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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/scriptnotes-live-in-la-2).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hi.

**Craig Mazin:** Thank you. Thank you. That was so jaunty. Love it.

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

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

**John:** This is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about what?

**Audience:** Screenwriting.

**John:** And?

**Audience:** Things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Honestly, for a second there, I thought maybe none of them listened to the show.

**John:** Oh my god, that would be so amazing if no one knew what that was.

**Craig:** Literally no one.

**John:** Not a one. Jerome on the piano, thank you [crosstalk 00:00:52]!

**Craig:** Thank you, Jerome. Thank you.

**John:** What a lot of people may not know is that Jerome is with us every week on Scriptnotes. Matthew just doesn’t cut him in to the actual show. We have to have backing piano. Jerome, it’s so great to have you here with us tonight live to provide [crosstalk 00:01:08].

**Craig:** Finally mentioning your name after 590 episodes.

**John:** Matthew and Megana get mentioned all the time. I believe Megan McDonald’s also here in the audience, one of our previous-

**Craig:** Megan right there!

**John:** There she is!

**Craig:** Hey!

**John:** I didn’t see, is Stuart Friedel here?

**Stuart’s Dad, Lee Friedel:** Stuart’s sick.

**John:** Stuart’s sick, oh, no!

**Craig:** Seriously sick?

**Unknown:** [inaudible 00:01:26].

**Craig:** Oh, fuck him.

**John:** We’ll be fine. Craig.

**Craig:** Yes?

**John:** It’s our first live show in three years?

**Craig:** Three years, yes. Something happened along the way, and we weren’t able to do it. Lovely to have everyone back. I feel like it’s like riding a bike. We couldn’t have possibly gotten worse at it.

**John:** We possibly could have gotten worse at it.

**Craig:** We might’ve.

**John:** I remember early in the pandemic we did our live show with Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It was exciting, but also, it was on YouTube.

**Craig:** This is nice.

**John:** Now we have one and a half glasses of wine in us, and we’re better prepared for a live show.

**Craig:** Might’ve gone up to one and three quarters.

**John:** Who do we have on our live show this week?

**Craig:** We do have an amazing show. For starters, we have the amazing Joel Kim Booster.

**John:** So excited, Joel Kim Booster. We have Megan Ganz?

**Craig:** We do. We have world-famous Ike Barinholtz.

**John:** We love Ike Barinholtz. It would not be a return to Scriptnotes without our own Aline Brosh McKenna. Plus, we have things we can only do with a live audience, including a raffle, a dumb little game show I made up about streaming, and we have to have Megana on the show, because she’s become a crucial part of the show.

**Craig:** I believe I heard a yeah and a yass, and I agree with both of those. Megana will be helping us out tonight with spooky audience questions, because she loves the spooky season.

**John:** The spooky season.

**Craig:** Which I will reiterate is horseshit.

**John:** What is not horseshit, Craig… Segue man.

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** We actually have breaking news to share. I texted you this afternoon about this news that is so fundamental to Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Just so you guys know, you get breaking news about four hours after I get breaking news. This is great.

**John:** I do tell Craig first. If I told him onstage, it would be maybe more authentic to the experience. We’ve talked about doing a Scriptnotes book for a year or so. Some of you have signed up for updates about the Scriptnotes book and sample chapters. We put together a full proposal, which we will happily email to all of you, because we sent it out to publishers. We got offers. We’ve signed a deal today to do a Scriptnotes book.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s Crown Books. They’ve done small, little things like the Obama books.

**Craig:** That’s about right.

**John:** That’s about right.

**Craig:** We should be up there with them.

**John:** We should be up there with them. 2024 probably. It could be sooner. 2024 feels like a safe bet. If you want to see the sample chapters and the proposal that we put out, go to scriptnotes.net. We have a special little thing there where you can put in your email address, and we’ll send you what we’ve done so far. We’re so excited. I need to thank Dustin and Megana and Drew and Chris, who were doing the real yeoman’s work of putting together this proposal and getting this book ready to go. We’re so excited to share it with everyone.

**Craig:** It actually looks quite good, I have to say, as somebody that has nothing to do with it. It looks gorgeous. It will be an excellent stocking stuffer for those of you who care about screenwriting or things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**John:** It’s like 500 pages, so it’s a big stocking. Get bigger stockings for 2024 is what we’re saying. We’re so excited to have this in book form. We’re more excited at this moment to be back in live form, in person, to welcome a guest in front of you, who we can ask questions of. Our first guest is Joel Kim Booster.

**Craig:** Joel Kim Booster, let’s give him a hand.

**John:** Let’s welcome out Joel Kim Booster!

**Craig:** There he is. Thank you for coming.

**Joel Kim Booster:** Hey.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Joel:** Hi, guys.

**Craig:** Hi.

**John:** Joel Kim Booster.

**Craig:** Welcome to the couch.

**John:** You are an actor, a stand-up comic. You’re a writer. You’ve worked with television. We’ve seen you on Shrill, Search Party. Your Netflix comedy special, Psychosexual, is terrific.

**Joel:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you for that. Everyone in this audience probably saw you most recently in the Hulu film Fire Island, which you wrote and starred in. Congratulations, Joel Kim Booster.

**Joel:** Oh, man, thank you so much.

**John:** I want to ask you the first question here. We talk on this show a lot about screenwriting, TV writing. We don’t talk a lot about stand-up writing. I want to talk to you about putting together a stand-up set, because you did Psychosexual, you’re probably in development on a new thing. What is your process for figuring out how to do stand-up and how to put together a stand-up that makes sense as a special or at least as one performance? What’s your process for getting stand-up jokes put together?

**Joel:** It’s really sloppy and bad. It’s completely different from my process writing scripts or anything else really. It’s very much a conversation I have with the audience. I’m not a comic who goes to a coffee shop and sits and writes down every setup and punchline word for word and then tries it out that night. I usually show up to a show when I’m working on stuff with premises and bits of jokes that are half-formed. Then I mostly do my writing on stage with the audience, doing a lot of crowd work.

**Craig:** That’s scary.

**Joel:** It was, and it is, but it’s freeing at the same time, because I can show up to a show and know like, okay, tonight I want to talk about the Electoral College and all of the fucked up things about the Electoral College that I can think of. Then I just talk to the audience about it and get a lot of feedback. In the special you saw the repeated crowd work with the guy. That started as just an early stage of writing that special and putting that special together, was in those early stages where I would just find that person to test it. That rolled into how I am writing this special as well.

**John:** It feels so unsafe, because as writers, we’re used to… We are just like, “I’m in my own little bubble.”

**Joel:** I’m raw dogging it.

**John:** You’re just out there. How do you balance that, like, “I want this to be funny for the people who are there with me, but I also want to experiment and find new material.”

**Joel:** I should say I’m constantly writing new material, even slipping it into my longer sets and things like that. When I go to a night, like a bar show or a set here at Dynasty Typewriter, which is one of my favorite places to work out new material, plug, I’m not doing 10 minutes of crowd work. It’s usually four, five minutes of crowd work that I’m doing with the new stuff, forming it, figuring out what hits and what doesn’t hit, and then mixing that in with the stuff that I’ve been workshopping a month ago, so that there are fully formed jokes. Most people paid at least a little bit of money to see me, so I don’t want to completely bite it, but I have.

**Craig:** I’m just fascinated, because you have this raw dog version. You go out there. You wing it. You see what happens. Then on the other side of things, you’re writing a screenplay for a feature film, which is the epitome of not raw dogging it. Not only that, but you’re writing a feature film that is based in part, or at least inspired in part, by Pride and Prejudice. You have this preexisting narrative. You’re obviously doing it in your own way with your own characters and your own vibe. I’m curious, going from the freedom of the stand-up stage to both the rigidity of the form of screenwriting and production, and honestly the rigidity of working inside of a preexisting narrative, was it awesome? Did you ever feel trapped? Talk us through the difference there.

**Joel:** The thing is, as loosey goosey as I am with stand-up writing, I am a very structured screenwriter when I write scripts. I started as a playwright. Even back then, I was outlining my ass off before I would even touch paper, because structure is what turns me on when I’m writing. It is something that I need to tackle and figure out before I actually go into script. That being said, by the time we were shooting Fire Island, the script supervisor hated me, because there were full monologues that I would show up to set and say, “I hate this as written.” I would tell Andrew, the director, I’d be like, “I’m just going to wing it.”

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**Joel:** The monologue that I give to James Scully at the end of the film, trying to convince him to go after Bowen Yang, that was completely made up that day and was fairly different every single take. Everyone from the script supervisor to Andrew to the editor all hated me, but it worked out.

**Craig:** It did work out, because it’s fantastic. I wonder, is the process of writing it and then showing up on the day and saying, “I hate this but let me find something new,” can that only happen if you do write it first?

**Joel:** Oh yeah, absolutely. It only happens when you’re also the executive producer and the star of the movie.

**John:** That does help, doesn’t it?

**Joel:** I wouldn’t recommend that if you’re not wearing all three of those hats at the same time.

**Craig:** You can’t fire yourself.

**Joel:** No one can really say boo. The structure has to be there. The technique has to be there. I went to theater school. I’m very staunchly in the camp of like, theater school, acting school, any of it doesn’t really make you better or can’t give you talent. Everybody who got there who was good got slightly better. Everybody who got there who was bad never got good.

**Craig:** They got poorer.

**Joel:** The reason the people who were good got better is because you learn all of these really annoying techniques that you’re like, “Okay, I’m never going to do this in practice.” When you get it all down into your body and into your brain and it’s running on autopilot in the back of your head, that’s when you can lift off and fool around with form and fool around with structure and make up a monologue on the spot, because you have all of the pieces in place running in the background to make sure that you have a safety net.

**John:** You’re talking about structure. You’ve written features. You’ve written television shows. You’ve written stand-up. We know structure in movies. We know structure in TV shows to some degree. Your stand-up shows also have structure. You have callbacks. You have a plan to go through things. As you’re developing your next special, how are you going from like, “Okay, I have these jokes about this thing and these jokes about this thing.” How do you make it feel cohesive? What is your practice?

**Joel:** That takes a lot longer than just writing the jokes. Right now, I would not say I have an excellent closer. For me, when the special or when the hour really comes together is when I land at the end. It’s very similar to how a lot of people write scripts, I think. I think most of us really start being able to write it when we find the ending. It gives us a good map to get there. Since I haven’t found that out yet, I don’t know what’s tying all of this together yet. I would say too that I don’t know that it’s absolutely vital that there is a cohesive structure.

My special on Netflix definitely had a point. It wasn’t full Nanette, but there was a point being made through the comedy of the special. That is actually a very British thing. They write new hours of stand-up every year and go through this festival system where they take that hour from festival to festival basically all year. They all come from this school of thought that stand-up is very much associated with theater almost. There is always a through line and a message or a point to the special that leads up to it. I spent a lot of time over there and in Australia where they also do that. That was another reason why the special came out the way it did, is because I was absorbing all of that process.

**Craig:** Are you workshopping that as well, the notion of what is this all about and what unites all these things together? As you’re doing your set in development for when you then shoot Psychosexual and it’s on Netflix, are you looking to see what’s landing and how?

**Joel:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** Not comedy-wise. I mean thematically.

**Joel:** Okay, because I was like, “Babe.”

**John:** Laughter.

**Joel:** Of course.

**Craig:** I definitely wanted you to call me babe. I’m happy about that.

**Joel:** I’m definitely doing that.

**Craig:** Stop it.

**Joel:** That’s harder, because with the jokes, it’s an immediate feedback system. You know if that’s working or not. I think for me, even in Psychosexual, I dip into moments of seriousness, but it’s a secondary goal for me. The primary purpose of stand-up is to make people laugh.

**John:** Make people laugh.

**Joel:** The rest of it is just set dressing. If that works for some people, then great. Overall, the set should work on its own without any of that as a piece of comedy. That’s more for me.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**Joel:** I care less about if that’s working.

**Craig:** Working for them.

**Joel:** As long as I’m closing strong and there’s a good joke-per-minute ratio throughout, I’m happy if that is all funny. I don’t care about the rest of it as much.

**John:** A common theme you see both in Psychosexual and in Fire Island is the specificity of being a gay Asian person making it through the world, and the special things that you’re encountering that other people may not be familiar with. Some of the job you have to do is deciding how much you’re going to tell the audience or explain to the audience about what things are versus just putting it out there and letting them figure it out. What is the balance there? How much do you feel like you have to educate people in like, “This is why this is funny,” or, “This is why this is important.”

**Joel:** You know what? I feel less and less beholden to that the longer I do all of these things, stand-up and writing. No matter what it is, I feel more and more free to let people fill in the blanks a little bit. I’m also coming with a good amount of privilege now, especially because the Netflix special is out. People who are coming to my shows, I’m not having to introduce myself completely to them every single time, which makes things a little easier. Then it also is a real shock to the system when I do get in front of an audience who has no fucking idea who I am, and I’m suddenly like, “Oh, this is good, because now I have to be a real comedian again. I can’t just rest on my laurels.” I really shot myself in the foot though in Fire Island in regards to that, because I added that fucking voiceover.

**John:** At what point did the voiceover happen? Was that always in the script?

**Joel:** It felt like a good idea at the time. It was always a part of the script. I always wanted it to be a part of the script. Actually, fun fact, when it was at Quibi, there was a moment when it was not going to be a personal first-person narrative. It was going to be a third-person narrative done by, we were hoping, Emma Thompson, because she was available to do a Quibi.

**Craig:** That’s right. You’re right. That would’ve been awesome.

**John:** Remember Quibi? Aw, Quibi.

**Craig:** Quibi.

**John:** Vertical video.

**Joel:** The problem with the voiceover for me became in post, because there are a lot of things that are unfixable in a normal movie, unless you want to spend the money on reshoots, which Searchlight was not spending money on reshoots for this movie.

**Craig:** Pour a little VO sauce on it.

**Joel:** All the notes were, “Can we explain this joke in the VO? Can we explain this moment in the VO? Can we fix this with the VO? Can we do this in the VO?” Is it a little bit more than I wanted in the film? Absolutely. Do I hate it? Absolutely no. That kind of stuff makes it a little harder when other people are asking you to explain it, because my thing was, I was always fighting back and saying the audience is smart, and the moments that go over audiences’ heads… I don’t know, when I’m watching movies that are about cultures that I’m not a part of, those are the moments. The moments that I don’t necessarily understand are the moments that make me feel almost the most engaged with the story.

**John:** Because you’re having to pay a lot of attention to figure out what’s happening there.

**Craig:** You’re learning.

**Joel:** You’re learning. There’s stuff that you look up afterwards and you figure it out, and it’s enriching. It makes the movie even better on a second watch and things like that. I think there are plenty of moments like that in Fire Island still. I was happy to leave even more of them in the movie than I think the studio would have liked. That’s the studio’s job, to make sure that it’s palatable to as many people as possible.

**Craig:** They do stand in as a little bit of a proxy of the average person that might buy a ticket. I’m interested in that. That oftentimes is focused on the other. They’ll say, “Okay, but what if you’re not gay and Asian? What will those people think?” I’m actually more interested in if you felt any pressure in the other direction, meaning when you’re telling a story from inside a group, there is a little bit of that syndrome of, “Okay, you’re going to tell our story. You better tell it fucking right.” Did you feel a squeeze that you were maybe going to be held accountable in ways that maybe other writers weren’t going to have to be?

**Joel:** Way more than the other thing. Way more than the other thing. Andrew’s constant refrain to me on set was, “We cannot write this movie for Twitter, Joel,” because it was in my head a lot. I was like, “What are people going to say about this moment? Gay Twitter’s going to drag me for this and that and the other thing.” I’m glad we were able in our press cycle to talk about the movie and how much we loved the movie and loved each other and loved the comedy of the movie, and we weren’t necessarily pressured to make it about our identities as much or anything like that, because I think that that can… I don’t know, people don’t like to go and see a movie that feels like homework.

**Craig:** Homework, that’s the best word for it.

**Joel:** We were really lucky that the studio didn’t pressure us to go in that direction. I think because we were able to present it as a hyper-specific movie… There were definitely people in my community who hate the movie. Trust me, no one is more willing to tell you that than a drunk gay guy, to your face.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**Joel:** I think because it wasn’t couched in universal terms… It wasn’t like, “This movie is for all gay people. This movie is for all Asian.” It wasn’t couched in those terms.

**Craig:** It was just the characters that were in the story.

**Joel:** I think I was able to fly slightly more under the radar than I think other projects have been able to.

**Craig:** That makes sense, absolutely.

**John:** You’re saying so many words we try to say on the podcast all the time. You’re talking about specificity, about being a unique, original voice. Whether you’re starring in the movie or just the person writing the movie to put out there in the world, it’s about what is it that you specifically can say about this situation, what is the story that you can tell, that other people couldn’t tell. You’ve been able to do that both with your stand-up and with your film. What is the next thing we can look forward to seeing you in or seeing you writing?

**Joel:** Right now, I’m getting ready to shoot Loot Season Two, which is an Apple TV show that I’m on, that I’m very grateful to be a part of.

**Craig:** Maya Rudolph.

**Joel:** With Maya Rudolph. I’m furiously working on my next screenplay.

**Craig:** Good.

**Joel:** Writing it on spec.

**Craig:** That’s good. I’m glad.

**Joel:** Just trying to keep my hands busy doing that. Then there’s a bunch of other stuff that will come out.

**Craig:** Fire Island was fucking great. If you haven’t seen it-

**John:** See Fire Island, Hulu.

**Craig:** I don’t watch things.

**John:** Craig doesn’t.

**Craig:** I loved it. I thought it was terrific. I don’t know, it was delightful. That’s the word I think is the best word. It was a delight. You should absolutely check it out. It’s fantastic.

**John:** Joel Kim Booster, can you come back for some Q and A after the show?

**Joel:** Yeah, absolutely.

**John:** Joel Kim Booster, everyone!

**Craig:** Thank you, Joel.

**John:** Now, we have a raffle.

**Craig:** Oh, here we go.

**John:** This is all just figured out as we’re doing this.

**Craig:** Now it’s gambling time. Here we go.

**John:** Talk us through how we should do this. I see that there are different prizes here. These are the tickets. There’s a grand prize. Exciting. For listeners that are home, who don’t have the video here, there’s Item 1, Item 2. Item 1 is the Camp Scriptnotes shirt plus a guaranteed question during the show, correct? Is that right? No, I was wrong. I was wrong. I was looking at the wrong card. Matthew, edit.

**Craig:** Matthew, do not edit that.

**John:** Item 1, a Momofuku basket plus two tickets to The Huntington.

**Craig:** Now, the Huntington meaning the garden.

**John:** The garden. I remember bumping into you at The Huntington gardens.

**Craig:** I’m there all the time.

**John:** Before the Scriptnotes show started, I bumped into you and Melissa and your son at The Huntington gardens.

**Craig:** If you have a little baby, it’s a great way to-

**John:** There you go. Having a baby is mostly about how you kill a Saturday and a Sunday.

**Craig:** Just fill a Saturday. You’re certainly not killing it with sex or anything like that.

**John:** We identified Item 1.

**Craig:** Item 1, here we go. Item 1.

**John:** Item 1.

**Craig:** Item 1.

**John:** Craig, I’m going to open this up. You’re going to reach in there and pick one of these tickets.

**Craig:** I’ve got one. The number is 3559437!

**Audience Member:** Yep.

**John:** All right! I see someone back there. You can stay there, but remember, hold onto that ticket, because we’ll remember that.

**Craig:** Hold onto that ticket. I gotta say that “yep” was pretty much the right response.

**John:** “Yep” is the absolute right response. We’re going to put this on top of this.

**Craig:** Based on what we were giving you, yep. What else do we have?

**John:** Item number 2. Thank God for Jerome. You’re saving us here.

**Craig:** Jerome, thank you. Thank you for saving this sinking ship.

**John:** What is Item 2 here?

**Craig:** Item 2 is a pumpkin spice basket and four tickets to The Broad.

**John:** Now, Craig, we know you have issues with spooky season. What is your feeling about pumpkin spice?

**Craig:** Bullshit.

**John:** Oh, man.

**Craig:** Now, I will say that pumpkin spice in a pumpkin pie is amazing. Otherwise, get it the fuck out of there.

**John:** I like pumpkin bread. I like pumpkin bread. You like pumpkin bread?

**Craig:** Okay, that’s you. Here we go. Are you guys ready? This is for pumpkin spice.

**John:** Pumpkin spice.

**Craig:** Pumpkin spice, the worst of the Spice Girls. Here we go. 3559411.

**John:** Oh, fantastic! We see you there. You are the winner of the pumpkin spice.

**Craig:** That didn’t even get a yep. That got nothing.

**John:** It got nothing.

**Craig:** Silence.

**John:** We’ll sit this here. Now, we are up for Item number 3. This is bigger. This is bigger.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** I recognize the studio. What do we got?

**Craig:** We have a DreamWorks basket. I don’t know what’s in there, but it’s exciting. Maybe the shark from that shark movie.

**John:** It could be Shrek.

**Craig:** And two tickets…

**John:** I’m excited about this, to the Hollywood Wax Museum.

**Craig:** I didn’t realize we hated them.

**John:** No, it’s exciting. It’s exciting.

**Craig:** Let’s see who the big loser is.

**John:** You could be a winner. There’s three tickets in here.

**Craig:** I know. Nobody wanted this. I’m so sorry, the owner of-

**John:** [crosstalk 00:23:47] now.

**Craig:** Ticket 3559389.

**Audience Member:** It’s me.

**Craig:** I’m so sorry.

**John:** Hooray!

**Craig:** Did you hear what she said?

**John:** “It’s me.” I’m sorry.

**Craig:** “It’s me.”

**John:** “It’s me.”

**Craig:** “It’s me.”

**John:** We’re excited for you. It’s so nice to win things.

**Craig:** Hey, listen, we can’t all be winners.

**John:** Oh my god, now-

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** These are the real ones here. This is serious.

**Craig:** Realer than that?

**John:** Realer than this. The winner of number 4 gets-

**Craig:** Number 4 gets a Camp Scriptnotes T-shirt and a guaranteed audience question. What does this mean?

**John:** That means they will absolutely get their chance to ask their question, no matter what.

**Craig:** What if they’re an idiot?

**John:** That’s the risk we’re taking.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** It’s really on you, because you’re going to draw this ticket. If it’s a terrible question, it’s all your fault.

**Craig:** Gulp. Here we go. Here we go. 355, I’m going to say it every fucking time, I don’t care, 9418.

**Audience Member:** It’s me.

**John:** Yay! Are you going to ask a great question?

**Craig:** “It’s me.”

**Audience Member:** Will you come back next year and do this for Hollywood Heart?

**John:** Sure, we’ll do it again.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Aw, you’re so sweet.

**John:** You can also ask a real question during the time.

**Craig:** She may not have one. Let’s not pressure her.

**John:** We’ll ask you in the moment. If you don’t have a real question, that’s fine too. Thank you very much for bidding on this. Oh my gosh, look how many… This is Item number… Wait, what’s the grand prize? Now I’m confused. What’s number 6?

**Craig:** Number 6 is the grand prize.

**John:** Number 6 is the guaranteed… Oh, that’s the Three Page Challenge. Oh my gosh, this is worth a lot. This is number 5.

**Craig:** Number 5, also a Camp Scriptnotes shirt.

**John:** We love the Camp Scriptnotes shirts. You might think there might even be too many Camp Scriptnotes shirts and we’re trying to get rid of them.

**Craig:** You’re right. And a lifetime Premium membership to Scriptnotes. That’s a lifetime of not spending $5 a month.

**John:** Let’s do the quick math here. Scriptnotes, the annual membership is-

**Craig:** I think we need an actuarial table to see how old they are and also do they smoke.

**John:** This could be worth thousands of dollars, honestly. Thousands of dollars. Look how many tickets there are. There are so many tickets in there.

**Craig:** There’s a lot. Oh god, people want this.

**John:** People want this.

**Craig:** People want this. Guess who’s gotten it? Number 3559487.

**Audience Member:** Yay.

**Craig:** Hey!

**John:** Hooray! Hooray.

**Craig:** I gotta tell you, I love the way you guys are taking victory in stride. “Yay.”

**John:** “Yay.”

**Craig:** This isn’t making us feel weird or anything.

**John:** Congratulations on this. We’re going to put this over here.

**Craig:** “Yay.”

**John:** Identify yourself later, and we’ll find you for your lifetime-

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Wow, this is worth a lot.

**Craig:** This is the grand prize. The grand prize, a guaranteed Three Page Challenge. That’s right. Bid on the opportunity to have your script pages featured in our next Three Page Challenge segment to receive feedback from John and Craig and a call-out on Scriptnotes.

**John:** Megana will tell you that we will have 200 people write in [crosstalk 00:27:12].

**Craig:** That’s a lot.

**John:** She’s reading through a lot. You could jump the line. No matter what, good, bad, you’re there.

**Craig:** A little bit of a monkey’s paw, this one. I gotta be honest. Here we go.

**John:** Craig, draw it out.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, a lot of people wanted this one, but only one person can get it. Their ticket will begin with a 355. The winner is 3559453.

**Audience Member:** That’s me!

**John:** Hooray!

**Craig:** Finally, someone with some passion!

**John:** I’m excited about that.

**Craig:** Thank you!

**John:** 453, what is the script you’re going to send through? Do you have a title for the script you might want to send through?

**Audience Member:** Skullduggery.

**John:** Skullduggery.

**Craig:** That’s a good title.

**John:** Everyone listen for Skullduggery.

**Craig:** I’m into it. It’s going to start with like, “Skullduggery started so well, but then hm.”

**John:** Thank you, everyone, for the raffle. Yay!

**Craig:** Thank you! Way to go, rafflers. Wow.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Now things are going to get a little weird, unfortunately.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** I gotta sit down for this, because this is going to get bad.

**John:** This is going to be a challenging moment here.

**Craig:** Not every segment we do on these live shows are what we would call easy or fun.

**John:** They’re not all giggles.

**Craig:** Some of them are tough.

**John:** Some of them are tough. Over the years of doing Scriptnotes, we’ve been able to highlight some real success stories, like people who are doing good in the world, like Pay Up Hollywood. That’s people who are doing some great stuff.

**Craig:** Hollywood Heart.

**John:** Hollywood Heart! I think we’ve also taken the time to call out some bad actors, people we felt like who were not helping screenwriters, especially aspiring screenwriters.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** What were the words you might use for those people?

**Craig:** The people that we don’t like?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Dickheads.

**John:** Dickheads, yeah, dickheads. Sometimes it’s gotten contentious. I’m thinking back to Episode 129, the one with the guys from Final Draft.

**Craig:** They were great, weren’t they? That was fun. I wish you guys could’ve been there to see John like…

**John:** I have serious PTSD from that episode.

**Craig:** Because I’m like, “No, John, hold on.”

**John:** The thing I’ve taken from this is that conflict is not necessarily bad, because sometimes in conflict you illuminate and elucidate some real issues there.

**Craig:** Make things better.

**John:** Yeah, which is why tonight, we want to take a risk and invite on somebody who we’ve talked about a lot on the show. You probably have the strongest opinions about the person.

**Craig:** I am very hesitant about this, but in the spirit of hoping that it goes well, I have agreed to do this.

**John:** You’ve never been shy about telling your listeners what you think about this. Now he’s here to give his side of the story. Please welcome The Manager We Told You to Fire.

**Craig:** Here he is, The Manager We Told You to Fire. Oh, god.

**The Manager We Told You to Fire:** In town. Let me grab my water.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**Manager:** Can’t really see past the first few rows, but I can tell it’s a bunch of average-looking people, because it’s writers! Because it’s writers, right? Come on, we’re all on the same team. We’re all in the same game.

**Craig:** We told you to fire him.

**Manager:** God.

**John:** Chad, thank you for coming.

**Manager:** That’s what she said.

**John:** God.

**Craig:** Chad. Chad.

**Manager:** Come on. Come on. It’s back.

**Craig:** No, Chad.

**Manager:** Woo! I’m happy to be here at this New Balance convention. Holy shit. Listen, man, I love the show. I listen to the show. I love it. It’s great.

**Craig:** Do you?

**Manager:** Yeah, I listen to the show when I can get to it. A lot of podcasts out there. I got you guys. I got Rogan. I got Logan Paul, my new client. He’s starting to write now. He wrote a feature, and it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** Basically, everybody that rhymes with “ogan,” you have.

**Manager:** Yeah, but also you guys, Pod Save America, Dax, another client, Dax Shepard.

**Craig:** That’s real.

**Manager:** You fucking heard of him?

**John:** I guess it’s good that you listen sometimes, because you know we talk about managers on the show sometimes, and people write in with questions and concerns.

**Manager:** I know. I know. I heard the show. I told you. You don’t believe me? I can do Sexy Craig. You ready? Hey, it’s Sexy Craig. Sexy Craig wants to touch your hair.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** You sound like that.

**Craig:** I don’t sound like that.

**John:** That’s what it sounds like in my head every time.

**Manager:** That’s what it is. That’s what it is.

**Craig:** No.

**Manager:** Hey, can I do a One Cool Thing?

**John:** No, you don’t-

**Craig:** You can’t. I’m going to go with no, you can’t.

**Manager:** Can I just say, the problem with you two is-

**Craig:** Oh, please.

**Manager:** You guys have never had a manager. I’m going to get real with you, no cap. You don’t even know what a manager does.

**Craig:** Great. Why don’t you tell us what the fuck it is you do?

**Manager:** It’s in the name. It’s manager, manage from the Latin manage.

**Craig:** What do you manage though?

**Manager:** I manage writers or writer/directors if they have rich parents, that type of thing or, oh, the golden goose is a writer/director/actor, multi-hyphenate. You get that shit, those people are desperate, like a groundling. Oh, give me a groundling. I want a groundling! Yeah, baby. They’ll do whatever.

**Craig:** You’re terrible. You’re a terrible person.

**Manager:** You know what I say?

**Craig:** No.

**Manager:** Hate the player. Don’t hate the game.

**Craig:** I should’ve known that he was going to say that.

**John:** Let’s get back to what you actually do as a manager. For example, do you read your clients’ scripts and give them notes?

**Manager:** John, yes, I read their scripts. Of course I do.

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** What’s the process?

**John:** Talk us through the process there.

**Manager:** Okay, the process. I’m on the Peloton, and I get an email. I’m trying to listen to Logan Paul’s podcast. I get an email from whatever. Let’s just call him, I don’t know, fucking Groundling Gus. He’s like, “Hey, I have a script. It’s about two turtles that are in love.” I just write back, “Boring!”

**John:** That’s it? That’s one word. Do you give them anything they can work on?

**Craig:** That’s your management, “Boring.”

**Manager:** I think it’s implied. I’m going to give you guys some free advice. Don’t write boring shit, especially this one about turtles. It was so bad. No one wants to see turtles, guys.

**Craig:** I gotta ask you a question. Did you actually read the turtle script?

**Manager:** I read the email. I read the subject of the email.

**Craig:** Fuck, I hate him.

**Manager:** Listen, man.

**John:** We told you to fire him.

**Manager:** What good is it going to do for me to actually read the script when I promise you no one’s going to buy a fucking script about turtles in love, about turtles in general, unless they’re Teenage Mutant variety, in which case, let’s talk.

**Craig:** To be clear, your entire process is you just read the log lines? You don’t read the material?

**Manager:** Yes.

**Craig:** Great.

**Manager:** Look at the movies that came out this year. I would’ve told my clients, if I represented any of them, not to write them. Bros, little too gay.

**Craig:** Can’t say that.

**Manager:** Fire Island, too gay and too Asian.

**Craig:** Can’t say that.

**Manager:** Double whammy. Double whammy.

**Craig:** Can’t say that.

**Manager:** Double whammy. Death on the Nile, not gay enough.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I will say there was actually a lot of-

**Craig:** No, I agree with him.

**John:** There was a surprising amount of gay coding there.

**Craig:** There’s coding.

**John:** If you look at Poirot’s relationship with Bouc, it felt like there was a thing that was happening there.

**Manager:** I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. Also, I don’t fucking care about subtext. If it’s there, just write it. Who cares?

**Craig:** Great. Let’s get back to the real question. What service are you actually providing to your client?

**Manager:** It’s the service of being their manager.

**Craig:** You don’t do anything!

**Manager:** No, I do, okay. I make it feel like something is happening in your career. You didn’t have a manager, and now you do. Nobody wanted to read your fucking script, and now maybe somebody will. Your mom can tell her friends, “Oh, my son Shmuli, he’s got a Hollywood manager.”

**Craig:** Shmuli?

**Manager:** Hello? Antisemitic much, Craig? The way you said that was fucking weird.

**John:** Let’s move on. A lot of times on the show, we’ve talked about open writing assignments. What is your policy or philosophy about OWAs and your clients?

**Manager:** I love them. They’re my bread and butter. I send all my clients out on open writing assignments, doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** All of them?

**Manager:** I will send literally every client on every writing assignment. As Gandhi said, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

**John:** That wasn’t Gandhi.

**Craig:** He didn’t say that. He did not say that.

**Manager:** He did. I think he did.

**Craig:** Just to be clear, he didn’t. He’s a great man. How dare you? Your clients are all competing against each other for every single open writing assignment?

**Manager:** Yes, it’s survival of the fittest. We pit them against each other. It’s like the movie with the Japanese teenagers where they all fucking kill each other.

**John:** Great. Even if one of your clients does book the job, the rest of them have all wasted days or weeks of their life going after that one job?

**Manager:** They learn how to pitch. That is a very valuable skill. Whatever they wrote up, they can leave behind to the executive.

**John:** Oh, gosh, no.

**Manager:** Just walk out and just drop it on the ground.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** That’s not how that works. That’s a terrible idea.

**Manager:** Whatever. Whatever. I’m not a real person, I guess. I’m a straw man that you created to stand in for all the terrible managers your listeners are always writing in about. What you’re forgetting is that a lot of your audience, they hear these tales about terrible managers, and secretly, deep in their hearts, they still want one, even a shitty one like me, because it’s scary never knowing if you’re going to make it-

**Craig:** That’s fair.

**Manager:** … if you’re good enough, if anyone will even care. Getting the tap on the shoulder from one person vaguely connected to the industry is a game changer. Why do you think people do your Three Page Challenge? Because they need that hit of validation. We’re not so different, you and I.

**Craig:** He did the line.

**John:** He did the [inaudible 00:37:44].

**Craig:** He did the line.

**Manager:** These mildly unattractive writers know there is a wall surrounding this industry. You don’t want the truth, because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.

**John:** You’re Sorkining. Congratulations.

**Craig:** Sorkining.

**Manager:** I would rather that you just said thank you-

**Craig:** He’s still Sorkining.

**Manager:** … and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand the post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you’re entitled to!

**Craig:** Just out of curiosity, did you order the Code Red?

**Manager:** I did the job. You’re goddamn right I ordered the Code Red!

**Craig:** I have no further questions.

**John:** Let’s give it up for The Manager We Told You to Fire.

**Craig:** The Manager We Told You to Fire. Thank you.

**Manager:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Ike Barinholtz, everyone!

**John:** He’ll be back for questions.

**Craig:** He will be back at the end of the show! Well done, Manager We Told-

**John:** Nicely done, Ike Barinholtz.

**Craig:** I gotta say-

**John:** Hate you, hate you, hate you.

**Craig:** We were right to tell them to fire him. He’s dreadful.

**John:** Good choices we made. Good choices.

**Craig:** Absolutely fucking dreadful.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** Craig, that’s stressful. It’s stressful having him around.

**Craig:** Can we have nice people [crosstalk 00:39:08]?

**John:** We should welcome some nice-

**Craig:** Nice people.

**John:** … warm, caring people who make things.

**Craig:** Nice, warm, happy, smart people.

**John:** People who make things.

**Craig:** Make things, yeah, not people who exploit us and treat us like shit, in a hilarious way.

**John:** Let’s brainstorm on who these ideal next guests could be, if we were to pick our next guests.

**Craig:** You’d want somebody with the skill of an Aline Brosh McKenna, but also somebody with the stick-to-itiveness and insight of a Megan Ganz.

**John:** These are really good choices, because they’re both TV showrunners. They both created shows. They know how it all works together. Maybe we could even read their credits a little bit before we bring them out, to set up the audience for who these people are.

**Craig:** It’s not that I don’t know what they’ve done, but I’d like to refer to this card.

**John:** I will talk about Megan Ganz, who’s a comedy writer and producer whose credits include The Onion, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Community, Modern Family. She co-created the Apple TV comedy series Mythic Quest, along with-

**Craig:** Starring myself.

**John:** … Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day.

**Craig:** And myself. Aline Brosh McKenna, I’m going to tell you who she is, even though you all know. She is a writer, producer, and director known for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and The Devil Wears Prada and 27 Dresses. Her feature directorial debut-

**John:** Her feature debut.

**Craig:** … Your Place or Mine will come out next year on a small channel called Netflix.

**John:** Megan, Aline, please come out.

**Craig:** Megan, Aline, please come on out.

**John:** Welcome to the couch.

**Craig:** Welcome to the couch. Have a seat. Please feel free to discard all of the cards that The Manager We Told You to Fire has left behind.

**Megan Ganz:** What’s great about having two women is we only get paid 60 cents on the dollar, so two of us-

**Craig:** Sorry, you guys are getting paid? John.

**John:** Sorry.

**Megan:** With two of us, you’re getting a buck 20 worth of value.

**Craig:** [inaudible 00:40:46] nothing.

**John:** It is so amazing to have both of you here. That last segment was very stressful to me. Hopefully, you can talk us all down. You are both people who create TV shows. You run TV shows. This last week, we saw a huge change that’s happening with our streaming services. Our streaming services that have never had commercials before are suddenly going to have commercials. Disney Plus is going to start having commercials. Netflix is going to start having ads in the middle of it. I want to talk to you about that, because that’s a different thing than we’ve encountered before. Megan, on your show on Apple TV, so far there are no ads, but are you-

**Megan:** Bringing back the act break? Is that what you’re asking?

**John:** Yeah, is that act break going to happen?

**Megan:** Bringing back the act break?

**Craig:** Because you have a lot of experience with ad-supported television.

**Megan:** I do. I started out in network television, so I started out thinking about act breaks a lot. In fact, on Modern Family, they always called the first act break the Hey May. Have you ever heard this phrase?

**John:** No, tell us Hey May.

**Craig:** No.

**Megan:** Hey May was that something really exciting had to happen before the commercial break, so that the guy that was watching it would say to his wife, “Hey May, you gotta see what’s happening on this show that’s coming up.” That was the phrase that they-

**Craig:** [crosstalk 00:41:48] name is May. What year are they from?

**Megan:** Cheers. They were watching Oklahoma. I grew up on knowing act breaks and very strict time limits for shows, and now that all went out the window, but apparently it’s coming back. That’ll be interesting. What do I think about it? When I was in network, and everybody was going to streaming and everybody thought streaming would fix all the issues, it was like, it’s just going to become the new dinosaur, right? Then whatever’s next, TikTok, will take over. Then in a few years, we’ll all be desperate to write TikTok shows.

**Craig:** The TikToks.

**John:** We first knew you of course as a feature writer. Then you were [inaudible 00:42:37] Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, when that was going to be a thing. Originally, it was a Showtime show, and then it transitioned to a CW show, so you had to figure out how to do act breaks.

**Craig:** The act breaks.

**John:** Are act breaks natural to you now? Are they part of your blood?

**Megan:** No, they’re not, they weren’t, and they never were. I’ve really only worked on one TV show for any sustained amount of time.

**John:** It was a good show.

**Megan:** We had six acts, which was too many.

**Craig:** CW’s pumping those ads out.

**John:** The network required you to have six acts?

**Megan:** Six acts. There are episodes where it’s 20 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 3 minutes, 2 minutes, 2 minutes.

**Craig:** That’s how they did it?

**Megan:** No, you could put them wherever you wanted.

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**Megan:** They had to be at least two minutes long. We would sometimes get to the end of the episode and just have just extra shit happen because we didn’t have… It would be a page and an eighth. I would have to be in editing, trying to pump the last act. The first act had been 22… It was a haphazard process. I was saying I enjoy watching things where I feel like, end scene, and then you’re moving. I think it’s a good discipline. Especially it works for comedy.

We’ve been through an interesting shift. For the old people on the stage, we wandered off to a thing where they were like, “This is a comedy,” and you’re like, “This is not funny, has no jokes in it, and is 48 minutes long. I don’t know what’s happening.” It feels like there’s a nice move towards more traditional. The cycles are accelerating at such a rate. People will write more towards those act breaks. Hulu’s always had ads, so they’ve always done that.

Then the other thing is I think formats are getting more… Everything is getting more juiced, because as we were talking backstage, for a streamer, you have to nab people really quickly. Also, you’re competing with things like TikTok now, and so people are… They want to know what they’re looking at, really, so the pace of things. You go back and watch a movie from 1978. You’ll be dead on the ground. It’s all like, “I need to go somewhere.” Then it’s the person opening the door and walking to their car, opening the car door, getting inside the car, backing out of the driveway.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** That’s so funny you say that, because something I would say a lot when I’m directing is, “I know how cars work. I know how walking works. I know how drinking works. We know how eating works. We know how buttering works.” There is a certain genre of thing where we’re going to watch this man unbutton every button. I feel like now it’s to the point where it has to be one or the other. It has to be the most eye-grabbing, attention-stealing thing ever or it has to be so bland that you could leave the room for minutes at a time and come back and miss nothing.

**Megan:** It’s so true. It’s like we’re in TikTok or we’re in profoundly Swedish, slow, slow… You come back and the tumbleweed has just turned over once.

**Craig:** That’s the best kind of Swedish is profoundly Swedish.

**John:** With shows you’re developing now, because Aline, you’ve set up some new shows, congratulations, and Megan, you’re working on new stuff as well, are you thinking about where the commercials will go if they ultimately stick commercials in? Craig, Chernobyl has commercials. We got the email in from France. Chernobyl in France has commercials in it.

**Craig:** That’s fucking France.

**John:** That could very well happen to HBO Max as well when people are watching Chernobyl here.

**Craig:** I must admit that I put blinders on in terms of what happens once it leaves the confines of the United States. I go, “I’m not there.” I’m not there when the tree falls. I don’t know.

**Aline:** Also now, we’re just aware that you’re spending all this time making something beautiful, and people are going to watch it in their bathtub with their grubby fingers.

**John:** Megan, would you…

**Aline:** Are you bothered? You say, “Who cares Chernobyl’s got commercials in France?” If you knew that they were interrupting in the middle of a line of dialog to go to commercial and come back-

**Craig:** It would be kind of amazing if they were just like, “That is how an RBMK reactor… “ Boom, and go-

**Aline:** Then commercials, and then it comes back.

**Craig:** Then it comes back and it’s already exploded.

**Aline:** Can we talk just a minute about the captioning? Now, somebody was telling me today it’s like 70% of people watch their TV captioned. They’re riddled with errors, riddled with misspellings. As you mentioned, I have the movie coming out next year. I desperately want to see the captions, because if the grammar is incorrect or spelled incorrectly, it’s going to make me nuts.

**Craig:** Why are you putting this in my-

**Aline:** I’m trying really hard to get it so that I can see it.

**John:** [crosstalk 00:47:16].

**Craig:** You know what just happened is that her Jewishness went into my Jewishness and just created this awful mega Jewishness of my anxiety now that they’re going to fuck the… Oh, goddammit.

**Aline:** It’s nerve-wracking with a W, come on!

**Craig:** Ah!

**John:** Practical guidance though for, let’s say we have our folks out here who are writing their pilots. If you were writing a pilot today and you wanted to be staffed on one of your shows, do you think these people should be putting act breaks into a one-hour, into a half-hour?

**Megan:** I don’t know for one-hours. I’ve never written a drama. For comedies, I did the act break thing for a long time, and then I ended up on Sunny, and they never talked about act breaks. All they talked about was that in every scene, every character should have a specific motivation and a want and that something should happen in that scene that changes the story and that moves them into a different place. Once I got into that mode where I was thinking more scene by scene, now I never think about act breaks anymore, because if the story is moving, it’s moving. I don’t think that your general uneducated TV viewer is like, “Oh, interesting first act. I wonder what’s going to happen once we get into that road of trials. Where’s our atonement coming from?”

Some of it is almost instinctual too. Story breaking has always felt like something to me that’s a little bit like I can almost explain why I think that the story should go this way or that way. It’s almost innate. I wouldn’t push act breaks on, because again, you’re never going to know. Maybe you write them all in, and then somebody yanks them all out again.

**Aline:** If you’re writing a spec for a particular show and you know the format, for that, I would [crosstalk 00:49:03] writing a pilot.

**John:** You just set up a new show with [inaudible 00:49:06]. For that, will there be act breaks?

**Aline:** It’s ABC network, so it’s a network format. Whatever network you’re selling it to generally has a format of some kind, or they have none. They generally have length guides. Actually, there were a lot of restrictions in working on the CW. I got to perversely enjoy them. We only had a certain amount of runtime. Then I got really into something I never thought I would be interested in, which is those previously-ons. You think they’re computer generated or something. We worked really hard on them. Really hard. I loved working on those.

**Craig:** Those are great.

**Aline:** We tried to craft them in editing, so it helped you understand what the episode was you were going to watch. Now I know that most people fast-forward through them. We put a lot of thought into them so that they would frame the episode correctly. I’ve grown to love them as an art form. It was Mad Men that famously had the string of just non sequiturs that you could not… They’re pretty fabulous. I think they can really help a show. Again, I like some of the more traditional format things I enjoy. I think that we might regret throwing out some of the baby with the bathwater.

**Megan:** Structure is good. I like structure.

**Craig:** Having some sort of thing to follow. You just mentioned what’s coming and what just happened. You’ve both worked on shows that have been ongoing shows. There’s the world of cable television or premium cable, whatever they call it, where here’s a limited series, or it’s a series but it’s only going to run for two seasons. You guys are working on shows that are designed to run for a long time. I’m curious, just from a craft point of view, how you guys balance the need to keep the flywheel going year after year without leaning too hard on things that you know are grade Hamburger Helper, like will they, won’t they, or we made it, we lost it all. What do you do to keep it going and fresh when there is this interesting meta problem that you need to reset it every time no matter what?

**Megan:** It’s got to be the same but different-

**Craig:** Same but different.

**Megan:** … every single time you have it. For me, it’s been different on the two different shows that I’m currently working on. On Sunny, they get around that by making them cartoon characters that know-

**Craig:** Learn nothing.

**Megan:** … nothing they do influences the next episode whatsoever.

**John:** [crosstalk 00:51:24].

**Megan:** They never learn their lessons. There’s no third act in Sunny. It’s great. You just get them in a really bad situation, and then you roll credits. Then the next week, they’re out of jail somehow. That’s great. That’s the way they do it on that show. That’s why they’ve been going for 16… I’m about to start on Season 16-

**Craig:** Oh my god. Amazing.

**Megan:** … of Sunny in a couple weeks.

**Craig:** Mythic Quest is a workspace.

**Megan:** Mythic Quest is a workspace, real people that have things that carry over. It has been difficult. We don’t have a romantic relationship between our two leads, so we can’t rely on that. We didn’t want to get into the place, because it’s all about a video game. We didn’t want to rely too much on is the video game going to be successful or not, because I don’t think most people care about that. We really try to pin it on the emotional relationships.

From the very beginning, we tried to make the thing that makes you coming back is there’s this odd couple, these two people, they love each other, they hate each other, they’re making this thing together. It’s like two people raising a kid, where it drives them insane, but they also can’t leave each other, so they’ve got to figure it out for the sake of the kid. We’re hoping that that tension is bringing people back over and over. What helps that is that it’s 10 episodes a season and not 24, which is what I used to do. In 24, you need a love interest.

**Craig:** You’re not going to make it otherwise.

**Megan:** You’re not going to make it.

**Aline:** Also, don’t we love a filler episode?

**Megan:** Oh, I love filler.

**Aline:** I love a filler episode. I love something where they just go to Costco for the whole episode. Honestly, they’re some of the most fun. The great thing about those episodes, they’re often later in the run. You’ve established so much about your characters that you can trap them all in a room together, and then you can really pay off these character-based emotional things. That’s why I love a good bottle episode. I think once you earn that thing where you’re like, “Guess what? We’ve set up so many things that we can put these people in one space and just let them talk to each other, and you’re going to be entertained for a half-hour.”

**Craig:** They can hash it out together.

**Megan:** Great.

**Aline:** Our last season was extended from 13 to 18. We managed to make one of them a live special, but then we still had four. We ended up doing things we never… She had a brother she didn’t know about. We just had a lot of fun.

**Megan:** Find a dog.

**Aline:** She knew that he existed. She’d not really spent any time with him. You can just chase wild herrings. She went to a waterpark. That was some of the funnest stuff we did. It’s not my podcast, but somebody said to me-

**John:** Really?

**Craig:** It basically is.

**Aline:** Never stopped me before.

**Megan:** It could be, by the way.

**Craig:** It is.

**Aline:** I wanted to ask you guys a question, because somebody said to me the other day… I was talking to an executive, and they said my… Their theory is that feature writers can write TV more easily than TV writers can write features.

**Craig:** I agree with that.

**Aline:** They said that if you’re a feature writer, you’ve learned how to wander in the woods by yourself big chunks of time, so then when you go to write TV, you have that sense of the whole scope, but you can write these tinier chunks faster, and it doesn’t have to be the complete thing. I don’t know about that. I’m curious about that.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Here’s the other version of that. It’s that sometimes you see these streaming shows just feel like, “Oh, I see it as a 10-hour movie.” I’m like, “Oh god, I don’t want a 10-hour movie.”

**Craig:** That would be bad.

**John:** I want a sense of [crosstalk 00:54:34].

**Craig:** Episodes.

**John:** Episodes. I want a sense that things [crosstalk 00:54:36].

**Craig:** I’m a big fan of episodes. I do think that feature writers know how to finish something, and a lot of television writers have never actually been in a spot where they had to finish something. It was always designed to keep the machine running. We know a lot of television shows really stumble at the finish line.

**Aline:** In TV you finish-ish.

**Craig:** Ish.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Finish-ish.

**Aline:** Finish-ish. You give them enough of a thing that they can go to bed that night, but then they gotta come back.

**Craig:** They gotta come back, exactly.

**Aline:** Literally, Act 1 is the pilot, then you have 70 episodes of Act 2, and then Act 3 is the last 15 minutes of the entire series.

**Megan:** Oh god, that’s great.

**Aline:** I could do it now.

**Craig:** You’re showrunners. I have been a showrunner, and I’ve learned a lot along the way. One of the things that’s blown my mind, and I’ve gotten used to it, but it’s been a little hard, when you’re not a showrunner, whether you’re a feature writer or you’re working on staff at a show, your job ultimately is a creative job. You’re supposed to be playing, and you’re supposed to be just being creative and writing and all the rest. When you are a showrunner, you have to do these things. You also are the CEO of a fairly large corporation. You are kind of a mom or a dad to a lot of people. How do you guys reconcile those two sides of yourselves when you’re doing the work?

**Aline:** I have a thing that I think may be different from how other people think of it, which is a lot of showrunners and movie directors have this thing where they’re like, “This is my process. Now welcome to my movie. Welcome to my TV show. I’m the boss, and this is my process.” I don’t do that, because I don’t think… I am assembling a group of creative people. Particularly with actors, they’re all very different. They all have a different process. They all approach things differently.

I’ll just tell you guys, we had Reese and Ashton on this movie. We also have Tig Notaro, Steve Zahn, Zoë Chao, Jesse Williams. They’re all really different actors. They approach things really differently. On Crazy Ex, we had people from Broadway, we had stand-ups, we had all different… I like to very much meet the actors where they live and explore what their process is and then even what they need on a particular day.

With the writers, you can only really have one process, but what I like to try and do is figure out how to make every writer there feel comfortable so that they can contribute the most. All writers are different that way. Some writers come in, and they just are very comfortable speaking to authority. They’re very comfortable speaking out. Some need more encouragement and more direction. That’s true with department heads too. I will be collaborating very, very closely with costumes. When I hire a costume person, I’m saying, “You’ll be sick of me. I’m going to go down to the socks with you.”

My process is a little bit different based on who I’m working with, as opposed to like, “This is how Aline does stuff.” There’s a few things that are baseline things with me. I’m not great with lateness. If there’s more than two people in the room, and someone’s late, the disrespect of that is really hard for me. There’s just a few things that I do a certain way.

Basically, instead of coming in and saying, “Gosh, I want this done a certain way. I gotta get everyone to do it,” I try and go more with like, “I have a goal. Our goal is to take the mountain, and we can all have a different approach to that,” because what you want to do is bring out the best creative work that you can from everyone. Everyone’s different.

For example, in the writers’ room, sometimes I will say to someone, “If you don’t feel comfortable speaking up in the room about something, come find me later or send me an email or put a note on my desk. If there’s something where you want to say, ‘I really think we should do X, Y, and Z,’ and for whatever reason, the room wasn’t the place where you felt like you wanted to say that, just let me know some other way,” or for an actor, if someone wants to send me a six-page email, but someone else doesn’t need that, I like to adjust my… I think if you’re trying to get everyone to be you and to approach things the way you would and to think that… You’re going to rob yourself of good ideas. It’s not going to work.

**Craig:** Megan, you’re toxically rigid, so what do you think?

**Megan:** I was going to say, have you-

**Aline:** I’m contrasting myself to Megan, obviously.

**Megan:** I was going to say, so your first room was Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

**Aline:** See, this is why I’m not a really good sample. I had been in other rooms, little, tiny things here and there. Basically, I didn’t come up being a staff writer.

**John:** Megan, give us the real dirt. How does it really work?

**Megan:** That sounds amazing. That is what I am, now that I am a showrunner, trying to do. What that process feels like to me, in an adjustment from the way that I saw showrunners being when I was coming up and the way they acted towards me, the way that I’m trying to be a showrunner is like… I bought mushrooms recently.

**Craig:** Go on.

**Megan:** This woman that I bought mushrooms from gave me this chart of different dosages.

**Aline:** I didn’t know what kind of mushrooms we were talking about.

**Megan:** Sorry.

**Craig:** You thought she was talking about [crosstalk 00:59:58].

**Aline:** I was like, “Are we porcini? What are we-”

**Craig:** Oh, Aline.

**Megan:** She gave me the scale of all the different things you experience, different levels. At six grams of mushrooms was ego death. That is what I feel like I’m experiencing as being a showrunner, because I think in order to do it right, it is exactly what you’re saying.

**Craig:** Ego death.

**Megan:** In order to do it right, what you have to do is go, “I am your captain, but only in the senses that I am here to make everyone aboard this ship feel safe and a part of this team and feel like we’re all rowing towards the same place.” That’s not my experience when I started. When I started, it was like, “I’m in charge. You do what I say. If I tell you to come in at 10 a.m. and sit in a room until 7 p.m. without me entering that room, you’re going to sit there.” I didn’t have that experience coming up. When I was trained, it was very much like you shove a million ideas to your showrunner, and then they take the best ones, and then those somehow became their ideas. Then they go on with that.

**Aline:** Megan, my training ground as a feature writer, which these guys will know, is working for sometimes wonderful, occasionally-

**John:** Often monstrous.

**Aline:** … not wonderful people who are not trained in story often-

**Craig:** Who have authority over you.

**Aline:** … who couldn’t express their ideas with words, to whom I would have to say, “Oh my god, that’s so amazing. That’s so interesting. I love that. I was wondering if we could do something that made sense or advanced the story or had to do with the characters. We don’t have to.” As a screenwriter, it is a certain way similar to being on a staff and being semi listened to.

**Craig:** You’re working for writers.

**John:** Writers [crosstalk 01:01:45].

**Craig:** In features, you are often working for people that just don’t understand [crosstalk 01:01:51]. They haven’t done it themselves.

**Aline:** Most of my really bad experiences, by the way, were with things that never got made. I worked with a gentleman whose entire way of communicating to me was to send me screen caps.

**Craig:** Efficient.

**Aline:** “I was thinking this scene could be like this.” It would literally be a screen cap of a cartoon from the ’40s.

**Megan:** I’m not trying to say that I’ve had it worse than anybody else. Let me just say that. I will say that that is what I’m trying to do as well, which is to say… Really, it’s come out of my experience, because I realize that if you’re not properly incentivized to believe that your contributions matter to your showrunner, you are not showing up every day to do your best work. You are showing up every day to be there until they let you go. Then you go home and you do things that matter to you. What I am trying to do as a showrunner is say, “I hear you. Your voice is important. The things that you say are important. Your thoughts are important. If you need to tell me something, send me an email,” those sorts of things.

**Aline:** You’re saying no 85% of the time.

**Megan:** Yes, all the time. I’m resisting my inner nature to not be like, “You should be so lucky that I’m even listening to you, because I never got that.”

**Craig:** I wish that you would express that more. I want you to release the Kraken. I’m just curious, do you ever miss just being the… Jerry Seinfeld once got an award, and he said, “I don’t want to be up here accepting this award. I want to be back there making fun of the guy accepting this award.” Do you ever miss being the person who, after the showrunner finally lets you go, you can go out in the parking lot and go, “What a dick.”

**Aline:** “What an asshole.”

**Craig:** Now you’re the dick.

**Megan:** I do. I do, because the place that I’m in right now is between the two better places, which is you can either be one of the guys rowing, that’s like, “God, the captain’s an asshole,” or you can be the captain. Being the guy that’s below the captain, that passes along the captain’s wishes to the rowers, and then the rowers complain to you, and then you try to go tell the captain. He’s like, “I don’t give a shit.” Then you’re like, “Okay, I guess I have to go back and tell the… ” That position, that’s where I’m at right now, which is in between those two things.

**Craig:** Which honestly is the dream of most of these people.

**John:** Indeed. It’s honestly the dream of these people to have a show on television. There are so many shows on television. Back when we started our careers, it was pretty easy to keep up with what was on television. You could go into a general meeting, and you haven’t seen the show, you fake it, because you know what the shows were.

**Craig:** There were 12 shows on TV.

**John:** There were 12 shows on TV. Did I ever watch Gossip Girl? No. Could I fake my way through a meeting about it? Absolutely. In 2022, it’s actually much harder. You guys have staff people, so you know it’s hard. We’re guessing that even two fancy TV showrunners like you couldn’t tell us-

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** … where these streaming shows are airing, or if they’re even real.

**Megan:** Oh, no.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** We’ll give you the title of the show-

**Craig:** And a little description.

**John:** … and a little description.

**Aline:** Can we confer?

**John:** You can confer, yeah.

**Craig:** And the platform.

**Aline:** Two women’s minds are better than one.

**John:** We’re going to tell you the title of the show.

**Craig:** We’re not going to say the platform.

**John:** You’ve gotta tell us what platform it’s on. If you don’t recognize the show, we can give you a log line and the star.

**Craig:** That’s it.

**John:** It’s hard, because we tried this. Are you ready to play I’ve Been Meaning to Watch That?

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** I’ll do this first. Mythic Quest, where would we find that show?

**Craig:** Is it real?

**Megan:** It’s on Apple TV.

**Aline:** It’s an extra special show starring Craig Mazin-

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Aline:** … on Apple TV, which I have watched.

**Megan:** Yes, it’s starring Craig Mazin on Apple TV.

**Aline:** I have watched.

**Craig:** They nailed it.

**John:** They nailed it.

**Craig:** That is correct.

**John:** One for you.

**Craig:** Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

**Megan:** [inaudible 01:05:36].

**John:** It’s streaming.

**Megan:** The CW?

**Craig:** That is not a streamer.

**Megan:** What is The CW? Is that Disney? That’s Disney, because-

**Craig:** Did you just arrive in this country?

**Megan:** I don’t know, Hulu?

**Craig:** Tell them.

**Aline:** It’s on Netflix.

**Craig:** It is on Netflix.

**John:** Netflix.

**Aline:** Some people think it’s a Netflix show.

**Megan:** I watched it when it was on legit CW TV.

**Craig:** There we go. Now the game gets-

**John:** Now it gets hard.

**Craig:** Basically, the difficulty level goes like… Here we go.

**Megan:** We know Chernobyl is on Disney Plus. Keep going.

**John:** [inaudible 01:06:08].

**Craig:** It’s very Elden Ring-like, as you guys know.

**Aline:** It would help that I don’t watch TV, right?

**John:** As you keep showing us.

**Craig:** It won’t hurt.

**John:** Our next program is Salvage Marines. Where is it streaming, or did we just make it up?

**Aline:** If it is streaming, it’s on Discovery.

**Megan:** It’s gotta be on Discovery, right?

**Craig:** We can give you a little information if you want.

**John:** We have a log line.

**Craig:** “In a green future of corporate tyranny and deep space combat, Samuel Hyst dares to dream of a life beyond the polluted industrial planet of Baen 6.”

**Aline:** Is it on the Syfy network?

**Craig:** No.

**Megan:** It’s not real.

**Craig:** Do you want to know who it stars?

**Aline:** Not real, I’m going to guess.

**Craig:** You’re incorrect.

**John:** Incorrect. A real show on Crackle. You can watch it now. Starring Casper Van Dien.

**Craig:** It is on Crackle. Here we go. The Old Man.

**Aline:** That’s on FX.

**Megan:** That’s real. That’s on FX.

**Aline:** That’s Jeff Bridges.

**Megan:** On Hulu.

**Craig:** Hulu, you’re right.

**Aline:** No, it’s FX for Hulu.

**Megan:** FX for Hulu.

**Craig:** What the fuck is the difference?

**Megan:** It’s FX for Hulu. It’s FX for Hulu.

**Craig:** You got it.

**John:** You got it.

**Craig:** You nailed it.

**John:** You got it!

**Craig:** It’s correct.

**Aline:** I watched it. I love it.

**Craig:** Nice work.

**John:** Irma Vep.

**Aline:** That’s on HBO. It was a French production. It’s Olivier Assayas. It stars-

**Craig:** Good Lord.

**John:** Jesus.

**Aline:** It stars the beautiful-

**John:** She’s getting the extra credit here. She’s like, “Teacher, teacher, I know more.”

**Aline:** Alicia Vikander. Alicia Vikander.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Megan:** Wow.

**Craig:** Mostly Fine.

**Aline:** I don’t…

**Craig:** You want a little description?

**Aline:** Sure.

**Craig:** “Two strange sisters deal with divorce, motherhood, and their father’s legendary china shop.”

**Megan:** Is it F-E-I-N?

**Craig:** It is not. It is F-I-N-E. Would you like stars?

**Megan:** Sure.

**Craig:** Lauren Graham and Zooey Deschanel.

**Megan:** No, that’s not real.

**Aline:** No, that can’t be.

**Craig:** It is not a real show.

**John:** [inaudible 01:08:07]. Rutherford Falls.

**Megan:** That’s real.

**Aline:** Rutherford Falls, yeah.

**John:** Where?

**Aline:** God, I did watch that too. I watched it too.

**Megan:** [crosstalk 01:08:16].

**Aline:** It’s Ed Helms. It’s Ed Helms.

**John:** Yes, that’s great.

**Aline:** The showrunner’s name is-

**Megan:** Sierra Ornelas.

**Aline:** … Sierra Ornelas.

**John:** Where is it?

**Aline:** It’s on…

**Craig:** I’ll give you a hint. Meh!

**Aline:** Oh, Peacock. Peacock. It’s an NBC show.

**Craig:** People don’t know that’s what they sound like, but they do. Roar.

**Aline:** That’s real, and it’s an anthology series. Alison Brie was in it.

**Craig:** Where do you find it?

**Aline:** It’s on Apple?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** [crosstalk 01:08:52].

**Aline:** I was at an Apple event literally last night talking to another person that came up and said, “Oh, I’ve got a new show.” I said, “Where’s it at?” He’s like, “Apple.” I’m like, “I never heard of it.”

**Craig:** Gulp.

**Aline:** I’m so bad! It’s so bad. We’re on the same things now, and we don’t even hear of each other’s shows.

**Craig:** There’s too much. Surely you’ll know about this one.

**John:** Woke.

**Aline:** That’s a semi-animated show starring Lamorne Morris.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Aline:** It was on Hulu.

**Craig:** We picked the wrong person to play this game.

**John:** Yeah, dear God.

**Craig:** Let’s see if you know about this one. Heartbreak High. Would you like a summary?

**Aline:** Yes.

**Craig:** “Emory becomes a social pariah when the mural she made of everyone’s past hookups goes public.” Heartbreak High.

**Aline:** This is a blind spot for me, because I don’t really watch high school shows.

**Megan:** I know, yeah. I don’t either.

**Aline:** I’m going to guess that is real and that it’s on… What are those high school shows on?

**Megan:** Freeform?

**Craig:** No, but it is real.

**John:** Real. Netflix.

**Craig:** It’s on Netflix.

**Aline:** Netflix.

**Megan:** There you go.

**Craig:** Heartbreak High.

**John:** Chapelwaite.

**Aline:** Isn’t that a British crime show?

**John:** I don’t know. You tell me.

**Megan:** Can we get [crosstalk 01:10:13]?

**Aline:** Is it a British crime show?

**John:** [crosstalk 01:10:14].

**Megan:** Use it in a sentence.

**Craig:** I have not heard of Chapelwaite.

**John:** “Set in the 1850s, this series follows Captain Charles Boone, who relocates his family to his ancestral Maine home. Charles has to soon confront his family’s sordid history to fight the end of darkness that has plagued them for generations.” Starring Adrien Brody.

**Craig:** Chapelwaite.

**John:** Chapelwaite.

**Craig:** Chapelwaite.

**Megan:** I have never heard of it.

**Craig:** Is it real?

**Megan:** It’s probably real, and it’s on a bus stop near my house I walk past.

**Aline:** Epix!

**John:** Epix is right. Aline [inaudible 01:10:49].

**Craig:** That’s inappropriate. Also, I thought it was Epix. Okay, next. Okay, smarty.

**Aline:** What?

**Craig:** Wendy.

**Aline:** Wendy.

**Craig:** Not Wendy Williams.

**John:** Yeah, Wendy.

**Craig:** Wendy. Would you like a summary?

**Aline:** Yes, please.

**Craig:** “Based on the classic Harvey comic, Wendy the Good Little Witch leaves the haunted forest but finds new terrors lurking in her high school hallways.”

**Aline:** No, that’s not a show.

**Craig:** That is not a show. You’re right.

**Aline:** It’s about a woman. It’s about a young woman. Why would you put that on the air?

**Craig:** It did say she was a witch.

**Aline:** If they did make it, it would be written, directed, and produced by a man.

**Megan:** That’s true.

**John:** I’m going to jump ahead to our last one here.

**Craig:** Let’s get Joel Kim Booster back up here.

**John:** The Last Kingdom.

**Megan:** That’s real.

**Aline:** That’s on Netflix. It’s a thing that my husband always wants to watch.

**Craig:** He sounds like a man.

**John:** My brother, who doesn’t watch anything, was like, “Oh yeah, we watched all four seasons and the movie.” I’m like, “This whole thing is just… ” You guys have won the-

**Aline:** There’s four seasons of it?

**John:** Four seasons. You have won the game-

**Craig:** You have won the game.

**John:** … I’ve Been Meaning to Watch That.

**Craig:** Well done.

**Megan:** Nice.

**John:** Let us welcome back to the stage Joel Kim Booster and Ike Barinholtz.

**Aline:** Oh, great.

**John:** Ike, I want to say, because in real life you’re not a douche bag manager. We just want to make that clear.

**Ike Barinholtz:** No, not anymore.

**Craig:** Not after tonight.

**Aline:** Not a manager at all.

**John:** I’m wondering if you could please answer this in the form of a question for us. This screenwriter, director, and actor is best known for The Mindy Project, The Afterparty, and Hulu’s upcoming History of the World, Part II. What is your question in the form of an answer, or answer in the form of-

**Ike:** Who is Ike Barinholtz?

**John:** Ike Barinholtz, everyone. Jeopardy champion, Ike Barinholtz.

**Craig:** This is my favorite part of the show, because we don’t have to prepare anything.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** We are deluged by questions.

**John:** Usually on our live shows, we have to give the warning of, if you’re going to ask a question, it actually has to be a question rather than a statement. We’re always nervous about questions.

**Craig:** Make your question a question.

**John:** This time, we did something different. We asked our audience to submit their questions in advance. They filled out little cards. They have been curated by our very own Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Yes, Megana Rao.

**John:** Please welcome to the stage, Megana Rao! Where are you, Megana? Megana, should we start with the audience question or your question? You get to choose.

**Megana Rao:** Let’s [inaudible 01:13:31].

**John:** Carefully step down the stage there and find [crosstalk 01:13:34].

**Ike:** Can I just say, this set is absolutely terrifying.

**John:** It is.

**Megan:** It’s very spooky.

**Ike:** That freaking skeleton up there, oh my god.

**John:** If you were the person who has a question for Megana, who won the raffle, do you want to ask your question, or are you passing?

**Audience Member:** I don’t have a question.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** That’s honestly the best gift you could’ve given us.

**Aline:** Aw.

**John:** Megana, I think she’s basically gifted you a question. Do you have a question you want to ask of any of these people up here?

**Craig:** That’s a big no. I can tell.

**Megana:** I spent enough time in the greenroom with them.

**Ike:** You have heard all the-

**Joel:** She’s so sick of us.

**Ike:** [crosstalk 01:14:06]. We’ve been talking for 30 minutes.

**John:** Megana, you’ve looked through these questions. What questions do you have for us here on the stage?

**Megana:** These are all questions from the audience, that came in before the show. Someone who did not sign it wrote, “Writers are upset about TikTok kids getting development deals, but is this different from a comedian getting a deal or optioning a bestselling book?”

**Craig:** Oh boy, here we go.

**John:** Oh, man.

**Craig:** How does that feel, gentlemen?

**Aline:** First, writers are just upset about young people being born every day, new people entering the world and trying to change things that we’ve set into place.

**Joel:** The bottom line is that they’re either going to make something cool or they’re not. It doesn’t really matter where you’re coming from. When you get these deals, they’re not meaningless, because you get a lot of money, but they don’t mean anything about the quality of the work. We’ve seen time and time again that a lot of social media stars do get these deals and then they don’t produce anything, because it’s a much different medium than what they’re good at. Some of them do end up making it and doing really awesome work that I enjoy. I don’t really pay too close attention to where they’re coming from. I’m mostly concerned about what are they making.

**Aline:** I love that answer. I love that.

**Craig:** That was the first good answer we’ve had on this entire podcast, ever.

**Aline:** I think that’s really smart. I think that’s really smart.

**Megan:** I met Bloom from YouTube. She just had uploaded her video. It didn’t have to go through a development program and a, I’m really bashing on men today, but another man and another man named Dave and another man named Brad and another man named Jeff to get to me. The thing that I love about TikTok is it’s people in their living rooms, it’s kids, and it’s not all people dancing. I’m going to talk more about that. I think if you create something great and then you’re put in a larger format and you can make it work for you and it’s something good, people will be judged on what they make, not how they broke in.

**Ike:** People are haters. It’s me and my friends living in a house, making our fucking TikToks. If they don’t like it, fuck off.

**Joel:** There you go.

**Aline:** I see you doing one of those where they come at the camera in a row and they’re dancing, and then one goes this way and the other one goes that way. What do you think?

**Ike:** We love it. We love all of our dances, don’t we, folks? Don’t we love our TikTok dances?

**Aline:** Didn’t Robert Evans just climb out of a swimming pool, and somebody saw him and was like, “Hey, you’re a star, baby.” What’s different about that from TikTok? It’s all the same.

**Craig:** I agree. You know what?. If you’re good at what you do, I don’t think you should be afraid of anybody. I don’t care what the new thing is. It doesn’t matter. If you’re a good writer, it’ll work.

**Aline:** I’m sure you experienced it, but when I worked in TV, developing pilots, they would give you a list of who the network was really into. It would be like, “We’re dying to do a show with this person.” It was always like, why?

**Megan:** Why?

**Aline:** Why? Didn’t it seem like the most random selection process?

**Megan:** Yes.

**Aline:** Then you would be walking around being like, “I’m doing a show for this person. The network really loves them.” Your friends and family would be like, “What?”

**Megan:** “Who?”

**Ike:** They’re talking about Mario Lopez, by the way, in case you’re wondering.

**Aline:** Be like, “He’s so funny in those interviews.”

**John:** Megana, do you have another question for us?

**Megana:** This one’s going to be a Megana question.

**John:** We love a Megana question.

**Craig:** Yay.

**Megana:** It’s a follow-up, because Joel and Ike were talking about social media. What is your take on writers having social media and the idea of building a brand as an emerging writer?

**Craig:** Brand.

**John:** Brand.

**Craig:** Brand.

**Megana:** I know, I set you up for that.

**Craig:** You’re not a person. You’re a thing.

**Joel:** Developing my brand on Twitter is just my fun, flirty way of saying I’m developing a mental illness.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Joel:** Every day, deepening, deepening, deepening every day.

**Aline:** May I say I love you on Twitter though?

**Megan:** Your mental illness is so funny.

**Aline:** It’s a thing. I’ve found a lot of people. That’s how I knew who Joel was to begin with. There are a lot of great… I don’t know. I’m really shilling for the big corporations here.

**Megan:** I don’t think that it’s the thing that’s definitely going to get you a job, but I do know that when I’ve been recommended writers, I tend to Google them, and the first thing that comes up is their social media.

**Ike:** That’s what I was going to say. I would be careful what you tweet.

**Craig:** I think that your answer was perfect. It does feel like if you are aiming for a brand, then you are probably trying to monetize your personality disorder, and you should not do so. You should try and be as authentic as you can possibly be. There’s nothing wrong with that. You don’t have to go crazy. You don’t have to tell everybody everything, because people do that. Calculating a brand, it gives me the willies.

**Aline:** I can’t think of writers who I’m like, “Wow, social media’s killing it.”

**Ike:** Just don’t tweet about other writers, because you might be interviewing them.

**Craig:** Or don’t tweet at all.

**Ike:** That’s another option.

**Megan:** I read that, Ike, what you said about me, by the way.

**Ike:** So sorry. I thought I deleted it. I don’t know how to delete it. Someone needs to show me.

**John:** A question.

**Megana:** “What makes a great elevator pitch?”

**Ike:** It just has to have a pulley system strong enough to lift what’s inside.

**Craig:** I knew it was coming, but I was happy that it happened.

**John:** John Gatins [inaudible 01:19:10] on the stage. We have a microphone. You can share a microphone. You need to pitch something. You have 15 seconds to pitch something to somebody in an elevator situation. What are the crucial things you’re trying to get out there?

**Aline:** Couldn’t be a wronger guy to ask this to. Couldn’t be a wronger guy than John Gatins.

**Megan:** [crosstalk 01:19:25].

**Aline:** Here is one of the things that John has been saying to me for… John and I have known each other since 1997. He’s been retiring since then.

**Craig:** That’s true. That’s fact. That’s fact.

**Aline:** I would say 8 to 10 times a year he’s retiring. The other thing John says all the time is, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” He goes, “I went to the movies. I saw that. I don’t know. I [inaudible 01:19:48] TV. I don’t know. That guy just got made the head of a studio. I don’t know. I don’t know.” It’s actually really great. I’m going to tell you one… I have many, many, many, many, many pearls of wisdom from John Gatins.

**Craig:** “I don’t know.”

**Aline:** One of them is a gift that I have given to many people, which is that John says, “Hollywood remains undefeated.” It is incredible. I wrote that down and hung that up in our office, because it is incredible. So many people look like they’re winning in Hollywood. The car’s about to cross, and then something happens. Hollywood remains undefeated.

Then the other thing that’s actually a helpful tip that I got from John, which is, when you’re upset about something to do with work and something’s really gotten you in the gut, John has this 40-hour rule. We’ll talk about something, and then John goes, “You know what? Call me in 40 hours.” It’s a great amount of time. It’s like the glass and a half of wine. It’s not two days. It’s not two full days.

**Ike:** It’s a workweek.

**Aline:** It’s just enough time for you to… Every time we’ve ever done that and I’ve called him back, I’ve gotten over myself in 40 hour.

**Craig:** Nice.

**Joel:** I think a good elevator pitch elicits-

**Aline:** You wanted us to answer the question?

**John:** Joel, if you’ll answer the question.

**Joel:** I think it should elicit a question. Don’t give it all away in the pitch. It should make the person be like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Why are you talking to me in this elevator? I’m trying to go to my doctor’s office.”

**John:** That’s actually a very good point, because basically, you’re not saying, “Oh, I only have these 15 seconds.” You’re trying to get them to ask the next question that makes it go on longer than that little, short period of time you had. So smart. Megana.

**Megana:** Chad is a storyboard artist, and he says, “In boarding, we have exercises like retro-boarding or watching a movie and pausing and drawing what the storyboard might have looked like. This helps you learn the craft. Anything like this in screenwriting?”

**John:** I think I’ve told this on the podcast before. When I was first trying to figure out what the hell is screenwriting, I would tape an episode of a show, like Star Trek, and I would actually just write what I was seeing, so all the dialog, but also what would the scene look like around that. It’s a thing you can do. It’s free for everybody. It’s just figuring out what would the scene look like underneath that scene. The good thing about the internet now is we can probably look and find the actual scene pages behind that and see how does mine compare to what the actual real screenwriter wrote. You definitely can do that. It’s a thing we can experiment with.

**Megan:** I actually had to do this when I wrote my spec script that got me my first job in TV, because I didn’t go to… I was an English major, so I never took a screenwriting class. Then all of a sudden they told me I needed to write a spec script, and I didn’t know what that was. I watched an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Then I wrote out all the lines of dialog for every scene, and exactly what you’re talking about, and reverse engineered a script. Then I went, “Oh, it’s about 28 pages long. I guess that’s how long scripts are supposed to be.”

**Ike:** Then you use that as your sample.

**Megan:** Then I sew that back in.

**John:** [crosstalk 01:22:55].

**Megan:** They’ve done so many episodes.

**Ike:** It’s not cool.

**Megan:** They couldn’t tell the difference.

**Ike:** Those morons.

**Megan:** They just hired me and I worked.

**Ike:** “She really understands the tone. This script is awesome.”

**Megan:** It was sort of reverse engineering. Then what’s been useful to me after that is that sometimes I will write down more like an outline of what happened to describe what happens in the scene, because all the best TV shows that I love… If you can’t describe what actually happens in the scene, especially comedies… You sometimes get distracted by the jokes. What I try to do is I broom away all the jokes, don’t write down any of the funny stuff that’s happening, just write the nuts and bolts of what’s happening in the scene, because then when I go to sit down and outline my own episodes that I’m writing, it lets me be more honest about is there anything actually happening in the story or is it just funny.

**Craig:** Great.

**Megana:** “What is the smallest hill you’re willing to die on?”

**Aline:** One space after every period in the script.

**John:** Yeah, one space.

**Craig:** Yass.

**Megan:** No.

**Joel:** No.

**Craig:** Bones.

**Megan:** No.

**Craig:** Bones. Bones.

**Ike:** I’ve been broken. I was a two-space guy, and I’ve been broken to the one space.

**Craig:** You should be, because you only need to do one space.

**John:** I look at old scripts of mine that have two spaces, and I’m like, “Who was this person? I can’t recognize him anymore.”

**Craig:** What was this idiot who needed all this extra space to know that the sentence ended? Please.

**John:** The period did that job.

**Craig:** The period does it.

**Megan:** I think we’re all going to Hell because no one knows the difference between fewer and less.

**Craig:** Ever since Game of Thrones made a point of it, I think it’s been coming around. They did a pretty good job.

**John:** It was in there. It was a little [crosstalk 01:24:28].

**Ike:** The word “desperately,” spelling that one. There’s just certain words, I’m just like, my brain cannot spell it. I can’t even think of them right now, but there’s four or five words that I’m just like, “Man, fuck those words.” I can never spell them correctly.

**Craig:** Fuck those words.

**Ike:** How about you?

**Joel:** I would say that Season 10 of Ru Paul’s Drag Race is an underrated season.

**John:** Remind us who the queens were on Season 10.

**Joel:** Season 10, the winner of course was Aquaria, Eureka O’Hara’s second go at it, Asia O’Hara, the butterflies, tragic but iconic, and then of course Kameron Michaels. That’s the smallest hill I’m willing to die on.

**John:** That’s a small hill.

**Craig:** He stole my answer.

**John:** Megana, one more.

**Megana:** “With all the bleak news about mass buy-offs, show cancellations-”

**Joel:** Ending on a high note, cool.

**Megana:** “… decreased box office sales, etc-”

**Ike:** Global warming, hunger.

**Craig:** My cat dying.

**Megana:** “… what can you tell those of us who are working to become working writers that might give us hope about the future of the industry?”

**Craig:** Oh boy, you asked the wrong group of people.

**John:** Hope, hope, hope, hope.

**Craig:** Hope.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Megan, they don’t know.

**Megan:** Sorry.

**Ike:** I think honestly, if you really focus on stories that you think are important and you throw everything into those stories, there’s a chance that you could end up working on Jeff Bezos’s sky raft. If you’re in the sky raft, you will live through the second atomic war. Once you’re up there, I don’t fucking know. I don’t know. Do whatever he says. To get there, really tell the stories that matter to you.

**Aline:** I’m going to give a more sincere answer. I have a production company. I have four wonderful people I work with. They read a lot of stuff. I read stuff after they curate it for me. If you write a great thing, it’s still really, really compelling, just because there’s more stuff, just because it’s harder, just because I think we have a huge problem with breaking people into the business now. It couldn’t be harder. It shouldn’t be so hard. It’s very hard to break in, very hard to earn a living. If you write a great thing, and that’s really what you want to do, a great thing does still really stand out and will get passed along and will be treated with reverence.

**Craig:** Here’s a little bit of hope. The things that you’re reading about are echoes of shit that’s already happened. It’s already old. Sometimes when we talk to people that work at these places, I’m startled by how they’re monomaniacally fixated on what they’re going to be doing in 2026.

The stuff that happens now, it may feel like you’re in the middle of it. You’re actually not. It’s already happened. You don’t actually know what’s going on, because they haven’t shown it to you yet, but it’s happening now. It may very well be that the evidence of things being wiped away and collapsed is already being undermined by things being created in even larger amounts. We just don’t know. We don’t know. Maybe the Netflix ad-supported thing, suddenly all these new shows get made. We just don’t know.

It’s probably best to not pay attention to that stuff, because you can’t control it anyway. It does go up and down. It’s a very cyclical business. If you concentrate on what you love and anything you feel very passionate about that’s unique to you, that’s all you can do. That’s literally all you can do.

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.

**Joel:** Or you can become huge on TikTok.

**Craig:** That’s the other myth.

**Joel:** That’s the other option.

**Craig:** [crosstalk 01:28:25].

**John:** The one other thing I’ll remind people about is that if productions shrink, if we’re not making as many shows, we probably won’t make for a while, if we’re making fewer movies, if you’re an actor, it’s tough, because as an actor, you’re waiting for somebody to cast you in a thing. As a writer, you always have the ability to create your own stuff and find a new way to make that thing. One of the huge advantages of the people on this stage is we can just go off and do a new thing. Do that new thing and figure out where the next place is that you can create some things for the world. That’s the luxury of being a writer. It’s what sucks about being a writer is we have to do all our own stuff. We have to be entrepreneurs, but we can just do our thing whenever we need to do our thing.

**Joel:** Entertainment is democratized in a way it’s never been before. Maybe there are less opportunities to make a shit ton of money doing writing. There’s also a million opportunities and ways to put out your work now. You can take that screenplay and make it a podcast. It’s so easy to do that now. It can get out to as many people as you can get it to. You just might not make as much money.

**Craig:** I don’t know, those guys just sold their podcast, what’d you say, for $75 million?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We gotta get that.

**John:** We made a book. We’re starting, Craig. [crosstalk 01:29:33]. That’s our show. [inaudible 01:29:37].

**Craig:** That was a great show. That was a great show.

**John:** We have some people we need to thank. We need to start off by thanking Hollywood Heart, Jessica Martins, Sarah Eagen, everyone at Hollywood Heart, our own John Gatins.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Also apparently UTA for their support. Hollywood Heart, everybody.

**Craig:** Of course, we would like to say thank you to all the volunteers who helped make tonight possible, and of course everybody who showed up here in person and online. We appreciate you.

**John:** There’s people watching the livestream. Hi, livestream people.

**Craig:** Hello, folks.

**John:** I want to thank Dynasty Typewriter for hosting us. This is just an ideal venue. This was great. This is terrific. Thank you very much for making this all possible here at Dynasty Typewriter.

**Aline:** Air conditioning in here slaps.

**John:** I love it. It’s so good. Jerome Kurtenbach on piano!

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** As always, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Yay! We are the least popular things in our own show. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**John:** Matthew! Thank you all. Have a great night!

**Craig:** Woo! Thank you guys. Thank you for coming. Woo!

**John:** Yay! Thank you so much!

Links:

* Learn more and donate to [Hollywood Heart!](https://www.hollywoodheart.org/)
* [Joel Kim Booster](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5527841/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/ihatejoelkim) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/ihatejoelkim/?hl=en)
* [Ike Barinholtz](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0054697/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/ikebarinholtz), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/ikebarinholtz/), and [Celebrity Jeopardy!](https://www.instagram.com/p/CjwlUK4ITxt/)
* [Megan Ganz](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3836955) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/meganganz) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/meganganz/)
* [Aline Brosh McKenna]() on [Twitter]() and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/abmck/)
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/571.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

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

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

Craig: Oh boy, do I.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Segue Man.

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

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

John: Tell me.

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

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

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

John: Wow.

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

John: Great.

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

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

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

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

Craig: I go to IMDb.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: That would be copyright violations out the wazoo.

Craig: Really?

John: Yeah, it is.

Craig: Why?

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

Craig: Really?

John: Yeah, you really would.

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

John: Yep.

Craig: Your credits don’t belong to IMDb.

John: Absolutely true.

Craig: Why can’t I do that?

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

Craig: Really?

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

Craig: What? What copyright information?

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

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

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

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

John: Webster.

Craig: Or a Webster attorney.

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

Craig: Oh my God.

John: Webster, the little-

Craig: Please can we go back to 1987-

John: Emmanuel Lewis.

Craig: …and write the Webster attorney show?

John: Oh my God, so good.

Craig: Webster at law.

John: So good.

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

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

Craig: There we go. Emmanuel Lewis-

John: Emmanuel Lewis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: There we go.

John: There you go.

Craig: There we go.

John: Speaking of keeping people in the ecosystem-

Craig: Segue Man.

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

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

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

John: They subscrobe.

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

John: It totally could be a word.

Craig: They subscrobe to Netflix.

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

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

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

Craig: They do.

John: … Squid Game.

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

John: It’s part of Disney.

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

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

Craig: There you go.

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

Craig: You mean local to different areas like-

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: There you go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: We’re in real trouble.

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

John: It is crazy what that-

Craig: What’s that about?

John: Residuals. Residuals, man.

Craig: It’s residuals.

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

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

John: Not at all.

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

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

Craig: Great.

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

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

Craig: Such a good question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: We do that always.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: No.

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

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

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

Craig: Exactly.

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

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

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

Craig: That’s right.

John: That’s really crucial too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Yeah, it could.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: She did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: An ad, usually.

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

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

John: That’s great.

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

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

Craig: What?

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

Craig: Which ones?

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

Craig: I thought that was The Nines.

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

Craig: Pre-Go.

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

Craig: Was that when you were in school?

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

Craig: It was called God?

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

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

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

Craig: I will.

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

Craig: God.

John: God.

Craig: God, writing it down.

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

Craig: It’s a pilot.

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

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

John: 100%.

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

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

Craig: I have.

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

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

John: So broken?

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

John: Great.

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

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

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

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

Craig: Oh, that Dan Green.

John: That’s Dan Green.

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

John: He’s still happily married.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: They have a kid.

Craig: Wonderful.

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

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

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

Craig: You know it.

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

Craig: Thank you.

Megana: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, do you suffer from nightmares?

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

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

Megana: Oh yeah.

John: Are you a nightmare person.

Craig: Megana is such a nightmare person.

John: A nightmare person.

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

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

Craig: Megana is really easily startled.

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

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

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

John: “Tell me about feelings.”

Craig: “How do they function?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: I have not.

John: I’ve had it.

Megana: I have had it a couple of times.

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

Craig: Gurgling scream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: That’s me.

Megana: Just recording us screaming.

Craig: That’s me watching.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Of course.

John: I see him chasing and barking.

Craig: So cute. Little twitches.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: You were validating her feelings.

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

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

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

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

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

Megana: I see. I see.

Craig: God, you’re a nightmare person.

John: Thank you both.

Craig: Thanks.

John: Bye.

Megana: Bye.

Craig: Bye.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

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

**Craig Mazin:** Standards and Practices has informed us that we have violated a certain number of rules, including use of bad language that may be inappropriate, in fact is inappropriate for your children, so earmuffs, guys, or just listen to it when they’re not around.

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name’s John August.

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

**John:** This is Episode 556 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, Craig is back, literally back, not edited together from episodes dating back 10 years.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** We have so much to talk about, from movies to gun to created by credits. We’ll also answer listener questions that have been stacking up for months.

**Craig:** Yes, please. I apologize, I’m a bit raspy. Hopefully, this comes across as maybe perhaps-

**John:** No, it doesn’t at all.

**Craig:** … compatible with Sexy Craig.

**John:** Mildly ill, yeah.

**Craig:** John, you’re not ill. There’s nothing wrong with this. Don’t kink-shame my voice.

**John:** Oh yeah, so that’s how you’re going to spin it around.

**Craig:** I’m going to spin it around. Sexy Craig loves to spin it around. Sexy Craig had to come back because my voice is a little shot. We’ve gone through whatever was nearly a year of production. I’m back home. I am whatever beyond exhausted is, whatever that state of mind is, but ready to reengage my number one pursuit, podcast making-

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** … because I love podcasts.

**John:** We’re going to get through all those topics. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’re going to discuss penmanship apparently, because this topic was chosen by our producer, Megana Rao, who I suspect just-

**Craig:** Has excellent penmanship.

**John:** I’m also making fun of you.

**Craig:** She can make fun of both of us, my friend.

**John:** At times I can write very neatly, but it just doesn’t stick.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Nope. Craig, while you’ve been gone, actually an update, the Scriptnotes book is actually going really well.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We’ve actually done a lot of work on it these past couple weeks. We’ve done a deep dive, which we sent out to all those folks who subscribed to get the updates on things. We did a deep dive on Frozen, which was an episode that Aline and I had done.

**Craig:** Oh yes, I remember it, with Jennifer Lee.

**John:** It turned out great. It was our first time testing what a deep dive chapter would feel like.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** A bunch of the interview ones done. Megana, you’re working on a chapter right now for group dynamics?

**Megana Rao:** Yes, on relationships in team movies and two-handers.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** That was actually based on… Two weeks ago our episode was a clip show that we put together. It ended up being a really good clip show with the two of us. That’s basically a chapter right there.

**Craig:** Honestly, we could probably put together 400 clip shows from the 500 shows we’ve done.

**John:** We’ve done a few while you’ve been gone.

**Craig:** You know what? Mix and match. There’s nothing wrong with that. When we were young, television would occasionally just-

**John:** Happens all the time.

**Craig:** You know what? It’s not new tonight. It’s a show that literally aired three months ago. Everyone was excited.

**John:** Also had the literal clip shows where it was like, remember that time we went and did this thing? That was a great time.

**Craig:** Yep, you get stuck in an elevator, you start remembering stuff.

**John:** You remember just a little bit. The Clerks animated TV show did not last for very long, but the first episode was a clip show, which I did respect.

**Craig:** Cute.

**John:** It was a good, fun idea. Updates on the book. I had said originally 2022. That’s not going to happen. We have a proposal that’s out now to our agent. We’re going to try to find a good publisher for the book.

**Craig:** What would you say the price is? Are we going to charge $300, $400 for this thing?

**John:** I think so, based on all of the work going into it. Each one is hand sewn. It’s going to be-

**Craig:** Big margins.

**John:** Big margins. Big margins for this book.

**Craig:** We’ve arrived.

**John:** It’s going to be good. Craig, not only are you back, movies are back.

**Craig:** Movies are back.

**John:** Movies are back.

**Craig:** They are back.

**John:** Big box office this past couple weeks.

**Craig:** It’s interesting. They’re back-ish. When Top Gun: Maverick comes out, it’s like the old days. It’s smashing Memorial Day weekend records. There have been big movies that have been coming out, but they are a very specific kind of movie, and there are not a lot of them. It used to be that on Memorial Day there would be two or three of these mega airliners smashing into each other and competing for this crazy week. It would go on for a few weeks. Now it’s like, oh my god, a movie. Then everybody goes, “Remember that?” I guess Jurassic Park, sort of.

**John:** Jurassic Park was probably the best example of… Top Gun was still able to hold on, while Jurassic Park did huge numbers as well. We’ll see whether we’re getting back into that groove. It’s also been nice to see Everything Everywhere All at Once doing great and just keeps trucking along.

**Craig:** That movie.

**John:** Delightful.

**Craig:** I can’t wait.

**John:** We’ve tried to get Daniels on to join us, and it’s just been a scheduling-

**Craig:** We’re going to get at least a Daniel. I don’t care. It has to happen.

**John:** Either one.

**Craig:** I love that movie so much.

**John:** So, so good. Craig, let’s talk about guns in Hollywood. This past week, a bunch of Hollywood creators signed a petition. I saw Shonda Rhimes. I saw Judd Apatow. Some of their statement with this open letter says, “As American storytellers, our goal is primarily to entertain. We also acknowledge that stories have a power to affect change. Cultural attitudes towards smoking, drunk driving, seat belts, and marriage equality have all evolved due in large part to movies’ and TV’s influence. It’s time to take on gun safety. We’re not asking anyone to stop showing guns on screen. We’re asking writers, directors, producers to be mindful of on-screen gun violence and model gun safety best practices. Let’s use our collective power for good.” An open letter. Craig, what’s your first instinct on this?

**Craig:** They solved it. We’re saved.

**John:** I have mixed feelings. I will say that going back to the episode we did about the Sideways effect and cigarette smoking, I do think stopping showing cigarette smoking on screen did have some impact in what people are doing to smoke cigarettes. The counter-example I have with guns though is that American movies are seen all over the world, and no one has the same gun violence problem that we do. It’s not the movies. It’s the guns.

**Craig:** In fact, I think it’s a very dangerous thing to suggest that it’s the movies. The issue with smoking is millions of Americans smoke. Millions of Americans do not murder each other with guns, although sometimes it feels like it. It’s a very rare and random thing that happens from time to time. When it does, the presence of a gun exacerbates someone’s terrible state of mind, and we have this awful violence. This is a uniquely American phenomenon, because for instance, certain states let 18-year-olds have assault rifles, which is insane.

We can’t impact millions of Americans with this, because millions of Americans happily are not murdering each other in the street with guns. Gun violence is not a function of movies. Nobody who shoots up a school or shoots up a supermarket or shoots up a post office is doing so because they watched a movie and got excited. No one. The premise is actually quite dangerous, I think. I think it feeds into this terrible narrative that we’ve always struggled to grasp at. You know what used to cause gun violence and things like that? Heavy metal. Then it was video games. Now it’s movies. It’s none of that.

You’re absolutely right to point out… In the UK for instance, there was a terrible school shooting in the ’80s in Scotland. The United Kingdom’s response, so, so sane, was to ban guns. There has not been such a school shooting since. They have all the same movies that we have. There’s plenty of gun violence there. I think that drama is always going to show extreme things. We’re allowed to murder people. Apparently, we can cut their throats. We can stab them in the head. We can have Jason walk around and hatchet teenagers.

This is a bit like… In reaction to the emergence of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, the porn industry was like, “Maybe everyone wear condoms.” Everyone was like, “We don’t want to watch that so much,” and then they didn’t, because movies are not reality. We actually understand that. We didn’t start wearing seat belts because of movies. We started wearing seat belts because there was a law, and we’d get a pretty sizeable ticket. Plus, it also made sense.

**John:** I want to make sure we’re not straw manning them here, because they’re not saying as a factor of gun violence. It’s a cultural attitude towards guns. I do think that there is a possibility that the way we portray guns in movies and television has an influence in how Americans perceive guns and the problems of guns and the utility of guns to solve problems.

I’ll give you an example. On the first Charlie’s Angels movie, one of the things Drew and I discussed from the very start is the Angels don’t use guns. There just are no guns. There are no guns in our movie. An Angel will never touch a gun. That was an important distinction at the start. Therefore, we’re going to have to find other ways to do the things you would otherwise do with a gun. That was helpful for that movie. Is it going to work for all movies? No, but I think sometimes asking that question from the start, of does a gun need to be in this scene or in this moment could lead to some good, better solutions.

**Craig:** It’s always a creative question. Putting the gun debate aside, it’s a very important creative question. What sort of violence does this character commit? Very famously, Batman doesn’t use guns. What Batman does do is severely beat his victims, to the point where they are probably likely going to be permanently brain damaged, whereas perhaps just shooting them in the shin would’ve helped, made their life a little bit better afterwards. That’s a Batman thing, doesn’t use guns. Superman doesn’t need to use guns because he can throw a meteorite at your face. Other characters do.

I don’t think that the discussion should be within the context of actual gun violence in the street, because if I think about a movie that glorifies gun use, John Wick comes to mind. John Wick is fun, and it’s insane. It’s crazy, posits a world where there is a hotel for hit men, where they have hit men tailors and whatever they do in there. Nobody’s John Wicking around. I can’t think of something that glorifies gun use more. There’s all sorts of things that are… You know what’s glorious on film? Drinking. We show people drinking all the time on film. Drinking is a poison that kills a lot of people. More people die every year from drinking than from gun violence, but we love it because it’s fun and because it’s the movies. It’s fake. It’s fiction.

**John:** Again, I want to make sure that we’re not escaping what they’re actually trying to do here, because they’re also talking about gun safety culture, like showing characters who do have guns actually locking them up or doing them safely. There are small things I think that could help.

**Craig:** I don’t see how that helps. I don’t see watching a movie where a guy puts a gun in a safe and closes it is going to make anybody else in the world think, “Oh, I should get a safe for this.” We all know. It’s like with smoking. Prior to smoking being removed from a lot of movies, there were warnings on every single pack of cigarettes for as long as you and I have been alive that said, “Don’t do this. It’s going to kill you.” We all know it’s going to kill us. Any reasonable person understands that you should keep guns out of the hands of children or people who should not have guns in their hands. Every reasonable person knows that they should be locked up. What I do think is good is to show people… For instance, when you show people using guns in shows or movies, and they are somebody that has picked up a gun before, they should hold it correctly. Keep your finger off the trigger. Keep the barrel down. Don’t do stupid things like pointing it sideways. Then again, some characters are knuckleheads and that’s what they do. That’s part of the stupidity of it. Have you seen Barry?

**John:** I’ve seen Barry, yeah.

**Craig:** This year, there was a moment-

**John:** There was a moment where two characters who decided they were going to use a gun to do violence should never have been sold a gun.

**Craig:** Correct. That was an interesting commentary on gun violence, because they are having a discussion about taking revenge and murdering somebody, and then it is revealed they are having that discussion right in front of a gun salesman, who says, “So are you taking it?” They say, “Yes.” He’s like, “Great.” He gives them the gun. Somewhat predictably, they end up injuring themselves, because they’re bad at gun use. That is an interesting commentary on guns. That’s within a show where a guy is constantly killing people with guns and never locks it up. I think it felt to me like its heart was in the right place. We all want to do something. I think Hollywood tends to believe that it is more culturally powerful than it is when it comes to certain things. We are more of a mirror than a projector.

**John:** Here’s as far as I’ll meet you is that I do worry that sometimes making the statement or saying we’re going to do this thing on our side is taking the pressure off of the actual people who need to affect the changes, which are lawmakers, because it was not just cigarettes not being shown in movies that affected the change. It was you can’t smoke in restaurants. We made it much harder to smoke.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** If we make it much harder to-

**Craig:** Get guns.

**John:** …own a gun, get a gun, use it improperly, yes.

**Craig:** From the beginning, one of the most popular Hollywood genres was the Western. In the Western, people shot each other constantly. That was the thing. There was rifles and handguns. They would swing the guns around. They would bring them in places and shoot each other in the streets. There were not mass shooting incidences in the ’50s and ’60s. One notorious one in Texas, and we still talk about it. If that happened today, it would be news for about an hour. The presence of the gun in our culture has always been there. The availability of guns for anyone, including the mentally ill or the angry or the young and brain not completed, therein is clearly, without question, the 99.9% contributing factor to our situation today.

**John:** We will not solve the problem of gun violence in America, but I think you and I may actually be able to achieve some closures or some real consensus on this next thing, which is a piece of follow-up. We talked about what is that page after the cover page before the script starts. It’s an interstitial page. Interstitial may be a good word for it. We asked our listeners for submissions about what they think that page should be called. I am going to read these aloud. I want your honest feeling about each of them. We may ultimately do a poll or something, but I want to hear you react first. Prescript.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Page 0.

**Craig:** Terrible.

**John:** Declaration page.

**Craig:** Outrageous.

**John:** Ancillary page.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Preface page.

**Craig:** Uck.

**John:** Epigraph page.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Dedication page.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Notes page.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Dramatis personae.

**Craig:** Get out of here.

**John:** Front matter.

**Craig:** Front matter just sounds disgusting.

**John:** This is from Icelandic. Sourbla [ph].

**Craig:** Perhaps in Iceland.

**John:** Elias sent that through for us. You liked epigraph most. I like preface most. Talk to me about why epigraph.

**Craig:** That’s what it is. That was the word-

**John:** In a book, it was.

**Craig:** That’s what I was trying to remember and I couldn’t. It was somewhere way back in my head. Epigraph is exactly the description that we have for that is the graph on top of epi. That is a perfect description of that page. Preface, it’s true. The problem is preface has its own meaning, which is a full chapter that is an introductory forward or something like that.

**John:** I get that. I feel like most people don’t know what an epigraph is.

**Craig:** Let’s teach them.

**John:** Otherwise, everyone gets the sense a preface comes before the thing starts.

**Craig:** Sure. I think we have the power, as we just know. That’s what I want to do. Let’s just put out our own competing thing, get as many of our friends to sign it, saying this thing really should be called the epigraph. Let’s stop calling it that weird page between the cover and the next thing. Let’s see if we can change the world.

**John:** After this episode comes out, we will officially poll the world and see if we can get people to come on board with one of these things. I feel like it’s going to be probably preface or epigraph. I also kind of like Page 0, but it also makes it feel like you’re going to number that Page 0.

**Craig:** Page 0 sounds pretty intense. That sounds like it could be a title of a movie. Look, I’ll accept any of them except front matter. That just sounds dirty.

**John:** Yeah, or it sounds like a brain thing. It’s like, oh, he has damage to his front matter.

**Craig:** Right, or it just implies that there’s back matter. I don’t want it.

**John:** A notes page feels like it comes at the end of a script to me.

**Craig:** Yes, or put notes on it. These aren’t notes.

**John:** No, they’re not notes. We have a question from Mark about Obi-Wan Kenobi’s created by credit. Megana, can you help us out with that?

**Megana:** Mark writes, “In Episode 552, you talked about the writing credits on Elvis and everything that went into the decisions to credit it the way that they did. In a similar vein, I wanted to ask why there’s no created by credit on the Disney Plus series Obi-Wan Kenobi. It’s my understanding that the writer of the first episode is usually considered the creator, but both of the first two episodes have story by and teleplay by credits in addition to the based on Star Wars by George Lucas credit, which has become standard since Disney bought Lucasfilm, and no creator credit. Is this more common than I think it is or is there some kind of weird possible IP-based reason why there isn’t a creator credit?”

**Craig:** There may very well be. My understanding is that when you’re talking about an adaptation, created by is in play if the adaptation is sufficiently different from the source material, if you’re directly adapting a preexisting storyline. I haven’t seen the Obi-Wan Kenobi show.

**John:** It’s based on things that exist, but there’s a whole new storyline. It’s not a remake of a thing.

**Craig:** It’s not from, for instance, a comic or a novelization or something like that. If you’re adapting something in a very close manner to what was there before, then there may be a rule about created by not being in play. My personal opinion is that the Writers Guild shouldn’t be in the business of taking created by away from anybody. I think it should be always available. It should always be there. I don’t really see what’s the point of limiting it, particularly if there’s not an argument about it. I ran into a weird thing with that on Chernobyl. Originally, HBO submitted the credits and said created by Craig Mazin, and the Writers Guild initially came back and said you can’t have created by because you’re only five episodes.

**John:** That’s right, you told me that.

**Craig:** Created by requires you to have six episodes. I was like, “Guys, it’s just me.”

**John:** No one else.

**Craig:** There’s no other writer that has been hired on this show. One writer is employed: me. You’re just taking away from me. It was going to be six episodes. We just collapsed it during production into five. They were like, “No, sorry, that’s the rule.” I was like, “Now I have to try and get a waiver.” I think at that point they were like, “Just give it to him.”

**John:** I just looked it up. Obi-Wan Kenobi has six credits, so that, it wasn’t the issue. I do wonder if there’s a thing about… There were multiple writers on it. I think there may have been multiple writers doing different things at different times. It may have been an arbitration credit to get to where we even were for the pilot credits. That makes it harder to get a created by credit.

**Craig:** I readily admit that when we get questions about feature credits, I have 100% confidence that I know what I’m talking about. Television credits, weird, but again, I don’t have a writers’ room, so it doesn’t come up, but I have 70% confidence in my answer.

**John:** The related credit you’ll often see in television is developed by, which is when it’s coming off of a piece of IP, but you don’t get a created by credit. We’re going to be comfortable in our not knowing the full answer here. You are doing more TV. I’m going to be doing more TV. We’re going to learn this. Check in in 10 years and we’ll be experts on these credits.

**Craig:** Or even a month.

**John:** Even a month. Let’s get to some listener questions. Megana, I hope you have your voice rested, because there’s a lot of questions to get through.

**Megana:** I do. We have Nile from Hong Kong, who asks, “How do you handle repetitive actions such as a military character enters and stands to attention? My current screenplay has quite a few ‘stands to attentions.’ I’ve tried variations, starting the scene later, adding a distraction, and even hanging a lantern on it, but I still have three more ‘stands to attentions’ than I want.”

**John:** I suspect you don’t actually need to have those “stands to attentions,” because at a certain point, we just get when a character comes into the scene, they’re going to have to do that. You don’t need to call it out every time. That’s my guess.

**Craig:** I’m a little concerned that you have that many soldiers entering and standing to attention period.

**John:** That’s a lot of walking in rooms.

**Craig:** It may be a sign that there’s just a lot of times where somebody walks into a room and goes wah. Are they saluting? Are they just bah? You can also get away sometimes with assuming that they’re standing to attention for the same person, like let’s say General Smith. You could say, “So-and-so enters the room, stands to attention in front of General Smith, as everyone always does,” and then you know this generally is going to happen.

**John:** Yeah, just because if you have people doing the kinds of stuff that they’re going to be doing in the world of your movie, you just don’t have to call it out all the time. In Top Gun, they’re not talking about how they’re doing stuff on the plane each time. Probably the first time in the script it’s mentioned, you’re seeing it, but then you’re not acknowledging it every other time.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can establish your routine as a routine, let us know that it is a routine, and then move along.

**Megana:** I think this is an interesting followup. Jonathan asks, “In your recent episode on entrances and exits, you mention that we don’t need to see people enter and exit places, yet in the show Severance it shows the subjects walking from place to place throughout a large portion of the show. Why do you think this works?”

**John:** I think it works really well in Severance. My guess is why it works so well in Severance is this is a show about characters being trapped in a place they cannot get out of. They’re in a very small environment. It works for them to always be walking from one point to another point. They’re always under surveillance. It feels right in the continuity of that show. My guess is that you see a lot more entrances and exits in an office world than you do outside, is that you’re seeing characters enter into spaces more down there than outside. I think there’s probably a good contrast there.

**Craig:** All we were saying is you don’t need to. We weren’t saying you shouldn’t or that it’s bad. It’s just that you don’t feel that you are obligated to show people enter or exit spaces. If there’s a purpose, whether it’s thematic or because the space is really interesting, do it. I write entrances and exits all the time.

**John:** I would say that show also has a lot of things that are happening in doorways, because you’re always in between two different spaces. It feels really natural that you’re just going to show somebody coming in and going out of that space. I would say definitely not trying to have a blanket prohibition on entrances and exits, but always look at a scene and say, wait, do I actually need to have this character walk in here, because I think so often, especially new screenwriters are treating it like a play, where everyone has to enter into the scene, do the work of the scene, and then leave the scene. The magic of movies is you don’t.

**Craig:** Exactly. We’re just saying ask the question.

**John:** Cool.

**Megana:** Alex from Manchester asks, “I’m in the middle of planning a short screenplay set in early 19th century Wales. While I’m happy with the overall premise, I can’t help but feel I’m damaging the integrity of the story by writing the film in English, as during this time, little to no one would’ve spoken English. Should this be a genuine worry or shall I plow on, incorporating the Welsh language where possible and in small doses to help hold up its overall integrity?”

**John:** I don’t know what I would do.

**Craig:** I know what I did.

**John:** Absolutely. People, they spoke, quote unquote, Russian.

**Craig:** Yes. People spoke English. They spoke English just like Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in not Danish but English. Alex is perfectly free to write this story not in Welsh, a beautiful but notoriously difficult language to speak, and very few people understand it. You’d right away be limiting your actor pool quite significantly. Again, it’s for an audience. The language to me is not where all of the beautiful detail is. If you get the clothing and the hair and the places and the props right, if you get the attitude, if you get the philosophy and the history correct, the language is just part of the regular artifice of recreating life through art. I don’t see any reason why you should feel obligated to try and write this in a language that I doubt you speak. Don’t make them sound like they’re from Manchester, because that would be hysterical but wrong.

**John:** A thing Alex may run into is that if everyone is, they’re speaking English, but we know they’re actually really supposed to be speaking Welsh, and he has to have a scene where some English speaker comes into that situation, that can be complicated. That’s the Hunt for Red October problem.

**Craig:** Exactly. England and the English language gives you such a great gift here. There is a Welsh accent in English. Lots of ells. It’s lovely. It would be good if the actors spoke English with a Welsh accent. Similarly, when the king is discussing how to put down the rebellion in Wales, he should be rather posh and kingly in his speech, RP and all that. There are wonderful regional accents that they can always pull from, especially if you’re making a film in the UK about a section of the UK. Try and get that accent right. Then again, they made Braveheart.

**John:** I was going to say Braveheart, that’s in English.

**Craig:** Everyone’s all over the place. Half of them are Irish. One of them’s American, so you know.

**John:** You know. I would say also, Alex, watch House of Gucci.

**Craig:** Don’t do that.

**John:** Watch House of Gucci, because those characters, they are Italian, but they’re speaking English. Sometimes they speak Italian. Sometimes they’ll say things like… In English they’ll say, “What’s the word for… ” It’s like, you’re speaking Italian right now.

**Craig:** Plus, they also vaguely sounded like vampires. It did not help that story. I agree with you. I really struggle when they just try too hard with the language. I do feel like well-trained actors from the United Kingdom will be able to do a Welsh accent with some training. There are wonderful dialect coaches that work with folks in the UK all the time.

**John:** Cool.

**Megana:** This is a quick question for Craig. Cuber Dad asks, “Do you like Rubik’s cubes? Where do they rank on your puzzle solving scale? I got one for my son and finally learned how to solve it in my 40s. Am I wrong to think that cubing and writing share some similarities? Trying to crack an algorithm on a cube feels like working through a difficult part of a script, turning a scene one way, then sideways, then back on itself, or perhaps I’m straining this metaphor.”

**Craig:** You are straining this metaphor.

**John:** You are definitely.

**Craig:** Writing is like a Rubik’s cube with so many pieces that no one can learn the algorithm, and it’s constantly changing anyway, because what you consider to be success with the Rubik’s cube, which is finite, is not success with writing. Nobody knows what success is with writing until you get there. No, they are not related. I do not know how to solve a Rubik’s cube. My script supervisor, Chris Roofs [ph], excellent Rubik’s cube solver. Bella Ramsey, excellent Rubik’s cube solver. The two of them would solve it, and then I would come and mix it up. That was my job. Could I learn? Yes. There is a method. You can learn it. That is the very reason I don’t want to, because once you learn it, you can pick up any Rubik’s cube that has been scrambled to any extent and within a few minutes, solve it, because you are essentially being a robot. That said, I do like watching them solve it.

**John:** It’s fun to watch. My daughter learned how to solve a Rubik’s cube while we were in Paris. For two or three years, she was solving it. Now it sits on a shelf. She’s never going to solve it again. It was useful in its time. There is a good Rubik’s cube movie. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

**Craig:** A documentary.

**John:** A documentary.

**Craig:** It’s lovely.

**John:** Great, but it’s not really about Rubik’s cubes. It’s about this relationship between these solvers and this one kid.

**Craig:** It’s about the autism spectrum more than anything. I think it’s gorgeous. Beautiful movie. I will say that level of solving is astonishing to me, where it’s not about solving your Rubik’s cube, it’s about seeing just how fast can the brain go, not only to know what should be done, but also to make the fingers do it. For these kids to blindfold themselves and solve a Rubik’s cube in 30 seconds is just astonishing to watch.

**Megana:** Ray in the Midwest asks, “I’m the main writer on a genre indie film coming out later this year with an Academy Award actor as one of the leads. On top of that, my representation is currently shopping three to four different genre scripts of mine that are getting interest. I parlayed this writing momentum into finally getting permission to adapt one of my dream projects after pursuing it for more than a decade. It’s a comic book property. I took it to my representation, thinking it could be a game-changer, which it was for a bit. Suddenly, they now have a major studio screenwriter who’s shown interest in the property and pitching it as a major studio tent pole, which means that I would not be the screenwriter on my dream project. However, I would still be on board as a producer, which my reps told me would be far more valuable than me writing my dream project at the indie level. I’ve dreamt about writing this movie for over 12 years, and I’m wrestling with what is the best approach here. I’m obviously in no position to get this made as a major studio tent pole like the other writer, but the project is incredibly important to me. I always want to be a team player, because this industry’s all about collaboration. My question is, is it more valuable to my career moving forward to write and maintain creative involvement even if the movie is at the indie level like 2 million or below, or to be a producer with very little input on the potential $50 million or more?”

**Craig:** There’s a girl you’ve been chasing for years. You finally get that chance, and then your best friend says, “You know what would be even better than sleeping with her? That guy sleeping with her.”

**John:** I feel really bad for Ray. I have had similar conversations with friends who have been in situations like this, where they had the take, they had the thing, and they were about to get the job, and then some big screenwriter, not me… There have been conversations where I’ve been the person who’s come in to be that big screenwriter. I feel bad for the Rays who I didn’t even know about who were involved in things. My hunch is that so far you have an indie coming out, which is great. You have this other thing you want to adapt. You want to do it as an indie. If it really wants to be a bigger property and you’re not going to be able to swing it, take the producer credit, learn how a big movie gets made. Learn how all the gears go together and grind things down into frustrating pulps. Then focus on doing other stuff, because you have other projects, other irons in the fire, as you said in the first paragraph, different genre scripts. Use those to be your indie calling cards. Use this to be a lesson about how to make a big movie.

**Craig:** You’re implying that you have a choice. I’m not quite sure how that is. If you do have a choice, then my feeling is write it. You know how to do it at a certain level. You believe you do. You should do it. If there is no choice, I’m not really sure what the question is anyway. This is happening.

**John:** Yeah, because he doesn’t control the IP it doesn’t look like.

**Craig:** What I would say is make your peace with it. John’s absolutely right. It’s a great chance to see something big get put together. It’s a wonderful opportunity to see something destroyed that you love, which everybody should experience in Hollywood at least-

**John:** I’ve had a few of those.

**Craig:** … 7 or 18 times. One thing I just want to be clear about, your reps are absolutely full of shit. This is not good. That producing credit will mean zero. There is in movies one producing credit that means something, and it is produced by. The rest aren’t going to mean anything. They’re going to give you co-producer or, God forbid, associate producer. Do not settle for that. Even if it’s executive producer, it doesn’t matter, because everybody will know who produced the movie, and everybody will know who wrote the movie. We all know. Don’t get swayed by that. It will accrue to a zero benefit for you.

**John:** Last week on the show we had Michael Waldron on. He was talking about he went to Pepperdine for film school. I was trying to drill him. I tried to be Craig here and say, “What did you really get out of it? Was it worth your time? Was it worth your money?” It was clear that he treated it as like, “I’m going to treat every day like it’s my job. I’m going to absolutely kill everything that comes my way. I’m just going to really approach it like that.” If this could be Ray’s film school, where it’s like, “Listen, I know that my producer credit’s not going to mean anything, just like my screenwriting degree is not going to mean anything, but I am going to learn the shit out of things every day on this process and I’m going to stay involved on those conversations,” that’s going to be really helpful for you.

**Craig:** You’ll have to fight your way into it.

**John:** You will.

**Craig:** You may think that, “Oh, I’m a producer on this.” They’re like, “No, you’re not.”

**John:** Craig and I have been producers on things we’ve barely touched.

**Craig:** Enjoy your two tickets to the premier, sitting way, way in the back.

**John:** Ray, congratulations that you have a movie coming out with good people. It sounds like things are going pretty well here. Just don’t take the negative of this one thing not going quite the way you hoped as a sign that everything is doom.

**Craig:** Lay in wait, because that big screenwriter may fall on his or her face. Happens all the time. Then you can step up and be like, “I know what to do.”

**Megana:** Nathan in Nashville asks, “I’ve been stumped for a few weeks on a new spec I’m writing. I have the gist of the story worked out in a broad outline. I know all the major set pieces, including the ending. However, something feels off with the logic. I feel like I’m trying to force a puzzle piece into a hole that’s a 95% match. It might even seem to fit to the untrained eye, but doesn’t lock perfectly into place. For context, it’s a sci-fi script, but if Michel Gondry and the Muppets had total creative control. In other words, the rigorous logic needed for audience buy-in is much closer to the Swedish chef cooking with singing food than it is to Anthony Rapp navigating a star ship through a multidimensional network of interstellar fungi. Even still, I feel stuck. Do you have any tips for working yourself out of this predicament? I keep trying to write around the problem and solve it in a second draft, but the fact that the story logic isn’t perfect keeps niggling around in my brain and stopping that progress. I just can’t find that perfect fit.”

**Craig:** You got to pay attention to that.

**John:** Something’s wrong.

**Craig:** There is no piece fitting 95%.

**John:** I can tell you as a person who solves jigsaw puzzles, there’s no such thing as a 95% piece.

**Craig:** Not a puzzle.

**John:** I am the person who’s qualified to answer this thing talking about puzzle pieces. I’m going to say if it’s a near fit, it is a misfit. It’s not actually going to work. You’re going to bend the edges of that puzzle piece. Only pain is going to follow.

**Craig:** You will not be able to reassemble your broken picture. I will say that you need to solve this problem. You cannot write your way around it. You can’t cover it with words. You can’t pour structure over it, all that stuff. You think that the untrained eye might not notice it. Everyone will notice it. It will be glaring the whole time. Think of how many times you walked out of a movie complaining that something didn’t make sense. You have to solve it. This is very hard. This is a hard, hard thing to do.

I always think of this line, I’m sure I said this before, from Searching for Bobby Fischer, where this little kid is sitting there, eight-year-old chess prodigy, but he’s learning from a grandmaster played by Ben Kingsley. He’s laid out this arrangement of pieces for the kid. He says, “You can get to checkmate in 10 moves. How?” The kid’s just staring. He goes, “I don’t see it.” He says, “Don’t move until you see it.” “I don’t see it.” “Don’t move until you see it.” “I don’t see it.” Then he whacks all the pieces away, and the chessboard is empty. Then the kid looks at it. Then he has it in his mind. Then he sees it. Then it’s glorious.

I would say to you, in terms of writing, don’t move until you see it. Solve the problem in your head. It’s often way more elegant than you think. You will go through all these, and I do this all the time, these torturous machinations, because you think you’re hunting for this elusive, complicated formula. You’re not. You’re looking for E equals MC squared. You’re looking for something so fundamentally simple that when you see it, you’ll know.

**John:** My hunch is that you’re going to find the solution is not by adding something, but by taking some things away, and probably by taking away some things earlier on, because you’re trying to stack things up to fit a certain way. If you just take that piece out, oh, that was the thing that was causing the wrinkle in the carpet. It’s that thing that you can’t solve. Once you take that thing out, you’re there. It may also be a piece of just logic you’re giving us early on or emotional logic that you’re giving us early on makes us feel like this is how it’s going to work. These are the rules of the world that I’m setting up. Within the rules of the world I’m setting up, this makes perfect sense. Maybe don’t move until you see it. Also, the other choice is to take a step back and don’t try to solve this problem right in front of you. Look at the whole thing, and see, if I take some other things away, does that problem disappear.

**Craig:** Look at what you have, and ask yourself if maybe the answer’s just sitting there, because just what happens if everybody relaxes? What happens if all the characters that are currently tormenting themselves into your plot, what if it just relaxes? What if it simplifies?

**John:** The language you’re using, you’re trying to force something. You’re trying to jam something. Nope, actually just got to ease back and just let it flow and let it go to the next thing. It can feel lazy. It can feel like, I’m not doing work to jam this thing. No. Actually, it’s much more natural. If you’re doing a great job of writing this, it’s going to feel both natural and surprising to the audience, I think, because one of the things I loved so much about the third act of Top Gun movie is that a bunch of stuff happens, that I’m not surprised that all happens, but it actually feels natural to how the movie is set up.

**Craig:** Great.

**Megana:** DJ from Palmdale asks, “I’m writing a script in which the main characters are introduced in the opening scene, but as younger versions of themselves. Later the story jumps forward to the time period where the rest of the movie takes place when they’re older. My question is should I do my in-depth character introductions in that opening scene when they’re younger versions of themselves or should I wait until a few scenes later when the main characters are reintroduced as their older versions? The characters haven’t changed much fundamentally since the time period in the opening scene and act pretty much the same, but their older versions are what the audience sees for most of the film.”

**John:** Interesting. I don’t think we’ve actually addressed this before. When you have younger and older versions of characters, if you’re saying here that they’re actually not fundamentally vastly different, personality-wise. They’re still going to look different. They’re still going to feel different in their space. Make sure you’re giving us a visual and a way to identify those characters, keep them straight, when we first see them, with the older version or the younger version. You get a sense of who they are. When we see the older or the younger version of them, you can use some similar language to remind us of the personality things or other defining characteristics so we completely connect them in our heads, because it’s one thing in a movie when we’re watching that we can see these characters, be like, “Oh, that looks like the young version of Bill Hader.” On the page, we don’t have that. All we have is these names, and hopefully, we’re going to match to be the same person. We can get lost in terms of what’s changed and what’s the same.

**Craig:** You’re asking should I do this or that. My answer is yes, because you want to introduce the characters as they’re young, the way you should introduce any character. I want to know what they look like, what their hair is like, their clothes, wardrobe, hair, and makeup. If there’s anything specific, are they missing teeth, are they skinny, are they heavy, are they goofy, are they handsome, whatever it is, tell us. If you’re telling me that when they’re older they’re basically the same, I’m telling you, you haven’t done it right, because age is the thing that changes us the most, and not just because there’s physical changes, but there are mental changes and emotional changes. If you’re telling me a story where I see them as children and then I see them as an adult, for the love of god, something must’ve happened when they were children to earn my way into now jumping ahead and seeing them as adults. It’s really important that you do it again. If all you do is say 15 years older but more worried, 15 years older, still boyish, but somehow has lost their charm, or the goofy one is now more possessed, whatever it is, you got to give me something. Otherwise, why are you jumping ahead in time? Something must’ve happened.

**John:** The other thing I’d ask you to really look at, DJ, is how important is the younger and the older version of these characters. It says here that you were mostly with the older versions of these characters. Really ask yourself what happens if we don’t have these younger versions. It may be absolutely essential to your story that we see these younger versions, but maybe it’s not. Maybe you’re trying to do a thing that won’t actually be benefiting you in the movie. Maybe the question you’re asking is really should you be doing this at all. Maybe you should. Just ask yourself could you get by without this.

**Megana:** Justin asks, “My name’s Justin, and I’m in Canada, and I’m dyslexic. I’m currently writing my first screenplay roughly 20 years after being told by a high school English teacher that I should give up writing. That moment shattered my confidence, but as spell check and grammar checkers became more and more reliable, I slowly began to write again. I will always have to take a final ultra-slow pass reading through my script, but I will still miss mistakes that may seem fundamental to other screenwriters. Generally, the mistakes are not so severe that it would ruin the reading experience. I’m really confident in my storytelling skills. Should I be informing people before they read my script that I’m dyslexic and that there may be a few grammar errors? I worry that they may not want to read it at all if I do this. If I don’t, I worry they may wonder how I could make some fundamental mistakes.”

**Craig:** Good question. For starters, you can ask somebody to proofread it for you. There are people who will read scripts, and they will check for both spelling and grammar issues. My guess is that there are probably some pretty good resources for you in Canada, Canada, my home away from home last year and some, a socialist country with a lot of resources. I would imagine that there’s probably some decent resources for people with dyslexia there. There may be something. I don’t know if you live in a major city or not, but perhaps at a university library or at the university setting, there may be somebody willing to just do that to help you out. If not, then I think it’s fair to let people know that you’re dyslexic. The way I would put it is, “If you see any errors that would make you think, why would a person like this make that error, now you know why.” I wouldn’t get into grammar or spelling per se. I would just say, “If you see an error that seems funky, just flag it for me. I’m dyslexic. This will happen from time to time.”

**John:** I think before you need to do that, you’re going to be able to find resources for getting that last set of eyes on them, because you talk about needing to read through slowly and carefully, so you do have a sense of the kinds of things you’re struggling with. It may be a public resource, but it may also just be the person you’re paying 50 bucks to do that last pass on a script before you send it in. I think we’ve talked about this on previous episodes where there are people who will just read your script and there are people who can help you out on that. Finding the college student who can do that may be one of the best resources there for that.

I would also say that I think one of the good things that’s happened in the 20 years that you weren’t writing is that we’ve recognized that dyslexia is a set of challenges for people to read and to write, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have the ability to express themselves or tell stories and do all these things. I’m just really happy that you’ve realized that you have the ability to do all these things, and just like a person who… Ryan Knighton is blind and can write a hell of a script. It’s a small obstacle on the way that you can deal with and address.

**Craig:** 100%. With that in mind, if you do find somebody that you’re going to pay $50 to, $50 Canadian-

**John:** Which is less than it would be in the US. It’s a bargain in Canada.

**Craig:** John doesn’t understand money. Anyway, the point is make sure that they know why they’re reading it. Everybody that you give a script to is going to be like, “I did have some things. I wasn’t sure if this… When she said that, would she really say that?” Just be real clear up front, “I don’t want any creative notes from you whatsoever. I just want spelling, grammar.”

**John:** I will say there’s a writer director I know, who I think she’s talked about her dyslexia, but I don’t want to say her name in case she hasn’t talked about it. She is dyslexic, and she has a very successful writing directing career. She just has people help her with those issues. Is it a thing you’re going to have to address? For sure. Can you still be perfectly successful? Yes, because she is.

**Craig:** There you.

**John:** Craig, it’s come time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us? We’ve missed you for so long, so I bet you’ll have a cool thing.

**Craig:** I do have a cool thing. It’s free, which I can’t believe. Like most shows that shoot on digital, which is most shows, we used an ARRI. One of the primary tools that have been around for directors and cinematographers for many, many years when we were shooting films was a viewfinder. The idea when you’re shooting on the ARRI or a film camera is you’re constantly switching lenses. The lenses are fixed focal lengths, so 50 millimeters, 35, 32, 27. When you’re trying to frame up the scene, when you’re blocking it out and you want to know what lens should we be using, we used to just get the lens on a stick. It was a viewfinder on a stick. You’d look through it, and you could turn a dial. That was a variable lens, so you could roughly see what it would look like. We don’t have to do that anymore.

**John:** You’ve got your phone out, so I bet it involves your phone.

**Craig:** It is. There’s an app called the Magic ARRI Viewfinder. It is free. There are a few extra doodads you can unlock on it if you buy… I don’t know, it’s like $4 for the little upgrade. It’s wonderful. Basically, you hold it out, and you just dial in with your finger what focal length. It’ll take any focal length, including lenses that don’t exist. Nobody uses a 68. If you want to look at it in 68, you can. When I was directing, I found it incredibly useful to be able to just take my phone, especially when I was scouting, to look around, just see, okay, I’m just going to roughly go in my mind. I know what a wide is. I know what a medium is. I know what a long is. Let me just take some pictures using the bright lens. Very helpful. Super free and/or cheap. If you are ever contemplating using a viewfinder for anything, that thing did pretty well.

**John:** I’ve seen viewfinder things on the iPhone for a long time, but it sounds like this one is deliberately an ARRI thing that is going to give you exactly what you’d expect from this camera, which is great.

**Craig:** Especially with this iPhone, it’s saying, look, this is what-

**John:** This is what you’re going to get.

**Craig:** This is what you’re going to get with a general lens, because the ARRI is not lenses. The ARRI is just-

**John:** It’s a box.

**Craig:** It’s a box. The lenses are the lenses. It’s saying if you were to stand here and look through a real lens on a 35, this is what you would see.

**John:** Craig, when you’re out scouting at location and you’re pulling out this app doing this stuff, are you just setting location manager, AD, stand there, stand there, to see relative framing?

**Craig:** I will occasionally do that. The last time I used it, I asked my production designer to stand here. I was like, “No, move to your left. Take one step forward. Stop.” Then you can tap on your area of focus. If I want to see the back of his head sharp but in the distance things blown out-

**John:** That’ll give you a sense of like, okay, if I was on this long of a lens, how quickly would I lose that, could I keep both of them in focus, if you wanted to.

**Craig:** Right, or if I want the background to be out of focus, how much out of focus will it be with this lens. Then I find the one, like, okay, this is basically what I’m thinking, take a picture. Then I can share that with my DP. I always say, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. This is just for a vague sense of my… You will make it look great. Maybe this lens is wrong and all that. This was just kind of a thought.”

**John:** Whenever I’m Slacking something through to Dustin, our designer, and I’ve just done something up in PhotoShop really quick, generally I’ll say, “A thousand apologies, this is terrible, because I’m stepping into your domain. This is what’s in my head.”

**Craig:** You know what I did? There was a note. I was talking to Franny Orsi, who runs HBO Drama. She was saying there was just something in a scene she wanted. She described it in the kind of way that executives do. I knew I had 50% of what she was asking for, but not 100%. I said, “Okay, Frannie, write dialog for me. Don’t worry. It doesn’t have to be good. It’s going to feel weird. I’m not going to use it word for word or even any of it. I just need to know what’s in your head. It will help me write something that will probably look completely different but maybe get to.” She did it, and she was so sweet about it. She’s like, “This is a first for me.” She’s like, “This was hard and weird and uncomfortable, but here it is.” It was incredibly helpful. It helped me. Like I said, I didn’t use that, but I did this, and it achieved hopefully the thing that she was asking for.

**John:** That’s great. My One Cool Thing actually comes from Megana. This is a tweet by Alex Hirsch, who was going through some of the emails he got from Disney’s Standards and Practices on his show Gravity Falls. Did you see this today?

**Craig:** I was just talking about this with our editor, Tim Goode, an hour ago. It’s really funny.

**John:** Let me play a little clip here from it.

**Alex Hirsch:** Page 492. It has come to our attention that hoo ha is a slang term for vagina. Please revise.

It is a proper word meaning excitement or hullabaloo, and that is clearly its meaning here. The context is an owl-themed restaurant called Hoo Ha’s Jamboree. Not changing it.

Page 14. Please revise chub pup on T-shirt. Chub has a sexual connotation.

This is silly. It’s an image of a fat dog. On the context, there’s no reason to think chub means anything other than that.

We have ran this phrase up the line, and unfortunately the concern surrounding it still remains. If you’d like to send me some alternate phrases, I can run those and let you know what becomes of it.

Alternate phrases: chubby pup, tub pup, chubbity pup pup. I can’t believe I have to do this.

**John:** Standards and Practices, for people who aren’t familiar with it, international listeners, particularly on the broadcast networks but also on some of the cable networks-

**Craig:** Censors.

**John:** Censors. They are censors. They’re going through and saying this is appropriate or not appropriate for our audience, for our network, not in a legal sense, but basically so that people won’t come after us and say that we are corrupting the youth of America, things that we are being asked to change.

**Craig:** Standards and Practices is notorious for being… It’s like they found the most fuddy-duddy people on the planet and then gave them an audience and said, “Suck the life out of things,” because we generally are smart enough to know where the line is that’s hard. If you’re writing for network, you’re not dropping F-bombs on that show. That’s not allowed by the FCC. You can’t do it. Then there are those weird things that are in the middle. You know, okay, look, I was dancing around… You might say, “Oh, did you get a handy?” Now, handy in that context clearly means hand job. You’re going to get flagged by S and P. You got to take the L on that one. Okay, fine. If, look, it’s called chub pug because it’s a fat pug, and we heard that you could also say I got a chub meaning an erection, no. No, I’m going to fight that all day long. That’s crazy. Who is going to misinterpret that? Certainly not the nine-year-old kids watching it.

**John:** The frustration with all of it is that it’s anticipating an adult responding in a way that a kid would never actually do it and taking offense on behalf of an imaginary child.

**Craig:** I love those videos when some outraged mom somewhere is like, “I got this animal, stuffed animal, and if you pull the string, it says words. Listen to what it says. It’s saying go fuck Santa.” Then they play it for you, and it’s like, no, it’s not. It’s saying, “Oh, I forgive you.” It didn’t say fuck Santa at all.

**John:** It says, “I’m fun Santa.”

**Craig:** You’re like, lady, you’re crazy. Then they get attention. Then a hundred articles are written. Anyway, now we have to put a language warning on this.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Lachlan Marks. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. The Dropbox folder that has all of our listener outros is getting a little bit bare.

**Craig:** Uh-oh.

**John:** Maybe send those in now. If you’ve been holding onto one, we need it. Ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today, but for short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You could 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 penmanship.

**Craig:** Penmanship.

**John:** Craig, it’s nice to have you back.

**Craig:** It’s so good to be back.

**John:** Craig, what is your handwriting like? I don’t think I’ve actually seen your handwriting ever.

**Craig:** I’m happy to do it for you right now.

**John:** Let’s find a pen here. I would like you to write instructions for heating up dinner.

**Megana:** I’m pulling up an article that says what does your handwriting say about you.

**John:** We’re going to trade.

**Craig:** Trading.

**John:** Mine has things I legitimately just wrote for myself and one thing I just wrote now for this. Craig wrote, “First, put the food on a plate. Second, place the plate in a microwave. Third, hit start three times.” It’s clearly readable. I can see what you’re going for here.

**Craig:** It’s not going so well over here, John. I’m taking a look at what you wrote. This says, “Magical pollution.”

**John:** Magical pollution.

**Craig:** “At end of… ” I think you meant to say pilot, but it is spelled pidut. “L?”

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** “Her?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Hope?”

**John:** Hope, yeah.

**Craig:** “L her hope?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “He, um, loody, huh, owl, M,” music note, “didn’t,” two marks that mean nothing, and then another M. Then on the back it says, “This is my normal… ” You meant to say handwriting, but what this is is… I got hand, and then it just went bad.

**John:** It’s the difference between… I tend to just write for myself, because I can read everything that’s on this. I can get it all back. Then I won’t think about, oh, I’m actually writing this for somebody else who has to read my handwriting, and it becomes really bad. The exception is I used to do my first drafts all by hand, and so I would send them through to Dana. I would fax them through to Dana.

**Craig:** Fax.

**John:** Because I would be bunkered down someplace, I would hand-write the pages, send them through. I would be very deliberate about my handwriting when I send them through to Dana. This is my scribble.

**Craig:** That’s very bad. That’s way worse than I thought it would be, because I think of you as a precision machine, but not-

**John:** No, I’m full chaos.

**Craig:** You know what? Every machine has some weakness. This is yours.

**John:** I would say on this [inaudible 00:55:07] this is my normal handwriting. I will tend to focus on the first bits of a word that actually are important, and then I’ll just… I’ll get the rest of-

**Craig:** It’s gone.

**John:** I’ll remember what the rest of the word must be.

**Craig:** My handwriting, it’s good to see that it’s legible. That’s great.

**John:** I’m holding this up so Megana can see it on Zoom.

**Craig:** Let’s see what Megana thinks.

**Megana:** Yeah, that is legible. You both have very creative handwriting.

**Craig:** It’s bad. Don’t get me wrong. It’s bad. Your handwriting is probably outstanding.

**Megana:** Yeah, it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** This is an experience I think almost every boy has had, being in 5th grade and you’re writing your little thing, and then you look in the seat next to you, there is a girl who is calligraphying it as far as… Or her hand is a font maker, every letter, the kerning, the fact that the lines are straight, the precision of it all. You’re like duh, duh, der. You just feel so bad.

**John:** Megana, I’m trying to think what your normal handwriting is. Are you printing or are you writing cursive for your normal, just daily writing?

**Megana:** I do a combination. It’s like Spanglish between cursive and print.

**John:** Does your handwriting vary based on whether it’s something just for you? I don’t know if you do morning pages, but if you’re writing just for yourself, is it any different than what people are writing for other people?

**Megana:** I’m looking at my morning pages.

**Craig:** What are morning pages?

**John:** It’s a whole thing that, Craig, you missed out on, because it’s this idea of… Megana, you do it, so describe them.

**Craig:** What is it?

**Megana:** I don’t really do it. I just journal but call it that facetiously. It is from this popular book called The Artist’s Way. The idea is that you wake up every morning and you write three pages without thinking. It’s supposed to clear you for the day.

**Craig:** I’d rather light myself on fire.

**John:** I tried it for two weeks. It was weird, because it’s just stream of consciousness going to your pen.

**Craig:** Oh god, no. No, because I know it. Every morning, I don’t want to do this, which makes me bad. I never want to do things that are good for me. I’m a bad person. I’m no good. I’m hungry. I eat too much. I eat too much. I want to eat something that’s bad for me. I should stop. You know what? I’m going to have a breakfast salad. No, I’m not, lol, you fat bastard. Then I would do another two pages like that. Then I would weep. Then I would go ahead and have myself one of those nice eggwiches.

**John:** Eggwiches are delicious.

**Craig:** Love an eggwich.

**John:** Egg sandwich, so good.

**Craig:** Anyway, I’m not doing that, Megana. I don’t care.

**Megana:** I’m not telling you to.

**John:** Can you hold it up to the camera? We want to see what your handwriting looks like.

**Megana:** Let me find something that-

**John:** That’s not your private journal?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s like, please hold up your private journal to Zoom.

**Craig:** She’s like, “I hate John so much.”

**Megana:** You know what? This is actually Craig level. These are old notes from a couple of years ago that my writers’ group gave me.

**John:** I would describe these… It’s mostly printed, but some letters do connect together. I would say it’s written fairly big. There’s a lot of open space within letters. It’s really easy to read that.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s also evident that a woman wrote it. That is female handwriting.

**Megana:** I feel like boys are socialized to play, and I spent so much time just writing boys’ names in doodly hearts.

**Craig:** Boys don’t think that way.

**John:** Megana, how many different boys’ last names did you practice with on your Trapper Keeper growing up?

**Megana:** Oh my god, so many. I don’t understand on the Trapper Keeper, because then the boy would see it. It’s on loose-leaf at home.

**John:** Perfect. Which was the best last name you aspired to?

**Megana:** Gosh, this is so embarrassing. I think Barton and then using a lot of changing the vowels to be hearts.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** What is the deal with that A? It’s pretty common. I guess writing is vaguely gendered. It can be. My A is like a very normal A. The lowercase A is just a circle with then a little leg coming off the right. Then there’s what I think of as the girl A, which is this curlicue and then a little… It’s like a pregnant backwards R. Exactly. Where did that come from?

**John:** What it comes from, in print, in actual typeset print, that is an A.

**Craig:** We’re doing it wrong.

**John:** No, but what I think is it came from typeset print and some people just started doing it in actual normal writing. I don’t think it was a handwritten thing at first.

**Craig:** I think it’s just a cultural thing where girls will copy each other doing it.

**Megana:** I do remember seeing it and being like, “That’s beautiful,” and then a little voice in my head-

**Craig:** See, there you go.

**Megana:** … being like, “You can do that too.”

**Craig:** Or bubble writing.

**Megana:** There we go.

**Craig:** Oh, the bubble writing. I think that Megana Mazin is the best last name you could’ve played with, because think about it, you sound like Megan Amazin’.

**John:** Amazin’.

**Megana:** Megana Mazin.

**Craig:** It’s so good.

**Megana:** That is true.

**John:** Amazin’.

**Craig:** Megana Mazin.

**Megana:** The nice thing about Mazin is there’s an I, which gives you the opportunity for a heart above the I.

**Craig:** The heart dot.

**Megana:** Or a flower.

**Craig:** The heart dot or a flower. The flower is the friendship version. It’s the blue heart of red hearts.

**John:** Megana, when you were in school, did they still teach cursive?

**Megana:** They did teach cursive.

**John:** In Ohio?

**Megana:** Yes. I feel like I might’ve been one of the last people to learn cursive.

**John:** They’ve basically given up on it.

**Craig:** I don’t even know why they should be teaching handwriting at all. It’s gone. It’s over.

**John:** [inaudible 01:00:38].

**Megana:** Wait, when you guys were in school, did you learn how to make a cool S?

**John:** Yeah, you’re talking the super bad ass, looks like a rock star kind of thing?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** The interconnected, the geometric-

**Craig:** Yes, the up, back, down, back, back, up.

**John:** That clearly is going to be the next Scriptnotes shirt.

**Craig:** It’s the Kiss S.

**John:** Yeah. The next Scriptnotes shirt will have to be-

**Craig:** Scriptnotes should have that. It should feel like that.

**John:** I learned cursive. For a while, my signature was the cursive J, which is that weird loop on top of a loop.

**Craig:** I like that J.

**John:** Then my friend Jason started doing this J that was just, “That’s cool. I’m going to steal that.”

**Craig:** Stealing it.

**John:** That’s now my signature.

**Craig:** My signature is cursive, but it’s evolved. If I do my name in proper cursive, so that’s my proper cursive name, which hopefully looks like-

**John:** Yeah, that looks like a Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Now here’s the actual signature. It’s like every hard bit has been removed. All that’s left is C, G, and Z. You know what?

**John:** It works.

**Craig:** When we go to the Austin screenwriting thing and then they’re like, “Sign 400 of these.”

**John:** Wah wah wah, wah wah wah.

**Craig:** I watch somebody doing their very beautiful signature. I’m like, “You got to let that go.”

**John:** I have two different signatures. The top one here, which is the stolen J, is how I sign checks. It’s my legal signature. The other one looks Disney-like. It’s printy.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, look at that.

**John:** That’s what I sign for Arlo Finch books and everything else.

**Craig:** I’ll do my first name. When you do John and I’ll do Craig, it’s sort of print.

**John:** When we send out-

**Craig:** Like that.

**John:** … emails from the Scriptnotes account, which Craig never reads, we’ll send them out-

**Craig:** I didn’t even know that we did that.

**John:** We’ll send out to our Premium Members to say… Premium Members are the folks listening to this segment. We’ll say, “Hey, we’re doing a Three Page Challenge. Do you want to send stuff in?” It’s signed John and Craig. You wrote that eight years ago.

**Craig:** That’s like the version of when you listen to a TV show and you hear a laugh track and all those people are dead.

**John:** Exactly, that’s what it is. I think we originally did that for the USB drives. We used to have the episodes on the USB drives way back in the day.

**Craig:** You can probably sign checks using that with me. I think you’re allowed, just Craig.

**John:** Craig. Craig.

**Craig:** Who’s this from? Craig.

**Megana:** I do have to say I had a really nice experience recently. I got notes from John back, and he had made the notes on a pdf on your iPad. Is that right, John?

**John:** Yeah.

**Megana:** As I was scrolling through, I was like, “What is this circle that he’s made on the paper, or is this parentheses? Do I need parentheses in this place?” Then I realized it was a little heart.

**John:** I wrote little hearts in there.

**Megana:** It was so sweet.

**Craig:** Your hearts look like circles.

**John:** I think if I did it quickly it could look like a-

**Megana:** Some quick hearts.

**John:** Sloppy.

**Megana:** Then I had to go back, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s hearts all over the place.”

**Craig:** There’s hearts all over the place.

**John:** There were hearts all over. It was a very good draft. There were things in there I really loved.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**Megana:** My heart exploded. I was so happy.

**Craig:** That’s great. Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** I had a similar experience. You were there, Megana, when we talked through Bo’s script, which I really liked. What I do is I will just highlight using… I’ll do it in Notability. I’ll just use my highlighter and just make them green. It’s maybe not as emotional as a heart, but if there’s a lot of green, that’s good.

**John:** Good stuff. Good topic.

**Craig:** Great topic.

**John:** That pulled it out.

**Craig:** Fun.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** Thanks, all.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**Megana:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Sign up for [updates on the Scriptnotes Book](https://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Box Office Balancing Test: How Many Tentpoles Can Share a Weekend?](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/box-office-balancing-test-how-many-tentpoles-can-share-a-weekend-1235166404/)
* [Judd Apatow, Shonda Rhimes and other Hollywood creators sign gun petition](https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/judd-apatow-shonda-rhimes-hollywood-creators-sign-gun-petition-rcna33509)
* [Magic ARRI ViewFinder](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magic-arri-viewfinder/id1347132361) on the App store!
* [Alex Hirsch’s Gravity Falls Tweet](https://twitter.com/_AlexHirsch/status/1537314312926003201)
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Lachlan Marks ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/556standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 548 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, films may have returned to theaters, but many of them are still being made exclusively for streamers. We’ll talk about the pros and cons of going straight to streaming, with the writers of two upcoming films.

First off, we have the writing team of Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, whose credits include How I Met Your Mother, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Most Likely To Murder, Pretty Smart, and the upcoming Chip ’n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, debuting later this month on Disney Plus. Dan and Doug, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show.

Doug Mand: Thank you.

Dan Gregor: Excited to be here. Thank you for having us in your upstairs backroom.

John: Which of you is Chip and which of you is Dale?

Dan: I guess I was accused of being Dale. We did early recordings for temp voice. I was Dale and Doug was-

Doug: Chip.

Dan: We got dropped very quickly.

Doug: Emotionally, because it is a movie about friendship and partnership.

Dan: Through long-term Hollywood careers.

John: The people actually playing your roles in the movie, they’re newcomers, right? They’re no one you’ve ever heard of.

Dan: Nobody you’ve ever heard of. The character inspired by me is played by a young upstart named Andy Samberg.

Doug: The character inspired by me is a little whippersnapper named John Mulaney, who we all have high hopes for, but you never know in this business.

John: Things could turn on a dime.

Doug: Oh my gosh. We’re pulling for him though.

John: We are so excited to welcome our very own Aline Brosh McKenna, who’s recording… You’re going to be in the editing room for your upcoming Netflix feature, but now I see a library behind you, so you’re back at home, correct, Aline?

Aline Brosh McKenna: Indeed. We turned in a cut yesterday. We’re getting towards the end.

John: This would be a cut of Your Place Or Mine, her feature for Netflix. We’re so excited to see it. Do we have a release date for your film yet?

Aline: We do not.

John: Soon. I want soon.

Aline: It’s up to the folks who decide those sorts of things.

John: On this podcast we’re going to be discussing movies made for streamers and the uncertainty of when do our movies come out. We’ll also talk in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members about getting work done when you have a newborn, because Doug and Dan, you both have really young kids. I want to talk to you about that and the strategies you’re employing for actually getting things done when you have a small, screaming infant in your house.

Doug: Work a lot less.

Dan: Whoop, sorry, Premium.

John: A very short segment. First, we have some follow-up. Megana, can you help us out with some follow-up from previous episodes?

Megana Rao: In Episode 545 we spoke with Elizabeth Meriwether and Liz Hannah about How Would This Be A Movie. One of our topics was MacKenzie Scott. We talked about what a limited series about MacKenzie Scott would be like. Teresa tweeted at us, saying, “FYI, there is a TV comedy inspired by MacKenzie Scott, sort of, coming out on Apple TV Plus. It’s a Matthew Hubbard, Alan Yang show, and it stars Maya Rudolph.”

John: The combination of these people, Aline and I know. Maya Rudolph is incredibly funny. This would be inspired by MacKenzie Scott, but not really… Doug, I see a puzzled look on your face.

Doug: That’s just my resting face, but yeah, go ahead.

John: MacKenzie Scott was Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife who’s now giving away all this money. I looked at the show description for this new show. “Rudolph will star as Molly, a woman whose seemingly perfect life is upended when her husband leaves her with nothing but $87 billion.”

Doug: That’s great. That’s a very funny line.

John: That’s a good premise. When people talk about how do you write a good log line, that’s it. That’s a [crosstalk 00:03:25].

Doug: That’s a great log line. That’s fantastic.

Dan: That sounds great.

John: Kudos to Matthew Hubbard and Alan Yang for a very funny log line. May the show live up to it.

Dan: I think it’s really smart. I was listening to that episode, and I also was like, don’t get caught up in all the nonsense of how they met and their relationship. I just want to see-

Doug: Get right to it.

Dan: What’s it like to be a regular lady with $87 billion?

Doug: I don’t need the first episode to be like, “We met and it was all so great and he was just a regular guy.” I don’t care.

Dan: It’s really a funny premise.

Doug: Go spend that money. Let’s get to Brewster’s millions.

John: We like it. Now, Megana, you and I had a Bonus Segment a couple weeks back talking about murder houses and murder house architecture. We got some follow-up from Penelope about this.

Megana: Penelope from Melbourne said, “I was listening to your segment on murder house architecture, and it made me think of Tom Anderson’s brilliant essay film, Los Angeles Plays Itself, released in 2003. He explores in detail why modernist architecture is so often used as the headquarters of villains in movies and TV. It’s such a great documentary, well worth a look if you haven’t seen it yet.”

John: We’ll look at the trailer. I’ll link to the trailer in the show notes. I really liked this. It did really strike to me, if you see a modernist house in a movie, it’s almost always the villain who lives there. Even Charlie’s Angels, the villain lives in the Chemosphere, the most haunted modernist house of all time. In this trailer, I was looking, even LA Confidential, which I think of as being such a period movie, it was a period movie in a modernist era, and the bad guys live there.

Dan: Did you see Westworld?

John: Oh yeah.

Dan: It’s the deep future, and they mostly take place in the Old West. Still, when they ever leave, the villains are still living in the exact same evil modernist houses.

John: Frank Lloyd Wright’s-

Doug: Exactly.

John: …[inaudible 00:05:09] house.

Dan: Exactly. It’s 2030000 and we can’t ever have our mean people live anywhere but Frank Lloyd Wright.

Doug: It was wild that when CAA moved, also they moved to what looks like a large spaceship that’s ready to be sent off into the atmosphere.

Dan: Into the core of the earth.

Doug: There is an evil feeling when you roll in there. I love the CAA. It was just so perfect, it felt villainous, just their new location.

John: Now, Aline, in your film, do you have your characters living in modernist architecture or more traditional? Your film is set in Los Angeles, correct?

Aline: It is set in New York and Los Angeles. We have a little spin on that trope, which is that the person who needs to explore emotional growth lives in a rather modern, arid environment. The person who also needs to experience emotional growth but is a little bit more female, for starters, lives in a more cluttered, craftsman-y, Echo Park, not modern home. I guess I’m using those tropes as well, in a different format.

John: We love it. Last bit of follow-up. We had something from Adam in Brighton, England. Megana, help us out.

Megana: Adam wrote in and said, “On your last episode, I think it was Liz Hannah who said that six-episode seasons struggle to make a profit. As someone who often feels that shows are stretched too thin, I’ve long wondered if the problem is driven by business needs. Do you have any insight that you could share?

John: I have no insight, but we have a lot of people who have made a lot of TV here. Dan, help us out. Talk to us about shorter seasons and the economics and why you don’t see really short seasons.

Dan: The thing that seems pretty clear is that it’s amortized costs. If you have to build a set, all of a sudden that set for a couple episodes is very expensive, but if you’re doing it for a bunch of episodes, it’s expensive. Same thing with basically all of your contracts. Doug had a show that was a 10-episode order. I’m sure you had a sense of what… What would happen if you pushed it more or less?

Doug: I listened to that episode as well. I was like, “Oh, that is interesting,” because I had not had the six-episode discussion. Once you’re up and running, it’s a lot less money to do it, especially a show like Pretty Smart, which was a multi-cam, so the set’s built and you have everything in place. That’s the most I know about it. I didn’t know about the model for six to eight episodes, six episodes being a cutoff. I did not know about that. Neither of us have ever pitched something that would be that long.

John: Aline, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend obviously was… You were 13 episodes and then even longer I think at some times. What was the decision process for like… Originally you were a Showtime show, and then you went to CBS. How did the number of episodes factor into the budget?

Aline: They told us how many episodes to make. It was not our choice. We made 2 18-episode seasons and 2 13-episode seasons. It was based on the network studio and their needs. We ended up making 62 episodes. That would’ve been maybe five, six episodes of streaming or cable. We just made them in the overlapping network system, where everything was happening at the same time. We weren’t able to separate out the phases of production. That made it especially taxing and complicated, but it also allowed us to compress a lot of stuff into a relatively short amount of time.

John: You were able to do 18 episodes of a season within just a course of a calendar year, which as opposed to some of these limited series streaming things, it’s dragged out over 2 years just to do 6 or 8 episodes which is allotted.

Aline: I Love Lucy did 50.

Dan: A season?

Aline: Something like that.

Dan: Oh my god. How I Met Your Mother was a 22, 24, 25 one year, a season kind of show. They were talking about the creative problem of all that, which is you have these middles of the season where you’re like, “We’ve just got to keep these characters in a stasis for a chunk of time so that we can keep our plot endgame primed for where we wanted to go at the end.” You just don’t want to burn out. One of the things we learned on those shows was, man, every meaningful plot point is so priceless. You just don’t want to over-dole them out too quickly, because you really need them to last. The short episode orders are a joy for like, “No, just do it, do it, do it.” That’s why it’s great.

John: Now, Aline, also, you have a TV development deal. In shows that you’re developing, how early on in the conversation do you know how many episodes they want the show to be? If you’re setting up a pilot, do they already have a discussion of like, “Okay, this needs to be at least eight episodes. It needs to be at least 10.” When does that conversation happen?

Aline: That’s interesting. We have a couple pilots that are moving down the highway at some degree of velocity. We haven’t totally nailed it down yet. I think it might also have to do, at this point, with actors and how much time they want off and need off, and the idea now that actors really do go back and forth between not just TV and film, but multiple TV series, and so setting it up so that the actors… If you get a very famous actor and they have a specific number of episodes that they do or don’t want to do, I imagine that that would factor into it.

I’m interested in the idea, from a crafty point, of how much story you eat, because sometimes you can feel that deliberate slowing of the story eating, because creators don’t want to burn too much, because if you burn too much, you get into soap territory very quickly. One of the mini-series I have most admired recently, and by admired I mean was obsessed with, The Dropout. In The Dropout they eat a tremendous amount of story in the pilot. At the end of that pilot, you think, my god, I have been through so much already. I admire that, because it’s giving you the amount of story that you might get in a movie really at that point. Then I think we’ve all gotten to the place where we are accustomed to those episodes, which as Dan said, are between Episodes 4 and 7, where it seems like we’re going to do a flashback episode about the first time this person learned how to use a payphone. That’s going to be the whole episode.

John: We’ve been talking about TV, but I really want to focus on features this time, because you guys are both in the middle of making features for screenwriters. We’ll start with Doug and Dan. Chip ‘n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, this was obviously a passion project from a very young age. You always dreamed of making a Chip ‘n’ Dale.

Doug: It actually was. It was my favorite cartoon. I have drawings from my childhood that my parents dug up of me cosplaying the Rescue Rangers in different outfits.

John: That’s amazing. Rescue Rangers is not even something that’s on my radar at all. It was very specific. You were just the right age for the Rescue Rangers to be a thing.

Doug: It’s an old, mid-old millennial kind of niche. All of those cartoons aired on the Disney afternoon, which was right when you’d come home from school. They were on repeat. You’d see these episodes hundreds of times, and so you memorized them.

John: It wasn’t the kind of IP where it was like everyone in the world was like, “Oh my god, we have to make a Rescue Rangers movie.”

Dan: That’s why they came to us.

Doug: Exactly.

John: When did they come to you, Doug, to do this?

Doug: I just did a timeline, just because it’s coming out and I just wanted to look at it. They came to us in I guess maybe the beginning of 2015. They were like, “We’re thinking about doing this.”

John: Who is they that came to you?

Doug: It was Louie Provost over at Disney, who is still there, which is a miracle that we had the same executive, and Mandeville Pictures. We had done some work with both of them. We had had meetings with them. They were like, “We think you guys would be great for this.” Our initial response was, “Why? Maybe not.”

Dan: What you’re saying exactly, which is like, does anyone even know who they are? It’s so niche. Even to me, who was obsessed with it for a little period of time, it was again the fourth-most important out of four cartoons. It’s really not a big deal.

Doug: It was, I think, a big deal in our career too. We weren’t getting a lot of IP brought to us. To Disney’s credit and to Mandeville’s credit, they were very much like, “Come to us with anything, any version of it.” Dan and I started talking about it. We took the essence of the why even do this and put that within the picture of the film.

Dan: The original title of the movie was The Chip ‘n’ Dale’s Reboot That Nobody Asked For.

John: How many years ago was this?

Doug: 2015 was our first pitch.

John: This is way before Disney Plus.

Doug: This was sold as a feature.

John: A Disney feature film.

Doug: Exactly. We were both scratching our heads. We pitched this movie that was a noir and had elements of LA Confidential in it.

Dan: Just to give the premise of it really quickly, it’s basically Chip and Dale are these two chipmunks, who in the early ’90s, this Disney afternoon, they would basically do what’s happening right now, which is they would repurpose old Disney characters, put them in new outfits, new adventures, give them new personalities. This was one of them. Chip and Dale were Donald Duck’s foils in the ’50s, ’60s. They were just nonspeaking chipmunks who ate peanut butter.

Doug: They were background actors or secondary actors. We play them as actors who played these roles.

Dan: They basically get put into… The concept is that they are the actors who played the Rescue Rangers in this early ‘90s sitcom. Now it is 30 years later. They are washed up actors, over the hill. In a Tropic Thunder, Three Amigos kind of storyline, they get embroiled in a real world mystery plot, very reminiscent of a Roger Rabbit kind of world.

John: Great. There’s some animation, but it’s mostly a live action feature.

Dan: It’s live action hybrid. It’s as much as it could be a hybrid as possible, because it’s as if cartoons are real people who live in real Hollywood and the real world, like Roger Rabbit.

John: Roger Rabbit rules.

Dan: Exactly.

John: Fantastic. You have this idea. You’re pitching it to Disney. They’re saying, “Fantastic. That’s great.” The feature version of that is incredibly expensive, the theatrical feature, not only to make it, but also to release it. What happens?

Dan: There are so few slots. We’re writing this, and we’re like, “They’re not going to make this movie.”

John: Yeah, because there’s always going to be a princess movie to make.

Doug: There’s a princess movie, and then there’s the Marvel movies that you have to contend with.

Doug: Star Wars, all of it.

Dan: Again, this is a movie that like, do people really need to see… Are people clamoring to see this, when they have four Thors to make? We’re writing it and we’re really enjoying it, and the response is really positive. That’s not always the case, even when you’re proud of something. Eventually it gets to the place of-

Dan: It just peters out, because they’re trying to figure out how could this be a much bigger four-quadrant movie. We’re like, “That’s just not what this is. It’s a weird offbeat comedy wrapped in a mystery.” Then it just peters out and it just sits dormant.

John: It becomes dormant and eventually gets [crosstalk 00:16:16].

Dan: It gets put on the shelf, but to their credit, which you don’t always get, our producers at Mandeville were big fans. Somewhere they met Akiva Schaffer…

Doug: Akiva Schaffer.

Dan: …who’s wildly funny and a great director…

Doug: From the Lonely Island.

Dan: …from the Lonely Island. They were like, “He might be good for this.” They show him the script. He laughs at the title, The Rescue Rangers Reboot That No One Wants. He reads it and he’s like, “I do like this.” At this point, Disney Plus exists now. The combination of those two things gave it new life. Akiva was like, “I’m interested in this.” Disney was excited about him and the idea that maybe you could make a movie that doesn’t have to be-

John: The pressure’s off of it, because it doesn’t have to open on a weekend and make $8 million.j

Doug: It doesn’t have to be a four-quadrant, like Dan is saying, in the same way.

John: Aline, I want to talk to you about your film, because talk about movies they don’t make anymore or movies that’d be hard to make. What was the origin story for Your Place Or Mine? It feels like the kind of romantic comedy that used to be made theatrically a lot, and now it’s harder to make. How did this movie get set up?

Aline: The origin story was that in 2010 when we were making Morning Glory, I needed a place to stay in New York because my per diem wasn’t really covering all of it. Our friend Ted Griffin had a lovely apartment in New York I knew that he wasn’t using full-time, so I asked him if I could stay there. He was living such a bachelor life at the time, that I really enjoyed being a mom in a bachelor space. I thought it would be funny to do a movie about two friends, where the mom is living in the bachelor’s space, and the bachelor is living in the mom’s space. I had that idea for a long time. A lot of the ideas that I’ve ended up doing, I carried around in my brain for a long time. Crazy Ex was one too. What I do is I cradle these little puppies in my arms, and then I wait for someone that I want to raise the puppy with.

My old friend Michael Costigan partnered with Jason Bateman. They had a deal with Netflix, which I think originated around the Ozark series. I had breakfast with them at John Benny’s. It was similar to when I met Rachel and as I was talking to Rachel I went, “You know what? Crazy Ex, she’s going to dig it.” At this breakfast I said to Jason and Michael… I pitched them the idea. They really loved it. The setting up process was, because they had this relationship with Netflix, we just went to Netflix and told the story to our exec at the time, Sarah Bowen, who’s no longer there. It was really easy and straightforward. I didn’t do what I normally have done with pitches, which is to go everywhere and sit in a million rooms. That was a great relief. The development process, the style of development was very different. I don’t actually know to what… I know that part of that is the culture of these streamers. Part of it is the individuals that I was working with. It was a more straightforward, business-like process in an interesting way.

John: Did you feel like when you made your deal at Netflix that it was a deal to develop a script or basically like, “We’re going to have you write the script and we’re probably going to make it.”

Aline: It did feel more like that. We who have been doing this screenwriting gig for a long time have sold in a number of different configurations. Sometimes you’re pitching stuff and everyone’s going, “I don’t know. We’ll give this a shot. Let’s see what happens.” Sometimes you’re writing in a situation where they have an actor, they’re in a rush. They need to do it. You think it might get made. It’s your football to drop. In this case, there was a feeling that they wanted to do romantic comedies that were with stars, maybe bigger stars on the platform. That was the design of it. I felt like that was something that they had identified a need for. As a writer, that’s always the best situation to be in.

What Dan and Doug are describing is you’re making a dish that wasn’t necessarily ordered, in which case the dish has to be that much better. When you’re making a dish that has been ordered, with Devil Wears Prada, not only had that dish been ordered, but people were banging on the table saying, “Where is it?” There’s a relationship between your product and your project and their appetite, but a really great script can overcome what might be a natural disinclination towards the project, which is what Dan and Doug overcame with the inventiveness of their writing.

John: Dan and Doug, it sounds like, holding this metaphor of the dish no one ordered, it was like, “Oh, this is really, really good. We have nothing we can do with it.” Then the world changed, and suddenly, oh, there’s actually a place that this would be perfect for. It sounds like the kinds of movies that Aline likes to make and this idea that she had… Aline, your movie would’ve been hard to set up at a conventional studio, unless you’d actually already had those big actors attached, correct?

Aline: That’s correct. Even then, because it was a star-dependent movie, we had to then get stars. One of the things about being a writer is it’s a fast-moving river. It’s always been. It is now more than ever. The number of buyers, who’s buying, what they’re looking for, it changes really quickly. It’s also interesting, as I said, for John and I, who came up in a quite calcified system where there were only certain types of jobs. I know that people are bemoaning the lack of predictability and consistency in the marketplace right now, but I think there’s a way to look at that as opportunities. When there is this transitional stuff happening, there are people who need certain kind of content. If you can identify who’s looking for what, then you can figure out who wants to buy your particular brand of pierogis.

Dan: Also, something you were saying about cradling your puppies, even more so, nothing’s ever really dead. That’s the other part that is… It’s heartbreaking when things seem like they go away or they die, but they never really do. They’re always gestating in your mind. They’re gestating in the larger business. There very well might be another time where it just makes sense to come back to life in a totally different iteration or a different concept.

John: We’re going to have a question later on that’s really about that, when do ideas actually just come back, or do you just wait for the right time for that idea to come back. Let’s talk about, in addition to the studio features we’ve made, you’ve also made indie features. I’m thinking about Most Likely To Murder, which to me feels like a movie that if it had come out in a streaming time, probably would’ve gone to streaming and it would have had a better home.

Dan: That was a movie that we… I wish that it got more clear traction. I think if it had been made for a Netflix, it would’ve been something that made a lot of sense. We made it. We did it for Lionsgate, but without a clear plan. They were just launching a thing called Studio L, a wisp in the wind, that no one really has any idea what the hell that is anymore. For a moment they were like, “We’re going to make digital movies.” Also they were trying to make straight-to-video comedies. That was not what we were making. It didn’t even really fit in their business model. We ended up selling it as part of a deal to Hulu, but it didn’t get the launch that I think it would’ve gotten if it was something that-

John: My movie The Nines, we debuted at Sundance, had a big debut there, sold off of that. It went to theatrical, but it was just like it never found that home. Two years later, if it had gone to Sundance, a streamer would’ve bought and it would’ve showed up on a streamer, and I could say, “Oh, it’s on Netflix,” or I could point to where they could see it. People tweet at me now, it’s like, “Where can I see your movie?” You could download it on iTunes. It’s frustrating.

Doug: You can buy it on Amazon, which is sort of something, but it’s not-

Dan: The deal with Hulu just ran out, so we’re [crosstalk 00:24:01].

Aline: Side note is that Doug Mand delivers an incredibly hilarious performance in that movie. If you want to see Doug Mand on screen in a film, he’s really funny.

Dan: With one of the more egregiously terrible facial hair performances in history.

Doug: It’s more my facial hair that’s doing the performance and I’m just along for the ride.

John: Dan, you brought up straight-to-video. I had forgotten that term, weirdly, because it just-

Dan: It doesn’t mean anything anymore.

John: That was the equivalent I think of what we’re talking about with streamers, like different genres there. You could make a movie for theatrical or you could make a movie for straight-to-video. There was a pejorative quality saying something goes straight to video. There were things that that was the right place to put that genre of film.

Dan: There’s something great about, again, the marketplace of content now, where yeah, if you want to make a small movie for a particular audience, then great, that’s fine. That’s part of the market.

John: I want to wrap up this part of the conversation by talking about a thing that is different about the actual features or straight to video is really the back end, because there was a clear model for what the back end was going to be like for movies that were made for the actual release or made for home video, because there were residuals. There was ways that you could make your money out of these things. We can share as much as we want to share about what are deals are looking like for this. Aline, for your movie, I hope it’s a huge, ginormous success. I hope that Netflix takes out those little ads saying how big it is, like how Ryan Reynolds’s movies are so big. That won’t impact your financials very much at all. I see you shaking your head. As you are making your deal going into it, are you trying to account for that? How are you thinking about that?

Aline: They gave me an opportunity to direct a movie with big stars and adequate resources. I think in the long run that will benefit me, if you’re looking at the bottom line, which I don’t tend to do that much, but it will benefit me that way. That’s really how I think about that one. With Cruella, it was an outgrowth of the pandemic that it got released day and date during the pandemic. I ended up getting the best upfront definition, because it was on whatever you call pan-demand, which is our best definition. It was day and date with the release. Obviously, the release was depressed by the pandemic. That ended up having a backend that I just didn’t expect.

I think that that’s going to change and evolve and will probably be driven somewhat by actors, because I think the upfront money might evolve as these companies have more data about what the revenue is actually accruing to them from these packages, because right now it’s guesswork. The actors have been, as with Scarlett and Disney, the actors have been on the forefront of trying to figure out exactly how much money these folks are making and trying to draft off of that. My personal thing didn’t impact me that much, but I can see coming up Prada and 27 Dresses happened to come out in the middle of the DVD boom.

John: Your residuals on those movies but be absurd.

Doug: God bless.

Dan: Oh boy.

Doug: Just make it public, Aline. Let’s open the books up.

Dan: Just write it down and show us.

John: I don’t want to nail you down to a dollar figure, but [crosstalk 00:27:16].

Aline: It’s a lot.

John: Millions of dollars.

Aline: They were right in that zone. Really what money means for a writer is time to do stuff you love. Those were so meaningful to me early in my career in terms of, hey, I’m going to take a break and do Crazy Ex, which was a pay cut for me in certain respects, because I have a pretty steady residual stream. All these new models are going to affect writers in terms of the kinds of choices they can make. I will say that the opportunities that streamers have almost everyone that came up in my generation to do things that they’d always wanted to do, that there wasn’t necessarily outlets to make in either the network television or the traditional studio, which seemed to take turns being the sausage factory. It used to be that TV was grinding out mid-range hot dogs and then it was features that were doing that and then the TV became fancy and now it feels like there’s a little bit of a shift going underway. All of those changes that you have to track as a writer, in my particular case I was balancing the fact that they were giving me a great opportunity with I wouldn’t get the backend.

Dan: Rescue Rangers, we signed the deal as a theatrical and so there was no discussion of it whatsoever. There’s a writing credit.

Doug: The writing credit bonus.

Dan: The writing credit bonus…

Doug: [Inaudible 00:28:42].

Dan: …that we’ll get when this comes out. I don’t know when we’ll actually get it. Even all that stuff, the movie was in this weird little flux where it was all of a sudden going well, and then there was a moment where they were discussing, “Maybe we will switch it to theatrical.” Then COVID happened. Then they were like, “Nobody’s ever going to go to the movies again.” They started just assuming it was going to be Disney Plus again. Then they started signing all of the actors to Disney Plus, to streaming-only contracts. All of a sudden they got to a point where they’re like, “Oh, we’re back in a world where there is theatrical.” Now we couldn’t even switch back to theatrical if they wanted, because they can’t renegotiate the contract now.

John: It’s a weird time.

Aline: I know some people who made movies just pre-streamer to be in either independent films or festival films and then tried desperately to sell them to a streamer, and in certain instances it was too complicated to do that. They had to watch their movies come out and plunge like zeppelins that’d been stabbed with a pencil. I think streamers are really great for getting movies out there that are just not being made in any other way. I guess that’s probably the most banal statement I could possibly make. There’s just such a huge menu, budget range of things that are being made. It’s almost more like silent films, where they were cranking out, we’re going to make a Tom mix, we’re going to make a romance, we’re going to adapt Lady Chatterley’s Lover, we’re going to do a whole mix of things. John and I will tell you, features for a good 8 to 10 years were not that. It was a very, very limited menu and a very limited genre area that we were given to work in.

John: Let’s transition back to TV, because we have some questions from our listeners that you guys are incredibly well suited to answer. Megana, can you help us out with Christopher’s question here.

Megana: Christopher asks, “A recent deadline article on the 2022 pilot season cited networks as increasingly opting for, quote, ‘presentations’ instead of filming pilots. I’m familiar with this practice for unscripted shows, and to a lesser extent, one-hour dramas, but I’ve never encountered it before for sitcoms. I know John has some experience with the mechanics of a presentation from his DC show with the WB, but I can’t find anything about what a presentation would look like for a sitcom, especially a network sitcom which is already only around 22 minutes long.”

John: Doug, can you talk to us about… Didn’t you do a presentation for your show?

Doug: We did not. That show Pretty Smart for Netflix was a pitch. They saw a place for it. It made sense for their schedule.

John: Did you shoot a pilot or you shot series?

Doug: We went right to series.

Aline: Weirdly enough, I’ve done one.

John: Talk about presentation, Aline.

Aline: I did a presentation, I’m going to say 20 years ago, or maybe even more. It’s a fancy word for no money, to make a scratch track. It’s a bummer. It’s really hard.

Dan: It goes right in the trash. That’s the worst part is you make it, and it’s usually under different contracts, or a lot of the time it’s just different crews. It doesn’t even look the way that the show would look. It’s just a proof of concept.

Doug: This is how we got our break really. It’s where I think presentation should be, which is myself, Dan, and Adam Pally, all best friends, still are, and we had an idea for a sitcom, and then we went out with our own money, none of us had representation, and shot a cold open for the show and an opening credit sequence at under a thousand dollars and then sent it to everyone we knew. That was a proof of concept. I think that’s what presentation should be, as opposed to doing 22 minutes. Better to do like, give me that money and let me show you an example of, for a sitcom, what the comedy feels like, what these characters are like.

Dan: Our next one, we paired with a producer who financed a presentation. They financed maybe a 12-minute presentation for a half-hour sitcom. It was one of those things where again it was super useful. We still ended up selling it to the CW. Before, they were looking to only do dramas, but then Crazy Ex broke that cycle. It was super helpful. They’re great. It’s a lot of work and a lot of money.

Doug: You can’t say that this is what 22 minutes is going to look like, because you’re asking me to do it at a third of the cost, maybe even less. I don’t like the idea of them shifting to that, because that’s just saying let’s just squeeze out as much money as we can. I’d rather say give me that budget and let us do six minutes of the show.

John: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, that was famously a presentation where they shot it themselves. It was a proof of concept for, this is the chemistry between these guys, this is the idea, and that could change everything, as opposed to DC, when I taught that presentation, the idea was that it was a cheaper pilot, so basically you had your pilot script and then you would pick certain screens from that pilot script and have only those. We were shooting things that had to fit back into the original pilot. It was the worst of both worlds. The only thing I would say was helpful for that-

Doug: Wait, I’m sorry, so like Scene 1, Scene 5, Scene 12.

John: Yeah.

Dan: They wanted to use it. If they were going to make a show, they were like, we’re not going back and shooting this.

John: There you go.

Doug: That’s even more make-believe, isn’t it?

Dan: That is all the [crosstalk 00:34:02].

Aline: It’s such a vote of semi-confidence too. It’s like you match with someone on Hinge, and instead of going to dinner with them, you’re like, “I’ll meet you for coffee 15 minutes at 9 a.m.” They’re not going into it with… It’s such a meh. It’s so hard to make things even when everyone is so enthusiastic. When we did it, it just also allowed them to change things and give crazy notes. We ended up with an 11-minute presentation that is one of the craziest documents in my career everywhere. It’s somewhere in there, that closet, on a VCR cassette. It was bonkers. It’s in a weird way better to wait until people really care about what you’re doing and can give you a little support. It also strikes me as hilarious. You know how you can never explain to your parents what you do?

Doug: Oh, god.

Aline: Try explaining a pilot presentation to your parents.

Dan: I will say I think for corporations, shifting the development process towards that is stupid and ridiculous and it’s just a weird way to not pay as much money. I will say this forever. If you can get a little bit of your own money together to make your own pilot presentation, I do think a well-made piece of film can go much farther than a script can sometimes for someone on the come-up.

Doug: Especially if you’re not established.

John: [inaudible 00:35:25] Adam Pally on it. That can show his-

Doug: Exactly. We had an unknown Ellie Kemper in that presentation, at the time, she hadn’t booked anything at that point, and a bunch of people who ended up doing great things. This is always the advice we give to up-and-coming writers is to go out, find your community, and shoot things. It’s hard to get people to read your writing if know one knows you.

Aline: Now you can put them on TikTok. TikToks can go up to five minutes now.

John: There you go.

Dan: Basically a feature.

Aline: You can make something great with your friends and put it on TikTok.

John: Megana, what else do you have for us?

Megana: Jeffery asks about writing gender-agnostic characters. He says, “In my work in progress, my two main characters are women, and I want to encourage gender-neutral casting for everyone else. When describing what these characters do, I’m toying with the idea of using they pronouns for them. For example, Senator McMartin rushes in late for the news conference. They step to the mic, only to spot their former business partner in the front row. Do you think this would be a good general approach to avoid using a default he/she, or do I risk getting a reader who thinks I don’t know how to write? Would this be worth using a reader’s note before the script begins?”

John: Before we discuss this, I want us each to vote, good idea or bad idea. Dan, good idea, bad idea?

Dan: Bad idea.

John: Doug?

Doug: I lean towards bad idea.

John: Aline?

Aline: I lean towards an explanatory note.

Doug: Didn’t vote, Aline. I would’ve leaned towards that too if I knew that was an option, Aline.

Aline: Really political over here today.

John: I’m going to vote bad idea. I’ll give my context and then everyone can weigh in. I totally respect what Jeffery’s trying to do, but I also think that in 2022 they/them pronouns is for characters who identify as not being on the gender binary. To throw up your hands like, “I don’t care,” is actually worse in some ways. I think as a writer you’re making a choice about who you’re putting in there. You cannot be as specific as you want to be if you’re not actually even deciding with the gender of this character is. That’s my instinct here.

Dan: Thank you for taking the lead on that, John.

Aline: Sorry, the question is how do I leave it open to as many types… You can say Officer Rao, and then in parentheses you can say male, female, or nonbinary, parentheses. Then you can say, “I will be using he,” so that they know that… I’m assuming they’re trying to keep it open, not write a nonbinary character, because obviously those would be different things. If you want to encourage them to keep it open, you can give them a gender-neutral name and then note that it could be played by…

Dan: I also want to know when I’m reading someone, especially I haven’t read before, what they envision the character to be. I think that’s okay to do. Then when casting discussions come around, you can always pull back and go, “You know what? This could actually be XYZ and I didn’t think about that.” I think specificity helps. You’re painting a picture for these people with your words.

Doug: Specificity’s everything. It’s everything.

Dan: It becomes more obtuse and more like, okay. It’s a choose your own adventure of like, oh, this is who I’m going to imagine then.

John: Exactly. It’s hard to put that scene in your head if you don’t know what am I even looking at, who is this person. A line is going to read differently from this character versus that character.

Dan: Completely. It’s a non-decision in your script.

Aline: I disagree. I think there’s a lot of times, especially when you’re writing a smaller part, that you can write parentheses, any gender, or parentheses, any ethnicity, so that you’re leaving it open. We’ve done that. We did that a lot.

John: Certainly for characters that basically have essentially no lines, and they’re purely functional, sure, great. You’re doing that sporadically. As Jeffery’s describing, encourage gender-neutral casting for everyone else, you can encourage that when you hand in the script, but you cannot just write that in on the page.

Dan: It’s fine to put a note that says, “Hey, whoever finances and makes this project, please cast openly with gender-neutral casting as much as possible.” It just seems a little cart before the horse. It doesn’t belong in the body of the script in my mind.

John: Also, generally, I think by choosing not to make a choice, if you have a social goal in mind for this, you could make some choices to make some of these roles female that would not always be female, or could be nonbinary that would not otherwise be. Specificity there can actually push your gender forward. Megana, what else do you have for us?

Megana: Great. Margaret asks about page density. She says, “I have a rom-com that is currently 104 dense pages. I snipped and squooshed and killed orphans to get to that svelte size, but now I’m wondering if more white space would make it a more enjoyable read. Do you think slenderness in the hand, measured by number of pages, or ease of quick reading is more important? If the latter, do you have any thoughts about how to put a dense script on a white-space-expanding diet? Where would the extra space be most useful, margins or between lines or everywhere? Nowhere do I have more than four lines of action or description or dialog, but still it looks dense.”

Aline: I’m going to quote Craig Mazin here, which is the return key is your friend. I never do a line of description more than… Rarely more than two, but definitely not more than three.

John: If you read through a bunch of scripts, there’s a wide range of stuff. There’s not one perfect thing to do for this. Judy Kay, don’t change the margins. Don’t try to make your margins bigger. That’s not going to help anybody. Also look at maybe what kind of script are you writing? If you’re writing a script with a lot of dialog, there’s going to be some natural white space there anyway, just because the margins have set in for that. I worry you may be worrying about the wrong things.

Dan: Look, my feeling on page stuff is that it’s purely a psychological tool for the person who’s receiving the script. We’ve all made enough scripts to know that the page count is functionally meaningless. Our shooting script for Rescue Rangers was 175 pages. The actual practical thing, when they re-transcribe the thing you’ve actually put on screen, every little um, eh, huh, it becomes 175 pages, but the movie’s 90 minutes. It doesn’t mean anything, the page count really. It’s just the way that people will receive it in development. Do they feel like it moves? Do they feel like it flows? Does it feel too heavy in their hand? It’s just that dumb stuff. I go home on my weekend read and they have a pile of six screenplays. They’re going to go to the thinnest one first, because they don’t want to take more time.

Aline: It’s a sales document, you’re right. If you open it and you see big, chunky, 10-line paragraphs, you’re like, “No, I’m not in the mood for that.”

John: 100%.

Doug: I don’t want to be prescriptive on it either, but I do think that first page… If I see a first page that is all scene direction, and I like reading… If there’s anything, I’d be like, look at those first couple pages and see what can you thin out to draw the reader in.

Dan: There’s nothing worse than the actions… We’ve done a lot of action movies, a lot of action movie rewrites. When you come in on an action movie where you’re seeing just pages and pages of the action described, you’re telling me the kind of machine gun they’re using, I don’t care. It’s a slog of a read. It’s not particularly interesting. It’s never character-forwarding. That’s probably the biggest thing is that it’s very-

Doug: Character or story.

Dan: Exactly. It just becomes meaningless details. It’s not fun. It’s not a good read.

Aline: I think from a writing standpoint, don’t you guys also think that most of the mistakes people make is too much stuff, not not enough stuff? A lot of times when you’re reading it, it’s like, she’s got a purple T-shirt and a button-down and Levis, and she walks over to the car and she opens it with her right hand. You’re like, which of those things do I care about? Which one of those are you pointing out? You can figure out what color the car is and what shoes they’re wearing later if the important thing is that she’s right-handed because later someone’s going to get stabbed with a left-handed knife or something. That’s what you have to highlight. I think beginning writers often, and I would include myself as a beginning writer for sure, there’s just a tonnage of extraneous detail, because you’re trying to show how beautifully and exquisitely you’ve imagined everything. You can’t do that. It’s like lighting. You’re trying to direct everyone’s attention to exactly where you want it to be.

Dan: You just said it. It’s directing. When you get late in a process and you’re having production meetings and you need to get every single detail in someone’s head, that’s the time to really get granular. Most of that stuff doesn’t need to be in there. You’re just trying to give a vibe a lot of the time.

Doug: You have to ask yourself what matters, I guess. If you’re telling me about the clothing, this is a person who just wears yellow, or you’re telling me what hand they use to open the door, do they have a broken right arm so they have to use their left. I think you have to ask yourself those questions of does this really affect the story, the character. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t need to be there, most likely.

John: Megana, another question for us?

Megana: JJ asks, “On a recent episode, John mentioned how near impossible it is to get a musical going at the moment. I have a musical out to buyers right now, and it’s been a lot of passes so far. The feedback has all been positive. People love the script, but more than a handful of buyers have said they simply can’t get a musical across the line right now. I wrote it in 2019 before the unsuccessful theatrical runs of a few notable musicals changed the landscape. My question is, what do you do when a script that excited agents, producers, and the director at the time it was written is ready to hit the market at a less than friendly time for the genre? Is a second chance possible a few years down the road? Is it dead? I’m very bummed at the moment and not too optimistic about the remaining places we are out to. Has this ever happened to either of you before?”

John: Yeah, this just happened to be. JJ could basically be just me writing. I did take a musical out. We basically went to all the streamers. Going into it, I’d heard musicals are really tough because of Dear Evan Hansen, because of West Side Story not working, but also just a whole slew of things, and so that certain streamers are saying no. They didn’t want to hear a pitch, because they said no. Other places, like, “Oh, we’re excited to hear the pitch.” I go in, it’s like, “It’s just so good. No, we can’t do a musical. I can’t get this approved,” which is heartbreaking but it feels [crosstalk 00:45:40].

Doug: You told me this the other day, and my heart sunk, because I am in the thick of a musical that I sold with Rachel Bloom to Amazon. On the other part of the subject, this is a movie that Rachel and I had developed a handful of years ago, took it out to all the places that do this stuff, all nos. We were like, “All right, it’s dead.” Then several years later, there was an executive shakeup at Amazon. The junior exec who loved it got promoted. His boss left. He had a new boss. He was like, “I have different directives. I’ve been thinking about this movie for years. Are you guys still open to do it with me?” We were like, “Yeah.” It again came back to life in this way that we had totally put it to bed. We’re in the thick of developing a musical for Amazon. I hope that all these things are conditional, because I would like for it to be a real movie.

John: It sounds like your movie’s already a little bit set up at a place. That definitely helps. It’s already in the track. Whether it’ll get that green light is the question.

Doug: Exactly.

John: You also have the track record of you and Rachel working on it. It also reminds me of Rescue Rangers, which is basically like there was a moment in which this was the way, the place that we could make it, and then it just goes away again. With musicals, we are just putting a pin in it. We will revisit after… There’s musicals that are in the pipe right now that could be huge hits.

Aline: It’s original musicals that are the problem, because Mamma Mia, Glee, things that draw on existing songs do way, way better. Having backed ourselves against the wall with this, with Crazy Ex, the thing I will share, when we were testing the Crazy Ex pilot, Rachel starts singing 10 minutes in. When you test TV, you have dials. The episode starts, and people are into it. People always responded extremely well to Rachel. People are enjoying the pilot. You can see the enjoyment line going up, up, up, up, up. There’s a scene she quits her job. Then the second she starts singing, when I’m telling you nosedive, it was as if everyone in the testing had just yanked their dial to zero. I remember turning to Rachel and saying, “That’s a traditional show tune, so maybe that’s why.” Then later in the episode there’s an R and B song with a rap solo in it, which has Rachel in her underwear for most of it. Same thing, they’re loving it, the dial’s really high. The second people start singing, the whole audience cranks it to the left.

If you looked at it, audiences have an innate allergy to songs they haven’t heard before in that format. I’m not sure why that is. It is a humongous overcome. If you’re doing Bohemian Rhapsody or the Elton John movie or Mamma Mia, people get excited when they hear those songs. I wonder if there’s ever a world where you take the Olivia Rodrigo album, and before you even release it as an album, you already have some sort of script ready to go so that once that becomes a hit, you have something that you can put into production with existing songs that are already a hit. It has to be a hit somewhere else in order to live in a comfortable… It’s very, very difficult. While our show had a certain cult status, we were for many, many months the lowest rated show on network television.

Doug: I don’t know if we were going to get to this before. I think it’s all connected in terms of when you let go of a project after you’ve made it and maybe it has been passed on. To talk about Rescue Rangers for a second, something that Dan and I actually haven’t spoken about that much is the idea of open writing assignments and doing free work. We were brought in on a different open writing assignment and asked to do free work, being like, “What’s your take on this property?” We spent a lot of time breaking out a take. We were like, “Why would we do this? This is such a long shot anyway.” We really liked the take. Then they passed on it. Then when Rescue Rangers came around, we were like, “There are some parts of this that are helpful.”

I think that it just goes to show that… There was a feeling of like, all that work was for absolutely nothing. I don’t think that’s ever the case. That’s the bit of silver lining in it. This is not to tell people to go out and do free work ad nauseum. There is an aspect of like, oh, that came back. That’s not done. It doesn’t have to be someone else green-lighting the same, exact thing. There were elements of it that we were like, “Let’s look back at that,” and be like, “There are elements that we can pitch for the Rescue Rangers and create around them.” That was very rewarding, because we’ve done so much. We all have done pitching on things that never went anywhere, never got paid to do. That time spent developing an idea is not a wasted time.

John: I’ll say that this musical that I wasn’t able to get set up, I did have 12 good meetings with places, and I have relationships with those places that I didn’t before. I didn’t get the thing going, but at least I know which of those executives I like. I definitely know which executives I will never, ever, ever work with. There’s a list of two or three people I kept telling my agents, “I will never work with her.”

Doug: Great.

John: That was good too.

Doug: Also, there’ll be a hit musical in five years.

John: Exactly.

Doug: All of a sudden there’ll be a boom for musicals, and then this’ll come back to life.

John: The two things that are in production right now that will come out soon. There’s 13 at Netflix, which could be great, but no one knows the songs. Then Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell have a movie for Apple TV Plus, a Christmas Carol story, which is-

Aline: The two-part Wicked movie.

John: The two-part Wicked movie will also happen. That’s already known properties. On the animation side, I have Toto, which is a musical, but it’s also animation, which has special rules.

Aline: It has special rules. With respect to the projects, you have that, you own that. That’s in your computer and in your brain. My company is called Lean Machine, but I often had this joke that I was going to call it Dead Horse Productions because if I believe in it, I will drag it around indefinitely. A lot of the things that I’ve gotten made are things that I just would not give up on. Crazy Ex was one of those. Every single television network that you’ve ever heard of has passed on it multiple times. I am a big believer, it’s a good idea… John, you’ll be sitting at [inaudible 00:52:10] with someone and they’ll say, “I’m looking for this.” You’ll say, “That’s funny, because I happen to have one of those.”

John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a television show which I loved when it came out. My daughter had never seen it. We watched the pilot to Lost this past week.

Doug: Oh my god, [crosstalk 00:52:27]. We got to talk about this.

Dan: We were just talking about it.

Doug: I actually have this debate constantly. I’m sorry to interrupt your One Cool Thing.

John: I believe the pilot to Lost holds up remarkably well, incredibly well. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to the pilot script for it, which I never actually read. It’s very, very dense on the page. It’s not what I would normally like to read. It’s so good. It includes a bunch of scenes that are dropped out of the show. As I was watching it, I was just noting the act breaks in it and how long before we get to that first act being done. It’s just a genius thing. I feel like in many ways, the same… Aliens was the script that I always kept going back to to look at how you write action. I feel like people should need to look at the Lost pilot script again just in terms of how you do that show, because I’ve seen so many versions of that show that are trying to be the Lost pilot. The Lost pilot is just so much better, so smartly done.

Dan: The Lost pilot is spectacular. There’s so many episodes of that show that are spectacular. Can you divorce the ending from any other part of it? This is my fear and feeling, that the ending abandons so many of the things that were needed and asked of the audience that I don’t think it’s a fair ask to start it.

John: To start watching Lost?

Dan: I don’t think it’s appropriate.

John: Oh my gosh. I think Lost is an absolute delight. I encourage people to watch Lost. You cannot watch Lost without watching the Lost pilot. Really, what I’m encouraging everyone to do is just watch the Lost pilot. It’s on Hulu right now.

Dan: It’s a great pilot. It’s going nowhere, guys.

Doug: It goes somewhere for a very long time.

Dan: It leads to nothing.

Doug: I don’t completely agree with that.

Dan: It’s a winding road down into a dirt pit.

Doug: You might be sending your daughter down a path that will be ultimately depressing and unsatisfying, but that journey is fantastic.

John: I had David Lindelof on the show. One of the things he says is the the experience of people who watch Lost all at once is so different than the experience that we had watching it week after week. Things like when there’s two characters who get trapped in a jail thing for six weeks or something, six episodes I think, it’s excruciating, but the people who watched those episodes all together, it was like, oh, that actually tracks and makes a lot of sense. I do feel like a person who’s watching Lost now is getting a very different experience than we did having it strung out over the course of-

Dan: Also, they have access to all the spoilers immediately. Maybe that’s to the benefit, where the what’s in the box question isn’t as loaded, because they know where this is going. They’re signing up for it.

John: The single best cold open ever on an episode was when you get inside the hatch for the first time.

Dan: Oh my god, I think about that all the time. It’s seared into my brain. I’m like, “We’re going in. We’re going in.”

Doug: I sing that song to myself all the time.

Dan: Exactly. Again, I was just so obsessed with that show, to the point where it was actually one of the things that I started really connecting with my wife about when we started dating. We went to a Lost exhibit, where they showed us all of the props from the show. I was so deeply, deeply in love. We were getting into all the weird Fibonacci math equation mysteries. Megana remembers that.

Doug: You guys were made for each other.

Dan: There’s a personal aspect to this.

John: Doug, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

Doug: Yeah, I actually do. It is music-related. It is an app that’s been around I think for a while, but no one ever seems to know it when I talk about it. It’s called Radioooo with four O’s. It’s world music that is really fun. The music is curated by country and decade. You just go on and you can either let them pick randomly for you… This morning, I was driving my daughter to school. We were listening to music from Angola in the 1980s, and she loved it. You’re discovering things that you’re not getting on your Discover Weekly. It goes all the way from 1900 to 2020. It covers almost every single country in the world. It’s really, really great.

Dan: That’s awesome.

John: Dan, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

Dan: Aline knows that the pandemic, I became a real sauce boy. I love condiments.

Doug: I think he was always a sauce boy.

Aline: Gregor and I were threatening during the pandemic to start an Instagram account called Condimentally Yours.

Doug: We were like, “Wait, is this a full TV show?”

Dan: Condiments, spices, sauces are really my obsession right now. My favorite one-stop shop for Middle Eastern spices, because that’s my favorite cuisine, is New York Shuk.

John: It’s an online store or LA?

Dan: I think it has a brick and mortar in New York, but it’s an online store. It goes all over the world. It’s beautiful packaging, great website. You get your preserved lemons there, your harissa, get your hawaij, get your za’atar. Get all the stuff, baharat, a lot of really important things.

Doug: All things you didn’t know you needed.

Dan: Exactly. A lot of important secondary stuff.

Aline: Gregor and I are both children of sabras, so we have that Middle Eastern stuff in common.

Dan: Exactly. You can even get a harissa spice and just put harissa spice in stuff without the sauce.

John: Harissa’s great.

Dan: Harissa’s great.

John: That’s great.

Dan: I highly recommend you go to New York Shuk, S-H-U-K, and buy their stuff. I’m not being paid.

Doug: You should be.

Dan: I love them.

John: Aline, you have a One Cool Thing for us?

Aline: I do have a One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing is Megana, because I’ve been listening to… I listened to the 20 questions episodes. I find that I have a little leap of joy in my heart when I know Megana’s going to be on an episode, because I really enjoy hearing from younger writers, and especially younger women. I think there is lots to learn from writers that are older, but I honestly learn so much from not just writers but executives, the people at my company who are younger. I love to hear about what they’re experiencing and what the market looks like for them and how they’re breaking in. I love Megana and Craig. That’s one of my favorite duos. Then Megana and John have their own special magic. I really enjoy it when I have that little leap that you have when you are watching an episode of your favorite TV show and you see that Reese Witherspoon is guest starring on Friends or something. I think Megana is a rather modest person, but she’s actually, I think, inviting a lot of people into Scriptnotes. She works her butt off. Megana, you are my One Cool Thing.

Doug: Wow. What a voice too.

Megana: Oh my gosh. I’m sorry, I have to go. I have to go lie down. I don’t know how to process how happy I am. That’s so nice. Thank you.

Doug: No, we need you. That’s the whole point. We need your voice.

Megana: Thank you so much. That’s so kind, Aline.

Aline: I love it. I wish there had been someone like that when I was a young writer. I wish there had been someone that I could listen to who was also trying to figure out how to put all these pieces together. You’re trying to figure out an entire industry and your own voice at the same time. I was cleaning out some cabinets. I came across a file that I had of original ideas that I was going to pitch. Oh my god. It was so scattershot. I was trying to work in every genre and tone imaginable. They’re insane. I love that period of your life when you’re trying to synthesize all these things. I have kids who are on their way to being grown. My son is graduating from college. I think embracing that time in your life when you’re on the on-ramp… I really love to hear from people like that. It’s been a nice addition to Scriptnotes and the Gen X codgers that we are.

John: That was our show for this week. We are still trying to sort out our schedule. Next week is likely to be a best of episode as we get back onto our normal Tuesday schedule. Scriptnotes is always produced by our amazing Megana Rao, our One Cool Thing Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Pedro Aguilera. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust as long as I stay on Twitter. Dan, Doug, are you guys on Twitter?

Dan: Yeah, @gregorcorp, C-O-R-P.

Doug: I’m @thedougmand, M-A-N-D.

John: @thedougmand. Aline, you’re using Twitter right now?

Aline: I’m @alinebmckenna.

John: Fantastic.

Aline: You’ll find important things like what is the best Kansas song. I’ve got important things on my Twitter. I really do.

John: Stuff you’d need to know. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the ones we’re about to record on having a newborn in the house. Aline, Doug, Dan, thank you so much for coming on.

Dan: Thank you.

Doug: Thank you. This was great.

Aline: Woot woot.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Doug and Dan, you have very young kids. Dan, I know your baby was born at the very start of the pandemic.

Dan: Yeah, March 20th.

John: Wow, that’s just right in the heart of it.

Dan: Right at the start.

John: Doug, one kid, two kids? Where are you?

Doug: One child, born end of 2017.

John: A little more experience then on this. You had to be doing a lot of writing work while this new life was living in your house. I want to talk a little bit about becoming a new parent and trying to maintain your career and trying to maintain your life, because I remember when I had our daughter, that first month was just so, so, so bleak. Then the moments where I would try to sneak away and actually write, I felt guilty for abandoning my other half and my child. What are some strategies that, Dan, you’re implementing right now with your kid?

Dan: Honestly, this is a very ritzy strategy, but I have an office in my house. I had the place I would go and work. At a certain point, my daughter turned a cognition corner and no longer lost track of me when I closed a door.

John: Object permanence happened.

Dan: Exactly. She would just bang on the door, just completely just bang until I’d come back out. Working at home became actually impossible. Me and my wife rented a little studio apartment down the street. We’d just walk down the street to go write in this little studio apartment.

John: You throw some goldfish on the floor for your daughter.

Dan: Exactly.

Doug: A big jug of water.

Dan: We put her in a bubble and just let her roll around the house with some water and goldfish. Just a little bit of private space has been by far the thing that has enabled it. I know that’s not necessarily available to everyone. That’s my first advice. Doug, do you have any particulars?

Doug: I do think a room of one’s own is really important to get out. Right before the pandemic, a year before… I have an office as well. My wife is a writer. I would go to a workspace. I loved it. I just loved writing from there. Then coming back home, it was really hard when the pandemic hit, because the guilt is what I felt. I have a garage where I can work out of. The bathroom was inside. I would go in. I’d be like, “No, dad’s not home right now. I’m just here.” There was a guilt. It’s like, you’re home, why aren’t you with your daughter? These are amazing, precious moments. I think if you can create a space, even if that’s, now that the pandemic is not as intense… It’s still quite real. Go somewhere to work. I think that’s helpful.

Also, just be vigilant with your scheduling, just being like, “This is the time that I write.” I think we all waste probably a lot of time not writing when we say we’re writing. If you have an hour, write for an hour. You’ll probably find that you’re getting more done in that time. Don’t beat yourself up for that. Then when you’re with your child, I would say whenever you can not bring your phone in, that’s been a big thing. Your child can sense when you’re not there emotionally. You’re looking at your phone. I try to give my daughter at least 20, 25 minutes where my phone is in another room and I’m just there with her. That makes me feel like not such an absentee father.

John: We’re recording this in the space over my garage. It was an absolute godsend when we had a kid. We would just make a show like, “Papa’s going off to work, bye.” I would walk up the stairs.

Doug: Close the window blinds so she can’t see you.

John: My former assistant, Stuart, was working downstairs. At a certain point she became mobile, and she would come in and talk to Stuart, but she had no idea that I worked upstairs.

Doug: Oh my gosh.

Dan: Oh my gosh.

John: I’d just be very, very quiet. Then eventually she started to wonder, “Why is Papa’s car still here?” It was like, “Oh, he must’ve walked to work.” Not technically a lie. I did walk to work.

Doug: Yes, you did.

John: Eventually, when it became clear, like, “Does Papa work upstairs?” we had a conversation about, “This is workspace. This is home space. You’re basically not allowed up there.”

Dan: The sneaking around my child is the most ludicrous thing. If I have to stop back in during the middle of the day, I will use the backdoor, I will tiptoe. I will pray to God that I am getting out of her line of vision so that she doesn’t see me, because if she sees me in the middle of the day then it’s like, I got put in a half hour.

Doug: At what age did you tell your daughter? Was there any-

John: Blow-back?

Doug: “That’s what’s been going on this whole time.”

John: She was either four or five before she really understood that-

Doug: She still doesn’t know [crosstalk 01:06:14].

John: Then at a certain point, they stop caring completely. Aline, we should talk about… We have older kids now.

Aline: I’m on the other end of it, because my kids are 19 and 22. In case anybody is feeling really guilty about it, I left… A friend of mine gave me an office in his office when my Charlie, my older son, was 18 months old. I always had an office outside the house after that. I have neurotically asked my children many, many times if they felt deprived by having a parent, specifically a mother who was working. They insist that it was fine and they actually liked it. That’s either what they’re saying to me so that I can continue paying their rent or they actually believe that. If you’re used to writing and you’re used to expressing yourself and that makes you happy, in whatever way writing can make you happy, but if that is a form of self-care, just remember that a happy, fulfilled parent is a wonderful thing. Specifically, I hope that moms don’t beat themselves up about finding a workspace for themselves.

Doug: It’s a great thing for your child to see.

Aline: Yeah, is that you’re being productive.

Doug: Yeah, this is Mom working, this is Dad working. It’s also part of life.

Aline: Definitely. One of the things that August and I have in common is a deep love of babies. Man, I love a baby.

John: Oh god, I love babies so much.

Aline: I spend so much time trying to spend time with Gregor and Rachel’s baby, especially during the pandemic, I was getting tested as much as I could so I could go and see her and see them. One time Dan said to Rachel, “Aline does know that this is just a baby, right, and it’s not her baby?”

Dan: I just want to make sure you know.

John: [crosstalk 01:07:55] those contracts like all output isn’t shared.

Dan: Exactly.

John: You’re writing partners.

Dan: Exactly.

Aline: Man, I loved it. It’s nice also, you get to work and you get to go home and have this most magnificent thing to interact with that takes your mind off of work and who doesn’t care that you got notes about you need to dig deeper.

Dan: Doug said this, but a writing day for me, my writing process truly was like, ease in around 11, and then do nothing for 6 hours. Then in my mind I was like, I’m only good at writing for a really intense burst from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. That’s how I lived my whole life. I was like, “I’m a late-night writer.” Boy, that went out the window with a kid. To Doug’s point, it’s just like, no, I’m clocking in. It just got me much better at the idea of clocking in, clocking out. These are my work hours, and I need to be able to make this a functional day job in a very real sense, where it’s like I need to be home by 5:30 to start doing bedtime kid stuff.

Aline: That’s why we did the Crazy Ex room the way we did. We had so many parents. My kids were 10-ish and 13-ish. I’d just want to get out of there. We had a lot of parents in that room. As the show went on, we had more and more. I had learned from my kids being little, yeah, you become much more efficient, and you want to get the eff out of there. We also didn’t do a lot of post-room lingering. It does make you more focused and efficient.

Doug: I would also say, if you don’t have the means, also I really like writing in a library. I had been doing that a lot. There’s something about being around other people working. If it’s not a workspace, there are wonderful libraries in most cities and towns. You really feel like you’re clocking in. I like that feeling of… It’s work that I enjoy. In there you’re really like, “I don’t want to be here all day. I’m going to do an hour and a half, two hours.”

Dan: I don’t want to go the bathroom.

Doug: Yeah, don’t want to go the bathroom and I don’t want to look at… Looking at websites and browsing the internet in the library is a very just gross feeling. You’re just like, “Just let’s write. Let’s just do it.” That’s a resource that a lot of people don’t use.

John: One challenge with being gone for most of the day and coming back at 5, 5:30, that’s often the absolute worst time of day for a kid. That’s often the time when they’re most upset. I think sometimes a vicious cycle happens where you feel bad for being gone all day, but your kid feels bad because it’s 5:30 and they’re hitting unhappy hour, and so you’re the bad parent who’s returned. You may need to adjust your schedules a little bit just so you can get a little bit more happy time with your kid too.

Dan: I haven’t had that yet. Thankfully, she’s still pretty decent at that hour. I’m sure it’ll get worse.

John: It’ll get worse. Thank you guys so much again for this conversation about parenthood.

Doug: Thank you.

Dan: Thank you. Thanks, Aline.

Aline: Thanks, Scriptnotes peeps.

Links:

• Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers May 20th on Disney+
• Your Place or Mine coming soon!
• Los Angeles Plays Itself
• Presentations versus Pilots
• New York Shuk for Saucy Boys
• Radiooooo App
• Lost Pilot read the script here.
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• Dan Gregor on Twitter
• Doug Mand on Twitter
• Aline Brosh Mckenna on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Pedro Aguilera (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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You can download the episode here.