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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: Oh, my name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 533 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, why are so many screenwriters worried about the word ‘we’?

Craig: Why? Why?

John: Craig and I will hopefully drive a stake to the heart of the “we hear/we see” prohibition, as we talk through some screenplay fundamentals, before looking at some of the scripts up for awards this season.

Craig: We will see some of those scripts. We will see them, we.

John: We will see them.

Craig: We see.

John: And if we were listening in a room, we could hear them-

Craig: Yes.

John: -because we can hear and we can see. We have the sensors.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Then, we’ll get into some listener questions. And our bonus segment for premium members, we will discuss what is the screenwriting equivalent of bootcamp?

Craig: Ooh, that’s interesting.

John: We talk about soap operas being like actor bootcamp. Is there a boot camp for writing?

Craig: Oh, I see what you mean. Got it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Understood. Okay.

John: A place where you’re doing so much work that you’re really picking up your skills, you’re developing your craft.

Craig: Mm-hmm. All right. [crosstalk]

John: I like it.

Craig: That’s only if you pay us.

John: If you pay us, you can listen to us talk about that.

Craig: Yeah.

John: If you pay enough money, you could own The CW, which is apparently up for sale.

Megana: [chuckles]

Craig: [chuckles] Wait, what? [chuckles]

John: Yeah.

Craig: The CW is for sale?

John: It was announced this last week or the week before that a CW may be up on the auction block. CW in the US, for our international listeners, is the home to a lot of great programs, including where Crazy Ex-Girlfriend used to air. It was a joint partnership between Warner Brothers and CBS. So, there were some shows that were CBS shows which was Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and some things. There are a lot of Warner Brothers shows that were there. Now that Warner is more focused on HBO Max stuff, and CBS is focused on Paramount+ stuff, it’s not quite clear how The CW fits in. So, it may end up becoming a new thing, it may change. But anyway, the head of CW said, “You know what? Yeah, we’re probably up for sale.”

Craig: The sentence you just said there, if we had just rolled back to when we started this podcast, would have made utterly no sense to us.

John: No. [crosstalk]

Craig: The HBO Max and– What?

John: Paramount+.

Craig: Paramount– CBS with Par– what? What? Para+. But it’s remarkable how much things have changed. I guess, similarly, it’s remarkable how oddly adaptable we are as human beings. We are terrified of change, but we’re really good at absorbing it and accepting it when it happens. We’re odd little creatures, aren’t we?

John: Obviously, it feels everything’s accelerating, but I think at any given moment in time, we would probably feel it’s accelerating to all these new things. It’s always strange to think back to 100 years ago, cars were new, the time between the first flight at Kitty Hawk to man landing on the moon was so much shorter than you think it would be.

Craig: Yeah. And that’s right. We are witnessing the acceleration of things in our lifetime. But everything that happened before us just feels like history that took forever.

John: Yeah. We’ll see what happens to The CW. One of the discussion points is that CW airs on a bunch of local stations, obviously, and the local stations are part of bigger groups. And that group might just buy out The CW instead of [crosstalk].

Craig: Do you have any interest in it?

John: Honestly, I don’t. I feel at this point, I’m all in on streaming. The normal linear broadcast and stuff is just not so appealing to me.

Craig: I mean, because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was on it, right?

John: It was. It was great.

Craig: We could own that.

John: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was originally going to be a premium cable show.

Craig: Showtime. Yeah.

John: And then, they retooled that. You can go back and listen to the episode where we talked to Rachel and Aline about the show back when it was a Showtime show before it became The CW show. It was filthier. There used to be a handjob in it and then the handjob became a kiss.

Craig: Ultimately, you’ve summed up the difference between Showtime and The CW.

John: I did.

Craig: It’s just that whatever mathematical equation converts a handjob into a kiss, that’s it.

John: That’s what it is.

Craig: That’s it.

John: That’s the difference between a broadcast and premium cable.

Craig: You’ve got it.

John: Do you remember Stuart Friedel?

Craig: Sorry, who?

John: Our first Scriptnotes producer, Stuart Friedel?

Craig: I mean, Stuart’s a part of our lives.

John: He is. Stuart is the reason for a lot of how Scriptnotes used to work, and of course, the reason why Scriptnotes t-shirts are so soft is because-

Craig: Yes.

John: -Stuart is so sensitive and has this Stuart’s sense of softness. Stuart talked to me last week. He said, “I just had a mentor conversation with a Nebraska kid, who is my mom’s hairdresser’s nephew,” which is classic. “This guy mentioned the movie that he wanted to write. And he described the opening as a Stuart Special. He doesn’t know why it’s called that, but that’s what it’s called on Scriptnotes,” he says.

Craig: [chuckles]

John: He has no idea that it’s called a Stuart Special because of Stuart Friedel.

Craig: How did he miss that?

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s a kind of amazing that there’s a generation of people who are going to call that a Stuart Special. The way in lore, the last shot of your day is the Martini. But the second to last shot is called the Abby or Abby Singer, because there was a first AD named Abby singer, who would call for the martini and he was always one shot off. And so, the second the last one became the Abby. And people will call it a Stuart Special, and then every now and then somebody, “You know why it’s called that by the way?” That’ll be a bit of trivia for people.

John: Yeah. And, of course, it’ll be like, it’s named after Stuart Friedel, who used to be a producer on Scriptnotes before he became a titan of children’s television.

Craig: Before he became the CEO of The CW.

[laughter]

John: Before he bought out The CW and turned it into–

Craig: I want to know what the Megana maneuver is?

John: Oh, yeah. Well, it has to be a term that Megana will coin here. But, Megana, I’m curious, do you know what the Stuart Special is? How would you define it as Stuart Special? Or, is it just all alien territory for you?

Megana: Stuart Special, I think, it’s something I encounter a lot when I read threepage challenges, which is flash forward in a script, and then, by the end of two or three pages, it’s like one week ago or six months ago.

John: Right. Absolutely.

Craig: Yeah.

John: That’s the Stuart Special.

Craig: Yeah. It’s showing the moment right before the climax. And then going back like one month earlier. Exactly.

Megana: Right.

John: Record scratch. I bet you’re wondering how this all happened, and let me talk about this.

Craig: [chuckles]

John: Flashing back to just a few weeks ago, we had Jack Thorne on the show. We had a great conversation with him. He was talking about disability and also invisible illnesses. This last week, Annie Hayes wrote in. Annie Hayes is a friend of Scriptnotes. She has helped us out at Austin Film Festival. She had such a great letter that I thought, “Oh, it’s much better as a blog post than for us to try to read it on the air.” But Annie Hayes writes about her experience. She’s a staff writer on The CW show In the Dark, and she’s had cystic fibrosis this whole time since [crosstalk] she had cystic fibrosis. And writing about sort of the challenges of living with a chronic illness and working with a chronic illness, a lot people can’t see that you’re fighting this. She started off as an assistant. I think she was assistant at Verve before she started working as a staff writer, but it’s a great overview of what her experience has been.

One of the things she really stresses is that she’s been very open about it, but she also tries to make sure she’s always presenting a solution rather than a problem, which seems good advice in general.

Craig: That is. It’s funny, a little bit after that show, I talked with Jack, because he was curious, because I did mention that I had been dealing with chronic pain for a long time. He was like, “What is it?” He was actually, I think, maybe the first person I’d really talked to about it, because I’m me. I’m not that guy. It’s not related to any feelings about disabilities or physical challenges as much as just my general sense that, “Just shut up, Craig,” [chuckles] is mostly what I struggle with all the time, but it is interesting that you have to make choices when you have an invisible disability or illness or challenge. Whereas you don’t have that choice when it’s visible, at all. Both things come with their own unique difficulties. So, I appreciate Annie writing in about this.

John: Megana, we got another question from a listener about the Jack Throne conversation.

Megana: Great. Alok wrote in and said, “Your recent episode with Jack Thorne was amazing. I love Jack’s Edinburgh TV festival speech. As a person with invisible disabilities, I find his advocacy work really empowering. But I’m looking for a recommendation. My disability forces me to read text documents while simultaneously listening to them using a text-to-speech software. The one I use is called Read Aloud, which is a Chrome plugin. It’s a free software with minimal options that reads documents back to me in a deathly robotic monotone.”

Craig: [laughs]

Megana: “It’s not at all suited for reading scripts.”

Craig: No.

Megana: “I was wondering if anyone at Scriptnotes was familiar with text-to-voice softwares that professional writers with disabilities could use to read their scripts. Again, it is text-to-voice that I’m looking for, not voice-to-text. If there is something on the market that you recommend suitable for script reading, I don’t mind shelling out some money to purchase it.”

Craig: Oh, that’s an interesting thought there. John, this seems like something you would probably know, if you knew you would know. Not me.

John: A couple things I can point you to. I do have friends who will listen to scripts in the car with some read aloud software. I think having similar experiences where it’s a little bit awkward, because it has no idea that you’re reading a script. Some things that could be helpful. In Highland 2, we have what’s called a narrated script. And what it does is, it’s looking at the same script, but it’s changing it to rather than like:

Tom: Welcome to my house, Mary.
Mary: It’s so nice to be here.

It says, “Tom says, ‘Welcome to my house,’ Mary says this.” It’s adding in the says and things, and it actually has the sense of like int and ext become interior and exterior, that may help you. It might make it a little bit easier for you to read. So, it’d just be a matter of throwing that PDF in there and exporting it as a narrated script, that could be a little bit better solution for you.

The Weekend Read beta has text-to-speech that’s actually really good, where you can actually set voices and do things so you can set the male characters to a certain male voice, female characters to a certain female voice. That’s great. It’s still in beta. So, I can’t offer that to everybody. We’ll send a copy to Alok, who can test it. And we’re also doing some new stuff in the new Highland beta that should be a little bit better for folks who need some accessibility things. We’re working with Ryan Knighton who’s our blind friend about making sure that’s fantastic for blind writers to use.

Craig: Well, that’s all sounds pretty useful information there. Turns out, you had all the answers right there, John.

John: I don’t have all the answers though, because I feel we probably have other listeners who are in similar situations. So, if you are like Alok who needs stuff read aloud, scripts read aloud, write into us and tell Megana what you’re using, and we’ll share that on a future episode.

Craig: It’s good idea.

John: Fantastic. All right. Well, let’s talk about screenplays in general and screenplay formatting, because this feels such a giant, fundamental question that we’ve addressed many times over the years. But even just this last week, Craig-

Craig: Hmm.

John: -you and I were both a little bit dumbfounded by someone who wrote to us and said like, “Hey, can you explain why you’re so upset against ‘we hear’ and ‘we see’?” And you replied with a GIF of–

Craig: [chuckles] Not sure if serious.

John: Not Sure If Serious. He just had fundamentally like mis–

Craig: Misunderstood, yeah.

John: -what we’re talking about here. So, just to make sure we will reiterate this a thousand times during the podcast. It’s absolutely fine to say “we hear” and “we see” on the page in screenplays. It’s also fine to not use it. You can be a writer who chooses not to use it, that’s great. But it’s an available tool for you, and you should not feel at all bad about using it. And if anyone smacks you down for using it, they’re being dumb.

Craig: They’re bad.

John: They’re bad.

Craig: Yeah, I use it all the time. Like John says, it’s not that we recommend using it. It’s just if you like it, great. I find it to be a useful tool. We’ve talked quite a bit about why it does something unique, that other presentations of actions do not so that it’s not simply a stylistic choice or a bit of decoration, but it has–

John: It’s not lazy. No.

Craig: No, it has purpose. I am mystified. I wish I could go find the patient zero of no one should ever write “we see” in screenplays. I don’t know who started this terrible virus, but it’s wrong. And it is metastasized throughout all of these mediocre schools. And the mediocre schools, I mean [chuckles] they’re all mediocre when it comes to this sort of thing. Waves of human beings have just keep arriving on Reddit, like teeming onto Reddit shores to explain to other people why you can’t use “we see.” And the two of us have just been standing there trying to rescue people from this nonsense because, I guess we can’t. But let’s try one more time.

John: We’ll try one more time. As we get into this, we’ll answer a bunch of listener simpler questions, and that’ll hopefully stack up together to a broader understanding of what we’re trying to do here on screenplay page. Megana, if you start us off with Adrian in Dublin here.

Megana: He asks, “I’ve been writing for years, but I’m still puzzled by the question when to use action in the quote ‘action section’ of a script and when to use it as a parenthetical.”

John: Adrian’s wondering, and this is a thing that every writer still makes choices, kind of every line is like, “Okay, is this going to be better as an action or scene description on the left-hand margin? Or is just the kind of thing that it’s better tucked underneath the character, the header, in parenthetical saying a small little thing that as part of that character’s direction or as a part of the overall scene direction?” You’re always making choices? for what that’s going to be. Craig, what general guidance are you thinking through when you’re making a decision about whether to use parenthetical or an action line?

Craig: Almost always, I’m going to use an action line for action. Parentheticals are the orthodoxies. Parentheticals are for terms that influence the way the line is read, or are there to imply that there’s a pause. However, every now and then, if there is an action that is super tiny, and is necessary to understand the dialogue properly, and the dialogue would be best served if we didn’t chop it up into two bits, then I will use the parenthetical. If I’m running a bit of dialogue and between two lines, someone lights a match, I might put that in parentheticals (lights a match).

John: Absolutely.

Craig: And then, they keep going. But it would have to be, we’re talking about an action that could easily be described in a couple of words, and more importantly, would feel really dumb and tiny if it were its own action line.

John: Agreed. It’s how short the action is both in screen time and in words, because parentheticals that go on for 6 or 7 or 10 words, that should have probably been an action line. In my whole writing career, I’ve probably written two parentheticals that were that long and it was for some very specific purpose that I needed to keep them together as a parenthetical, rather than moving them in as an action line. Parentheticals, if it’s affecting how that line is going to be read, it’s really affecting the tone, the tenor, the intention of that line, that’s great for a parenthetical. If it is something that a single character is doing that is breaking their dialogue block, like a sneeze, that can fit great in a parenthetical, but anything that’s between multiple characters, beyond offering a handshake, that becomes action.

Craig: Yeah.

John: One of the reasons why you may mix it up occasionally or decide to make something parenthetical versus a longer line is, you and I both have a preference against long columns of just two characters talking. Therefore, we’ll both look for opportunities. It’s like okay, this is a dialogue scene, but I would love to have some moments where over on the left hand margin in an action line, just to break up visually on page and not make it feel like this is just a tunnel of text.

Craig: Yeah, I call it ticker tape. Ticker tape screenplay page where it’s just dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, and just run out of things down the middle. If you require that you break it up, it forces you also to start thinking about, “Well, where are they? What are they doing? How are they moving in the space? Is there anything I can do to make this visually interesting?” Otherwise, it’s just going to be bing-bong, bing-bong, bing-bong.

John: Great. Another question for us, Megana.

Megana: Nick in LA asks, “Over the last few months, I’ve been listening through all the back episodes of Scriptnotes, and there was a string of episodes in 2014 where John and Craig brainstormed ideas for a top-to-bottom reimagining of the screenplay as we know it. This new format included things like embedded music, images, more clickable links, etc. In general, a more interactive and dynamic document than the current standard. My question is, now that we’re sevenish years later, do you still feel the same way about the standard screenplay format? Has any progress been made in terms of what is permissible to include in your script, and is changing anything a fool’s errand? What you described in those episodes sounds great and made a lot of sense to me, but it seems little has changed since 2014.”

Craig: Yeah.

John: Very little has changed. I do see links in screenplays more often. I have seen clickable links in PDFs of screenplays that will link out to an image or something that explains something more fully. But no. I think you and I both had a little bit more utopian idea of this is what’s going to change, and it didn’t.

Craig: Well, I think we thought this is what we would like to change. This is what we would hope for change. But no, it hasn’t happened, and I think it’s still a great idea. It hasn’t happened at all. Part of the problem is Final Draft. It’s just this monster that sits on top of Hollywood and keeps this entire format back. I really do believe that. No one is sitting there at HBO or Universal or Disney saying, “We really love this 100-year-old method of putting screenplays down.” They don’t. Unfortunately, Final Draft, which is now owned by a payroll company, which is perfect, has essentially cornered the market on the format of screenplays as connecting into the format for budgeting and scheduling. There’s just no appetite for it, because everyone’s just stuck using it. It’s the Windows problem.

John: It’s the Windows problem. I’m not going to put all the blame at Final Draft’s feet, because I do think if Final Draft were to suddenly just explode and go away, it wouldn’t change quickly, because I think everyone’s just so used to scripts looking a certain way. You’re doing your show right now, and you could do your scripts a different way. You could choose to do something different. You’re not using Final Draft, you’re using Fade In, and you could do something different. But it’s easy to keep people doing the same thing they’re doing and it’s working for you. What I do think has changed since 2014 is, and this is also, I think, because the pandemic, because of Zoom, I see screenwriters doing a lot more work in Keynote or PowerPoint. A lot of early presentation stuff is now being done as slides. I think slide decking has become a more important part of describing a project early on. It’s not like I’m turning in a script and add a deck for things. But for some stuff, I might because it would at least show this is what this is meant to look like.

There’s a big world-building project that I may or may not do. I think if I were to take on that project, my script might be accompanied by, “Here are the images that go with it,” because everything I can describe on a page, so helpful. But to me being able to show it to you, it’s going to be more instructive.

Craig: I would do something else. I would write my show now in a different way if the tool were available. It’s not.

John: Okay.

Craig: There’s just no tool, and I don’t think there’s going to be a tool available until someone feels the amount of time, energy, and resources to create something like that would be rewarded, because it just takes a lot. If Final Draft disappeared tomorrow, there would be a period where people would have to use other things that would basically be the same thing. But there would also be a massive opening. I think you would see a lot of people trying to become the next Final Draft, and figure out how to fill that space, but do it better. If there were a tool while we were writing, there was a way to create a document that wasn’t a PDF– by the way, that’s the other issue is that PDF that format is just kind of useless. It’s useful, but useless.

John: Yeah, the good thing about PDF is it’s baked in and locked down. The bad thing about it is it’s baked in and locked down, and it’s hard to do anything else with it.

Craig: It’s a printed piece of paper, except it’s on your screen. That’s all it is. It’s static. If there were a software platform that created a document that people could open and view that was dynamic, that would be amazing, and I would use it all the time, but there isn’t.

John: I will tell you that for Late Night and Variety comedy writing, especially the daily shows, they are sometimes now using fully online writing software where you can– the monologue, it’s constantly updated by everybody all at once. It’s a better version of Google Docs.

Craig: Yeah. What’s that, Script 2.0? Ah, what’s the one–

John: It’s lot like WriterDuet.

Craig: WriterDuet, yes.

John: It’s like that, but very deliberately multiple users can really work on it. It’s not just you and your writing partner. Everyone can tag in. You can see who’s made what changes. And it works, but it’s very specifically set up for that kind of show to do. I think Colbert’s show does that. Some of those changes are working in places where they really need. They have very specific, very time-based needs. And so little of what we do is urgent in that way. But I will say, Craig, you’re working on a show right now that if you could update everyone live in terms of, these are the changes, it would be fantastic. But you’re probably doing some version of this just distribution lists of things go out.

Craig: Well, it’s Scenechronize. Scenechronize is the other big behemoth, and Scenechronize is the standard distribution software for things. Scenechronize could distribute anything. I think it’s just that there is the file format that I would love, the kind of method of creation of a screenplay document that I would love just doesn’t exist. Where when you’re talking about a song, there is a little note icon, you click it and it starts to play that song, and brings it up in a soft window, up to the right, that you can minimize or get rid of, or just click away if you chose to. There are little icons and things to say, “Okay, I want to see what this looks like.” We can’t do that, because there’s no document that we can release that other people can look at that works like that. That’s the biggest issue.

John: Okay. Yeah, as a person who builds the software for a living, I can see some of the solutions, but I can also see some of the issues. It’s what the shape of that container document is. Are you sending the document? Are you sending a link to something that lives on a server?

Craig: For privacy purposes and all the rest of it, whichever would be fine, whichever people would want. But the problem is, there isn’t the receiving thing on the other end. It’s going to be hard to create that because you’re asking people to download and they don’t want to [chuckles] and you’re asking them to try a new format, and it’s new. Change is hard. Tip of the hat to the screenplay format, as we’re talking about it, it has lasted longer than most human beings. In fact, it’s lasted longer than almost every human being.

John: Absolutely. I think we should also stress that what we’re describing in terms of changes to screenplay format is not the words on the page. We’re not talking about the “we hear”, “we see,” we’re not talking about the job of the writer. We’re talking about the container in which this is going out there so that your words can be accompanied by other useful material and be updated in real time in ways that aren’t so torturous. Because right now, how we handle screenplays, especially as we go into production, with star changes and such is so linked back to when we had to xerox pages and send them out, that it’s maddening.

Craig: Yeah, it’s pretty weird.

John: Another question for us, Megana?

Megana: Scott asks, “I’ve been working on a spec script based on a true story that feels like it’s taken on the scope of a Godfather-esque crime epic. The question of whether to expand this into a longer miniseries-type structure has come up before. But my producer and I both agree this feels like a feature film. As we’ve gone back and forth on drafts, the length of the script has fluctuated from 140 pages at its longest down to 125. I’ve always been taught no one wants to read a spec from an unproven writer longer than 120 pages and I’ve tried to reach that magic number, but the notes we keep getting from colleagues is to dig deeper into the characters and to explore more, not less. So, my question is this. In our current climate with the line between film and TV forever blurring, is the 120-page rule the end-all and be-all, or 132 pages reasonable for a decade spanning crime saga? Follow-up question, why are gangster movies always so long?

[laughter]

John: They do seem longer as a rule. Let’s take this last part first. I think because we have expectations of the genre, that it’s going to be a bunch of characters and there’s going to be complicated family dynamics in addition to the A plot, that there’s just going to be a lot happening, and so we just allow them to be long, and also because the Godfather is long.

Craig: Yeah. It may have something to do with the fact that the directors who have made these things have come out of a school where length wasn’t a problem. There have been mobster movies forever, but the big ones were coming out in the 70s. But then again, you look at like Martin Scorsese’s first movie, Mean Streets, I think that was his first movie, it’s under two hours. So, it’s not necessarily always the case that they need to be super long, but I think John is right. If you’re telling the Godfather saga, then it is marked by an epic nature. They’re very Shakespearean in this regard. They are telling long family dramas, and they’re telling involved crime plots, and we seem to enjoy– otherwise, it becomes an action movie. Part of it is the opera. It’s opera. By the way, Godfather III is that– you’ve seen Godfather Part III, I assume.

John: I have seen it. I have seen all of them now.

Craig: Yeah. I love that operatic third act. It’s just lovely. Anyway, I think that’s what it is. Scott, here’s the deal, man, if the first 10 pages are awesome, people will keep reading, they really will. Especially these days, I just think the rules are not the rules anymore. They’ll be reading it wondering, “Well, maybe I could turn this into a limited series.” You never know what they’re going to be thinking.

John: Craig is right. Obviously, if it’s good, they’ll keep reading and you should not worry about that much. A 125-page script is a lot different than 140-page script. 140-pages, people start to go, “Oh, okay, wow. This could be a problem because it’s going to probably be longer when that one’s actually shot.” I would say that my expectations of movies are things you can watch in one sitting and we always had a sense of like it’s a story that can only happen once.

But as we look now at limited series that also feel like they’re things that can only happen once, maybe there’s nothing wrong with thinking about, does this story really work best for me sitting in a chair for two hours watching it? Or does it have natural parts in installments that build out in ways that it could fit a limited series? If the first 50 pages or 60 pages of what you wrote has a natural cliffhanger, it can be a phenomenal writing sample for you, and a phenomenal spec to take out there in the world for people to see like, “Oh, this person can write really well.” And they’re more likely to read that one-hour thing versus a two-and-a-half-hour thing, because the one-hour thing can get made because people are hungry for the one-hour thing.

Craig: Yeah. Also, we’re in a weird time, you could maybe make just two-hour longs or three-hour longss. You say, “Okay, it’s at 140 at its longest.” So, you’re talking about 45 pages-ish, 43 pages-ish per episode of a three-episode thing. Well, you’re probably squeezing yourself in 140 anyway. Expand a few things here and there, write some endings so that each episode has an ending and each episode is beginning. So, there you’re filling some things out. Before you know it, you’ve got three-hour long episodes.

John: Yeah. My one cool thing this week is going to be a six-hour thing that feels like a movie. It is cinematic and tightly focused, but it could only work a limited series, and it works really well as that. Keep that in mind.

Craig: Yeah.

John: All right. Let’s take a look at some movie movies, like actual movies that showed up on big screens this past year.

Craig: What?

John: I saw many of these but not all of these. But the good thing about 2021-2022 is you can read the scripts for all these movies online for free because they put them out there for award season. We will have links in the show notes to all the scripts that we’re talking through. I really encourage you, if you’re a person who’s interested in screenwriting, to read through these. You don’t have to finish them, but just look at what they actually look like on the page, either before or after you see the movie because you’ll get a real good sense of, this was the intention on the page and this is how it translated.

In most of these cases, these were the writers directing. In a couple of cases, there’s different screenwriters and directors. But they’re all really good and interesting in different ways. They’re all chock full of “we hears” and “we sees.” And we’ll not just cherry pick the ones that had them. Most movies, I would say probably do use “we hear” and “we see.”

Craig: Yeah, because it’s incredibly useful.

John: It’s incredibly useful. I want to start with a young writer named Aaron Sorkin.

Craig: Who?

John: This early work, this is called Being the Ricardos. This is a story of behind the scenes of I Love Lucy. I actually really enjoyed this, I actually tweeted a little screenshot of a scene that I really liked a few weeks ago. This is all a backstage drama of an imagined week on the set of I Love Lucy and the conflict and controversies behind the scenes. The thing I tweeted about was, there’s a scene on page 5 that goes on for a long time. And it’s all OS, it’s all off screen. Basically, we are focused on a radio while Lucy is off screen and she’s listening to this thing, but having conversations with other people, and we don’t see people’s faces for a long time. It’s a deliberate choice on Sorkin’s part just to not show Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem for a long time, so we’d be invested in them as characters before we saw their faces and had to make a judgement of like, “Oh, does she look enough like Lucille Ball?”

Craig: Yeah. What I love about these pages, and well done, young writer Aaron Sorkin, is how much whitespace there is. Even in scenes where there’s huge blocks. For instance, on page 5, the announcers has just got this big huge– what is it nine-line bit of dialogue all because he’s reading advertisements, and he’s doing an intro to radio stuff. All fine, because then there’s just these wonderful seas of white, as Lindsay Doran would say, “Like milk.” And it’s so useful. It’s really useful. Interesting choice, by the way. This is what the Academy voters see, is that correct, John?

John: Mm-hmm, it is.

Craig: Interesting choice. When you go into production, inevitably, they’re going to be revisions that you want to do. Just as a holdover from the old days where people would have to have binders where they would insert pages into, there are A pages and B pages, and there are pages where there’s only stuff on half a page, because they get rid of the rest, but the page numbers don’t change. I would imagine that a lot of people would just do a collapsed page unlock version. But he just sent over the other one. He also does something that I don’t do, which is at the top of the page, it says “Continued:” and then the scene number, which I don’t do.

John: Which we don’t. This is a thing that Final Draft and Fade In can do for you. I’ve never found it especially useful. It’s never tripped me up. So, I’ve never done it. I want to get back to the scene where we have this radio announcer talking and we’re not seeing their faces. We come out of it, and the broadcast continues as we hear the front door open.

Craig: What?

John: The next minute or so, we’ll see no faces, just out of focus arms and legs and other shards of movement as they pass through the frame, which remains on the radio, the only thing in focus. We hear and we see in the same paragraph from Mr. Aaron Sorkin, who’s won many, many awards for being a good writer.

Craig: How else would you even do this? I’m top of page 6, “We HEAR his face being SLAPPED–” In this case, Aaron Sorkin has capitalized word ‘HEAR’ just to stick it to all of you, ding dong “professors of screenwriting,” because how else was he supposed to describe that? Someone hears his face being– the sound of a face being slapped? Like what do you say? Of course, we hear it. We hear it.

John: Love it. I think that Sorkin does, which another one of our writers that we’ll to talk about today, he capitalizes every character’s name, even in scene description. You can do that, that’s not common. I would say that’s maybe 5% of scripts I would see do this, but he does it. And you know what? It’s fine. But I wouldn’t leap on that as an example, but you could do it.

Craig: Clearly, and because the truth is I read through some of this, and I didn’t even notice it, because it just doesn’t matter.

John: He doesn’t use a ton of seeing description in his things. And there are ticker tape pages where it’s just all dialogue down the page. You know what? It’s really good dialogue, that helps.

Craig: It does help. And if you do have pages of ticker tape, for instance, page 12, the lines are short. The longest line is three lines long. Then, okay, actually, in a weird way, that’s a ticker tape conversation, snappity, snap, snap back and forth. I like it.

John: We were talking about A pages and B pages. An example is page 22A. At scene 24, and it’s just one line goes over the edge of this. Lucy has a single block of dialog there. It’s a good reminder that this all comes from a time when you were distributing physical pages. So, rather than having to send people a brand-new script, when there’s a tiny change, you just send in the pages that changed. But if there was too much to fit on one page, you create an A page or B page, and it would fit in between. So, his script would go page 22, 22A, a 22B if there needed to be and then there’d be a 23. That’s historically how we’ve done it. We could still do it that way. Craig, on your show, are there A, B pages, how do you do that?

Craig: You know what? There are. I’m starting to wonder why I’m bothering, because I have not seen anyone with a printed script on my set. Everyone used to carry binders around, but our script supervisor, the incredible Chris Roufs, he uses an iPad, as I think almost every script supervisor at this point uses an iPad or laptop. The first AD isn’t walking around with a binder with pages in it. I’m starting to wonder if I should just get rid of that. And just [crosstalk] do it anymore.

John: Here’s the issue. If you were to then unlock pages, you’d have to talk about what scene it is and never talk about the page numbers again, because the page numbers will keep changing.

Craig: But we never talk about page numbers anyway, we just talk about–

John: Yeah, because they’re [crosstalk] scenes.

Craig: And we talk scene numbers which never change. By the way, it’s so weird. It’s been a while since I’ve worked just a couple of years now on a feature script in production. Scene numbers here looks so tiny, because in television shows you start with scene 101, because that’s Episode 1, scene 1. And then, by the time you get to your 10th episode, it’s starting with scene 1001.

John: On these shows, do you have scripts that have more than 100 scenes?

Craig: No, that would be insane. I don’t even know how– [crosstalk]

John: Yeah. I was just thinking really complicated Game of Thrones episodes where you’re constantly cutting back and forth between a bunch of different things, but you’re not really-

Craig: You would just sort of–[crosstalk]

John: -picking those individual scenes, because they’re all a part of–[crosstalk]

Craig: Yeah. I’ll just pull a random script here. I’ll take episode 5. Let’s see what the number is of this particular– how many scenes I hit. 56. I have a feeling that’s probably pretty standard for me.

John: Yeah, that makes sense.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Last thing I want to say about Being the Ricardos, this is on bottom page 23. The scene description reads, “We’re going to start to go in and out of LUCY’s head as the reading goes on. She’s imagining what each beat will be like in its final form the way a chess master can see the board twelve moves ahead. She can also see and hear what the audience is going to laugh at.” Basically, so the idea is, we’re intercutting between the table reading of a script, and Lucy’s imagination of how it will actually be staged. It works really well in the movie, but it’s done very simply on the page. And Sorkin trusts that the reader is going to pay attention and follow what’s happening here, and you do.

Craig: Yeah. This is an area where– because sometimes people will say, [in mimicking tone] “Well, if you’re directing–” and that’s yes, to an extent, that is true. He can shorthand things somewhat, because what he doesn’t have to worry about is a director coming along and going, “I don’t know what the hell it is. I guess I’ll just make something up.” When you’re writing for other people directing, and I typically am, I will at least try and put things in there to make sure that the stuff that I need to happen or want to happen is there. That said, there’s always some amounts of confusion or things that can be cleared up. And that’s why we have 4000 meetings [chuckles] before we start shooting. So many meetings. Oh, my Lord.

John: [crosstalk] -obviously, there’s a tone meeting, which is really talking through what are we actually going for scene by scene? What does this need to feel like? But we have so many logistical production meetings to just figure out every department what do they need? What is the intention behind this? What does Craig want? What is the director need? All these things.

Craig: Yes. There are questions that are legitimately, “Can you explain this?” There are questions of, “Okay, we think you’re saying this, but are you saying that?” Then, there are questions that fall into the general category of, “I don’t want to be yelled at on the day.” It says here that he stabs him. Is that meant to be through the clothes, because if it’s not, then we have to build a prosthetic. And on the day, I don’t want you to show up and be like, “What the h–?”

John: Yup.

Craig: They ask, and it’s reasonable. They should ask. [chuckles] Making television and movies is basically a game of how many questions can I answer today without falling apart?

John: Let’s move on and take a look at The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal. This script is based on the Elena Ferrante novel. Obviously, she has that to draw from. As I’m looking through this, especially this opening sequence, there’s not purple prose, she’s not painting every sunset, but it’s very effective, especially in terms of describing the house that the character is renting, the house that she’s moving into, and giving us a sense of the geography inside the space. I felt like, “Oh, I can see where things are.” I can feel how would I generally get from one place to another, and how this character specifically is approaching this space. I really liked what they did there.

There’s also a man who’s like a– I was in the movie, so I think it’s interesting, a supporting character man, but I liked his character description is just his white hair. From the initial description, I felt I could see him, but then he was doing very specific things along the way and saying specific stuff. That was helpful for grounding him but also the space, this [unintelligible [00:38:22] that we’re staying on.

Craig: Yeah. This is an example of a script that generally does things differently than I do, and I don’t care. I like to bold my scene headers. Maggie doesn’t. I like to keep my action description chunks really tiny. She will occasionally roll off one that’s 12 lines long. I don’t care. As long as it’s interesting and I can make it through it, then I’m fine. She uses CONT’Ds. When a character talks, then there’s an action description, then the same character talks. I don’t do that, don’t care.

John: I generally do that if it’s going to be unclear. So, I will do that.

Craig: Yeah, I don’t it. It just doesn’t matter. Ultimately, the point is you set yourself free, people, it’s all good. Everything works fine if the script is good. The other thing that Maggie will do, she puts up– getting back to our parenthetical question from earlier, she puts a lot of stuff in parentheticals. She’ll have two-line parentheticals, and that’s fine. There is nothing better than a good script. And there are no formatting issues that a good script can’t overcome.

John: One small thing that I would do if I’d had access to the script, is do a search and replace for double spaces and make them one space because there’s places where there’s one space and places where it’s two spaces, and it’s just a little bit off. That’s a personal little pet peeve of mine, that does not influence the quality of the writing.

Craig: Well, yeah. Look, the very title page, there’s a comma after the word ‘based on’ that shouldn’t be there. [chuckles] I would say, Maggie, John and I are available for basic stuff like that.

John: Punctuation consultants, that’s all we’re asking.

Craig: Mostly, we just want to hang out with Maggie Gyllenhaal. [crosstalk]

John: Yeah.

Craig: We just want to hang out. We want to be your friend.

John: I met Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal a zillion years ago back when they were children because they used to live down the street from me.

Craig: Oh, wow.

John: It’s nice to see that they’ve made something of themselves.

Craig: They’re doing all right. They’re doing all right, those crazy kids.

John: The other thing I’ll say it’s important about, as we’re reading through the script, is right from the very start, it sets up the rules of how this movie is going to work, and that we are going to be going back and forth in time, and that is important. It’s important to do that early enough in movie, so we get a sense of like, “Oh, this is this kind of movie where the back and forth will matter.”

Mitchells vs. the Machines is a film I’d love from this past year. It’s written by Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe‎. I just really adored it and I was happy to see that so much of what I adored, starts on page 1 of the script. It is one of the busiest first pages I’ve encountered. And yet, I could follow it and really get a sense of what this movie was going to feel like. It was chaotic, but ultimately with a point.

Craig: The script on the page feels like it’s on cocaine, which is correct.

John: Yes.

Craig: Lord and Miller as producers have a really good record of both kinds of paces and things, but this has that kind of fantastic growing up in the 70s, we ate way too much sugar cereal in the morning, and then just sat down and watch these strobe lights of terrible cartoons, and our attention spans are shortened to nothing. Obviously, here’s just this wonderful quality that Mike and Jeff have put down on the page, but it does also have that just crazy snap to it.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s almost exhausting reading these pages. You can feel yourself like, “Oh, my God. Oh, yeah.” [onomatopoeia] [chuckles]

John: And then the movie does really trade on that. In the end, the movie eventually does settle into some quieter moments so it’s not this frenzy all the time, but it does kick off with a tremendous amount of energy. There are so many exclamation points on this first page, but none of them feel gratuitous. The word “we” is used constantly because we’re always there with them. Basically, it’s inviting us to be a part of this journey with the characters. I really dug it.

There is a shotgun introduction of all of our main characters. In one paragraph on page 2, “The VERY stoppable “warriors” are: RICK (40, Bearded, nature-loving Dad), LINDA (38, colorful, yet nervous Mom, worn out from trying to keep everyone together), AARON (8, nerdy blonde Muppet who wears exclusively dinosaur shirts), delightfully round pug, MONCHI. And KATIE (17, exploding with creative energy- nerdy now, but will be cool in college).

Generally, shotgun intros are not my favorite, and it works really well here because they boldfaced all the character names, so you see that, “This is important, pay attention here, we’re really going to see these people. This is our movie, is these four characters, plus this pug that looks like a loaf of bread. That is who we’re going to follow in the course of the story.”

Craig: The introductions feel they’re part of the tone. If you stop and did standard introductions, you’d be like, “Oh, what happened? Did you guys get tired?” Because, they’re just like, “Bah,” on page one, and then page two like, “Bah,” and then they’re like, “Okay, now let’s talk about dad is a–.” It’s wonderful, because they’re going to make a point of stopping this madness on page 4, when it literally says, “We go from this manic energy to,” boop, “a quiet, boring suburban neighborhood.” And that’s where they slowed down a bit, because they can.

John: It’s an animation script, and writing is not different than normal writing, there’s no fundamental difference here. This could be a live action script as well. So, we just reminded that animation writing is writing. The only thing you may notice is that parentheticals, here in this case, have been tucked in to the first line of dialogue, rather than having their own separate line. You see that more often in animation. Nothing would change if we were to do normal parentheticals here, you could absolutely do normal parentheticals in this case, and nothing would break or change. We’re not seeing scene numbers here. Numbering scenes and sequences in animation is its own special, unique beast. My advice is to do whatever they tell you to do.

Craig: Yeah, because it’s practical. There’s no magic to that. If you find yourself as you’re writing, dwelling on these issues of formatting, just make a mental note that you are trying to avoid writing.

John: 100%.

Megana: [laughs]

John: A film I greatly enjoyed watching was Passing. This is a film by Rebecca Hall. She adapted it from a novel by Nella Larsen. Here’s what I want to point out about Passing, is that the movie and the script have this kind of hallucinatory, too bright, kind of uncomfortable, kind of stagey artificial feel to it. That really works for the film. There are moments in in it I felt like, “Wait, is this somebody’s 16-millimeter project from the 90s?” And then, you realize like, “Oh, no, it’s actually the incredibly well-made best version of that film aesthetic.” I really dug that the film, partly for just how strange it is, and it feels strange on the page too. It radiates from the page to how they actually shot it.

Craig: Lots of little short bursts of things, then there’s longer stuff. There’s an interesting thing that happens on the bottom of page 1 where there’s a scene header.

John: Yeah, I saw that too.

Craig: Then the same starts in the next page, which we never really do. We always combine the scene header with at least the first line of the scene itself.

John: And who do we have to thank for that? Final Draft. Final Draft, honestly, one of the few things Final Draft did well early on in its incarnation is, making sure that scene headers don’t flow at the bottom of pages, so they always carry through the next page. It just automatically does that, and so is Highland and so does Fade In. Everyone does that.

Craig: That wasn’t something about the steno pool of Warner Brothers and– [crosstalk]

John: Oh, the steno pool did it, but, I think-

Craig: Oh, okay. Final Draft turned it into an automatic–

John: Automated, yeah. You and I don’t think about it because you and I never have to manually do that.

Craig: We don’t manually do it, which made me wonder if Rebecca had written this in Microsoft Word or something, because [crosstalk] notes, which is totally fine. Again, doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.

John: It just doesn’t matter. And she’s capitalizing all the character names like you might in a play. It works fine.

Craig: Also, in the second paragraph of the first page, it says, “Dissolve to Light flaring in a static frame.” She’s capitalized the word ‘light.’ Not all caps, just the L. Um, okay. [chuckles] It’s fine.

John: Yeah. If we’re doing a three-page challenge [crosstalk] we’d then point out that’s unusual.

Craig: It’s unusual. It doesn’t kill anything, and maybe it’s intentional. I can’t tell if it’s intentional or just Rebecca is one of those people– because there is a whole generation of people, they don’t care about capitalization or punctuation. That’s all fungible to them.

John: We’ll see.

Craig: We’ll see.

John: I’ll quickly get through Belfast. This is a script by Kenneth Branagh. He’s a person who’s done some [unintelligible 00:46:40] movies, it’s not his first here. This is labeled as “Shooting Draft.” It’s also in Gill Sans rather than Courier. I strongly suspect that this is something that some studio put out and said, “Oh, it shouldn’t be in Courier.” I’d be willing to bet $100, this was a Courier script that’s somebody down the road ultimately put it to Gill Sans for us to read, because it’s weird that it’s in Gill Sans. I don’t think it’s helpful that’s in Gill Sans.

Craig: It is odd, only because of all the things that people can and can’t do, Courier is the one that just about everyone does, 99.9%. So, when it’s not in Courier, there’s a little bit of a, “Oh, so I guess you don’t need to get in line like the rest of us.”

[laughter]

Craig: Special, feel special, do we?

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s a little tricky, but it also makes me yearn for a different time or a different day where we wouldn’t have to necessarily be in Courier, because actually on the page, it’s rather pretty. It’s just different.

John: It is. I wouldn’t have picked this typeface. I love a sans-serif typeface. This, I think it’s actually a little bit hard to read. I think Gill Sans is a great face for certain things. All uppercase doesn’t look great in Gill Sans. Some things are harder to read than they necessarily need to be. Again, character names are being uppercased through the whole thing for whatever reason. Maybe it’s a British thing. Maybe that’s why Rebecca Hall is doing this as well. A thing I really did appreciate about this though is there’s on page 3, the description, “The camera is high above and behind BUDDY as he starts to walk down the middle of the street. You can see clearly all the way down to the other end, where it meets a road going horizontally across, making a T junction.” Great. I can see that. Also, weird, we got a “you” rather than a “we?” Sure.

Craig: Yeah, I’m fine with it, because “you” and “we” are doing the same thing. They’re just saying in the audience, whether you feel like you’re a part of an audience, perhaps at this point in his career in life, Kenneth Branagh, when he watches movies, just buys up the entire thing. [chuckles] [crosstalk] So, he just presumes that everyone watches it alone.

John: Yeah. He doesn’t want to share armrest with anybody.

Craig: There’s no one else there, but you see the following.

John: It’s also important should point out that, we’re following a young boy through this, all the action is character limited to what he can see and experience until a certain point. Basically, there’s a mob that’s descending, and we’re only getting limited information from what he’s encountering until the mob is upon us. And then eventually, we break that limited POV and see everything, but that’s just good technique. It’s a technique that works on the page, that translates really well to visual medium. [crosstalk] -thinking of that.

Craig: Yeah. There’s another thing that happens on page 7, which is cool. He’s doing a montage really. It’s not so much a montage, it’s just a rapid sequence of things, and he uses CUT TO: for each one of them, which he doesn’t use for other scenes. It makes everything spread out really big on that page. But in a sense, that also helps me see each one of those things. I actually quite liked it. Generally, I don’t do it even in something like this, because I’m always scrambling for paged count time, but the truth is, this is probably more accurate. Again, no problems. It’s fine.

John: No problems. Last one I want to look at is Tick, Tick… Boom!, a film I really enjoyed. This script is by Steven Levinson. It’s based on Jonathan Larson’s musical, directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. On page 1 and 2– the thing I think the film does really crucially, and you see this here on the script, is it has to set up, okay, this is who Jonathan Larson was, this is why he’s famous, and we’re not going to get to that stuff at all. This is all going to take place before then. And that’s a lot to do in two pages, and it does it really, really well. Basically, framing this is how much of the story we’re going to tell, and only this part of the story is really important. I thought they did a very effective job here, starting off with making sure you understood why you’re watching the movie, and what movie you’re going to watch.

Craig: Yeah, totally agree. Quality-wise, obviously, great. There’s an interesting choice here that I struggle with a little bit format-wise on a script that is only 104 pages. So, you have the time, meaning you have the space, to not put that extra line break before each scene header. It just makes everything– and to not bold, the scene headers, it’s harder to read. I just find it harder to read. I get confused a little bit as I’m going through or the transitions don’t feel quite as crackly or sharp because it’s just a smudge. For me, and this is really a pure readability thing, I think people should put that extra line break before the scene header or bold the scene header, but to do neither is rough. That said, doesn’t stop things from working.

John: It could work. Your choices are one or more of extra line space before the scene header, underlining scene header, which some people do–[crosstalk]

Craig: Yup, that works.

John: -are choices. There’s underlining here which I think it’s really important in top of page 3. “NOTE: Throughout the film, we move back and forth between Jon in 1992 performing at the show, and the events he is narrating as they occur in 1990.” This is something that is completely obvious when you’re watching the movie, but could be perplexing as you’re reading the script. What the script does, INT – LOCATION – DAY, and then will say either 1990 or 1992, because they’re two different timelines and we can see it when I watch the movie. But on the page, it could get confusing. So, it’s important to put that note out there for the reader.

Craig: Great.

John: Great. These are some pretty good scripts. So, congratulations to all of our writers here. I think you did a good job, I think you have promising careers ahead of you.

Craig: [chuckles]

John: But I really do strongly encourage our listeners to click through the links and take a look at the pages that we’re discussing and describing because that’s how you learn, is by reading scripts and reading good scripts is a great way to learn how some good writers’ work.

Craig: Great.

John: We have time for maybe a question. I see one here from Johnny. Megana, can you ask us that one?

Megana: Johnny asks, “I have this question for John about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Charlie inherited the chocolate factory from Wonka because of his good nature/personality/traits, honesty, kindness, compassion, etc. However, in the beginning, he bought the chocolate using the $10 bill on the street. He didn’t try to find the owner or turn it in. Does this behavior contradict his good nature?”

John: Craig, I have a question for you before we get into the actual script for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If you find $10 on the street, do you have an ethical duty to find its owner?

Craig: How the hell are you going to find the owner?

John: That’s my question.

Craig: No.

John: Money is fungible. I can’t tell you whose money that is. If I find a wallet, I’m going to find-

Craig: Yeah, of course.

John: -the owner of the wallet.

Craig: Of course. But if you find money on the street, there’s literally no way to identify who that came from. None. If somebody came rushing back around the street was like, “Oh, my God! Did you find a $10 bill on the street?” I’d say, “You know what? I did. Here it is.” Because there’s no way they would have known that it was a 10 or on the street if they weren’t there. But otherwise, no. That’s that’s a weird question.

John: It’s a strange question. But I wanted to point to Johnny to say, just go to the library, go to my johnaugust.com Library, and you can just read the script, that’s not actually what happens. And I realized like, “I’d never actually posted the scripts for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” I posted the working scripts, and then a final script for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And just like our Aaron Sorkin script, I put in the change pages so people can see this was the white draft, here’s the blue pages, here’s the pink pages, and here’s the final script all together so you can see how this fit in. I also put in the memos that go out with those distributions so people can see like, “Oh, this is why these things are changed.” And this, again, back in the time of physical pages going out. I would put a list of, “This is the order of pages that you should see,” because sometimes it gets confusing. All those things are out there.

The reason why I point to the original script though is that doesn’t say like you won it because you were good. He says, “I invited five children to the factory, and the one who is least rotten would be the winner.” Charlie doesn’t have to be good, he just has to be the least rotten. It’s also important to share my version of Charlie and Chocolate Factory. Wonka is going through this existential crisis and self-doubt and all sorts of weird things are crashing down on him. He doesn’t really want to give up his factory. So, that’s the point of like, Wonka is protagonating over the course of this and really going through this crisis. He’s not even quite sure why he’s invited these kids in here. But it’s not because he wants to find a good-hearted kid, because that’s not even how Wonka is wired.

Craig: Other than getting everything wrong, Johnny’s question was great.

John: What Johnny’s question did, is it did motivate me to actually finally put up the scripts, which I’m not sure why I didn’t put up the scripts before, so people can read how Charlie and Chocolate Factory looked on the page. All right, I think it’s time for One Cool Things.

Craig: Okay.

John: As promised, my One Cool Thing is a limited series that I enjoyed and really loved called Vigil. This is a British show that in the US is on Peacock. I guess this is on Peacock, you don’t even have to subscribe to Peacock. Even the free Peacock would have it. It’s created by Tom Edge. Personally, I follow him on Twitter. George Northy described it as “Mare of Easttown on a nuclear submarine.” And that’s actually probably what it is. You have a female police detective investigating a murder. It’s on this British nuclear submarine, but she has family custodial drama. There’s just a lot happening in her personal life [unintelligible 00:56:11] being a claustrophobic character on a submarine. I just really dug it. I love everything that has a submarine, but I really thought it worked especially well. The twists and turns were great. There’s that classic sense of Mare of Easttown. At a certain point, you suspect that every character you’ve seen on screen somehow was involved in these murders. That’s the show, and I really, really dug it.

Craig: Fantastic. My one cool thing this week, is the MIT Mystery Hunt, which you cannot– Currently, it’s a week later now when you’re hearing this or five days later, and it will surely have been solved by some group of incredibly brilliant people. But I don’t know if you’re familiar with the MIT Mystery Hunt, John.

John: I don’t know what it is.

Craig: MIT Mystery Hunt has been going on for quite some time, maybe 20 years. It was always a physical hunt that took place on the MIT campus that involved solving lots and lots of puzzles, which would feed into meta puzzles. It’s like an incredibly complicated, long version of the thing that David Quang and I did at The Magic Castle that you attended.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It would take place over the course of a number of days. It would involve moving physically around the campus and finding a coin, and then you won. If you found the coin, you were the team that won. Over the years, it’s become more and more complicated. The last couple of years, it’s been virtual for obvious reasons, including this year.

One of the interesting things about the MIT Mystery Hunt is that the team that wins is responsible for creating the mystery hunt for the next year. When I tell you that this is like a full-time job, I’m not kidding. Last year, a team named Palindrome or Team Palindrome, they won, and they have won before, a couple of times, I think. Some of my friends are on it, including Dave Shukan and Mark Halpin. There’s also a guy that I’ve occasionally solved puzzles with named Eric Berlin, who I think was their captain. These folks, along with dozens of other people, this is a very large team, by all accounts created quite the hunt, and I think it legitimately took them all year to create this huge event that teams are currently working on and solving right now.

To give you a sense of how complicated it gets, the team last year, Galactic Trendsetters, they were the ones that won the year before us, they created the puzzle hunt last year, they literally created their own MMO for this event. Because you’re dealing with MIT people. They can do anything, anything. They’re coding. They created their own proprietary software for this. Anyway, it’s very exciting. I’m a decent solver. I’m just not at this level. I can solve the first tier of their puzzles, but the later tier, beyond me, definitely beyond me. It’s going on right now. I don’t think anyone’s won yet. But my guess is probably by– we’re recording on a Saturday. Probably by Sunday, there will be a winner. So, I just wanted to say one cool thing to Team Palindrome for creating all that working, so hard. It’s not a paid job. And then, congrats to everyone that solves it and participates in it. And of course, a special congratulations to the team that wins. I don’t know who they are yet.

John: I was going to say, I wonder why someone would do something like this when they aren’t getting paid for it, and all they could do is have some sense of satisfaction of how they made a thing, after– [crosstalk]

[laughter]

Craig: Well, we get to do this one hour a week. The sense I got was that this was practically a full-time job that required its own organizational structure and methods, and just review– I actually test solve quite a few puzzles for them. I think they were nice to only have me test solve the ones that I was capable of solving, but they were all really interesting. There are rafts of test solvers that are being worked on. They have this point system for evaluating. It’s incredibly com– it’s like producing a show. It’s something else. Great work on that, everyone. I’m hoping everyone’s enjoying it. I’m sure they are. Dave Shukan has told me that he will send me a collection of good ones that he thinks I [chuckles] can solve that I haven’t already solved. So, thanks, Dave. I appreciate that.

John: Fantastic. Also, it might be a good moment to shout out a congratulations to a friend of the show, David Kwong, who is now engaged.

Craig: That’s right. David Kwong is finally going to be an honest man.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: We’re incredibly happy for him.

John: Yeah, please don’t saw your wife in half. That’s all we’re asking.

Craig: Those are the people that are doing all the hard work on stage. You know that, right?

John: Yeah, of course. They’re the contortionists.

Craig: Yeah, exactly.

John: Yeah. And that’s our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by William Brink. 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 am @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. It’s also where you can also find the links to some of the scripts we talked about today. You’ll find the transcripts there. And you can sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts, and they’re great. They have Stuart’s sense of softness. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. The hoodies are great. Now, Craig, did you pick up your hoodie while you’re in town or not?

Craig: Oh, I don’t think I did.

John: Okay. Well, we’ll ship it to you up in Calgary so you can keep warm.

Craig: Oh, thank you.

John: They turned out really well. 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, talking about the screenwriter equivalent of bootcamp. Until then, relax, stay chill. And we’ll see you next time on Scriptnotes. Bye.

Craig: Bye.

[music]

John: Hey, Megana, we got a question from Andrew. Read the question that Andrew has?

Megana: Andrew asks, “I’ve heard many former or current soap opera actors refer to working on the soap as a bootcamp for them, mainly because of the production schedule and the need to get everything right the first time. Soap actors who find work elsewhere are praised for their ability to memorize and always get things right quickly. Is it the same for writers? Do writers who worked on soap operas have an insane work ethic and the ability to turn out content? If not, what is the writing equivalent of a writing boot camp?”

John: All right. That’s an interesting question. There obviously are. There are actors who started out soap opera actors who are now some of our best actors out there. Not everyone who works on a soap opera is going to be the best actor out there. But that sense of being able to show up, do the work, get it done, get it right the first time, memorize a bunch of lines, that all feels great and crucial. Craig, can you think of examples of high pressure or writing jobs where there’s so much quantity that you actually do pick up good skills?

Craig: Sure. I think I went through it, and it’s called advertising. Copywriting in advertising is pretty brutal. You have to do a lot of different kinds of writing, is to do a lot of idea making, which is important obviously. You have to talk a lot about how to get into something and what the purpose of something is, so you learn about purposefulness. And then you have to write a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of versions. Versions, and versions and versions. And they all have to fit to time. You’re dealing with a very limited amount of time to get your idea across, the purpose, the point, structure, beginning, middle, end. And then, you have to do it again, but for a shorter amount of time to do multiple versions of it. When you’re cutting things together for marketing like trailers and things, you need to start asking which of this stuff is emerging as important or salient or notable. And you also learn which movies are harder to market because they don’t know what they’re about either. All of that is pretty great bootcamp. You learn audio, you learn visual, you learn how to write, purpose, revisions, rewrites.

When you come out of it, you’re pretty well set up to go on to the next thing. I’m not recommending that people go seek it out as the basis for a screenwriting career, but having gone through it, I think boot camps is a pretty darn good term for it.

John: My freshman year of college, I was a journalism advertising major. My J54 was the basic news writing class I had to take. It was famously difficult class, it was exhausting class, because it was 8:00 in the morning, you’d show up and the professor say, “Okay, I need each of you to find a story on campus and it needs to be delivered in the next 90 minutes.” So, you’re like, “Argh.” You’re running around, trying to find something to write about. Get introduced, get notes, get back, sit down at a computer and write the story. And then, he would hover over you as you’re writing. It really made you focus in on just getting it done, getting the words out, thinking about that pyramid style, like the most important stuff at the top and being able to cut off the story at any point, and breaking some of your preciousness are the way that you can get in your own way with stuff. So, I had to learn how to write those kinds of news stories. And yeah, I did learn a lot there.

But that kind of news writing is different than longform journalism. When I would actually have the time to actually do more work and to do more than just reporting, but actually think about synthesizing and putting stuff together, those classes were much more useful in terms of my actual screenwriting, in terms of thinking about how I’m going to go from, “Here’s a bunch of ideas,” to, “Here is the way I’m going to structure and tell these ideas in a way that is interesting.” I think we have to have both. I just stayed doing news writing, it would be like when I was working at Tristar and having to write coverage on two scripts a day. It would burn a hole in your brain and limit you from doing other kind of writing.

Craig: That’s one of the downsides of working as a young person in something like advertising, is that the people who have remained, you can tell that they have been scarred and changed by it.

John: Yeah. [chuckles]

Craig: It’s because there is something brutal about writing that isn’t about the writing itself. That whatever you write is in service of a purpose. You learn to write with purpose, but only purpose. Whereas when you’re writing things to entertain people, there is its own intrinsic value. The point is watch this, not watch something else, or learn about something else. When are in your 20s and you’re working at these things, you often are working for people that are maybe a little roughed up. I remember meeting some wonderful people. It’s possible also that my experience and your experience was strongly informed by the year it was. The 90s, people were meaner in the 90s.

[laughter]

Craig: They really were. People were mean.

John: Well, let’s think about things that are closer to what we are actually doing for a living. People do write soap operas obviously, and soaps are covered by the WJ. There’s WJ writers who are writing soaps. I don’t see a lot of people who are moving from writing soaps into other things. It feels almost like game show writing. It’s a very unique specialty, because you’re just having to crank out so much and there’s just not time to do the kinds of other work you could be doing. But there’s obviously people write on network one-hours that are like procedural shows, and there’s a whole way procedural shows work. There’s TV sitcoms, which have a very different vibe in how it’s all geared up towards the weekly taping of the show. Those are very differing experiences, but you are on the hook for generating a lot of material each week. And it’s going to get you out of some of your preciousness about everything having to be perfect at all times.

Craig: Yeah. You can pick up skills in these things. Accountability is a big one. It would have been really hard as a 21- or 22-year-old to start writing a screenplay with no sense of accountability whatsoever. When you are paying your bills because of the stuff you’re writing, you learn accountability. You also learn frustration.

John: Yes.

Craig: The frustration of being a writer, I don’t want to say it’s a good thing, but it’s a helpful thing that we get frustrated so frequently, because we get better and better at dealing with it. There are other categories of artists in our business that I don’t think have been exposed to the frustration we’ve been exposed to. It’s harder for them to deal with. We are weathered.

John: We’re talking about these early jobs as being you’re accountable for doing stuff, and you haven’t just turned stuff in. Schools can be accountability mechanisms, where basically you are having to turn stuff in and therefore having to get work done on a regular basis, and be able to show it to people and actually have a conversation with people, which could be great. But, Megana, I’m thinking about the writing groups that you’re a part of. A large part of that is accountability, where you’re getting better because you’re being forced to generate stuff for each week’s meeting.

Megana: Absolutely. I think the social pressure of it is really helpful too. I think you lose your preciousness really fast. One thing my writing group implemented, which has been helpful during the pandemic, is that you have to say what your goal is for the next session, and if you don’t meet that you have to contribute a certain amount into a pot that we use at the end of six months to take ourselves out. So, there’s a financial repercussion if you’re not meeting your goals.

Craig: Yeah. That’s right.

Megana: That is helpful. It’s like, “Ah, okay, well, I’ll send something in that I feel unsure about because I don’t want to spend 20 bucks on missing this deadline.”

Craig: Hmm. You don’t want to give me that option of buying my way out of writing though.

[laughter]

John: Well, let’s talk about– Craig and I have been bought many times. I want to think about when we do weekly work, and I’m not doing as many weeklies as I used to, but for a time I was doing a fair number of weeklies, and it wasn’t very classically that pick two motto. Something could be fast or cheap, or good, and you’re going to pick two. They would pay me really good money. I was not cheap, but I was fast and I was good. It was my ability to recognize what they needed, to be able to deliver what they needed within this short period of time that they had. If I could write great pages but I couldn’t turn them in on time, that was not helpful to them. If I was fast and I wasn’t delivering what they needed, it wouldn’t have worked. So, I did learn a lot having to generate pages that could shoot tomorrow on that timeline.

Craig: Everybody has their own internal clock. If you find yourself in a situation where writing has to be done really quickly and really well in a short amount of time, it may not be for you. You may not have the ability to write well that quickly. You may not have the emotional ability to write that well that quickly. One of the things that happens when you’re working on a weekly, and it’s very similar to when you’re working on short term, impulse projects like advertising and so forth, is you’re also going to be getting the same amount of compressed reviewing and critiquing in the short amount of time. So, you work on something for a week, you’re readily expecting to be rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and hearing and talking and back and forth and back and forth for the week, it’s intense. And you need to be able to do all that, and have the emotional fortitude and the mental stamina, and your mind just has to work quickly. It’s not for everybody, it really isn’t.

I love doing weeklies because they actually don’t have the level of accountability that other things have. And I don’t mean to imply that I write a bunch of crap and walk away laughing. I care very much. But it’s focused, it’s so focused, I’m not responsible for the entire movie. I’m just trying to fix the first act. And then, I’m gone. I’m doing everything I can in that moment to help, but I am not raising this child. I’m just watching them like a grandparent for three days.

John: Absolutely. It’s more like you’re the emergency room doctor who’s keeping the patient alive and stabilized and getting them so they can walk out of the hospital, but you’re not responsible for like, “Oh, that other thing which we detected,” you’re not going to fix all those problems.

Craig: I did. There was one project I’m working on where I was like, “I’m not the emergency doctor trying to stabilize this patient. I am the undertaker just trying to get you into open casket funeral.”

[laughter]

Craig: That’s all I’m doing. This thing is dead. I just wanted the parents to be able to see it when you wheel it out there because right now, oh, my God.

John: Yeah. We’ve all been there. We’ve seen some of those movies and early things. I say yes, there are some bootcamp situations. Do you need to enroll or list yourself in a bootcamp situation? I would say to our friend who wrote in, Andrew, assess what you need. Is your problem that you’re just not getting stuff done? Is your problem accountability? Then, signing up for a class or getting into a writing group might be good interest in terms of getting you to generate more pages. If the problem’s that you’re just not generating a lot, that’s great. If you’re a person who’s generating a lot of stuff, it’s just not very good, maybe what you don’t need is a bootcamp. Maybe you just need some quality control. Maybe you need to slow down a little bit more and focus on refining some stuff, and getting some people to read you, who can really help talk you through what’s working, what’s not working, so you can actually polish rather than just generate the most you can generate.

Craig: Great.

John: Cool. Thanks, guys.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

Megana: Thank you.

LINKS:

• The CW is for sale!
• Annie Hayes on Writing with an Invisible Illness on John’s blog
• Being the Ricardos by Aaron Sorkin
• The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal
• The Mitchells vs. the Machines by Mike Rianda And Jeff Rowe
• Passing by Rebecca Hall
• Belfast by Kenneth Branagh
• Tick, Tick, Boom by Steven Levenson
• Willy Wonka Script at the johnaugust.com library!
• Vigil show
• MIT Mystery Hunt 2022
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by William Brink (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 524 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

We don’t have Craig today but we do have a very full show because today’s episode we’re going to be talking about endings. We’re going to start with a segment from Episode 44, Endings for Beginners, where Craig and I look at how you plan for a successful conclusion. Then we’ll have Aline join us for Episode 152, The Rocky Shoals, where we look at the particular challenges writers face around page 70 every script, when you start shifting gears into the end game. Then in a segment from 392 we will focus on the final moment, the punchline and the payoff. So it’s a whole episode about endings. It’s not really a script from A to Z. It’s more from R to Z, or maybe S to Z. But it should be a very useful thing as you’re thinking about your script.

As always, if you want to hear these full episodes you can find them in our archives available to premium members at Scriptnotes.net. And if you are a premium member stick around at the end where Megana and I will chat about nighttime rituals for creative folk. Enjoy.

[Episode 44]

John: I thought today we’d start by talking about endings, and let this be more of a craft episode, because a lot times as we start we start looking at writing screenplays, start writing TV pilots, it’s all about those first ten pages, about getting people hooked and getting people to know your world, getting people to love your characters. That’s not ultimately what they’re going to walk away from your movie with. They’re going to walk away from your movie with an ending.

And so I thought we would spend some time today talking about endings, and the characteristics of good endings, and the things you need to look for as a writer as you’re figuring out what your story is both way in advance and as you’re leading up to those last few pages.

Craig: Yeah. Ending are… — Like I think we had talked in a prior podcast about the bare minimums required to start beyond idea, main character. And for me, one of them is ending. I need to know how the movie ends, because essentially the process of the story is one that takes you from your key crucial first five pages to those key crucial last ten. Everything in between is informed by your beginning and your ending. Everything.

I’ve never understood people who write and have no idea how the movie’s going to end. That’s insane to me.

John: So, I would argue that a screenplay is essentially a contract between a writer and a reader, and same with a book, but we are talking about screenplays. And you are saying to the reader, “If you will give me your time and your attention, I will show you a world, I will tell you story, and it will get to a place that you will find satisfying. And it will surprise you, it will fulfill you. You will have enjoyed spending your time reading this script and seeing the potential in this movie.”

The ending is where you want to be lost. It’s the punch line, it’s the resolution, it’s the triumph. And so often it’s the last thing we actually really focus on.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So many writers, I think, spend all of their time working on those first ten pages, their first 30 pages, then sort of powering through the script. And those last five, ten pages are written in a panicked frenzy because they owe the script to somebody, or they just have to finish. And so those last ten pages are just banged out and they’re not executed with nearly the precision and nearly the detail of how the movie started.
Which is a shame because if you think about any movie that you see in the theater, hopefully you’re enjoying how it starts, hopefully you’re enjoying how the ride goes along, but your real impression of the movie was how it ended.

My impression of Silence of the Lambs, great movie all the way through, but I’m thinking about Jodie Foster in the basement and sort of what happens there.

Craig: Right.

John: As I look at more recent movies like Prometheus, I’m looking at the things I enjoyed along the way, but I’m also asking, “Did I enjoy where that movie took me to at the end?”

Craig: Yeah. I like what you say about contract, that’s exactly right. Because it’s understood that everything that you see is raveling or unraveling depending on your perspective towards this conclusion. The conclusion must be intentional. We always took about intention and specificity. The conclusion must, when you get to it, be satisfying in a way that makes you realize everything had to go like this. Not that it had to go like this, but to be satisfying it had to go like this.

That ultimately the choices that were made by the character and the people around the character led to this moment, this key moment. And I think we should talk about what makes an ending an ending, because it’s not just that it’s the thing that happens before credits roll. You know, I’ve always thought the ending of a movie is defined by your main character performing some act of faith. And there’s a decision and there’s a faith in that decision to do something. And that is connected — it always seems to me — it is connected through, all the way back to the beginning, in a very different way from what is there in the beginning.

That’s the point is there is an expression of faith in something that has changed. But there is a decision. There is a moment where that character does something that transcends and brings them out of what was so that hopefully by the end of the movie they are not the same person they were in the beginning.
John: Either they have literally gotten to the place that you have promised the audience that they’re going to get to. Like if you have set up a location that they’re going to get to. Is Dorothy going to get back to Kansas? Well, you could have ended the movie when she got to Oz, or when she got to the Emerald City because she was trying to get to the Emerald City, but her real goal was to get back to Oz, or to get back to Kansas. I’m confusing all my locations.

Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas. If the movie doesn’t get us back to Kansas, we’re going to be frustrated. If she gets back to Kansas and we’re there for 10 more minutes, we’re going to be frustrated. The movie has promised us that she will get back to Kansas, or I guess she could die trying. That’s a valid choice too.

Craig: I’d like to see that movie.

John: That’s her literal stated goal. That’s her want. And there’s also her need. And her need is to, I guess, come to appreciate the people that’s she’s with, to find some independence…

Craig: Well, but that’s what I’m talking about when I say that the character must have some faith and a choice, and a decision that’s different. In the beginning of the movie she leaves home. She runs away.

John: That’s right.

Craig: And at the end of the movie she has to have faith that by actually loving home, which she finally does now, she can return. And essentially you can look at the entire movie in a very simple way as somebody saying to a runaway on the street, “Trust me kid, if you want to go back home you can get back home. You just got to want to go back home. I know you ran away, you made a stand, you thought you were a grown up. The world is scary. It’s okay. You can go back home. They’ll take you back.”

That’s what the Wizard of Oz is. And the whole thing is a runaway story. And yet the ending… — It’s funny; a lot of people have always said, “Well, you know, the ending, it’s they’re mocking us. She just hands her the shoes. She could have given her the shoes and told her to click the heels in the beginning, we’d be done with this thing.”

But the point is then, okay, fine, maybe that’s a little clumsy, but really more to the point the ending is defined by faith and decision. And I think almost every movie, the wildest arrangement of movies, and look at Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the end he has faith. “Close your eyes, Marion.” That’s faith he didn’t he didn’t have in the beginning in something. It’s not always religious, you know.

The Ghostbusters decide, “We’re going to cross the streams.” [laughs] “We’re gonna have faith that we’re gonna do the thing we knew we weren’t going to do. Forget fear. Let’s just go for it. It’s the only way we can save the world. We might die in the process but we’re heroes now. We have faith in that.” I see it all the time. And I feel like when you’re crafting your ending and you’re trying to focus it through the lens of character as opposed to circumstance, finding that decision is such a big deal.

John: Yeah. The ending of your movie is very rarely going to be defeating the villain or finding the bomb. It’s going to be the character having achieved something that was difficult throughout the whole course of the movie. So, sometimes that’s expressed as what the character wanted. More often it’s expressed by what the character needed but didn’t realize he or she needed. And by the end of the movie they’re able to do something they were not able to do at the start of the movie, either literally, or because they’ve made emotional progress over the course of the movie that they can do something.

Craig: Right. That’s exactly right. And it’s a great way of thinking about, you know, sometimes we get lost in the plot jungle. And we look around and we think, “Well, this character could go anywhere and do anything.” Well, stop thinking about that and start thinking about what you want to say about life through your movie, because frankly there’s not much more reason to watch movies. [laughs] You know?

John: And we are talking about movies, not TV shows. And a movie is really a two-hour, 100-minute lens on one section of a character’s life, or one section of a cinematic world. And so you’re making very deliberate choices about how you’re starting. One of the first things we see, or how we meet those characters. You have to make just as deliberate choices about where you’re going to end. What’s the last thing that we’re going to take out of this world? And why are we cutting out this slice of everything that could happen to show us in this time?

Craig: Right.

John: And you will change your ending, just as you change your beginning. But you have to go in with a plan for where you think this is going to go to.

Craig: No question. I think a huge mistake to start writing… — And frankly if you’re writing and you don’t know how the movie ends, you’re writing the wrong beginning. Because to me, the whole point of the beginning is to be somehow poetically opposite the end. That’s the point. If you don’t know what you’re opposing here, I’m not really sure how you know what you’re supposed to be writing at all.

John: In one of our first screenwriting classes they forced us to write the first 30 pages and the last 10 pages, which seemed like a really brutal exercise, but was actually very illuminating because if you’ve written the first 30 and the last 10 you can write your whole movie because you know — you have to know everything that’s going to happen in there to get you to that last moment.

Craig: I love it.

John: And it makes you think very deliberately about what those last things are. And so I still try to write those last 10 pages pretty early on in the process while I still have enthusiasm about my movie, while I still love it, while I’m still excited about it. And so I’m not writing those last pages in a panic, with sort of coffee momentum. I’m writing them with craft, and with detail, and with precision.

And then I can write some of the middle stuff with some of that panic and looseness if I don’t have… — If I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm, I can muscle through some of the middle parts, but I don’t want to muscle through my ending. I want the ending to be something that’s precise and exactly what this movie wants to be.

Craig: You know, I have the kind of OCD need to write chronologically. I can’t skip around at all. But I won’t start writing until I know the ending. And what I mean by ending, I mean, I know what the character, what he thought in the beginning of the movie, what he thinks differently in the end. Why that difference is interesting. What decision he’s going to make, and then what action is he going to take that epitomizes his new state of mind.

When we start thinking about what should the ending be, I think sometimes writers think about how big should the explosion be, or which city should the aliens attack. And if you start thinking about what would be the best, most excruciating, difficult test of faith for my hero and his new outlook on life, or at least his new theoretical outlook on life.
And, you know, Pixar does this better than anybody, and they do so much better than everybody. And it’s funny, because I really start thinking about endings this way because of Pixar films. And I went, I remember I was watching Up. And they got to that point where he had — Carl had finally decided that kid was worth going back to save. You know, he brought the house right to where he said he would bring it, and no, he’s going to leave that and go back. And I like that but I thought, that’s not quite that difficult of a test. And then, of course, see Pixar knows that it wasn’t enough, that the real test to say “I have moved on” is to let that house go.

And they design their climax, they design the action of the climax in such a way to force Carl, the circumstances force Carl to let the house go to save the kid.

John: Yup.

Craig: And that’s the perfect example to me of how to think about writing a satisfying ending. That’s why that ending is satisfying. It’s not about the details. The details are as absurd as “man on airship with boy scout, flying, talking dogs, and a house tied to him.” No problem; you can make it work.
John: And example I can speak to very specifically is the movie Big Fish, which really follows two story lines, and the implied contract with the audience is you know the father is going to die. It would be a betrayal of the movie if the father suddenly pulled out of it and the father wasn’t going to die. We know from the start of the movie that the father is going to die.
The question of the movie is, “Will the father and son come to terms, will they reconcile before his death, and will this rift be amended?” And so quite early on I had to figure out like, well what is it that the son — the son is really the protagonist in the present day — what is it that the son can do at the end of the story that he couldn’t do at the start of the story? Well, the son has to tell the story of the father’s death. And so knowing, like, that’s going to be incredibly difficult, an emotionally trying thing to do, but I could see all that, I could feel that.

Knowing that that was the moment I was leading up to, well what is it that lets the son get to that point? And you’re really working backwards to what are the steps that are going to get me to that point. And so it’s hearing someone else tell one of the father’s stories, it’s Jenny Hill, that fills in this missing chapter and sort of why that chapter is missing. That backtracks into, “Well, how big is the fight that set up this disagreement?” “What are the conversations along the way?” Knowing I needed to lead up to that moment, knowing what that ending was was what let me track the present day storyline back to the beginning.

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. There was to be a connection between the beginning and the end. I am excited for the day that Identify Thief comes out, because I can sort of talk specifically about how that — that ending, the whole reason I wrote that movie, aside from liking it, was I thought I had a very interesting dilemma for the character at the end, and it was an interesting climax of decision. And the decision meant something. And it was interesting. And I like that. That to me — it’s all about the ending like that. So, looking forward to that one coming out. Hopefully people will like it.

John: This talk of endings reminds me of… — I met John Williams. He was at USC; the scoring stage is named the John Williams Scoring Stage. And when they were rededicating it John Williams was there, along with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and they were talking about the movies they worked on together.

And John Williams made this really great point, was that the music of a movie is the thing you take home with you, it’s like the goodie bag. It’s the one thing you as an audience member get to sort of recycle and play in your head is that last theme. So as I’m thinking about endings, that’s the same idea. What is that little melody? What is that moment that people are going to walk out of the theater with? And that’s — that’s your ending.

And we’ve both made movies where we’ve gone through testing, and you’ll see that the smallest change in the ending makes this huge difference in how people react to your movie.

Craig: Oh, for sure.

John: It’s that last little thing that they take with them.

Craig: Yeah. In fact, when people are testing movies that have sort of absurdly happy endings, you know, what you’d call an uplifting film, you almost to kind of discount the numbers. You’ll get a 98 and you’ll think, “Well, it’s not really a 98. At this point it doesn’t matter, it’s just that the ending was such a big thumbs up.”

But, you know, if you ask these people tomorrow or the next day would they pay to go see it, you might get a different answer. And similarly when you end on a bummer, or on a flat note, just like the air goes out of the theater, and people will struggle to explain why they did not like the movie when in fact they just didn’t like the ending.

John: But I want to make sure for people who are listening, we are not arguing for happy endings.

Craig: No.

John: We’re not arguing that every movie needs to have a happy ending. It needs to have a satisfying ending that matches the movie that you’ve given them up to that point.

Craig: Yes.

John: Is it one that tracks with the characters along the way? So it doesn’t mean the character has to win. The character can die at the end, that’s absolutely fine, as long as the death is meaningful in the context of the movie that you’ve shown us.

Craig: Yeah. And maybe just a little bit of hope.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know, I mean, I always thought it was such a great choice by Clint Eastwood, the ending shot of Unforgiven, which really ends on a downer. I mean, this man struggled his whole life, most of his adult life, to be a good person when inside in fact he was awful. And in a moment of explosion at the end truly reveals the devil inside, kills everybody. We kind of sickly root for it. And then he goes back home. And it basically says he never, you know, he just died alone.

And yet there’s something nice about the image because while that’s rolling, and we just dealt with all of that, the final images of him alone on his farm, putting some flowers down — I think by the grave of his dead wife, who we understand from the scroll is somebody that he always, he truly loved and was good to, so that there is a bit of hope there. You know?

[Episode 152]

John: So, we’ve set a very high bar. But let’s get started. Let’s get started with those rocky shoals. So, talk to us about what you mean by this topic.

Aline: Well, this is something that I’ve always found to be true and in talking to other writers I have found it also true for them. Which is the first act tends to be the funnest and easiest to write. You often overwrite the first act. You often write the 38 pages when it needs to be 29, but it’s usually because it’s the thing that you spent the most time on which is the setup and the idea and you have the most information about it.

And what I’ve found is that after the first part of act two, where you’re sort of setting up the pins to knock them down — analogy — in the second part what you’re really doing is sort of building that on ramp to the third act. And I know Craig has talked many times about how you need to know that third act to write the movie, and it’s best if you know the third act, and I agree with that. And I find third acts not, I would say, on a par with first acts in terms of difficulty to write.
But if I’m going to have an existential crisis, if there is going to be a moment where I drive home from work and say to my husband, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how I’ve ever written one of these before, I don’t understand how these work,” it will always be around 71 where I start to feel like, you know, it should start to spit out material, and it’s probably the stuff you have the least of in the outline. But it should start to spit out steps to this thing that you know you’re going to.

So, often I know exactly what the third act is and I can see it. And it’s just over the crest, but I need those steps, and 70 to 90 are those steps. And if something is wrong, if you’ve conceived a character incorrectly, if the action in the third act is in fact wrong, if your thematic are wrong, that’s where it’s all going to fall down. It almost never falls apart in act one. For me it almost never falls apart in act three. It’s always 70 to 90 is the moment where I think, oh boy.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: In act one you’re setting things up. And that’s the part of the movie where you had the best idea of what it really was. That was probably what got you to start writing the movie. You had this idea, and that was probably act one.

Act three, you’re closing stuff down. You’re cutting off those threads, you’re tying stuff up. Final confrontations. But there is not a defined thing that’s sort of supposed to happen in that stretch that you’re talking about. There’s probably been some big thing that happened in the middle of your second act, but now you’re kind of waiting for this third act thing to happen. You’re waiting for either the worst of the worst, or this big twist, this big reveal, and you don’t want to do anything before its time. But, yeah, it’s a tough moment.

Craig: Well, it is. Although I kind of feel like that’s the point. You know, your character is going through this process and that’s the part of the movie where they’re lost, right? Your plot is building in a certain way and that’s the part of the movie where the plot and the simplicity of what’s supposed to happen doesn’t work anymore. It’s natural for us to get to that place and start to feel overwhelmed. Oddly, we give ourselves a break from page 30 — well, the ending is far away, I’m relaxed.

When you get to page 70 you think, well the ending is supposed to be coming up soon but it also still feels far away. It feels further away now that I’m at 71 then it did when I was at 30. But I feel like that’s the purpose of that section. In a weird way pages 71 and 90 in every movie is a horror movie, in every genre. That’s where the horror is. It’s where everything is supposed to basically fall apart, otherwise your ending is kind of a “who cares?”

So, if you start to embrace the fact that you’re supposed to feel that way, particularly if you’re connected to your main character and the movie is supposed to fall apart. You have to break it to fix it. Then maybe, you’ll still be scared, but at least you’ll understand why.

Aline: You know how Ted Elliott talks about that stuff where you make those first couple decisions about a movie and then you’re sort of — you have the consequences of those you can’t ever get back. I feel like to use one of my tortured analogies that to get — you’re going to have a lot of stuff and you’re winnowing. The process of a movie really is winnowing down thematically and plot wise.

And I always feel like it’s like you’re at the edge of a river. You’re Tarzan. You’re trying to get to this place across and there’s ten vines. And you can only pick a couple to swing across on. And I just have had a couple times where I’ve gotten there and thought which one is taking me, is the right path to act three. And I think that’s probably the section that I rewrite the most because often I have an act three I really like, but it might not land if the onramp is not — if I have not picked the right thing to swing across on.

John: One of the things I think you’re describing may be part of the problem. If you’re describing it as an onramp then you’re not describing what the actual — what’s the joy of that part of the movie? If it’s only doing work, then there’s not a joy to that part of the movie.

Aline: Right.

John: One of the scripts that I was working with at Sundance this last year, as I was talking with the writer we were trying to figure out how to move some scenes around, or sort of what could go where. And I had him really rethink the whole thing in terms of sequences. And so basically like imagine this is the sequence that goes from here to here, the sequence that goes from here to here. And within that sequence, those are the edges of your sequence — what is the movie? Like imagine that little sequence as its own movie.

And maybe that’s the key to what the 70 to 90 is, is think about, well, given where we’re at what is the movie of 70 to 90 and how can we make the most interesting movie in that place?
Craig: That movie also is… — One thing, it’s funny, I actually have a weirdly opposite point of view that it is true, as we make choices, the breadth of choices that are available to us begin to narrow. But that section to me is actually the one place where you get to not worry about that because, for instance, that’s the point in movies a lot of times when somebody gets really drunk, or gets high, or has a vision, or a dream. That part of the movie you’re allowed to almost become non-linear. And then arrive at something kind of —

Aline: But you need propulsion. It’s too late in the movie to not be propulsive. And I often find I’m in that section cutting stuff because it feels early act two-y.

Craig: Maybe so. I mean, to me if you’ve gotten your character to a place where they are disconnected from the life they had, but they are no longer at the life they need to live, then you’re allowed to get arty horror, I guess. I don’t know how else to put it. You’re allowed to break the rules of your movie and actually plunge them into a moment where out of it they can have an epiphany or something.

I was just telling John before the show began that I’m plotting out the story of the script that I’m about to write and I got to this point. And I understood that my character needed to have an epiphany, but well how do you have — it’s hard to create an epiphany. If you can create it that simply then it’s probably not that satisfying.

So, part of what I did was just relax. I don’t know how else to put it. Like you can start to beat yourself up when you get to that section because you feel like, oh my god, ugh. And then it has to make this half propulse and make the ending happen and all the rest. I just weirdly just relaxed.

Aline: But I do think it’s the point where the audience starts to get shifty. It’s just the part in the movie after the first hour and it’s the thing that I always refer to in meetings as you really don’t want people to be sitting there going, “Did I park on P2 or P3? Honey, was it P2 or P3?” And they’re thinking that. And that’s where if it’s going to go south it’s going to be there.

I mean, you have such tremendous goodwill in act one. You really do. And I always find, I have a friend who watches movies going, “I’m at an A. I’m at an A+. I’m at a B. I’m at a B-. I’m at a C.” Like that’s how he experiences a movie. And so often you watch a movie and you’re like, I’m at an A. I don’t know why people didn’t like this. I’m at an A. I’m at an A. But getting back to you’re like at a B. And then it’s always an hour in where you’re like, oh, we just wandered into D- here. Like we’ve lost our way.
That’s always the — that really is. That’s why I say, “Rocky shoals, men from the boys, you know?”

Craig: Yeah. Because you can get into a treading water syndrome where you kind of think, oh, I’m not allowed to have my ending yet. I need to do some work. You actually don’t. Like for instance one solution to your 71 to 90 problem is that it’s really 71 to 80.

John: Yeah, you’re cutting it short.

Aline: And you know what I will say? I worked with Alex Kurtzman and he said something to me that I really think about all the time. He’s like, “You always need less stuff than you think you need.”

Craig: It’s so true.

Aline: It is so true. You pack up for your screenplay and you’ve got like giant suitcases and a duffle and a carryon slung across you. And you always get through and go, “Why did I bring all this stuff? I didn’t need all this stuff.”

Craig: But you don’t know what you need until you get to the resort.

Aline: You don’t know what you need until you get there!

Craig: Yeah, but you should just be willing to not wear everything at once. Right.

John: Well, let’s talk about like that heading into that last section. If we talk about a movie as being a character’s transformation and hopefully you’re going to have this arc of transformation. They start at one place and they end up in a different place. And that transition to act three is really the lowest of the lowest, that moment of great transformation. Everything seems lost. All hope is gone.
There may be an opportunity in that 70 to 90 phase for the character to try a new thing, to try a new persona, to try a new approach that may not end up succeeding, but you can see it’s a step on their way to this next thing. So, they wouldn’t get to the character they’re going to be at the end if they hadn’t tried this new thing. And that could lead you into the new thing.

It may also be a moment for — I’m a big believer in burning down the house. Like literally I will burn down the house as much as I possibly can. And sometimes you’re burning down the house at the start and that’s instigating the whole story. But sometimes you’re burning down the house at the act two moment, that’s like that was the worst of the worst and their house got burned down. But it can be a fascinating time to literally burn down their house or destroy everything they have at that moment before the real end of act two. And so this is a section where they’re forced to sort of be on their own. They’re force to sort not be able to go back.

Aline: I’ll give you a somewhat, it’s not super specific, but in the script I’m writing midway through this character has had a relationship with — a woman has had a relationship with a man. And halfway through she realizes he’s not who she thought she was. And the third act is her realizing, oh, he’s a good guy. I’m going to go help him and save him.

But in between, oh, he’s not the person I thought he was, in that 70 to 90, she’s trying to decide or figure out is he the good guy or bad guy of this story. That’s really what’s she’s doing is she’s going back and forth between trying to figure out was I right to be drawn to this person or not. And at the end she’s, yes, and she goes — so, she is in a treading water kind of a thing where she’s investigating and it is a little bit like a horror movie because she’s sort of going down halls and trying doors.

And my challenge has been to pick the things that allow her to be in a little bit of a suspended state, which you often are in that section, right?

Craig: Without feeling like —

Aline: Without feel like —

Craig: The movie is just flat-lining across. I know what you mean.

Aline: Yes. Exactly.

Craig: Well, sometimes also the way to approach those sections is to think of them as false endings. So, okay, in her mind this movie needs to end on page 90. So, perhaps then she just decides I’m going to make a decision. I don’t know if it’s the right decision or not, but I’m making a decision and I’m going to confront this person and I’m going to blow this thing up. And that’s going to be the end of this movie. And she does it. But then it’s not, you know?

Aline: Right. Right.

Craig: Or sometimes if it is a heist movie, this is where we’re going to do the thing, oh my god, it just —

Aline: Well that’s exactly, really smart, because that’s the part in the heist movie where everybody is moving in and getting the thing and the acrobat is in the box and all that stuff is happening. And I think one of the reasons really truly that I find it challenging is not often because I don’t know what to do, but because the execution of that, if it’s elegant and wonderful like it is in Ocean’s, if it’s an elegant, wonderful, surprising thing, it elevates the movie and if it’s the kind of thing where the audience goes, yeah, yeah, okay, so that’s the part where blah, blah — I think the onus on the level of execution in that particular thing is quite high. I just think they’re not in a — an audience is not in as forgiving a mood.

Craig: Yeah, no, you have to write it well.

Aline: Yes.

John: [laughs]

Aline: The solution to all your writing problems is write things well.

Craig: Yeah, you have to do that part good.

Aline: But I do find, I always think of it as like going down a
rapids thing and then you get there and you’re like, oh, you know, here it is. Rocky shoals.

John: Part of the challenge may be with your project, but all projects in that 70 to 90 phase is that you want to sort of keep your hero active. So, right now in your case like she’s opening doors and she’s investigating, but that character doesn’t necessarily know where the end is. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for.

Aline: Exactly. That’s right.

John: And I think part of the reason why movies often feel aimless in this part is you’re not communicating to the reader and to the audience what the character is trying to do and where the character thinks they’re headed. And so sometimes you just literally need to put a place or you need to put — explicitly state a goal, like I need proof that he is this person. I need proof that he really did this thing, so we know what they’re really trying to do.

Aline: I’ve noticed this a lot in action movies where they wrap their movie up on page 85 and they start a new movie.

Craig: Right.

John: Yup. Absolutely.

Aline: Every action, I mean, I actually really admired in X-Men it did not feel that way, the latest X-Men. I felt like it was a true continuation. But a bunch of the super hero movies I’ve seen and the action movies I’ve seen recently, it seems like you all just stop at the end of act two and then there’s new creatures, and new stakes. And then they go to a… — And that’s a note. In the third act you often go to a new setting, a new environment.

Craig: I actually don’t love that syndrome. And I think that’s part of the new creature of movie as theme ride theme room.

Aline: That’s exactly how it feels. It’s like that thing where you’re in that strap in a ride and you get around the corner and you see that last thing.

Craig: Right, you’re like, oh, I thought I was done, but there’s one more thing. You know, and that’s fine. But for an integrated story that you’re telling, I think, John’s got the exact right advice. There’s a — even if the character doesn’t have clarity, that’s good. But the audience needs clarity.

Aline: That’s right.

Craig: And you need clarity to know what the hell you need to do.

Aline: She doesn’t need to know what’s going on, but you don’t want the audience to be like, “What is she doing?”

Craig: Right. Even if she sets an artificial thing up, okay, I’m giving myself 48 hours. I’m like a jury now. I’m going to collect evidence over 48 hours and then I’m going to render a verdict. Verdict: you’re not good; I’m dumping you.

Aline: Right.

John: Another possibility would be to shift POV. So, if your
story has really locked POV to one character —

Aline: That’s when you can switch.

John: That might be the right moment to switch and actually see things from the other point of view.

Aline: Listen, you guys are very expensive, so if we do a lot more of this on the air I’m going to be owing you guys a lot of dough.

Craig: Uh, you already do.

John: Yeah.

Aline: That’s a great idea because you know what’s funny —

Craig: As John Gatins says, “The meter is running.”

Aline: It’s funny when you have a single perspective movie, it does get exhausting. And that’s a great kind of technical tip just to try, even if you don’t end up keeping it, which is go to the other lead, go to the other main relationship and write what they’re doing for awhile and see if that is — because that creates a nice intriguing mystery for the audience, which is you want to get back to your lead. That’s an excellent tip.

John: One of the other exercises I do with people when I’m sitting down and talking about their scripts is I’ll ask them like, okay, you have written a thriller here, but let’s imagine this as a crazy comedy. Let’s imagine this as a western. This imagine this in a completely different genre.

Aline: Yes

John: And sometimes you’ll figure out what the beats would be in that other kind of genre and that you won’t necessarily be able to apply those directly, but it will get you thinking in different ways.

So, in your case, if your movie is predominately not a thriller, but these are thriller moments, like let’s talk about the real thriller of this, and then you can sometimes bend those elements back into your —

Aline: Well, I don’t think it’s funny because this is sort of what Lindsay Doran’s thing is, but every movie I’ve written in any genre, you always start going — someone always says, or you say to yourself, “This is really a love story about these two people.”

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: All movies are.

Aline: Always. All movies are.

Craig: If they’re done right.

Aline: They’re always a love story between two people.

John: 21 Jump Street is a love story.

Aline: Sometimes you have the wrong people. I mean, name any movie we love, ET, even movies that are — every Hitchcock movie. I mean, they’re love stories.

John: Cast Away.

Craig: All movies have a central relationship. All of them. And knowing your central relationship and playing that through. And she has this great thing. She talks about how some movies it’s do a thing, and then you get the relationship. And some movies the relationship is the thing.

Aline: That’s right.

Craig: Which I love. I love both kinds.

Aline: That’s great.

Craig: But I think it’s not — the Rocky Shoals aren’t so rocky. You know, we know this because we get through them. Once you’re done with it, and you’ve fixed it, and you know what you’re doing and you’ve solved that problem, when you look back you go, “There’s no rocks. There’s no shoals.”

Aline: Yeah, well, of course. Any writing problem once you fix it it’s like why was that a problem, yeah.

Craig: So, I guess my point is that over time, we’ve been doing this long enough to know, when you get to that place, see if you can’t subtract the fear of it from the equation. The answer may come, I don’t know if it will be a better answer, but it will probably come quicker. I do believe that. I believe that relaxing and not tensing up will probably make it go faster. I love speed.

John: Yeah, speed is good.

Craig: Speed.

[Episode 392]

John: Cool. Our big marquee topic I want to get into today is the final moment in movies, or I guess episodes of TV, but I’m really thinking more in movies. And this came to mind this morning because there was an article talking about the end of Captain Marvel. This is not even a spoiler, but at the end of the original version of Captain Marvel she flew off into space and they changed it so she flew off into space with some other characters. And it was an important change and sort of giving you a sense of where the character was headed next.
And it got me thinking that in pretty much every movie I’ve written that last moment, that last beat, has changed from the pitch to the screenplay to the movie. And I sort of want to focus on why that moment is so important and also why it tends to change so much.

Craig: Interesting. And it’s funny because for me because I’m obsessed with that moment it actually rarely doesn’t change – it doesn’t change much for me.

John: OK.

Craig: But that’s in a sense because I think I weirdly start with it. I don’t know.

John: I start with it, too. And so as I was thinking back to Aladdin, my pitch for it had a very specific runner that had a very definite end beat. And so when I pitched it to Disney and also I just pitched it casually to Dana Fox, it made Dana Fox cry that last line, the last image of that last moment. It’s not in the movie at all. It totally changed in ways that things change.

But I would say even the movies like Big Fish and other things which have been very much, you know, we shot the script, those last moments and sometimes the last image really does change because it’s based on the experience of sitting through the whole movie and sort of where it’s deliberated to.
So let’s talk about that last moment as a way of organizing your thoughts when you’re first thinking about the story and then what it looks like at all the different stages.

Craig: Well, to start with, we have to ask what the purpose is. You know, I think sometimes people think of the last shot in cinematic terms. Somebody rides off into the sunset. So the last shot really is about sunsets. But of course it’s not.
For me the final moment, the final shot, that last image contains the purpose of the entire thing. Everything comes down to that. If your movie was about the love between two people, then that is that final moment. We’ve talked about Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk where she talks about how movies are really about relationships. And she would cite how sometimes she would ask people well what was the last image of some movie, The Karate Kid, and a lot of people don’t remember it is Mr. Miyagi’s face. Proud. It’s Daniel and then Mr. Miyagi looking at each other and there’s pride.

So, figuring out the purpose of that last shot is kind of your step one of determining what it’s supposed to be. And you can’t get there unless you kind of know what the hell your whole movie is about in the first place.

John: Yeah. I mean, movies are generally about a character taking a journey. A character leaving home and getting to some place. But it’s also about the movie itself starting at a place and getting to a place. And that destination is generally that last beat, that last moment, that last image. And so of course you’re going to be thinking about that early on in the process of where do you want to end up. And way back in Episode 100 there was a listener question and someone asked us I have a couple different ideas for movies and I’m not sure which one I should start writing. And my answer was you should pick the one with the best ending because that’s the one you’ll actually finish.

Craig: Right.

John: And if you start writing without having a clear sense of where you’re going to you’re very likely to either stop writing it or get really off track and having to sort of strip away a lot of what you’ve done. So, having a clear sense of this is where I think the movie lands is crucial. It’s like the plane is going to land on this runway tells you, OK, I can do a bunch of different stuff but ultimately I have to make sure that I’m headed to that place. You may not be signaling that even to the reader, to the audience, so that they’re not ahead of you, but you yourself have to know where this is going.

Craig: John, when you were in grade school and you had some sort of arts and crafts assignment and the teacher said you need to draw a circle, and you just have to draw a circle. You don’t have a thing to trace. Were you a good circle drawer?
John: I was a fair circle drawer. I know it’s a very classic artistic lesson is how to trust your hand to do the movements and how to think about what a circle is. Were you a good circle drawer?

Craig: No. Absolutely horrendous. If you ask me to draw a circle you would end up with some sort of unclosed cucumber. And the reason I bring this up is because to me the classic narrative is a circle. We begin in a place and we end in that same place. There is a full return. Of course we are changed, but the ending reflects the beginning. The beginning reflects the ending. There is a circle.

If you don’t know your ending and you don’t know how the circle finishes it’s quite probable that you won’t know how to start the circle either. That you will end up with an unclosed cucumber, like nine-year-old Craig Mazin attempting to draw someone’s head. This is how things go off. This is where, I think, people can easily get lost as they’re writing their script because they realize that the story has developed in such a way that it wants to end somewhere but it has really not a strong click connection to the beginning.
One of my favorite albums is Pink Floyd’s The Wall, I think it’s Pink Floyd The Wall. And Pink Floyd The Wall, they play little games, the Pink Floyd folks did, and one of the games they play in Pink Floyd The Wall is very low volume at the very beginning. You hear this tiny little song and then someone says, “We came in.” And then at the very end, the very end, they’re playing the song and it finishes and then you hear someone say, “Isn’t this where?” And that’s exactly the kind of thing that blows a 15-year-old boy’s life, but it also was satisfying. You felt things were connected and they chose to make the very last moment some sort of indication that the beginning is relevant.

It’s the way frankly Watchmen ends. It’s the same thing. There’s this beautiful come around with that last final look.

John: Now, because we’re talking about narrative circles I need to acknowledge that Dan Harmon has this whole structure thing that’s based on a circle where there’s a circle and there’s these little lines across it that characters go on this journey. That’s absolutely a valid approach if you want to think about story that way.
That’s not quite what we’re talking about.

Craig: No.

John: We’re talking about how in general a character leaves from a place and gets to a place, but in both cases they’re either finding a new home or returning to a previous home changed. And so just a character walking around in a circle isn’t a story. A character being profoundly changed and coming to this environment with a new understanding that is a change. And sometimes it won’t be that one character. Sometimes it’s the narrative question you’ve asked at the beginning of the story has gone through all these permutations and landed you back at a place that lets you look at that question from a new way.

So it’s either answering the question or reframing the question in a way that is more meaningful. So that’s what we’re talking about, the narrative comes full circle. There’s a place that you were headed and that place that you were headed reflects where you began.

Craig: No question. And it’s really clear to us how someone has changed when we put them back where they were when we met them. It’s just one of those things where you can say, oh, here’s the variable. Where we begin is the control. Our character is the variable. Start at the beginning, get me to the end, and let me see the difference. And sometimes it’s very profound.
You know, we start and end in the same place in Finding Nemo, but we can see how different it is in the same place because the variable has changed and that’s your character.

John: So, I’m finishing the third Arlo Finch book right now which is the end of the trilogy, and so each of the books has had that sense of like, OK, reflecting where the book began and where the book ended and there is a completion there. But it’s been fun to actually see the whole trilogy. And it’s like, OK, this is the journey that we went on over the course of this year of Arlo Finch’s life. And yes he’s physically in the same space but he’s a completely different character in that same space and has a different appreciation for what’s happened.
And so being able to go back to previous locations where things have happened you see that his relationship to them is completely different because he’s a different character having been changed by what’s gone on. That’s what we’re really talking about with that last beat and how the last beat has to reflect where the character started and what has happened to the character over the course of the journey.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, you would not – reading Arlo Finch you would never expect that he would end up a savage murderer, but he does.

John: [laughs] It’s really shocking for middle grade fiction.

Craig: Well it is. But then when you look back you go, oh yeah, you know what, he was laying the groundwork for that all along. It actually makes sense. He’s a nightmare. Then there’s the
Dark Finch trilogy that comes next. Oh, you know what? Dark Finch trilogy is not a bad idea.

John: Dark Finch sounds pretty good.

Craig: You should do it.

John: I think it’s going to be a crossover with Derek Haas’s books about his assassin.

Craig: Oh yeah. Silver Bear.

John: Silver Bear.

Craig: Silver Bear. Dark Finch. That sounds like a Sondheim lyric. I love it.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: I love it. So, you know, when I’m thinking about these last images, everybody has a different way of thinking about this. But what I try and do really is actually think about it in terms of a last emotion. What is it that I want to feel? Do I want to feel comfort? Do I want to feel pride? Do I want to feel love? Do I want to feel hope? The movie that I worked on with Lindsay Doran, which is I think my favorite feature script, and so of course it hasn’t been made. They make the other ones, not those. The last shot to me was always an expression of the kind of bittersweet salute to the people who are gone. You know, it’s a coming of age story and the last shot when I just thought about the emotion at the end, the emotion at the end was the kind of sad thankfulness for having known someone who is no longer with you.
And I go, OK, I can wrap myself in that. That feels like a good emotion. And I know how that is reflected by the beginning. How you then express it that can change.

John: For sure.

Craig: And often changes frequently. But this is an area where I think movies sometimes fail because the system of movies is designed to separate the writer and her intention from the actual outcome, so a writer will have an intention like I want my movie to end with the bittersweet thankfulness for those who are no longer with us. That is my emotional intention. And here is how I would execute it.

Nobody else sees the intention underneath, or they don’t understand it, and they just go, “Well you know what? We don’t like necessarily the way they’re executing that. Let’s make a new execution. Let’s do this. Let’s do that. Let’s make it noisy. Let’s make it loud. Let’s make it funny.” And the intention is gone. And then you get to the movie and you show it and people go, “Well, the ending.” And you’re like, yeah, the ending, and that writer never really nailed the ending.

John: Ha.

Craig: You see how it goes? It’s just freaking brutal.

John: Yeah. That’s never happened to me once in my career. Let’s talk about what that ending looks like in the different stages. So, in the pitch version of it, you know, obviously we talked about in pitches that I would describe it as you’re trying to convince your best friend to see this movie that you’ve seen that they’ve not seen. So you’re really talking a lot about the characters and how it starts. And you may simplify and summarize some things, especially in the second and third act about stuff. But you will tend to describe out that last moment, that last beat, because you’re really talking about what is the takeaway experience going to be for a person who has watched this movie that you’re hopefully going to be writing.

So, in a pitch you’re going to have a description of what that last moment is because that’s really important. It’s the reason why someone should say yes to reading your script, to buying your script, to hiring you to write that script. So that last moment is almost always going to be there in the pitch, even if it’s not fully fleshed out, to give you a sense of what you want the audience and the readers to take away from reading the script.

Craig: What I’m thinking about in a room where I’m relaying something to somebody is ultimately how do I want them to – I want to give them a fuzzy at the end. I want to give them some sort of fuzzy feeling. I don’t want to give them plot. If I finish off with plot, so for instance, let’s say I’m in a room and I’m pitching Star Wars.

What I don’t want to do is get to the end and say, “And in our last shot our hero receives a medal which he deserved.” What I want to talk about is how a kid – I would bring it back to the beginning and say this farm boy who didn’t know about this world beyond him, didn’t know about the Force, who didn’t know about the fate of his father or the way he can maybe save the world, he is the one who saved the galaxy. And at last he knows who he is.

See, some sort of sense of connected feeling to the beginning. If you’re selling plot at the end then what you’re really selling is what Lindsay Doran calls the end that people think is the end but not the actual end.

John: Well, let’s take your example of Star Wars because you might pitch it that way, but then when it comes to writing the script you actually have to write this scene that gets you to that moment. And so as you’re writing that scene at the last moment you’re looking at what is the medal ceremony like, who is there, what is said, but most importantly what is the emotional connection between those characters who are up there. Actually painting out the world so we can see like, OK, this is why it’s going to feel this way. This is clearly the intention behind this scene but also I’m giving you the actual things you need to give us that feeling at the end.

And so in the script stage what was sort of a nebulous description of like this is what it’s going to feel like has to actually deliver on that promise.

Craig: Yeah. I always wondered – I hate being the guy who’s like would it be better if a movie that everybody loved ended like this – but the last shot of Star Wars is the medal ceremony, right. And then you have them looking at each other, and so the emotion is the relationships between them. But I always wondered what would happen if the last-last shot of Star Wars was Luke Skywalker returning back to Tatooine a different man and kind of starting a new beginning, a new hope. You know, that vibe of returning. I always wondered if I would feel more at the end if I saw him return.
John: I think it’s worth exploring. I think if you were to try to do that though it would just feel like one more beat. It would feel like the movie was over when he got the medal and you had this swell. Whether the journey was this is a kid who is all on his own who forms a new family, so like going back to where his dead family was wouldn’t feel like the kind of victory.

Craig: Dead family.

John: Dead family. So I think you want to see his joy and excitement rather than sort of the – I would just imagine the music would be very different if he had gone back to Tatooine at the end. It wouldn’t feel like a triumph.

Craig: Yeah, no, you’re right. And I guess then the payload for that final bit is really the looks between Leia and Luke and Han and Luke. That it’s we’re a family, we’re friends, we did it. We went through something nobody else understands.

John: So let’s say you’ve written the script, you’ve gone into production, and 100 days of production there’s finally a cut and you see that last moment in the film and it’s different, or it doesn’t work, or the way you had it written on the page doesn’t work. In my experience it’s generally because the movie sort of got – the actual movie that you watched isn’t quite the movie that’s on the page just naturally. And as people are embodying those characters things just feel different. Obviously some scenes get cut, things get moved around. And where you kind of thought you were headed is not really where you’ve ended up. And so you have to make some sort of change there.

In some cases it’s reshoots. In some cases you’re really shooting a new last scene. You realize this was not the moment that we thought we wanted to get to at the end. But in some cases it is just a matter of this shot versus that shot. Whose close-up are we ending on? You talk about Mr. Miyagi. I bet they tried it a bunch of different ways and it would make more sense to end on Daniel rather than Mr. Miyagi, but ultimately Mr. Miyagi was the right choice.

They’re thinking about what does the music feel at this moment. How are we emotionally landing, the payload here. And the music is going to be a big factor. So, there’s going to be a lot of things conspiring to get that last image, that last moment of the movie. And you may not have been able to anticipate that on the page.

Craig: No question. And this is why it’s really important for you to understand your intention because it may work out that your intention didn’t carry through in the plan. But if we know the intention and we have married the beginning to the end then the beginning has set up this inexorable domino effect. You have landed at the end. You require a feeling. Let’s see if we can make that feeling editorially a different way. And if we can’t, OK, let’s go back and reconsider what it’s supposed to be.

In rare circumstances you do get to a place where you realize, oh my god, having gone through this movie it’s really about this. It turns out we care more about this than this. This relationship matters more than this relationship. OK. So, now we have to think of the beginning, let’s recontextualize what our beginning means and then let’s go ahead and fix an ending.
But the ending can never be just – do you know what? “It just needs to be more exciting.” That’s nonsense.

John: The danger is a lot of times in test screenings they’ll see like, OK, the numbers are a little bit low here and people dipped at the end, so let’s add some more razzmatazz to this last little beat, or like an extra thing. And generally people don’t want more. They don’t want bigger or more, they just want to actually exit the movie at the right time with the right emotion. And that’s the challenge.

Craig: Right. How do you leave them feeling is the biggest.
John: So sometimes though the opposite holds true. Just this last week I was watching a rough cut of a friend’s film. And he has this really remarkable last shot and these two characters and their relationship has changed profoundly. But as I watched it I was like oh that’s a really great last shot/last moment for kind of a different movie than I saw. But when I looked at the movie I had seen before that I was like, oh yeah, you could actually do some reconfiguring to get you to that moment and actually have it make sense. So it was really talking about this is where we get to at the end. I think you’re not starting at the right place. And so therefore you may want to take a look at those first scenes and really change our expectations and change what we’re following over the course of the movie because doing that you could land at that place and it would feel really meaningful.

Craig: Again, the beginning is the end is the beginning. Right? If something is not working in that where your circle is supposed to connect up and you ended up with an open cucumber, then either the ending is wrong, or the beginning is wrong, or they’re both wrong.

John: Ha.

Craig: But it’s usually one or the other. And it is I think tempting at times to say, “Well, since the ending is the last thing, everything else is the pyramid and this this thing sits atop the pyramid, this is the easiest thing to fix.” And, John, you’re absolutely right. Sometimes the easiest thing to fix is the beginning.

John: Yeah. Change the expectations of the audience as they go into it and you can get them there.

Craig: Match them to where they’re going to arrive.

John: All right. That is our discussion of that final moment.

[Bonus segment]

John: All right. I’m here with Megana Rao our producer. Megana, why did you pick these segments for today’s episode?

Megana Rao: I guess because I’m approaching the rocky shoals in my own project and rewriting it. And so I obviously turn to Scriptnotes for advice.

John: All right. So you don’t get enough of me and Craig just talking normally.

Megana: Exactly.

John: You listen to old back episodes. Now we’re talking about endings so much in this, and I feel like we’re always talking about beginnings in this podcast, like sort of how you get started, how you break the seal and get started writing, but we don’t talk enough about finishing stuff up in terms of your work and your craft. With you and a script how do you – if you’re finished with the day’s work what does it look like and are you just walking away from your laptop? Like when you’re done what do you do?

Megana: I feel like if it’s a good day’s work I’m usually pretty hungry. I’m usually pretty hungry or you know sometimes you have that feeling where my mind is still buzzing but there’s nothing in there. I still have a lot of energy in my body so I’ll go for a walk or I’ll workout then.

John: Yeah.

Megana: But basically just not writing and not looking at my computer.

John: Yeah. I think it is important to sort of make a clean break from your writing time to your non-writing time, because you will still have stuff swirling there and you should take some notes. I tend to if I’m sort of writing more or less in sequence or I know what the next thing is I would be writing I’ll take some really quick little notes about what happens next just so I can plan for it, so that my next – I’m trying to do a favor to my future self.

Megana: Aw.

John: And put some stuff down there so that Tomorrow John will be able to get some stuff actually written there. In Highland that’s where I would use the synopsis format where there’s little equal signs there. It’s not meant to be real material, but it’s just bullet points for what happens next.

Megana: And then the next day are you going back and rereading your work?

John: I’m not rereading from the start, but I’ll try to at least reread what I just wrote the day before so I can get a sense of what the flow was. And I will make some small changes in that to get back up to speed and obviously you recognize some things that you didn’t notice the first time. And so you can polish that a little bit. But I will try not to go back too far because otherwise you’re just constantly revising stuff you’ve already worked on and you’re not actually moving the cursor forward.

Megana: Totally. And when you finish a writing session do you go back and read those pages?

John: Not immediately. Sometimes I will print, like I’ll print them for you so that they’re down there. It’s sort of that closure on that idea. But I will save the file and sort of walk away from the laptop. I’m trying not to focus on it too much.

Now, how about at the end of the day? Are you doing anything at the end of your work day or the end of getting ready for bed that is creative?

Megana: I don’t think so. I feel like I’m a night owl and so my best writing time is either 9pm to midnight or 7am to 10am. But we live in a morning-biased world. So most of my nighttime is trying to get my body to sleep when it’s so tough because as soon as the sun goes down I’m just awake.

John: Yeah. Classically I was oriented the same way where I was very much a night owl. And I loved to write from like 8pm until 2 in the morning. And sort of once you have kids that stops becoming an option. And also just like you’re trying to have a life and do other things and see friends. It does get in the way of a lot of things. And so I’ve had to much more shift to like, you know, my work life is 9 to 6 as much as possible as I can do.

But, the creative brain is still functioning really well at night and sometimes that stuff is coming up, so I do have as you’ve seen a stack of note cards beside the bed and I will just write down the stuff that’s in my head so I can get it out of my head. And capture it. And that helps me sleep, too, because I’m not trying to keep a loop going in my head of I have to remember this beat or this moment or this line of dialogue. I write it down, get it out of my head, and I have a constant system where I put it on the door, on the floor, by the door so I will see it as I’m headed downstairs in the morning. So I know that I’ve captured it and I won’t forget it and then I don’t have to worry about it.

Megana: Yeah, sometimes I’ll journal and write goals or things that I want to write in the morning before I go to bed and that helps me turn that part off.

John: Now is that journaling at all like The Artists’ Way, that classic technique of getting stuff out of your brain?

Megana: Yeah. I think that that’s where it started, the sort of morning pages of doing the – I’m not doing a full three pages, but as you know I’m such a deep sleeper and my dreams are really intense, so I need to write in the morning to remind myself that I am awake and starting my day. That journaling in the morning helps me make that transition.

John: Let’s circle back to where you are at in the script you’re at right now because you said you were in the rocky shoals situation. And is that because you feel like you’re having to shift gears from the first engine of your story to the end game of your story? Or do you feel that you haven’t adequately planned for the section? What kind of stuff are you feeling about the section of the script you’re in right now?

Megana: The supporting characters, I feel like I have gotten to know them too much. That my original ending doesn’t feel satisfying anymore.

John: That makes a lot of sense. You’re going to discover a lot about your characters over the course of writing, and especially if you’re writing in sequence you spend 70 pages with them and you might have had one plan for them but they’ve told you who they are in ways that’s different as you’ve gotten to this point. Listening back to the segments that you picked for this show, are there any insights from that that you think you can actually use?

Megana: In your discussion of the final moment where you talk about getting to this final moment and then having to rewrite your beginning because of that, like I have come to the realization that that is what I’m going to end up having to do.

John: It’s giving yourself permission to do that. Because you might have had absolute, fantastic, perfect opening image, opening moment for the story you did not end up writing.

Megana: Exactly. Exactly. It is, yeah, it’s a weird feeling and I’m like, ugh, it feels like I have gotten to know these people and now I can’t shut them up.

John: Yeah. You’re also suffering from a bit of the curse of knowledge. Because you know who those characters are at page 70 in ways that the audience wouldn’t. So, again, you have all the blessings of wisdom of living with these characters and really knowing who they are, but you have to remind yourself that a person picking up the script for the first time won’t know these things, so you have to introduce them as strangers too.

Megana: Yeah.

John: And that’s honestly one of the really tricky things about getting through this pass and sort of – it’s not even really your second pass. It’s that draft 1.5 is remembering, oh that’s right, you have information that the normal reader would not have.

Megana: Oh. I have to walk away. If this wasn’t on a mic stand I would have dropped it for you. Wait, but did you want to talk about your nighttime rituals?

John: So my nighttime ritual is obviously using the cards is really helpful to get stuff out of my head. And if there’s a thing that’s the main thing I’m writing and I don’t have it all figured out I will as I close my eyes to get to sleep I will try to think about that space and be in that space. And I won’t necessarily dream about it but it just reminds me that it’s the most important thing to be working on.

I’ll also write myself some cards like focus on this first tomorrow. As I get started on the day’s work I’ll know like, oh, those are the things I actually really wanted to write. And so the scenes you just read today those came out of cards last night saying like write this scene between these characters, do the new version of this, and that sort of sets the priority, the agenda for what my writing is going to be like the next day. Because as you know it’s just so easy to be distracted from actually getting started doing the work and so to close up a day’s work with notes about what you want to tackle next feels important.

Megana: So you’re not writing at night at all?

John: I’m almost never writing at night. Unless there’s something urgent I’m almost never writing at night. There have been times where I’ll have to excuse myself, I really do have a great new idea that I want to tackle. But as a parent and husband you can’t do that too often.

Megana: Yeah. That makes sense.

John: Now, we’ve talked about the end of your writing day, the end of the day, sort of getting ready for bed. But what about finishing up a script? Because at this point you’ve now finished a couple of scripts. And do you have – what is working for you in terms of feeling closure, completion with the stuff you’re writing?

Megana: I will usually send it to a friend and then I will like treat myself to something nice, like maybe a nice blouse.

John: The equivalent of me treating myself to Panda Express.

Megana: Exactly. Like I’ll buy a piece of clothing that I like, or I will go treat myself to a nice dinner.

John: Which is I think a smart way to reward yourself. We’re in the middle of NaNoWriMo right now so, or I guess we’ve just started NaNoWriMo, and when I was doing the Arlo Finch book which started as a NaNoWriMo project I loved the daily routing of like OK I have to hit my 1,500 words or 1,600 words in order to hit this goal. But it did feel weirdly artificial because I didn’t necessarily feel like I was achieving any sort of story purpose. It was a very artificial sort of boundary behind stuff.

One thing I do very much like about screenwriting is that a scene begins or it ends. It’s just done and you can have some closure. And there can be short scenes. And there can be short moments that feel intact and full. But getting to the end of an Arlo Finch book was just so amazing because I could just look at all the words that I had done. There wasn’t even time to reread the whole book because it just takes too long to read a whole book. So those feelings of completion, like I actually had some postpartum joy and depression for a week or two after finishing one of those giant books.

Megana: There’s such a fleeting moment between feeling so proud of yourself and then being like, wait, was that shit? Now I have to reread it and edit it and face my own writing judgment.

John: Yeah. So as we end this segment on endings any thoughts about the next topic that will be good to do as one of these clip shows? Because we hadn’t done clip shows before you became a producer. So, any other things you want to think about? Do you want listener suggestions?

Megana: I would love listener suggestions. And to hear what other people are struggling with.

John: Yeah. Megana, thank you so much.

Megana: Thanks John.

Links:

• Scriptnotes Episode 44: Endings for Beginners
• Scriptnotes Episode 152: The Rocky Shoals
• Scriptnotes Episode 392: The Final Moment
• Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Henry Adler (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/the-one-with-jack-thorne).

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

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

**John August:**
This is episode 530 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ll look at making TV in the U.S. versus the UK, and what writers on either continent need to know. Then we’ll discuss disability on screen and behind screen. As we get ready to move into 2022, we’ll focus on some goals you can control. Now, Craig, since you and I are not well versed on several of these topics, could you suggest someone who could talk to us more eloquently about these issues?

**Craig Mazin:**
When you’re looking for somebody who is eloquent and you can’t find that person, you immediately to turn to Jack Thorne. One of my past One Cool Things, one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite people in the world, Jack is, among other things, very tall. He is wonderfully British and a spectacularly good and almost as importantly, spectacularly prolific writer. Among his as many brilliant credits are the The Aeronauts, National Treasure, not the looking for treasure in the U.S., but National Treasure, the sexual abuse scandal film that was done in the UK, Wonder, Enola Holmes, The Secret Garden. Television credits include His Dark Materials, Skins, Shameless, and the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, along with the miniseries This is Britain. Basically Jack is kind of the cornerstone, as far as I’m concerned, of modern English screenwriting for feature and television, and again, one of my favorite people in the world. If he weren’t already wonderful enough, he’s gone and kind of out-sainted you, John, which is really hard to do, by giving voice to an issue that has gotten a bit of a short shrift as our industry, global industry, has attempted to rectify sins of the past and do better for everyone working within. That is advocacy for disabilities and the representation of disabilities and disabled folks on screen. Welcome Jack Thorne.

**Jack Thorne:**
Thank you for having me. You’re very nice.

**Craig Mazin:**
I agree.

**John August:**
Jack Thorne manages to be incredibly humble. Even in emails, you could hear his voice. This is the first time I’m really meeting him, but you could hear his humility in an email like, “Oh, I shouldn’t even be on the show.” It’s like, of course you should be on the show. Thank you very much for agreeing to join us here.

**Jack Thorne:**
You’re very kind. I feel like I sort of thrust myself upon you, but yes, all good.

**John August:**
Now we’re going to talk about these things, but I also want to, for a bonus topic, get into the differences between American English and British English and sort of how you reveal which side of the pond you’re on in your screenwriting and whether you should basically put the U’s in the words when you’re writing a British thing. We’ll get the official answer from you about writing American versus writing British.

**Craig Mazin:**
Just spoiler alert. Don’t use the phrase fanny pack when you’re writing in England.

**John August:**
Now, as I was watching your MacTaggart lecture, which we’re going to put a link in the show notes to, it was one of Craig’s previous One Cool Things, we have questions about it from our listeners, but as I started listening to it, I recognized that this is a famous lecture given every year at the Edinburgh Film Festival, Edinburgh TV Festival I guess, about television. Can you just give us a sense of what the MacTaggart lecture is? Your being chosen for it was an honor, of course, but also probably a huge responsibility. Then we can maybe transition into really talking about British television, because I kind of only barely understand it.

**Jack Thorne:**
The MacTaggart is a big thing. It’s had all sorts of different stages in its existence. More recently it’s had quite a lot of makers talk. Michaela Coel famously gave a speech which laid the groundwork for what became I May Destroy You. Before that there was a period when it just basically took the most powerful people in television and gave them a microphone, which included at one point an excruciating lecture from James Murdoch. It’s had lots of different iterations. Everyone from Dennis Potter to Troy Kennedy has done it at different points, and it was a ridiculous honor to be given it, and as you say, a huge responsibility, because coming out of COVID in particular, it was clear what I needed to talk about, but whether I had the necessary means to talk about those things, whether I had the moral power to talk about those things, were questions I really wrestled with.

**Craig Mazin:**
Let’s talk about your moral qualifications. By the way, I should apologize. The shows you work on were called This Is England, not This Is Britain, but I’m a donkey, so this’ll happen every now and again. Why were you wondering if you were morally qualified to deliver this talk? In what ways do you have any kind of personal insight into this, or why this? Why connect it to this topic for you?

**Jack Thorne:**
I walk a really weird line where disability is concerned in that I was a disabled person. I had a physical breakdown when I was 21. I got this condition called cholinergic urticaria, which left me unable to move. I became allergic to heats in all its forms. I became allergic to sunlight. I became allergic to radiators. I became allergic to my body movement. Every time I moved, I provoked an allergic reaction. I spent six months flat on my back, and then slowly but surely I worked out how to get better. I got on the right medication and I got the right doc support. It was about 12 to 15 years of my life, I was very limited in terms of what I could do, but I got better.

**Jack Thorne:**
Now during that time, there’s this theater company in the UK called Graeae. Graeae are this wonderful company, disabled-led, that’s trying tell stories about the disabled experience with disabled performers and disabled writers and disabled makers. They have this open day. I went along to this open day, unsure whether I belonged or not. I talked to a woman there called Alex Baumer, and she said, “Of course you belong here. You are a disabled person.” It felt like something just kind of … My back straightened. It was like, “Oh right, this is where my pain makes sense,” because the thing is, if you are battling pain every day as I was, you don’t really know who to talk to about it. There comes a point where people get a bit bored of hearing you talk about it, and so you sort of stop talking about it. That thing of being part of a community of people for whom pain was an everyday occurrence and who navigated these things, and it didn’t mean that I had someone to moan to, it just meant that I felt like I belong somewhere.

**Jack Thorne:**
The way I talk about myself now is I was a disabled person, I am now a member of the disabled community. Whether that’s legitimate or not, I don’t know, but it’s what I cling to because I think that that experience and what happened to me is a history that’s still very current in my body, and it’s a history that’s still very current in my head. I’m trying to, as much as I can, do disabled work and have disabled performers and disabled makers within my shows. I am in no way an angel where that is concerned. I have got it wrong a huge number of times. As I talk in the lecture, I have been a coward a huge number of times. That question as to can I talk about this, is it legitimate for me to talk about this, and how will people feel about me holding the microphone when I talk about these issues, when I’m not someone who has the stigma and the attacks, who isn’t coping currently with a disability, how will people feel about me being the one that’s holding that microphone?

**Craig Mazin:**
They seem to feel pretty good about it, from what I can tell. The response was dramatic and it was extremely well received, and for good reason. You have chosen an excellent cri de coeur, and you have delivered it beautifully. One of the things you talk about are the notion of invisible disabilities. Disability is something that affects everyone sooner or later. This is a universal condition at some point for everyone. Chronic pain is something that an enormous amount of people live with silently. I myself have lived with chronic pain now for about four years. I don’t talk about it much, or ever. Here I am. I’m okay. We carry on. I’m very British this way I suppose. I should start saying English. I’m very English this way. It is something that everybody deals with to some level or another.

**Craig Mazin:**
One of the things that I really admire about you is that while you have talked a little bit about how and why you came to be inside of this movement, you also don’t make it about yourself. You recognize that there are tiers of disability and that there are people who have been more egregiously treated and more egregiously left out. That is something that is happening on both sides of the camera, behind and in front, in terms of how people, when we create characters who are disabled, how we treat and portray them, who we hire to cast them, who is writing those characters. All these questions are now coming to the forefront in a way that I think had not happened until people like you, not only you, but people like you really started banging the gong over the last few years.

**Jack Thorne:**
The way I see it is that I’m temporarily in a spotlight for a moment. I was given that spotlight by the MacTaggart, and my job is to get out of that spotlight as fast as possible, which would be nice, personally would be nice, in order to let more legitimate people come to the front. I’m trying to do that in my working practice too, in terms of co-writing and producing and trying to change the dial so that the spotlight is filled with those people that it should be.

**John August:**
Great. Before we get to some of the recommendations about improving portrayals of disability on screen and the work behind screen, can we talk a little bit about the environment in which you’re giving this lecture? Because I don’t think we have anything equivalent to this in the United States. We have upfronts, which is the annual meeting of big advertisers where they pitch their big new shows. In the film industry we have the big exhibitor screenings where we’re talking about things. We don’t have a situation where there is one point of focus saying this is the state of the industry, this is an important thing we must focus on, whether it be you talking about this, Michaela Coel or Rupert Murdoch. We don’t have anybody talking about this and what needs to change, why it needs to change. I think you also bring up in the lecture is that television actually does have a moral responsibility because it is in everyone’s home. Can you talk to us about how television functions in the UK and if you feel like that might be different than how it functions in the U.S? I feel as an outsider, I think there is a central authority to television in the UK that does not exist in the U.S.

**Jack Thorne:**
That’s really interesting. It’s not something I’ve especially thought about in terms of comparing the two, but we do, I suppose, wrestle a bit more in this country, maybe with the general state of the industry rather than specific programs. The MacTaggart is supposed to be that conversation, what should TV be, because yeah, I think that TV is hugely important. I think it’s the stimulation of a conversation. If you look at the trajectory of where we are, I think TV, sometimes it’s reflecting society and sometimes it’s pushing society on. The movement between the West Wing to Succession is quite a stark point. What it means that we want society reflected that way, or is the reflection provoking the society that is, is I think a really, really fascinating question and something I think about an awful lot.

**Craig Mazin:**
You’ve got a situation in the UK where there seems to be a lot more state involvement in practically everything, and television is no exception. BBC, I don’t know if it is technically the most viewed channel on television, but it’s certainly-

**Jack Thorne:**
I would suspect so. I would suspect so.

**Craig Mazin:**
In the United States, PBS gets about 12 people a week watching it. I apologize, PBS. I know it’s more than that, but it’s very small. As John says, all of our gatherings, whether it’s the Television Critics Association or the upfronts as you mentioned, it’s all commerce. It’s all about selling. That’s partly because it is entirely a question of corporations and not at all a question of the state, and therefore there is no governmental interest or point of view in the United States. Television is an industry and it is not necessarily ever promoted as some kind of potential lever for good. I think that is a cultural difference between the United States and the UK that is stark. It makes a lot of sense that in the UK television and culture in general would be spoken about both in terms of commerce, but also in terms of how to promote the public good. I’m interested in how you feel things have gone practically. I know that at least in the public space of discussion, your lecture, as I mentioned before, was incredibly well received. It was reprinted and revideoed everywhere. I think it’s the kind of thing that makes people feel really good to talk about. My question is are they just talking about it or are things changing? Because ultimately I feel like the only prayer we have over here is in this instance seeing some leadership from your side of the pond.

**Jack Thorne:**
As part of what has happened in the last year, I’ve been part of this pressure group. We call ourselves a pressure group called Underlying Health Condition. We call ourselves Underlying Health Condition because we are angry at the appropriation of that phrase to describe essentially disabled people and disabled deaths. Certainly in the first half of the pandemic, the idea of dividing deaths in two seemed to go everywhere, where it was like, okay, there’s one set of deaths that we worry about and then there’s one set of deaths that we really don’t. We had our first Omicron death in this country recently. you saw the question being asked everywhere, which is, did he have an underlying health condition, in that should we be concerned or is it just happening to disabled people? We formed this pressure group, and we formed this pressure group to look at TV. My lecture came out of that pressure group, and now we’ve launched a report on the back of our findings. A number of different things have happened in the last six months, that straight after the lecture that the BBC and Netflix and Channel Four made commitments to disabled programming. There were certainly mooted commitments from Sky and Channel Five too.

**Jack Thorne:**
What we are focused on, I mean Underlying Health Condition, which isn’t just me, it’s me, Katie Player and Holly Lubran, who are two people that work behind the scenes, and Genevieve Barr, who is an actress and a co-writer of mine, we’ve done three things together, and a writer in her own right too, and what our focus has been on is accessibility, because TV is incredibly inaccessible. I’ve been sitting on panels with disabled actors and makers for the last 15 years, and at the start of every discussion, the first question that basically comes up is how do we make TV accessible to us, because we can’t use the toilet.

**Jack Thorne:**
Underlying Health Condition did a survey of facilities companies and of studio spaces. Facilities companies, one of the starkest findings was there is one accessible honey wagon. The honey wagon is our name for toilets. I don’t know whether you call the toilets-

**Craig Mazin:**
We call it that too.

**John August:**
Honey wagon, right.

**Jack Thorne:**
There’s one accessible honey wagon in the whole of the UK. For 20% of the population, there’s one toilet that they can use. I hear stories all the time from friends who are wheelchair users about trying to restrict how much they use the toilet, because using the toilet costs the production time, and they do not want to be responsible for costing the production time, because this is the reality for disabled people all the time, which is we do not want to cause trouble. If we cause trouble, we might not get hired again. On panels, every single time that would come up. From friends, every single time that would come up. We set out, trying to work out how our industry could break down the barriers, how we could reform the way that the industry functions so that if you are a disabled person, you are not excluded by the space you work in. The response to that has also been very good. We are at the start of that process. It’s going to require a big injection of time and money. Who knows what practical things will come out? Certainly at the moment I’m talking to very senior people in the BCC and Channel Four and ITV and in Sky and Amazon and Netflix, and going to find ways to address our recommendations. There is stuff happening. It’s just it’s going to take a while. It’s going to be hard.

**Jack Thorne:**
In terms of what you say about the U.S, that’s really interesting. We work closely with the One In Four Coalition, which was set up by a wonderful talent manager called Eryn Brown. What she’s done is amazing. One of our key recommendations is for an accessibility officer on every set.

**John August:**
That’s interesting.

**Jack Thorne:**
That comes from One In Four. They have been at the forefront of that. They say the same as you, which is maybe, if Britain, which is a smaller community with more government, maybe if Britain sets about answering some of these questions, then the ripples can be felt in the U.S.

**Craig Mazin:**
That’s really interesting.

**John August:**
We’re going to put links in the show notes to both the Underlying Health report and the One In Four Coalition to see the recommendations. There’s overlap between the two of them, but I want to focus on the four key recommendations that you have in your report, which they seem very practical, which really speaks to the fact that you are a person who makes television and understands that you need to actually be able to do things and achieve things and make things happen. The first recommendation is a line in every budget for needed adjustments. Talk to us about adjustments that might need to come up in a budget to make a show accessible to a disabled person.

**Jack Thorne:**
That was about making the production responsible for those adjustments. By the way, you say in terms of practicality, I am useless. I am one of the least practical people alive. Katie Player, who’s one of my co-writers on this, is a production manager. She understood behind the scenes a lot better than us. When it was coming up with these recommendations, she has been an invaluable part of that. The idea is that there is small fund, and by small we’re talking 5,000 pounds adjustable down if you’re a smaller production, which is available for interpreters, is available for ramps, is available for a stool, is available for anything that the accessibility officer or coordinator suggests that just might make the experience better. It’s not a radical sort of like, “Yeah, we’re going to have to build something specifically for a purpose.” It’s about adjusting what we’ve got.

**Jack Thorne:**
Katie worked on a show of mine a few years ago and managed to get a hold of a ramp that she now takes with her wherever she goes. She was working on another production where the ramp didn’t quite go down to the floor because the trailers were a bit higher, so someone built her a little wooden extension to the ramp. Those sorts of things, it’s not a huge amount of money, but it can make a huge difference that the production is prepared and ready and considering the adjustments that might be required for a disabled person.

**Craig Mazin:**
It doesn’t seem like that an enormous amount of resources are required. What’s required is a minimum of care. When we all started in the business and somebody was walking around, let’s say on some sort of elevated space in a scene, they would walk around and the stunt people would say, “Don’t get too close to the edge,” and you wouldn’t get too close to the edge. Now we tether people and we paint it out digitally because we have safety standards that are stricter. Yet as we have advanced the cause of safety where we can, we don’t have disabled accessible toilets or a trailer that has something other than steps on it. I watch even people who aren’t disabled but merely old struggle on sets. I struggle on sets at times just to get around and over things. It is not the most hospitable place. Changing things would not require a lot of money. It seems to me that it just needs attention, a small amount of attention, which is why I’m desperately hopeful that this kind of attention that you’re bringing to this is going to work.

**Craig Mazin:**
Normally what you hear is, “Yes, no, of course, and we’re absolutely looking into these things, but it’s a large budget item,” and rah rah blah blah blah, of course. They’re discussing this while they’re having dinner and charging it back to the production. Something for instance, you mentioned the idea of a disability coordinator I think. Is that what you called it, a disability coordinator?

**Jack Thorne:**
Accessibility.

**Craig Mazin:**
Accessibility coordinator. Even better. We have intimacy coordinators now. We never did before. In the old days there would be sex scenes, there would be scenes with nudity, and some of those sex scenes were violent and criminal in nature, and people would just do it. A lot of weird stuff happened. A lot of bad stuff happened. There was certainly an enormous amount of pressure on people and confusion about boundaries. Now we have an entire professional class of people who appear to help mitigate those problems. We’ve had somebody like that on our set, not for a sex scene, but just because there was something that involved some nudity. It was amazing having her there. She made everything really clear and simple. It was a relief. I would think that productions would want this, because it’s a relief to have somebody help you navigate through it, especially if you are running the production and you aren’t disabled and you don’t have a lot of personal experience with people with disabilities. Then let’s just hire the people who do and let’s make everybody comfortable and welcome, physically comfortable and physically welcome.

**Jack Thorne:**
Absolutely. Disability is a spectrum. It could be that there are people who identify as disabled and for whom the accessibility coordinator will make a huge, huge difference immediately. There are others on the set who won’t necessarily know how to talk about what’s going on with them. To have someone that they can talk to privately about what needs they might have that the production isn’t automatically addressing will make a huge difference to the comfort of their lives and their ability to do the job. It’s such a small thing, but it could just create an unbelievable change in how people feel going to work. It stops things happening like, a friend of mine’s a producer, the production was on the fourth floor, the lift stopped working, so they put her in the canteen. She wasn’t part of the production from then on. She was just excluded on the outside of it. That happens all the time. If you have someone that’s just there to go, “This doesn’t work. We need to address it in a different way. We need to radically think about things or just moderately think about things,” the difference could be profound.

**Craig Mazin:**
We’ll get to lift versus elevator later.

**John August:**
Our premium members can hear about the lift versus elevator debate. Now you were talking about the needs on a set or the physical needs of a place, but one of your recommendations seems more targeting who gets to actually be able to write on programs. This is freelancer funds coming out of the high-end TV pool, which is where I recognize that I don’t know how British TV works, because what is a-

**Craig Mazin:**
What is that?

**John August:**
… high-end TV pool? Your MacTaggart lecture also mentions different tiers of budgets. Can you talk us through what those are? Because it’s really confusing to me.

**Jack Thorne:**
I don’t know it all. High-end TV is everything I believe above 750,000 pounds an hour. That’s about a million dollars would it be?

**Craig Mazin:**
Yep.

**John August:**
About a million.

**Jack Thorne:**
The high-end TV pool was formed a little while ago. It was a commitment by broadcasters that if your show was above that tariff, if your show budgeted above that tariff, then you would pay not .5% of your budget into a pool, which was for training purposes for people coming into the industry. It’s run by an amazing group called Screen Skills. Screen Skills have been talking to us about whether they could be part of this freelancers fund. It would be amazing if they can. The idea is that it’s not .1% on top of that, which would just allow for disabled people who have needs to have those needs cared for.

**Jack Thorne:**
I was working on a show. Someone’s call was at 6:00 a.m. Now if their call is at 6:00 a.m. that requires a carer to be with them at 3:00 a.m. They don’t have the money in their budget, their personal budget, to have a carer with them at 3:00 a.m. If they had access to this freelancers fund, that would allow for it. Similarly, deaf people and having an interpreter around both on set and off set so that they are not excluded from the processes that are happening off set as well as on set. All these things require someone to make life work more easily for those who have impairments. A freelancers fund would allow for that.

**Jack Thorne:**
Now we have something in the UK called Access to Work, which is for disabled people to access, which is supposedly for that, for the adjustments that they need that go beyond what an industry would pay for them, so that the industry wasn’t paying for them so that the government pays that bit so that the industry still pays their wage and so people aren’t excluded from work. It’s a very, very brilliant scheme. Unfortunately, it doesn’t operate very well in the TV sector because our jobs are very transitory, can happen very quickly, and also Access To Work has had quite a few cuts to it in the last 15 years under the Tory government, which has meant that it operates a little less well than it used to, well a lot less well than it used to.

**Jack Thorne:**
We think that this fund, which the rich in the TV industry will pay for, you know that everyone that makes high-end TV is rich in comparison to the rest of the country, our industry is doing very well compared to the rest of the country, would allow for a world in which disabled creatives would have power over their own agency.

**John August:**
The point to bring up here is that it’s one thing, with it probably equivalent thing American with Disabilities Act, which requires that place of employment, place you need to go into are accessible. It’s one thing if you have an office worker who’s making sure that getting into the office building and the use of the office building is accessible, but a freelancer going from show to show to show, in television or in film, they cannot count on the fact that things are going to be accessible for them. Some sort of funds that let them bring their accessibility with them feels crucial. I think that gives me some hope that some of these changes can be implemented. As we saw with the advent of COVID that studios really wanted to be back in production as they found ways to, “Okay, we’re going to set up COVID funds. We’re going to figure out how to do this thing.” It was really difficult, but you know what? We made a lot of good film and television during the pandemic once we figured out how to do this stuff. They can spend money when it’s in their interest to spend money.

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh yes. Think about this, John. Every day our production is providing health support and services to every single member of our crew in the form of COVID testing and making sure that everybody has PPE and all of that stuff. We do it. There’s an entire job now, and an entire team of people working for the guy who’s in charge of COVID compliance. We have cleaners that we didn’t used to have before. We were able to mobilize an entire new department, new division of people that cost new amounts of money so that otherwise healthy people wouldn’t get sick. We seem to struggle with anything that would help people who live with a disability. That’s just shocking. It’s the sort of thing, and Jack, don’t beat yourself up, you’re doing amazing work, I know you’ve mentioned your cowardice, I don’t note any of it. I think the sin out here in the world of not being Jack Thorne is a general obliviousness. It’s very easy to be oblivious about this sort of thing, until it gets you, and then harder, a lot harder to be oblivious.

**John August:**
Let’s talk about differences between the U.S. system and the UK system. The UK system has this sense of moral authority in television and in industry grappling with a thing. We don’t have that, but we do have unions. We do have, in ways that the UK doesn’t have, we have bodies that set standards for things. It does feel like in terms of performers being able to do their job on sets, that feels like a thing that SAG wrestles with, to a degree to which writers have the ability to participate in a writers room, to have interpreters be available for them if they need them. That feels like a WGA thing, the same with DGA. We have groups that can mobilize tremendous pressure to get some of these things done, and I would not be surprised if as we push forward here, we’ll see these unions step up to demand some of these changes happen. It won’t happen the same way. It may not happen as quickly. I think some of these things can and should happen.

**John August:**
I’m also reminded that when we added the parental leave benefit to the WGA, which is a new thing we won, one of the artist rule to make is that, listen, everybody who works for Netflix right now gets paternity leave, gets parental leave when they have a kid. It just seems right that the writer who’s creating that show should have the same benefits as the executive who’s running that thing. I can imagine a situation where people who are working for the studios right now have expectations that their workplaces can be wheelchair accessible for people who need to use wheelchairs. The same should apply to our sets. I think that logic sometimes can help and help people think about why they need to be thinking about this and why they need to be ready to spend some money to make that happen.

**Jack Thorne:**
I love that. I’d not considered that the unions could be a huge, huge role. You’re right, the power of your unions is so much bigger than the power of the unions in this country. The idea that they could provoke this change, it’s really warming, it’s really huge, really exciting to hear actually.

**Craig Mazin:**
All they have to do is work together, which they’ve never done before [inaudible 00:30:51].

**John August:**
Even working under their own self-interest though, some things can change. It tends to build upon each other, so things do happen. We have two listener questions that came in which were very specifically designed for you to come on the show, not even knowing that you’d come on the show. Megana, can you help us out with some of these questions that we’ve gotten?

**Megana Rao:**
Great. Scared of Umbrage but Desperate for Insight asks, “Craig-”

**Craig Mazin:**
Here we go.

**Megana Rao:**
“Your cool thing has broken me. Jack Thorne’s MacTaggart lecture was extremely impactful. I feel broken because I’m concerned I’m taking the wrong lessons or that I’m being selfish. Originally I was writing a story with a main character who had been disfigured in military service. Later I decided to pare it down to a mental health issue like PTSD, because I just didn’t think that I should write it, as I have no experience with physically disabled people, but I can’t help reference the embarrassingly large number of stories put to screen that have clearly been written by people who don’t have the slightest clue how their character should sound or how those events should play out.

**Megana Rao:**
“Mr. Thorne’s speech has made me think about a lot of things that I don’t have answers for. I want to write for female characters, because in my life the women around me have been so valuable and interesting that I’m inspired to write with them in mind. I listen to the voices of marginalized people speak on how they feel. They just want a place at the table, starting with their faces in popular culture. I fall immediately into self-doubt and concern for what my place is in producing that culture. I am a near radioactive level of white bread American. Should I even participate?

**Megana Rao:**
“Jack Thorne spoke passionately and with great vulnerability about a group of people that just wants dignity and a fair shake. How do I participate in the business of storytelling that doesn’t perpetuate the endless narrative of the singular white male voice telling the world what culture is?”

**Craig Mazin:**
Jack, that’s a simple question and I’m sure you can answer that in, I’ll give you seven words.

**Jack Thorne:**
I think authorship is something we’re all wrestling with right now. I write a lot of female characters. I write a lot of female character-led dramas. I always have. It’s something that I’m asking about myself why I do that and whether I have right to do that.

**Jack Thorne:**
When it comes to disability, one of the groups that spoke at our event, we had this launch event, and we didn’t want it just to be about Underlying Health Condition, we wanted it to be about all the major disability groups in British television. We had lots of different people speak. One of the people that spoke was this man called Laurence Clark who outlined how a writers room should be run for disabled people and what consideration should be given when having disabled people in the room. It’s really complicated because you’re talking about a group that have been historically excluded. It’s a very, very small group. It’s a group where being given authorship is not something that historically has happened. I don’t quite know whether no one should be writing disabled people except for disabled writers. I certainly think disabled writers need to be part of a discussion when it comes to writing disabled characters, and they need to be a senior part of that discussion, and they need to be armed so that future authorship is exclusively disabled, because as the caller says, there has been historically a huge amount of ignorance, and quite dangerous ignorance put on the screen by people who didn’t know better but should’ve known better and have perpetuated myths about the disabled experience, which has been incredibly damaging to disabled people everywhere.

**Craig Mazin:**
Well said. I think Scared of Umbrage but Desperate for Insight, don’t fear my umbrage, I have no umbrage for you. I feel for you. I would suggest that somewhere along the line in our bourgeoning and justifiable desire to include people who have been traditionally excluded and to have better, fuller, clearer, and truer representations of all sorts of people on screen, we have lost sight of what the word fiction means. Particularly when we’re talking about fiction in drama, everybody is writing something they’re not. There is only one story you can write that is perfectly true to yourself, and that is your autobiography, and even that will probably be garbage. We are professional liars, who like actors, occupy the minds of people we are not. That is literally the job. What’s happening I think is that some people are having an existential crisis about what it means to actually be a fiction writer.

**Craig Mazin:**
What I do think is critical, and we’ve said this on the show many times, is that you have to approach material with respect. You have to approach the lives of other human beings with respect. Here’s the deal. Doesn’t matter how good your intentions are. If you are a bad writer, your writing will be bad. If you are a good writer but a callous writer, your writing will be probably put off in that pile of what they call lazy or tropey or oblivious. You have to be both good and you have to have your ears open, you have to have your eyes open, and you have to have some humility. You have to talk to people. When you are writing a character, and if that character’s disabled in a way that you don’t have personal experience with, find people who do, who are already willing to discuss these things, not people that you know who that you can then burden your questions upon, but rather there are groups, advocacy groups. The Writers Guild is very good about putting you together with people who want to talk about these things, who are interested in helping. If you do get into a position, a privileged position where you can hire people, hire them. That’s important.

**Craig Mazin:**
When you are writing characters who are a different race than you are or a different gender and then you cast those people, talk to the actors and ask them, “How did we do? What did we get wrong? What did we get right? Let’s have that discussion.” What we should not do is box ourselves off into a place where we can only write who we are. If anything, that would mean fewer representations of disabled people on screen. What I like about what Jack is doing is that he’s advancing in a rising tide manner everybody’s opportunity. If you write something great that provides opportunity for better representation and employment of different people than you, then that’s a victory for everybody.

**John August:**
One moment of the current discourse I’m following closely is West Side Story. West Side Story is an iconic musical that is problematic when you look back at the original incarnation of it. You look at this new incarnation and Tony Kushner’s work on it, and you can see that like a Jack Thorne, he was very concerned about his role in telling the story and making sure to find the information about the communities he’s writing about and what the communities were like at that time and how this could all fit together. It’s a difference between letting that concern guide you to do more and harder work and letting that concern stop you from ever trying to do that work. That’s I think what Scared is wrestling with. I think you may be looking at it as a blockade, a wall preventing you from actually doing the work, when in fact it is a challenging path for you to go down, but really it’s an invitation to really explore what’s out there.

**Craig Mazin:**
Megana, what’s your take on this question?

**Megana Rao:**
I agree with all of the things that you guys have said. One other thing that came to mind is I watched an interview with Ariana DeBose, who plays Anita in West Side Story. She is a Black Latin woman. She talked about going to the interview with Steven Spielberg and saying, “I’m not going to take this role unless you honor what it means for Anita to be played by a Black Latin woman.” They were really receptive to that and made the changes in the script and worked with her on doing those things. I think that speaks to what you were saying, being open to the experiences that your actors or actresses who are representing these characters bring to that material as well, even in the later stage of the process.

**John August:**
Megana, you have one more question that feels very much on topic here.

**Megana Rao:**
Great. Mike from London asks, “I got COVID in May of 2020 and subsequently developed long COVID. Most of my symptoms have improved since then, but I’m still suffering extreme fatigue and post-exertional malaise. In short, getting COVID seems to have triggered chronic fatigue syndrome. Before this I was a healthy 27-year-old with dreams of writing for Hollywood. I improved as a writer each year and was starting to see a small amount of success. I was a semifinalist in the Nicholl last year and was getting some reads from managers and production companies, but unfortunately, getting long COVID has made everything much more difficult. I now have to be careful not to use too much energy in a single day. Even a small amount of activities, like going on a short walk and writing two or three pages, can be enough to completely exhaust me for a few days. Just writing this email feels like a huge mental drain, and because of this, I know I won’t have energy to write this evening. All of this on top of having to somehow keep my job has left me worried that I’ll never reach my goal of being a working writer. I’m wondering if you know or are aware of any working writers with similar chronic diseases. How has their disability informed the content of their writing and their process?”

**Craig Mazin:**
Rough situation there, Mike. First of all, we are still learning a lot about long-term COVID, long COVID, long-haul COVID as it’s sometimes called. We don’t know if it’s permanent. It is very tempting when you are in the middle of something difficult as, Jack, you are in the middle of your disability. I’m sure it seemed to you at the time like it would be permanent, which is terrifying, I assume. I’ve certainly felt that way about my situation.

**Jack Thorne:**
I was told by a doctor, “You won’t get better.”

**Craig Mazin:**
Even if you’re not told by a doctor, you’re told by your own fear center in your brain that you’re not going to get better. That is really terrifying. First things first, it seems to me, Mike, you just have to honor the reality that you’re in. The reality that you’re in is you can only do what you can do. You can’t do more than you can do. If I told you that the only way to be a working writer would be to climb 100,000 steps a day, no matter what your situation would be, you wouldn’t be able to do it. That’s not a failure. That’s just reality. Accept the reality that you have.

**Craig Mazin:**
Perhaps as a relatively young person, in fact rather young, half my age, sir, or ma’am, give yourself a little bit of time here. Maybe what you could do is concentrate on what you might be able to do to get a little bit better, if there is that ability, and if there’s not, then take the time to readjust your life. If you write, I think it says writing two or three pages in a day is enough to completely exhaust you for a few days. Then that’s what you can do. You can write two or three pages for every few days. By the way, I know a lot of great writers that have zero problems who do exactly that. If they’re two or three great pages a day or two or three great pages a week, that’s two or three more great pages than almost everyone else can write in the world.

**Craig Mazin:**
Count the blessings, but also accept the reality. Make your peace with it. Mourn what you’ve lost. Do anything you can that’s available to you. In terms of resources, yes, I think Google is your friend. There’s got to be some groups of writers living with disability and working with disability and chronic disease. John, does the Writers Guild have a resource or a group for something like this?

**John August:**
I don’t know that they do. I know that there are committees that have writers with disabilities, but I don’t know. This is actually I think a great question for Jack to answer, because this feels like this is not an accessibility kind of issue, this is not even a representation issue, this is like it’s hard for me to do the thing that I want to be doing situation. Do you have experience with this?

**Jack Thorne:**
Yeah. I would say try and find a community, because that’s what gave me the most solace. In terms of the UK there’s two groups I would say to go to straight away as you’re a Londoner. The first is a group called DANC, which is D-A-N-C, or also called Triple C, which is confusing, but I think it’s www.triplec.org.uk. Then there’s another group called DTPTV, deaf and disabled people in television, who are also amazing. They are on Facebook and Twitter. Both those organizations have a community of people that you can talk to about this stuff. Reach out to them. Make yourself part of it. Become a member of the community. I think you’ll find that there’s lots of other people going through similar things. My experience of that was feeling like I had a home. Once you feel like you have a home, I think everything gets a bit easier. I’m so sorry you’re struggling. I really hope it doesn’t stay with you, but if it does, there are lots of people who are going through chronic fatigue and who do produce beautiful work, behind and in front of the screen, very good friends of mine who do find ways to manage their condition, and as a result of finding ways to manage their condition, find a way to have a fruitful career in our industry.

**Craig Mazin:**
Great.

**John August:**
Great. Our last little bit is hopefully inspiring. Actually I think does fit in well with this last question, which is basically do the things you can do and control the things you can control. This comes off of a TikTok by Franchesca Ramsey, but it’s Ashley Nicole Black, friend of the show, who had retweeted it, put it on my timeline here. Let’s take a listen to what Franchesca says.

Franchesca Ramsey:
If you’re a writer, winning an Oscar or selling a $100,000 movie, those are huge goals, those are awesome, but you can’t control those right now. So many things have to happen in order for those doors to open and those opportunities to come to you. Instead, shifting your goal to something you can control, like write 10 pages a day or take a writing class, start a writing group, finish my feature, try a pilot new genre, those are things that you can control, and then you can actually cross them off your list and feel like you are accomplishing things that are helping you get to the place that you want to get in your life.

**John August:**
That’s Franchesca Ramsey. Ashley Nicole Black also had said if your goal was to be cast on Saturday Night Live, you’re giving all of your power to Lorne Michaels to cast you on Saturday Night Life, but if your goal is to learn how to write great sketches, that’s a thing you can learn how to do. Jack, as a incredibly prolific writer here, what can you tell us about the work you control versus the work that makes it out in the world ratio in your life?

**Jack Thorne:**
It’s so interesting, isn’t it, that I’m still wrestling with now, to be honest, in terms of, “Oh, but if I do this, then I can get this. Then if I get this, then maybe people will like me.” I don’t think that goes, that feeling.

**Craig Mazin:**
I already like you.

**Jack Thorne:**
You’re weird.

**Craig Mazin:**
So true.

**Jack Thorne:**
It’s strange in terms of thinking about my career. I remember ringing my parents so excited because I had a lunchtime reading at the Young Vic, and my parents being completely nonplussed by a lunchtime reading at the Young Vic and me realizing that it was a huge achievement for me, but no one else quite being able to see it. I think that thing of just constantly seeing rungs of a ladder and then going, “Oh right, if I do this and if I do that.” I suppose what she’s saying is try to avoid the ladder entirely and just celebrate what you do every day. To be honest, I’m nowhere near able to do that yet. It’s a good goal for me for 2022.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s funny, the word goal maybe is part of the problem, because I think sometimes people, what they outline as a goal is really a symptom. Winning an award is a symptom of something. So is being cast on Saturday Night Live. You have a goal, and the goal should be something that only can be things you can control. It’s not just focus on goals you can control. If you can’t control it, it’s not a goal, as far as I’m concerned, because the only purpose of the word is some target that you can hit. You try and be the funniest you can be, and then you show up for an audition and let’s see what the symptom is. You try and write the best you can write, and then you hand it out in the world, let’s see what the symptom is. Let’s see what the reaction is. Everything goal-oriented is probably a bit of a trap. The only way to get there is to immerse yourself in the process. If goal has an antonym, I suppose it’s process. Process is everything.

**Craig Mazin:**
The work is unromantic. We talk about this on the show all the time, how unromantic writing is and how angry I get when I see portrayals of writing on screen. You want to talk about bad portrayals on screen, writers getting some sort of mystical burst of energy and typing a novel all night and then it’s celebrated and the next thing they’re at a book signing. I hate this crap. I just want to fire it into the sun.

**Craig Mazin:**
Maybe, maybe if you want to get to the next third eye in the forehead level of achievement here, don’t have any goals at all. Just try and write. How about that? Just create stuff. Try and access what feels honest and good to you and enjoy it for what it is. I will tell you the thing that I’ve done that was received the best was not a goal-oriented thing. There was absolutely no expectation that it would even get made. The goal concept sometimes is a liar that whispers stuff in our ear and turns our head from the path.

**John August:**
I think it’s so important to distinguish goals that can actually be achieved under your own efforts versus goals that you just rely on the universe working out a certain way, which I think Saturday Night Life is a universe working out a certain way. The goals that are under your own control to some degree, like wanting to run a marathon, “I want to finish a marathon,” okay, if that’s your goal, great, but what are the actual things you need to do in order to get yourself up to being able to run a marathon. Completing a marathon is a lagging indicator. If you got to that point, it’s only because all the leading indicators, which were how many short runs were you able to do, how far could you go. All the work that it would take to get up there, that’s what you could actually focus and do, which is basically putting on your shoes and starting to run. You’re not going to put on your shoes and start to run a marathon. You’re going to put on your shoes and start to run a mile and then two miles and eventually you’ll get up there. Frustratingly, writing is just that hard work of page after page, mile after mile. To be more inspiring going into this, maybe go into 2022 thinking about forget your goal, let’s focus on what you’re actually trying to do each day and make that work rewarding.

**Craig Mazin:**
What if we take the goal away, meaning let’s take the reward away. Doctors make a the bin Laden mistake. Megana and I are both unlicensed medical doctors, so I think we both understand this. Doctors put an enormous emphasis on the scale, on your weight. This is automatically a very goal-oriented thing. “You’re 240 pounds. You need to be 160 pounds.” That’s a goal. No one’s pretty much going to get there. What’s sad is for a lot of people, that goal isn’t even revenant to their well-being.

**Craig Mazin:**
If they simply just made certain changes in their life for the sake of bettering their health, with the promise of no reward, if I say to you, “Look, I’ve looked into your future. If you do the following things, you will not lose any weight at all, but you will live another 10 years,” and so we’ve taken away all the reward. You’re not going to wear the skinny pants. You’re not going to look like the person on the cover of the magazine. All that’s garbage. What you are is going to be happier and healthier. Would you take that deal or not?

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s hard for people, because what you’re saying is it’s just process. Goals that are distant and far off like that and intangible are really hard, whereas when someone says, “Okay, I’ve got a goal. I’m going to be 150 pounds. I’m going to do the thing. I’m going to be on the cover of Men’s Health,” that’s when they fail, inevitably. You’ve set yourself up for failure by turning the goal into the goal.

**Megana Rao:**
Something Ashley said in her tweet was that she added what she wants the work to feel like as part of her goals. She says, “I wanted to work in a calm, fun environment, which makes decisions easier to make.” I also think shifting from thinking about goals, how you want the experience of the process to be, I don’t know, that’s not a concept that I’d heard before, but definitely something I want to use in 2022.

**Craig Mazin:**
I like that too. Look, in the U.S. the goal always has a dollar sign in front of it. We’re trained this way from birth. The whole thing is basically fame and fortune, fame and fortune, fame and fortune. When you look among the class of the famous unfortunate, you find a lot of misery and bad behavior, because humans are human, as it turns out.

**John August:**
We should also call out Ashley Nicole Black for her new deal at Warner Brothers. She’s joining Craig over there in HBO Max land.

**Craig Mazin:**
See, that was a goal that just happened. I doubt that was her goal. It’s a symptom of her good work.

**John August:**
Indeed.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s a process symptom. Well done.

**John August:**
Any last thoughts on goals, Mr. Jack Thorne?

**Jack Thorne:**
I’m interested in the notion that, because the show that you’re referring to, which I know you probably get bored of talking about, but the show that you’re referring to happened despite setting a goal with Chernobyl, and yet that was you taking a fork in the road, wasn’t it? That was you going, “I don’t want to write the sort of shows I’ve done before, so I’m going to take a fork in the road.” That is you setting yourself a goal of working in a new genre, working in a new way, and challenging yourself in a way that you hadn’t challenged yourself before to do a certain type of work. By doing that, and I think that you’re probably the starkest example of someone that’s done that, of writers that I can think of, you changed the whole trajectory of your working life. Is that not a goal? Is that not a, “I am going to put my head down on a stone and rub it until I get to a different place for myself.”

**John August:**
What a metaphor that was.

**Craig Mazin:**
I don’t know if it was a rubbing stone. I think I wanted to do it because I felt like it was worth doing. When I did it, there was no promise of anything. Really the only promise was that it would likely just be ignored. Nor did I know if I could do it. I just wanted to. It to me very much was there was no real money involved, there was no guarantee of anything, nor was I doing it with any expectation that you would need to be watched. I honestly thought that it would mostly end up being a thing that substitute teachers would show the social studies class on a rainy day in high school. It really was not goal-oriented. A lot of what I do, I’m very haphazard about a lot of things, I have to admit. When I find that I start thinking about how to create outcomes, that’s actually where I get into trouble, because artificial things start to seep their way in. Maybe I’m a bad person to ask this question to, because my career has been weird and meandering and confusing. There’s not a lot of shape to it. I have a lot of notes on the narrative of my own life and career. It’s not a well told story. Weird fits and starts. You have a much better narrative, Jack Thorne. That’s a story. I like that story. That’s a good one.

**Jack Thorne:**
The distinction between going, “If I do this, I’m going to win an Emmy,” and, “If I do this, then I might find a tad more professional well-being in my soul,” I found your example very motivating and very interesting in terms of the choices we make for ourselves. That is a goal, is it not? I suppose it’s just that that interests me.

**Craig Mazin:**
I think that sometimes people underestimate the joy I had in prior work to all that, because I really did enjoy them.

**Jack Thorne:**
I’m not saying you didn’t. If your character was singing the I want song, you used the word I want, there would be a moment where you were making a film that you were enjoying and you said, “I want to write about the Soviet Union, and I feel like I’ve got a way of singing about the Soviet Union,” and then the audience would be on their feet.

**Craig Mazin:**
See, that’s the thing about writing. I love that this is something that was specifically targeted by Franchesca Ramsey to creatives, is that there’s nothing in between you and the doing of a creative thing, unless it requires a lot of money, but writing doesn’t. You don’t even need to get to goal step. If you want, and I did want to write something, write it. That’s the best part. It’s not even a goal. It’s there. You can do it. You can paint whatever you want. You can write whatever you want. You can sing whatever you want. All that’s there. Now are people going to watch it? Is it going to get made? Will it be popular? Are you going to get money? Will you get a big deal? All that stuff happens after.

**John August:**
It’s completely out of your control, which is of course-

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s completely out of your control, exactly. In a weird way, if your goal is to write something amazing, you can take that write out of the goal column and put it right into the I’m doing it today. You don’t have to wait. A goal to me isn’t the future. Maybe I just am confused about the concept. There’s nothing stopping you right now today from writing anything you want. It’s free, which is wonderful.

**John August:**
Now in our discussions of goals, Megana has in our little workflow here a year in review. Our goal with Scriptnotes was not to have 500 episodes in 10 years in Scriptnotes, but-

**Craig Mazin:**
Jesus.

**John August:**
We hit that-

**Craig Mazin:**
Thank god that wasn’t a goal-

**John August:**
… this last year.

**Craig Mazin:**
… because I wouldn’t have done it.

**John August:**
Lord no. We were listened to in 198 different countries.

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh god.

**John August:**
We had 2.15 million downloads so far this year in 2021.

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh my god. Now wait, with that 2.15 million downloads, I presume that’s just three people that just keep redownloading it over and over.

**John August:**
It’s all bots. It’s bots all the way down.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s bots. Just bots.

**John August:**
A bit of housekeeping, we’re hoping to do another random advice episode. That’s this episode where we just answer random listener questions that don’t have anything to do with writing at all. It could be about relationships. It could be about real estate. It could be about the proper fork to use for a certain meal. If you have random advice questions, send those into Megana, ask@johnaugust.com, and we’ll get a special list of those together and we’ll answer random things that are not about writing.

**Craig Mazin:**
That’ll be fun. We should have Jack on for that as well. I think Jack should be the new … Let’s just have him all the time.

**John August:**
Absolutely. It’s time for our one cool things. Craig, do you have a one cool thing?

**Craig Mazin:**
No, I don’t.

**John August:**
Jack Thorne, you got the memo. Did you find a one cool thing to bring in?

**Jack Thorne:**
I’ve got two.

**Craig Mazin:**
Thank god.

**Jack Thorne:**
One of which is slightly embarrassing.

**Craig Mazin:**
Good. I’ll take that one. That one’s mine.

**Jack Thorne:**
Craig chose me for One Cool Thing six, seven years ago. I don’t know how long ago it was.

**Craig Mazin:**
I would call that early Thorne period. America still didn’t know.

**Jack Thorne:**
It was a highlight of my life and a really beautiful thing and it made me spill my water. Sounds like I wet myself. I almost said made me spill my tea, and then I was like, I don’t drink tea. I don’t drink any caffeine. One of my one cool things is Craig Mazin, who appears like he is a misanthrope and seems to present like a misanthrope, and yet is incredibly kind. I once went to lunch with him wearing Ray Bans and he laughed at me for about an hour, but it was still … His ability to give time to things that he shouldn’t give time to is a very, very kind thing, and so he is one of my one cool things.

**Craig Mazin:**
Thank you, Jack Thorne.

**Jack Thorne:**
If that’s all right.

**Craig Mazin:**
Jack, I think you had another less Craig-oriented one cool thing.

**Jack Thorne:**
Which is authentic and celebratory portrayals of Father Christmas, because I find it very annoying that Father Christmas, I have a five-year-old, is frequently portrayed in our modern world as a dark, despairing figure or someone with a take on it. We’ve watched Santa Claus the movie, the Dudley Moore film from 1985 twice this week, and we’re probably going to watch it a third time, purely because Elliott, my son, finds the Father Christmas in it so authentic to his impression of what Father Christmas should be. I don’t know whether Father Christmas should be white or any of those things, but a jolly person who is having a good time is a good thing, and we need more of him I think.

**Craig Mazin:**
Can I ask, this might seem like an odd question, but who’s Father Christmas? We don’t have him here. Who’s that?

**John August:**
That’s Santa Claus.

**Jack Thorne:**
Santa Claus.

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh, Santa Claus. Oh, Santa Claus.

**Jack Thorne:**
You don’t call him Father Christmas?

**John August:**
No, we call him Santa Claus. There is more of this in the bonus segments. Trust me.

**Craig Mazin:**
Megana, have you ever heard of Father Christmas?

**Megana Rao:**
I have.

**John August:**
I’ve heard of it.

**Megana Rao:**
I have.

**Craig Mazin:**
Wait, hold on. Now I know. It’s from the Kinks song, (singing).

**John August:**
It’s not from the Kinks song. It’s a thing that exists and the Kinks mentioned it.

**Craig Mazin:**
I thought the Kinks invented it. All right. So much for that.

**John August:**
My one cool thing is also Christmas-related. This last week I fell down a rabbit hole of the Wikipedia list of common misconceptions, which if you have not read it, you should just spend an hour of your life looking through the Wikipedia list of common misconceptions. Mine is that the Bible does not explicitly say that three magi came to visit baby Jesus, does not mention a Father Christmas or Santa Claus either, nor does it mention that there were kings or rode on camels, that their names were Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. The three magi are inferred because there were three gifts. Basically the three kings who come to visit baby Jesus in the Christmas story, that was just made up sometime in the third century. We don’t really know where came from, but not part of the original Christmas story. My one cool thing. That is our show for this week. Jack Thorne, thank you so much for joining us.

**Craig Mazin:**
Thank you, Jack.

**Jack Thorne:**
Thank you for having me. I’m very sorry for talking quite a lot.

**Craig Mazin:**
No, that’s why you’re here.

**John August:**
Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Nico Mansy, if you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes there at @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. Jack Thorne, are you on Twitter?

**Jack Thorne:**
Not really, no. No. It sent my brain mad.

**John August:**
That’s fine.

**Craig Mazin:**
Me too.

**John August:**
You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and sweatshirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. The sweatshirts just came and they are actually genuinely the softest things I have experienced in a sweatshirt. Craig, your sweatshirt should be there, if you ordered that first batch. Mine came yesterday. Check your mail. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. We’ll learn from Jack Thorne what a British person would call a bonus segment and other words that don’t make sense on either side of the pond. Thank you all very much.

New Speaker:
BONUS SEGMENT

**John August:**
We’re back. Jack Thorne, as you were talking, I was writing out some of the things you said that were-

**Craig Mazin:**
Ridiculous.

**John August:**
… distinctly British. You said Graeae are this wonderful company. You used are because the company is plural, but we would say Graeae is this wonderful company. Pluralism is a thing that is different between American English and British English is you would say are and we would say is.

**Jack Thorne:**
I wouldn’t assume that I speak good English. I’m not a very educated person, so I wouldn’t assume that [crosstalk 01:04:06].

**Craig Mazin:**
This is outrageous.

**John August:**
This humility.

**Craig Mazin:**
This is outrageous.

**John August:**
You said, “I remember ringing my parents.” We never ring our parents at all here.

**Craig Mazin:**
We call them.

**John August:**
We call them. We don’t ring them.

**Craig Mazin:**
Then oddly, when people are describing names in England, they will typically say, “Oh, I met a guy, he’s called Jack,” and here we would say, “He’s named Jack.”

**John August:**
British English still does that thing like [inaudible 01:04:29] you’re calling somebody. You call somebody the same way you phone them, which is strange. Are you ringing your parents if you’re ringing them on their mobile phones?

**Jack Thorne:**
Yes, yes, still ringing my parents. I would still say that, yes.

**John August:**
Now you’ve written for both the UK and for American audiences. Do you change anything in your actual writing if you know it’s going to Warner Brothers rather than to the BBC?

**Jack Thorne:**
Yes, and will use U.S. spellings. Now I say I do that. I have an assistant called Mariella who is rather brilliant and does that and makes sure that I make sense in another country.

**Craig Mazin:**
I had the opposite experience. Jane Featherstone, who is a very small person, and yet a giant person in-

**Jack Thorne:**
She is.

**Craig Mazin:**
… British person, she was rather insistent, and I think reasonably so, that as we were a European production on Chernobyl that I ought to use English things like torch instead of flashlight. You wouldn’t go into the hospital. You would be in hospital. I was trying to think. Color and even spelling, which doesn’t show up on screen, but color and favor with a U.

**Jack Thorne:**
Honor.

**Craig Mazin:**
Honor, which is actually fun to do. Then there were certain things too like firemen. We have firemen, and you guys have fire brigade.

**John August:**
[crosstalk 01:05:55].

**Jack Thorne:**
We have firemen, but if they’re a collective then they’re a fire brigade.

**Craig Mazin:**
You call the fire brigade. There’s a line in Chernobyl where he’s like, “There’s a fire,” and he goes, “Call the fire brigade,” but originally he said, “Call the fire department,” because that’s what we call it, the fire department. She’s like, “No one calls that here.” That was it. When Jane tells you to do something, you do it.

**Jack Thorne:**
Jane is always right.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yep.

**John August:**
Growing up, sometime in about fourth grade or something I recognized that British people put the U’s in the words, and I was just obsessed with putting the U’s in the words. I’d put U’s in words that they couldn’t possibly exist. I would try to do it. All my school essays I would do it. Sometimes I’d get flagged for it, sometimes I wouldn’t. I’m wondering if it was just an early case of cultural appropriation. I just desperately wanted to not be this Colorado kid. I wanted to be this international student. Craig, did you ever do the U’s in your words?

**Craig Mazin:**
No, but I think that the cultural appropriation was taking the language and bringing it here. That’s cultural reappropriation. I never did that. That would probably get you beaten up on Staten Island, John. I got to be honest with you. That, by the way, the other thing that sometimes, we mentioned fanny pack earlier, so in America fanny is your butt, and a fanny pack is that silly pouch that travelers wear with the belt that goes around their butt and they put their money in it. In England fanny is cruel slang for vulva, I think would be fair to say. There are certain differences like that.

**John August:**
There’s a word for cigarette that we don’t use here.

**Jack Thorne:**
Do you know what we call a fanny pack?

**Craig Mazin:**
You call it a bum bag.

**Jack Thorne:**
A bum bag, yeah.

**Craig Mazin:**
Now if you say bum bag in the U.S., people will assume that that’s something that involves a hobo. It is entirely different. Also I’ve noticed in England the C word, which is quite a verboten term here, is tossed around like it’s nothing over there.

**John August:**
It becomes really challenging, because you’re not sure whether that person, a British person’s using it in a sexually offensive way, in a way that it’s going to cause a lawsuit, or if they’re just speaking their language.

**Craig Mazin:**
I think they’re speaking their language.

**Jack Thorne:**
Try being in a rehearsal full of 50 people and just using it as part of your sentences, because that’s who you are, and then just looking at their faces as they stare back at you in literal sheer horror.

**Craig Mazin:**
I actually had the reverse experience where spending so much time in Europe with Brits and then coming back to the U.S. and people like, “I’m sorry, what?” I’m like, “Oh, right, sorry. I’m not [crosstalk 01:08:33]-”

**John August:**
“You can’t say that.”

**Craig Mazin:**
“… anymore. It doesn’t work that way anymore.” We do speak a common language, but there are these fascinating. Really it’s the structural differences that get me, the things like called and named and in hospital. He’s in hospital.

**John August:**
I would say as a screenwriter, when I’m working on a production that’s going to be shooting in the UK, I’m not sticking U’s in my words where they don’t need to be there, but I am mindful if there’s a thing that’s going to translate wrong or feel different in the other place or if I can just get away from that problem. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is an example of we wanted the movie to feel like it didn’t exist either in the U.S. or the UK. The cars drive down the middle of the road. The bill he picks up out of the street is not a British pound or American dollar. We’re deliberately in no place. That’s great, but then everyone speaks with a British accent, so I guess we are still in the UK.

**Craig Mazin:**
That’s how that works.

**Jack Thorne:**
I love that film, and it felt very British to me. Even if it wasn’t intended to be, it felt like that to me.

**Craig Mazin:**
One of the other challenges that screenwriters face, and I think we maybe talked about this on the show before, is in the U.S. we use eight and a half by 11 paper. In the UK we use A4. They’re so close to being the same, but they’re not the same.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s outrageous.

**John August:**
A4 paper always looks wrong to me. Mathematically it makes so much more sense.

**Craig Mazin:**
Of course.

**John August:**
It’s such a smarter design for paper.

**Craig Mazin:**
As is the metric system.

**John August:**
100%.

**Craig Mazin:**
That’s the nice thing about England is you guys straddle the metric system and the imperial system, which I like. You haven’t quite let it go, which is good.

**Jack Thorne:**
I think we firmly believe in the imperial system.

**Craig Mazin:**
You believe in the imperial system unless it comes down to things like liters of petrol, litres of petrol.

**Jack Thorne:**
Yes, we do, but you can also see gallons. There’s a separate measure for gallons.

**Craig Mazin:**
Very good. Wow. This plus the blue passports, England is back.

**John August:**
Now on a practical matter, if you were working on something like you’re working on His Dark Materials, which was a complicated production. There were American companies involved. There were probably British companies involved as well. Were your scripts done on A4? Were they done on eight and a half by eleven? Did you just make a choice early on and just live with it?

**Jack Thorne:**
I didn’t even think about it. I just opened final draft and just used whatever format. I guess other people might’ve changed it, but I don’t think so. Those sorts of questions, I think our industry’s a lot more haphazard than yours. We don’t really ever deal with them. No one complains. I guess I just kept doing it the same way that I was doing it.

**John August:**
I ran into it on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We were using A4 paper, and the Warner Brothers script department, which is a whole notorious thing, we could talk about a whole rant about the Warner Brothers script department, would send it back to us in not A4 paper, and so the scripts would be longer and we’d get all these concerns about budget. It’s because you put it on different paper. It’s the exact same script.

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh wow.

**John August:**
Drives me crazy.

**Craig Mazin:**
A4.

**John August:**
A4.

**Craig Mazin:**
A4.

**John August:**
[crosstalk 01:11:24].

**Jack Thorne:**
I’m so sorry.

**John August:**
Jack Thorne-

**Craig Mazin:**
That’s Britain.

**John August:**
Again, don’t apologize for everything. Far too much.

**Jack Thorne:**
I’m afraid my country, the imperial system and everything else that comes out of my country, gets away with the fact that we are probably responsible for more evil than any other country in the world.

**Craig Mazin:**
Certainly A4 is just maybe the worst thing that Britain ever did, A4, top of the heap, followed by the slavery and colonization.

**John August:**
Jack Thorne, thanks so much.

**Jack Thorne:**
Thank you so much.

**Craig Mazin:**
Thank you, Jack.

Links:

* [Jack Thorne’s MacTaggart Lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxUZPMBRIPU)
* [Jack Thorne Launches Underlying Health Conditions Pressure Group, Publishes Major Report Into Disabled Representation in TV Industry](https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/jack-thorne-underlying-health-conditions-1235125435/)
* [1 in 4 Coalition](https://www.1in4coalition.org/)
* [Ashley Nicole Black and Francesca Ramsey Twitter Thread](https://twitter.com/ashleyn1cole/status/1460703224285908993?s=20)
* [Santa Claus: The Movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089961/) a celebratory portrayal of Father Christmas
* [Wikipedia List of Misconceptions](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions?wprov=wppw1)
* [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/)
* [Jack Thorne](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2113666/) on IMDb
* [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 Nico Mansy ([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/530standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/m-is-for-minimum).

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

**Craig:**
My name Craig Mazin.

**John:**
And this is episode 528 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show with animation writers fighting to get paid what live action writers get, we’ll look at what minimums and backend really mean, but it’s also a craft episode. We’ll talk about the kind of movie, where the hero is actively trying to find themselves and is the waste paper basket the writer’s most important tool? Plus, in our bonus segment for premium members, is movie dialogue actually harder to understand these days? Craig has opinions.

**Craig:**
Amazing. Absolutely [inaudible 00:00:36].

**John:**
A taste of what’s to come for our premium members. Craig, it’s nice to be back recording with you. It’s been a minute here.

**Craig:**
Yeah. A little bit up and down over here, as we make our way through this insanely large production, still here in Canada, although we’re catching a little bit of a break now, as we head into the holidays. I get to come home for a little bit, looking outside at beautiful Calgary, it is a lovely dusting of snow. Apparently La Nina and El Nino have joined hands to make Il Nino and something enormous is coming apparently. Apparently it’s going to be snowpocalypse up here, which is okay for us. We’ve got an episode, where we need a little bit of snow.

**John:**
Oh, it’ll be great.

**Craig:**
Yeah.

**John:**
Yeah, little bit of snow’s also good for skiing. I would love some more snow for that.

**Craig:**
Yeah. I’m not going to do that.

**John:**
Yeah. I’m going to do that, but while you were gone, we replayed the Die Hard episode. This was a special episode we’d done for premium members. We put it in the main feed and I added in a bonus segment for our premium members, where we talked with Steven E. de Souza about the writing of Die Hard, which is so exciting. We did some follow up on that. Megana, can you help us out with a follow up?

**Megana:**
Great. Jeb writes, “You did a great job in the Die Hard episode, highlighting the various Reagan era elements of the film, bumbling experts, idiotic feds, awful Europeans, et cetera, but one of the key elements in the story, is the fact that Holly works for a Japanese firm. As you of course remember, the 80s featured a fascination with Japanese culture, highlighted perhaps best in Karate Kid, but also fear related to the perceived decline of the US, in relation to Japan. Japanese companies excelling in the auto industry, electronics, and even US real estate. Movies like Gung Ho, highlighted those tensions for comedic gain, but that anxiety was real. Anti-Asian hate crimes were rampant in the era and the fact that Holly is working for a Japanese company, building its own towering foothold on American soil, is just one more thorn in all American John McClane’s side. The fact that he prevails and saves the American employees, is a not too subtle message.”

**John:**
That’s a good point. Let’s talk about that [crosstalk 00:02:45].

**Craig:**
[crosstalk 00:02:45] Jeb.

**John:**
Okay. I would say that a person looking at the movie now, who didn’t grow up in the 80s might not realize the degree to which there was this sense that, “Oh, Japan’s going to take over the world,” because they didn’t. Spoiler and it is interesting, because I do sense that at the start of the movie, the fact that this Japanese company is made a little bit more of a thing, but I like that the movie doesn’t feel racist towards the Japanese owners and the Japanese owners are good people and solid.

**Craig:**
Yeah. That’s where I’ll push back a little bit on Jeb. I do agree that of course his pretext is correct. There was a very famous memo written by the head of Sony, that was circulated around American businesses in the 80s, as a warning that they were going to beat us, but also why aren’t we like this? It wasn’t simply a Japan-a-phobia, it was also Japan-a-phelia. There was an admiration and a desire to raise our standards to theirs. They were doing it better than we were. The Nakatomi building is in a not-80s-way, It’s not played for racism jokes. Nobody makes fun of the Japanese culture. The boss is portrayed as an honorable, decent man, whereas the American employee is the cokehead snake. The fact that John McClane saves the day, that’s not I don’t think, a particularly trenchant point about America versus Japan as just, he’s the movie star, he’s the action hero that came to save the day. If anything to me, the fact that it was a Japanese company, which by the way, disappears in terms of importance almost immediately. It’s just not really a thing, I would say reflects nothing more than what was in vogue at the time, which was, yeah and we should make it a Japanese company, because that feels like an 80s thing right now.

**John:**
I would say that the Japanese company helps set up McClane’s initial fear of losing his wife, because not only has his wife moved to the other side of the country, but she’s really working for a Japanese company and will probably end up moving to Japan at some point. I think I remember that. It said that she may actually need to move to Tokyo at some point and the sense of losing all of the stuff that he’s had, to this company is real and yet that’s not the meat of the film at all. It’s misdirected.

**Craig:**
No. There is a really interesting episode, that I think we could do and we’d want to bring in some friends to discuss I would imagine, about the movie Gung Ho, which Jeb cites here, which is a fascinating 80s attempt, I would call it, an 80s attempt by white people, to make an anti-racism movie and spoiler alert, it doesn’t go great, but it also weirdly wears its goofy heart on its sleeve.

**John:**
I’m trying to remember the premise. Is this Michael Keaton or is this Tom Hanks?

**Craig:**
It’s Michael Keaton, although it could have been Tom Hanks and more importantly, it’s Ron Howard. It’s this kind of very… Ron Howard to me, always represents the sweetest, most innocent American point of view, which doesn’t always mean it’s enlightened, it just means it’s not coming at something out of anger or disgust or contempt, but yeah, Ron Howard directed this movie. Starred Michael Keaton and it was about a Japanese company purchasing an American company and it was a car company, changing the way the auto factory worked and how it suddenly became a culture clash and it was Gedde Watanabe and George Wendt and Michael Keaton and very much white savior stuff, but also weirdly at times, beautifully human. You could see, it was actually a little bit ahead of its time. The problem was the time was really behind where we are now. It was ahead of its time and yet behind where we are now, it’s a fascinating thing to look at and I think maybe one day we can dive in. It won’t necessarily be the most comfortable, deep dive we do, but worth examining.

**John:**
Yeah. Now if we were to make Die Hard today, that Die Hard never existed, but it was just being made today. It would not be a Japanese company. It’d be a Korean company, who inevitably was building that building, which brings us to squid game, not squid games, but we have some follow up on that. Megana can talk to us about what Eliza sent.

**Megana:**
Eliza says, “As an avid Korean-American listener, I want to clarify why the show’s English title is Squid Game singular and not Squid Games, as in the Olympic Games or Hunger Games. The last game in the series of childhood games, is The Squid Game. If the last game had been hopscotch, then perhaps the title would’ve been Hopscotch. If one is unfamiliar with the Squid Game as are most English speakers, there’s a desire to encapsulate the entire experience with an umbrella term. However, you can see it wouldn’t make sense to title it Hopscotches, had the last game been different. Squid Game sounds awkward to a Korean speaker and only sounds right to an English speaker. Furthermore, Korean doesn’t have a plural indicator like the S in English. A single rock is Dol, just as a fist of rocks is Dol. The rest of the sentence communicates the nature of the rock, as it relates to its surroundings and condition.”

**Craig:**
Well, Eliza, thank you for that. We love language here, obviously. I think the thing that I was perhaps primarily ignorant of, wasn’t the fact that plurals work differently in Korean, as much as that, apparently there are more than one game that occurs in Squid Game and Squid Game was the last of those games. I just thought the whole thing was just all Squid Game, because I still haven’t seen it. That said, this interested me. What really grabbed me on this single rock is Dol, a fist full of rocks is Dol and I checked with our intrepid Bo Shim over here, because what I was curious about was the Olympic Games, because Eliza mentions the Olympic Games and Korea has hosted the Olympic Games and I asked her in Korean, what do people call the Olympic Games? And she said, that in Korean people simply call them Olympic like, “We’re hosting the Olympic,” and of course this confirms what Eliza’s saying, but now what I want to do, is not say Squid Games or a Squid Game. I just want to call the show, Squid.

**John:**
Reduce everything down to it’s single elemental route, that the fundamental thing that everything ventures out from. Yes.

**Craig:**
I have not yet seen Squid.

**John:**
Not a bit of it. More follow up on our Thanksgiving movies. Lars from Cologne writes, “I finally got around listening to episode 522 and would like to suggest that another reason Thanksgiving movies are not as common as Christmas movies, could be, that Thanksgiving is an American tradition, which would make it tough overseas. That’s also why they’re often sold as road movies, as John pointed out. The event is really just an excuse to get some people who don’t see each other often, but have a lot of history and unresolved issues, to sit down at a table and fight them out. Yes, I think the universality of Thanksgiving is not in it’s favor for a movie.”

**Craig:**
A little bit of editorializing there from Lars, from Cologne. Sometimes Lars, I know this is hard to believe, people just sit down and have a good time. Typically that’s what we do on Thanksgiving, but yes, it’s true, Thanksgiving is solely American, although Christmas is not particularly universal. I think more people than not, in fact, I know that more people do not celebrate Christmas than do, but also a Thanksgiving movie could be very cheap proposition to make. Yeah. I think honestly we figured it out last time, but thank you Lars for the help. Just there’s no narrative built into it. It’s a meal, that’s it. It’s a meal.

**John:**
Yeah. Now back to Christmas though, two years ago, I celebrated Christmas in Korea. This is going to be the Korean episode. It’s really what I’m getting back to you. It’s all going to be about Korea, this whole entire episode and it was delightful to celebrate Christmas in Korea and they really did a number there. They really celebrated it big.

**Craig:**
Yes. Christianity is very big in Korea. Although, I would imagine it is not at this point, quite as big as Squid.

**John:**
Nothing is as big as Squid.

**Craig:**
I do love there’s a… It’s not Squid, it’s Cuttlefish, but there’s this dried Cuttlefish, Korean snack called Ojingeochae. It’s like-

**John:**
It’s [crosstalk 00:11:04] get that for you and then you actually mark in the bag, how much of the Cuttlefish each of you has eaten?

**Craig:**
No, that would be insane.

**John:**
Yeah. No, nothing like the ketchup doritos?

**Craig:**
No, no, no, no. Here’s the deal. The ketchup Doritos and I’m going to say it again. Something happened and I don’t even want to get into it, but something went wrong there and it’s-

**John:**
And now you don’t like them?

**Craig:**
No, I love them, but it’s driven a wedge between me and Bo. No, I started eating that all the way back in 1992, because I was living with my friend, who’s a Korean American named Chin and he introduced it to me. It’s almost squid jerky, is what it is, but it’s actually, you would think, “Oh squid jerky, this right off the bat didn’t sound great.” It’s delicious. Delicious.

**John:**
Yeah. All right. Another piece. This could be umberage inducing, but let’s see how this goes here. Our podcast that you’re listening to right now, is called Scriptnotes. There’s a feature in final draft called Scriptnotes, which is how you leave little notes for things and several people pointed out this week that they’ve started putting a TM after Scriptnotes. A trademark symbol. I did what a person does and I looked at the trademark registry. They used to have a trademark on it, but they let the trademark lapse in 2018.

**Craig:**
Well, why don’t we trademark it?

**John:**
We could try to trademark it.

**Craig:**
I think we should. Let’s trademark it and then let’s sue them.

**John:**
Here’s what I know about trademarks, because I actually had to get a trademark on this other game that we were doing at one point and trademarks exist in certain spaces. It’s entirely possible they could get their trademark for this feature in a software program, called Scriptnotes and we could get our trademark in the podcast called Scriptnotes, but honestly let’s just stop fighting over a trademark and just not-

**Craig:**
Well, the good news is we haven’t started fighting over the trademark. I think we can just stay right here where we are. Obviously they could have said something about it, prior to the abandonment in 2018, but they didn’t, probably because the thing that you’re worried about when you get a trademark, I have a trademark for instance, for my production company Word Games, is that what I don’t want, is another company that does what I do, calling themselves Word Games and then the question is, “Oh, well who made this?” And without question Final Draft the company, could have said there is a marketplace confusion, if we have Scriptnotes as part of our script running software and these other guys are doing a podcast about screenwriting, people might be confused and think that they represent us, but I have a suspicion that they were happy about that.

**John:**
Yeah. One of the challenges when you have a trademark, is you have to protect and defend your trademarks. You have to look for people who are infringing on it and you have to send them letters saying, “Hey, don’t infringe on our trademark.” I sent actually, a very nice email to Final Draft, reminding them that they don’t actually have the trademark on Scriptnotes. We’ll see if they take the little TMs off their videos and such.

**Craig:**
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Look Final Draft, we keep it on a simmer with you guys. Don’t wake the dragon.

**John:**
All right. Back to Korea news. When the agency campaigned, the WGA agency brujaja was settled, one of the points in that, was that the companies who own production entities had to sell down to a 20% stake, basically were limited to a 20% stake. This past week it was announced that Endeavor is selling its content side to CJ Entertainment, which is a Korean firm. I think I may have even predicted that on the show, that that’d be who would buy out this entity, because it makes a lot of sense, because this is a Korean company who wants to do more American production, who has a lot of experience, has a lot of money. It seems like the right outcome for both sides.

**Craig:**
Yeah and yeah, the company’s worth quite a bit of money there. You never know with these things. It’s a little bit like when they make sports deals and then you find out later, “Oh, well it’s not really that much money and the other team paid for half of the money, that they said that they got,” in any case who knows, but it’s impressive regardless either way and yeah, CJ Entertainment’s a real deal.

**John:**
They did Parasite, they did Big Fish in Korea. They’ve done lots of… There’s just two examples of high quality things they’ve done. They are the equivalent of Sony Entertainment for Korea. They are a big production house.

**Craig:**
This is an interesting development. I’m watching it and yeah listen, every time a new company comes into Hollywood, I think there is a reasonable, people get a little bit excited, because they think new buyer-ish person or somebody that will perhaps get and sometimes that’s true. More often than not, the new companies are worse than the old companies and I don’t know exactly what the relationship is with CJ Entertainment and say unions and you always have to wonder, how this is going to go, but as far as I’m concerned, it can’t be worse than Silicon Valley and their attitude towards unions. Let’s see how it goes.

**John:**
All right. Megana, do you want to talk to us more about some bullshitting?

**Craig:**
Ooh.

**Megana:**
Great. Brandon wrote in and said, “The discussion on bullshitting for writers was quite illuminating for me. I feel like there’s this proverbial wisdom out there, that you should fake it till you make it, but the saying has always felt a little toxic to me. Is it really okay to say I’m a writer, if I’m not making a living as a writer or should I be honest and tell people my day job, when they ask me what I do? When meeting someone new in the industry, the question of what do you do, is almost inevitable. Any guidance on how to navigate or bullshit a response to this question, would be greatly appreciated.

**John:**
Craig. I think it is fine to identify yourself as a writer, who is not making a living as a writer. What do you do? “I’m a writer, in the meantime I’m working a day job at someplace,” is absolutely fine and valid to say. I think, especially when you’re newly moved here, speaking aspirationally is good and normal and appropriate, but how are you feeling about that?

**Craig:**
How will I put it? I understand Brandon’s squirminess about this. I would say Brandon, that the saying fake it till you make it, isn’t really, at least for me, it’s never about just straight up lying about stuff that you wish were true, because that’s delusional and that’s dishonest and misleading. I think fake it till you make it is more about, “Hey, I believe I have the capability of doing something intellectually. Right now, I’m terrified. Let me just behave like I’m not terrified and then I won’t be scared, once I get into it.” In terms of describing yourself, if you’re not making a living as a writer, it’s a little weird to stick the word aspiring on, because that sounds weird. What I would say, is I’m working on a screenplay. I think this is perfectly fine. Say, I’m working on a screenplay. I have a day job, but I’m working on a screenplay. It’s going really well. I’ve got some interest from X, Y, or Z. If you have no interest from X, Y, or Z and it’s just, you’re writing a screenplay at night while you’re working during the day, then no, I wouldn’t say I’m a writer, because that’s not really true. I am a writer, does implies certain things and the reason I’m saying don’t say that, is not because I’m feeling like there should be forced humility, it’s more that I’m just concerned about the follow up questions you’re going to get. What are you working on? Who do you work with? And then you’re stuck. I’ll tell you the question I always get. If somebody doesn’t know who I am and they say, what do you do? And I say, I’m a writer. I work in television and movies and the next immediate question, is: what have I seen? Every single god damned time. Have I seen anything of yours? Since all those questions are going to be forthcoming, you might want to just make it more about the process itself. I’m working on a blank.

**John:**
Yeah. I think the “ing” forms are really helpful here. To say that you’re writing is great. When you say that you are a writer, then you’re going to get the follow up question, “Oh, what have you gotten made?” Or if you say, I’m a novelist, it’s like, “Okay, well, where’s your book?” But if you say, I’m writing a book for this or I’m working on stuff. That is true and honest and also basically where you’re at in the process.

**Craig:**
Correct. Totally.

**John:**
Yeah. A bit of news and follow up here. Last year, as we came through the contract negotiations, we added paid parental leave to the deal for writers. For the first time, writers who have new kids have, I think it’s eight weeks of paid parental leave. Effective January 1st, 2022, the health fund will offer coverage for infertility treatment, for those who have a medical diagnosis of infertility, available to all participants with active coverage for them and their spousal dependence, with a lifetime cap of $30,000 with no deductibles or copays.

**Craig:**
No deductibles or copays. Lifetime cap of $30,000. Oftentimes it does cost more than $30,000 and of course, if you want to have more than one child, then you’re going to need that infertility treatment coverage later, you then will have to probably dip into your pocket, but let’s not underplay the fact that, that’s a big amount of money that you used to have to pay for entirely by yourself and while my wife and I, very luckily did not have any infertility issues. I think we’re the exception of so many.

**John:**
My husband and I had infertility issues.

**Craig:**
Well yes. Right there is a big one. John, you guys aren’t having another kid, I would imagine?

**John:**
You know what, with this $30,000 bonus, maybe so. I’m just saying-

**Craig:**
Maybe you and I should have a kid, because if you think about it, who’s going to inherit this podcast one day?

**John:**
Yeah. We’re experienced parents at this point. We really know what we’re doing. Yeah. I have a kid who’s going to be heading off to college in 16 months. The thought of having a brand new child, while I love babies, I think we’ve established on this podcast, I absolutely love babies.

**Craig:**
Love them.

**John:**
Love them.

**Craig:**
Love babies.

**John:**
But I don’t want to have another four year old, for example, or another 10 year old.

**Craig:**
No, no, no. At all. This is great news and I think I always, in these moments, want to tip my hat obviously, to the Writers Guild for, we represent half of the trustees on the health fund and they’re the ones who make these decisions. We don’t actually negotiate these in contracts. This is something that has to be worked out between our trustees and their trustees, but I also tip my hat to the companies, because they have half the trustees too and this doesn’t happen unless the companies agree and there are certain areas where I think everybody starts to find their collective humanity and their shared experiences and there are people on both sides, management and labor, who know the pain of wanting to have a child and struggling and this is a fantastic thing and I tip my hat both to the Writer’s Guild and the companies.

**John:**
Yeah and it’s also important to note the distinction between, there was no more money added to the pot for this. Basically, it’s reprioritizing how you’re spending the money that’s in the pot and that you’re going to start covering fertility treatment, as opposed to paid parental leave, which was part of the contract, because it’s additional money being put in there, to actually pay for that fund. That’s the difference there. That’s why that was a contract thing and this was just a decision made by the folks who run the fund.

**Craig:**
What they cover and what they don’t cover medically, is always going to be part of their decision and they do run the numbers and they generally do have to balance the budget. I hope that they did that by removing nonsense alternative treatments, that don’t do a goddamned thing.

**John:**
Yeah, I imagine so. That’d be great. All right. I was going to lead us into this Netflix topic by talking about Netflix numbers, but I feel like I’ve talked about Netflix numbers so, so much, that I’m just tired of talking about Netflix numbers.

**Craig:**
John, your discussion of Netflix numbers is the most listened to discussion, ever in Scriptnotes history.

**John:**
I would like to congratulate my friends, Rawson Thurber and Ryan Reynolds for the number one movie of all time on Netflix. It’s fantastic. It’s great. Wonderful. I’m so happy that it’s happened. I hope that you guys get the equivalent of backend off that. I hope for every time they send out a press release about how much money or how many viewers it’s had, you get a ca-ching. That would be fantastic. They won’t, but let’s get into how money works and how backends work, because this past week, a bunch of things showed up on my feed and a lot of questions showed up in my feed, about writers getting paid and backends and residuals. I think it’s because animation writers right now are going through negotiations about increasing their pay, because animation writers are generally not covered by the WGA, covered by the Animation Guild and people had natural questions about backends and profits and scales and minimums. I wanted to have a little segment here to talk about the difference between minimums, which is something that’s being handled by the Guild contract and what writers actually bring in, which is handled by their own contracts. We have a lot of terms to define here, but hopefully we can make sense of where money comes from and how it gets to writers.

**Craig:**
Yeah, totally normal thing to happen when you’re looking at one group of writers, like animation writers, who aren’t doing as well as Writers Guild writers and what will happen is, people will point towards Writers Guild writers and say, “Here’s what their experience is. Here’s how they’re treated. Here’s what they get,” and some of the things that they’re pointing to, are things that the Writers Guild has not gotten them at all and more interestingly then by implication, they don’t need the Animation Guild to get them either because we are, the term is an overscale employment base, at least certainly in features and in television, where the overscale occurs most notably, is in the double job description, writer/producer. A lot of things happen under the heading of producer and the Writer’s Guild doesn’t touch or affect any of those.

**John:**
Yeah and it’s especially complicated in TV, because the number of weeks that count against gets wild, but let’s start with some really basic things we can talk through. I want to discuss the difference between the contract, which is the big contract that’s being negotiated every three years, versus individual writer contracts. I want to talk about when writers get scale and when they don’t, profit participation and residuals and the idea of CPI and increases. Basically, how much things ramp up over the years, because that also gets confusing. Craig, can you talk to me about the difference between the contract and what’s in the contract, versus what’s in an individual writer’s contract?

**Craig:**
Sure. For the Writer’s Guild and this holds true as well for Animation Guild, the collective bargaining agreement is also known as a Minimum Basic Agreement. Minimum Basic Agreement, simply means nobody that is in our union can do worse than this. That’s what it is. They could also call it the worst case scenario document.

**John:**
It’s the floor.

**Craig:**
It’s the floor. Now our individual contracts by design, already incorporate everything that’s in that contract. There’s a clause in our individual contracts that say, under no circumstances can anything in this contract be construed as doing something worse than, the terms of the Minimum Basic Agreement. However, obviously in our individual contracts then, there are lots of things that our lawyers, managers, or agents, well, not managers legally, but our lawyers or agents can get us, that are better. A lot of those things are almost boiler plate at this point, because everybody gets them. Some of them have to do with you and your individual status and work history and perceived value to the company, but most contracts I would argue, have at least some aspects that are better than the Minimum Basic Agreement that the Writer’s Guild or the Animation Guild provides.

**John:**
Back in episode 407, we talked through understanding your writing contract and it was you and me at the Guild, along with some Guild lawyers and we literally walked through what an individual writer’s contract looks like and some of the things that are in there, are essential about this is how much you’re getting paid for your first draft, for your rewrite. These are the optional steps, the guaranteed steps, but also carried in there is, this is your net profit definition and this is what your backend looks like and you laugh now, but we laugh every time, because movies are designed to never actually achieve net profits. Only a handful of movies each year, each decade, could be considered net profits. Something like a Blair Witch Project is so successful, that there’s just no way to hide the money that’s coming in there, but they achieve this process for never actually becoming profitable, by continually siphening out for the money that’s coming in and charging fees against things. You could never actually hit those profits. Those things are still in your contract, but they’re not actually meaningful. The confusion I saw from people on Twitter is, “Oh, that means they writers don’t get anything for the movies, they make,” and it’s, “No, we get residuals and residuals don’t have anything to do with profitability,” and I think that’s an important thing to distinguish. Craig, can you talk to us about residuals and how residuals get calculated in a broad sense?

**Craig:**
Residuals are calculated on a gross basis and a number of people in this discussion on Twitter, were saying that residuals needed to happen for the Animation Guild, so that they could participate in the profit of things and then some people said, “Well, the problem with the Writer’s Guild, is the residuals are only there for profits and nothing ever shows profits and they should really be based on the gross,” and the answer is, they are. That’s exactly what they are. Residuals have nothing to do with the profitability of a movie. They have everything to do with how much the movie grosses and by grosses, we mean the amount of money that comes into the studio, regardless of expenses. Now, the residuals are defined in such a way, that the only part of the money coming in that matters, is for movies, not the ticket sales and not exhibition on airplanes, but all the other stuff afterwards. The now dead videotape and DVD market, but online rentals, online sales, the sale of the movie to streamers and cable outlets and networks overseas, all that gross comes in and then there is a formula that is applied to it. Is it a great formula? No, but it’s formula and it generates money.

**John:**
And it’s important to stress that, that formula and the recalculation of that formula, happens every three years in the contract, the MBA and that, that is where the residuals are calculated. Your individual contract might have something like hand waving towards residuals, but that’s not where your residuals are coming from. Your residuals are coming from this Minimum Basic Agreement, that applies to all film and all television that’s done underneath a WGA contract, which is good, which is how you want it and it also means that there can be consistent accounting for it and the WGA can actually collect that money on your behalf.

**Craig:**
Which is why your agents, managers, or lawyers, should never commission that money and if they are, ask them to please stop, because they didn’t negotiate that term, the Writer’s Guild did and while it is true that, I guess I would characterize it as every three years, we have the opportunity to adjust those formulae, when in reality they’re adjusted almost never. Once they’re there, they’re there for a long time.

**John:**
They largely get baked in and the things that, when you get news about what changed in the contract, it could be the thresholds for certain things may have changed a bit, but the actual percentages rarely change or what counts rarely changes. Only when there’s a brand new thing that you have to figure out, how are we going to treat this new thing that’s existing, do you sign a brand new residual and as we said many times on the show, figuring out how we’re going to handle residuals for movies that are made for a streamer and only show on a streamer, a movie like Red Notice is complicated, because if that movie was made by a studio and then sold to a Netflix, the residual will be based on what that sale price was to Netflix, but because there’s no sale price, it’s tougher to figure out what the residual is and it’s going to be a big focus in negotiations.

**Craig:**
It will always be lower. Until something changes, the way that Netflix does things in general, works very much in their favor, surprise, because there isn’t much of an independent and this does tie back to Netflix. You have an article here that you linked to, we’ll throw it into the show notes, from Variety about Netflix’s data expansion being a flex, which is a very nice way of saying the thing that you and I have been saying for a long time.

**Craig:**
Which is, that Netflix just continually manipulates data to make it sound like everyone is watching Netflix every minute of the day and every new thing that comes out, is the biggest thing that Netflix has ever done, because just the data is a big, huge hailing storm of hot air and what’s bizarre is, a lot of people do watch Netflix. It’s incredibly popular. I don’t know why they need to do that, other than to say that they have a total black box control over who watches what and when they report it, meaning how many people have seen this and similarly therefore, how they deal with residuals, which usually is some large buyout, works in their favor, almost always.

**John:**
Yeah. Now, here we’re talking about the back end of what’s happened and everything. The movies come out, but let’s talk about initial compensation, which is also crucial here and one of the things I’ve noticed with the animation writers talking about, is their initial compensation is just dramatically lower than equivalent conversation would be for a live action writer, a WGA writer. They’re trying to raise that initial compensation. This is something that we’re really talking about scale. We’re talking about, this is the minimum that you could be paid to do this job, to write this script, to be working on this show and that’s where we’re trying to increase here. Now again, we’ve got to stress, that is the minimum they can pay you, but certainly for future writers, you want to be working above scale and your goal is to get above scale as quickly and as thoroughly as you can, so you’re not being stuck at the absolute minimum they can pay you for things.

**Craig:**
There are two limits that impact how people are paid in general. One is the floor, which is obviously as you mentioned, something the union sets and the other is whatever the perceived ceiling is. That may be the biggest difference, because there is a difference between the floor, but it is not a massive difference. The massive Delta is in the ceiling, where the most highly paid writers in live action are paid vastly more than the most highly paid writers in animation and I’m talking about with the exception of maybe some Pixar features and things like that, but when we talk about television, when we talk about animation writers for television animation, not WGA television animation, the ceiling is just nowhere near what the ceiling is on the live action side. That is where you can start pulling people up a bit.

**John:**
Also, we should make sure the ceiling is not defined. You’re not going to find some contract that says, this is the most we’ll ever pay. They just have this internal thing. The company will say, “We never pay more than this,” and I’ve been through this in my own experiences. You probably have been too. It’s, this is the most we’ve ever paid for this. This is the most we’re willing to pay. We don’t go above this line.” [crosstalk 00:34:24]

**Craig:**
It’s the market price and that line, they will go over that line. It’s just not today, but that line is a market line and every now and then something seismic occurs and that line changes, because somebody gets paid a whole crazy amount, because somebody really, really wanted that person. That part can change. The issue with more than anything in animation writing, non WGA animation writing, is that they haven’t yet zeroed in on those people, that are worth an enormous amount. That starts to change, because at that point, instead of a factory floor, you have a factory ladder. For animation writers, they have a double problem. The Animation Guild does have low minimums. They don’t have residuals, they don’t have credit protections and in the marketplace, that group of animation writers doesn’t have a cadre of extremely high paid people, that are setting a progression for everybody else.

**John:**
Now, there have been notable animation showrunners who have made fantastic deals at places and that’s awesome for them and they can hopefully use some of that power to get writers paid more, but that’s the exception rather than rule. There are very few big animation showrunners, who could pull that off and it’s not like live action TV showrunners, who do get those 10 figure deals.

**Craig:**
Yeah. Pretty much everyone that’s running a show on television, is getting paid pretty darn well, when I talk about live action. Some people are being paid numbers that require extra digits. You have deals that are approaching a billion dollars at this point. It’s insane, but certainly a number of people being paid in the hundreds of millions of dollars and I don’t think that is happening at all in non WGA televised animation and in the cases sometimes where it is, I think you are dealing largely with the production entity. It’s just a different culture and what it comes down to is and this is where I feel for the people who run the Animation Guild, because they are trying. I have talked to a couple of them over the years and I know, they know and they’re not delusional. They’re not sitting there going, “No, our numbers are great.” They know and what they’re dealing with is a cultural problem that the industry does not value the animation writers, the way that the industry values the Writers Guild writers and that is a cultural problem that also needs to be attacked and in that circumstance, the partners they need unfortunately at the Animation Guild, are the agencies because agencies do this too. They look and see, “Well okay, those people are being paid that, so let’s not really concentrate on that, because 10% of that isn’t that much,” but they can drive that up too. They’re the ones who push the market around.

**John:**
Now, you hit on this early in the discussion, but it’s important to note that in television, someone who’s staffed on a TV show, they’re going to get paid a certain amount for their writing services, but also as a producer. As a staff writer, as a story editor, as a consulting producer, they’re getting a separate paycheck, that’s covering their producing services for a show and their writing services will tend to be listed at scale, but everything else about their producing services, is a part of their individual contract negotiation. It’s important to notice that if you’re a newly staffed writer, you might see in your contract that, “Oh, it looks like I’m being paid scale,” but you also are being paid separately as a producer and that’s just the weird way that we decided to do television, which is frustrating for folks who come from the feature world.

**Craig:**
Yeah. In one aspect, when you do come from the feature world as I did, you look at it and go, “Well, man, I’ve been paying a lot in dues, that these producers and television haven’t been paying at all.” In features, I paid a 1.5% of every dollar I ever made and television, I pay 1.5% of basically minimum, because the companies have used the producer valve, as a way to essentially pay out more, that doesn’t get applied against, for instance, healthcare and pension and the writers who take this money including myself, recognize that there’s less in dues to pay as well and you get more perceived power, because you’re a producer. For the animation writers, I’m not sure that this relief valve is there. I think basically they’re saying, this is scale. That’s what you get and there is nothing else, but there is and part of it is just figuring out how to push that marketplace forward. For me, if I were running the Animation Guild, I’ve got to be honest, I wouldn’t start right today since it’s… Look, they’ve lost over and over and over, okay? It’s quite a losing streak. How do you turn around a losing streak? Maybe you start with something that doesn’t cost money at all, but is about dignity and that would be credits and if you begin to open that door with credits and dignity, then you start to push ahead on how to make something out of those credits, because right now everything seems to be decided by the companies with a reactive position from the Animation Guild, because they don’t have the strength or backing really to get something done. It’s possible that now with the new leadership in IA, which did threaten a strike for the… We almost had an IA strike for the first time in Hollywood history. Maybe they could throw a little muscle behind the Animation Guild, which is part of IATSE. It’s complicated.

**John:**
One of the other challenges with the Animation Guild, is that Writers Guild represents just writers, Animation Guild represents not just animation writers, but also everyone else who works in animation and their interests are similar, because they’re all trying to make great animated projects, but it’s not quite analogous to the WGA, where everyone’s doing the same job.

**Craig:**
Correct and there is a conflict that can occur, because you have story artists who, if you’ve worked in animation you know, they are writing with pictures and they often throw a lot of dialogue in as they’re pitching and there is a blending of how writing functions in animation, that our terms in the Writers Guild don’t really artfully cover and those people have to be taken care of too. I think sometimes part of the problem is, that people who’d have a title and function that is very similar to what we do in the Writers Guild will say, “Wait, they got that and I’m getting this and it’s not fair and also I should be covered by the Writers Guild.” Can we just, once again John, point out that that cannot happen.

**John:**
It cannot happen. Here’s the challenge, is the folks who are represented currently by the Animation Guild, they are represented by a union and the WGA cannot come in and say, “No, no. We are taking these writers out of your unit and putting them into the WGA.” That just cannot happen. That’s just not federal law. That’s just not going to happen. What can happen is on new projects that are not covered by the Animation Guild, they can be covered by the Writers Guild and there’s a push to get more new projects covered by the Writers Guild and I have a show that’s going to be an animated Writer’s Guild project. It is doable. It’s hard to do, but that is the way you are going to get animation writers covered by WGA contract, is by setting up new projects and new places, that do not have already coverage by the Animation Guild. That’s just how it’s going to have to happen.

**Craig:**
New employers is a huge part of it. The problem, is that new employers generally aren’t stupid. They can look and see which one’s going to cost them more and it’s the Writers Guild. That’s definitely going to cost them more.

**John:**
And that’s why there’s a push to get a bunch of animation showrunners to say, “Hey, we will only do new projects at places that can offer WGA contracts,” because there are some folks who are worth it, they’re willing to do a WGA deal at certain places. That’s how I was able to get the one I just did.

**Craig:**
Yeah, years and years and years ago I was hired by Bob Weinstein, to write an animated movie and I said, “I won’t do it if it’s not WGA,” and what they did was, they just made a company.

**John:**
Yeah. They [crosstalk 00:42:39].

**Craig:**
They made a new company and that new company became signatory to the Writers Guild and that new company existed solely to employ me to write this movie and that’s fine, it’s a bunch of paperwork and as you say, it can be done, but if it’s done on an ad hoc basis, because they really want you to write something and they really want me to write something, that is not going to ever really move the needle, because the vast bulk of stuff that’s done, is done at places that are fully married into doing things through the Animation Guild.

**John:**
Yeah, but you get the point of the wedge in there and you can start to make some changes and that’s-

**Craig:**
Tip of the spear.

**John:**
Tip of the Spear. We’ll do it. Around the office this week, we started talking about the kinds of movies where you have the hero, who is undergoing transformation, which is true to all movies hopefully, but where the point of the story, is that the hero is changing and transforming. They’re not going on a quest for something else, but they’re actually struggling to find themselves from the start of the movie and the two things that were making me think about this, this past week, the Kendall Roy character on Succession, especially this season, you see that he’s desperately trying to figure out who he is and he’s trying to organize this publicity and to promote this image of himself. But really, he’s trying to figure out who he actually is. He wants the world to tell him who he is. He wants the press to reflect back what he wants to see and the answer is, you’re an asshole and that’s not a great answer for him to get, but I was also thinking about this article, it’s a letter sent to Blair Braverman, who writes the column for Outside Magazine and it’s about a writer who moved to a cabin off the grid and she figured like, “Oh, here I’ll be able to write every day and it’s going to be great. I have this fantasy version of what my life is like and it was just miserable,” and I wanted to talk about this as a movie construct and also maybe a TV construct as well, but this idea of characters who enter into the story, looking to transform rather than going on a quest, where the transformation happens along the way.

**Craig:**
Yeah. It’s really… Partly what this wonderful essay is talking about, is the over romanticization of writing, which will have another little thing we want to mention about that, but what’s fascinating to me about these movies, is that they aren’t necessarily doing something that any other movie isn’t. In fact, they are necessarily doing something every other movie also necessarily does. Somebody changes, but what I like about movies like this or stories like this on television, is that the character is aware of it. Whereas when they’re not aware, which is probably the majority of the time, we might be aware, but we understand at the end, she is different than she was when she started and in these kinds of stories, the character says, I don’t know who I am or I don’t like who I am. I want to figure out who I’m supposed to be and then they are somebody different at the end and that is simply about a self-awareness. There’s a meta aspect to this character who understands that they need to figure out the nature of themselves, as a protagonist in their own story.

**John:**
Yeah and as we looked at examples of things, The Graduate comes up, where we have a kid at the end of college, who starts trying to figure out who he is and what he wants in life. In Good Company feels like the same kind of movie. There’s a heavily gendered component to this, where you have a lot of women who are going through this transformation. Under the Tuscan Sun, How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Eat Pray love, but even recent examples, like Tick Tick Boom, is that you have a guy who’s trying to stage his show, but really he’s trying to figure out his existential angst, is over turning 30 and this sense of doom. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I want.

**Craig:**
Am I successful? Am I not successful?

**John:**
Yeah. Exactly. Should I take this advertising job? And it’s really about figuring out who he is and being a musical, he can sing through his frustrations there and I think its so important to stress, that every movie’s going to have some hero transformation ideally, but it does feel so different when the character starts wanting to transform.

**Craig:**
Yeah and there’s something that is amusing about the whole thing. When they do this and this is the part of these stories I generally don’t like, what they’re doing is looking at you in the audience and saying, “You know this feeling right? You’re scared too. You don’t know who you are or you’re unhappy with who you are or you think you’re not yet where you’re supposed to be. You’re freaking out, let me show you a fairy tale where I figure it out. It’s going to make you feel good. It’s figure-outable and the fact is, that it’s generally a simplification of how that process goes, because the real process of figuring out who you are in life, is a process that ever ends and then you die. And of course in these stories, there’s a conclusion and I think I find that the conclusion is always amusing, because the last scene is, I did it. I’m happy. I’m self-actualized, I’m pleased and then we never see the next scene, where they have to wake up and then they have diarrhea or something and the next day begins again and they’re like, “Wait, actually, I’m still just… Ah, man. I’m still me.”

**John:**
Yeah. Taking off our movie lenses, because obviously we’re looking for closure in a movie, I think two series that do a very good job of characters trying to find what they actually want, Search Party, which I love, which is ostensibly about trying to figure out what happened to this missing girl, but it’s really the central character trying to figure out who she is and what she wants and her arc in transformation, but of course, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend starts with this woman on an existential quest, I don’t know what I actually want in my life and transforming everything and transforming everyone around her as she does it and because it’s a series and doesn’t have to resolve in movie time logic, it can go through all the ups and downs and the moments of realization and moments of self doubt, that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to fit into a classic two hour movie structure.

**Craig:**
Yeah and those journeys are fascinating, because they are actually dictated or at least they used to be more like this, not necessarily by what the character’s experience was and how they were following a path and arriving in a destination, but rather more how well is the show doing, because when it’s doing really well, they can’t figure their shit out yet. They’re going to have to wait until the show is ready to conclude, at which point they will figure their shit out and that’s why one of my favorite endings for a who am I, what am I supposed to be journey, is the Sopranos, because it begins with a man going to therapy as a villain, but he’s going to therapy to try and figure out who he is and what his problems are and he never gets it. He never figures it out and then he’s murdered and that’s pretty much the way life works, except minus the villain and the murder part, occasionally there’s murder.

**John:**
Occasionally there’s murder. You put a great article in the show notes here about a writer’s advice to other writers and let’s tie this in because I think it harkens back to the article I listed, which was the woman moving to the cabin. Talk to us about what you put into-

**Craig:**
Yeah, it is a wonderful little story here. Somebody has written a… I’ll just talk about the woman that it centers on, is a Polish author name and I apologize, I’m murdering this name, Wislawa Szymborska. If you are Polish please right in and help me. I’m sorry. I’ll just call her Ms. Szymborska. She was a poet. She died in 2012, at which point it was discovered she had destroyed about 90% of her writing, which is amazing. Despite that or perhaps because of it, she won the Nobel prize in 1996 for poetry. Now here’s what I love about this and this ties into this romantic search for self and particularly as writers figuring out, am I a writer, as one of our questioners asked or how do I describe myself as a writer? Or should I go to a cabin and try and write there?

**Craig:**
She wrote an anonymous column for a Polish literary journal, called Zycie Literackie. Again, I screwed that up. I’m sorry. It means literary life. She did this from the 1960s to the 1980s and the column in literary life was called Literary Mailbox and I’m quoting now from this article, “The idea was that aspiring writers would send in their work and receive helpful advice. Mainly, the article says Szymborska advised them to stop writing at once and destroy all their work.” This is like the dark iron curtain version of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:**
“The aspiring writers,” I continue to quote, “imagine that being an author will bring them happiness, fame, and fortunes. Szymborska tells them to get a grip. Writing is a ridiculous profession, she argues persuasively. Failure is inevitable. Success is highly conditional and mostly feels like failure as well,” which I’ve got to tell you is absolutely true. What is her positive advice for poor wretches out there attempting to be writers. I quote from the article, “Her advice is monumentally sensible. Don’t be a narcissist. Work much harder. The best writing utensil is a waste paper basket. Life is short, yet each detail takes time. Don’t be a utopian, but keep away from the void for as long as you can.”

**Craig:**
I’ve got to tell you, I feel like even though Ms. Szymborska and I lived at the same time, somehow I think the two of us may have been scrambled together in the simulation, because man, she’s just putting beautiful Nobel worthy, poetic words to how I feel all the time.

**John:**
Yeah. What she’s saying, also reminds me of the Kendall Roy thing I mentioned at the start of the last segment, which was basically people write into her or they want to be writers, because they have this perception of, “Oh, if I have these things, then I will be happy,” and she’s there to tell you, no, you will not be happy, just as Kendall Roy could get the company and he will not be happy.

**John:**
He just wants someone to tell him what he wants and no one can do that except for himself and in many ways, her saying, “No, you don’t want this. You’re not good at this. Stop doing this. It’ll only going to lead to misery,” is a gift in some ways. We’ve talked on the show, different times, there have been some people who’ve come up to us at live shows over the years like, “Thank you so much for your show. You convinced me that I did not want to be a screenwriter,” and I think that it’s a huge success, because if we’ve driven some people away from it who recognize like, “Oh my time is better spent doing something else.” That’s great.

**Craig:**
Completely and I think I really just want to underscore again, success is highly conditional and mostly feels like failure as well and it must be hard to believe, but-

**John:**
You and I are pretty successful and yet we often feel like failures.

**Craig:**
Well and the success in specific, because when it happens you think, “Okay, the thing is, it’s still just me and my meat suit, moving around and thinking and worrying and all the rest of it and it’s hard to describe.” Success never feels like success. The word itself is promising a mirage that you never get. You have to be just okay with all the stuff in between, because there is no cake.

**John:**
Listen, you’re not going to enjoy every moment of sitting down and actually writing, but if you actually hate writing, if you actually hate the process of doing this, but you’re just doing it because you think it’s going to feel great when you’re successful, you should stop right now, because that’s not likely to happen. You’re not going to feel good being a famous published author, if you don’t feel reasonably good, being an unpublished author.

**Craig:**
No and the cabin won’t help you and being alone won’t help you and the herbal tea won’t help you and for God’s sake, if you ever see a movie where an author suddenly gets a burst of inspiration and then there’s a typing montage and then a novel erupts, just understand that’s the writing equivalent of watching porn. It’s not how it works. It’s fake. Never, ever, never think that, that’s what happens. It has never happened. It will never happen.

**John:**
The worst part of Misery for James Caan, was he had to write a book.

**Craig:**
Exactly.

**John:**
Ah, all right. It’s time for one cool thing. My one cool thing is, one that I know Craig is very excited about, because I tipped him off about it. This is The Game Master’s Book of Non-Player Characters and the resource for really D and D, but there’s this whole weird thing where you can’t say D and D, but you can say fifth edition and it’s designed for Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons. It’s not made by the official Dungeons and Dragons people. It’s written by Jeff Ashworth and what I love so much about this, is that the writing is just so good and it’s all these characters you can use for different adventures or different encounters in underground locations or big cities or small towns. Their characters are so specific and let me see if I can get just an example of one character’s description here, because I just love the little box descriptions on people. This is Boo Boo Crawford, a foppish man of middle age, with an overwhelmingly large explorers pack, strapped to his back a few pots and pans hanging from the straps of his chest, holding a guidebook like a mask. That’s your first initial taste of Boo Boo Crawford and they talk through what he’s actually trying to do, what his goals are, what his wants and needs are. It’s so useful and I kept imagining Craig finding voices for all these characters. Craig, does very good voices when we play D and D.

**Craig:**
I try my best. I’m excited to look through this, because I really do believe that fun and interesting NPCs are half of what makes the experience fun. If you don’t have them at least here and there, the conversations become incredibly utilitarian. They’re not really conversations. There’s also not conflict. Part of it’s figuring out how this other person works. In this other game I DM, there’s a council of three people that make decisions for the town and the way that the module presents it, it’s talk to the three people, see if you can convince them and I’m like, “Okay, but who are they?”

**John:**
Yeah, I would say the official adventure books, don’t do a great job describing those characters and this is what I was [crosstalk 00:56:34].

**Craig:**
Yeah, this exactly. One of the things I did, was I decided that there would always be a vote and there’s three of them. The vote would always work one way or the other, except that one of them is just incredibly indecisive. It’s really just about, we’re no longer trying to convince this woman to why your point of view is the best. You really need to help her. You need to give her therapy, so that she can figure out why she can’t make a decision about things and the characters can engage in that way and it’s more fun and what I like about this resource is, sometimes when I’ve got 30 minutes before we’re playing, I’ve got to figure out who these three people are, being able to turn to a book and finding some great ideas would be lovely. This sounds like an amazing resource. I purchased it within seconds of you texting me about it. I’m very excited.

**John:**
I want to give one more character description here, because this is actually useful for all of us as writers. This is about Fresticia and Pillow, a barefoot girl around eight or nine years old with dark skin, a missing front tooth in her innocent smile and her hair tied up in fluffy pigtails atop her head, dressed in a black dress with a scrappy red scarf tied around her neck. She is trailed by a skeletal cat. Two sentences. I got a whole picture there.

**Craig:**
Yeah. Yeah, exactly and what’s the story with the cat and all that is great. Sometimes it’s all you need, is just a little bit of a starter and then off you go. Great recommendation, if you do play Dungeons and Dragons. I know they say game master. It is obviously the dungeon master, but of course there’s Pathfinder and all these other lovely games. John, my one cool thing and this is a 10 year odyssey of trying to find the best email client for Mac. I dumped the mail app a long time ago. Fooled around a few things, landed on Air Mail and I’ve been using Air Mail for many, many years. I think I might have convinced you at some point to use Air Mail, but there’s a new one now that I’m using, that I find much, much superior to that and it is called Canary. Canary works beautifully, far fewer errors or weird buggy techies. It’s also fast, fast, fast, fast, fast and it is for Mac OS and iOS and the two sync between each other flawlessly. I find it to be an excellent email client. I recommend it highly.

**John:**
That’s great. I think I’ve told you this before, but I switched over to Superhuman at Rachel Bloom’s recommendation and.

**Craig:**
Superhuman?

**John:**
Superhuman. I think Craig, you may want to check it out. Superhuman only works with Gmail, sits on top of a Gmail.

**Craig:**
Oh, I got a problem with that.

**John:**
All right. I’m entirely in the Gmail ecosystem, but it is ridiculously fast and it does such a great job of sorting stuff out, so I can get to inbox zero super quickly. I’ve been loving Superhuman, but it’s not to everyone’s taste. Interesting with superhuman. The onboarding process, you basically apply for it and then they make an appointment and then you have a half hour Zoom with the superhuman tech who walks you through everything.

**Craig:**
I’m never going to do that. Ever, ever. I don’t want to talk to somebody.

**John:**
It’s better. It’s better.

**Craig:**
I obviously have some Gmail addresses as everybody does, but I don’t have only Gmail.

**John:**
Yeah and you and I never actually email each other. We’re only texting.

**Craig:**
Yeah. Emails… Megana just email’s for old people, right?

**Megana:**
What? I email a lot.

**Craig:**
Well, you’re old.

**John:**
It’s a sensitive subject there, Craig.

**Craig:**
Yeah. Oh, you thought I was asking you from the young person’s point of view?

**Megana:**
Oh God.

**John:**
You can reach Megana Rao. She’s our producer of Scriptnotes. you can find her at ask@johnaugust.com. Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli after this week is by Timothy Fajda. If you need 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 sometimes @Clmazin. I’m always @JohnAugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

**John:**
We have t-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. It’s dicey, whether you can get one of those t-shirts or hoodies by Christmas, but try. They’re really nice. They’re really soft. You can sign up to become a premium member @scriptnotes.net. You get all the back episodes and bonus segments. Like the one we’re about to record on why movie dialogue is so hard to understand. Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Craig:**
Thanks guys.

**Megana:**
Thank you.

**John:**
Craig, we are talking about this article that Ben Pearson wrote for Slashfilm. I saw it passed around all over Twitter this past week, looking at whether and why movie dialogue has become harder to understand over the years. We’ll start with the first question. Is the thesis correct? Has movie dialogue become harder to understand over your lifetime?

**Craig:**
I think so. I think so. I am a sound obsessed producer and I struggle all the time, all the time, when I’m watching things. Sometimes I play things back. I struggle with the way they mix things and I wasn’t even aware of how grumpy I was about a lot of it, until I read this article and thought, ah, okay, I’m not nuts. I’m not nuts.

**John:**
Yeah. I approach it from a couple different ways. They talk about Christopher Nolan in here who seems singularly uninterested sometimes in actually, us being able to understand what his characters are saying, but also having worked on enough sets and worked with enough sound people, I know that we have tremendous technology to record sound and mix it properly and I don’t think the problem is technological on any level or that our sound professionals are not extraordinarily good. I think they all are and I want to make sure we are not throwing any of them under the bus, because it’s not their fault.

**Craig:**
No, not at all. In fact, we have more technology now than we ever have, to present excellent sound to people and I don’t mean excellent sound like everything is crisp and clear and quality, but even just beautiful. This is a problem that everybody who works on a mixing sounds stage, is well aware of. They’re fighting against this all the time. Similarly, on stage the sound recording team, which is the sound mixer there and the sound assistant, who’s wiring everybody up and the boom operator, they’re always worried about sound and they always want to make sure that we’re not picking up stuff, we shouldn’t be picking up and that the lines aren’t being muffled or squished by the movement of clothing or anything and I support that tremendously. It’s one of the first things I say early on, on a production is how important sound is to me and I let the first AD know that to me sound, it’s more important the sound is good during a take, than if I don’t know, a light gets a little wonky, but that’s me.

**John:**
Yeah and I think you’re probably also willing to say, for this shot, I don’t really care about sound. I’m not anticipating using the sound for this. You can tell people when it’s the priority. We have to understand everything here clearly or that should be the default, but if there’s some wide shot, where you’re just not going to care about the sound, you know you’re not going to use the sound, you can also tell them that, so that the sound person’s not trying to kill themselves to get sound, that you’re not going to be able to use.

**Craig:**
Which they know.

**John:**
They know.

**Craig:**
They know and the reason why we say in wide shots, the sound and dialogue isn’t particularly as important, is because we’re far enough away, that we can probably put another take in their mouth if we need to.

**John:**
Let’s talk about that, Craig, because I think most listeners probably don’t have a sense, the dialogue they see characters speaking, it may not be the actual take that they are… Editors do magic all the time.

**Craig:**
All the time. Keep in mind that obviously when we’re watching people talk, there are a few shots where we see them both at the same time, like wide shots and then once we get into coverage, meaning, okay, but now I’m over a shoulder to you and I’m over a shoulder to you or I’m clean on you and I’m close up on you, some of the dialogue is off screen. It’s off camera and we can put any take in there. We can also take a word that you might pronounce a little funny and find another take where you said the word correctly and just drop it in there with an audio edit and you’ll never know. Dialogue editors can do incredible things, but only if the dialogue has been recorded cleanly and there wasn’t the sound of a truck going under it and if the producer in the room in television, me the show runner or in features, typically the director, cares to make it sound good.

**John:**
It’s the producer or director saying, “No, no. This has to be good and we are going to either do another take, so we can get this right. We’re going to not do that noisy thing, so we can get one clean thing. We are going to get coverage. We’re going to get wild lines. We were going to spend the time to do this,” because time is probably the biggest reason why some dialogue is not recorded as cleanly as it could be.

**Craig:**
And for me, I just have an ear on it. If I’m watching a take and it’s really good, but there’s one word where, because somebody shifted in their jacket, the lab is all screwed up, then I ask the sound people, do we pick it up on the boom and also, is there another take where I could just stick that line in or is it the kind of thing where I could edit around, but the biggest impact I think the director or show runner can have on dialogue and the clarity of dialogue, is talking to the actors, because there is and this article sites something that I absolutely believe is true, a contagious mumble-core-ism, that has infected everyone and it’s bad.

**John:**
Let’s get into this, because you’re also an actor. You are on sets, where you’re having to make choices about how you were going to-

**Craig:**
I’m a great actor.

**John:**
You’re… I’m sorry, Craig, you’re a great actor., Who’s honest at making choices about how you’re going to play a line.

**Craig:**
Yes.

**John:**
And one of the choices you could make, is to bury the line or mumble the line or just not bring a lot of attention to the line, basically set it internally and you’re choosing not to do this. Talk to us about the decision about realism in delivery of things, versus the heightened thing that you might do, so people can actually understand what you’re saying.

**Craig:**
Well then once again, comedy gets it. Clarity and understanding is essential to appreciation of something, generally speaking. In drama, what can happen sometimes with actors, is in their reasonable desire to avoid indicating, emoting, overdoing, pushing, they get small, they can get really quiet. Sometimes in rehearsals, things that are just a normal conversation, like the one you and I are having, get slow and whispery. Part of it is a little bit of a fear, part of is a little bit of an insecurity. The one thing that I really don’t like doing is table reads, because I find that really good actors recognize that this is unnatural. They don’t want to be judged for their performance in that room, sitting around a table and they get mumbly. They just don’t want to be on the hook for it. Sometimes it’s about comfort. It’s about getting the actors comfortable through a few takes, so that you can start to get volume and clarity and things aren’t too whispery or mumbly.

**Craig:**
Some of the whispery/mumbly stuff is just pretense and some of it is a lack of caring. I’ve got to tell you, the thing that they cite here is Bane and I love doing my Bane impression, but I missed a bunch of Bane stuff, because I just didn’t understand why I would miss it, because it seemed like they were actually taking the audio from him, from the mask and not just re-recording it and then filtering it through the… Because, if you’re going to wear a mask, other people have to at least understand you. By the way, if in Bane, he had been, [inaudible 01:08:47] and then Batman was like, yeah and [inaudible 01:08:51] and then he’s like, “No, seriously, I do not… Say that again slowly.” [inaudible 01:08:56] and it would’ve been awesome, but they didn’t do that. Everybody understood them except for us where we were like, “What?” I do think that it’s important for the show runners and directors, to carefully and respectfully get the actors to place where you know people are going to be able to appreciate the words they’re saying.

**John:**
Yeah. I also wonder whether sometimes actors don’t have appreciation of how much editors and directors and posts and everyone else, can help them get to that quiet place. I think they may think that they have to be super, super quiet to hear, because they would be whispering in real life and don’t understand that, no, no, no, we can actually see the effect you’re trying to achieve. Let us achieve the effect, rather than you thinking you have to do it all yourself. They don’t want to feel stagey and theatrical in that way, but no, we can get you to that volume place appropriately, just give us a little bit more here, so we can record it.

**Craig:**
Yeah and a lot of times what I will do, is make a note that a word or two has been garbled a little bit. The other thing is that enunciation is a big deal for people, who’ve been trained in theater on stage. Enunciation is not necessarily something that has been strictly drilled into people, whose primary experience has been in television or film and some people struggle with enunciation and for me, rather than becoming a speech therapist, I just make notes and I think to myself, “Okay, if I really need that one clear, I’m going to go in there and say, this word got a little bit garbled,” but not, in my mind I think I’ll loop it.

**Craig:**
I can get that later and I can blend it in and it’ll be really good and looping, which is our all encompassing term for recording the line again later in a sound studio and then dropping it into the film, has become better and better and better to the point now where I’m way more comfortable believing that it will blend and that we will not notice a discontinuity in sound between naturally recorded voice and looped voice later.

**John:**
Working on a serious television show now, you’ll also get a sense of, these are actors who I know are just fantastic at ADR and looping and they are people who can say, okay, no, this is going to be fine, we’ll get that in the room, versus there might be other people like, you know what, it’s actually not their greatest skillset, is being able to hear what they did and match it and you might want to get that wild line or get another take, there on the set.

**Craig:**
Yes and one of the nice things about doing episodic television, is while we’re shooting, we’re also editing. I can go and sit down with Bella Ramsey and say, “Oh, we’ve got 20 minutes. Let’s bring our sound team over here. I just need you to say this line, because it’s off camera and it was a little funky on the mic, so let’s get it nice and clean now and then we can drop it in,” because we know it’s easy to do. We can start actually looping before we ever get even to proper post, which is advantageous.

**John:**
But, underlying all of this is you have to care and the fact that you do care, is why you’re going to get some good sound. Basically, the answer to this question about movie dialogue and how to get it better, is just it’s caring and it’s making sure that the caring comes from the very start.

**Craig:**
It’s caring and as much as I love when people have complimented a show I’ve made, about how it looks, when I get a compliment about how it sounds, that’s the thing that just warms my heart the most and I think I’ve seen this interesting look on the face of people in post, when I talk about this and it’s sad, because the look is, finally. Do you know what I mean? They’ve been neglected and it’s not right and look, maybe it’s just me, but sound to me is like smell. It’s a weird one, except that’s where all the memories come from. It’s just a faster root to my weird under brain and that’s what I find sound can do.

**John:**
Love it. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:**
Thank you John.

Links:

* [Endeavor sells its content side CJ Entertainment](https://labusinessjournal.com/news/2021/nov/29/endeavor-sells-content-studio-south-korean-media-c/)
* [WGA Health Fund](https://www.wgaplans.org/health/healthfaqs.html) now eligible for infertility treatments.
* [For tips on understanding your contract, check out episode 407](https://johnaugust.com/2019/scriptnotes-ep-407-understanding-your-feature-contract-transcript)
* [A writer who moved off the grid and hates it](https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/love-humor/remote-cabin-write/) advice by Blair Braverman
* [Have You Considered Accountancy? How to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for Writers By Wisława Szymborska (Edited and translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh)](https://literaryreview.co.uk/have-you-considered-accountancy) review by Joanna Kavenna
* [The Game Master’s Book of Non-Player Characters](https://www.amazon.com/Game-Masters-Book-Non-Player-Characters/dp/1948174804) by Jeff Ashworth
* [Canary Mail](https://canarymail.io/) email service for MacOS and iOS
* [Why Movie Dialogue is so Hard to Understand](https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/?fbclid=IwAR3ClhGA3-F33lfL1MXxML90-rrSH8Tt2vARyijsSFKEsZL-3D5vrJO6i-g#) by Ben Pearson for Slashfilm
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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 Timothy Vajda ([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

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