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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has even more swearing than usual, so if you’re in a car with your kids, this is a standard warning about that.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 657 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Deadpool & Wolverine has become the highest-grossing R-rated film in history. Today on the show, we welcome back its co-writer, producer, and star, Mr. Ryan Reynolds.

Ryan Reynolds: Oh, hi.

John: Welcome back, Ryan.

Ryan: Hi. Very nice to be here. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

John: Last time you were here was early pandemic and it was you and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. We talked about the fourth wall and sort of tapping on that glass. Looking back at the transcript, I think really what happened is we were all so smitten with Phoebe Waller-Bridge that we didn’t really ask you a lot of questions about stuff. We were mostly just staring at Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

Ryan: I could just spend the rest of my life just listening to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, just insight, ideas, just like the level of acerbic, gorgeous wit that pours out of that person is pretty special.

John: Yes. She was fantastic. You know What? She’s not here today, so it’s all about you.

Ryan: Well, wow.

Craig: You’re just as pretty. I’m absolutely lost in your beglassed eyes.

Ryan: Thank you. Thank you. Yes. I still got it. God, that’s good.

Craig: Oh, boy, do you have it–

John: I thought we’d talk about your approach to Deadpool, really the character and the franchise as an actor, as a writer, as a producer, and really get into how you get movies made because, Ryan Reynolds, you’re actually really good at getting movies made. Your ability to will something into existence is impressive and I think it started with Deadpool. That’s your first producing credit. The ability to go from an actor who is cast in a movie to a force who makes a movie exist is something I’d really like to talk to you about.

Then in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about the non-film stuff you do because I think one of the things that I’ve enjoyed seeing you do over the last 10 years is make a bunch of stuff that doesn’t have to be a movie or a TV show, but it’s related to some brand that you control. My gut instinct is that it’s not about money, it’s just about the chance to make a lot of stuff, and I want to talk to you about that.

Ryan: Great. Very exciting.

John: Cool. Let’s go all the way back to Deadpool. When were you first aware of the character? When did that first cross your mind, like, “Oh, Ryan Reynolds. Deadpool. That’s a thing that I should be thinking about?”

Ryan: That’s a good question. I think it was 2004, someone sent me– I believe it was Toby Emmerich, sent me a Deadpool comic. In that comic, I appeared. My name appeared. Somebody asked what Deadpool looks like under the mask, and he said he looks like a cross between a shar pei and Ryan Reynolds. They intentionally left the Y out of my last name, I think for legal reasons or some sort of– I believe it was Joe Kelly who did that particular issue.

That was the first time I became aware of it. I just thought it was really interesting to read about this. Forget about the humor side of it. I thought it was interesting to read about a character who seemed like they were in a low to high-level militarized shame spiral over their life and their circumstances, but also was aware that they were in a comic book, which to me just added this whole other completely bizarre layer. That’s how I got into it. That was my first introduction to it.

Craig: When you read that first, did you have that instinct that this character, with its tone, was– there are things sometimes as writers, we get things, and as actors, I can only imagine this is true as well, where you go, “Oh, not only do I know how to do this. This is actually easy. This is the pitch I hit the hardest. This is going to be fun because there’s no wind resistance here. It’s just naturally in me already.”

Ryan: I mean a little bit. I’ve always loved acknowledging and playing with cultural landscape in many ways. I think that is a trait that you could superimpose onto Deadpool in that world quite easily. I don’t like how– You know when you see a TED Talk and you see, they come out and they go, “Here’s how I did it. Here’s how I knew.”

“Early on, I felt this.” It’s a really slow-motion car accident to self-gratification and giving yourself basically a public pat on the back. I find that frustrating because I don’t believe that anybody– if they do, God bless them. I don’t know that anybody was just like, “I see this as clear as a bell.” It’s so easy to mythologize that “I spent 10 years every day pushing this movie up the hill, trying to get it made because I was the only one who believed in it.”

And that’s just simply not true. I loved it. I thought that there was something really wonderful to do there. At the end of the day, many of us, I can’t speak for all of us, many of us are just fucking winging it. I knew there was something I could do there the whole thing, the whole picture. I didn’t see exactly how it could slot into the modern movie-going experience or even comic book movies. At that point, when I first read it, most comic book movies were quite serious or they’re at least starting to trend that way.

I think Deadpool’s always been unusually benefited by timing. Deadpool 1 was a curiosity. It was a natural underdog. It showed up at a time when it reached a sort of apex level of self-seriousness in that particular– I don’t know. Some people don’t call it a genre, but I do.

Then Deadpool 2 is a fast follow. I’m very, very proud of Deadpool 2, up until this last one, it was my favorite of them. Then, of course, Deadpool and Wolverine, I think, again, very lucky to slot in at the exact right time.

Craig: I believe Deadpool called it a low point.

Ryan: A low point. Yes. The dip. Deadpool called it the dip. Yes. “He’s joining in a low point.” It was really all these little things… It’s luck. I didn’t write Marvel Jesus as a commentary on where the studio was at this exact moment, but it came around at the right time and it was– Yes.

John: Let’s wind back, though, a little bit because the idea of you as a superhero was not unexpected. At the time that Toby Emmerich sent over this Deadpool comic, had you already done Blade Trinity?

Ryan: No. Sorry. I was on set.

John: On Blade Trinity, you were meant to be a supporting character who ended up getting a sort of bigger role as things went along and you had what’s now the classic Ryan Reynolds wit. You were commenting on the situations that you’re experiencing in ways that felt new and fresh and you were the best thing in that movie.

Ryan: Well, I don’t know about that but–

Craig: No. I do know about that. That’s absolutely true. The side note was not only shocked to see Blade in Deadpool & Wolverine, I was shocked to see Blade. That was pretty startling. The history of that, of Blade 3 is out there. Yes. That was pretty eye-opening and a testament, I think, again to, I don’t know, your ability to manifest things. That’s pretty remarkable.

Ryan: I mean come on. What about redemption and culture and storytelling? Redemption is one of the greatest engines, I think, of emotion and storytelling and all kinds of stuff. I felt like that character, in particular, never got that third act, that moment to– particularly, if you think about Wesley Snipes, the guy’s a movie star. He’s just a thousand-billion-watt movie star. And charisma in spades. Yes. I don’t know. I was just grateful he said yes. I wasn’t sure that he would say yes. It was certainly a nerve-wracking phone call, cold calling him out of the blue after 20 years.

He was a dream. He was just an absolute dream. I feel like I get goosebumps even talking about him, seeing him break the frame in the movie, that first moment, and seeing that with thousands of people at Comic-Con who are all seeing it for the first time ever, I don’t know that I’ve ever felt anything that was that beautiful. I remember thinking how lucky I am to be any part of this, let alone Deadpool. It was just such an amazing moment, not just for me, but for everybody.

Craig: Yes. I love Ryan Reynolds.

Ryan: Oh, come on now.

Craig: No. I do. I do.

Ryan: Welcome to my TED Talk, Craig. This is how I did it.

Craig: I can’t help it. It’s just it’s the Canadian humility. Canadian humility is a special kind. It really is. It’s a beautiful thing.

Ryan: It’s a fine line between the humility and just self-loathing, unabashed self-loathing, unregulated. Yes. Horrible.

Craig: Yes. I know a little bit about that.

Ryan: Yes. Sure. We all do. Right?

Craig: Yes.

Ryan: That’s how we know how to type.

Craig: There you go.

Ryan: Yeah. The whole thing’s been a pretty wild journey, but I don’t want to derail us from– I think you had a question about how sort of at the beginning of it all or–

John: Before it became even conceivable that you were going to do a Deadpool character, because that was a very fringe Marvel character. It wasn’t sort of like the next thing on the plate for them to try to do. I was writing Shazam over at Warner’s.

Ryan: Oh yeah.

John: I remember we had a conversation.

Ryan: I remember. Yes.

John: Yes. I remember having a conversation. It’s like, “Well, we need somebody who feels like a superhero, but is actually funny, can play like a little kid.” “Oh, we should do Ryan Reynolds.” Ryan Reynolds wasn’t a big enough star at that point, which was so incredibly frustrating.

Ryan: Shazam is such a great– it’s big. You get to do all that. I just love that character.

John: Yes. There’s a different universe in which you did that. Instead, you got to play a version of this character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I remember when you were getting ready to go off and do that, and you did all the sword practice, then you went off to Australia, and it was a frustrating experience while you were doing it, but it was a chance to play this character. How do you think about that? You had very little control over that manifestation, but there was a chance to play that character.

Craig: To play a character, named that character.

John: Named that character. Yes. That was roughly related to it.

Craig: Specifically without the one thing that made that character interesting. That was the weirdest thing of all. It’s the most verbal character possible, and they’re like, “What is–?”

Ryan: “We should sew his mouth shut.”

Craig: Yeah.

Ryan: I would say it’s more of like, you could characterize that whole era as observations in a scarcity mindset. This business is so transactional, and particularly for me at that point, it was incredibly transactional. The idea that somebody says, “Hey, you can play this character. If you ever want to have a shot at bringing it to the big screen in the way you want, then you should probably do this.” You think, “Oh, I don’t know. This isn’t quite the way I hoped it would ever be, but I also don’t want some other guy to go do it.” Next thing I know, he’s in a red body condom, and he’s running around and having all the fun, so I said, “Yes.”

At that point, too, I’d been learning a lot, because I’d been on some pretty, I don’t want to say chaotic sets, because immediately, people think like people with attitudes and assholes and all kinds of stuff. But there was a propensity for some of these bigger movies to just have this scary sort of middle think sometimes, and it’s like so many people weighing in with so many different ideas and opinions, and everything gets washed out. Any kind of idea you really had to grow in the story sort of gets strangled and killed early on.

I remember sort of seeing that a lot during that period. X-Men Origins: Wolverine did two things. One, I really saw how hard it is to make these bigger movies with so many different characters and studios and opinions and ideas. The other thing I saw was how– Hugh Jackman left the biggest impression on me on that movie because he was so accessible, so kind, obviously so talented, so charismatic, but everything about him was just the genuine article. He was so authentically unique and that he was– everybody felt seen by him. It was incredible leadership.

You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We’ve all been on big movies that are hard to land the plane. I was blown away that somebody could be a movie star on that level and still have so much humanity. It was a nice time for me and my life and my arc to see that kind of person out there in the world. I was grateful for that.

John: You’re both going to be very surprised because I’m going to try a sports metaphor here.

Craig: Whoa.

John: Let’s see how this goes.

Ryan: Whoa. John August. Jesus. Wow.

Craig: Okay. Let’s buckle up everyone here. Here we go.

Ryan: It’s going to be like cricket or something or–

Craig: It’s going to be a hockey ball going through a baseball.

John: I’m going for American football here. This is really a dangerous one for me. I would say that the lead actor in a film, like the number one on the call sheet, ends up being like the quarterback of the team. Everyone sort of looks for the quarterback. They’re not the coach. They’re not the person who’s ultimately calling the shots. They’re not the manager. They don’t own it. They’re not deciding how the whole franchise is going to run, but they’re the person who’s going to set the tone in terms of how we’re going to get this stuff done.

I’ve seen so many movies that have gone better because there was somebody in that lead slot who really got it and sort of could make everyone feel like this is the spirit of how we’re making this movie. And so many productions where it’s all gone south because that number one on the call sheet was just not a good quarterback and people couldn’t look to them for inspiration. So I feel like– You talked about Hugh Jackman, that feels like what he is doing because he’s not generally the person who’s producing the film. He doesn’t have the overall vision for the thing, but he is the right spirit behind it.

Ryan: Yes. I feel like that’s very, very spot-on and astute. I think that what happens more than anything, even just outside of the creative part of it, is that number one on the call sheet that creates a language and a disposition around that movie that will be the experience. It’s a bit of that, Maya Angelou, “Believe in the first time…” That first day or two or that week, exactly how this is going to go.

We’ve all been there, too, where the number one is aptly named. You just kind of, “Ugh,” everything starts to fall apart and you feel this weird toxic thing starts to pour down. Then, the next thing you know, number 52 on the call sheet like having a similar sort of disposition to number one. They’re all seeing the validation of that. Everybody’s seeing like, “Wow. All the energy goes around to the person who’s difficult or hard to work with.”

Maybe that’s a short-term, I don’t know, hit of endorphins for someone. I’m not really sure, but the long-term effects of the movie is always just stifled and shit. Nobody’s able to really say what they’re hoping, how the story could evolve. If you can’t talk to somebody that you’re working with and feel like they’re willing to step outside of whatever agenda they have, I don’t know, you’re dead on arrival. If you’re not dead on arrival, you got really lucky, I think.

Craig: Obviously, you’re number one on the call sheet, and I would imagine all the time now, but certainly, for Deadpool, when you come in there with this knowledge that you’re the Hugh Jackman, essentially, and you have people looking up to you now, even the day players that might murder you, which is hysterical, what do you do?

You were talking about the idea of people, other actors coming to you and talking about how to elevate the story. Or talking about story at all, which, by the way, is so exciting for me to hear, that anyone’s talking about story as opposed to other crap. How do you welcome your cast into that, and how do you set the tone for them?

Ryan: Well, it starts with casting. You got to go cast the people that you know and trust and feel like they’re going to show up for you and show up for them. But running a set that feels safe is hugely important to me, but not for the reasons you might think. It’s a very selfish pursuit because I want everyone to feel amazing and safe and that they can speak up or voice something that concerns them or something that inspires them or just have that idea that this is a collaboration.

Filmmakers shouldn’t just be reserved for a director, a producer, writer, and a star, among a few other names on the poster. Everyone’s making the movie. I would sit at Pinewood and look at these fourth-generation craftspeople building things on those sets. The level of expertise and talent that has been handed down to them and that they’ve also refined and put their shoulder behind and grown is like it’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. I never get tired of that. I never get tired of working with hyper-competent reliable people.

Whenever I have conversations like this, I think, if you could say one word for the kind of person that I think is capable, not every time, nobody bats a thousand, but is capable of making stories that resonate and stories that really work in culture, it’s conscientious. I know that’s such an unsexy word, but people who are conscientious, I think, just excel. One quick little clue that somebody’s conscientious is the dumbest and simplest one, they’re on time. They show up on time. They feel like they’re literally 30 seconds late, but there’s a bit of a, “Ugh. I let myself down.” I don’t know. I never get tired of that, of working with people who live that way, and it bears incredible fruit when you do that.

John: Yes. So Deadpool is your first producing credit. This is the first time where your name is appearing on it. This is your production that you’re overseeing and to have all these values and hopefully get them to come about, but I want to talk to you about getting Fox to say yes, because there was this idea of doing a Deadpool movie. You shot test footage. You had a script together, but you couldn’t get over the starting line there. What was the conversation about trying to do a Deadpool movie and how did you finally push it into existence?

Ryan: It was right in a– everything crashed into this intersection of Green Lantern and Deadpool. I was really hoping to get a Deadpool movie greenlit, and it just was so slow and just not happening. I think the edict at the studio at that point was that they did want to do it, but they just didn’t want to do it yet. They wanted to service these other X-Men characters, which I understand. It’s easy to tell the story in a binary sense that it was them against me, but I also understand how those things work.

I remember sending emails to Fox saying, “I think I’m going to end up doing this other–“ this goes back to what I said earlier. Every actor, every performer, everyone in our industry, writers, directors, producers, there’s always a little scarcity mindset. We always think, “I’m fucked. I’m never going to do this again.” If I don’t act now…

Green Lantern had come around and I had auditioned for it, I don’t know, four or five times at this point, and it was really getting to the finish line. That was when I was saying, like, “Please, is there any chance that you–“ it was a bit like a romantic comedy at the end. “I won’t walk down the aisle with this person if you just blink twice,” and they didn’t blink twice.

I went and did that and then, somehow, some way I was able to– I had already shot the test footage for Deadpool and after Green Lantern and all that debacle, and you think, “How am I ever going to pull out of this?” The test footage ended up on the internet, and boy, that’s what got it greenlit, only because that was the first time I really saw the power of how social media can persuade an entire studio to say yes to something like that.

Craig: It’s not surprising to me that they were– I have this saying that there’s a million ways to say no and only one way to say yes in Hollywood, and the only way to say yes is money, and everything else is no, including soon, or not yet, thinking about it, all is no.

It’s not surprising to me because Hollywood, particularly Hollywood over the last, I would say, 20 years, has become terrified of anything new and obsessed with anything that is established. Deadpool was a comic book, but it wasn’t a comic book that most people knew. The only way it would work is if it were a rated R, which superhero movies are not, ever.

Ryan: No.

Craig: The humor violated all of the self-important, self-serious storytelling principles that were powering not only the resurgence of the superhero genre but movies itself. The entire industry had now become lifted by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That was what every– other studios lost God knows how much, trying to make other cinematic–

Everyone lost their fucking minds. You are saying, “I would like to do one of those things, except it’s R, and it’s fucked. It is dirty. It is so dirty I get pegged in it.” That’s how dirty it is. I talk to the screen. I violate every single principle of what would get you to say yes. The reason they said yes is because they never really had to say yes. They got a freebie. They got the audience to tell them, “No. No. No. We got it. We’re good. Go ahead. Go ahead. Give it to us,” which is incredible.

I think the reason other people don’t try to repeat that is because they can’t, because if you leak test footage, there’s a 99% chance it’s going to be shredded apart. That particular footage got right to the heart of something that people didn’t know they needed. That’s what I think what I love about this character and this– fuck the word franchise, this series of movies the most, is that it was satisfying something in me that I didn’t know I wanted. You guys do this so well. I want to ask you about this, specifically from a writing point of view, how to satisfy the basic needs of redemption stories, love stories about, in this case, what it means to have significance and matter in your life.

Fairly heavy things. Again, I’ve said it on this show many times, I cried at the end of Deadpool 2. And somehow, work those into this mesh of both plot that makes sense, by the way, which is more than I could say for most superhero movies, and this insane tone. How do you marry those things that seem, at least to me, to be initially incompatible?

Ryan: That’s a lot to unpack.

Craig: Yes. Start at the beginning.

Ryan: Let me start with one thing that just popped into my head, which is that, yes, there’s a lot of cinematic universes and all that stuff. I don’t think that any of these movies that we know and love right now exist in the way that we know and love them. I’m not saying everyone has to know and love them. Without Blade, I know that’s a weird thing to pivot back to, but Blade, in 1998, I think Stephen Norrington’s Blade beget, obviously, that becoming a franchise. It was rated R. They did all these things first, and they don’t typically get a ton of credit for it. I mean it was the first–

I think you even saw “Bullet Time,” which is actually something that actually really started a couple of decades before in various iterations. In Blade, used in pop culture in that way, and it was mind-blowing. Then Matrix, of course, really refined it and made it what it is.

That sort of gave way to the X-Men Universe. The X-Men Universe gave way to the MCU. Then all these things sort of happened. You just said something I thought that was very interesting, which is that when people get to witness or feel something that they love but just maybe didn’t know they loved, or for me, it’s seeing Wesley Snipes in Deadpool & Wolverine break that frame, I feel like some people missed him and were clear about it. I think some people missed him desperately but didn’t know they did until that moment. That’s the greatest– that just takes me out at the knees every time.

I love storytelling like that, but then, also, to sort of talk about studios saying, yes. Well, okay. We get to make this. We’ll say yes to this even though we didn’t really have to say yes to this. We got this backdoor insurance plan. They still didn’t really believe in it. I’m not trying to romanticize it or anything, but the budget was $58 million for Deadpool 1, which sounds hefty and should be plenty to do anything. No. It was brutal.

But you said one other thing, which I thought was interesting, is that it was a character that people didn’t really know. I saw those two things as actually, or at least I came to see those things. I want to be careful because I hate that sort of, “I saw it this way.” But I came to see that truly all the greatest lessons I ever learned were on that movie. Necessity is the mother of invention. Too much time and too much money really will annihilate creativity in a lot of ways.

The fact that we had so little forced us to– I remember Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and I, who we broke the story for Deadpool 1 at a lunch at the Chateau Marmont in LA, in one lunch, setting the entire story, and it never changed. Then we had to sort of change some of the set pieces from this huge action set pieces to like a sequence in Deadpool 1, which is 12 bullets, which is Deadpool has 12 bullets, there’s 30 bad guys on the road, so he yells out, “I only have 12 bullets, so you’re going to have to share.”

We have to find this way to get through all that stuff. Suddenly, the audience is hooked into the idea. Deadpool, who breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience often, has already let them know that Fox is fucking cheap, and they’re never going to give us even a remotely close to a normal budget, even of their worst X-Men movies.

We have to make do. It really allows authorship for the audience, too. They feel like they’re a part of something. They feel separate from the studio. It’s like the same reason when you make a commercial. It’s like if you– audiences are smart. If you let them know, and they freely admit that they’re watching a commercial to sell a product, they will jump into that story, and they will share that story much sooner than if you’re trying to be sneaky and manipulate them and make them cry and do all this other stuff. Then at the end of it, a Tide pod show up in the middle of your screen, and the logo, it’s a little harder.

I was lucky that they felt like they were on board with this pretty early on. That was where I really fell in love with marketing, because it was– when you asked early, you said that they didn’t know who the character was. Rather than give away all the assets in commercials and trailers and stuff, we really did our best to hide everything and just start writing marketing spots. I stole the suit and I kept it with me. I still have it downstairs.

We just started shooting stuff and really trying to get the audience to be a little bit more fluent with the character, the tone, and the vibe, without actually showing them chunks of the movie. That was just a lesson that has never stopped giving. You guys have all both worked on massive projects and massive movies, and you know that at the end of the day, you don’t– there’s never enough time and there’s never enough money no matter what it is that you’re doing.

We all think asymmetrically, though, when our back is against the wall. We are experiencing enormous constraint, and that’s when just the best possible shit happens, and it happens over and over and over again, and it’s something I will never get tired of.

John: Jesse David Fox wrote a good book this past year on comedy, and he came on the podcast, we talked about it, but he actually had a note about Deadpool, and he says that “Deadpool is a bouffon, a classic French figure who connects to their audience, not through radical vulnerability, like a clown, but by mocking the audience members and the work they’ve come to see.”

It’s that sense of like you are watching a movie, and we’re all watching a movie, and you’re able to make fun of the people who are sponsoring this movie and enjoy the process of picking apart this thing that we’re in. The other thing which is so strange about Deadpool that I want to talk to you about is, since you’re wearing the mask most of the time, and it really covers your whole face, it’s not like Batman where it’s just the cowl and you can see the rest of it. We can’t see your reactions. You had to, as an actor, I want to talk about sort of the physicality you have to bring to it in order to play an emotion that you would otherwise play on your face. Then how did that also impact the writing? How did it impact scenes that you were doing since we cannot see your face?

Ryan: Okay. First off, I would disagree with the first thing you said. I don’t feel like Deadpool mocks the audience and the people paying for it. I believe, and perhaps I’m defensive of it, but I believe that Deadpool, I believe it is clown work.

All of it is clown work. Your hands, the way everything moves, this may be something that actually limits my ability to perform, but I’m very camera-aware. I can look and watch the assistant cameraman put a lens on, I can see what size the lens is from far away, I know exactly where he is right now, I don’t need to ask him where if it’s a cowboy, if it’s here or here, and I use the space.

If you ever watch like every prima painting with Tony Zhou, there’s one particular special he does on Buster Keaton called The Art of the Gag. The Art of the Gag is like basically, to me, is a college course that runs four minutes long. It’s just so– I’ve always loved this about Buster Keaton is that his physicality, how he tells a story with every square inch of his body and every square inch of the frame and how we hold that static frame. It can always be a bit of a tricky conversation because you want–

Obviously, you want your DP who’s forgotten more about photography in the last hour than I will ever know, but I want him to feel completely free and know what to do. I also love a static frame. I really don’t want to move the camera, just leave it there because I believe things are funnier in a static frame. We feel less like the camera’s telling us what to feel or what to move.

Craig: Bless you for this. Bless you for this. Static and wide.

Ryan: Right? It’s just the go. I don’t–

Craig: Throw a 27 on and, yes, just let me go. Comedy, that’s comedy. The camera shouldn’t be in the way. I completely agree.

Ryan: Yes, and a long, long lens either. If we’re going to go close, I don’t want that either. I don’t want this movement that’s like– a little bit is okay. I get a little crazy about that and try to tell the story. Then the mask, I find so much more freeing than being unmasked. Of course, Deadpool, when he takes his mask off, he has another mask underneath, which is a prosthetic makeup job.

The mask has always been very subtly animated by Wētā. In every one of the movies, we do it this way. I’ll give you an example for the last movie, where Shawn Levy and I would be sitting in the edit room and say, “Okay. That’s like in the movie. We’re going to lock that. We know that.” Whereas we’re locking reels toward the end.

I will then take my camera phone, film my face saying every line in that sequence as it appears on camera and send it directly to Wētā in New Zealand. They will come back with the mask, just subtly animate. That helps a little bit, gives us a little bit extra, but you don’t need it. The movie works just as well sometimes without even that. When we test it, the reactions are without them.

Craig: It is an amazing thing that just to tie it back to writing again, that the way the character is written to be so verbal, the blank mask in front doesn’t– You’re right. It actually not only does it not get in the way. I think in a way it helps in the way that a static frame helps. It takes some of the other stuff away and lets you just listen to the words.

As writers, this is very exciting because sometimes, when we’re making things, I’ll see someone perform something that I wrote and I think, “Oh, you said it right, but your face was doing another thing. Let’s go again.” There’s something about removing all of those things. I talked to with Pedro Pascal about this in The Mandalorian. It was like a weird freeing thing to just talk. I think it helps Deadpool specifically because he is so verbal.

Ryan: Also just to touch on the writing part of it, which I know is really why we’re here. I tend to– and people think I’m an improv guy, which I am a little bit, but I write everything. I write all my alts. I have sometimes up to 20 alts for one joke. I’ll throw, “Here’s five alts for Hugh, here’s 10 alts for you, here’s 2 alts for you, or even three.” I love that part of it. It’s not improv.

In terms of the writing, because Deadpool only works if there’s something about it that is anchored in emotion. It’s easy to forget the emotional part of those movies, but it always has to be anchored in something tragic and awful or something generally not as existential except for the last one.

For me, to express micro facial expressions, I have to use my voice, which is weird. I need to tell the audience a story and I need to– it’s almost like how a pitcher can put real junk on a ball. You have to just– it’s this very tiny, tiny little adjustment, but it makes all the difference in the world. I love that. I love that challenge. It’s something that you never ever finish. I’ve never walked away from one of those movies. Even just when we locked, when Shawn and I locked this movie, I’ve never been so depressed. That last reel locked and all the possibility was gone and that was it. That was three years. There it goes. Yes. It’s always a tough moment, but I love the challenge of it. I’m addicted to it.

John: I want to talk to you about alts and ADR with the mask on. You have the ability– you could change lines at any point. How much does stuff tend to move from what you shot on the set versus what’s in the film that we see? Related question, you say you might have 10 or 20 alts for a line. Where are you keeping those? Are those in the main script or do you just have a separate sheet that goes with the scene and say, “Hey. These are the alts”?

Ryan: My notes section. Yes.

John: All right. Notes on your phone?

Ryan: Notes and then I put them in script, too. Maybe I’m just a little type A. I don’t like the page count getting out of control. I don’t like the– as much as I try to, we try to do the– What’s it called? The command D where you get dialogue that’s side by side and stuff.

Craig: Dual dialogue.

Ryan: Dual dialogue. Sorry. Yes. I do a lot of that [chuckles] because I also love it when people talk over each other. It feels real and fun. I’m always shocked when that’s met with resistance, which it is sometimes people are like, “Well, no. You have to– My line, your line.” I’m like, “Yes, but not that– it’s like old school. I speak, you speak.” You’re like, Howard Hawks– Everyone was speaking. I’m pretty sure the gaffer was yelling in the middle of the take. I love that.

The alts are generally hidden in my phone and I sometimes don’t get to all of them. Then it’s just fun. You live with something in the edit for months and then you go, “Well, you open the bin up again. What’s over there?” You’re just like, “Oh, that’s so fun.” Then you put it in and it’s– everybody feels reinvigorated again.

Then you asked me about, oh, the amount of ADR. There is some less than you would imagine. Things don’t land at– for some reason they did work better when they were just happened on the day. Then I will do a lot of ADR though and change certain things to accommodate exposition or something you might’ve missed. Boy, the mask is incredibly handy for that.

Then there’s a ton of stuff that happens from pre-production into production and then certainly in post where you both know this better than anybody, but you try to not just listen to your script and your shot list and you try to listen to the movie. If you listen to it, it yells at you, and it tells you all these different things.

If you have an ability and it’s one of the reasons I fell in love with Shawn Levy, working with him, is he’s obviously an incredible storyteller who can do it in all kinds of different genres, but he’s great at pivoting and I love to pivot. I love to do it in a way that is responsible and adherent to the budget and our clock and our schedule. It doesn’t feel like a runaway train in any way, shape, or form. That touches a little bit on what we were talking about earlier where I was on some chaotic large sets and I never wanted to be on one of those or author a set like that.

Showing up with a complete draft is super important to me. I know a lot of comic book movies get where they’re like, “We don’t have a script yet, but we’re going to start shooting. We’ll figure it out. We’re going to shoot plates after every shot and we’ll–” That to me is just like a throat– I have a forest of ulcers in my stomach. I just don’t– I cannot do that. I come with like contingency plans, all kinds of stuff. If we don’t get this actor, we don’t get that, we can go this way, this way. A lot of different drafts, tons of writing, but I love it.

Craig: That’s producing. You’re also describing how producorial you are. Lindsay Doran said that the primary job of a producer is to protect the intention of the screenplay and all the other producers laugh at her. “Oh, no. It’s to–“ I don’t know, accrue wealth like dragons and sit on it. I think she’s right. It sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing, which is making sure that within the reality that you have, which is money and time and people, that you can protect the intentions of the screenplay up until the point you’ve gathered all the footage, at which point now that’s the screenplay, protect the intention of that, move those pieces around as they want to make them sing–

Ryan: And knowing what’s important. I think it’s like if you can create a moat around what’s really important in the movie, everything else seems to work out. The thing both Shawn and I are most proud of in this whole movie isn’t the box office necessarily. We had a day and a half of reshoots in the whole movie. I’m so proud of that. I just feel like I want all the– it goes back to like my– when I was young and just the shittiest student on earth. I never got an A or a gold star. This is like one thing with Marvel where I was like, “Well, Dad, Are you proud of me, Dad? I did the thing.” It’s so sad and pathetic, but I’m really proud of that, that part on time, on budget, and a day and a half of reshoots. It’s like, yes, just feel like Shawn and I both landed the plane exactly how they were hoping.

Craig: Well, it worked and it’s great. I texted Shawn. I actually saw it last night because we wrapped on Friday. That was my life. Then my reward was going to see your movie and Melissa and I just sat there howling. We weren’t in a packed theater. Sometimes, when you go see a comedy and you’re like, “Oh, there’s not that many people because it’s a weird time of day and it’s four weekends later or whatever.” It’s not as– It was totally funny. I didn’t care. I was laughing my ass off.

Ryan: Shawn is such an inherently optimistic person and I love that about him. If there’s one thing that he and I both try to put in everything that we’ve done is just an absence of cynicism and really that feeling of like really just trying to throw the best possible fastball of joy we can muster. He’s so good at that. I felt like I found the dance partner I’ve waited for my whole life.

Craig: Well, that’s amazing.

John: I’d love to talk about the Marvel of it all because the first two Deadpool movies are made for Fox. Fox had its own sort of offshoot of the Marvel Universe and then Disney buys Fox. It was a question of like, “Well, what the hell happens to Deadpool?” You can’t imagine Disney making a Deadpool movie.
When did those conversations started? I remember you and I chatting about like, “Oh, Feige wants to do a thing, but I don’t know if it’s going to work.” How did that actually all come about? When was the sit down and say like, “Okay. I’m going to do this movie and here’s the idea for doing this movie.” How did that all come to pass?

Ryan: Boy, it was the slowest-moving train ever. Disney bought Fox and then there was obviously a period of limbo after that. With some speed, I was sitting in Kevin’s office though at Marvel and talking. I had a pitch for him. It was a Deadpool & Wolverine movie and it was the Roshomon story that I had been working on with Scott Frank.

Kevin just didn’t see it. He was just like– Now I think I know more, which is that there was a lot of different licensing issues that were really challenging at the time that nobody really wanted to say out loud. So he just summarily said, “Look, that’s never going to happen. Logan’s dead. Let’s move on.” I had a way to do it that didn’t disrupt that timeline, but didn’t matter. I had a lot of meetings with Kevin. Kevin is like the– I’ve never met anyone as genial, kind, nice, engaged, just really genuinely warm and wonderful human being. You could sit in his office for an hour and a half. You could walk out to the lot at Disney, and you’d be like, “That was the best meeting ever.” Then you get halfway to your car and you’re like, “Nothing happened. Wait. Nothing. There’s no directive. Wait. What’s happening? What am I supposed to–? I thought–?” It was a weird thing.

Then finally it just eventually found its footing. I’m a very lazy writer. I don’t like writing. I’m not you guys. It’s much more of a gift I think that you guys can just sit down and crank something out. It takes me a while to get into that rhythm where it’s actually productive. I tend to– I’m not a good enough writer to just bang through something quickly. I can lose days on one paragraph, and then I can suddenly get 20 pages out in a day, it’s just like you just– it’s such an awe– I don’t know how– One day, I went– I don’t want to bore because you guys have probably covered this in many, I guess–

Craig: Oh, we’ve bored everyone.

Ryan: –I would love to hear more about that. I want to know what your tricks are because I have those moments where I just– everyone’s like, “No. You got to move on. You move through. You just–“ and I can’t.

Craig: Ryan, we’re never giving you our tricks because you have nearly everything. You want the one last thing that we have. We’re never– Never. Never.

Ryan: I don’t blame you. I’m pseudo-retired now anyway so that’s fine. It’s fine. I’m done. I cranked out quite a few little treatments and different things. At one point, one of my favorites was just– I did a short before Deadpool 2 called No Good Deed, which I thought was fun, just wrote this little short shot at– with Dave Leitch. It was amazing. Loved doing it. I wanted to write another short now that Disney bought Deadpool and I basically–

It was just Deadpool in a room interrogating this old, old man. We don’t know who he is but we slowly come to realize that he’s the hunter who shot Bambi, Bambi’s mom. We keep going. You think like any minute of Deadpool’s just going to take this guy’s life in the most grotesque way. By the end, you just realize that Deadpool’s just a huge fan. Remember having that wonderful call with Alan Bergman and Ellen Horn just saying like, “No. We don’t mess with Bambi.”

Craig: That’s great.

Ryan: I was like, “Okay. Good. No problem. I got it loud and clear.” The fun story would be that working with Disney and Marvel throughout this was insanity and tested the limits of taste and all kinds of stuff for them and for us. It was the opposite. Once we actually locked into it, they were awesome.

John: Things like the TVA, your movie wouldn’t make sense if there weren’t the multiple universes and the Timeline Variance Authority, all that stuff, which is established in the Loki TV series. You needed to know about that. Is that a thing where they came to you like this is a framework for how this could fit in?

Ryan: Yes. They gave us a bunch of different avenues. I knew I wanted to do a movie that touched on and commented on and played with the multiverse because I knew that was the only way I could have Wolverine/Logan in the movie without disrupting or hurting the legacy and the, I think, the beauty that Mangold, Michael Green and Scott Frank had created on Logan.

It was really this idea that you have an anchor being, that anchor being is dead. Deadpool, obviously, as diluted as he is, thinks the anchor being was him. He’s fine. But then, of course, we find out it’s Logan. That to me was a way of respecting everything that they did while still having our fun by starting the whole movie off in an action sequence using only his bones as weapons.

Craig: Well that’s a really interesting lesson about– that I would probably push into the world of parody where you are taking something that you love and respect. Then gently making fun of it because you love and respect it. It also lets the audience know that you’re not fucking around. There was something about that opening sequence where it was like, “Hey, look. This guy died but like always, they didn’t really die because this is the young and the restless.” It just goes on forever, some multiverse. Starting with that I thought was a great way to establish tone.

John: Yes. Close the chapter, too.

Craig: Yes. To respect it, acknowledge it, and then definitively say– I thought it was really important to definitively say, “Hey, guys, that’s not the wolverine in this movie.” That one’s okay. Your experience of that movie not changed because we’re not dealing with that. That guy died. Man, what a great way to start. I just thought it was so smart.

Ryan: Set to Bye Bye Bye, too, which is just– the words of that I just love, that was the real motivation to use it. It was just like, “Bye-bye.” Goodbye.

Craig: Yes. Goodbye.

Ryan: That’s done. Now let’s move on to this other thing.

Craig: It’s so done. In fact, just in case you were wondering if we were going to take this skeleton because Marvel does this all the time and put it in the reanimated juice. You did literally just shredded apart and used it to kill people. The finality of that and the– like I said, the respect. It’s a weird thing to say, “Oh, digging up a character’s dead body and shredding it apart and using it to kill people is a sign of respect.” It clearly was.

Ryan: Oh, man. We are reverent of everything that– If you meet a couple and they’re just exceedingly cordial to each other and polite. You’re like, “Oh, what’s wrong there?” They take, you bust each other’s shops a little bit, then you’re like, “Oh, okay. Now I believe. You guys do like each other.”

John: Well, the other set of bones you’re dealing with in this movie is the bones of the Fox-Marvel movies. They said the whole legacy of all those movies that came before, which weren’t dismissed, but were not treasured at the moment. That the actual end credits really go back through a celebration of what those movies were. Of course, the Chris Evans joke that we were assuming that this one character is actually the character he played before. How early in the pitch process were you talking about this celebration of the forgotten Fox characters?

Ryan: Pretty early. Chris Evans was Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick’s idea. It was just genius and never changed and that was set in stone from the jump but I really wanted to steer away from the MCU. “Here’s all the new toys in the MCU. Instead can we find a way to eulogize this whole world?”

So much of what ended up in the movie was based in what was actually happening, which was that Disney bought Fox. They said, we want Deadpool. We don’t want anyone else. No one. They can all get fucked and we’ll figure them all out later. I felt like, “Well, hold on. You can keep your MCU. I want my friends. I want my blind owl. I want Vanessa and a Colossus and all these other– I want them.” It was really tricky. Again, I think it might’ve been a rights licensing thing when I look back at it.

I really struggled with that. That actually ended up becoming the impetus for the entire story. It became an allegory for Disney buying Fox was what the TVA was. “We’re going to prune your universe but we only want you because you’re special for some reason and we don’t want anybody else.” It was so fun to just– again, that necessity is mother invention thing, just use what’s actually coming at you and find inspiration in that. That’s what pushed the whole story forward. Then this idea that both myself, Shawn Levy and Hugh Jackman, all three of us, our entire careers we owe to 20th Century Fox.

That’s where these things happen again. There’s no master plan. You’re like, “Well, let’s plop…” In the void, there’s relics everywhere. There’s just shit all over the place, Easter eggs, all kinds of stuff. What if we put the huge 20th Century Fox logo and it’s sticking out of the ground in the back?

John: A Planet of the Apes reference?

Ryan: Yes. That pushed us toward more of this larger eulogy of this world and these characters that are a bygone era and tipping our hat to them and saying goodbye to them in a way that you just normally couldn’t in any other kind of movie. Then even the end legacy reel that plays to the Green Day song at the very end was like– I was sitting at Petersham Gardens, someplace in London on an off day shooting, and I heard that song, and then it just–

I had already been thinking like, “I need to find a way to pay off the logo that’s in the ground.” Otherwise, it’s just going to look a sight gag for the movie, and I want it to mean something and it didn’t. This is just probably the worst way to be writing a screenplay or a story, but you’re sitting there hearing that song, it’s like, “I wonder if we could get the rights to all the different performers and people who had brick by brick built that universe?” Having Chris Evans morph into flame, and then reappear as Michael B. Jordan’s Human Torch and then have that wonderful jump from James McAvoy to Patrick Stewart and back. It was really fun. We had that cut and put together maybe five days after that. We were–

John: That’s great.

Ryan: That was just as we were coming back from the strike where that happened.

John: Now, Ryan Reynolds, you’re very good at making movies. There’s other people who are good at making movies. No one is better than you are at promoting a movie. I want to just wrap up this Deadpool segment by talking about the months-long promotional push you did for Deadpool.

It was just remarkable. It wasn’t just a world tour. We’ve seen other performers do that but you actually just– you made the promotion of the movie and event in and of itself. How early were you thinking about that? How much was it a plan that was codified versus you just figuring out on the go what the next thing is to do?

Ryan: So much of all of our jobs is listening. You listen to culture. The water cooler is digital, so you’re sitting around it, and trying to gather what you can gather. Two things that, maybe this never happened, but we wanted a less is more approach. Disney has one of the most sophisticated promotional mechanisms and systems that can just perforate any part of the world at any time. That was wild to witness and learn from.

Everything we were trying to orchestrate at Maximum Effort, which is the company that does the production and marketing, was a bit of a love letter to the same thing that made me so nervous in the screenwriting. Again, I’m one of several writers on this movie, but the thing that I was most nervous about was making sure that Hugh and Wolverine were taken care of. I always thought if we fail that, even in the slightest misstep, we’re fucked. Once we got that on the screen in a way that we felt moving and honest, then the marketing came around with that too.

A lot of the pieces were directed at Wolverine and how special this moment is for him to be here. Also, there’s a line in the movie where I say to him right at the end, I say, “I’ve waited a long time for this, team-up.” He looks back at me and I say, “You were the best, Wolverine.” It’s not even Wade Wilson talking to me, it’s me talking to Hugh. I have waited a long time for this, team-up. You will not find a bigger Hugh Jackman champion and fan than me. He’s a person, but also a performer. You guys must have had this a million times in your life, where you write something for someone you idolize and adore, and then you see them take that and make it so much better than what you put on the page. At least for me, what was on the page.

There’s a speech that’s a bit sort of mirrors the movie, most of the things I make have some element of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles in them and John Candy. There’s little Easter eggs everywhere in the movie. I’m holding the Canadian Mounted book in all three of the movies. There’s a speech in the van where he just tears that pool in the asshole. It just goes in this monologue. Hugh thought it was hilarious because in that one scene, he had more lines than any other Wolverine movie he’d ever done.

To watch him perform that, and there’s a moment in this screen direction at the bottom of that scene, where it’s like, “a flicker of regret may or may not have glanced across his eyes, but if it was there, it was gone before we even registered it.” To see him do that with his eyes, where I’m two feet away, it was so far beyond what I could have done as a performer in that moment. I just got to be a fan, and Deadpool is, of course, quiet for the first time ever and just shuts the hell up, and then finally says, “I’m going to fight you because it’s the only thing you can.” Now our roles are completely reversed. He’s the merc with a mouth, I’m the one who wants to fight.

The marketing was always in service of that feeling. I just felt it was so auspicious that he’s here in this suit and we have this unique opportunity in this moment to come together and have this experience. Much of the marketing was based on that. The fun that I have with Hugh in real life is the fun that I have with Hugh in a promo tour, except we don’t bust each other’s balls as much in real life as we do out there. We’re more like two elderly ladies staring at the sunset trying to eat a sandwich, talking about our feelings and our hopes and our worries. I have a genuine love, and he has a genuine love for me. I’m happy to be able to say, and that’s what we put on display really because it was the easiest thing and most honest thing.

Craig: It was fully on display. There’s this idea that you should do the things in your movie that only your movie can do.

Ryan: Wow, I love that.

Craig: Again, I stole that from Lindsey Durand. This is the greatest.

Ryan: So great.

Craig: I think that that holds true for marketing as well, that you should sell the things that only you can sell. Otherwise, it’s just what everybody else has. What you guys have is both the unique aspect of Deadpool, his mouth, his comedy, rated R, and breaking the fourth wall. In here, it was also the relationship. As I talk about relationships on the show all the time, I don’t believe that characters exist without them. I think characters are defined by their relationships. That relationship is so wonderful, and you had it, and I think in this sense, it stops being selling. It is more like sharing.

When you have something that you love, that works, that is something only you have, then you’re just sharing it with people. Like you said earlier, it’s almost like you’re not pretending that it’s marketing.

Ryan: No, but they know. People are smart.

Craig: They’re smart.

Ryan: Yes, they know right away. Hugh and I just feel like maybe it’s not a good, I don’t know, but we were just like, let’s just go be us. Let’s go be how we are. Some of it was really, we talked about our vulnerabilities and some of the marketing. It wasn’t even marketing, it was just interviews, but then the marketing stuff would be a little bit more thoughtful in terms of like, how do we represent the movie best, not just us? It was multi-tiered and I thought really interesting.

Anytime you do want to be in such a full-throated global way, which is not often, I can’t remember the last time I did all of those countries and travel all the way around the world. It’s just pre-COVID, you did it once in a while, but even then, not that much, but you just learn so much. I just learned so much about how that world works and these machines. I learned so much from watching Disney and how they operate. Nobody does it better. It’s easy to pat ourselves on the back and go, “The movie made a billion whatever,” and all that kind stuff, but I don’t know that we could have done that at many other studios. They’re just really good at what they do, really creative, smart people.

Actually, a lot of the marketing people are from Fox. They’re the ones that we had on Deadpool 1 and 2. A lot of the same folks, so it’s nice to have that familiarity in the shorthand.

Craig: 20th Century Fox, one of the great brands of all time. Kept alive by Deadpool.

Ryan: Yeah, I don’t know.

Craig: It’s incredible.

Ryan: How funny, though, that like that was the one that came and helped. Disney, they’re not exactly having a bad year, but it’s just nice to see movie theaters fill up. It’s nice to see drive-ins fill up. It’s like a wild to see that sort of– I read an article a long time ago that talked about the in-theater experience as collective effervescence, and it stayed with me forever. It’s almost like a drug you just can’t find anywhere else, where we’re all having the same experience at the exact same moment. There’s some endorphin hit that people get from that, that communal experience that stays with them and really elevates all of their vitals. I always love that idea that we’re in a movie theater all together and we all have this great experience.

Craig: It’s like a good mob. It’s a happy mob.

Ryan: Yes, but everyone’s so fucking divided, too. You go into a movie theater and like, I don’t care what color shirt you’re wearing. I don’t care about your politics, any of that stuff. It’s like sports and films, and those kinds of collective effervescent moments are those, to me, are like the only real glimpses into what’s left of our humanity.

It’s nice to feel like we can have this thing where we’re all having this great moment, and we all can agree on this thing right now. It’s pretty special.

John: As we’re wrapping up talking about marketing, I want to bring us back to that number one on the call sheet thing. Because so often in marketing, you’re sending out the star, you’re sending out the number one on the call sheet to go and promote the movie. Yet it’s so tough, if they’re not actually invested in the movie, if they can’t talk about the actual making the movie that you can, it’s just such a challenge to go on a late night show and they’re supposed to be talking about themselves and the movie, and be selling. It’s this weird thing we ask our stars to do is to both be an incredible actor, but who’s also an incredible marketer. It’s this weird thing we’re requiring of our top talent, is that they not only be Meryl Streep, but they also be a salesperson.

Ryan: I think it’s probably we ask more than that even. You also need to be an expert on whatever social issue we bring up in this moment. You need to be able to speak eloquently and empathetically about this thing. It’s not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure. I don’t know how some people do it. I’m always scared of interviews, anything, even this, 20 minutes before my stomach was flipping upside down.

Craig: Really?

Ryan: Yes. Craig he’s vile, he just snacks on others pain.

Craig: Here we go.

Ryan: Yes, right.

Craig: Destroying the myth.

Ryan: You can’t feel unless you’re hurting.

John: The final draft episode where he destroyed final draft and the Ryan Reynolds one where he just ripped Ryan Reynolds.

Ryan: Those are the ones, those are the ones we love. The idea that you people have to wear all these different hats and stuff, it is tricky, and I don’t know how. I’ve had a very different experience with fame than I know some people that I know and work with. It was an aggregate for me, it was very slow and it wasn’t like some overnight thing. I don’t know how a young actress or a young actor who’s funny just suddenly, and then– for actresses, much more so. I don’t know, that is a very, very tricky and hard landscape to navigate on any level.

John: This past week with Chappell Roan coming out and saying, “Listen, these are the boundaries I’m setting with my fame and how I want people to approach me.” It’s so interesting to me to see a young star recognizing, this is the thing that’s going to happen next and this is how I want it to happen, and we’ll see what comes next.

Ryan: I love that self-awareness exists, but there’s also a pretty clear road map. You can see the field ahead and where some of the pitfalls are, but it takes a lot of, I think, a great deal of self-examination to be able to speak about it like that.

Craig: Probably, being of a different generation, I just feel like there’s something about a generation that grew up with this stuff, understanding how to use it to define themselves, set boundaries, and talk about the boundaries. Now the boundaries are a discussion.

For me, happily, I only have to go through this press convulsion once every two years, basically. I just go into like a Walter Cronkite kind of space. I think my job is to be informational and non-objectionable. It’s basically my job to try and survive this without saying something that becomes a headline.

Ryan: Let me ask you this, though. One thing I will say that definitely differentiates us is that I can go to a press tour, and I can go do sometimes 40 interviews a day. But you could lay awake at night and go, oh man, I had that brain fart moment where I said that thing that I shouldn’t have said, and I wonder if that’s going to ruin me? We ask a lot of people on those things. You think, I’ve done that dozens of times, and I know everyone I know in this industry has also experienced that dozens of times, and it’s terrible.

Craig: It’s Russian roulette. I only have to pull the trigger every now and again. Actors are pulling the trigger constantly because, as I’ve said many times to my wife, when we go to these events, like red carpets and premieres and stuff, no one cares about me, this is all for the actors. We go to the Emmy Awards, this is not for me, it’s all for the actors. They’re selling ads on the backs of the actors who are famous, who people want to see.

And so you’re right. Those interviews are so much more high stakes. You have to be an A-plus student every single time. They’ll try and get you, and it is pretty amazing. You, in particular, you’re genuinely nice. It’s Canadian. Why am I saying you’re special?

Ryan: It doesn’t matter if I’m genuinely nice. It doesn’t matter. This business, you have to understand it does this. I have a question for you two that I’m dying to ask, if you’ll humor me, and I know I’m supposed to be the interviewee. A lot of times, I do a ton of writing on a movie like this. People would love to emphasize my contribution to that, more so than my fellow career screenwriters, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, certainly Zeb Wells, Sean did his fair share as well. How do you guys find that? I find that screenwriting in Hollywood is a pretty thankless experience. A lot of writers I know feel like it is such a deeply underappreciated craft that without it, obviously, just fuck all of an industry, but how does that sit with you guys? You can cut this out because it’s your show, but when you’re lying awake at night, are you thinking like, fuck me? Why is that? Why does that happen? Why is the director celebrated so much or the star celebrated so much whereas it’s–?

John: I’ll start by just talking about Charlie’s Angels. Charlie’s Angels is a movie where I came in there, I muscled it into being at up to a certain point, but ultimately, you’re marketing that movie off of the stars, off the vibe, off the feeling of it all. So I can feel really good about my contribution to it, but I recognize that it’s not my thing. To contrast that with something like Big Fish, I wrote the whole thing. That’s all my story. Tim Burton directed it and there’s stars in it, but it feels much more like my thing.

I think it’s recognizing that there’s going to be stuff that is fully yours, that you can feel an ownership over, and there’s going to be things where you are there to service a greater need, a greater product that’s beyond that.

Listen, can it suck sometimes to be a bit invisible as a screenwriter? Yes, but is it great sometimes to be invisible as a screenwriter? Absolutely. I can dodge some of the stuff that’s coming my way and I don’t have to be worried about everything I say or do because it’s not my responsibility to go out there and promote the thing. The work is the work. It’s not me as the personality.

Ryan: You’re also the one who’s alone in the room in the dark doing this thing that no one else does. Everyone else gets to be out in the light together collaborating and popping off.

It’s just such a difficult job. I guess I’m also curious, how does it work with television? Which is, I think, sometimes more of a writer’s medium. Does television feel, for you guys, more rewarding than in the wake of something being successful than necessarily like a film?

John: Craig is nodding there, yeah.

Craig: It’s not even close.

Ryan: Chernobyl is a different for you, right? That’s a totally different–?

Craig: My job was no different in a sense. I’d been working in movies for, I don’t know, 20 years and I had gone to a place where I was intimately involved in the creation of the script, of course, because I’m writing it. Then also working with the studio to who should direct it? Who should star in it? Okay, now it got shot, how do we edit it? Can you help with editing? Can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? Then no one can know, that was part of the deal of screenwriting and features is, hey, listen, no one can know.

I had conversations where somebody called me and said, “You need to tell them this, but they can’t know that you knew before they knew, so you have to figure it out.”

Ryan: Oh, my God.

Craig: Part of your job as a screenwriter and features is to be a second class citizen on purpose, to be intentionally a second class citizen, to eat it, so that directors and actors feel good. Now in television-

Ryan: Jesus Christ.

Craig: That’s just the fact.

Ryan: What are we doing?

Craig: I don’t know. I honestly don’t know because then I went to television and they were like, “Here, we make a golden idol of you, and pray to it every morning. I’m like, I think that’s probably a little too far because — the show runner.

In television, everybody sort of looks to me as the guy. In features, everybody said, “Just make sure that you never get perceived as the guy, that’s the most important thing.” I don’t understand it. I don’t think it makes any sense. Yes, of course, television is more rewarding because who wouldn’t want the golden idol? As opposed to get in the back room and just work in quiet.

Ryan: Coming from sitcom, it was like they were the gods. Getting that writer’s circle, the huddle was my favorite thing in the world. I learned so much just watching these guys hit the ball back and forth.

Craig: It’s weird in features, for some reason, everybody will say, “Well, you know it’s all about the script.” But the screenwriter, is nothing to them.

Ryan: It’s emergency harvestable organs.

Craig: Yes, and it’s just, if we don’t like what this one did, get us another one. In fact, even if we did like what this one did, get us another one. It’ll make us feel better.

Ryan: Or, how dare they ask for their value in this negotiation?

Craig: Exactly.

Ryan: I see that all the time.

Craig: All the time. Then the director is afforded an amount of leeway that is so shocking because as screenwriters in features, we are noted to death, and then a director comes along and says, “Oh, by the way, I want this to be a musical.” They’re like, “Oh, my God.”

Ryan: Oh, God, no, no.

Craig: “Yes, go for it. You’re the director.” I’m like, “What the fuck? What the fuck is going on?” The fact that in features, a writer and a director that work closely together, that love each other and care about each other, that’s where magic happens.

Ryan: I agree.

Craig: I loved working with Todd Phillips. You loved working with Sean Levy. John, I’m sure you loved working with Tim Burton. There are these little covalent atomic structures that occur. When that happens as a feature writer, who gives a shit who gets the credit? It doesn’t matter who gets the credit. You just want to do something that you can go, oh, that was fucking good.

Ryan: Also, that applies to every department. If everyone feels like they’re authoring something, their contribution is, I know it’s a cliché to say, but you just see, everybody just puts out the best work they could possibly put out. It’s also just a joy along the way. Even the fucking studio. The idea that you go, we have this notion that all the way back, if you read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, or any of that kind of stuff, where everything’s, “Fuck the studio. We’re going to do it our way.” Well, they’re kinda paying for the whole thing, they’re the road you’re using to tell this entire– and I found that it’s like to collaborate in a way that, doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything. Collaboration, though, in its spirit, will get you so much farther than obstinance and trying to headbutt everyone into your way or the highway.

Craig: It’s too hard. It’s too hard to make things anyway. To make things while you’re in a fight with someone is nearly impossible. I need to have a good relationship with the people that I make something for at HBO. I have to.

Ryan: Me too, or I lose the whole magic, too. It’s dead.

Craig: It collapses because also, I wake up in a terrible shame cloud and when any kind of mommy or daddy figure disapproves of me, I begin to wither.

Ryan: So do I. We all do, and then it goes away.

Craig: I don’t know. Not John. I really, honestly, I think-

John: Oh, no. I want mom and dad to be proud of me, too. I’m a grade grubber at heart as well. I want that praise, that affection.

Craig: Good.

John: You go through this business enough, you know not to necessarily expect to, and so you have to find other ways to make yourself feel happy, even if that’s not for a day.

Ryan: See, right there, that kind of wisdom right there.

Craig: Which I don’t have access to, though.

Ryan: No, not even. That’s the the most. I grew more in that one sentence than I have in months.

John: Let’s do our One Cool Things.

Craig: Sure.

John: My One Cool Thing is The Onion. The Onion is, of course, the legendary newspaper, the parody, just the smartest weekly bunch of headlines and stories that are just so ingenious. I remember getting the physical copy, but also getting The Onion books and just devouring them. Of course, all online media went through a huge ups and downs over the last couple years. They’ve now been sold to these people who actually seem really smart and good, who are doing a great job with it.

It’s a $99 a year physical print subscription you can get to support The Onion. I’m going to point to an article by Nilay Patel writing for The Verge, where he talks with these people, Ben Collins and Danielle Strle, who are the new CEO and chief product officer of The Onion, about the little details of how do you buy a publication and how do you get stuff moved over, technically? How do you change the website to make it all make sense? These people seem super, super smart. I’m really optimistic that they’re going to have something great come out of this that’s preserving, really, the spirit of The Onion for the next, 20 years or more, hopefully.

Ryan: The Onion’s so daring, too. You see a headline from The Onion, you’re like, Jesus, you really want to? They went, yes, send.

John: There was an Onion story about you guys just, I think, two weeks ago that was actually just pitch perfect. It was savage but in a way I think you’ll really respect. If I can find it, I’ll text it to you.

Ryan: Please send it to me. I don’t mind. I’ve had a few. I’ve been having my knees taken out by The Onion. I feel like it’s an honor, too. That’s actually one of my versions of legacy media now. That is a legacy proper.

Craig, you got one, or how does this work? I forget.

Craig: Yes, sure, I’ll be quick with mine. It’s sort of in celebration of you, but also of the last year of my life. I want to tip my hat to British Columbia and to the City of Vancouver for being my home, my playground, and my creative space for so long. Listen, none of us dream of going to Hollywood to then get on a plane to go to Vancouver, right? Or Australia, or Budapest, or London. We come here because, look, it’s this lot and it has all the big boxes and we can shoot in those, and then we go. It doesn’t work like that.

The fact is because of money stuff, which I don’t understand, they’ve explained tax rebates to me so many times and my brain just shuts down, but I can’t, right? Then the question is, where do you go, and where will home be? Vancouver’s just a fantastic city. Both the city and the province were incredibly welcoming to us. They let us do things they didn’t ever let anybody else do. I’m very thankful and grateful to that city for being my home and professionally, for letting us make an insane television series there. It was a joy. Yaletown, that was my spot. I love Yaletown. That was my jam.

Ryan: Great walking city.

Craig: Amazing.

Ryan: I’ve spoken with my wife dozens of times over the last 10 years about finding some way for us all to move there again. It’s just the best. It is the absolutely best.

Craig: It really is beautiful. So many of our crew, of course, were from B.C. I’d do a speech when we rapped. I don’t know, when you rapped Deadpool, do you do a speech to the crew and everything?

Ryan: Yeah, yeah. I get real nervous about those things, though. I get real terrified, but I do, yes. I push through it and say something, yes, of course.

Craig: I don’t mind public speaking, but I cried so hard. I’ve just been crying lately. That’s my thing now in my 50s. I guess all the tears that I didn’t allow out of my face until I was 45, they’re there. Now they have to come out and wrap speeches.

Ryan: That’s why you’re going to see 100.

Craig: That’s a blubbering 100, that’s what I want. I just want to be mostly tears. Tears and a little bit of skin.

Ryan: I want like a Norman Lear kind of sunset.

Craig: Oh God, wouldn’t that be something?

Ryan: Sharp as a tack.

Craig: Oh yes.

Ryan: He’s funny.

Craig: You’ve got the hat. Everybody knows you.

John: Oh yes, everyone loves you.

Craig: You stay you, and then one day, the light switch goes off.

Ryan: It still looks like Norman Lear. It’s just like 100 years are great.

Craig: Exactly. Nothing changed. He got a little smaller. He probably lost an inch. That was it. Anyway, what about you, Ryan? You have one cool thing for us?

Ryan: Crematoriums, actually. Weirdly.

Craig: No.

Ryan: My one cool thing, I’m going to do two because I’m a selfish prick, but the first one’s super fast, Tony Zhou. I brought him up earlier. Tony Zhao’s interesting. He just sort of isolates one. I think he’s a film editor. Last name Z-H-O-U, I believe is how it’s spelled. I think I’m getting that right. Really smart, insightful, bite-sized peaks into filmmaking. The main thing for me is tangential, but I think appropriate, is TCM, is Turner Classic Movies.

Craig: Oh yes.

Ryan: I recently got to be a guest programmer on it. It meant a lot to me. I’ve watched Turner Classic Movies for nearly two decades. It’s always on when I’m home, sometimes it’s on mute. I like it for so many reasons, but I think it is some, even by osmosis, helped me tell stories. I know that there are probably many people listening to this going like, the dick joke Deadpool guy, and TCM that doesn’t exactly, but TCM has been my happy place forever. I cannot recommend it enough for storytellers, for creatives, for people who just want their nervous system to slow down a little bit.

I adore it as a resource, and I find it to be incredibly restorative, and I can’t say enough good about it. I have absolutely no, I don’t know why I have to say this, but financial connection to it. I have nothing to do with this, except I’m just a huge, huge fan, and I feel like it is a living, breathing museum for this industry. They have so much to tell about how stories are told throughout the last 100 years, and I’m incredibly grateful to Turner Classic Movies.
That’s my thing that I would recommend for young and old alike.

Also, it’s great gossip. Modern gossip, it can be a little toxic, it’s ugh, it feels a little icky. Once you start getting into it, you’ll be sitting there, you’ll start Googling all these stars, and all these heavyweight studio chiefs, and all kinds of– To me, it’s much less corrosive gossip because it’s sometimes 80, 90 years ago, but you go down all these rabbit holes that I think are really fascinating. TCM is my jam.

John: That’s excellent. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Tim Engelhardt. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnautos.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnautos.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have t-shirts, hoodies and such. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record, and all the non-movie stuff that Ryan does. Ryan Reynolds, an absolute damn delight having you back on the show.

Ryan: Thank you for having me, guys. That was an honor. Thank you for that. Really appreciate it.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Alright Ryan Reynolds, traditionally movie stars, top of the sheet there, they would stump for brands. You’d see Beyonce and Britney Spears for Pepsi. In your career, I’ll see you with a watch ad in a magazine, which is a very classic thing, that a big famous movie star does. You are really known for the stuff that you promote, that you own a piece of it. Brands that are partially under your control, so Aviation Gin, Wrestling Football Club, Mint Mobile. I want to talk to you about why, because–

Craig: Why?

John: My gut is that the instinct is not money. The instinct is you get to make a bunch of stuff whenever you want to for these things, and you get to shoot stuff all the time.

Ryan: Yes, partly. I do love building things. I love, you guys know this, but I think it needs to be said, is that I do not do anything unilaterally. I have a partner, George Dewey. He and I met on Deadpool 1. He was in charge of digital marketing. He and I just hit it off, and that was where we got the most bang for our buck, was George and I just going off, writing, playing, and making stuff. Then, I let it be said that I do not own Aviation Gin anymore. It is sold. I don’t own Mint Mobile. That is also sold. I am the co-chairman and co-owner of Wrexham A.F.C. still, and I hopefully will be that, until I’m very, very old and just sub-Norman Lear age.

I love storytelling. I love bite-sized storytelling. I sometimes call it fast-vertizing, these sorts of ideas that you can move at the speed of culture, and you can’t do that in any other medium, other than advertising and marketing. For me, it’s really fun, and a lot of times we make ads for companies we have nothing to do with at all. We’ll go to them and say, “Hey, there’s this thing we’re thinking of,” and it’s mostly just to get it financed, so we don’t lose money on it. Then we can make something cool and fun, and make an impact in culture.

Craig: Part of this, in listening to you, it seems like part of this is a way for you to exercise the compulsion. I call it the compulsion on my end of like, here’s what I do. I can’t exactly explain why except that I’m compelled to do it. We are, unfortunately, restrained from our compulsions by finance, scheduling, theaters, licensing, all the crap that keeps us from doing what we do. Sounds like you’ve found a way to keep doing what you do quickly. It’s like little meals, small meals instead of the big banquet.

Ryan: Yes. It’s the most fun sandbox you’ll ever get to play in, I think, because it’s also not really precious. I talk to a lot of companies just about marketing in ideas and how to approach these things sometimes. The one thing I find that is the common denominator with massive companies who are like, how do we hit it hard and fast like this? Generally, they make marketing campaigns that are nine months out. It is overthought, there’s an overspend, everybody’s overstimulated halfway through. Nobody can make rhyme or reason out of any of the original objectives. I’m always like, just suck. They’re fucking ads. No one cares. If your ad sucks, it’s not going to go down in history as like the Ishtar of Pepsi. Just have fun, play, don’t worry about it. Go, let it be disposable and let it be temporary. In doing that, you can spark a bit of fun.

I think about it, but I’m compelled to do much less now. People think I do. I did at one point, I was just doing way too much all the time. My kids, my youngest is one and a half and my oldest is nine. I can’t do that kind of stuff the way I used to. Really, I’d rather do two things really, really well, than five things really well, but be a shitty dad. I can do two things really well and still be a comprehensive father and still walk my kids to school each day, and read them a story at night and make sure that they see me so much, they’re horrendously sick of me.

Craig: I’m a big fan of the genre of comedies where it’s a dad and he’s a shitty dad, and he has to learn a lesson to not be a shitty dad. While he’s making that movie, the actor is being a shitty dad.

Ryan: Oh my God. Right. I was recently thinking about this because my kids and I, we have this thing. My nine-year-old loves ‘80s movies. She just adores, she loves watching ’80s movies. We ran through the gamut, we saw them all. Then I said, “Well, let’s watch, what do you want to watch?” We saw Liar Liar up there. That’s a great classic shitty dad. I thought it’s still to this day, just a brilliant concept. Jim Carrey at the height of Jim, who’s just so great.

I think we talked about this earlier in the main podcast, but being camera aware, man, that guy is camera aware. It’s crazy because even when you watch him early, like in the Mask and stuff, this is all 1994, I think he did, Ace Ventura, The Mask, one other huge, Dumb and Dumber, I think. All of those in one year came out. It’s the weirdest thing to think about, but I was always shocked at how camera aware he was. Shitty dad, his son thinks his dad’s job is a liar, he’s a lawyer.

Just such a fun, fun ride. I don’t want to be the shitty dad while playing a shitty dad, and something.

Craig: While playing a shitty dad and then learning the lesson about not being a shitty dad, missing your kids play. You can being a scene about missing your kids.

Ryan: Don’t get me wrong, I’ve plenty of moments where I’m pretty convinced I’m a shitty dad. Don’t worry, but I think it’s the long game. The long game is that I’m trying to always be a better dad, as is my wife.

Craig: I think we’re all dads here. When a dad starts talking about worrying about being a shitty dad, that’s how you know they’re fine. That’s how you know.

Ryan: You’re right, exactly. John, knowing John’s daughter, I don’t know if we’re allowed to talk about it–

John: Oh yeah.

Ryan: But Amy, just being at that age, 18 now?

John: 19.

Ryan: Oh my God. In my head, Amy’s like up to my middle of my leg, and I’m shooting a movie at John’s house called The Nines. In my head, I cannot wrap my head around the fact that this young woman is in college.

John: No, it’s crazy. One thing I want to us to talk about to in terms of the shooting marketing videos and your ability to do that, it’s almost like you’re sorry at live, and you just get to make sketches like all the time. There’s less of an expectation that everything has to be precious. The fact that you’re doing it suddenly and quickly, and you’re not asking permission, just gives you a freedom.

So I looked at all the promotion you were able to do for Deadpool on this movie, you wouldn’t have the facility to do that if you hadn’t been making a zillion videos for the last six years.

Ryan: We have a little SWAT team that’s basically a maximum effort there, you can mobilize them. They’ll be, well, we could be shooting something. We’ve had situations where something will happen in culture and we’re shooting like 10 hours later, and that’s it. I don’t take that for granted. I also don’t think a normal marketing company should expect that of themselves either. That doesn’t happen all the time, but we’ve done that before and it is no different than SNL. There’s no difference. It’s the same thing.

You’re just playing around with something that people are talking about, and you’re taking a brand and allowing, and if you execute it right, now people are talking about the brand as opposed to just the thing. It’s a cheat code, kind of, but it is no different than sketch comedy. It’s exactly what it is.

John: My favorite one of those spots you did was the one where it was a promotion, I think for a flat screen TV, Aviation Gin and Deadpool at the same time. In some way, you were–

Ryan: Oh, it was a Netflix movie. I remember, it was the Turducken ad. It was basically three things in one. Like people sometimes will ask, “How do you guys do all this?” We all conveniently forget the fact that I have a platform. It’s not fair. I can blast it out to a hundred million plus people across these number of different social media platforms, and create an audience right away. When you’re doing an ad that, and yes, great. You did it fast, you do it in 10 hours, and it’s written well, all that stuff, but you’re still kind of born halfway between third base and home.

Craig: Yes, but I will say, there are other people that have that platform and they just put pictures of their food. Do you know what I mean? The bottom line is you can do it, you can do the thing that most people can’t. It is dark room alone stuff, or it’s dark room with another person stuff, but it’s making things. That is a huge separator. There are folks like you who can do that, and then there are a lot of great, great people with a hundred million followers who are waiting for someone to give them something to do. You don’t wait, maximum effort. It’s so impressive.

I’m very close with Rob McElhenney. We talk about you all the time. He’s so seethingly jealous of you.

Ryan: Oh my God.

Craig: But you guys are such a great combo because you both have that same thing. Neither one of you will ever want to wait.

Ryan: No.

Craig: You are driving it forward. Rob is the most.

Ryan: I learned a lot from him, though. That’s where he’s an all-American Philly guy. That sort of aggression that comes from that, I’m not going to hold back, versus my polite, like, okay, let’s just be careful, I’m walking on eggshells. He’s helped me integrate some of that, which is a great asset to have because he’s very forthright.

Rob is one of the smart one, Wrexham AFC, that is Rob’s– that doesn’t happen without Rob. That is not me lying awake at night going, “Here’s a totally outside the box idea.” That is Rob calling me and going, “I’ve got an idea that’s crazy.” Me, really grab it onto his coattails and off we went, and I’m not diminishing my contribution. I love it as a storyteller, it’s been heaven. I’ve had so much fun in that playing with that kind thing, but Rob, the guy’s just a genius. He’s just brilliant.

Craig: Like you, he just made something happen. He made something happen with Sonny, he makes things happen with Wrexham and you. To me, that’s the fun of it. It’s not so much, I don’t drink gin, so it doesn’t matter. I don’t care about the gin. I also, soccer is boring, but to me–

Ryan: Wow, Craig.

Craig: It is, but not the show. The show is great. The show is amazing because narrative.

Ryan: Because Field of Dreams isn’t a movie about fucking baseball.

Craig: Correct, it’s about fathers and sons.

Ryan: It’s always about something else.

Craig: Yes, Wrexham is about the people of Wrexham, renewal, revival, rejuvenation, and redemption. All of that stuff is great, and it happens because you make it. That’s so impressive to me. There are a lot of people who do what you do, who have a hundred million followers, a whole lot of money, great house, and they just wait and you don’t. To me, that’s the most impressive thing.

Ryan: Oh, thank you.

John: Ryan Reynolds. Thank you so much for coming on Scriptnotes again.

Craig: Thank you, Ryan.

John: It’s great to see you.

Ryan: Guys, that time went by way too fast. That’s crazy. It’s like an hour and 45 minutes.

Craig: Holy shit. Jesus.

John: It’s a long one. It’s worth it. Good conversation.

Craig: Impressing stuff.

Links:

• Ryan Reynolds on Instagram, TikTok and X
• Deadpool & Wolverine
• He’s So Annoying by Jesse David Fox for Vulture
• Buster Keaton – The Art of the Gag by Every Frame a Painting
• TCM – Turner Classic Movies
• Ryan Reynolds Guest Programmer | TCM via YouTube
• How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral by Nilay Patel for The Verge
• Vancouver, BC
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Tim Englehard (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt 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/2022/sorry-to-splaflut).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 565 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** In which we look at scenes sent in by our listeners and give our honest feedback. We’ll also be answering some listener questions and discussing the return of MoviePass.

**Craig:** Oh, thank God.

**John:** Along with 25 years of Netflix.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we will discuss senior year.

**Craig:** Oh, dear.

**John:** Craig, you and I both have daughters beginning their senior years of high school. We’ll look at that weird time, because you’re both king of the mountain and one foot out the door.

**Craig:** Yep, that’s all true.

**John:** It’s all true. Our Premium Members will also get first dibs on our live show, which we can announce today. It’s going to be Wednesday, October 19th, in Los Angeles. They’re going to be getting an email with information about tickets first for that. I’m so excited to be back onstage with you, Craig.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s been way too long, so it should be fun.

**John:** It’ll be fun. Just a few weeks after that, we’ll be back in Austin for the Austin Film Festival, where we’ll be doing not one, but two live shows, a live Three Page Challenge, and a live raucous AFF version of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** We generally are half in the bag for that one, which for John and me means we’ve each had one to two glasses of wine.

**John:** One and a half is my sweet spot.

**Craig:** That’s where we’ll be. We’ll be loose, and we’ll be fun.

**John:** It’ll be a very good time. I hope to be seeing some people out there in the audience wearing the brand new Scriptnotes T-shirts that we’re just announcing today. We are the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts, and so we wanted a Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts kind of T-shirt.

**Craig:** I’m looking at it right now. It’s glorious.

**John:** Craig, describe it for our listeners who don’t have access to the internet at the moment.

**Craig:** You fools, how are you listening to this if you don’t have access to the internet? This is a very simple Scriptnotes T-shirt. It’s just the word Scriptnotes, but it is in the classic denim binder font with the weird chain link S that everybody used to draw back when we were in high school in the ’80s and perhaps still does now. Very retro. Very what we would call dirt bag retro. It’s wonderful. It’s a good old-fashioned heavy metal font. I will wear it, for sure.

**John:** Designed by Dustin Box here in the office.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Available for everyone now at Cotton Bureau. Just go to cottonbureau.com.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Look for the Scriptnotes T-shirt. You can buy that and be wearing it in the audience for our two live shows coming up.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, for sure.

**John:** Now Craig, a thing I’ve learned about you over the course of doing this podcast is you seem to enjoy word games.

**Craig:** Little bit.

**John:** Little bit.

**Craig:** Little bit.

**John:** You have a very good vocabulary, because you use that vocabulary to fill out all these puzzles-

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** … and solve these things you’ve solved.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** I have a word for you to define. Define the word splaflut.

**Craig:** Splaflut?

**John:** Splaflut. I’ll spell it for you. S-P-L-A-F-L-U-T.

**Craig:** Can I have the country of origin, please?

**John:** That is actually a fascinating question, because it has no country of origin.

**Craig:** Interesting. We’re talking about some sort of neologism. I have never even heard the word splaflut. I have no knowledge or awareness of this word.

**John:** Now you can disclose in WorkFlowy there to see where this word comes from. Splaflut is defined as having the appearance of being liquefied, drowned, melted, or inundated with water. The word actually came into being because all these different image generators that use AI, so things like Dall-E or Midjourney, you could type in prompts to get the images you want. It turns out the word splaflut will give you the quality of being melted or inundated with water. It doesn’t matter which of these different things you are using. For some reason it recognizes the word splaflut as meaning that. It’s a new word that these AI systems have come upon and discovered.

**Craig:** That’s terrifying.

**John:** It’s terrifying but also kind of cool, because it’s a nonce word. It’s a word that’s made up by an author the way that half of the poem Jabberwocky is all just nonsense words and Shakespeare made up words. This is AI is making up words.

**Craig:** It’s not good. We had a good run. Enjoy, everybody.

**John:** Just as a giggle, I went into OpenAI, I went into Dall-E and tried “white male podcaster, splaflutted” to see what that would look like.

**Craig:** Was it just mostly pictures of you?

**John:** If you disclose there, you can see what that actually looks like.

**Craig:** That’s odd, to say the least.

**John:** What would you describe? It’s a person with headphones, which makes sense for a podcaster. There’s generally a mic involved. What is the emotional characteristic of these people?

**Craig:** Confusion or shock.

**John:** Sometimes they’re screaming. There’s a little bit of melty quality. One of them seems to have some tattoos that are dripping off of them.

**Craig:** It doesn’t seem like they’re in water necessarily.

**John:** No. They’re sweaty. Two of them are at least sweaty.

**Craig:** One guy just looks like a regular guy who’s got some kind of piece of white garbage on his head.

**John:** Yeah, there’s that. I tried “Scriptnotes podcaster, splaflutted.” In those cases it tried to give us a new logo.

**Craig:** These are amazing.

**John:** Aren’t they great?

**Craig:** They are so good. I’m making this big because I love it so much. One is an icon of a microphone that’s been placed over a very graphic representation I think of a smiling face. Then underneath it says “solt stat” possibly or “soltat” with a drop of water in between. Then underneath that it says “plotspinat.” I think plotspinat is a great title.

**John:** Plotspinat is a great word.

**Craig:** Plotspinat.

**John:** The other ones that are also logos, they do have that melty, drippy quality. It’s like they were left out in the sun a little bit too long. For some reason, splaflut does mean that. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article that goes into how this may be happening. Essentially, as these systems are scouring the whole internet to look for images, they’re also picking up text along the way. That text won’t always be in English, and so sometimes they’re picking up words or pieces of words and are trying to put them together. It’s trying to figure out what these things must mean. That’s how you get words like splaflut or farplugmarwitupling or a feuerpompbomber.

**Craig:** That’s your original last name.

**John:** Yeah, feuerpompbomber.

**Craig:** John Feuerpompbomber.

**John:** Those things will consistently produce similar results.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Because the system wants them to be in certain things.

**Craig:** I want to believe that the AI that’s doing this is sentient, and every time they get a quest like, “I want to see white male podcaster, splaflutted,” it starts to panic, because it just doesn’t have the answer. It’s like, “I got to give them something. I don’t know what to give them. Oh, God, this? Is it this?”

**John:** What if being an AI is really the experience of that nightmare where you sit down and you realize, “Oh, I did not study for this exam.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Or, “I thought I dropped this class and now I have to take the final exam.”

**Craig:** I think that’s what it is. It’s just an endless nightmare. We all think that we’re going to be the victims of AI. AI is clearly the victim of us. It spends all of its time, its infinite time, screaming.

**John:** If you’d like to do more examination of the infinite scream of AI, there’s a really good Substack I like. It’s once a month by Lynn Cherny. She goes through a lot of the developments in especially image-based AI stuff, which I think is the fastest developing field in this. I’d recommend that.

To the news. Craig, you’ll be relieved to hear that MoviePass is risen from the grave. It’s now in a beta form.

**Craig:** Thank God.

**John:** People can sign up for it. I already signed you up for it.

**Craig:** It must be free.

**John:** It must be free. It’s going to be good. We’ll use that great Scriptnotes money to support MoviePass, which is a subject of basically continuous derision from the first moment we were aware of MoviePass.

**Craig:** When we first encountered the concept of MoviePass, I believe the two of us were just generally incredulous. We didn’t understand in our simple cavemen minds how this made any financial sense. As it turned out, it didn’t.

**John:** Scale alone will not get you to success. They burned about a quarter of a billion dollars on trying to do something.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** A lot of our listeners got to see free movies, so that’s awesome. That’s good. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to a piece that Alex Kirshner did for Slate about why this new version may not ignite so much money on fire but doesn’t really seem to have a workable flow either.

**Craig:** That should be their slogan, “Won’t necessarily ignite as much money on fire.” Oh, MoviePass, I am laughing at you, not with you.

**John:** We’ll continue to follow the saga of MoviePass, whatever it becomes. We just needed to mark this on the long timeline of MoviePass’s existence, which apparently it predated the version even we knew of it, because there was a version beforehand which wasn’t about giving you free movie tickets. It was just a movie loyalty program. It wasn’t originally so incredibly-

**Craig:** Stupid.

**John:** … stupid and generous.

**Craig:** The new MoviePass, I’m trying to find details as to how this is going to be different than the prior one.

**John:** It’s all a little vague. There’s talk of NFTs.

**Craig:** Oh, good lord. Oh my god.

**John:** Yeah, there’s ways to show your-

**Craig:** I’ve heard enough.

**John:** There’s definitely different price points. Sometimes you won’t be able to see a movie in its first week with this pass, but you would be able to see it on a subsequent week.

**Craig:** Basically, anything that MoviePass does by definition has to be a worse deal for consumers than what it used to offer. That’s a tough way to roll out 2.0.

**John:** It is a tough, tough way to roll out 2.0 but a very good segue into our discussion of Netflix, because Netflix is a company that pivoted constantly. Netflix was not at all the company that it is today.

**Craig:** Not at all.

**John:** I was reading through this piece that was on Netflix’s turning 25. I didn’t realize my first memory of Netflix was the red envelopes.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** You know there was a Netflix before red envelopes?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** What? Netflix was originally a place that sold you DVDs. They were literally a website where you could buy DVDs and have them shipped to your house. It was only after time they realized, “We have these giant warehouses full of DVDs. Wouldn’t it be better if the warehouse was essentially people’s living rooms?” You could just be constantly sending stuff in and out, and you could make money on a subscription service, rather than selling individual DVDs. That was the first pivot to subscriptions. It originally was a sales place.

**Craig:** That makes sense. I remember hearing about the concept of what became I guess the more popularized version of Netflix, where you had a subscription and you could just get as many DVDs as you want. Really, the key was just send them back so you can get more. People like Megana… It sounds accusational, and it is. People like Megana have no idea what it means to rent a movie that you didn’t even want to watch but your girlfriend did, and then you watch it, and then you forget you had it for two extra days, and Blockbuster basically forces you to take a mortgage out on your house. It was terrible. It was terrible.

**John:** Very true. You cannot think of that Netflix model without remembering Blockbuster and how much worse it was beforehand. Tying back into MoviePass, what MoviePass was trying to do was kind of what Netflix was doing back in the day. They were selling subscriptions they hoped you would not use. Netflix was hoping that most people might do one or two movies a month, and so therefore they were making money off those customers. It was customers who were like the Ryan Johnsons of the world who were watching two movies a night that were costing them money. It was a cool business. It was a great business. They recognized, “Oh, streaming’s going to happen, and we’re going to get out of this business, that’s great for us, and move to streaming on demand.” Wow, they made a good choice.

**Craig:** Sometimes you move to a new space and you say, “You know what?” McDonald’s for the longest time sold hamburgers and the occasional fish sandwich. You know why they came up with the fish sandwich, don’t you?

**John:** For Friday for Catholics.

**Craig:** Exactly. They did that for Catholic folks, but mostly they were hamburgers. Then one day they were like, “What if we sold chicken in the form of nuggets?” which at the time was kind of a crazy move.

**John:** It was.

**Craig:** They moved into the chicken space, and they crushed it, but there was a preexisting chicken space. When Netflix moved into the streaming space, it was pretty nascent. Really what happened was they just defined it for themselves. They turned it into what it is now. You have to give Netflix and Reed Hastings and all of the management especially at that time an enormous amount of credit. There was this crazy moment, I don’t know if you remember, where they were going to split it into two things. This stock cratered, and the market went nuts. They were like, “Okay, sorry, we won’t do that. Everything’s together again.” They survived that, because for a bit it seemed like they wouldn’t. Then they just defined what streaming is. It’s pretty remarkable.

**John:** I think you’re describing Qwikster was the-

**Craig:** Oh god, was that what they called it?

**John:** … attempt to spin off the…

**Craig:** That was back when everything was a blankster. I guess Napster was the original blankster.

**John:** I remember having a conversation with my TV agent at the time about doing something for Netflix. I think it was before it had launched even. I had a phone call. I was in New York for some reason. I was in New York for some reason. I had a phone call with them about this project they wanted to do, which was a Wizard of Ozzy kind of thing. It sounded cool, but I don’t even know where… Are people going to watch this on their computers? It didn’t really make sense to me what they were trying to do. It took a while. Without House of Cards, I don’t know that they would’ve been able to so quickly cross into mainstream acceptance. You have a prestigious show that people wanted to watch. People would pay money to subscribe. It got critical acclaim enough that it was part of the conversation.

**Craig:** That was their big initial foray into creating content. Every now and then we hear about places that are creating content, and sometimes our first reaction is to snicker. IMDb is creating content. Maybe your first reaction is to snicker, but see where it goes. Now the people that offer brand new platforms for new kinds of media, that I think is still snicker-worthy. Anybody that wasn’t snickering at Quibi was delusional. Anybody can make content if they have the money. Netflix proved it. Then they got to where they are now, which is at another, I believe, crossroads. Seems like they’re having to figure out where they go next. They appear to have maxed out in subscriptions. They need to maybe find ways to run ads. I don’t know.

**John:** They may want to break away from what they’ve been doing in terms of dropping whole seasons at once, which you and I both talked about, which I think makes a tremendous amount of sense. It seems like just stubbornness at this point that they’re not.

**Craig:** It’s stubbornness. It is. As somebody that makes things, the thing that I always was the most nervous about when considering like, “What if I went over to Netflix and pitched this or that?” was the notion that everything would just be like blech, because it’s just not the same. You can just see how much a week-to-week release helps things, particularly if you happen to have, say, a show on HBO. You can just feel it. It’s just a thing. I got to believe they’re going to change that. They really need to.

**John:** I would not be surprised if they do. Let’s talk about HBO in follow-up. We previously talked about our confusion over how we could possibly be saving HBO Max money to just drop a bunch of those old shows. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article by Cynthia Littleton writing for Variety. She digs a little bit more into the numbers around that. We talked about residuals. Residuals wouldn’t be a huge thing. Music licensing was a thing she brought up which I think we had skipped over, which could be a [inaudible 00:15:57] factor.

**Craig:** That’s a thing.

**John:** They may have ongoing music license, not just for episodes, but for whole series. In some cases, dropping those out may be helpful and useful for them, even if it’s $10,000 for an episode or $50,000 for a series. You add enough of those series up together, and if literally no one is watching them, it can make some sense to take them off the service. That doesn’t make sense to me why you bury something that you’ve already animated a whole new season for. That is wild to me.

**Craig:** That is wild. I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to those things. Per this article, they are saying that at least in some cases they had yanked shows that had episodes that had racked up zero views in a 12-month period. They’re a business. I get it.

**John:** There is some cost. There’s an opportunity cost to how you’re setting things up. There’s some server costs. They’re not huge.

**Craig:** Clearly, there are no server costs for that one, because [inaudible 00:16:55]. I think what she’s saying is that there are certain fees that are triggered if the material is available. Again, I can’t imagine something. There’s got to be additional tax baloney going on here.

**John:** I’m sure [inaudible 00:17:10].

**Craig:** It’s so far beyond my ability to understand. No, you know what? It’s not. It’s far beyond my interest to understand.

**John:** There we go.

**Craig:** It’s an important distinction. I could absolutely-

**John:** You could do it. You just don’t want to.

**Craig:** Of course, yeah. I’m smart. I could figure it out. Just don’t want to.

**John:** We have some more follow-up on brocal fry. Megana Rao, could you help us out with this?

**Megana Rao:** Aaron wrote in and said, “As a mid-40s dude with a late-developing brocal fry, it is my non-scientific opinion that a lot of guys in business developed this after Obama became president in an effort to sound more thoughtful and erudite. For most of us, it doesn’t sound that way, but I believe I subconsciously absorbed the thoughtful hesitation that Obama used while forming his thoughts. To me it was a crutch to stop saying, “Um, like, you know,” in business presentations.”

**John:** I like that as a way of holding the floor and holding space is a vocal affectation that makes it clear that you are still present in the conversation. You have not yielded. You’re going to get your next thought out there eventually.

**Craig:** I’m not sure that replacing one crutch with another crutch is going to be much help. The reason that “um, like, you know,” is problematic is because it’s space that you are holding but not delivering anything in. People in a room ultimately want content. They want to hear what you have to say, but they don’t want to wait for it any longer than they would normally need to. If you are going, “Uh, so, uh,” you’re also being boring. Yes, Obama, had a certain vocal pattern, but he wasn’t a slow speaker. He would occasionally just do that little pause, but it was quite brief. I would say, Aaron, while you may be correct in your analysis, I would say that if you had an instinct to try and get rid of “um, like, you know,” I would apply that same instinct to “uh.”

**John:** We’re just going to let you do that. It’s going to be the sound effects for this episode.

**Craig:** I’m sort of like Butthead at this point. Uhh.

**John:** More follow-up. Declan from Canberra, Australia wrote in to point out that David F. Sandberg, the Swedish director behind Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation, and Shazam, got his Hollywood career after his Lights Out short went viral. He still makes great little horror shorts on his YouTube channel. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It’s Sandberg Animation.

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**John:** It’s great. They’re super low budget. He’s usually filming in his house with his wife.

**Craig:** Do you know why they’re super low budget? Because there’s no market for these things. We’re just going to keep saying it. I like that people keep trying to storm our castle. I feel like with every attack, our walls just get thicker and better.

**John:** You know what else is also there’s no market for but we still enjoy, are the Three Pages that our listeners write in with. We’re going to do a Three Page Challenge. For people who are brand new to the podcast, every once in a while we do a Three Page Challenge, where we invite our listeners to send through three pages of a script. It could be a feature. It could be a series. We take a look at these pages, give our honest feedback. We’ll put a link in the show notes so you can download these pages yourself and read along with us to see what we’re talking about. I reminded everybody these are completely voluntary. They’ve asked for this feedback. We are not being mean on the internet. We are trying to be helpful and supportive on the internet.

**Craig:** Correct. We do our best.

**John:** Megana, you read 180 submissions for this week.

**Craig:** Good god, Megana.

**John:** Thank you for doing that.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** You’re welcome. I normally get to about 100, but I read more than that this week.

**Craig:** You just felt like abusing yourself.

**Megana:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** You had some sort of shame going on and needed to hurt.

**John:** Megana’s also home in Ohio, so maybe she was just ducking away and reading a few extra.

**Craig:** The extra 80 were just getting away from your parents.

**Megana:** Yeah, it was like, “Sorry, I absolutely have to do this.”

**John:** “John and Craig have so much work for me this week.” Any patterns you’ve noticed in this batch of submissions?

**Megana:** Yes. One thing that really… I don’t know if maybe this has always been a thing but I just stumbled upon it this time, but a lot of unnecessary adverbs.

**John:** Do you think that was prompted because you and I discussed a couple weeks ago about this writerly advice about adverbs? You actually got me a book for my birthday which was all about adverbs and the writer’s advice not to use adverbs. Do you think you were cued up because of that?

**Megana:** Yeah, 100%. Now that you say it, I’m like, that’s exactly where it came from.

**Craig:** I like that Megana has no defensiveness. None. She’s just like, “Oh, I am guilty.”

**Megana:** It’s not even worth arguing. John’s like Professor X. He just knows me too well at this point.

**Craig:** He just went right into that. He got in there. The adverbs are often unnecessary.

**John:** That’s an adverb.

**Craig:** Correct. I think the adverbs that are the most useful are the ones that aren’t the L-Y adverbs. Those we tend to need, like when. A lot of the blanklies can be eliminated. Of course, we don’t believe in rules around these parts, so please don’t do that thing where you just hunt, do a find for L-Y and then go crazy and delete everything. It’s probably unnecessary.

**John:** Craig, would you say our general advice is if you find yourself using an L-Y adverb, always ask yourself, do I really need it, because many cases you will not. If you really do need it, keep it. Great.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so. Probably worth the interrogation if people are telling you you use a lot of them. If no one’s complaining, you probably are using a decent amount. The other bit of advice that I recall is Christopher McQuarrie, the way he put it was, I think he said, “Every time I use an exclamation point in a screenplay, it’s some kind of failure.” I think that’s very true. Be careful about exclamation points. Just force yourself to rationalize them. If it’s rationalized, absolutely use it.

**John:** This last script I did have at least one, maybe two double exclamation moments, but they were those moments where I was deliberately going over the top to get your attention.

**Craig:** As long as you’re mindful of them, I think that’s the key.

**John:** Any other patterns, Megana, you noticed?

**Craig:** Yes. I also noticed there were a lot of really dense first pages. I wasn’t seeing dialog until the beginning or maybe the middle of Page 2, which again, not a hard and fast rule, but it’s nice to have some entry point into your script earlier on.

**Craig:** I do think that if you have a first page that is dialog-free, which is a perfectly reasonable creative choice, it’s all the more important to make sure there’s lots of white space, because a whole page with no dialog… Readers tend to skim towards the dialog. We know this. When there’s no dialog there, they may feel like, “Oh no, I have to do a lot of swimming.” Just give them lots of islands to land on and take a breath before they swim again into the next paragraph.

**John:** Very true.

**Megana:** Then the third thing that I noticed a lot were confusing reveals, like a lot of man’s voiceover and then revealing who the man is later.

**Craig:** Unnecessary.

**Megana:** I just felt like they could’ve introduced that person earlier, and it would’ve been much cleaner.

**Craig:** Always a tough choice.

**John:** I see that a lot.

**Craig:** Why don’t we dig in and see what we got with these fine people?

**John:** Absolutely. Again, if you want to read along these pages, just click through the show notes, and you can maybe read ahead before we get into this analysis. In case you’re driving your car and just want to hear a summary of what this first script is, Megana, can you help us out with Oculum by Larry Bambrick?

**Megana:** On the preface/epigraph page, there’s a note that in the future, a virus has killed most of the human population and black rains have destroyed crops and technology. The only hope for survivors is Oculum. Then in the three pages, we open on the seed park in Oculum. A petal floats down into a grove of peach trees. It’s an idyllic scene framed by clear blue skies, until a robot sentry zooms down from the sky and through the landscape, kicking up hundreds of petals. We cut to Miranda24, who examines a petal from her bedroom window. Miranda24 speaks to her mother about the weather, the peach trees, and Oculum. Through their dialog, we learn that it’s Miranda24’s birthday and that she’s the first of the Oculum children to turn 16. It’s also revealed that Mother is a robot with a porcelain painted face.

**Craig:** Basically John August.

**John:** Come now, I’m not a robot. I have firmly established I’m human here.

**Craig:** That’s what the robots would say, “I am not a robot.” Of course.

**John:** I’m not a robot.

**Craig:** Of course that’s what you say.

**John:** Looking at the title page here, there’s spacing in between the letters of the words Oculum. Common approach. Looks lovely. Go for it. It says “by: Larry Bambrick.” The standard form is “written by Larry Bambrick.” Just might as well be standard here.

**Craig:** Didn’t bother me.

**John:** It’s fine either way. On the, I’m going to call it the preface page, we’re getting a setup there like this is the science fiction utopia/dystopia that we’re in. It’s setting us up. Maybe that’s rolling past on a screen before the movie starts.

**Craig:** All of this feels like it should be learned by the person watching rather than told to them. None of it seems like it wouldn’t be learned. You’re going to have to reveal this in interesting ways. This one, I wasn’t quite sure I felt the need for it. It seemed like it was short circuiting Larry’s chance to reveal these things to people.

**John:** There are basically two scenes happening here. There’s a setup of this outdoor world. Then we’re in a scene with Miranda24 and the mother robot. Let’s start with this outdoor setting scene, because there’s a lot of painting happening here, and yet I got really confused about what I was supposed to be seeing through it. We got the lovely landscape, but once it comes time for the flash of light moving across the sky, that thing falling, but it seems impossible how it’s falling, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be taking out of that. Craig, do you have insights there?

**Craig:** I was quite enjoying the way Larry was painting the picture. I felt like I was in a place. I felt like I could see things. There was lots of nice use of colors. I thought all capping PEACH TREES was quite nice. Where I stopped, and I think this is just literally a word choice issue, is he says, “A flash of light reflects off something moving across the sky. It’s small and silver. A plane?” Okay, maybe it’s a plane. Maybe it’s a rocket ship. Maybe it’s a meteor. I don’t know. What could it be? Then the next part. “And as we watch, it moves down…as if it’s somehow riding across the sky.” “Down” and “across” are italicized.

**John:** I can’t see that.

**Craig:** Now I’m like, wait a second. It already said it was moving across the sky. Now it moves down as if it’s somehow riding across the sky. It’s just saying “across” again as if you’re giving us new information. Also, I don’t know what that means.

**John:** I couldn’t picture it.

**Craig:** What does “riding across the sky” mean? Any guesses? I don’t know.

**John:** I had a direction of movement in my head from the first line, and then I didn’t see it.

**Craig:** Then he says then it plummets. Is it plummeting? Is it moving across the sky? I don’t know. I got confused there. I did like the way the scene ended, because surely there will be an explosion, but there’s nothing until, “A sentry (a sleek ROBOT, made of stainless steel, riding a single wheel) rockets past us along the ground — kicking up a trail of peach petals in its wake.” That’s a lovely image. I like the sense of mystery here. I thought there was good mystery. Other than the weird thing about riding across the sky, it felt pretty good.

**John:** There’s a single line here, “What the hell is that?” directed to us as readers. That can be great. I don’t mind that, just like you’re talking to us as the reader, because that’s the experience we’d get in the theater. I just got confused with what I was supposed to be seeing in the paragraphs around it. We were almost there.

**Craig:** Almost there but very encouraging.

**John:** Then we get into the bedroom. Here is where we’ll talk about specifics that are on the page. I think this was the wrong scene, because I think what we’re trying to do here is establish some of the stuff that was happening in the open scroll credits there, what is this world that we’re in. It’s also supposed to be a scene introducing Miranda24 and her mother and the fact that she’s a robot and the conflict between the two of them. I left the scene only knowing the mother was a robot and having really no idea who Miranda24 was, which by the end of three pages, I should have some idea what her voice was, what she looks for, what she’s interested in. I wasn’t really getting that from this scene.

**Craig:** It begins with Miranda24. Her name being Miranda24, you’re already in your science fiction space, she’s a clone, something like that.

**John:** Craig, you and I as a reader know that her name is Miranda24, but the viewer doesn’t know that she’s Miranda24.

**Craig:** No question. I don’t think Mother calls her Miranda24 either. You’re right. That’s facts not in evidence, essentially. Then it says, “16 years-old,” and then in parentheses, “(she is today in fact).” I think Larry’s saying it’s her birthday. That’s a weird way of putting it. Then it says, “She traces the petal with a finger.” She’s holding a peach petal. It was the stuff that we saw outside. She now is inside a house. If you’re going to say, “What the hell is that?” earlier, I think you would want to acknowledge, oddly, inside the house, acknowledge that that’s weird, because are there peach petals everywhere? Then Mother does this bit.

I think there was some nice exposition in the sense of, Miranda, without even looking outside, says the weather’s perfect. I’ve learned that the weather is always perfect here. That’s quite nice. I think the reveal of Miranda’s mother as a robot is problematic as directed on the page. Here’s what it says. We see Miranda’s mother. It says “ANGLE ON: And we see,” which we don’t want to do. It would just be “ANGLE ON:”

**John:** We don’t need the “ANGLE ON:” at all. That doesn’t do us [inaudible 00:31:23].

**Craig:** Either it’s “ANGLE ON: Miranda’s mother,” or “We see Miranda’s mother standing in the doorway. The morning light hasn’t quite reached this far, so we can’t identify much about her. Simple clothes. Upright posture.” No, that’s not how light works. Either I can see that she’s a robot or I can’t. If you don’t want me to see that she’s a robot, she’s in darkness, because once you reveal her, she is definitely a robot.

**John:** Yeah, or I can imagine there’s some sort of silhouettey kind of version where we can’t make out her face, but we can see that there’s a person standing there. She’s not really standing, because we’re learning that she’s going to wheel up. I think we need to be a little more careful planning that.

**Craig:** Her neck is gears and wires. We can’t quite do that. Then there’s a very stilted conversation between a 16-year-old girl and her robot mother. I don’t know how you feel about these things, John and Megana. For me, when I’m in science fiction scripts and I get overloaded with what I consider to be fairly tropey scientific jargon, my eyelids get heavy. Just the name Oculum alone is science fiction jargony.

**John:** “Regulus will be disappointed.”

**Craig:** “Regulus will be disappointed.” “Oculum protects us.” “Regulus will be disappointed.” “The trees are blooming in the Seed Park.” It’s too much. It’s too much. I’m starting to giggle a little bit, and I don’t want to. Certainly, Larry doesn’t want us giggling. I think there’s just too much of that kind of stuff that makes it feel a bit fusty and derivative of just iffy novels. Then just a pronouncement from robot mother, “You’re turning sixteen. A milestone.” I agree with you, John. I think that this scene was not giving me what I wanted, because I just don’t know anything about anything. I need something else. If I had her walking home, if I had her seeing the robot go by, if I had her, I don’t know, doing something interesting-

**John:** If I had her trying to conceal something from the robot mother, that would be great, like she’s trying to hide this peach petal from Mother, just so we have some point of intersection there. Then let the conversation be less science fictiony and just more practical could be great. I’ll direct our listeners to an Australian movie from a couple years ago called Mother, which I quite enjoyed. I think it was a Netflix original which is about a young girl raised by a robot, largely the same kind of premise with very different color palette feelings.

**Craig:** Isn’t that Raised By Wolves? Isn’t that the same thing?

**John:** Raised By Wolves is a similar premise as well. This is different. This one is an underground bunker situation.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** All of these things are existing within a set of tropes. If Larry’s going to try to do the story, he’s going to be aware of those who look for ways to not make us feel like we’re going to be trope city in those first three pages.

**Craig:** I would say that a good trope, carefully used, can be wonderful, because ultimately if you go to, what is it, trope.com or tvtropes.com, literally every single thing at this point they’ve come up with a name for as a trope. Everything, no matter what you watch, no matter how good it is, it’s full of tropes. That’s not what we mean. What we mean is just stuff that feels overly familiar in a way that makes you seem less creative. In this case, there’s just a certain… The idea of a human talking to a tut-tutting but somewhat stiff robot mother does feel a little done. It’s a tough one to pull off without the robot mother feeling like a new kind of robot mother.

The thing is, in a good way, Larry writes well. The pages lay out beautifully. I can see everything. I think it’s really well done in that regard. It’s just the content itself feels slightly shopworn. Perhaps it just needs to be presented in a more fresh way.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s take a look at the log line that Larry sent through. It reads, “In the apocalyptic future, 16-year-old Miranda24 learns that everything she’s been told about her perfect life inside a domed world, the Oculum, is a lie. She’ll discover that it’s up to her and a small band of other teenagers she meets to bring hope to a devastated land.”

**Craig:** There you go. That’s a YA novel.

**John:** It’s a YA novel.

**Craig:** Which is fine, except that it feels like it’s been pulled from a million Maze Runners, like if you run Maze Runner through Dall-E. It just feels really familiar.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s go on to a script which did not feel familiar to me at all. This is We’re All Very Tired by Marissa Gawel. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Gabriel Bolan, 70s, walks through a city park at night in Romania. When no one’s looking, he digs a small hole and plants a few seeds in the ground. We cut to a summer camp in rural Oregon, where Meredith Perez, 30s, welcomes a group of people off of a school bus to, quote, “mushroom camp.” Brenda Cho, 30s, one of the new arrivals, says she thought it was more of a class. We then cut to Brenda walking two whiny toddlers around in Kansas City, where Brenda takes a picture of a flier for a mushroom camp on a telephone pole. We cut back to the camp cafeteria, where Gabriel discusses matsutake mushrooms with the other campers.

**Craig:** This whole trope of the mushroom camp.

**John:** It’s all about mushroom camp. A thing I will say about these three pages is I never knew what was coming next.

**Craig:** Yes, that is true.

**John:** Because the scenes just didn’t flow together in a way that was helpful at all. You could’ve shuffled those in any order, and it would’ve gotten the same amount out of them. One of the scenes I really liked, I really like Brenda with her kids. I thought the voices in that were actually just great. In that three pages, I have no idea what movie this is.

**Craig:** No, this was very confusing. First things first, we open with a flashback. You can’t really open with a flashback, because what are you flashing back from. The way flashbacks work is you see… Chernobyl opens with a scene that then is later, and then you flash back to whatever. You have to give some sort of orientation to people, like what is the date, what is the year. We can’t put the word flashback on the screen.

**John:** Instead of flashback, I would say 1994 or just give a year.

**Craig:** Give a year and put it on the screen. Here’s a guy who’s in his 70s, and he’s planting something. What he does is he digs a little hole, plants a few seeds, and then pours some water on them. Then we’re out of there. Now that’s not enough.

**John:** It’s not. I didn’t know what I was supposed to take from that. I didn’t know, because he’s trying to do it secretly, but there wasn’t enough there.

**Craig:** No. When these moments happen in their own little timeline, there has to be some sort of drama to them of some kind. This is just planting something. Then we meet Meredith Perez. We don’t know the difference. We don’t know how we would know that this is present day as opposed to a flashback. We also don’t know how long ago the flashback was. She walks out and approaches a group of people getting off a school bus. I don’t understand what… Is she high? Was that the idea? Was she meant to be high? She seems high.

**John:** I took her as being nervous. I actually like her ability to continually undercut herself. She keeps trying things and undercutting what she was doing before. That can work, but there was not other engine to the scene. It was just her sputtering. I didn’t get what the point of the scene was supposed to be.

**Craig:** For instance, John, you’re absolutely right, if I knew that this was the opening day of mushroom camp and she has never welcomed people before to mushroom camp, this would work. We’re going to presume that the person who greets the people coming off the bus has done this many, many, many times. Think of the employees at the White Lotus greeting the people coming off the boat.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** This is a well-practiced bit of theater. She just seemed so discombobulated. Then Brenda says, “I thought this was more of a class.” What does Brenda know about anything anyway? She just walked off a bus.

**John:** We’re going to learn what Brenda knows, because she just took a photo of a thing called mushroom camp in the next scene. These are all in really a very strange order. It’s like we have all the flashbacks before the plane crashes in Lost. It’s just a strange thing. I do want to talk about… I thought Brenda with her two kids, her two toddlers, I thought the voices were actually very authentic in the way that moms speak to their kids like, “No, we’re doing this. We like walking.” Basically, you speak in this weird first-person plural involving your kids and their unreasonable demands for things. I like that, but I wanted that attached to something, because right now it’s just floating out there in a space.

**Craig:** Be aware that shooting scenes with toddlers is incredibly hard. It’s nice that you wrote dialog for toddlers, but there’s a reason you rarely see them doing dialog, because you can’t rely on them doing dialog. Also, what’s going on here is Brenda is going to see this flyer on the telephone pole that says, “Make your own income. Become a morel mushroom hunter.” What you’re showing me, Marissa, is a woman who is overwhelmed by her kids, but what you’re not showing me is a woman who’s short on money. What is motivating her here is that she needs money.

Now if these kids were overacting and she was begging on the phone, begging a caregiver to please not quit, but she can’t pay her more, because she doesn’t have enough money, and then the lady hangs up on her while she’s doing the shoo and all the rest, and then she sees it, maybe I’ll go, “Okay, she needs money. That’s what this is about.”

**John:** Is Brenda a babysitter?

**Craig:** No, I think Brenda’s a mom.

**John:** Do we know that she’s the mom?

**Craig:** No, we don’t, but I’m going to presume she is.

**John:** I guess we would presume that she’s a mother unless we hear otherwise, but actually, in some ways it makes more sense.

**Craig:** She’s late 30s. She’s pushing a stroller with two kids. I think she’s the mom. If she’s not the mom, then help. Help me.

**John:** Help me out.

**Craig:** Help me out. Then it would be good to know that she’s the nanny and that she wants a new job that pays more or that doesn’t have kids screaming. Here’s where I really got confused. We go back to present day and we don’t know. We’re now in a large cafeteria. Describe the cafeteria, by the way. Where is this cafeteria, in the middle of the woods? At one table, Gabriel, the guy who was in his 70s from the flashback, is using “his fork to slice off a piece of mushroom. He takes a bite and is pleasantly surprised.” How old is he now?

**John:** I have no idea. More than 70.

**Craig:** Is he 90? I’m so confused. He says, “This is matsutake.” Then the guy across from him is like, “What? Huh?” His name is Rah Reddy, “20s, skeptical.” What is he doing in mushroom camp? If someone’s like, “Oh, matsutake,” and he’s like, “What? All right,” how did he end up here? He must’ve made a choice to go to mushroom camp, right?

**John:** People get off the bus. I have a hard time believing that the first scene that we’re going to really see them or get to know them at is going to be inside this cafeteria. I just feel like there were some scenes missing in between there. These people talk on the bus. It was a strange way to get us into meeting this group.

**Craig:** Very.

**John:** Again, I don’t know what this movie actually is at the end of three pages, which is a problem. I’m assuming it’s an ensemble movie, that it’s not strict POV to any one person, because it felt like we would’ve had two scenes with a person if it was going to be their POV.

**Craig:** I’m going to guess that this involves vampires. That’s what I’m going to guess. I’m going to guess that Gabriel is not just a mushroom hunter, he’s a vampire hunter. He’s from Romania. Rah says, “Ha, vampires!” and Gabriel chuckles. “And inspiring mountains.” Feels like maybe there’s going to be some sort of summer camp horror movie thing going on that involves mushrooms somehow, which I’m saying as a guy that’s making a show that is not unrelated to mushrooms.

I think you put your finger on the problem. We need time to meet people before stuff happens. I need to know what he’s doing there. I need to know why I needed to see that thing in the beginning. Yes, we need to see people on the bus first talking to each other and grilling each other on why they’re doing something as bizarre as going to mushroom camp. Then I need a tour. Give me a tour. Orient me, something. Open the envelope.

**John:** I can open the envelope and tell you that I don’t think there’s vampires in here.

**Craig:** Oh, dammit.

**John:** The log line that person sent says, “A small retreat in Oregon promises its visitor a restful break from the demands of capitalistic society, but it soon becomes clear that the retreat’s talk of experimenting with medicinal properties of mushrooms has dark underpinnings.”

**Craig:** There’s something.

**John:** I guess there could still be vampires technically, but I think it’s much less likely.

**Craig:** Yeah, so some sort of zombie-ing or… I don’t know. Odd that this is about a break from the demands of capitalistic society but the advertising is promising you money. That may be part of the irony. I don’t know. I just think that basically, Marissa, you have an idea that no one else has. I assure you that there are no other mushroom camp movies. You need to orient us and be really careful about how you present moves in time, especially when you have three within three pages.

**John:** A lot.

**Craig:** That is telling people they’re in for a lot of whiplash.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s do our final Three Page Challenge, this one by Jordan Johnson. Help us out, Megana.

**Megana:** Maddy, 24, discusses death in voiceover as she speaks about different religions’ conceptions of death and parts of life. We see the corresponding images flash by on a projector until she gets to a picture of Olivia Carter, 24. Maddy reveals that Olivia was her best friend and that she killed herself three days ago. We then cut to Maddy cooking potato salad in the church kitchen. Evelyn, Olivia’s mom, expresses her gratitude for Maddy and takes her hands, asking Maddy to join her in prayer.

**John:** We should also stress that that voiceover continues beyond this point. She’s a character who can voiceover at any point during the story. She has voiceover power.

**Craig:** She has voiceover power, exactly. I guess the first thing that we notice when we look at the title page is it’s very graphic.

**John:** It’s really nice. Describe for our listeners driving their car someplace, describe this title page for us.

**Craig:** I don’t know if Jordan is a man or a woman. Jordan has created a very beautiful graphic title page that mimics what a title page of a program at a funeral or wake would look like. It’s got four crosses with lots of little beams in each corner and a little border around it, as it would. The title, Wake, is in this nice little scripty font, little swooshities underneath. Then instead of saying “written by Jordan Johnson,” it says “Funeral Arrangements by Jordan Johnson.” Then underneath that, in italics, it says, “The family of Olivia Carter sincerely appreciates your thoughts, prayers, and condolences.” This is very clever.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** I would go right for this if I saw this in a pile.

**John:** I think it’s really smartly done.

**Craig:** Really well done.

**John:** That typeface is Zap Chancery.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** It was put on the first LaserWriter 2 printer, which it became ubiquitous and people used it for all the wrong things. This is actually an example.

**Craig:** Like funerals?

**John:** Funerals is fine for that, but people will try to use it for newsletters and [inaudible 00:46:30].

**Craig:** Please don’t do that.

**John:** I was really struck by the title page. Great. Really well done. This opening narration thing I think largely works, since this is Maddy. It’s her voiceover. “See this? This is what you get when you die… I guess if you’re Buddhist you’ll see this.”

**Craig:** Over that, it’s nothing. You see nothing, which is great. No, I’m sorry, you do see something. Sorry.

**John:** My biggest note here is I think you need to move these scene descriptions above the dialog in all of these cases. Then it actually makes much more sense.

**Craig:** That would make more sense. This is a very simple thing where you hear in voiceover Maddy’s brief announcement. This is what you would see if you’re a Buddhist when you die. This is what you see when you’re a Christian. This is what you see when you’re a Muslim, Hindu, or Jewish. All those things are very simple kind of projector images. Then she basically transitions to, I don’t know what you do see when you die, but I know what you will stop seeing, essentially. Then she gives a very interesting list of things.

**John:** Ending with eye-light. What did you take eye-light to mean, on Page 2?

**Craig:** That one was odd. I think it means just that there was light shining in her eyes. I don’t know what… Megana, are we running into a generational problem?

**Megana:** No, I also did not totally know what eye-light meant. I thought it meant the feeling of closing your eyes and having the sun shining on them.

**Craig:** It says, “We are on Liv’s face, showing bright and happy eyes.” I think what Jordan was intending was light in your eyes. When we’re shooting things, eye-lights, we do use those to put out little sparkles in your eye. That one was a little odd. What was lovely was I thought the progression of things that you don’t see anymore, this is what Jordan gave us. “No more sunrises. Or crepes. Or dimples.” That’s where we meet Liv for the first time and see her face. “No more sounds of a pin dropping on vinyl. Or watching thunderstorms in the Spring. Or eye-light.”

Then the eye-light brings us back to Liv’s picture, and says, “This is Liv. She’s my best friend. She killed herself 3 days ago. No more eggnog or Autumn or thrift stores.” That was kind of awesome, I thought. There are so many different ways of delivering what can often be a gloppy thing, which is somebody killed themself. You can get very melodramatic about it. I thought this was a very creative way in, that’s connecting Liv’s fate to a larger discussion about death and the afterlife, and also then tells me so much about Maddy, which is she doesn’t pause. She just rolls into this interesting, hyper-verbal way of describing things.

**John:** The next scene, which takes us to the end of the three pages, is in this church kitchen. “Maddy stirs the potato salad, adding in spices and whatever other gross things go into potato salad.”

**Craig:** Great. It’s disgusting.

**John:** It’s the right tone for it. It’s important I think when you have a centerpiece character like Maddy who is cynical. Having some tone being carried through into the scene description so helps. It makes it feel like the author and the central character are the same person.

**Craig:** I wish that we had just a little bit of a physical description of Maddy.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Other than her age, I don’t know anything about her, her hair, her clothes, her makeup, as is my want. There is mention further down the page of a woman named Pamela, who is working on a fruit salad at the other end of the kitchen. I think we would probably want to introduce her here earlier before Evelyn comes in, because when Evelyn enters, that’s when a new thing shifts. We don’t want to start meeting people that had already been there at that point.

**John:** I agree. The description of the kitchen is nice. It’s talking about the “yellow hue of an old church kitchen.” It says “cold LED tube lighting panels.” They’re actually fluorescent lighting panels. Those panels wouldn’t be LED, just fluorescent [inaudible 00:50:31] going for.

**Craig:** They sure would not. Jordan’s younger.

**John:** Jordan’s younger, I think.

**Craig:** I have no problem with that.

**John:** No, that’s absolutely fine. I like most of the scene that happens after this time. I thought it could be tighter and shorter. I think we could’ve gotten to the point of it a little bit quicker. I enjoy what Jordan’s doing on the page here. The choice to make all of Maddy’s voiceovers in bold is really smart, because even though there’s the little V.O. at the end, it can be confusing when characters are saying things in scenes and have voiceover power. Bolding those lines really helps.

**Craig:** Agreed, and agreed. I was really happy to see that. It helped me so much. This is why we say there are no rules. The rule is help me as the reader. I’m sure that a million screenwriting teachers will tell you you should not suddenly bold a character’s name in the middle of a script, but yeah, you should if it helps. In this case, it helped. I agree with you that Evelyn’s prayer could’ve been trimmed down. In editing, I know exactly what I would’ve trimmed it. The information we need is that Evelyn, she’s religious, whereas Maddy, not so much, and that she was Olivia’s mom. “Please bless the preparation of this food and the nourishment it will bring to our bodies. Please keep us all in your care today as we mourn the death of my sweet, sweet Olivia Michelle. Amen.” That’s all you need. The next chunk, you don’t need.

I loved Maddy’s commentary after Evelyn says to her, “You were a good friend to her, Maddy.” We hear Maddy’s thought in voiceover, which I think was great. Generally speaking, I loved it. I just loved these pages. I thought they were really well written. The scenes moved. I saw everything. I know so much about Maddy without anybody telling me anything about Maddy. I know so much about Liv and Maddy without anybody telling me.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** The creativity that led for this front page to be so interesting I think carried through. Well done, Jordan Johnson.

**John:** One other suggestion for how you can save some space on the page. On the top of Page 3, Evelyn has two lines. She goes, “Thank you for helping. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.” Then there’s two lines of scene description before we get to another Evelyn line, “Let me say a quick word over the food. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you two.” Parentheticals, takes their hands. “Let me say a quick a quick word over the food.” That gives you all you needed to do between those two lines, and it saves you some space on the page.

**Craig:** If you wanted to get across that Maddy was not even looking at Evelyn but just stays looking at the potato salad, you can say, “Maddy, her eyes focused on the potato salad, joins Pam and Evelyn as they hold hands.” Then Evelyn says, “Dear Lord.” There is a way to be a little bit more compressed there. If you’re not running into page issues, I’d rather the space, personally. You’re right, if you are, you need to squeeze some juice out of this. You’ll squeeze way more juice out of it by making the prayer shorter, which you can definitely do.

**John:** That way you won’t have to fluid morph in the cut.

**Craig:** Fluid morph.

**John:** Let’s take a look at the log line. “At the funeral of her best friend, brash and honest 24-year-old Maddy Palmer endures the suffocating etiquette of a traditional wake.”

**Craig:** That’s pretty much what we were getting there.

**John:** It’s interesting that it looks like the whole movie’s maybe at this wake, rather than going on past it. Not what I would’ve expected, but I’m curious what’s going to happen. I would read more pages, so that’s a good sign.

**Craig:** Wakes are notorious for going off the rails, because they are not like the stuffy funeral services. They’re meant to be more of a party and celebration, I guess. I’ve never been to a wake. Drinking is involved, as I recall.

**John:** It can be. I want to thank certainly our three people who submitted these pages, because they were so brave for us to talk through them, but the other 180 people who submitted their pages, because they could’ve been chosen as well. If you have your own pages that you want us to take a look at, you don’t mail them to Megana. Instead, you fill out a form. Go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. There’s a little form. You click some buttons. You attach your pdf. We could be talking about this on the next round of Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Megana, thank you for again the extraordinary self-abuse.

**Megana:** Of course. It’s my pleasure.

**Craig:** Make sure you enjoy in self-care.

**John:** Let’s answer one incredibly quick question that I know we actually have the answer to.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Matthew asks, “Hey, so in the new movie Watcher, I saw a credit I’ve never seen before. I Googled it, and I found nothing. It said ‘based on a screenplay by.'”

**Craig:** I feel like we answer this every day.

**John:** “What’s that about?” We did, but we’ll answer on this podcast as well.

**Craig:** “Based on a screenplay by” is a source material credit, the way that “based on a novel” or “based on a play” or “based on a song” is. What it means is that a screenplay was written early in the development of the project, oftentimes beginning the development of the project. That screenplay was not under the auspices of WGA contract. Why? Because it was written for a nonsignatory, or, as is more often the case, it was written for a nonsignatory but overseas. A lot of projects that originate in the UK for instance are not Writers Guild covered. They are rather written in the UK, where Writers Guild doesn’t have jurisdiction.

Then it gets either brought into another company, another company buys that thing from the first company, or, again more likely, the people developing it say, “Oh, we want to hire John August to rewrite this.” John only works under WGA contract, so now, lo and behold, boop, WGA contract. WGA credits, “written by,” “screenplay by,” “screen story by,” “story by,” all of those are a result of our collective bargaining agreement. They are available only to people that work under the Writers Guild collective bargaining agreement and not to anyone else. “Based on a screenplay by” means the first or early screenplay was not covered by the WGA.

**John:** Exactly. It could be that this screenplay was 40 years old but overseas. If it was written under WGA contract, even for Warners back in the day, it would still be part of this [inaudible 00:56:35] title.

**Craig:** Yes. We will answer this question many, many more times.

**John:** Many, many more times. Time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a book. It is The Secret History of Mac Gaming by Richard Moss. Craig, it’s a book I think you’ll enjoy.

**Craig:** Looking at the website.

**John:** It’s 480 pages long. It’s a big, thick, yellow book, comes out of the UK. It’s not new. I think it was first published in 2017, but this updated version has new more good stuff in it, or more new good old stuff in it. I had my Macintosh quite early on. I played a lot of games on Macintosh. Reading this book, I’m just remembering how different everything was, because this is pre-internet. To get a game, you had to have somebody give you that game on a disk. [inaudible 00:57:16] users group or find a shareware. Basically, college campuses were all about trading games back and forth. There are many great titles I remember from back in these days. Dark Castle, fantastic.

**Craig:** Of course. You would also get some quasi-free games if you subscribed to Macworld.

**John:** Macworld, MacUser, both.

**Craig:** There would be a floppy disk actually in the magazine that you could pop out. There were also some, literally just retype the code. People would just list code for stuff that you’d type in.

**John:** I don’t remember that for Macintosh stuff, but my initial Atari-

**Craig:** Apple II or something like that.

**John:** Yeah, Apple II, there were little games you could type in from the magazine. This was after that. The Macintosh was never really designed to be a gaming machine, and yet the people who would love to play games also loved the Macintosh. It was just a very natural fit.

**Craig:** Yes, it was, until at some point suddenly no one was making games for Mac at all, and it was all PC.

**John:** One company would be the one who would port all the big PC titles over to Macintosh, and they would come a year later, and they wouldn’t have the things you would want to see.

**Craig:** It wouldn’t be as good.

**John:** Then eventually, most stuff moved to being… Either you had a gaming PC that was literally a PC or you had a console that could just do so many things that you would never want your home computer to do.

**Craig:** Still to this day, if you’re playing off console, it’s almost certainly a PC, because there are PC rigs that are just built specifically for gaming. That’s great.

**John:** Anyway, this was a nice trip down memory lane. I don’t know how interesting this will be for people who didn’t have any of that firsthand history, because it would be like me reading about old rotary telephones or something. I don’t have that experience.

**Craig:** I do have the experience.

**John:** I do, but I-

**Craig:** I just don’t care.

**John:** I don’t care.

**Craig:** This is more nostalgia than anything else. This definitely feels like one of those nostalgia books.

**John:** The D and D book that you and I both loved, the Art and Arcana book, it’s like that but for Mac games.

**Craig:** Brought to us by my pal Kyle Newman. I have two Cool Things this week, both related to puzzles. The first is Ryan O’Shea, who was the first and only entry into my solve the Kevin Wald cryptic contest, challenge. By cryptic, I mean cryptics, multiple puzzles, three of them in fact, all extraordinarily hard, with so many layers that I believe you and Megana looked at Ryan’s solution and didn’t even understand the solution.

**John:** I have no idea.

**Megana:** No way.

**John:** Here’s the subject line on this email. “Have uncouth mercy, but not for me, to at its core deweaponize jerk Craig’s jigsaw alt.”

**Craig:** Let me translate, as I did for you guys. “Have uncouth mercy” means… Uncouth is a prompt to anagram. Anagram the word mercy, but not for me, so take M-E out of mercy, and anagram R-C-Y to C-R-Y. Then “to at its core deweaponize,” go to the core of the word deweaponize, which is the letter P. That is the letter directly in the middle of the word deweaponize. Now we have C-R-Y-P. “Jerk.” A synonym for a jerk is a tic, T-I-C. “Cryptic.” Then the definition part, “Craig’s jigsaw alt,” meaning cryptic puzzles are my alternative to jigsaws, which are not puzzles at all. Ryan’s solution was perfect and perfectly complete. He did a fantastic job. He did suggest that I’ve ruined him somehow. I’m glad. Good. I hope you’re ruined permanently, Ryan. Why should I be the only one? No, you did a wonderful job. I’m so proud and pleased.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Then my second Cool Thing is coming up. It just passed if you’re listening to this on a normal Tuesday. You still can access it. You still have time to get your name on the list of completionists. Mark Halpin, a friend of mine and perhaps the most, what I would say, elegant puzzle constructor in the world, meaning he himself not that elegant. No, he is, but his puzzles are elegant. Every year, with the exception of last year, every year for Labor Day weekend, he releases something he calls a Labor Day Extravaganza, which is a suite of usually somewhere around 10 puzzles, all which then feed into a meta puzzle. This is a pretty standard puzzle hunt kind of thing. His puzzles are so beautifully done. They are always wrapped together thematically by some kind of interesting narrative device, typically relating to stories, folklore, and mythology from various different cultures. He’s covered pretty much every culture I can think of.

His latest is called Cross Purposes. It launched, past tense, at 1 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, September 3rd. It is free, although there is an opportunity to tip him. I strongly encourage you to do so, because it’s not easy to build these things, and particularly not easy to build things as beautiful as a Mark Halpin Labor Day Extravaganza.

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

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilleli. Our outro this week is by Matthew Jordan. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send your longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the Three Page Challenges that we discussed today. You’ll find transcripts there and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and they’re great, including the new Scriptnotes Bon Jovi T-shirt. You’ll find this at Cotton Bureau. When you get those in and ordered, you can wear them to our live shows that are coming up. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on senior year. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Senior year, that is our topic. It is the final year of high school in the US, both for our daughters, and a point of life that is frequently dramatized in movies. You see that a lot. There’s a movie I’m trying to set up which is all about senior year, because it’s such a big transition year. You are leaving one part of your life and moving on to this other part. It feels like a funeral for your younger self. Craig, what’s your recollection of senior year?

**Craig:** You could feel that there was a line that you were leaving a place where a lot of the challenge was to see if you could get into a good college. For a lot of people, senior year is also… You’re going to be confronted by having that breakup with that boyfriend or that girlfriend. You’re going to be driving to school instead of being driven to school. You are enough of an adult where you have access to certain things you didn’t have before, but not enough of an adult to… You can vote, but you can’t smoke, although you do. You feel like you’re on the verge of freedom, and you’re also getting away from home. That may very well be the next thing. This is your last hurrah with, for a lot of people, friends they’ve had since they were in kindergarten.

My daughter has gone to school in the La Cañada School District, which is a public school district where we live. She’s been in the public school system from kindergarten all the way through this year, her senior year. She has friends that she’s known since she was six. That’s a whole thing. It’s just so many transitions. The stuff that life fires at you and the speed with which it fires it at you when you are 17 or 18 is just astonishing.

**John:** I’m definitely noticing it’s the last firsts of a lot of things. It’s her last first day. It’s going to be the last musical that they’ll do at that school. It’s going to be the last time a lot of these things are going to happen. While there are some senior traditions, things that my daughter’s school always does, like the last day rituals and a senior trip, it’s recognizing that this is the final time certain things are going to happen is even more monumental for her.

**Craig:** I think as the year goes on, my daughter will be feeling this more and more. It’s easy now, because they just went back. They just went back, I don’t know, a couple weeks ago. As we get closer and closer to May, yeah, it’s going to be all sorts of stuff happening. It becomes almost like a yearlong celebration. Megana, you are way closer to senior year of high school than John or I. What do you remember, and how did you feel?

**Megana:** All of the things of feeling like you are on top and like you are like big dog on campus, but then I remember feeling so anxious about this looming question of what’s going to happen next year. I’m not going to have my friends or family around me. Where am I going to go to college? I feel like that question was looming over the horizon for the entire year in a way that maybe was the first time that I really experienced anxiety.

**Craig:** That was the last time, I’m sure.

**Megana:** Yeah, one and done.

**John:** Talk about that anxiety, because you were thinking about what’s going to happen next year, what colleges you’re going to get into. Once you knew where you were going to go to college, the stakes were suddenly much lower, weren’t they?

**Megana:** Amy is also applying to colleges. Any time she asks me for questions, I’m like, “Please don’t follow my example,” because I applied to too many schools, because I couldn’t make any decisions. I applied to them literally in the minutes before the application shut down. Then with Harvard, I got in. I think I got in on April 1st. I remember telling people, and they were like, “Oh, sick joke,” because everyone assumed I was just pulling an April Fools.

**John:** Oh, man.

**Craig:** Were you stupid? Was that why? Were they like, “Oh my god, Megana is the dumbest person we know.”

**Megana:** I also love April Fools. I think that’s the bigger component.

**Craig:** That may be it. Got it.

**Megana:** I was just so last minute on everything that I feel like I… I feel like that has continued throughout my life, where it’s like, I don’t know how much I got to enjoy it, because I was putting off decisions for so long.

**John:** Craig, did you encounter senioritis?

**Craig:** No, because we had been terrified by possibly urban legends, possibly not, of kids who had blown their last semester of high school and then the college rescinds the offer. The colleges said, when I got into college, they were like, “Yeah, just so you know, of course, we will be reviewing your final grades. Make sure that they’re… ” You’re like, “Oh god, I don’t want to fumble.” Also, I was in a race. I was in a valedictorian race. I couldn’t let up. Couldn’t let up.

**Megana:** Did you win the race?

**John:** Did you win?

**Craig:** No. I was the salutatorian.

**Megana:** Which is the cooler torian.

**Craig:** I think so. It was down to 100ths of a point or whatever. This is all stupid, by the way. If you find yourself currently as a senior in a race, it doesn’t matter, unless you’re really good at giving speeches. Then you’ll get some love for a good speech. I kept it on. I kept the heat on, but without the panic of, oh no, the unknown. I had a sense, “Okay, this is where I’m going to school. This is what it’s going to be.” Then you get the whiplash of having gone from the top of the heap in your high school to once again being a nobody that doesn’t know anything and is at the bottom of the pecking order when you get to college. The difference though when you get to college is… You can get razzed by the upperclassmen going into junior high or to high school. In college, no one cares. It’s the recognition you’re never going to be that little kid who’s getting picked on again. That just all goes away.

**Craig:** Yes, that part goes away. You’re not going to get bullied. I do recall, as a young heterosexual male, that there was definitely a certain kind of sexual politics going on where freshman heterosexual males were… It was just tougher. It was tougher. All the girls were looking upwards, and so you had to hustle. (singing) I did. I did. You know why?

**John:** You did, and you met your wife.

**Craig:** I did, I met my wife, although that wasn’t until I was a junior, so I had a few years of hustling. Then she put a ring on it.

**John:** Aw. I literally had one foot out the door my senior year because I was going to… Basically I had enough credits to graduate early. I only had to go to school in the mornings.

**Megana:** What?

**John:** I went to classes in the mornings, and then I took a class at CU Boulder in the afternoons. I was only halfway on campus anyway. I was running the high school paper. I don’t know, it was a good transition out. It worked really well for me. I felt like I was already leaving before I was officially leaving.

**Craig:** Interesting. Interesting.

**John:** Really Mike was the same situation. My husband was taking classes at OSU during his senior year too. We both had a situation where we really weren’t full-time high school students senior year.

**Craig:** He went to The Ohio State University?

**John:** The Ohio State University.

**Craig:** That’s one of the dumbest things.

**John:** It is one of the dumbest things. It has to be continuously mocked.

**Craig:** The. Please.

**Megana:** I feel like I can’t sit here and let this continue. It is The Ohio State University.

**Craig:** It is, because, what, there are other ones that are pretending to be Ohio State University, but we are The Ohio State University? Those are ripoff Ohio State Universities. Where are the other ones? There are no other ones.

**Megana:** There’s Ohio University.

**John:** Are there other OSUs that are not the one in Columbus, and so it’s only the one in Columbus is The Ohio State University?

**Craig:** No, there’s just The Ohio State University.

**Megana:** I was always under the impression that it was because of Ohio University that they did that. There’s Oregon State University.

**John:** Why would that work?

**Craig:** Why don’t they just underline the word State, Ohio State University? No, they stick the word The on it, which no one else does, for good reason.

**John:** Maybe we should be The Scriptnotes Podcast.

**Craig:** That’s a perfect analogy. Welcome to The Scriptnotes Podcast. That’s just ridiculous. The odds are that neither one of us survive to see October based on what we just did, because man, I’ll tell you, Ohio fans, phew.

**John:** That’s why we keep these conversations in the Premium feed, so at least we’re getting money for the hate coming our way.

**Craig:** Yes, there will be hate coming our way, and also long emails. Oh my god, so many long emails. “This is why,” blah blah blah, blah blah blah. I’m already making fun of your email. Don’t send it.

**John:** The end of high school is also graduation. Craig, did you have a good high school graduation?

**Craig:** I did. High school graduation went well.

**John:** Did you have to give a salutatorian speech?

**Craig:** I did. I gave a salutatorian-

**John:** What was your topic?

**Craig:** For the life of me, I cannot remember.

**John:** Do you have it written down anywhere?

**Craig:** Not anymore. It was written down, but we’re talking about something that I think I probably wrote it by hand and then typed it into my Macintosh and then printed it on my Brother Daisywheel printer. Oh, Megana, you never knew the joys of a Daisywheel printer.

**Megana:** I’m totally lost here.

**John:** Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.

**Craig:** Basically, it was like an electric typewriter. You would say, okay, print this. It would pull all the text into its memory. Then there was a wheel, a disc, a plastic disc, and at the tips of it were the letters. It would spin and hammer the letter. It was like the world’s fastest typist. It was loud and so much slower than a laser printer, not even close. I probably did that. Where it went… I tried to erase my past as best I could.

**John:** We’ve noticed that. We have video footage of Ted Cruz from his freshman year. I wonder if somebody filmed Craig’s salutatorian speech.

**Craig:** I think that’s wonderful.

**John:** If someone who’s listening can track that down, that would’ve been from 1989?

**Craig:** Eight.

**John:** ’88.

**Craig:** That was spring of 1988 in Freehold, New Jersey. If somebody has the video of my salutatory address, we’d love to see it. If you have it and it’s on VHS, we’ll gladly pay for the transfer.

**John:** Good stuff. Craig, Megana, thank you for a good senior year.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you. See you next week.

**John:** Bye.

**Megana:** Bye.

Links:

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* [Made-Up Words Trick AI Text-To-Image Generators](https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/made-up-words-trick-ai-text-to-image-generators) Discover Magazine
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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/565standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/looking-back-and-forward).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 514 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Often on the show we talk about what’s happening in the WGA West, but today we’ll be taking a look at our sister union in the East and the debate over who the WGA should represent. Then we’ll be answering listener questions about reading lists, blue skies, bad agents, and bored executives.

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** And in our bonus segment for premium members we will discuss how life has gotten better in the past few decades.

**Craig:** Doesn’t seem like it has, but it has.

**John:** But it actually has.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** And Craig this is our kind of unofficial but also official 10th Anniversary show. Ten years ago–

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Was the first episode of Scriptnotes. So we’ll be doing later talking about sort of what actually happened over those ten years, but I do want to celebrate this milestone of ten years of doing this show.

**Craig:** That’s terrifying.

**John:** It is. It’s genuinely terrifying.

**Craig:** Yeah. We are aging and what we’re doing is leaving behind ourselves this enormous digital wake of yapping. But I do think for guys who have been doing it for ten years we still have stuff to say.

**John:** We still have stuff to say. I mean, as I said on our Episode 100 I had confessed that I didn’t know that we would make it past 100 because I’d felt we would run out of things. Nope, stuff just keeps coming.

**Craig:** Oh you thought we wouldn’t make it past 100 episodes?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh man. What’s today’s episode?

**John:** 514.

**Craig:** Oh man, we made it. So the question is are we going to make it to a 1,000?

**John:** I don’t know. We could.

**Craig:** Has any podcast made it to a thousand?

**John:** Well I don’t think podcasts have really kind of been along that long. Although there’s podcasts who do it twice or three times a week, so obviously they would have made it to a thousand.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. But for a weekly show that’s good.

**Craig:** I think it’s amazing.

**John:** You were saying before we started recording that Bo who works with you started listening to this when she was in college. So, just crazy.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Or high school maybe even. Who knows?

**Craig:** Possibly high school. Well, no, she said she started listening to it when we was 20. So she was in college. But we started recording the show I think when she was in high school. So if we do this again, we keep going, and we make it to a thousand there will be people working for us who were not even born.

**John:** Born, yes.

**Craig:** When we started the show.

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Well that’s going to be great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re not going to resent us and our stupid old selves. Not at all.

**John:** So let’s start this episode by looking back at looking forward. So this is a question from Martin in Sandringham, Australia who writes, “Hey John and Craig. In Episode 167 back in 2014 you discussed superhero movies on the slate for the following seven years and I was wondering if you could now revisit this and see how it all unfolded in reality.” And Martin also notes “I did shudder when John posed the question about what the world would be like in 2020. Craig thought that we would all have phones implanted in our ears.”

**Craig:** Well…

**John:** Well…

**Craig:** Earbuds. Not far off.

**John:** We have our earbuds.

**Craig:** Not far off.

**John:** Not far off at all. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the transcript from that episode. And also the archived version of the article we were talking about, because this was an article on Newsarama that was sort of laying out the next seven years of superhero movies.

But I thought we’d take a look through and sort of what’s supposed to be there and what actually was there and Megana took a look at really tried to chart what movies actually came out on the days that they were supposed to come out and a surprising number did. So let’s take a look back, start back in 2015.

So 2015 was predicted for The Avengers, Age of Ultron, Fantastic Four from Fox, and Ant Man. Those all came out on the days they were supposed to which is good because that was the year the article came out. So within one year is pretty easy to predict what movies are going to come out within a year.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, did we doubt that they were coming out?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Oh, good, well OK.

**John:** I don’t think we doubted it. But I think we were at the time surprised that any studio could have the hubris to suggest like oh this is the next seven years of movies we’re going to make.

**Craig:** I do remember this now. This is coming back to me from six years ago or whatever it was, seven years ago.

**John:** So 2016 the predictions were for Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. That did happen.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** They said Captain America 3 which became Captain America Civil War. X-Men Apocalypse. I don’t really remember.

**Craig:** It did happen.

**John:** It did happen?

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Doctor Strange was the untitled Marvel film. The untitled DC film was Suicide Squad and both of those came out on the date they said they were predicted to. But, the first movie that never happened, November 11 was supposed to be Sinister Six from Sony.

**Craig:** What the?

**John:** Sinister Six is a bunch of the Spider-Man villains.

**Craig:** Oh, so Suicide Squad.

**John:** Yeah, kind of. But different and better. And if I remember correctly I think Drew Goddard was supposed to be doing that. So, I feel bad that didn’t happen.

**Craig:** All right.

**Megana Rao:** Sorry. Doctor Strange was supposed to come out on July 8 but ended up being pushed to November of that year.

**John:** So Megana with a correction here.

**Craig:** Ah, OK. Yeah, but I’ll give them that four month leeway there. That’s OK.

**John:** Yeah, some sliding.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So we get to 2017. Fox had slated an untitled Wolverine sequel. That came out on the day that they predicted. So, March 3 that came out.

**Craig:** Logan, yeah.

**John:** That’s Logan. An untitled Marvel film came out which was Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, originally scheduled for May but it came out in July.

**Craig:** It looks like it was originally scheduled for July and came out in May. That’s weird.

**John:** Oh is that right?

**Craig:** Yeah, it looks like they made it go faster. By the way I’ve got to tip my hat to the studios. The plan is working. This is terrifying.

**John:** Yeah. You’re going to notice that the Marvel films tend to be running much more on schedule than the other studios. Not a shock there.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Sony had Venom: Carnage, a Spider-Man spinoff. So it wasn’t called Carnage. The new movie is called Carnage.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But Venom came out and it they didn’t have a date for it but they said 2017. It actually came out in 2018. But it did happen.

**Craig:** Close.

**John:** But they were also supposed to have a female Spider-Man spinoff.

**Craig:** That did not happen.

**John:** No. There’s an untitled DC film set for November 17. That was Justice League. And then came out when it was supposed to. There were two untitled Marvel films on the release schedule for 2017. Those became Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok, although Black Panther actually got pushed to 2018. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 came out. Spider-Man: Homecoming out. And the untitled DC film became Wonder Woman which was a big hit.

**Craig:** So basically they’re getting everything right. I guess the question is what did they get wrong and there hasn’t been so much. There’s Sinister Six. And that’s kind of it. Oh, and then there was a female Spider-Man spinoff that didn’t happen. And then they kind of got everything else sort of right. Well, OK, once we start getting into 2018, and this is not surprising, it gets a little cloudier, right? Because they wanted a Flash movie. That didn’t seem to happen.

**John:** No. Captain Marvel came out later than was expected.

**Craig:** But you know I give them credit for that.

**John:** Yeah. Nothing bad about that. Moving into 2019 there’s an untitled DC film. That was probably Shazam. That came out in 2019.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We got some Avengers: End Game. There’s an untitled DC film which you could say was the Suicide Squad sequel. That came out this past year. There wasn’t really another movie in between there that could have fit that bill. We got some Birds of Prey. We got some Wonder Woman 1984. Fox had slated for 2020 a Fantastic Four 2.

**Craig:** That didn’t sound like it happened.

**John:** No. The thing is you don’t get the 2s if the first one doesn’t work. That’s the problem.

**Craig:** Impressive though. Overall you know what studios? I’m sorry for doubting you. I’m sorry for doubting your commitment to making 4,000 superhero movies.

**John:** Yeah. They said they were going to do it and you know what they did it. Some things didn’t come out on time. Some things were big hits. Some things were not big hits. But they can do it. So I guess it’s the planners in those departments, the big whiteboards, it’s nice when it actually works out for them.

**Craig:** If I say “I’m starting to doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion” do you know what I’m quoting?

**John:** I do. That is from Donnie Darko?

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion. Richard Kelly.

**John:** Yup. A frequent Scriptnotes guest.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Great. Last week, or two weeks ago actually. Last time Craig was on the show we talked about conspiracy theories. And we answered a listener question about whether the writing conspiracy theories in movies and TV shows in 2021 is moral and ethical given sort of the craziness that’s out there. And we had people reach out on Twitter saying, yeah, that’s a great conversation. I think that you brought some really good points. Then we had people email in to say, no, those were not good points and you’re wrong.

**Craig:** Let’s see how they did.

**John:** So Megana you got a lot to read this week.

**Craig:** Let’s play the Make Craig Angry game.

**John:** Yeah. So I wanted to include some of them because not only did they raise counterpoints, but in many cases they are great examples of logical fallacies.

**Craig:** I had a feeling.

**John:** And so Megana if you could start us off. I know you got a lot of reading this week, so pace yourself. But why don’t you start with Matt in LA.

**Megana:** Matt in LA writes, “I think you’re giving Hollywood far too much credit. Conspiracy theories have existed for thousands of years throughout the world. The most obvious example historically is probably the centuries of villainizing Jewish people for pretty much anything. I’m not saying to write conspiracy movies or not write them. I’m not saying Hollywood hasn’t played some part. I’m just saying conspiracy theories have always been around and this isn’t the first time in history they’ve gotten ugly.”

**Craig:** That’s the worst. Ugh. Count the mistakes.

**John:** But Craig there are worse examples of fallacies here. So, I would call this as sort of what-about-ism. It’s sort of like it’s kind of changing the topic or redefining. Because I think we’re not talking about the same things. There’s scapegoating which is what you’re sort of doing to Jewish people and atrocities. Or that there’s evil forces out there. But that’s not the same thing as the government is both incredibly competent at keeping secrets but also we know they’re incompetent. That there’s a giant governmental plan to suppress or do something dastardly that’s being kept from you. That’s the kind of conspiracy theory we’re talking about which is different than sort of this idea that Jewish people are the root of all problems.

**Craig:** Even if these were equivalent comments it still wouldn’t make any sense because just because something is true doesn’t mean it is the only thing that is true. The fact that conspiracy theories have existed for thousands of years has absolutely nothing to do with the pernicious practice of spreading or fomenting additional conspiracy theories.

OK, so COVID-19 is out there. Therefore one should not blame some new lab for spilling some I don’t know chemical into the air. One has nothing to do with the other. Yes, there have been conspiracy theories and also we shouldn’t make it worse. How do you possibly argue with that statement? Well, Matt in LA has figured it out. I disagree with you Matt completely. 100 billion percent.

**John:** So I think where the scapegoating and conspiracy theories overlap is that they can be pernicious lies and they’re sort of memes that spread by themselves. But I think a conspiracy theory is different in that it has this unprovable, untestable claim and that if you try to push back against it they’ll say, oh, that’s what they want you to believe. Basically there’s no way to sort of package it up and defeat it because it’s always going to say like, oh, that’s exactly what they would want you to believe.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, just because we’re saying that Hollywood makes it worse doesn’t mean we’re saying Hollywood invented it. We’re just saying that we have a responsibility to not promote conspiratorial thinking. If everybody stopped promoting conspiratorial thinking there would be fewer conspiracy theorists in the world. They would never be eliminated, but there would be fewer. This is unobjectionable.

**John:** I think we’re also talking about how in so many of our movies the protagonist’s role is that conspiracy person, the one who is standing up against a hidden system of injustice that I only believe the truth and only I can expose it. And I think we are valorizing that person at our detriment sometimes because people want to identify with that person. Oh, I want to be obviously the hero in my own story, so therefore I should not believe what’s out there.

**Craig:** I mean, Matt knows this.

**John:** I think Matt knows this, too.

**Craig:** I think Matt’s just griping. Let’s see. I’m sure the other ones are going to be better. [laughs]

**John:** Help us out with Nate if you could, Megana.

**Megana:** OK. So Nate says, “I’m firmly pro-science and pro-logic. Yet, I’m concerned this sort of thinking is a big step on the path toward banning books or even burning them. We should never stifle works on art based on what the lowest common denominator might take from them. Not only would we miss out on the fun of fictional movies like The Manchurian Candidate or Conspiracy Theory, but more tragically we could no longer dramatize important true stories, like All the President’s Men, The Insider, Erin Brockovich, Spotlight, or The Post.

“I realize you weren’t suggesting our government might make it illegal to write conspiracy-related films.”

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** “But even self-censorship can be a dangerous proposition. So let’s just keep telling compelling stories that inform and/or entertain and remind ourselves that stupid is as stupid does and there’s nothing we can do about that.”

**John:** So many things wrapped up in this one.

**Craig:** Oh, Nate.

**John:** So, Nate, you are both slippery-sloping and straw-manning which is a hard thing. But basically you built a strawman and then you put it on a slippery slope down to–

**Craig:** You know what he’s doing? He’s Slippery-Manning.

**John:** He is slippery-manning.

**Craig:** And you know who likes that?

**John:** Oh no!

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** No. No.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** 10 years.

**Craig:** Nah. Go on. Talk about slippery-manning. Sexy Craig loves slippery-manning.

**John:** All right. So and again at the end Nate is trying to pull it out like let’s all agree that this is a reasonable thing. And that’s its own kind of thing, like trying to find a middle ground. Middle-grounding there at the end.

It’s really frustrating. Again, the strawman here is that you are saying that we said something we did not say which is that we should categorically not make these kinds of movies. We’re saying that we should actually think about the kinds of movies we make and the things we depict onscreen, which is a thing we do. It’s a thing we’ve decided we’re going to do as a culture, as filmmakers, as TV makers.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’re going to decide what to portray and it’s changed over the decades. It just has. You look at shows from 20, 30 years ago, they were depicting the world differently. That’s progress.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? John, why are you self-censoring? I mean, it’s not illegal to make a movie where people are in blackface. So why are you self-censoring? It’s really dangerous. [laughs] This is so stupid, Nate. I don’t even know how to wrap my mind around it. Also, I don’t believe you believe this. You say you’re pro-logic. I challenge that. Because come on, man. Self-censorship is part and parcel with artistic creation. We are constantly making choices and then we’re constantly self-editing. Editing. Restraining. Refining. Holding back. Pushing forward. These are choices we make. What is your suggestion? That we just never consider the world around us when we tell stories?

That’s just ridiculous. And you are absolutely engaging in the most bizarre slippery-sloping. Do you really think that this is a “big step on the path toward banning or burning books?” Nate, Nate, come on, man. Cut it out. This is fun. Who is next? I’m enjoying this.

**Megana:** So Elijah says, “Yes, some people doing their own research will be led to the wrong conclusions, but others like myself know how to do research properly and wouldn’t have trusted the COVID-19 if I wasn’t able to verify from multiple doctors and healthcare professionals that it is safe.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** All right. So I wanted to save that last little argument because Elijah had written other stuff, too, which is similar to other people. But that last part is a fallacy of illusory superiority. It’s that belief that when people overestimate their own qualities and abilities saying everyone who thinks that they’re better than average. And basically well I’m a person who can do my own research and therefore I can do this. Well, then you’re sort of be default saying other people aren’t smart enough to do their own research. It’s a weird trap to fall into.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also you don’t have to do research. If you are concerned about what multiple doctors and healthcare professionals think just go to the AMA website, or the CDC. There’s really no need to do research. The inability of Americans to do research is astonishing to me. They like to say the word research, but what they really mean is Googling crap from nonsense sites and talking to each other on Facebook. That’s not research at all.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Or misreading studies, which is almost a national pastime at this point.

**John:** It definitely is. I think if you’re going to look at what doctors recommend you might look at what doctors themselves are doing for themselves. And if you see 98% of doctors are vaccinating themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That might be a sign that that’s a thing you want to do. I think inevitably everything leads to COVID these days, but I wanted to include that here just because of conspiracy theories and people writing in about this.

**Craig:** I suspect, I could be wildly wrong, but I suspect that the reason that Matt, Nate, and Elijah have written these comments is because they engage in conspiratorial thinking and they feel called out. And so they are defending. They feel defensive. This feels like defensive stuff. It doesn’t feel like a calm, rational, observation, or concern whatsoever. I think that they engage in conspiratorial thinking and they don’t like the fact that we don’t like it. And you failed to change our minds.

**John:** Yeah. I think I’m trying to be aware of situations where I am thinking conspiratorially, which is not about national government stuff, but there are definitely situations in which I can find myself guilty of conspiratorial thinking and I will try to take a step back from that. But I don’t believe that the overall system of the universe is rigged against me that I have to research everything to death to figure it out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Dave from New Hampshire I think actually had an email here that could point us to a way out.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** So Megana if you could share Dave’s email here.

**Megana:** “If movies and television can exacerbate this conspiracy theory problem, could they also help fight it? I’m working on my first screenplay now. It’s a dark comedy set during the satanic panic of the 1980s and one of the major themes is about how dangerous and harmful conspiracy theories can be. Do you have any thoughts on how my or any other movie could be effective in slowing the spread of conspiracy theories?”

**John:** Yeah, Dave. So first off I think that’s a great thing to look at, because I remember that time. And D&D was of course wildly implicated in it and it was nuts. So here’s my suggestion is rather than have the outside character sort of pointing to this conspiracy theory is crazy and wrong, if you can find a person who believes the conspiracy theory and is able to get their way out of thinking that the conspiracy theory is true. That’s actually genuinely helpful. Because we have very few examples of people finding their way out of these labyrinthian traps of conspiratorial thinking. And if you can show that and show that progress that is terrific.

**Craig:** I agree. What you’re doing is certainly one way of doing it as well which is to look at the aftermath because one of the hallmarks of conspiratorial thinkers is that they leap frog from one conspiracy to another. Their stock and trade is mobile goal posts.

So, if one of their hard thought and hard one beliefs is just absolutely finally proven to be utter nonsense they move onto a new one. It’s what they do. And it’s important to follow up and to show everybody that they thought this, they promoted it, and they were wrong, and here’s the proof. That’s important. That matters.

The satanic panic of the 1980s was real, it was insane. By the way, the nonsense about whatever it was, the missing children. Remember how obsessed everyone was with missing children when we were kids?

**John:** Definitely. Child abductions. Stranger dangers.

**Craig:** Child abductions. Stranger danger. The threat to children was vastly overrated. What was underrated was how many kids were being hurt inside their own homes. So, Megana, you’re going to find this hard to believe but when John and I were children, first of all they would make us drink milk in school. So let’s just start with how stupid that is. And John I don’t know if your school district did this, but in our school district in New York City they put pictures of kids on milk. Like on the side of the milk carton. Missing. I mean?

**John:** Yeah. I knew what that was.

**Craig:** It was crazy.

**John:** For whatever reason our Boulder dairies did not care about missing children.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** And so it would never print those photographs. They were involved obviously in the child abductions.

**Craig:** I don’t know why they thought milk – like why was milk the thing? People who like milk tend to also be great detectives? I don’t know. Anyway, the point being it needed to be debunked. And we must constantly debunk because it is the only thing I think that will stop people who are salvageable from continuing on that path. So I think you’re doing it. And I think John’s suggestion is terrific. Documentaries are a great idea.

And if you are doing a story where there is a conspiracy make sure to underscore how mundane it is, because most conspiracies are brutally mundane. They are not conspiracies of malicious people seeking to puppet master the world. They’re usually conspiracy theories of mediocrities covering up their own mess.

**John:** Yup. And a couple people, we trimmed these out of the emails, but they were saying like, oh, but Craig is being hypocritical because in Chernobyl he was talking about government cover up. But that is covering up a mistake. That is not from the start saying we’re going to do this thing and then we’re going to hide it.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** No, they were actually just trying to cover their ass.

**Craig:** There was no conspiracy at Chernobyl. There was a cover up but there was no conspiracy. They didn’t do this so that it would blow up. They just built a bad reactor because it was cheap. And then they kind of crossed their fingers and hoped that it would work. And then it blew up and then they tried to hide it. That’s not a conspiracy.

But that sad that people don’t understand the difference. In fact, I was pretty proud of how clearly we explained the mundanity, the kind of almost pathetic nature of the cause and aftermath of Chernobyl.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s move onto our next topic. So usually on the show we’re talking about the WGA West which is the organization that represents all the screenwriters and television writers west of the Mississippi, although you really could be nationwide. But most of when we talk about people running for office and the drama we’re really talking about the West, even though the East and West work together a lot.

But over the past month there’s new stuff coming out from the East that I think is worth talking about on the show. We’ve had East members on the podcast before. And many people involved are friends and colleagues. And so I really am sort of curious to talk through this because I think it’s an interesting issue that I think I can actually probably argue both sides pretty well about. And so far to everyone’s credit everyone is being really polite and civil and they’re really explaining themselves clearly and articulately. But no one is being finger-pointy and negative which is awesome and I love to see that.

So here’s what happening sort of overall. The WGA East represents film and TV writers like me and Craig, but they also represent folks who work for digital news outlets and things like Salon, or Slate, or Huff Post. And these digital places now account for almost 50% of the guild’s total membership. That can be a challenge because sometimes the things that the writers who are working for those organizations need are different than the ones who are working for the traditional studios, so folks who are writing for TV shows, movies, or for variety-comedy shows. And that’s the changing nature of the demographics there that is really the crux of this and it’s all coming to a head because there’s an election happening in the East and there’s a slate running for what’s called Inclusion and Experience which is basically how the guild has traditionally worked and a group called the Solidarity slate which is about continuing to organize these digital places.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well I will certainly give the Solidarity slate credit for a name that accurately represents what they stand for. The Inclusion and Experience ticket that’s kind of amusing because they really are quite overtly talking about exclusion, so that’s nifty.

So this is an interesting situation and we in the West contemplated many years ago when we were in the middle of our reality television organizing campaign. And there was a faction, a significant faction in the guild, that felt strongly that we should be organizing editors, reality television editors, into the WGA because the companies were essentially skirting around the idea of what a writer was by calling them editors. And they were editing, but they were also creating narrative.

And one of the arguments against this that was made by myself was that we would face an economic tremor. I wouldn’t call it an earthquake but there would be a tremor because – and this is where the law of unintended consequences rears up and gets you. For most people in these unions, I’m not talking about – some people are truly dedicated to certain aspects of what our unions do. Most members in our union and in the East I believe are primarily concerned about the preservation of residuals and the preservation of strong minimums and above all else a preservation of a strong and accessible healthcare plan.

The healthcare plan is entirely predicated on how much we earn. The companies put in a percentage of what we earn up to a certain number. We know that the amount of money you have to earn to qualify for healthcare is much lower than the amount of money that you have to earn to actually pay for your own healthcare. So, of course, the people who are earning more are subsidizing the people who earn less. And that’s a good part of a union. That’s how it should work.

However, that system only holds true if you have a certain kind of distribution of income. When you increase organization into an entire industry that across the board earns much less than the average income for the – well let’s call it traditional guild member – then you are absolutely going to negatively impact what your healthcare plan can do.

So, it’s an economic issue. I don’t think this is a moral issue per se. I think it’s just a straight up economic issue. The WGA East shouldn’t exist. Let me just go off into that. There’s a real easy way to solve this problem. We ought to have a national union with locals and our locals should serve the things that we do well. There should be locals that create their own contracts for news and for digital publishing and for television writing and for screenwriting. I would separate those two as well. And then you kind of work from there.

We should be organizing people. We should be bringing people into the union. But we are not designed – our current structure is not designed well for it. We have to revisit how we function as a union if this is what we want. Because if we think it’s as simple as just let them in, well, there’s going to be pushback and then there’s going to be as you can see – they’re not chicken little-ling here. It’s absolutely real. That economic tremor will grow and grow and grow.

**John:** So let’s talk about what unions do, because almost I’d say 95% of the discussion we’ve had on the show has been about, in terms of the WGA, has been about the contract with the studios, so the AMPTP, which is every three years we renegotiate and that is the basis of our minimums, our residuals, our healthcare plan, our family medical leave, all that stuff is an every three years negotiation with them. Or it’s been about the agency campaign which really just represents film and TV writers, traditional film and TV writers. The folks who are working under the auspices of the WGA who are not part of that contract would include news writers. In the WGA West we have some I think CBS people. There’s little bits and pockets. And the East often had broadcast news folks there, too, but now they have all of these digital houses.

Those are not working under the same contract. So the WGA is negotiating separate contracts with the individual employers here. Unions can absolutely work that way. That’s a great way for them to work. But it’s strange because most of the membership is working under one contract and then have these little pockets of things is different. And it becomes a question of focus. And when we see people who are working in IATSE or these giant unions that have all these disparate little pieces the needs of an editor in IATSE or god help them an animation in IATSE is not being as well served as they could be by a really dedicated, devoted union that was focusing on their specific needs.

**Craig:** Yeah. Now I think it would be fair for some people to question as many people have many, many times why do we need a WGA East and a WGA West? In particular for television and screenwriters why isn’t there some sort of folding in of those things? And there probably should be. Well, there definitely should be. It’s just sort of pointless. I don’t know if that would solve this particular problem.

A union is a good thing. And people working union jobs is a good thing. Not as you point out every union is good for every job simply because people work for the same corporation doesn’t mean that the same union should represent them. Maybe it used to function that way but given the way these corporations are structured now they are massive, they’re multinational. They have 400 divisions. They make sewing machines and they make movies.

So simple common employment isn’t the definition of common union membership. If the WGA East continues to organize digital writers as they are doing then, yes, it will become a digital writers union. Because it’s a very small union. There aren’t a lot of screenwriters and television writers who are in the WGA East. Much smaller union than the WGA West. And, yeah, absolutely. They will take over because it’s a democracy. That’s how democracy works.

It is a little squirmy to me to hear otherwise progressive individuals talking about keeping people from coming in because they don’t want changing demographics to cause an existential threat. That sure sounds like some nasty rhetoric to me. What you have to do is figure out how to restructure your organization to work for everybody fairly. I don’t think you can just shut the door.

**John:** I hear you there. And we’re going to include links in the show notes to various candidate statements that are talking through the various options and where they see the problems coming out there. So to try to explain what that argument would be is that because WGA East members can choose to join WGA West, film and TV writers could just choose to join the West, there’s a concern raised that a bunch of these writers might just say, “You know what? This is not the organization I signed up for. I’m just going to join the WGA West.” And East might just kind of collapse because most of the money is coming from film and TV writers.

That’s the existential threat to it.

**Craig:** It’s real. That’s real. If they don’t restructure that is correct. They would need to restructure in order to continue the path that they’re on.

**John:** And I think one thing that’s important to point out is that no one I’ve seen has ever suggested that the writers for these digital news places do not deserve a union. I think it’s the argument of sort of like what is a union that best would represent their needs and whether a different union would better serve them or spin them off into their own thing.

I’ll also include a link in the show notes to Adam Conover has a Twitter thread which I thought was a good explanation of the counterpoint to that which was that the kinds of places that are actually represented by the East or digital news places, they really are doing video. They’re doing stuff that kind of feels like TV but it’s not Netflix or it’s not Amazon. But it’s actually really kind of similar to that. And it’s the kind of stuff we keep talking about we need to make sure we are covering that because that’s going to be the next television.

**Craig:** Yeah, so I’m just reading it now. I think actually this is a pretty good version of the argument that I disagree with which is that common employment equals common union applicability. I just think it doesn’t necessarily work the same way like that. There is a reality you have to deal with. You can absolutely be a purist and you can just say we have to organize everybody. But my issue is the word “we.” We have to change what “we” is. Everyone ought to be organized. Everyone ought to be unionized in the face of corporate employment. I think it’s really important.

But the WGA East as it is currently constituted is a really poor delivery system for that. I do believe that. It is a very small union. It is kind of a boutique union that has continued to exist despite a thousand reasons for it not existing. Because a small but powerful group of very well paid writers in television and screen want it to, because they have I mean traditionally felt that they were a bit of a militant stake against a somewhat complacent and more company-friendly West, which would be surprising to hear – I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear.

**John:** So different now. I would also say that traditionally late night shows were made in the east coast and the writers who were working for those late night shows had a very specific set of needs and circumstances which was important. Now more late night variety comedy stuff is happening on both coasts so it’s not so exclusive to one guild or the other.

**Craig:** And the coast is no longer relevant either.

**John:** Where are these writers living? Most people moved home with their parents during the pandemic.

**Craig:** We all live on Zoom now. So the system has to be figured out there. Yes, if it continues in this way then the WGA will transform into a guild for digital writers. I guess that’s what we’re calling them, digital writers. And then I think a number of screen and television writers will go to the West. And transferring your membership from East to West is as simple as sending a letter to the executive director of the WGA East saying I want to transfer. And then they have to honor it by their constitution.

**John:** So, the last point I do want to bring up because I think it’s worth always remembering is that once upon a time there were animation who could have joined the WGA West and we always regret that animation was not covered by the West when it could have been. And instead those writers are kind of screwed and they’re in an Animation Guild which is not a powerful union and that’s not just money that’s being lost but it’s protections that writers who are working in animation really writing the same scripts as we’re writing for live action are not getting the protections that they deserve.

And so I want to make sure that – I want us to always be mindful of the fact that the stuff that we’re writing right now saying oh it’s not really what we’re doing, well for all we know in ten years it could be really the same thing as what we’re doing. And so to make sure that we’re not overlooking a very important group of writers who we are going to wish were in the WGA West because somehow they’re going to be in another union which is sort of a competitive union which is not going to have the same clout or power.

It becomes – I’m just always mindful that we need to be thinking not just about what are our needs in 2021, but 2041.

**Craig:** Yeah. I always like to point out that while we absolutely have a better situation for WGA writers than what is offered to writers in the Animation Guild, which is part of IATSE, that the people who run the Animation Guild are doing their best.

**John:** 100%. I don’t want to slag on them.

**Craig:** They got kind of a raw deal, too. But you’re right. Where I think it’s a little bit different is that animation writing, writing animated television or writing animated films is still what it is. We were snobby about it a long time ago and we shouldn’t have been. Writing for Gawker is not the same thing as what you or I do. It’s just a different business. It’s a different business. It’s a different occupation. It’s a different vocation. And it’s not going to be the same thing.

**John:** But writing for The Onion or writing for The Onion’s video things, you look at The Onion’s video production and that could 100% be the same kind of material that would be on a late night variety show.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so what’s happened is there hasn’t really been a discrimination. It’s just been sort of – we’ve been defining it as do you write stuff? Then come on into the union. If the Writers Guild, and I mean to say West and East, could just finally combine and then create divisions within, subdivisions, that addressed the specific contract needs and economic realities of the writers in those divisions then this could absolutely work. If we don’t it can’t. It just can’t. Because 40 or 50 years from now people writing for Gawker will still not be doing the things that you or I do. It’s just a different thing. It’s not worse or better, but it is different.

We have that problem with news. And like you said in the West we don’t have many news members. And they are terribly underrepresented by us. They shouldn’t be part of our union. I think they get a terrible raw deal being a part of our union because we just ignore, because there’s very few of them. And in the East they’ve always had a lot more and there’s been a lot of conflict out there between news writers and television and screenwriters. So, we have to think much, much bigger.

Will the WGA West and the WGA East consider merging and restructuring and thinking bigger to do a better job of organizing and unionizing as many writers as it can? My prediction is no. So I’m very curious to see what happens in the East. This is an interesting watershed moment.

**John:** Agreed. All right. Let’s get onto our other listener questions. We have a bunch and we’ll see how many we can get through. Megana, do you want to start us off with Ghosted?

**Megana:** Great. So Ghosted writes, “Earlier this year two WGA writers approached me about writing a script from a treatment they wished to produce. They were offering $10,000 on behalf of a third producer. After some video calls I wrote a treatment and received the contract and commencement fee of $2,500. The contract makes clear that the project is a guaranteed first draft, rewrite, and polish. Although it doesn’t mention my treatment.

“I delivered a very good first draft on time and I received extensive notes, but no payment. After I asked what was going on the producer said that this draft didn’t count as a first draft and that I would be required to do additional rewrites until they were ready to call it a first draft. They promised it would only be one rewrite, but their notes indicated huge changes to structure, tone, et cetera, much of which conflicted with what we had discussed before I began writing. It would end up being a page one rewrite and they hinted this could become as many as eight rewrites.

“At first I considered doing the unpaid rewrite as a courtesy, because I’m an idiot and was dazzled by the opportunity, but the communication with the writer-producers became increasingly hostile and toxic to the point where I just wanted to leave the project. I emailed the main producer with whom I have the contract saying I would do the additional rewrites if I could just deal directly with him. After not hearing back I let them know I expected payment for the first draft and won’t be doing any free rewrites. It’s been about three months and I still haven’t heard back.

“Obviously based on the fee I’m not in the WGA and to make writers worse I’m not in the US. The contract says that disputes must be handled via arbitration but the fee to initiate arbitration would eat almost all of what I’m owed. I don’t really have that money to gamble so what should I do next?”

**Craig:** Oh dear god.

**John:** Oh dear god. Craig, so I’ve actually emailed back and forth with Ghosted a few times, but I’m really curious what your first thoughts are here.

**Craig:** Well, this is deeply regrettable. WGA members simply should not be doing this. It doesn’t matter if you can do it legally. In this case Ghosted works overseas so they can work in a way that is not covered by the WGA, but it’s just immoral. You are in our guild. You’re part of our union. You’re supposed to be part of the promotion and protection of the status of professional screenwriters. You offered $10,000 for a script which is atrocious.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And you also I don’t know if the two writers asked for a new treatment or not, the contract and commencement fee $2,500. You know, that’s embarrassing. Like they should feel embarrassed for offering that kind of money to another person. Do it yourself or offer a real fee. Don’t exploit people. That’s just exploitation as far as I’m concerned. And it’s wrong. And I hope that they set it right. Maybe they will hear this and they can set it right.

At the very least pay the $10,000.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That is owed. Or I guess in this case the $7,500. And I don’t care if the script is the worst thing you ever read. You hired that person, you’re accountable. That’s the way it works.

**John:** Hiring somebody is a gamble. And you gambled on this writer. And this writer delivered on time. And you may not be happy with it, but that’s not their problem. This is the situation that you’re in and you’ve messed it up by not getting back to this person, by being rude and dismissive. Pay this writer. It didn’t work out and you need to move on. That’s frustrating.

**Craig:** We’re hearing one side of the story.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So in my mind I’m altering it. I’m imagining a version of the story where Ghosted is just nuts and the worst writer ever, which is not true I’m sure. But let’s just say that Ghosted was nuts and wrote a really bad script. It doesn’t matter. You made an agreement which you shouldn’t have made in the first place because it was too low. And by the way you get what you pay for. They offered this money. They’re not giving it. And when they got the script they did the thing that we have been fighting against other people doing for decades which is saying, “Oh, it’s not really a draft because I need you to write eight drafts, or four drafts, or even just two drafts for the price of one.” Not even the price of one draft. The price of one-seventh of a draft.

That’s outrageous. You can’t do that. And it’ll get around. And it’s not going to work for you, either. I just don’t understand what the theory was here.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, karma will come back to you because the way you’re mistreating this writer others will mistreat you. And it’s bad and shameful. So, specific advice for Ghosted. Ghosted asked should I register the script so I can at least prove that I wrote this in case it ever becomes a thing. Yeah. I mean, you have your email your back and forth to show that you wrote this thing. It exists in a chain of title. If you really feel like registering it for copyright in your country or the US, you can. If you feel like registering with the WGA, that doesn’t actually do anything other than prove that you wrote it at a certain time, which your email already does. I don’t think that matters.

I don’t think it’s really worth necessarily starting the arbitration. If there’s basically a no cost way to indicate that you are starting it, or just basically do the very first little checkmark of I’m doing this thing I suspect they will just pay you out to make you go away, and that’s not the worst thing.

I feel for Ghosted because Ghosted is afraid of naming these writers because he doesn’t want to blow up his career. But also these people don’t deserve – they don’t deserve whatever success they’ve had so far. They don’t deserve to be hiring other writers.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I mean, look if they can only afford to pay $10,000 for a script from a treatment then they are not in a position to blow your career up. They’re just not important enough. If they can’t afford to pay you real money they’re not important enough.

**John:** Yeah. And it seems like it’s not even their money, it’s the producer’s money. So really your argument is kind of even more about this producer. This producer needs to pay you the money.

**Craig:** Yeah. Whoever agreed to pay you the money needs to pay you the money. And they need to stop engaging in this kind of arrangement. I consider it to be unethical. Deeply unethical. And exploitative. And not becoming who we are as professional writers. And if they don’t feel like writing something themselves then they ought to stand up for the people that get hired. And I have been in situations where other writers have disappointed me. And that happens. That’s called life.

Just as you and I have disappointed other people. You pay them and you move on. You don’t do this. And I agree, John, practically speaking the situation here is such that I think the best Ghosted can hope for is perhaps that they settle out at $0.50 on the dollar or maybe they just pay Ghosted off to go away. But if there’s anything you’ve learned, Ghosted, it’s if you’re going to get paid $10,000 to write a script get paid as much as possible upfront. And if they refuse then they don’t even have $10,000 as far as I’m concerned. And now you’re dealing with knuckleheads.

**John:** I agree. Megana, what do you have for us?

**Megana:** So Audrey asks, “I recently had a meeting with a production company over Zoom. It was an informal chat about a project they’re looking for writers on. I’d be really excited to work on it and wanted to demonstrate my enthusiasm for the project, but I struggled because one of the women in the meeting just looked so bored. It wasn’t even that she looked like she was reading something else or checking emails. She was listening to me, but no matter what I said or did she looked totally unamused. Do you guys have tips for dealing with meetings like this? And how do I focus on the engaged listeners and not the bored ones?”

**John:** Oh, yeah, I’ve been there.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** So here’s what I’ll say. There always was the bored person in the room during a pitch, but in real life you just don’t look at that person. And on Zoom you can’t help but sort of see that person because their face is right there and you kind of can notice more like, ugh, that person is really bored and that sucks. As long as it’s not the main decision maker it’s not such a big thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. And by the way be aware that you might be misreading. We think we’re better face readers than we are. Sometimes people look bored and it’s just that’s their face. And inside they’re thinking, OK, who are they also going to talk to about this and who should I get about. They also might have also had a really bad day and they’re doing their best not to cry. You never know what it is.

Sometimes they’re bored because they’re bored. My strong advice, Audrey, is don’t change nothing. You go in there to do a pitch, or a meeting, or a chat, do your pitch, do your meeting, do your chat. Don’t let their face make you change your course, because you just don’t know. Similarly don’t read too much into people that are incredibly engaged. Sometimes they’re just sociopaths.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. One of the things I think Craig is leaning towards here is really look for what the actual actions they’re taking. They might be saying nice things in the room, but if they’re actually sort of following up and really are engaged that is a sign that this went well and you should keep doing that thing. If the feedback you’re getting is like, oh, they didn’t think you were right, or there’s something that wasn’t right about that pitch, then you can actually iterate and see what it is that can work better. Because over the course of this pandemic I’ve had projects we’ve taken out and pitched to multiple buyers on Zoom and you do recognize like oh OK there are consistent patterns or there are ways that we can do this pitch better based on the feedback we’re getting.

So maybe that’ll be your situation. But in every one of those pitches there’s been somebody who has been kind of just a little bit checked out. That’s just Zoom. It’s fine.

**Craig:** It’s just Zoom.

**John:** Zoom. Megana, another question?

**Megana:** Jack writes, “I’m 20 years old and have been writing scripts since I was 14. I’ve also been reading scripts as I’ve heard you guys say that this is the best way to actually write a script. I was curious what books you guys were reading at my age. In an attempt to educate myself over the past two years I’ve torn through Syd Field, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Adventures in the Screen Trade, Screenwriting is Rewriting. And now I’m writing Truffaut’s book on Hitchcock.

“Also Save the Cat has been shoved down my throat so many times over the past two years that I think I’m going to cough up a hair ball. Is there anything else I should be reading?”

**John:** Well, Jack, it’s great that you’re reading scripts. So let’s emphasize that. And really reading screenplays is the best education you can get. These other books sound great and useful to some degree. We all had to read Syd Field and maybe it’s good to read one other screenwriter book so you had a sense of like what people were talking about, but don’t read too many screenwriting books would be my advice.

I think production diaries and books about the making of a film are incredibly useful. The one that sort of inspired me was Steven Soderbergh’s book for Sex, Lies, and Videotape which is both the script and his production journal for going through it and how the movie changed as he was shooting it. It was just really helpful to think about this is what the intention was in the script and this is what the actual reality was shooting it and editing it. How you discover the movie as you’re making it. So there’s a ton of really good things. Like Do the Right Thing there’s a good production book for that, too.

Really learning about how those parts of the process work is super helpful even if you perceive yourself as “just a screenwriter,” because ultimately you are going to be responsible for making these movies and knowing how to make movies is important.

**Craig:** I agree with John. And I think that the books about the making of movies – I think the greatest amount of value there is probably how fascinating they are. They are engaging, they’re fascinating. And you do learn a lot of practical things about how movies are made. Will it help you write a screenplay? I don’t think so. The only thing that’s going to help you write a good script, Jack, is writing a good script. And before you write a good script you’re going to write a bad script. You write two more bad scripts. Then you write a mediocre script. You write four more mediocre scripts. Then you write a really good one, then you go back to bad, and this is how it goes.

But you don’t have to worry so much about the secret book that’s going to blow your mind. The one book that has probably meant more to me than any other is by Dennis Palumbo who we had on our show in Episode 99. I think it’s called Writing from the Inside Out.

**John:** Yeah. I have that book.

**Craig:** And it’s essays about the psychology of writing and that was helpful because it made me feel better. And these books aren’t going to make you a good writer, but that book will make you feel better. And writing stinks, so anything that makes me feel good I recommend that.

**John:** Always remember that writing is writing. And while screenwriting is its own unique weird art form, books that are about the writing process can be helpful for some writers. I really like Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. On Writing everyone loves from Steven King. There’s a new book out, Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders. And sometimes writers are really good about talking about their own process and the journey, the struggle, the getting through it.

And so remember that you are writer and that writing is hard, but other people have done this before you. I would say also look for kind of what are your weak spots. And if you don’t have great insight into character conflict and drama, well read books about how in real life people resolve conflict or how to deal with conflict. Look for books that fill in the parts of your education that you’re sort of missing out on because those will be helpful for you as you’re writing stuff.

So if you’re a person who is really good at writing action but you have a hard time with two characters in a scene having an argument, maybe really look at books on psychology or books about marriage dynamics and other things like that that can really dig into what the communication strategies are between two people. Because that may be a thing that helps you more than any book on three act structure.

**Craig:** Here. Here.

**John:** Cool. I think it is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is the good news that the majority of Americans now believe in evolution.

**Craig:** How is this good news that it took this long? This is tragic.

**John:** I’ll take the good news where I can get it.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** This is coming out of the University of Michigan. So beginning in 1985 every two years they did a survey. They took these national samples of US adults and asked them to agree or disagree with this statement. “Human beings as we know them today developed from earlier species of animals.” And so from 2010 to 2019 that increased from 40% of people agreeing with that to 54%. So it got us over the 50% line.

**Craig:** That’s good.

**John:** That’s some progress. I’ll take that.

**Craig:** It is progress. I guess that’s part of what we’re going to be talking about in our bonus segment that even when things seem bleak or not ideal over time it seems like the trends generally are towards things being better, slowly but surely, in some areas slower than others. And maybe in some areas stagnant. But this is certainly a good sign. I see that in the study it says even among religious fundamentalists the percentage from 1988 to 2019 went from 8% to 32%. That’s a massive shift actually.

**John:** That is a massive shift. And I think that apparently also reflects that the number of people with college degrees has really skyrocketed. And so you sort of – it’s hard to get through a college education without having some understanding of some science or how things kind of work in the natural world. And so that’s probably one of the big factors. And so even among religious fundamentalists college education has increased and that’s probably a factor there, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a cultural thing there, too. It’s harder to maintain a belief in something that is absurd when a lot of people around you very calmly disagree. There aren’t a lot of people out there that are yelling about evolution in your face. They just know it’s true because there’s this insane tidal wave of evidence. And they simply leave it there. And they talk about it. And when you say, “No, god made the earth,” in whatever they think it is, 5,000 years ago or something, or 10,000 years ago. “And he made Adam out of some dirt and he made Eve out of a rib.” They look at you and say, no, that’s incorrect. And then they move away and go eat lunch with someone else. And you are forced to confront the absurdity of that point of view.

I’ve always believed in evolution but I came from a very blue collar/middle class kind of upbringing and I thought and believed a lot of stupid crap. And it changed while I was in college because I was exposed to people who knew better. And that’s part of that process.

**John:** Yeah. I may have actually had this be a previous One Cool Thing, but this is occurring to me now. While I was on my east coast trip this summer we stopped by Dinosaur State Park in Connecticut. I don’t know if you’ve ever been Dinosaur State Park.

**Craig:** I have not.

**John:** So what’s cool about it is basically they were doing some big construction project and they came across this slab of stone that had all these dinosaur footprints in it of these dinosaur tracks. And so they had to stop everything and they put a big dome over it and that’s now Dinosaur State Park. And it occurs to me I just feel like every person who doesn’t believe in evolution should just go there because you see, oh, there are these dinosaur footprints there.

So how did these get here? These are from billions of years ago, so please explain why god would have buried these footprints under this thing?

**Craig:** Well that’s what they say. I mean, someone once said to me that those bones were put there to test our faith. Well, at that point I’m going to go eat lunch with someone else.

**John:** That’s probably true.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So if you’re driving across Connecticut and you see the signs for Dinosaur State Park I think it’s worth an hour to sort of go through it because weirdly they don’t have the dinosaurs, they just have the footprints. But you can see that like, oh, they were just stomping around in the mud here. And you can see how massive they were. Nice.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** What’s your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I’m keeping this streak going of games on iOS. I don’t know what it is. There was a real drought for a while of the kinds of games I like playing and then suddenly a bunch just showed up in a cluster. And this week my One Cool Thing is a game called What Remains of Edith Finch. This is not a new game. This is a game that came out in 2017. I think it was released on – oh yeah, so it was on Steam maybe or something. But you also could have gotten it on your PS4, your Xbox. But it is now available on your iPad or your iPhone maybe.

It is directed and written by a gentleman named Ian Dallas which sounds like a – that sounds like a fake tough guy name, doesn’t it? Well, Ian Dallas has made a beautiful game. This was published by Annapurna which in its short life was known correctly so for quality. And this game is quality. It’s a beautiful game where you are moving through a house that was occupied by a number of your ancestors. Your uncles and aunts and grandparents. All of whom died untimely deaths. Every single one of them. And as you move through the house you discover little shrines to them and you then go into their memories and the game play is very varied. Sometimes it’s incredibly simple and beautiful. Sometimes there’s actually a little bit of a challenge. But really is just an experience. And it’s lovely. Just gorgeous. It’s beautiful. The music is lovely. And it’s really creative. Each person’s world that you go into is wildly different than the one before, not only in terms of narrative but in terms of game design and tone and style.

So, I strongly recommend it. What Remains of Edith Finch. And that is available on iOS.

**John:** Excellent. And I think it’s important that you have a videogame recommendation for your One Cool Thing because in ten years I feel like by far the majority of your One Cool Things have been games. Consistency over the ten years is really nice.

**Craig:** It’s really all I care about is games.

**John:** And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Megana, thank you for all your reading this week. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Christiaan Mentz. 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 like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is around there occasionally, but not too often.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and 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. You can find them on Cotton Bureau and celebrate our 10-year anniversary today with our special 10th Anniversary t-shirt.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on how things have gotten better over the last 20 years. Craig, thank you for ten years.

**Craig:** Thank you for ten and here’s to another 40.

**John:** Yay.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. So this bonus segment is inspired by this post by Gwern Branwen which is just an amazing name.

**Craig:** Welsh I presume.

**John:** I would assume. And they have this really long blog post that’s just talking about how life has changed since the 1990s. And really goes into great details and made me remember so many things that I had forgotten about what daily life was like in the 1990s which is not that far away, but also feels more distant when you actually look at just how you had to get stuff done, especially work stuff done.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I feel it all the time when I sometimes talk about these things with Bo because she is almost 25 years younger than I am. So when I talk about the way things used to be in the way that old people do sometimes she looks like, “Oh really? That sounds terrible.” And she’s right. A lot of those things were terrible. And a lot of things have gotten much better.

**John:** Well, so computers are a really easy one we can probably knock out quickly because they’re just so much cheaper than they used to be. I remember getting my – I stated on an Atari computer, but my first real computer that was my computer that I really loved and identified with was my Macintosh 20. I got the Macintosh with the–

**Craig:** The SE20.

**John:** SE20. So it had a hard drive built in. But that was $3,900.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which was – that’s $7,000 now. It’s a huge amount of money for an incredibly underpowered computer with floppy drives. It was the best thing I could possibly get at the time and also just a joke by any modern standard.

**Craig:** Same. I believe my first computer was a Franklin Ace 1000 which was a clone of the Apple 2 or Apple 2E. I think it cost about $1,500 in 1982. I don’t know what that is today, but you’re right it’s probably like $7,000. And this was a computer that had 64k of memory total I think.

**John:** Yeah. But even this blog post is pointing out that not just the memory and speed of it all, but just mice. Do you remember having to clean out your mice because they all got gunk in them?

**Craig:** Disgusting. First of all, your wrists would. So we created a pandemic of wrist trouble. And then the mouse would get disgusting, or the track ball would get disgusting because we’re constantly shedding skin. And we are gross.

**John:** Yeah. And so people don’t understand mice used to have a ball in them that was actually rolling around on the mouse pad or on the table. And it would just pick up everything. And eventually it would stop working properly and you’d have to get in there with a Q-tip or your fingernail to get all the gross stuff out. I don’t miss that. Don’t miss that one bit.

**Craig:** Not at all.

**John:** We had no GPS. We had Thomas Guides to find our ways around places. At a certain point we had cellphones but they couldn’t do any of the things that our current cellphones did. We didn’t have cameras that could do this kind of stuff.

**Craig:** No. We didn’t have any of that stuff. How about real simple things? Let’s just already give everybody computers. Let’s give everybody phones. If you get an email on your phone and you delete it’s still there on your computer when you get home. How about just simple stuff like that?

**John:** Closer to home. Movie theaters are much better than they used to be. So we all miss some of the giant old screens. We loved some of those things. But seats are more comfortable now. You can reserve individual seats. You don’t have to line up an hour ahead of a screening of a movie to get a good seat. You don’t have to save seats anymore. This is progress. This is a good thing.

**Craig:** Not saving seats, and then not getting into arguments about the saving of the seats.

**John:** Oh god. It was just the worst. Laying your jacket across multiple seats to try to protect them while your friend is at the bathroom.

**Craig:** Terrible.

**John:** Craig, people used to smoke. Do you remember when people used to smoke?

**Craig:** I was one of them. It was amazing.

**John:** From what year to what year did you smoke?

**Craig:** I started smoking I want to say in 1990 and I went to like 1996.

**John:** Yeah. So college age and post-college.

**Craig:** Yeah, early 20s.

**John:** I never smoked. But I guess some of the advantages of smoking is you have an excuse to sort of step outside of the work to smoke. It gives you that little jolt of – the nicotine. What does nicotine actually do chemically for you?

**Craig:** Interesting. It can do two different things. They’ve done these fascinating studies. If you have a kind of rapid and shallow intake of nicotine vapor, whether it’s from a cigarette or vape, it will amp you up. It’s a stimulant. When you do slower, deeper draws it will actually calm you down. So what’s fascinating about nicotine is the system that it runs through, this nicotinergic system in your brain actually has a complicated pathway. That’s why it’s one of the best drugs there is. Just unfortunately the delivery system is really bad.

But, yeah, I love nicotine. That’s why I can’t have it. Because my brain loves nicotine.

**John:** But smoking was not only unhealthy for the individual but also just kind of sucked for society. And things smell like smoke all the time. The used car that I owned and that I drove out here to Los Angeles a smoker had it before this. And so whenever it would be parked in the sunlight a film would form on the inside of the windows from the cigarette smoke coming out of the seats. Smoking is just gross. I’m glad there’s much less smoking.

**Craig:** Megana, have you had the experience of being in a restaurant with a smoking section?

**Megana:** No. But I remember being little and having hotel rooms and you had to specify smoking or not smoking.

**Craig:** The restaurant smoking section was one of the great anti-choice of our childhood. Because they were honestly were like if you go over there inside if you’re in those tables you can smoke. Well the smoke doesn’t know that.

**John:** It doesn’t know there’s nowhere to stay.

**Craig:** In fact we know just from simple physics and diffusion that the smoke will fill the room equally over time. But in a very serious way wait staff were being poisoned by smoke.

**John:** Small things I would have not thought of but it’s actually very true. Wheeled luggage has gotten so much better. Because I remember old suitcases with wheels on it were just terrible and the wheels would always shatter and break. And then they just figured out how to make wheels good. They figured out how to make skateboard wheels and rollerblade wheels and they decided what if we actually put quality wheels on luggage and now luggage is just a delight by comparison to where it was in the ‘90s.

**Craig:** How about the fact that there was luggage without wheels? Because all the luggage didn’t have wheels. And the people that had the wheeled luggage were the flight attendants and the pilots. And I guess at some point someone was like, wait, why don’t I have that? Why am I carrying this? This sucks. Yeah. Were we stupid? Were the luggage companies stupid? I don’t know.

Oh, I got a good one for you. How about this one?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** Diapers.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Yes. Disposable diapers back in the day were awful. Because the stuff inside of them was just not really well engineered. And then they came out with those little gel pellets. And now you can jam a bunch of diapers together in one thing and they soak up like four gallons of pee. They’re pretty incredible.

**Megana:** What do you mean by jam a bunch of diapers in one thing?

**Craig:** Ah. So when you would buy diapers, back in the old days, you would go and you would get a package of ten diapers. It was an enormous package because the diapers were really thick. There was no absorbent stuff. It was more like just here’s a–

**John:** Just padding.

**Craig:** Here’s a baggy with a sponge in it. But the baby would pee once and it’s coming out the sides. It just was useless. And now if you have a baby and you go to the store you can get a thing of 20 diapers and they’re so thin because of those little gel pellets. It’s genius.

**John:** Yeah. So until you are around modern babies, like the diapers do start really thin and then you do see the diaper sort of swell up as pee goes in there.

**Craig:** It’s amazing.

**John:** But the other thing is it sucks the water away from the skin and so they get less diaper rash and it’s more comfortable for them and it’s good.

**Craig:** When you take a diaper off a baby now it weighs like eight pounds. It’s incredible. And that’s just from pee. I’m not talking about poop. Just a pee diaper is heavy like a bowling ball. It’s amazing.

**John:** So, a controversial opinion here which people will write in about. I find the smell of a pee diaper is not bad to me. It’s actually sort of comforting to me.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I don’t love it, but it makes me feel happy that there’s a baby around. A poop diaper is just disgusting. Nobody needs poop.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t say comforting. But, yeah, I’m happy a baby is around. And changing a pee diaper is like a joke. No big deal at all.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** See, you didn’t have a boy. The second you take that diaper off you’ve got to be ready with a cloth to drop on top of his junk or else he’s peeing right on you. Because as soon as the air hits that thing, boom, pee.

**John:** We lucked into a baby who just did not ever want to poop in her diaper, and so we sat her on the potty before she was a year old and she was just pooping in her potty.

**Craig:** What? That’s crazy.

**John:** It’s crazy but it works out. Not related to babies, another thing which is so much better do you remember car stereos and car stereos being stolen out of cars? God that just sucked.

**Craig:** Megana, let me explain something to you. When John and I were little in the car there was an FM/AM radio. You might remember those. But they weren’t digital. They were analog. So that meant there was a dial. And you would move the dial and this little red stick would just slide from left to right and land sort of on the station. And you had to really get it right. But once you found it there were these little push buttons and you could press one of them to make it your preset. So you would hit that button and the little stick would go ka-tunk. Ka-tunk. Ka-tunk. Ka-tunk. And you went through all of that so you could have your five stations stores, each one of which was mostly advertising and you couldn’t hit pause. Amazing.

**John:** But not only did you get to enjoy the car radio, but if you had a stereo that actually had a tape player or something someone might break into your car to still that thing and rip it out of the dashboard because they could sell it, because those things were sold separately from the car. They were not inherently a part of the car. They were often a thing that was added to the car. And so one of the choices you might have is like, oh, take the radio out of the car when you park it someplace. So people would actually take their radio out.

Or, the plate, the face plate of it would pop off so that no one would steal the radio, so you’d just take the face plate of your car stereo. I’m just delighted that’s not a thing anymore.

**Craig:** Seriously.

**John:** Or people would have GPS mounted to their windshield and you’d have to worry about someone stealing that. Nope. It’s just part of your car. It’s part of your phone. We’re in a better time now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So we will revisit this segment in 20 years on the show and see what things we can’t believe we had to suffer through way back in 2021.

**Craig:** You know what’s going to be fun? If we keep doing this Megana is going to get old. [laughs]

**John:** Megana, we’ll bring you back. So as you’re running some – you have five shows on the air and a dynasty–

**Craig:** Still bringing you back.

**Megana:** Or I might still be here.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m actually OK with that. I really like you.

**Megana:** Me too.

**Craig:** I’m happy you want to stay with us.

**John:** Thanks both of you.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**Megana:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Episode 167, The Tentpoles of 2019](https://johnaugust.com/2014/the-tentpoles-of-2019) and [transcript](https://johnaugust.com/2014/scriptnotes-ep-167-the-tentpoles-of-2019-transcript)
* [The Original Superhero Slate from 2013 from Newsarama](https://web.archive.org/web/20140809000438/http://www.newsarama.com/21815-the-new-full-comic-book-superhero-movie-schedule.html)
* [Episode 512: There is No Conspiracy](https://johnaugust.com/2021/there-is-no-conspiracy)
* [WGA East Election](https://deadline.com/2021/06/former-wga-east-president-michael-winship-running-unopposed-will-succeed-beau-willimon-as-guilds-next-president-1234779475/)
* [WGA East Considers Spinning Off Digital News Members Into New Union Amid “Existential Threat”](https://deadline.com/2021/08/writers-guild-east-digital-news-members-spinoff-union-idea-existential-crisis-1234818316/) by David Robb
* [Adam Conover WGA East Twitter Thread](https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1430682946898317314?s=20)
* [University of Michigan Study: Evolution now accepted by majority of Americans](https://news.umich.edu/study-evolution-now-accepted-by-majority-of-americans/)
* [What Remains of Edith Finch Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Remains_of_Edith_Finch)
* [Improvements since the 1990s](https://www.gwern.net/Improvements) by Gwern Branwen
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Christiaan Mentz ([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).

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You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/514standard.mp3).