writer, he said, “Being excited about things like showers and bedtime.”

**Craig:** Bedtime in particular has really become… I used to really dread it, and now lately I’m like, “Can I just get into bed? Can I get into bed now? Oh my god, no, it’s 8:15. I can’t.”

**John:** Along those lines, “Being excited when you have no plans for the weekend.” So good. “Wanting a low-key birthday.” “Seeking empty beaches.”

**Craig:** Empty beaches. I never wanted full beaches.

**John:** I never want to go to the beach. I hate the sun.

**Craig:** You really should not ever-

**John:** I should not be in the sun.

**Craig:** No. When you were an Eagle Scout, were you just in a full beekeeper costume?

**John:** For a variety of reason, I’ve pretty much always worn hats, which has helped a lot. I would say my one advice to people is just put on a hat, because it’ll help you out so much. I do remember on a horseback trip wearing a ball cap and having my ears get incredibly badly sunburned. That’s not a fun thing when you’re just peeling dead skin off your ears.

**Craig:** You need a brimmed hat.

**John:** I need a brimmed hat. That’s what I need.

**Craig:** For sure. That’s why I’m saying beekeeper. If you look into beekeeper costumes, I think you will-

**John:** I think I’ll be happy. We have some follow-up on our discussion about gun violence. Megana, do you want to help us out with this?

**Megana:** Nikolai brought up, “In Donald Glover’s brilliant show Atlanta, LaKeith Stanfield’s character Darius is at a shooting range. Around him, Second Amendment enthusiasts are shooting at human targets, which Darius shoots at a target of a dog. He’s approached, and the men tell him, ‘You can’t shoot dogs,’ to which Darius replies, ‘Why would I shoot a human target?’ I’m certainly not doing the scene justice, but I think the point still holds.”

**John:** I haven’t seen Atlanta, so I haven’t seen this beat. I think that’s a really clever idea for a moment. It’s also an interesting way to bring up the ideas of why are we using guns and what’s okay about guns and what’s not okay about guns.

**Craig:** It’s pretty setuppish. That’s my favorite word. I got that word from Hannibal Buress, setuppish.

**John:** Setuppish.

**Craig:** Isn’t that a great word?

**John:** It is. It’s pejorative but not dismissive completely.

**Craig:** It’s just saying you’re luring me into something. It’s setuppish. It is clever.

**John:** It is clever. I like it. Follow-up on remote writers’ rooms. Help us out.

**Megana:** Allison wrote in and said, “A follow-up to that great question about remote writers’ rooms. Why must writers’ rooms be in LA when so much production is remote? Wouldn’t it make sense for Disney to have writers’ rooms in Atlanta, for instance? I live and work in Portland, Oregon, where we have a thriving TV and film scene. The productions may hire local camera operators, directors, actors, etc, but the writers’ rooms are always based in LA. This above the line/below the line divide never made sense to me. Making writers’ rooms local to the locations could go a long way to bridging this divide.”

**Craig:** Interesting point.

**John:** I think I remember some anecdotes of a show that did actually put its writing staff in the place where it was shooting. It’s so unusual that I think it just stuck out because I’d never heard of that before.

**Craig:** There’s a really simple reason for this, Allison. Money. When you take people from where they live and ask them to live somewhere else, it costs money. You have to pay them a per diem. There’s a weekly fee that they get just for living expenses. You have to put them up somewhere. You have to feed them. You have to take care of their travel back and forth and all of that stuff. It’s just money. Now if it were me and I had a writers’ room, which I don’t, but if I did, yeah, I probably would’ve wanted them with me. Then I’m sure HBO would’ve said, “No, we’re not spending all this money for people to be up there and be there when you need them during production, but when they’re not needed during production, then… ”

Ideally, a lot of this stuff is written before you get into production. We do hire below-the-line folks and then bring them places and put them up and pay for them, because sometimes we need specific people. Cinematographers, camera operators are a good example, and obviously actors. Basically, bottom line, Allison, dough.

**John:** Yeah, dough. Also, I think it’s understanding the timeline of when you’re shooting these things. Craig’s right to say ideally you’ve written all the episodes before you start shooting, or you’re getting close to that. The exception would be if you were doing a traditional network show like one of the Baltimore shows like Homicide. I think Homicide may have actually had its writers’ room there in Baltimore, because they were right there on set doing all the stuff. You basically needed to have those writers be right there on set to do the things. It was great. That is a possibility there for a network show where you’re not writing so far ahead of what production is. For most shows, it’s not going to work. I think Allison also may be thinking that they’ll hire local writers to do that thing. No, they won’t. No showrunner’s going to find the six writers they want for that show in Portland. They’re just not going to find that. It’s not going to be a thing that works out.

**Craig:** Even if they were there, it doesn’t matter, because you need writers where you are before you get to Portland. You can’t get to Portland unless you’ve written a lot.

**John:** When we had Liz Meriwether and Liz Hannah on the show talking about their productions, they did have writers on set, but they had to bring in one writer at a time, because that’s what they can afford to bring. That was great and helpful for them. That’s what they could actually do.

**Craig:** That is industry standard.

**John:** We have some follow-up on disclaimers. Megana.

**Megana:** Frank from LA wrote in and said, “I wrote a pilot that’s a Real Housewives style reality show spoof about plus-size male models. When I was first taking it out, execs who read it blind without meeting me or without seeing the web series it was based on thought I was making fun of fat people. It was so frustrating, because I was doing the exact opposite. The feedback was largely tepid and/or cautionary, until I added a second page that said, ‘The author is loud, queer, and overweight. In their head they could be Naomi Campbell if only the world would let them.'”

**John:** Here’s an example of a preface page or an epigraph, still debating what those are going to be, that was helpful for Frank in getting his script read because people did not understand the context of who their writer was and how they should be reading the script without some sort of introduction there. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** It’s everything, so well done, Frank. The fact that maybe you didn’t think about doing that initially is not your fault. What I love is that you then thought of doing it. There’s nothing questionable about this. To me, context in the course of humor is incredibly important. We’re all grown up enough, especially now, to understand that some things are funny when certain people say them, and some things are not funny when certain people say them. You could boil it all down to the punch up/punch down thing, but I tend to think of it more as self-criticism versus outward criticism, self-awareness versus otherness.

If I write a comedy, and I suspect this is going to come up later when we get to our One Cool Things, and I am criticizing American Jewish culture, I’m doing it from inside my group, and that is different than if somebody else does it from outside. It just is. We don’t have to even get into why. We all know and understand this inherently. I think it’s actually brilliant and puts people at ease. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to like the script. What they can’t do is say, “Oh, I don’t feel comfortable here, because I think somebody’s just teeing off on other people.”

**John:** Well done. I agree. I think it’s a good use of that preface page or epigraph. You can use either term.

**Craig:** Prologue, whatever.

**John:** Prologue.

**Craig:** Epigraph, I think that’s what we’ve settled on.

**John:** I think we settled on preface page. Let’s get to our marquee-

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** …topic here. It’s been a while since we’ve had a marquee topic. Craig, while I was on this vacation, I read a book. I read Jason Kander’s new book, Invisible Storm. If you don’t remember Jason Kander, he was a candidate for Senate in Missouri who lost but came really, really close and was just a phenomenon in Missouri. He was also then going to be running for president. He decided not to run for president, ran for mayor of Kansas City, pulled out of that to announce that he basically needed to stop because he had tremendous PTSD and basically could not function as a candidate. The book does a really good job of talking about those decisions and what he was trying to suppress but ultimately couldn’t suppress.

It got me thinking about, so often on Scriptnotes we’re talking about what characters want, what they’re driving towards, what they’re aspiring to become. That always feels like a pull. We’re being pulled in one direction. In the case of Jason Kander, he was really being pushed away from something. He was basically trying to escape from this PTSD. So much of his success was actually a fear-avoidance mechanism, trying to get away from this thing. Basically, as long as he was running really fast, it couldn’t catch up. He believed it couldn’t catch up. I like that push-pull dynamic that a magnet both can be drawing towards something but also repelling away from something else. I thought we might talk about what characters are trying to do looking at both what they’re being pulled towards but what they’re pushing against.

**Craig:** The pushing against part is probably a universal thing. I think everybody is afraid of something. Fear is a huge part of what it means to be human and therefore a huge part of writing human characters. What we find is if we simply write somebody as being afraid of something and moving away from something, the story isn’t very interesting, because they’re just hiding, and they’re hiding overtly, and we just are waiting for them to stop. It’s more interesting when we think what we’re seeing is the story of somebody driven toward something positive. It’s only then that we realize that their positive motion forward is really in lieu of what they’re afraid of doing.

**John:** As we look back to some of our deep dive discussions on Clueless or on Little Mermaid, these characters will express their wish, the thing that they’re trying to go towards. They’re also leaving home. Sometimes that leaving home is being pushed away from that too. Sometimes they are pushing off against the wall as they’re swimming away. Figuring out what that wall is can be really, really important. Figuring out what it is that they don’t want themselves to become, what it is that they are afraid of becoming, what it is that they are loathe to face again, can be what’s driving them. In really successful stories, and I think Kander’s real life story is successful in its way, it’s finally having to confront that monster, confront that thing that you were trying to escape, is part of the journey that gets you through to the end. It gets you into your third act. It’s finally facing this thing that you’ve been trying to avoid the whole time.

**Craig:** Exactly. This is very simpatico with the whole how do you write a movie podcast that we did. The revelation of what it is that terrifies you is something that should happen. It’s almost like a little horror movie inside of every movie, whether it’s a comedy or an adventure. There’s this daunting realization that the problem, the thing that you were not looking at is the following. You weren’t even aware of it necessarily. What a lot of first acts do well is give you all the clues as to what might be the problem. We notice early on in our stories that our characters are not merely pulling towards something, but they’re good at it. They’re often competent at it. It’s much more interesting if the thing you’re pulling towards is something that you’re good at, because then theoretically you can just keep going.

**John:** That’s a thing that we see with Jason Kander, who’s very good at being a politician and raising the money and doing the things and being on the phone constantly and doing all the things it took to be successful as that and was using those things to have this vision of where he was going to end up. Really, he was distracting himself from the work he needed to do. It reminds me of when we had Phoebe Waller-Bridge on the show. We talked about Fleabag. Fleabag is a character who is… Her forward momentum really comes from constantly pushing people away and basically building a distance between herself and other people. You don’t see her going after a thing as much as pushing people away and using the conventions of talking to the audience and other things to create a space around her. It’s only when she’s finally confronted about this that she can make the progress and growth she goes through at the end of the series.

**Craig:** It’s one of the ways that we connect with the quote unquote unlikable character, which is why this character isn’t likable is the worst note that anyone can get. Shame on everybody who gives it. Their unlikability is often about how they are pushing things away, and doing so in a way that allows them to get through life. It’s often very funny. Pushing people away is probably better presented through comedy than through drama. It gets very heavy very quickly when you’re just like, “Screw off,” constantly. The notion of, it was just misanthropy, I guess, it’s funny. They’re funny people, because we’re like, “Yeah, everybody does stink. That is stupid.” Then you realize, wait, that’s the part of me that is a bit afraid of things. I think it’s really important that we get to see people being repellent.

**John:** I think back to Melissa McCarthy’s character in Can You Ever Forgive Me. We had Marielle Heller on the show talking about that. That is a miscreant character. She does not like the outside world. She does not trust the outside world. We see her doing specific things to protect herself from exposing any vulnerability. Of course, for the movie to succeed, it has to introduce characters who can break through that armor and give her things that she actually wants to see and make her step outside of her comfort zone to let some people in. Of course, her whole scheme falls apart in the process. That’s an example of a movie that’s not a comedy and yet does do that job of I have a strong magnetic field that is pushing everyone away from me and succeeds.

**Craig:** There are obviously comic moments in that movie. Melissa McCarthy is a fascinating example, because I think basically every character she plays, with rare exception, is somebody that is pushing people away. Zach Galifianakis, also very, very famous for this. What makes them so good at it is more than just their talent, which is exceptional. They also just have this interesting humanity in their eyes. I’ve always said among comic character actors, or just comic actors I guess you’d call them, that some of them are a little scary, and some of them you want to just take home and hug. Jim Carrey, I think his characters always have this mania that’s a bit terrifying, and so it’s exciting.

**John:** You would not want to give him a sharp knife. I would not be comfortable.

**Craig:** Exactly. You don’t want to give him a sharp knife. There’s a danger about his… Sacha Baron Cohen, there’s a danger there. Then when you look at Steve Carrell or Zach or Melissa, it’s like… For whatever reason, there’s just something about Steve Carrell where I just want to take him home and hug him. Those characters tend to do really well when they’re pushing people away, because you know inherently they’re not being mean or cruel. They’re just hurt.

**John:** When you get the note about likability, I think the corollary note to that is relatability. Sometimes those characters who might seem unlikable, as long as they’re relatable, as long as we can see aspects of things we would ourselves do and protective mechanisms and defense shields they’re putting up in our own lives, we can relate to them, even if they’re not classically likable human beings, they’re not picking up and hugging puppies. We can see ourselves in them. I think that’s an example of something Melissa does so well is that in the characters she’s playing, you can see why she’s doing what she’s doing. You can understand she’s trying to push you away and she’s still letting you in.

**Craig:** I think that relatability is ultimately essential for every single character that is ever… The only characters that you can get away with being not relatable are I guess dispensable ones and very broad ones, so James Bond. The classic template for James Bond movies is that there’s a main villain who usually is somewhat relatable, but then that main villain has an interesting sidekick, so Oddjob or Jaws, Nick Nack. They are always very thin characters. By and large, everybody, villains, second bananas, leads, everyone at some point or another must be relatable, even in ways that are seemingly incompatible with their circumstances. For instance, Thor is a god, and yet really all those movies are asking us to relate to him on a very not godlike level.

**John:** I would say the most successful Thor movies are the ones that pierce the Thor character the most and reveal his inner flaws and his humor and his dissatisfaction with himself and his own situation. It’s not the ones where he’s awesome, it’s the ones where he’s flawed are the ones where you’re going to be most curious to follow along.

**Craig:** If you were Chris Hemsworth, do you think you would ever wake up in the morning being like, “Pretty flawed here.”

**John:** I think the success of one of these films though is showing beautiful people who are still flawed in relatable ways. That’s obviously one of the great challenges we face as writers is to have characters who are compelling and driven and feel like a movie can center around them, and yet we’re still seeing through to some of their vulnerability. I think the Iron Man character that Robert Downey Jr plays is a very good example of this, because he is an asshole. He’s fundamentally not a sympathetic character, and yet he is written with a specificity and with a vulnerability that lets you see behind the surface. He could be both. He could be pushing you away, literally pushing you away with his little magnetic jet hands, and at the same time letting you in to see what’s there.

**Craig:** We’re going to get so many angry emails. “Those are not jet hands. Those are Propulsors.”

**John:** Repulsors, yes, I’m sorry.

**Craig:** I don’t know what the hell they are. It’s really interesting. Separate topic we should talk about one day is the unfortunate phenomenon that no matter how much representation we talk about and the improvement of representation on film, the one area where human beings just seem to really struggle with is we want good-looking people on screen. We want them. Black, white, disabled, doesn’t matter, but all we ask is that their faces have symmetry. We are fascinated with the lives of people who have symmetrical faces. It is so weird to think of. When you really boil it down, it’s like, what is happening there? There’s not a chance that people’s facial symmetry is a statistical reflection of their actual interest value as humans. What are we doing? What is happening? Anyway, I just find that fascinating.

**John:** Yet facial symmetry doesn’t make you a movie star. Tom Cruise is a good-looking person and was a good-looking person growing up, but it was his actual charisma, which is not his physical body, that made him the star.

**Craig:** Yes. Really, what it comes down to is if you have this much talent and your face is this symmetrical, you can be a movie star. If you have even more talent than that, but your face is terribly not symmetrical-

**John:** You can be a voice actor.

**Craig:** You’re not going to be a movie star, because people just don’t… They don’t care. That’s what so strange. It’s so strange, because there are some incredible actors out there who don’t have whatever that is that’s the facial symmetry that we all demand. Then we miss them somehow. Then there are actors who we all know are famous because they’re very good-looking. A lot of the people who are now famous for being famous, I think a lot of that is just… Anyway, side topic. We’ll come back around to that on Episode 730.

**John:** The last little point I will make here, which we’ll reference again when we come back to this topic, is it reminds me of… There’s this phenomenon of hockey players who are born in a certain month are much more successful. I think it’s probably because of that. It’s because this actor was so beautiful and was so handsome and was cast in these roles, they learned how to become a much better film actor, and they kept getting the work. They improved as an actor because they kept getting more chances to play and more chances in front of the screen.

**Craig:** There is no question that… I can’t remember the comedian who said the secret to happiness is be good-looking. You laugh, and then he starts talking about it, and you realize, oh my god, yes. Yes, apparently, that is the secret. Everything gets a lot easier. Everything. Everything. All of your successes are over-praised. Your failures are ignored. Everybody is interested in you and wants to be around you and are attracted to you. It’s this interesting magnetic thing we’re talking about.

**John:** Last bit on magnetism I would just say is a lesson I learned as I’ve been thinking about this over the last few weeks is that obviously, always be looking for what a character wants, because what a character wants is going to be driving them in a lot of cases. Just never forget the corollary question is what are they trying to get away from. What are they pushing against? What are they trying to push away from themselves? You’ll find some really interesting details and maybe some interesting characters and situations by looking about what it is that they are repelled by and see whether that can be additional driving force for you in figuring out your story and basically your protagonist’s journey.

Cool. Let’s go into our One Cool Things. I have two recommendations for you, both things you can see on streaming. First off is Fire Island, written by Joel Kim Booster, which is a delightful retelling of Pride and Prejudice but all told on Fire Island. Really, really nicely done. Delightful. You can find it on Hulu. It matches very well with our Clueless episode, which we just aired last week, which is a retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma. This is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, all set on Fire Island. Very much recommend you see that.

Also, if you’ve not seen Heartstopper, which is a really well-reviewed and popular show on Netflix, I would recommend it. It is a small gay British high school show that is just really smartly done. It’s weirdly chaste and based on these great graphic novels by Alice Oseman. If you are in the mood for something just light and delightful, I would recommend Heartstopper for you.

**Craig:** I have to watch the show. Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie in The Last of Us, and a guy named Steve Oben, who is one of our costume department geniuses, they were obsessed with this and would talk about it all the time. I have to watch Heartstopper. In a lovely way. They just said it puts a smile on your face.

**John:** I was describing it to Megana as being like M and M’s, where you eat an M and M and suddenly you’ve ate the whole bag. You’re like, “Wait, where’d the show go?” They’re very short episodes. It’s just delightfully done.

**Craig:** I’m in. How could my One Cool Thing this week not be the James Webb Space Telescope?

**John:** Pretty amazing images.

**Craig:** You and I are old enough to remember when Hubble blew our minds. By the way, I feel bad for Hubble. Hubble’s been out there killing it for decades, and then James Webb shows up. It’s not enough that James Webb is so much better than Hubble. Now it’s supposed to be like, “Look at this shit from Hubble. Look at this shit photo from Hubble. Now look how much better it is from James Webb.” It’s so mean.

Anyway, it is kind of incredible. The images that we’re seeing are startling. They are not of stars, but of galaxies. They are closeups of galaxies. They are sections of sky that show dozens or hundreds of galaxies, each of which, of course, contain countless stars and planets. All of this is just mind-blowing. Interestingly, most of them do look a little bit like… Remember when we were kids, John, you would go to the store and there were those little vending machines where you’d put a quarter in and you’d turn the dial and you’d get a little plastic egg?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Inside the egg was candy or a toy. One of the toys was this clear, super bouncy… The Super Ball. A super bouncy ball.

**John:** Super bouncy ball, yeah.

**Craig:** Inside a lot of them was a billion sparkly things.

**John:** It’s glitter. It’s glitter inside a rubber ball.

**Craig:** That’s what the universe is. It’s a glittery Super Ball. It’s mind-blowing, portrays a kind of vastness that our brains are simply incapable of processing fully. My One Cool Thing this week, James Webb Space Telescope, and you know what, also the Hubble. Hey, Hubble.

**John:** Hubble’s doing great.

**Craig:** You are the OG, Hubble.

**John:** 100%. I got to see the James Webb Space Telescope before it launched. We went down to Northrop Grumman and got to do a tour. I’ll talk through how you get to see it. You are going up three stories, up to this glass observation bay, and looking down at a bunch of people in beekeeper suits basically, that Craig would be happy with, just completely vacuum-sealed, because this whole thing, which has this giant gold mirror, a speck of dust on it could ruin everything. Years of years of construction for this. It felt impressive. I could not even imagine launching it into space. To see the results that they’re able to get off of it is just incredible.

**Craig:** NASA has been, I won’t say quietly, but not noisily, being amazing for a really long time, and particularly I think for the last 10 years or so, in terms of what they’ve been able to do with Mars and now with this telescope. I have to say the reorientation away from man space travel towards investigative space engineering is great.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** It’s great. I don’t need a guy on Mars. What’s he going to do? He’s going to walk around. Who cares? Show me more of it and analyze it.

**John:** Put some more robots there. Let them dig around and pull stuff up.

**Craig:** How about this? HD cameras are preferable to putting a person there, so that that person can be like, “Oh my god, I did it.” We’re like, “You did it.”

**John:** You look at this telescope or even the rovers we have on Mars, they can work for 10 years-

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** …and keep doing stuff, versus a guy who can be there for a week and you got to fly him back.

**Craig:** We get excited because we can watch it, and he’s walking on Mars. We’re like, “Oh my god, it happened.” Now what? The cost and the danger is extraordinary, and for not a great amount of information, not as much as you can get from diagnostic and investigative equipment like this. Hooray, NASA is what I’m saying.

**John:** There’s things that we’re able to do on the space station with humans there which seem great. We’re able to run experiments and really do stuff on the fly. Fantastic. I don’t feel a pressing need to send people back to the moon or back onto Mars. We’re good. We’re good.

**Craig:** We’re good.

**John:** We can focus on some things on Earth here that can be much more useful.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. Like making Scriptnotes, which is a-

**Craig:** Podcast.

**John:** … podcast produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Yay.

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

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Adam Pineless. Thank you to everyone who sent in outros. I put out a call for them, and now we have a whole bunch of new ones in, and they’re so, so good. We’re stocked, but we’re always looking for new outros. 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. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the 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. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you’ll get all the back-episodes, Bonus Segments, and Bonus Episodes, like the one we’re putting out this week on word games. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

Links:

* [Animation Guild Members Ratify New Three-Year Contract](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/animation-guild-ratifies-three-year-contract-1235174906/)
* [As Nexstar Deal For Control Of The CW Nears Finish, Ownership Structure Comes Into Focus](https://deadline.com/2022/06/nexstar-deal-to-acquire-control-of-the-cw-nears-finish-line-1235054433/)
* [John’s Adulting Twitter Thread](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/1544347536366108673?s=21&t=gkZVGb4zyQhdj41RFy-4Cg)
* [Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/invisible-storm-jason-kander?variant=39935556911138) by Jason Kander
* [Fire Island](https://www.hulu.com/movie/fire-island-c2abb64a-bf06-48fa-8465-c0958e2b8ecd) by Joel Kim Booster on Hulu
* [Heartstopper Series on Netflix](https://www.netflix.com/title/81059939) and [Graphic Novel](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/heartstopper-alice-oseman/1133594836) by Alice Osman
* [James Webb Space Telescope](https://webb.nasa.gov/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Pineless ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/558standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 557 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what happened before this moment, and how do we take the audience there? We’ll be discussing flashbacks, or maybe we already did.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** We’ll also be answering listener continues about managers, writing partners, and remote rooms. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what makes a person an adult? We’ll discuss the markers and behaviors that indicate that someone is no longer a child.

**Craig:** That sounds lovely. Maybe I’ll find out if I’m a child finally, because I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t know either.

**Craig:** I feel like a child with a really poorly functioning spine.

**John:** I do feel like I’m the youngest person in the room a lot of times, which I’m generally not anymore.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There’s a lot there.

**Craig:** You know what we are?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** You and I are ex-wunderkinds.

**John:** That’s what we are.

**Craig:** Now we’re just old people.

**John:** I think we should be up front and clear with our listeners that we are recording this on June 20th, but this episode will probably come out in July at some point. We are living in a world where we don’t even know what Break My Soul sounds like.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** That’s how far back we are, because Beyonce’s song is dropping at midnight tonight. We don’t know what it sounds like. We don’t know what the world looks like post Beyonce’s new song after so much time.

**Craig:** I want to reiterate again that I’m old. I had no idea. I didn’t know what you were talking about at all, even remotely.

**John:** There’s a new song by Beyonce. For all we know, the world could be completely transformed, and everything we’re saying in this podcast could be irrelevant, because she is a goddess who will transform everything.

**Craig:** No. It’s a song. It’s a song.

**John:** More likely, things will go on the same. My question is will her new single make it so that Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush does not achieve number one status.

**Craig:** Is it because of Stranger Things?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is it on its way to number one again?

**John:** It’s on its way to number one again.

**Craig:** Was it number one the first time? Probably not.

**John:** Nope. It was top 40, but not number one.

**Craig:** (sings)

**John:** Exciting times.

**Craig:** It’s cool that now, speaking of flashbacks, these songs that were perfectly contemporary for us are these ancient things that can be unearthed for Megana.

**John:** Megana knew the song before Stranger Things.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Is that correct, Megana?

**Megana Rao:** I did.

**Craig:** Yay.

**Megana:** I feel like Kate Bush is a good rite of passage for young goth girls.

**Craig:** Or young not-goth girls.

**John:** How goth were you, Megana?

**Megana:** Goth on the inside, normal on the outside.

**John:** Fully see that.

**Craig:** My daughter has a nose ring now.

**John:** My daughter does too.

**Craig:** She does too?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Wow. How about that?

**John:** It’s been a while since you’ve seen her.

**Craig:** Just side note, since our podcast is about things that are interesting to screenwriters and people with nose piercings. When she asked, was there a difference between you and Mike in terms of acceptance?

**John:** Publicly, no. We present a completely united front to our daughter at all times.

**Craig:** Right, but privately-

**John:** Privately, a little bit.

**Craig:** Who was pro and who was con?

**John:** Neither of us were strongly pro. What I will say is, when it became clear that it was a piercing on the side rather than a piercing in the middle, a septum piercing, then we were better with that.

**Craig:** We were septum. We’re septum over here.

**John:** Team septum.

**Craig:** Team septum. I’m team septum. The way it goes over in my place is Jessica’s like, “Hey, can I pierce my septum?” I’m like, “Sure. What do I care?” Then Melissa’s like, “Um, but,” and then asks a thousand questions. Jessie generally asks me first on those things.

**John:** We save these things for holidays or birthday presents, basically. It’s a big thing she can do on one of the once-a-year gift situations. We go to the really expensive but really good place on Melrose that actually knows what they’re doing.

**Craig:** My feeling is that once my daughter turns 18, which is nigh, December, she’s going to do whatever she wants anyway. The tattoos are coming. More piercings are coming. Should I care? I don’t care. Am I a cool dad, or am I just an apathetic dad?

**John:** Or a checked-out dad?

**Craig:** No, I’m not checked out. I actually think I’m cool in the sense that I’m into it. I think it’s fun. Anyway, happy Father’s Day to me.

**John:** Happy Father’s Day, belatedly.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** A month later for all the people listening to this episode. Let’s get into some screenwriter things. I’m going to start with a fun little thread that popped up in my timeline today from Twitter. This is by Jeremiah Lewis. The theme of this thread was ruin a screenwriter’s day in three words.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** He started the thread off with “really well told.”

**Craig:** Oh, “really well told,” that is a classic brushoff.

**John:** I’ve heard that a couple times. I’ve heard that after pitches. I genuinely think in most cases they were trying to sound positive but noncommittal because they hadn’t talked amongst themselves on Zoom, but I don’t know. Now I’m second guessing myself.

**Craig:** I don’t think it ever is a good sign. I don’t think I’ve ever once heard that and thought to myself, “Nailed it.” Really well told. That was really good. Terrific. Good for you. “Really well told” means I’m not buying that, but you did a good job trying to make that sound not bad. That’s basically what that means to me.

**John:** Oy.

**Craig:** Oy.

**John:** Let’s go through some of the other contenders here. Maybe we’ll just alternate turns here. I’m going to go with “really good start.”

**Craig:** That’s also rough. “Lots of potential.”

**John:** Basically, what you did shows us that there could potentially be a movie there, but you were not the one to deliver it. There’s still potential.

**Craig:** That’s not exciting. Jeez, this is depressing. Why did Jeremiah Lewis do this?

**John:** I’ll serve back with a “found it charming.”

**Craig:** I’ve never heard that one, maybe because I’ve never been charming.

**John:** Something feels diminutive about charming. It’s not good, but it’s charming.

**Craig:** This next one is really weird. “Congratulations, you finished.” What? That’s terrible.

**John:** I could tell it was a slog, but you got through it. That’s not so good.

**Craig:** I have one that isn’t on here.

**John:** What’s this?

**Craig:** “It’s a script.”

**John:** “It’s a script. Wow, it’s fully a script.”

**Craig:** You wrote all of a thing. It’s started and finished. It is script-sized. Congratulations on your script.

**John:** No one can say this is not a script.

**Craig:** That’s right. It’s a script.

**John:** “There’s something here.”

**Craig:** “There’s something here.” Wow. There’s so many layers to that one. There’s something here, but you’ve drowned it in nonsense, and you’re not the thing, clearly.

**John:** Here’s the thing. “There’s something here” is a useful note if it’s talking about a scene or a moment. It’s like, okay, this is not fully explored, but if it’s applied to in overall script, that’s not an encouraging sign.

**Craig:** No, not at all.

**John:** “Lots of fun.”

**Craig:** That’s right up there with “this is cute.” You don’t want that.

**John:** Cute and charming, no. “Some good stuff.”

**Craig:** There’s some good stuff. It’s not a complete zero. I feel like if they say, “There’s some good stuff,” what they’re really saying is there’s no good stuff.

**John:** Not enough stuff to string together to make a movie that they will actually want to make.

**Craig:** No. This one I think is not going to ruin your day. It’ll make you bummed out, but it’s honest. “Not for us.” I’d rather get “not for us” than “some good stuff.”

**John:** I agree with you. “Not for us” makes it clear we’re not even talking about the merits of the thing you’re discussing. It’s just really like, this is not a movie that we can make. I get that. “Promising first draft.”

**Craig:** That’s not terrible.

**John:** That’s not the worst. Not going to ruin your day, as opposed to “enjoyed the premise” would.

**Craig:** You didn’t need a script to enjoy the premise, did you?

**John:** No. You could’ve written this on a napkin, and I would’ve enjoyed it as much.

**Craig:** Exactly. This could’ve been a text.

**John:** “We like a lot of this,” Craig.

**Craig:** “We like a lot of this.” If you hear “we,” start running, because everybody’s going to try and hide as part of a group. Look, hundreds of us really had a problem, as opposed to like, okay, this is awesome. Good news I think is always very focused. Bad news is vague and comes from some hive mind. I don’t blame them. I don’t think that they’re being cowards. I think they’re being human. Nobody wants to be that guy. I don’t want to be that guy. I don’t want to be the person who delivers bad news and says, “You submitted this with dreams that I would love it, and in fact, not only do I not love it, I hate it.” That’s upsetting to everybody. I don’t blame them.

**John:** I don’t blame them at all. Let’s try to pull some joy out of this. What is good things you would hear in one of these meetings? When I’m on one of these calls, it’s like, “Okay, let’s have business affairs get into this.” That’s the sign. Business affairs means it’s real.

**Craig:** Business affairs means you’re getting paid. That’s always a good sign. If they say something along the lines of, “You’re the right person for this,” that means it’s not even about what you’re saying. They are now auditioning for you. They want you to do it. It’s really up to you. They’re trying to convince you to do it at this point.

**John:** If they’re asking about your availability, that’s a good sign.

**Craig:** Availability is always a good sign. If they want you to get on the phone with an actor or a director, always a good sign.

**John:** Always a good sign. Previously on the show we talked about main character energy. We have a corollary to this. This is side character energy. This is Lola Okola on TikTok talking us through what side character energy is.

**Lola Okola:** Personally, I’m actually off main character energy. The vibe is beloved side character with great outfits and funny one-liners. No, I will not undergo any character development, nor will I grow as a person. I’m here to be funny and sexy.

**John:** I really support side character energy. I think also it gets back to this thing we talked about on the show before, why side characters often steal movies.

**Craig:** She does land on something important, which is that side characters are not here to change, which means theoretically that side characters aren’t beset by fatal flaws that they have to overcome. Side characters are loyal and they’re funny and they’re supportive. They’re there for you. In the end, when you finally change and succeed and win, they applaud you or hug you. They are very warm, loving, supportive people. I have to tip my hat to one of the great beloved side characters of all time, Jon Cryer, who did such a good job of it back in the day, although now that I think of it, that was a very tragic sort of thing.

**John:** What are you talking about, Sixteen Candles?

**Craig:** Pretty in Pink.

**John:** Pretty in Pink.

**Craig:** I was talking about Pretty in Pink.

**John:** [inaudible 00:11:15].

**Craig:** I take it back. He was actually tragic. You know who was a beloved side character back in the day? Robert Downey Jr. Robert Downey Jr back in the day was a fun, wacky… In Back to School, he was a wacky, beloved side character.

**John:** I always think of Donkey in Shrek as being a side character who’s just there to do Donkey things and not be… I guess Donkey’s worried about Shrek to some degree, but Donkey can do Donkey things. There’s an animated movie I’ve been working on that I really love my side character. She’s just tremendously fun throughout the whole range of it. She does actually protagonate at the end. Some of the fun of it is that I think she does not want to change at all. She has no desire. She does not identify any fatal flaw in herself, and yet she finds herself changing despite herself, which is a joy.

**Craig:** That’s the Dory evolution. Dory was a wonderful, beloved side character, and then Dory got to do her own thing, which is fun. Listen, Lola Okola, I’m with you. I feel like I’m a beloved side character. I don’t like being involved in drama. I don’t want my life to be swirling about in drama. I like to be next to people who are having drama and listen to them and then tell them it’s going to be okay. That’s what I prefer. I don’t always get it.

**John:** Hey Megana, can you help us out with our main topic here? I think we have a question that can set us up well.

**Megana:** Yes. We got an email in from Sky Jones, who asked, “I suppose the topic isn’t strictly a screenwriting topic, but instead relates to all types of fiction. Lately, I’ve been watching some shows on HBO, specifically The Staircase and Station Eleven. Both of them heavily use flashbacks. In fact, they jump around in time quite a lot. I think the use of flashbacks made the storytelling more compelling than if the story had been told completely linearly. I’m wondering if there are any tips and/or strategies for heavily using flashbacks in a script, especially a TV series, which is obviously longer than a feature script. For instance, are there obvious reasons for deciding to heavily use flashbacks? At what point in the writing process is that usually decided? Are there any specific strategies for keeping track of the story in the outlining and writing process when flashbacks are heavily used?”

**John:** Great. Sky, you really set us up well there. In volleyball, that would be the set getting ready for the spike, just like it’s putting it properly in position for us to answer.

**Craig:** Plus Sky Jones.

**John:** Is Sky Jones main character energy or beloved side character energy?

**Craig:** Sky Jones feels like main character energy.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** Sky Jones.

**John:** Stormy is the sidekick who is also just a lot of fun.

**Craig:** We have a problem. Who can we bring in? Sky Jones.

**John:** Sky Jones is the only one who can do this.

**Craig:** Sky Jones is here to ask this question. Sky Jones has asked an excellent question, and very specific. Maybe the premise, Sky, is that there’s a more specific way of approaching this, and I think there is, because I think a lot of it is to taste. You have to feel your way through these things. If I know John, and I know him well, before we discuss what to do, he’s going to want to define flashbacks.

**John:** I think we’re going to want to define our terms, make sure we’re talking about the right same thing. A flashback in a general sense is any moment that is set in time earlier than the main story. Of course, that implies that there really is a main story and a main timeline and that you’re not hopping around freely between all these things. Station Eleven is an example of a show. I would say those aren’t really flashbacks, because it’s set in multiple simultaneous timelines. You can’t say that’s a flashback so much. They tend to be briefer.

Another thing I would distinguish is that yes, novels could have flashbacks, a comic book could have a flashback, but really it feels like mostly a cinematic and a TV invention, because in a novel, I can be halfway through a paragraph and talk about something that happened before and bring us back to that moment and bring us back to the present time. You’re not really at one place in a book the same way that you are in a movie. We really know as an audience if we’re in a flashback or not, whereas opposed to a novel, it’s just a constantly churning stew of information that’s surrounding us.

**Craig:** Flashbacks exist in connection with the present. They don’t exist on their own. You’re right to say that there are shows where the narrative exists in multiple timelines. Those aren’t flashbacks, because ideally they’re commenting on each other in some important way, but not specifically. To me, a lot of good flashbacks are there very specifically latched to either the thing that came right before them or the thing that’s coming right after them.

**John:** There’s a reason why we’re moving from this present time to that flashback thing. Either it’s to provide some piece of information, some piece of context, something that makes it clear why this is happening. That to me feels like a flashback as opposed to now this next 10 minutes is going to be set in this other time period for just storytelling reasons. Now, we’ve talked about flashbacks before. I did a Google search. We actually talked about them in Episode 10, way back in Episode 10.

**Craig:** I’m sure we did a great job of it.

**John:** We did a great job there. I’ve also talked about it on the blog. One thing I want to make sure we don’t get out of this thing without talking about is how you indicate flashbacks in this script, because it can just be like you cut to this thing, you say it’s a different time, but I find, and tell me if you’re doing the same thing, after the day or night, I will tend to write, in brackets, “flashback,” just to make it clear, super clear on the page that this is a flashback, this is not cutting to something else in the present day timeline. What do you do?

**Craig:** I don’t think I write the word “flashback,” because for me at least, it feels a bit artificial, meaning it’s defining it in a way that I may not want the feeling to have. Typically, I will say something and then what the time is, five years ago, eight months ago, yesterday, because the word “flashback” I think is maybe too loosey-goosey, and there is a vague whiff of cheese about the word. That’s not our fault. It’s just that there’s been a lot of cheesy flashbacks. When you and I were kids growing up, the sitcoms would flash back all the time. It would be like (mystical sound effects). It was really cheese ball. To avoid that and to help tie in some specificity to the timeline, I’ll usually just use the time.

**John:** That’s fair. I think I probably will do that in the script if I’m moving to something we’ve not seen before in the movie. I think I’m saying the brackets “flashback” is to a moment that happened before in the movie that we’ve actually been watching, to make it clear that it’s connected to this thing.

**Craig:** Like a repeat.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ah. Then I would probably say “flash to.”

**John:** “Flash to” as a transition rather than as a-

**Craig:** I think so.

**John:** It’s whatever feels right on the page.

**Craig:** As you and I have made clear, hopefully. None of that stuff matters. I’m sure that other people will now dedicate hundreds of Reddit threads to the orthodoxy of flashing back.

**John:** Let’s get into some of the orthodoxy, because they have a stink to them. It’s not a blanket prohibition on them, but people have issues with flashbacks. We have a question here from Francoise. Megana, maybe that can set us up for this part.

**Megana:** Francoise says, “I recently received coverage on a feature script that noted a first flashback appearing on Page 26 was too late to be throwing this sort of device in the audience. The note went on to read that a flashback needs to happen much sooner so the audience isn’t thrown off or confused. I haven’t heard this before and would appreciate your thoughts to set me straight.”

**John:** We haven’t read Francoise’s script, but I kind of get what the reader might be saying, is that as an audience, we are approaching a movie, and we have a certain set of expectations about how the movie is going to work. If we’re 26 minutes into the movie and suddenly it’s doing a very different conceptual thing than we’ve seen before, that could be jarring in a bad way. I think you can absolutely have a movie that works really, really well, where the first flashback is on Page 26, but if it’s a thing you’re going to be doing a lot, it feels a little bit late to be introducing that as a device, to me.

**Craig:** It depends. I think where the reader goes awry, as they so often do, is by trying to create a general rule out of an individual reaction. The general rule is a flashback needs to happen much sooner so the audience isn’t thrown off or confused. Half the time you’re writing flashbacks to throw the audience off or to confuse them, disorient them. Audiences enjoy some disorientation as long as it pays off. What may be is that whatever the flashback contained was information that felt out of place there. That doesn’t mean the flashback is the problem. That means the stuff inside the flashback is the problem, if you get my drift. The mechanism, they say this sort of device, the device of a flashback, can work anywhere if the stuff you’re flashing back to feels correct in that spot.

**John:** I think that the problem with flashbacks is that often you’re flashing to things that don’t feel correct or they don’t feel like they are necessary or you’re illustrating something that you don’t need to illustrate. Here’s an example of something that Megana found that we’ll link to. It reads, “Flashbacks interrupt the narrative flow. Consequently, they should be used only when it is not possible to tell the story chronologically. Don’t use the flashback to merely illustrate what a character is relating verbally. It is often more effective to remain focused on that character who’s recalling them to the event, so as to gauge what the memory means to them.”

Here what I think they’re saying is a bad use of flashbacks is I am telling you a story and then we’re going to flash back to the events that I’m telling you there. That’s probably not a great use. What tends to be a more effective use is if we’re on a character, and then we flash back to the experience was meaningful for them and come back to them at the present time. Just having it be an illustration to go along with a person’s narration, that doesn’t feel great.

**Craig:** As is so often the case with what we discuss, there are all of these potential rules and pitfalls and ways to do these things, but if you write something well, then the mechanism will be just fine. No one will complain about a… Just as no one will complain about a Stuart Special. What was the Megana one?

**John:** What did we call that, the Raoveal?

**Craig:** The Raoveal? No one will complain about a Raoveal. Everything will be fine because they enjoy it. If they don’t enjoy it, then so much of what… I wonder if so much of the Sturm und Drang of screenwriting orthodoxy comes down to the fact that a lot of people will blame a misuse of technical things to avoid saying to somebody, “Your writing is bad,” especially when their job is to evaluate the writing and give a critique, because that’s a useless critique, but oftentimes it’s the only true, essential critique, “Your writing is bad. Sorry.” They can’t do that, so they say, “Oh, this flashback shouldn’t be here.” If the writing were good, then yeah, I think there wouldn’t be a problem.

**John:** I think there are also cases where something is not working in the script, and it could be that they are getting lost or confused about what it is they’re supposed to be following. I think sometimes poorly done flashbacks or nonlinear storytelling can be a contributing factor here. I’ve lost the thread. I don’t understand what it is I’m supposed to be following. I’m getting confused in a bad way. I don’t feel confident that you are going to be able to lure me there. Yes, maybe it’s bad writing, but it’s also there’s a thing you’re doing on the page that is confusing to them, something that is not working great for them about how you’re choosing to convey this information or get it out there.

A thing I will also say is that sometimes we have… I’m just thinking back to the whiteboard scenarios of complicated shows with complicated structures. There’s a real question about how many different timelines an audience can be expected to maintain. If you are in a two-timeline story and then you have a flashback within one of those timelines, how much can the audience put up with there. I think that’s a thing you’re only going to discover on the page, but maybe in the editing room as well.

**Craig:** Things have become far more complicated. The audience has become far more sophisticated when it comes to these things. That doesn’t mean that your job is to provide a timeline Olympics for them. Sometimes the story just wants to be simple and clean, and you should respect that. When you’re talking about whether or not to use a flashback, ask yourself, am I doing this simply because I’m bored with the way things are going in the current timeline or the current structure or the current narrative unfolding, or am I doing it because it would make this all much, much better? It has to be the latter. It can’t be the former. Don’t do it just because it’s something to do.

To answer the specific question from Sky Jones about at what point in the writing process is it decided to use a flashback, for me it’s in the outline process. I don’t capriciously go, “Oh, I’m going to fling myself backwards in time here.” It is as structured in and outlined in and prepared for as any other scene. In terms of keeping track of the story, you should be able to keep track of the story. If you’re having trouble keeping track of your timelines, the audience will have no chance. If you feel like you need multiple color-coded tabs to control multiple timelines, either you’re writing Inception and you’re aware that you’re basically creating a puzzle box for everybody or you’re getting too complicated.

**John:** I think it has to come from an overall Inception point of view. Am I writing the kind of movie or kind of show that will have flashbacks? If you are, great, but you’re going to be planning for those. If you’re not that kind of show, then how are you going to deliver the information you need to deliver to the audience about things that happened before. I don’t know if they explicitly said it, but it feels like the Game of Thrones guys said, “We are going to have no flashbacks on our show at all.” When they did need to go back in time to show a crucial point of family history, they had to do some Wargy time travel stuff to go back there, to make an excuse for why we were showing the audience this thing, because the show has no flashbacks otherwise.

**Craig:** That’s not quite true. For instance, they showed how the Night King was created.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** This is a personal opinion of mine. For episodic television, getting in and out of flashbacks is easier than for movies because every time you start an episode, you have an opportunity to start in one timeline and then go ahead. I do that all the time. It helps to ground people, essentially. You could have a series where every single cold open is something that takes place in an earlier timeline to create an ironic context, hopefully, for what you’re about to see.

**John:** Absolutely true. Megana, you have a question.

**Megana:** Yeah, I have a question or maybe a theory. I think for newer writers, maybe what doesn’t work about flashbacks is the impulse to deliver exposition through flashbacks. I think what you guys are saying is that if you use a flashback to emotionally inform the story or complicate things, then it works, but if you are using it as a shortcut to explain something, there could be a better, more effective way of doing that.

**Craig:** Exposition, we’ve talked about quite a few times, is either a burden or an opportunity. We’ve talked about interesting ways to deliver exposition, for instance through a relationship or personal drama, or if there’s a flashback and there is exposition, but it is presented in that flashback in the context of something that is interesting or moving or startling, then I think it’s fine. It keeps coming back to a very simple thing. Do you do it well or not? This is why for all the episodes that we’ve done, we could probably just do one mega, meta Scriptnotes episode, and it is be a good writer. It really does solve just about everything.

**John:** I do wonder if there’s a certain kind of… We could give somebody the outline and say, okay, here’s all the things that need to happen. You go to seven different writers. If there are seven different really good writers, they could make something that seems impossible on the page actually work, because they know the tricks and know how to get through it and know how to arrange the stuff, whereas opposed to a new writer would really struggle to get that stuff to work, just because they don’t have the tools in their toolbox to make it possible.

**Craig:** That’s right. We can certainly say things like, hey, avoid doing this. Whatever it is that they move toward, if they’re not good at that, it doesn’t really matter that they avoided this. Similarly, there are times where it may be better for them to just follow their instincts. If there’s one takeaway, at least for me, it’s that you just make sure that the flashback is earned and is not simply something you’re doing as a trick. It’s got to be something you are compelled to do, because it’s going to make things richer.

**John:** Let’s get on to some other listener questions. Megana, start us off.

**Megana:** Great. To Ampersand or Not To Ampersand asks, “How should I tell my writing partner I want to write my own scripts? That’s a lie. How do I tell my writing partner I’ve secretly written multiple drafts of an original-”

**Craig:** Oh, damn.

**Megana:** “… feature behind their back and am about to start a new one? Neither of us are working writers yet, but we have written two decent, at least we think so, pilots together. We’re great friends outside of writing, but for the future I see myself enjoying being a solo writer more. What’s the best way to break up with my writing partner? What on earth do I do on the off-chance one of our pilots actually sells?”

**John:** Craig, how do I break up with my girlfriend? Tell me how to break up with my girlfriend. That’s the same kinds of stuff. It’s like, “I really want to see other people. I really want to not be in this-”

**Craig:** “I have been seeing other people.”

**John:** Serial monogamist here. Listen, Ampersand.

**Craig:** Ampersand knows what we’re going to say, right?

**John:** You don’t want to be in this relationship, and therefore you need to have a grownup sit-down adult talk with this person who’s also a friend and say, “Listen, I’ve enjoyed working on these things together, but I really want to write some stuff on my own. I’m sorry this may hurt. You may want to write stuff on your own too. I really think this is going to be what’s best for me. Let’s have a chat.”

**Craig:** Without question, that’s what has to happen. It doesn’t have to be tragic. The way I would put it… I had this conversation many years ago with a writing partner, who’s a wonderful guy. I told him the truth. The truth was, “I think I’m supposed to be writing on my own.” It had nothing to do with our writing process or whatever was going on with our career, because we were getting movies made. It was just, “I think I’m supposed to be writing on my own, and so I should probably be writing on my own. I think we’ll all be happier.” He is more of a writer partner guy. He has a new writing partner. They’ve been working together for many years. It’s fine.

That’s really what it comes down to is some of us are solo writers and some of us aren’t. We don’t know when we start out. I think it’s perfectly fair to sit your partner down and say, “Okay, you know what? This is how it is.” As far as the shared custody of the pilots, just say, “Look, if somebody is into those pilots, let’s cross that bridge when we get there. We’ll figure it out.”

**John:** I have friends who wrote stuff together. They were married, wrote stuff together, got divorced. Now some of the stuff’s getting produced, and they’re figuring it out. They have joint custody of stuff, and it’s fine. The other piece of advice I would give to Ampersand is I don’t think this first conversation is the time to say, “Oh, and I also already wrote this other script.” That’s irrelevant to hear. Basically, going forward, you want to work by yourself.

**Craig:** The whole “I’ve secretly written multiple drafts of an original feature behind their back,” was there some sort of arrangement or agreement or understanding that you could not write things on your own? Unless there was. Either way, I think that just doesn’t need to be an issue. I just think you can simply say, “Here’s the way it is,” and that’s it. Don’t get too caught up in how they’re going to feel. They will feel their feelings, and they will process it, and then they will move on as well.

**John:** Also, I’ll say if this person is a friend, you want to maintain them as a friend, make sure you make some plans in the upcoming couple of weeks to do things that are fun together, because you don’t want this person to just disappear out of your life.

**Craig:** Yeah, like writing a script.

**John:** Go see a movie together. Just do some stuff so you don’t lose this person.

**Craig:** I’m so glad Megana’s here, because usually I’ll say something like that and then there’s just silence and then John moves on.

**John:** [inaudible 00:31:41] silence.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana. God.

**Megana:** Are you guys ready for a manager question?

**Craig:** So ready for a… I woke up this morning ready for a manager question.

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Megana:** Tim from DC asks, “I think my manager is pretty ineffectual, and I need to leave them.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**Megana:** “I’m questioning the time of when to leave.”

**Craig:** Right now.

**Megana:** “I’m working on two projects to which my rep already has a claim, one that my rep says they’re going to take out as soon as I send them the next draft, for which they’ve already set up several generals and supposedly have dozens of people waiting for, and another project that I’ve been working on for months that may soon be sent out to the town. I guess I’m wondering, since my current rep is going to get 10% regardless, if I solicit a new rep with other projects already in progress, will a new rep want to fight as hard for me, given the fact that my two most active projects are both tied to my old rep? Might my new rep resent having to push ahead with my current projects without being entitled to that 10%? How does one handle this kind of situation?”

**Craig:** Aha, Tim.

**John:** Aha.

**Craig:** These are good questions.

**John:** These are good questions. I think Tim may also be making some mis-assumptions about what that manager owns or controls.

**Craig:** Unquestionably, there is a premise issue here. Managers are not agents. Agents represent clients and procure employment for them, and in doing say, they are essentially attached to the deal and make 10%. Managers do not do that. They are not allowed to do it by law. They break the law all the time, but they’re not allowed to. Managers are service providers. They make 10% as long as they’re providing a service to you. If you fire them, they don’t get 10%. There is a concept called on the wheel, off the wheel. They are off the wheel when you fire them. The new manager can work it out with the old manager. That’s their problem. You let them figure that out. I assume you have an attorney. An attorney can also advise on this. You need to leave them? Leave them. You’re questioning the timing of when to leave? There’s no time like the present.

When you say, “I’m working on two projects to which my rep already has a claim,” this is where my hair goes on fire. These people have claims to nothing. Nothing. They convince you they do, but they do not. Considering that your manager is pretty ineffectual, I wouldn’t be worried about repercussions, since obviously they’re not good at stuff, including, I would imagine, repercussions.

**Megana:** What if the manager has been sending them notes and giving them creative feedback?

**Craig:** Great. Thanks. Look, here’s the thing. They paid them. Let’s say I write something, and my manager represents me, and then it gets sold somewhere, and my manager gets 10%. That 10% is the service fee that they have to continue to service me. It doesn’t matter if they give me notes or not. Everybody can give me notes. Why do we think that we owe these people anything for the notes that they give us, when we can get notes from friends or we can pay $100 for notes? Notes are nothing. Most manager notes are terrible. If the manager’s notes were great, this person wouldn’t be considering leaving. Tim would be thrilled, because the manager would be making the scripts better. That’s my point. Good managers who actually are able to give good comments and help connect you in rooms of good people and be effective, they don’t have this issue because their clients don’t leave.

**John:** I agree with most of what Craig has said here. I think that realistically, that first project which they are aware of, which they have been exposed to, which they have given notes on, they’re going to try to hold that over you like they control it or that you owe them something for the work they’ve done on it and they’ve meaningfully set up for it. I agree with Craig, it’s not your problem. It’s your new manager’s problem. That’ll be taken up by them. This thing that you’re writing right now that they don’t seem to be aware of, don’t worry about that. That doesn’t matter. Use that new thing to get you your next rep, because they would love to see something new and show what it is you’re working on right now. You do need to leave. This is a great time to leave. It’s a great time to be looking for a different manager, a better manager, one who gets it and gets what you want to do.

**Craig:** Tim, to specifically answer this question about how will the new rep feel… I’m guessing that you’re early on in your career. It sounds like it, at least. I don’t think a manager is concerned too much with the 10% right now. They’re playing a longer game where hopefully they forge a great relationship with you, your career advances, you start to become a big shot, and then that 10% means a lot. Right now I don’t think their motivation is going to be particularly tied to any single instance of a commission of what you’re going.

**John:** Agreed. Megana, another question we can answer?

**Megana:** Moe asks, “I’m a mid-level TV writer, and I’m curious about the WGA stance on remote writers’ rooms. The union and many studios/production companies have publicly stated a need for diversity and inclusion in writers’ rooms. I love the big speeches, but in regards to action, the best way to bring more diverse voices into a writers’ room is not to force them to move to one of the most economically inaccessible cities in the country. I’m a writer of color and do not live in Los Angeles for this reason. I know several others who are in the same boat. They either cannot afford to move to LA or are responsible for a larger, sometimes multi-generational family unit, not to mention people who are pregnant and parents with young kids benefit greatly from the flexibility of remote rooms. My personal experience has been that older writers higher up the food chain are now pushing to be in person. Almost all of the writers I know are very happy staying remote. We’re at a point in the pandemic where remote rooms have become incredibly normalized. The kinks have been worked out. If the WGA is truly interested in supporting its nonwhite, economically diverse writers, shouldn’t they push to standardize remote and hybrid writers’ rooms?”

**John:** Great. We can talk about whether this is a WGA issue or not. Let’s just talk about remote rooms and hybrid rooms versus the standard where everyone just is around one big table and there’s a lunch order every day. Over the past couple of months, I’ve had a bunch of showrunners on Scriptnotes, and we’ve talked about how they were working, how they’re working in person, how they’re working remotely, hybrid stuff. A lot of them do miss being in the rooms with their writers. They feel like there’s things that happen when people are together that just don’t happen in the Zoom rooms. That said, a lot of really good shows have been made with Zoom rooms over the course of the pandemic. It is possible.

I definitely hear what Moe is saying though about having to be there in person is really challenging for some people just because of the cost of Los Angeles, and being fully remote is a good choice for some writers. I think you’re going to see both of these things moving forward. I think you’re going to see fully remote rooms moving forward. I think you’re going to see more hybrid rooms. I think there will be some fully in-person rooms. I think they could be less and less common, just because it’s better for people’s quality of life to not always be trucking into the office. Craig, you’ve not worked in a writers’ room, but what’s your instinct and what are you hearing from other people?

**Craig:** I spent some time briefly in the Mythic Quest room.

**John:** Oh, that’s right.

**Craig:** I don’t use a writers’ room myself. Personally, I am okay with certain kinds of remote collaboration. As Moe says, some of the older people, that would be me, “Some of the older writers higher up on the food chain are now pushing to be in person.” There’s a reason for that, Moe. It’s not capricious. It’s not because they can’t work the newfangled Zoom. Of course they can. There is a kind of magic that happens when people are together. It’s different. The question of how to balance that against access is a good one.

As far as the Writers Guild is concerned, the thing that the Writers Guild can do to help this is to get writers paid more, so that they can afford to live in Los Angeles. The Writers Guild is almost certainly not capable of dictating how writers’ rooms should be structured, be it in person or hybrid. It’s just not something that their own members would want. I don’t think their members would all agree with you. Sometimes when people write these things, I think they think that they are standing on firmer ground than they are. I get the premise of what you’re saying, Moe. I don’t disagree, but others will. Even if the Guild did agree, the studios would have zero interest in mandating that there could never be an in-person room. It’s just not something they would do. It is a weird limitation of our creative freedom to collaborate as we wish.

As far as I’m concerned, the answer here is get writers paid more, particularly writers on the lower end of the spectrum, the income spectrum, or as you put it, on the food chain, lower down on the food chain. Then they can afford to live somewhere in LA. By the way, it’s never easy. These are jobs that a lot of people want. Maybe you’ll have to drive in 30 or 40 minutes each day, which means that you live about a mile away from the office. In all seriousness, there will be some hardships and there will be some difficulties. The way we get around some of the structural inequities, I think, the fastest is through money.

**John:** I agree with you. I think the WGA was in a position to force remote writers’ rooms when it was an actual matter of safety. That made sense. There were a lot of studios that basically refused to allow any in-person writers’ rooms because of safety and because they didn’t want the liability of having a bunch of writers sitting around who didn’t absolutely have to be sitting around, but they could do their job remotely, made it possible.

It’s easy to think about writers together in a room, because we see it and they’re all ganged together and there’s a lunch order. We know what that is. There’s a lot of other jobs in the industry that have been remote, that are now going back to in-person, but it’s a real question job by job, person by person, how you’re going to do it. I think about editors. I think about color correction. I think about a lot of the other… Craig, you’re recording this right now at your post facility. During the pandemic, that post facility was not open. They were figuring out other ways to do it other places. I’m guessing now most of the post is happening kind of in person and kind of in a place. Is that true?

**Craig:** Certainly for us it is. We follow the ever-evolving rules that come down from the corporation. The rules from the corporation are rules that take into account the union rules. We are cross-sectioning with the Writers Guild, the Directors Guild, and IATSE. All of those unions have their own positions on what they mandate. Basically, we follow the most strict set of rules. Boy, am I tested a lot. Oh, am I tested.

**John:** It’s a thing I think people outside the industry don’t have a sense of just how often folks in the industry are tested, as opposed to any other industry, probably even more than professional sports. You’re just constantly tested here, because it’s worthwhile to keep sets healthy.

**Craig:** First of all, it’s a union mandate thing. You have to. A lot of it was driven primarily by the Screen Actors Guild or SAG-AFTRA because they had the only employees that could not wear masks all the time. Because actors must take their masks off, everybody around them then had to follow a bunch of procedures for SAG-AFTRA to essentially say, “Yes, our members can work for you.” We’ve been very careful about all that stuff. As far as writers’ rooms go, Moe, there’s no chance that the Writers Guild is going to be taking this up as a cri de couer. I think the best we can do is try and get people paid more so that they can afford to live in the city where these things happen.

**John:** Agreed. I think over the next several weeks, Craig and I will informally ask a bunch of our showrunner friends about what they’re doing on their shows and where things are headed and get a sense of what’s really happening out there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I bet if we did survey all working members, the split would not be what you would think it would be. I think it’s going to be widely divergent about who wants to be in person and who wants to be fully remote.

**Craig:** Then the question is who are you asking, because ultimately the showrunners are the ones deciding. One of the weird things about our union is that it includes a lot of management in it, which I think we’ll maintain as massively problematic.

**John:** Let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing… Craig, click through that link. I think this is right up your alley. It’s a subreddit called cutaway porn. It’s all the images you remember from books growing up, but where you have an image and then it cuts away a piece of it, and so you can look inside.

**Craig:** This is David Macaulay stuff.

**John:** Yes. Let’s look inside a Bronze Age roundhouse. It cuts away the roof or shows how parts of a castle function and how things go together. I just found it delightful, nostalgic, really informative, just how stuff actually works. I don’t know who was the first person to… I guess da Vinci probably had cutaway stuff like this. It’s really showing the inner workings of buildings and systems and machines. I think it’s delightful.

**Craig:** There was a big book I had called Castle. I believe it was Castle.

**John:** Oh yeah, I remember Castle. Castle’s great.

**Craig:** It was just medieval castles, cutaways. Spectacular. Learned so much. Still think about those things occasionally from time to time as we’re playing D and D.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** That brings me to my one cool thing.

**John:** Segue man.

**Craig:** Segue man. This is fairly narrow, but if you are playing D and D or any role-playing game on Roll20 the way that we are… We had a nice in-person session.

**John:** We did. We did. Our first in-person session since the pandemic.

**Craig:** Lovely. You know what? I have to say, side note, a little worried that going from a bunch of guys sitting around a table with pen and paper and dice and maps and dry erase markers, it would just feel too clinical and sterile if we showed up with our laptops instead. Nope, it was great.

**John:** It was fine.

**Craig:** Perfectly fine. Turns out we are what we needed. We.

**John:** That’s what it is.

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** I know, right? Every now and then, I will plug a plugin, which on Roll20 they’re called APIs. There’s one called SmartAoE that has been written by a fellow named David M. I don’t know his full name, because that’s how he goes on the forum. AoE stands for area of effect. Megana, why would you need an area of effect spell?

**Megana:** To affect a certain area?

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Well discerned there.

**Craig:** In fantasy warfare, there are lots of things that target an individual person, and then there are spells and things that target an area, that could hit lots of people at once. It’s annoying figuring out like, okay, I cast fireball, and it’s going to cover this much space. Then you got to draw the shape out, drag it over, make it resized, move it around. SmartAoE makes it so much simpler to do. It’s more fun. I got to say, these people are brilliant. These men and women who write these things… Is it Java, I guess?

**John:** It’s good stuff. It’s all the stuff of geometry and math, but applied to… It’s trying to apply cones and circles to a grid. You can look [inaudible 00:47:39] supposed to do it, but it’s inevitably an argument between Craig and Kevin about who’s covered and who’s not covered. This just does it so much better.

**Craig:** It just does it better and saves me from arguing with Kevin, which is really why I install everything.

**John:** A very good plugin. Thank you for doing that. It was also really nice to see everyone in person again playing D and D. That was in person, and also I took a Peloton class that had other riders in the studio with the instructor for the first time. It felt like, oh, the pandemic’s over.

**Craig:** We’re back.

**John:** We’re back.

**Craig:** We’re back.

**John:** That is our show for this week.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Sam Brady. 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. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the 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. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on adulting. Craig, Megana, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Hey, Craig, when did you become an adult?

**Craig:** Oh, me, probably around seven.

**John:** Same with Mike. Mike became an adult very, very young. I did not become an adult very young. Megana, how about you? When did you become an adult?

**Megana:** Today.

**John:** Today. Now you’re an adult.

**Craig:** Today I learned I’m an adult.

**Megana:** I don’t think I’m an adult quite yet, because I’m bad at putting myself to sleep.

**Craig:** Who puts you to sleep?

**Megana:** Me, but I feel like to me, that is the definition of adulthood, being able to go to bed at a reasonable hour.

**Craig:** Then no, I’m not an adult either.

**John:** It’s not a matter of literally rocking yourself to sleep. It’s a matter of telling Megana, “Hey, Megana, go to bed.”

**Craig:** It’s not like somebody needs to read you a story.

**Megana:** No one’s patting my back as I go to bed.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Somebody should be.

**John:** Somebody should be.

**Craig:** We’ll get Bo over there.

**John:** Here’s what I’ll say. I think Megana’s bringing up a general case that’s a good marker for adulthood is recognition of consequences and avoiding consequences. If I don’t go to sleep at this time, I’m going to be a zombie tomorrow, or if I have an extra beer, I will suffer for it. That’s a thing which as you rise up through your teenagehood and into your 20s, eventually at some point you realize, okay, the consequence of this is not worth it for me, and therefore I will do a responsible, mature thing and not do that dumb thing.

**Craig:** I think a lot of maturity and adulting comes down to self-denial of basic pleasure, in part because you’ve enjoyed it before and you don’t need to feel it all the time, and also because you and your pleasure are not necessarily the most important thing. You may have a partner. You may a child. You may have employees. You may have work that you’re doing, your vocation, customers, clients. There are people for whom you are accountable. You begin to put other people ahead of your own base interests. That feels like a very adulty thing to me.

**John:** It’s accountability, but it’s also just responsibility. I remember when I first got my pug, Jake, I was responsible for it. This little being would not stay alive if I didn’t feed and care for him every day. That was a maturity thing. It was my mid-20s that I finally had my own dog. It was a form of growing up, because now this thing was fully my responsibility in a way that nothing else in my life had been. Paying rent is a responsibility. Just making sure the bills get paid every month was responsibility.

**Craig:** God, I remember paying off my student loans, getting a credit card, making those payments, making sure I made the payment every month, making sure I had enough money for rent, doing a budget, a lot of money stuff, simple, basic money stuff. I think also what helped me adult maybe faster than other people is that when I came to Los Angeles, I was 3,000 miles away from my parents. I had zero interest in relying on them for anything. When I say anything, I mean anything. No kind of support whatsoever, neither emotional nor financial. Nothing. There’s no net. There’s very real consequences for failure. That urgency definitely led to a fast adulting, because the alternative to fast adulting was a pretty dismal kind of failure.

**John:** The thing about moving out here without the safety net is it could lead to more ambitious choices, it could lead to many things, but it could also lead a person to be cautious and paralyzed. It wasn’t for you. You were always probably cautious, but you were still pursuing what you wanted to pursue. Recently, people were talking about how whenever they do a profile of 30 under 30, super successful people in their 30s, it should also show what do their parents do and what was their background that let them do those things. People who have these billion dollar valuations, there’s something about the history that got them there that’s probably a common thread behind them and what allowed them to take the chances that they took.

**Craig:** No, I think sometimes it’s just some people are like that, and some people aren’t.

**John:** Now Megana, are you an adult? Do you consider yourself fully adult or are you still a kid in many ways?

**Megana:** Aside from the sleep thing?

**John:** The sleep thing.

**Megana:** I think I’m an adult. I think another big part of being an adult is taking responsibility for yourself, being able to apologize and have self-awareness. I hope that I have those things. I think that qualifies me as an adult.

**John:** Apologizing, standing up on your principles, and not always doing what situationally is the easiest, recognizing the shades of gray and that things aren’t perfect. I remember my daughter and I have this argument about… She was saying there’s never been a truly communist system, but a truly communist system would be fantastic. I’m like, sigh. I fully get that that’s where she’s at in the understanding of it all, but also recognizing the world doesn’t match up to our utopian expectations and that you have to adapt with the world you actually have.

**Craig:** That’s a pretty adult thing to say.

**Megana:** I do think also, just to tie it back to side character energy, I think that not thinking of yourself as the main character to me feels like it signifies adulthood.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** I like that.

**Craig:** It’s a version I think of what I was saying earlier, which is you’re not the most important thing anymore. Other things are the most important thing. You becoming whatever it is that you’re aiming for… You have things or people or friends or stuff that you’re trying to get done, and it’s no longer about… Children are narcissistic, as well they should be. They’re trying to figure out who they are. At some point, you’re you, let’s get on with it.

**John:** Becoming an adult doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily old, that you’re suddenly giving up all your youth. One of the things I’ve done over the course of my career is always trying some new things, because I feel really young in those new things, because I’m inexperienced. I’m doing all the first-timer mistakes and figuring stuff out. Whether it’s doing the Broadway musical or doing the book series, there are chances to feel young again, even though I’m a full-grown adult. I’m young in doing those things. That is an opportunity not to feel put out to pasture, a sense that you are newly exploring some things with the same enthusiasm I did in my 20s for screenwriting.

**Craig:** I always say I really do feel like I’m just maybe 10 or 11 but in an older body. I mean that in that I’m still that person. Everything that I do that’s new is scary and exciting. All the fears that I had then, I probably still have quite a few of them now, despite all the therapy. I think I’m just better at managing it. Part of I guess being an adult is realizing you’re not really an adult. What you are is a child who is capable of doing more and who has different values I guess is what it comes down to.

**Megana:** I would say though that although the two of you are very much so adults, you’re both very curious, and you have a lot of optimism and excitement about new things.

**John:** I hope so. The other thing that I would say is a marker is that when people start coming to you for advice, that is some sign of being an adult. When people come to you as being the wise person who knows some things, it’s one marker. When hopefully, you’re still going out to get advice, but people come to you for advice, it’s the rest of the world recognizing, oh, you seem mature and like you know what you’re doing.

**Craig:** I feel that way. It’s not an age thing, because I meet people from time to time who are much older than I am, and they feel like the least wise people.

**John:** That’s a thing. I don’t think it’s necessarily a function of age, but it’s a function of adulting.

**Craig:** It’s weird. Then there are these people. Bella Ramsey is 18, and she has this weird, Yoda-like wisdom. I’ve never encountered it quite like the way it is in her. So wise, like when they say old soul. I don’t think old soul is the right term. It’s an adult soul. She has adult soul.

**John:** Megana, Craig, you’re some of my favorite adults.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Enjoy. Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too, guys.

**Megana:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp43OdtAAkM) reaching [number one on the pop charts](https://www.billboard.com/music/chart-beat/kate-bush-reclaims-uk-chart-running-up-that-hill-1235104046/)
* Beyonce’s [Break My Soul](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjki-9Pthh0)
* [Side Character Summer](https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ce6zOHKqxgW/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link) by Lolaokola on IG
* Jeremiah Lewis’s tweet @fringeblog [Ruin A Screenwriter’s Day in Three Words](https://twitter.com/fringeblog/status/1538582676076220419?s=21&t=sJtLfzZYwV9-3UIB4DF_IA)
* [Scriptnotes Ep. 10: Good Actors and Bad Writing Partners](https://johnaugust.com/2011/scriptnotes-ep-10-good-actors-and-bad-writing-partners-transcript)
* [Flashbacks and dreams](https://johnaugust.com/2003/flashbacks-and-dreams) on the blog
* [Reddit’s Cutaway Porn](https://www.reddit.com/r/Cutawayporn/)
* [Smart AoE](https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/10485883/script-smartaoe-graphical-interface-for-implementing-aoes-on-gridded-maps/?pagenum=1)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Sam Brady ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/557standard.mp3).