The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/the-one-with-jack-thorne).
**John August:**
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:**
My name is Craig Mazin.
**John August:**
This is episode 530 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ll look at making TV in the U.S. versus the UK, and what writers on either continent need to know. Then we’ll discuss disability on screen and behind screen. As we get ready to move into 2022, we’ll focus on some goals you can control. Now, Craig, since you and I are not well versed on several of these topics, could you suggest someone who could talk to us more eloquently about these issues?
**Craig Mazin:**
When you’re looking for somebody who is eloquent and you can’t find that person, you immediately to turn to Jack Thorne. One of my past One Cool Things, one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite people in the world, Jack is, among other things, very tall. He is wonderfully British and a spectacularly good and almost as importantly, spectacularly prolific writer. Among his as many brilliant credits are the The Aeronauts, National Treasure, not the looking for treasure in the U.S., but National Treasure, the sexual abuse scandal film that was done in the UK, Wonder, Enola Holmes, The Secret Garden. Television credits include His Dark Materials, Skins, Shameless, and the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, along with the miniseries This is Britain. Basically Jack is kind of the cornerstone, as far as I’m concerned, of modern English screenwriting for feature and television, and again, one of my favorite people in the world. If he weren’t already wonderful enough, he’s gone and kind of out-sainted you, John, which is really hard to do, by giving voice to an issue that has gotten a bit of a short shrift as our industry, global industry, has attempted to rectify sins of the past and do better for everyone working within. That is advocacy for disabilities and the representation of disabilities and disabled folks on screen. Welcome Jack Thorne.
**Jack Thorne:**
Thank you for having me. You’re very nice.
**Craig Mazin:**
I agree.
**John August:**
Jack Thorne manages to be incredibly humble. Even in emails, you could hear his voice. This is the first time I’m really meeting him, but you could hear his humility in an email like, “Oh, I shouldn’t even be on the show.” It’s like, of course you should be on the show. Thank you very much for agreeing to join us here.
**Jack Thorne:**
You’re very kind. I feel like I sort of thrust myself upon you, but yes, all good.
**John August:**
Now we’re going to talk about these things, but I also want to, for a bonus topic, get into the differences between American English and British English and sort of how you reveal which side of the pond you’re on in your screenwriting and whether you should basically put the U’s in the words when you’re writing a British thing. We’ll get the official answer from you about writing American versus writing British.
**Craig Mazin:**
Just spoiler alert. Don’t use the phrase fanny pack when you’re writing in England.
**John August:**
Now, as I was watching your MacTaggart lecture, which we’re going to put a link in the show notes to, it was one of Craig’s previous One Cool Things, we have questions about it from our listeners, but as I started listening to it, I recognized that this is a famous lecture given every year at the Edinburgh Film Festival, Edinburgh TV Festival I guess, about television. Can you just give us a sense of what the MacTaggart lecture is? Your being chosen for it was an honor, of course, but also probably a huge responsibility. Then we can maybe transition into really talking about British television, because I kind of only barely understand it.
**Jack Thorne:**
The MacTaggart is a big thing. It’s had all sorts of different stages in its existence. More recently it’s had quite a lot of makers talk. Michaela Coel famously gave a speech which laid the groundwork for what became I May Destroy You. Before that there was a period when it just basically took the most powerful people in television and gave them a microphone, which included at one point an excruciating lecture from James Murdoch. It’s had lots of different iterations. Everyone from Dennis Potter to Troy Kennedy has done it at different points, and it was a ridiculous honor to be given it, and as you say, a huge responsibility, because coming out of COVID in particular, it was clear what I needed to talk about, but whether I had the necessary means to talk about those things, whether I had the moral power to talk about those things, were questions I really wrestled with.
**Craig Mazin:**
Let’s talk about your moral qualifications. By the way, I should apologize. The shows you work on were called This Is England, not This Is Britain, but I’m a donkey, so this’ll happen every now and again. Why were you wondering if you were morally qualified to deliver this talk? In what ways do you have any kind of personal insight into this, or why this? Why connect it to this topic for you?
**Jack Thorne:**
I walk a really weird line where disability is concerned in that I was a disabled person. I had a physical breakdown when I was 21. I got this condition called cholinergic urticaria, which left me unable to move. I became allergic to heats in all its forms. I became allergic to sunlight. I became allergic to radiators. I became allergic to my body movement. Every time I moved, I provoked an allergic reaction. I spent six months flat on my back, and then slowly but surely I worked out how to get better. I got on the right medication and I got the right doc support. It was about 12 to 15 years of my life, I was very limited in terms of what I could do, but I got better.
**Jack Thorne:**
Now during that time, there’s this theater company in the UK called Graeae. Graeae are this wonderful company, disabled-led, that’s trying tell stories about the disabled experience with disabled performers and disabled writers and disabled makers. They have this open day. I went along to this open day, unsure whether I belonged or not. I talked to a woman there called Alex Baumer, and she said, “Of course you belong here. You are a disabled person.” It felt like something just kind of … My back straightened. It was like, “Oh right, this is where my pain makes sense,” because the thing is, if you are battling pain every day as I was, you don’t really know who to talk to about it. There comes a point where people get a bit bored of hearing you talk about it, and so you sort of stop talking about it. That thing of being part of a community of people for whom pain was an everyday occurrence and who navigated these things, and it didn’t mean that I had someone to moan to, it just meant that I felt like I belong somewhere.
**Jack Thorne:**
The way I talk about myself now is I was a disabled person, I am now a member of the disabled community. Whether that’s legitimate or not, I don’t know, but it’s what I cling to because I think that that experience and what happened to me is a history that’s still very current in my body, and it’s a history that’s still very current in my head. I’m trying to, as much as I can, do disabled work and have disabled performers and disabled makers within my shows. I am in no way an angel where that is concerned. I have got it wrong a huge number of times. As I talk in the lecture, I have been a coward a huge number of times. That question as to can I talk about this, is it legitimate for me to talk about this, and how will people feel about me holding the microphone when I talk about these issues, when I’m not someone who has the stigma and the attacks, who isn’t coping currently with a disability, how will people feel about me being the one that’s holding that microphone?
**Craig Mazin:**
They seem to feel pretty good about it, from what I can tell. The response was dramatic and it was extremely well received, and for good reason. You have chosen an excellent cri de coeur, and you have delivered it beautifully. One of the things you talk about are the notion of invisible disabilities. Disability is something that affects everyone sooner or later. This is a universal condition at some point for everyone. Chronic pain is something that an enormous amount of people live with silently. I myself have lived with chronic pain now for about four years. I don’t talk about it much, or ever. Here I am. I’m okay. We carry on. I’m very British this way I suppose. I should start saying English. I’m very English this way. It is something that everybody deals with to some level or another.
**Craig Mazin:**
One of the things that I really admire about you is that while you have talked a little bit about how and why you came to be inside of this movement, you also don’t make it about yourself. You recognize that there are tiers of disability and that there are people who have been more egregiously treated and more egregiously left out. That is something that is happening on both sides of the camera, behind and in front, in terms of how people, when we create characters who are disabled, how we treat and portray them, who we hire to cast them, who is writing those characters. All these questions are now coming to the forefront in a way that I think had not happened until people like you, not only you, but people like you really started banging the gong over the last few years.
**Jack Thorne:**
The way I see it is that I’m temporarily in a spotlight for a moment. I was given that spotlight by the MacTaggart, and my job is to get out of that spotlight as fast as possible, which would be nice, personally would be nice, in order to let more legitimate people come to the front. I’m trying to do that in my working practice too, in terms of co-writing and producing and trying to change the dial so that the spotlight is filled with those people that it should be.
**John August:**
Great. Before we get to some of the recommendations about improving portrayals of disability on screen and the work behind screen, can we talk a little bit about the environment in which you’re giving this lecture? Because I don’t think we have anything equivalent to this in the United States. We have upfronts, which is the annual meeting of big advertisers where they pitch their big new shows. In the film industry we have the big exhibitor screenings where we’re talking about things. We don’t have a situation where there is one point of focus saying this is the state of the industry, this is an important thing we must focus on, whether it be you talking about this, Michaela Coel or Rupert Murdoch. We don’t have anybody talking about this and what needs to change, why it needs to change. I think you also bring up in the lecture is that television actually does have a moral responsibility because it is in everyone’s home. Can you talk to us about how television functions in the UK and if you feel like that might be different than how it functions in the U.S? I feel as an outsider, I think there is a central authority to television in the UK that does not exist in the U.S.
**Jack Thorne:**
That’s really interesting. It’s not something I’ve especially thought about in terms of comparing the two, but we do, I suppose, wrestle a bit more in this country, maybe with the general state of the industry rather than specific programs. The MacTaggart is supposed to be that conversation, what should TV be, because yeah, I think that TV is hugely important. I think it’s the stimulation of a conversation. If you look at the trajectory of where we are, I think TV, sometimes it’s reflecting society and sometimes it’s pushing society on. The movement between the West Wing to Succession is quite a stark point. What it means that we want society reflected that way, or is the reflection provoking the society that is, is I think a really, really fascinating question and something I think about an awful lot.
**Craig Mazin:**
You’ve got a situation in the UK where there seems to be a lot more state involvement in practically everything, and television is no exception. BBC, I don’t know if it is technically the most viewed channel on television, but it’s certainly-
**Jack Thorne:**
I would suspect so. I would suspect so.
**Craig Mazin:**
In the United States, PBS gets about 12 people a week watching it. I apologize, PBS. I know it’s more than that, but it’s very small. As John says, all of our gatherings, whether it’s the Television Critics Association or the upfronts as you mentioned, it’s all commerce. It’s all about selling. That’s partly because it is entirely a question of corporations and not at all a question of the state, and therefore there is no governmental interest or point of view in the United States. Television is an industry and it is not necessarily ever promoted as some kind of potential lever for good. I think that is a cultural difference between the United States and the UK that is stark. It makes a lot of sense that in the UK television and culture in general would be spoken about both in terms of commerce, but also in terms of how to promote the public good. I’m interested in how you feel things have gone practically. I know that at least in the public space of discussion, your lecture, as I mentioned before, was incredibly well received. It was reprinted and revideoed everywhere. I think it’s the kind of thing that makes people feel really good to talk about. My question is are they just talking about it or are things changing? Because ultimately I feel like the only prayer we have over here is in this instance seeing some leadership from your side of the pond.
**Jack Thorne:**
As part of what has happened in the last year, I’ve been part of this pressure group. We call ourselves a pressure group called Underlying Health Condition. We call ourselves Underlying Health Condition because we are angry at the appropriation of that phrase to describe essentially disabled people and disabled deaths. Certainly in the first half of the pandemic, the idea of dividing deaths in two seemed to go everywhere, where it was like, okay, there’s one set of deaths that we worry about and then there’s one set of deaths that we really don’t. We had our first Omicron death in this country recently. you saw the question being asked everywhere, which is, did he have an underlying health condition, in that should we be concerned or is it just happening to disabled people? We formed this pressure group, and we formed this pressure group to look at TV. My lecture came out of that pressure group, and now we’ve launched a report on the back of our findings. A number of different things have happened in the last six months, that straight after the lecture that the BBC and Netflix and Channel Four made commitments to disabled programming. There were certainly mooted commitments from Sky and Channel Five too.
**Jack Thorne:**
What we are focused on, I mean Underlying Health Condition, which isn’t just me, it’s me, Katie Player and Holly Lubran, who are two people that work behind the scenes, and Genevieve Barr, who is an actress and a co-writer of mine, we’ve done three things together, and a writer in her own right too, and what our focus has been on is accessibility, because TV is incredibly inaccessible. I’ve been sitting on panels with disabled actors and makers for the last 15 years, and at the start of every discussion, the first question that basically comes up is how do we make TV accessible to us, because we can’t use the toilet.
**Jack Thorne:**
Underlying Health Condition did a survey of facilities companies and of studio spaces. Facilities companies, one of the starkest findings was there is one accessible honey wagon. The honey wagon is our name for toilets. I don’t know whether you call the toilets-
**Craig Mazin:**
We call it that too.
**John August:**
Honey wagon, right.
**Jack Thorne:**
There’s one accessible honey wagon in the whole of the UK. For 20% of the population, there’s one toilet that they can use. I hear stories all the time from friends who are wheelchair users about trying to restrict how much they use the toilet, because using the toilet costs the production time, and they do not want to be responsible for costing the production time, because this is the reality for disabled people all the time, which is we do not want to cause trouble. If we cause trouble, we might not get hired again. On panels, every single time that would come up. From friends, every single time that would come up. We set out, trying to work out how our industry could break down the barriers, how we could reform the way that the industry functions so that if you are a disabled person, you are not excluded by the space you work in. The response to that has also been very good. We are at the start of that process. It’s going to require a big injection of time and money. Who knows what practical things will come out? Certainly at the moment I’m talking to very senior people in the BCC and Channel Four and ITV and in Sky and Amazon and Netflix, and going to find ways to address our recommendations. There is stuff happening. It’s just it’s going to take a while. It’s going to be hard.
**Jack Thorne:**
In terms of what you say about the U.S, that’s really interesting. We work closely with the One In Four Coalition, which was set up by a wonderful talent manager called Eryn Brown. What she’s done is amazing. One of our key recommendations is for an accessibility officer on every set.
**John August:**
That’s interesting.
**Jack Thorne:**
That comes from One In Four. They have been at the forefront of that. They say the same as you, which is maybe, if Britain, which is a smaller community with more government, maybe if Britain sets about answering some of these questions, then the ripples can be felt in the U.S.
**Craig Mazin:**
That’s really interesting.
**John August:**
We’re going to put links in the show notes to both the Underlying Health report and the One In Four Coalition to see the recommendations. There’s overlap between the two of them, but I want to focus on the four key recommendations that you have in your report, which they seem very practical, which really speaks to the fact that you are a person who makes television and understands that you need to actually be able to do things and achieve things and make things happen. The first recommendation is a line in every budget for needed adjustments. Talk to us about adjustments that might need to come up in a budget to make a show accessible to a disabled person.
**Jack Thorne:**
That was about making the production responsible for those adjustments. By the way, you say in terms of practicality, I am useless. I am one of the least practical people alive. Katie Player, who’s one of my co-writers on this, is a production manager. She understood behind the scenes a lot better than us. When it was coming up with these recommendations, she has been an invaluable part of that. The idea is that there is small fund, and by small we’re talking 5,000 pounds adjustable down if you’re a smaller production, which is available for interpreters, is available for ramps, is available for a stool, is available for anything that the accessibility officer or coordinator suggests that just might make the experience better. It’s not a radical sort of like, “Yeah, we’re going to have to build something specifically for a purpose.” It’s about adjusting what we’ve got.
**Jack Thorne:**
Katie worked on a show of mine a few years ago and managed to get a hold of a ramp that she now takes with her wherever she goes. She was working on another production where the ramp didn’t quite go down to the floor because the trailers were a bit higher, so someone built her a little wooden extension to the ramp. Those sorts of things, it’s not a huge amount of money, but it can make a huge difference that the production is prepared and ready and considering the adjustments that might be required for a disabled person.
**Craig Mazin:**
It doesn’t seem like that an enormous amount of resources are required. What’s required is a minimum of care. When we all started in the business and somebody was walking around, let’s say on some sort of elevated space in a scene, they would walk around and the stunt people would say, “Don’t get too close to the edge,” and you wouldn’t get too close to the edge. Now we tether people and we paint it out digitally because we have safety standards that are stricter. Yet as we have advanced the cause of safety where we can, we don’t have disabled accessible toilets or a trailer that has something other than steps on it. I watch even people who aren’t disabled but merely old struggle on sets. I struggle on sets at times just to get around and over things. It is not the most hospitable place. Changing things would not require a lot of money. It seems to me that it just needs attention, a small amount of attention, which is why I’m desperately hopeful that this kind of attention that you’re bringing to this is going to work.
**Craig Mazin:**
Normally what you hear is, “Yes, no, of course, and we’re absolutely looking into these things, but it’s a large budget item,” and rah rah blah blah blah, of course. They’re discussing this while they’re having dinner and charging it back to the production. Something for instance, you mentioned the idea of a disability coordinator I think. Is that what you called it, a disability coordinator?
**Jack Thorne:**
Accessibility.
**Craig Mazin:**
Accessibility coordinator. Even better. We have intimacy coordinators now. We never did before. In the old days there would be sex scenes, there would be scenes with nudity, and some of those sex scenes were violent and criminal in nature, and people would just do it. A lot of weird stuff happened. A lot of bad stuff happened. There was certainly an enormous amount of pressure on people and confusion about boundaries. Now we have an entire professional class of people who appear to help mitigate those problems. We’ve had somebody like that on our set, not for a sex scene, but just because there was something that involved some nudity. It was amazing having her there. She made everything really clear and simple. It was a relief. I would think that productions would want this, because it’s a relief to have somebody help you navigate through it, especially if you are running the production and you aren’t disabled and you don’t have a lot of personal experience with people with disabilities. Then let’s just hire the people who do and let’s make everybody comfortable and welcome, physically comfortable and physically welcome.
**Jack Thorne:**
Absolutely. Disability is a spectrum. It could be that there are people who identify as disabled and for whom the accessibility coordinator will make a huge, huge difference immediately. There are others on the set who won’t necessarily know how to talk about what’s going on with them. To have someone that they can talk to privately about what needs they might have that the production isn’t automatically addressing will make a huge difference to the comfort of their lives and their ability to do the job. It’s such a small thing, but it could just create an unbelievable change in how people feel going to work. It stops things happening like, a friend of mine’s a producer, the production was on the fourth floor, the lift stopped working, so they put her in the canteen. She wasn’t part of the production from then on. She was just excluded on the outside of it. That happens all the time. If you have someone that’s just there to go, “This doesn’t work. We need to address it in a different way. We need to radically think about things or just moderately think about things,” the difference could be profound.
**Craig Mazin:**
We’ll get to lift versus elevator later.
**John August:**
Our premium members can hear about the lift versus elevator debate. Now you were talking about the needs on a set or the physical needs of a place, but one of your recommendations seems more targeting who gets to actually be able to write on programs. This is freelancer funds coming out of the high-end TV pool, which is where I recognize that I don’t know how British TV works, because what is a-
**Craig Mazin:**
What is that?
**John August:**
… high-end TV pool? Your MacTaggart lecture also mentions different tiers of budgets. Can you talk us through what those are? Because it’s really confusing to me.
**Jack Thorne:**
I don’t know it all. High-end TV is everything I believe above 750,000 pounds an hour. That’s about a million dollars would it be?
**Craig Mazin:**
Yep.
**John August:**
About a million.
**Jack Thorne:**
The high-end TV pool was formed a little while ago. It was a commitment by broadcasters that if your show was above that tariff, if your show budgeted above that tariff, then you would pay not .5% of your budget into a pool, which was for training purposes for people coming into the industry. It’s run by an amazing group called Screen Skills. Screen Skills have been talking to us about whether they could be part of this freelancers fund. It would be amazing if they can. The idea is that it’s not .1% on top of that, which would just allow for disabled people who have needs to have those needs cared for.
**Jack Thorne:**
I was working on a show. Someone’s call was at 6:00 a.m. Now if their call is at 6:00 a.m. that requires a carer to be with them at 3:00 a.m. They don’t have the money in their budget, their personal budget, to have a carer with them at 3:00 a.m. If they had access to this freelancers fund, that would allow for it. Similarly, deaf people and having an interpreter around both on set and off set so that they are not excluded from the processes that are happening off set as well as on set. All these things require someone to make life work more easily for those who have impairments. A freelancers fund would allow for that.
**Jack Thorne:**
Now we have something in the UK called Access to Work, which is for disabled people to access, which is supposedly for that, for the adjustments that they need that go beyond what an industry would pay for them, so that the industry wasn’t paying for them so that the government pays that bit so that the industry still pays their wage and so people aren’t excluded from work. It’s a very, very brilliant scheme. Unfortunately, it doesn’t operate very well in the TV sector because our jobs are very transitory, can happen very quickly, and also Access To Work has had quite a few cuts to it in the last 15 years under the Tory government, which has meant that it operates a little less well than it used to, well a lot less well than it used to.
**Jack Thorne:**
We think that this fund, which the rich in the TV industry will pay for, you know that everyone that makes high-end TV is rich in comparison to the rest of the country, our industry is doing very well compared to the rest of the country, would allow for a world in which disabled creatives would have power over their own agency.
**John August:**
The point to bring up here is that it’s one thing, with it probably equivalent thing American with Disabilities Act, which requires that place of employment, place you need to go into are accessible. It’s one thing if you have an office worker who’s making sure that getting into the office building and the use of the office building is accessible, but a freelancer going from show to show to show, in television or in film, they cannot count on the fact that things are going to be accessible for them. Some sort of funds that let them bring their accessibility with them feels crucial. I think that gives me some hope that some of these changes can be implemented. As we saw with the advent of COVID that studios really wanted to be back in production as they found ways to, “Okay, we’re going to set up COVID funds. We’re going to figure out how to do this thing.” It was really difficult, but you know what? We made a lot of good film and television during the pandemic once we figured out how to do this stuff. They can spend money when it’s in their interest to spend money.
**Craig Mazin:**
Oh yes. Think about this, John. Every day our production is providing health support and services to every single member of our crew in the form of COVID testing and making sure that everybody has PPE and all of that stuff. We do it. There’s an entire job now, and an entire team of people working for the guy who’s in charge of COVID compliance. We have cleaners that we didn’t used to have before. We were able to mobilize an entire new department, new division of people that cost new amounts of money so that otherwise healthy people wouldn’t get sick. We seem to struggle with anything that would help people who live with a disability. That’s just shocking. It’s the sort of thing, and Jack, don’t beat yourself up, you’re doing amazing work, I know you’ve mentioned your cowardice, I don’t note any of it. I think the sin out here in the world of not being Jack Thorne is a general obliviousness. It’s very easy to be oblivious about this sort of thing, until it gets you, and then harder, a lot harder to be oblivious.
**John August:**
Let’s talk about differences between the U.S. system and the UK system. The UK system has this sense of moral authority in television and in industry grappling with a thing. We don’t have that, but we do have unions. We do have, in ways that the UK doesn’t have, we have bodies that set standards for things. It does feel like in terms of performers being able to do their job on sets, that feels like a thing that SAG wrestles with, to a degree to which writers have the ability to participate in a writers room, to have interpreters be available for them if they need them. That feels like a WGA thing, the same with DGA. We have groups that can mobilize tremendous pressure to get some of these things done, and I would not be surprised if as we push forward here, we’ll see these unions step up to demand some of these changes happen. It won’t happen the same way. It may not happen as quickly. I think some of these things can and should happen.
**John August:**
I’m also reminded that when we added the parental leave benefit to the WGA, which is a new thing we won, one of the artist rule to make is that, listen, everybody who works for Netflix right now gets paternity leave, gets parental leave when they have a kid. It just seems right that the writer who’s creating that show should have the same benefits as the executive who’s running that thing. I can imagine a situation where people who are working for the studios right now have expectations that their workplaces can be wheelchair accessible for people who need to use wheelchairs. The same should apply to our sets. I think that logic sometimes can help and help people think about why they need to be thinking about this and why they need to be ready to spend some money to make that happen.
**Jack Thorne:**
I love that. I’d not considered that the unions could be a huge, huge role. You’re right, the power of your unions is so much bigger than the power of the unions in this country. The idea that they could provoke this change, it’s really warming, it’s really huge, really exciting to hear actually.
**Craig Mazin:**
All they have to do is work together, which they’ve never done before [inaudible 00:30:51].
**John August:**
Even working under their own self-interest though, some things can change. It tends to build upon each other, so things do happen. We have two listener questions that came in which were very specifically designed for you to come on the show, not even knowing that you’d come on the show. Megana, can you help us out with some of these questions that we’ve gotten?
**Megana Rao:**
Great. Scared of Umbrage but Desperate for Insight asks, “Craig-”
**Craig Mazin:**
Here we go.
**Megana Rao:**
“Your cool thing has broken me. Jack Thorne’s MacTaggart lecture was extremely impactful. I feel broken because I’m concerned I’m taking the wrong lessons or that I’m being selfish. Originally I was writing a story with a main character who had been disfigured in military service. Later I decided to pare it down to a mental health issue like PTSD, because I just didn’t think that I should write it, as I have no experience with physically disabled people, but I can’t help reference the embarrassingly large number of stories put to screen that have clearly been written by people who don’t have the slightest clue how their character should sound or how those events should play out.
**Megana Rao:**
“Mr. Thorne’s speech has made me think about a lot of things that I don’t have answers for. I want to write for female characters, because in my life the women around me have been so valuable and interesting that I’m inspired to write with them in mind. I listen to the voices of marginalized people speak on how they feel. They just want a place at the table, starting with their faces in popular culture. I fall immediately into self-doubt and concern for what my place is in producing that culture. I am a near radioactive level of white bread American. Should I even participate?
**Megana Rao:**
“Jack Thorne spoke passionately and with great vulnerability about a group of people that just wants dignity and a fair shake. How do I participate in the business of storytelling that doesn’t perpetuate the endless narrative of the singular white male voice telling the world what culture is?”
**Craig Mazin:**
Jack, that’s a simple question and I’m sure you can answer that in, I’ll give you seven words.
**Jack Thorne:**
I think authorship is something we’re all wrestling with right now. I write a lot of female characters. I write a lot of female character-led dramas. I always have. It’s something that I’m asking about myself why I do that and whether I have right to do that.
**Jack Thorne:**
When it comes to disability, one of the groups that spoke at our event, we had this launch event, and we didn’t want it just to be about Underlying Health Condition, we wanted it to be about all the major disability groups in British television. We had lots of different people speak. One of the people that spoke was this man called Laurence Clark who outlined how a writers room should be run for disabled people and what consideration should be given when having disabled people in the room. It’s really complicated because you’re talking about a group that have been historically excluded. It’s a very, very small group. It’s a group where being given authorship is not something that historically has happened. I don’t quite know whether no one should be writing disabled people except for disabled writers. I certainly think disabled writers need to be part of a discussion when it comes to writing disabled characters, and they need to be a senior part of that discussion, and they need to be armed so that future authorship is exclusively disabled, because as the caller says, there has been historically a huge amount of ignorance, and quite dangerous ignorance put on the screen by people who didn’t know better but should’ve known better and have perpetuated myths about the disabled experience, which has been incredibly damaging to disabled people everywhere.
**Craig Mazin:**
Well said. I think Scared of Umbrage but Desperate for Insight, don’t fear my umbrage, I have no umbrage for you. I feel for you. I would suggest that somewhere along the line in our bourgeoning and justifiable desire to include people who have been traditionally excluded and to have better, fuller, clearer, and truer representations of all sorts of people on screen, we have lost sight of what the word fiction means. Particularly when we’re talking about fiction in drama, everybody is writing something they’re not. There is only one story you can write that is perfectly true to yourself, and that is your autobiography, and even that will probably be garbage. We are professional liars, who like actors, occupy the minds of people we are not. That is literally the job. What’s happening I think is that some people are having an existential crisis about what it means to actually be a fiction writer.
**Craig Mazin:**
What I do think is critical, and we’ve said this on the show many times, is that you have to approach material with respect. You have to approach the lives of other human beings with respect. Here’s the deal. Doesn’t matter how good your intentions are. If you are a bad writer, your writing will be bad. If you are a good writer but a callous writer, your writing will be probably put off in that pile of what they call lazy or tropey or oblivious. You have to be both good and you have to have your ears open, you have to have your eyes open, and you have to have some humility. You have to talk to people. When you are writing a character, and if that character’s disabled in a way that you don’t have personal experience with, find people who do, who are already willing to discuss these things, not people that you know who that you can then burden your questions upon, but rather there are groups, advocacy groups. The Writers Guild is very good about putting you together with people who want to talk about these things, who are interested in helping. If you do get into a position, a privileged position where you can hire people, hire them. That’s important.
**Craig Mazin:**
When you are writing characters who are a different race than you are or a different gender and then you cast those people, talk to the actors and ask them, “How did we do? What did we get wrong? What did we get right? Let’s have that discussion.” What we should not do is box ourselves off into a place where we can only write who we are. If anything, that would mean fewer representations of disabled people on screen. What I like about what Jack is doing is that he’s advancing in a rising tide manner everybody’s opportunity. If you write something great that provides opportunity for better representation and employment of different people than you, then that’s a victory for everybody.
**John August:**
One moment of the current discourse I’m following closely is West Side Story. West Side Story is an iconic musical that is problematic when you look back at the original incarnation of it. You look at this new incarnation and Tony Kushner’s work on it, and you can see that like a Jack Thorne, he was very concerned about his role in telling the story and making sure to find the information about the communities he’s writing about and what the communities were like at that time and how this could all fit together. It’s a difference between letting that concern guide you to do more and harder work and letting that concern stop you from ever trying to do that work. That’s I think what Scared is wrestling with. I think you may be looking at it as a blockade, a wall preventing you from actually doing the work, when in fact it is a challenging path for you to go down, but really it’s an invitation to really explore what’s out there.
**Craig Mazin:**
Megana, what’s your take on this question?
**Megana Rao:**
I agree with all of the things that you guys have said. One other thing that came to mind is I watched an interview with Ariana DeBose, who plays Anita in West Side Story. She is a Black Latin woman. She talked about going to the interview with Steven Spielberg and saying, “I’m not going to take this role unless you honor what it means for Anita to be played by a Black Latin woman.” They were really receptive to that and made the changes in the script and worked with her on doing those things. I think that speaks to what you were saying, being open to the experiences that your actors or actresses who are representing these characters bring to that material as well, even in the later stage of the process.
**John August:**
Megana, you have one more question that feels very much on topic here.
**Megana Rao:**
Great. Mike from London asks, “I got COVID in May of 2020 and subsequently developed long COVID. Most of my symptoms have improved since then, but I’m still suffering extreme fatigue and post-exertional malaise. In short, getting COVID seems to have triggered chronic fatigue syndrome. Before this I was a healthy 27-year-old with dreams of writing for Hollywood. I improved as a writer each year and was starting to see a small amount of success. I was a semifinalist in the Nicholl last year and was getting some reads from managers and production companies, but unfortunately, getting long COVID has made everything much more difficult. I now have to be careful not to use too much energy in a single day. Even a small amount of activities, like going on a short walk and writing two or three pages, can be enough to completely exhaust me for a few days. Just writing this email feels like a huge mental drain, and because of this, I know I won’t have energy to write this evening. All of this on top of having to somehow keep my job has left me worried that I’ll never reach my goal of being a working writer. I’m wondering if you know or are aware of any working writers with similar chronic diseases. How has their disability informed the content of their writing and their process?”
**Craig Mazin:**
Rough situation there, Mike. First of all, we are still learning a lot about long-term COVID, long COVID, long-haul COVID as it’s sometimes called. We don’t know if it’s permanent. It is very tempting when you are in the middle of something difficult as, Jack, you are in the middle of your disability. I’m sure it seemed to you at the time like it would be permanent, which is terrifying, I assume. I’ve certainly felt that way about my situation.
**Jack Thorne:**
I was told by a doctor, “You won’t get better.”
**Craig Mazin:**
Even if you’re not told by a doctor, you’re told by your own fear center in your brain that you’re not going to get better. That is really terrifying. First things first, it seems to me, Mike, you just have to honor the reality that you’re in. The reality that you’re in is you can only do what you can do. You can’t do more than you can do. If I told you that the only way to be a working writer would be to climb 100,000 steps a day, no matter what your situation would be, you wouldn’t be able to do it. That’s not a failure. That’s just reality. Accept the reality that you have.
**Craig Mazin:**
Perhaps as a relatively young person, in fact rather young, half my age, sir, or ma’am, give yourself a little bit of time here. Maybe what you could do is concentrate on what you might be able to do to get a little bit better, if there is that ability, and if there’s not, then take the time to readjust your life. If you write, I think it says writing two or three pages in a day is enough to completely exhaust you for a few days. Then that’s what you can do. You can write two or three pages for every few days. By the way, I know a lot of great writers that have zero problems who do exactly that. If they’re two or three great pages a day or two or three great pages a week, that’s two or three more great pages than almost everyone else can write in the world.
**Craig Mazin:**
Count the blessings, but also accept the reality. Make your peace with it. Mourn what you’ve lost. Do anything you can that’s available to you. In terms of resources, yes, I think Google is your friend. There’s got to be some groups of writers living with disability and working with disability and chronic disease. John, does the Writers Guild have a resource or a group for something like this?
**John August:**
I don’t know that they do. I know that there are committees that have writers with disabilities, but I don’t know. This is actually I think a great question for Jack to answer, because this feels like this is not an accessibility kind of issue, this is not even a representation issue, this is like it’s hard for me to do the thing that I want to be doing situation. Do you have experience with this?
**Jack Thorne:**
Yeah. I would say try and find a community, because that’s what gave me the most solace. In terms of the UK there’s two groups I would say to go to straight away as you’re a Londoner. The first is a group called DANC, which is D-A-N-C, or also called Triple C, which is confusing, but I think it’s www.triplec.org.uk. Then there’s another group called DTPTV, deaf and disabled people in television, who are also amazing. They are on Facebook and Twitter. Both those organizations have a community of people that you can talk to about this stuff. Reach out to them. Make yourself part of it. Become a member of the community. I think you’ll find that there’s lots of other people going through similar things. My experience of that was feeling like I had a home. Once you feel like you have a home, I think everything gets a bit easier. I’m so sorry you’re struggling. I really hope it doesn’t stay with you, but if it does, there are lots of people who are going through chronic fatigue and who do produce beautiful work, behind and in front of the screen, very good friends of mine who do find ways to manage their condition, and as a result of finding ways to manage their condition, find a way to have a fruitful career in our industry.
**Craig Mazin:**
Great.
**John August:**
Great. Our last little bit is hopefully inspiring. Actually I think does fit in well with this last question, which is basically do the things you can do and control the things you can control. This comes off of a TikTok by Franchesca Ramsey, but it’s Ashley Nicole Black, friend of the show, who had retweeted it, put it on my timeline here. Let’s take a listen to what Franchesca says.
Franchesca Ramsey:
If you’re a writer, winning an Oscar or selling a $100,000 movie, those are huge goals, those are awesome, but you can’t control those right now. So many things have to happen in order for those doors to open and those opportunities to come to you. Instead, shifting your goal to something you can control, like write 10 pages a day or take a writing class, start a writing group, finish my feature, try a pilot new genre, those are things that you can control, and then you can actually cross them off your list and feel like you are accomplishing things that are helping you get to the place that you want to get in your life.
**John August:**
That’s Franchesca Ramsey. Ashley Nicole Black also had said if your goal was to be cast on Saturday Night Live, you’re giving all of your power to Lorne Michaels to cast you on Saturday Night Life, but if your goal is to learn how to write great sketches, that’s a thing you can learn how to do. Jack, as a incredibly prolific writer here, what can you tell us about the work you control versus the work that makes it out in the world ratio in your life?
**Jack Thorne:**
It’s so interesting, isn’t it, that I’m still wrestling with now, to be honest, in terms of, “Oh, but if I do this, then I can get this. Then if I get this, then maybe people will like me.” I don’t think that goes, that feeling.
**Craig Mazin:**
I already like you.
**Jack Thorne:**
You’re weird.
**Craig Mazin:**
So true.
**Jack Thorne:**
It’s strange in terms of thinking about my career. I remember ringing my parents so excited because I had a lunchtime reading at the Young Vic, and my parents being completely nonplussed by a lunchtime reading at the Young Vic and me realizing that it was a huge achievement for me, but no one else quite being able to see it. I think that thing of just constantly seeing rungs of a ladder and then going, “Oh right, if I do this and if I do that.” I suppose what she’s saying is try to avoid the ladder entirely and just celebrate what you do every day. To be honest, I’m nowhere near able to do that yet. It’s a good goal for me for 2022.
**Craig Mazin:**
It’s funny, the word goal maybe is part of the problem, because I think sometimes people, what they outline as a goal is really a symptom. Winning an award is a symptom of something. So is being cast on Saturday Night Live. You have a goal, and the goal should be something that only can be things you can control. It’s not just focus on goals you can control. If you can’t control it, it’s not a goal, as far as I’m concerned, because the only purpose of the word is some target that you can hit. You try and be the funniest you can be, and then you show up for an audition and let’s see what the symptom is. You try and write the best you can write, and then you hand it out in the world, let’s see what the symptom is. Let’s see what the reaction is. Everything goal-oriented is probably a bit of a trap. The only way to get there is to immerse yourself in the process. If goal has an antonym, I suppose it’s process. Process is everything.
**Craig Mazin:**
The work is unromantic. We talk about this on the show all the time, how unromantic writing is and how angry I get when I see portrayals of writing on screen. You want to talk about bad portrayals on screen, writers getting some sort of mystical burst of energy and typing a novel all night and then it’s celebrated and the next thing they’re at a book signing. I hate this crap. I just want to fire it into the sun.
**Craig Mazin:**
Maybe, maybe if you want to get to the next third eye in the forehead level of achievement here, don’t have any goals at all. Just try and write. How about that? Just create stuff. Try and access what feels honest and good to you and enjoy it for what it is. I will tell you the thing that I’ve done that was received the best was not a goal-oriented thing. There was absolutely no expectation that it would even get made. The goal concept sometimes is a liar that whispers stuff in our ear and turns our head from the path.
**John August:**
I think it’s so important to distinguish goals that can actually be achieved under your own efforts versus goals that you just rely on the universe working out a certain way, which I think Saturday Night Life is a universe working out a certain way. The goals that are under your own control to some degree, like wanting to run a marathon, “I want to finish a marathon,” okay, if that’s your goal, great, but what are the actual things you need to do in order to get yourself up to being able to run a marathon. Completing a marathon is a lagging indicator. If you got to that point, it’s only because all the leading indicators, which were how many short runs were you able to do, how far could you go. All the work that it would take to get up there, that’s what you could actually focus and do, which is basically putting on your shoes and starting to run. You’re not going to put on your shoes and start to run a marathon. You’re going to put on your shoes and start to run a mile and then two miles and eventually you’ll get up there. Frustratingly, writing is just that hard work of page after page, mile after mile. To be more inspiring going into this, maybe go into 2022 thinking about forget your goal, let’s focus on what you’re actually trying to do each day and make that work rewarding.
**Craig Mazin:**
What if we take the goal away, meaning let’s take the reward away. Doctors make a the bin Laden mistake. Megana and I are both unlicensed medical doctors, so I think we both understand this. Doctors put an enormous emphasis on the scale, on your weight. This is automatically a very goal-oriented thing. “You’re 240 pounds. You need to be 160 pounds.” That’s a goal. No one’s pretty much going to get there. What’s sad is for a lot of people, that goal isn’t even revenant to their well-being.
**Craig Mazin:**
If they simply just made certain changes in their life for the sake of bettering their health, with the promise of no reward, if I say to you, “Look, I’ve looked into your future. If you do the following things, you will not lose any weight at all, but you will live another 10 years,” and so we’ve taken away all the reward. You’re not going to wear the skinny pants. You’re not going to look like the person on the cover of the magazine. All that’s garbage. What you are is going to be happier and healthier. Would you take that deal or not?
**Craig Mazin:**
It’s hard for people, because what you’re saying is it’s just process. Goals that are distant and far off like that and intangible are really hard, whereas when someone says, “Okay, I’ve got a goal. I’m going to be 150 pounds. I’m going to do the thing. I’m going to be on the cover of Men’s Health,” that’s when they fail, inevitably. You’ve set yourself up for failure by turning the goal into the goal.
**Megana Rao:**
Something Ashley said in her tweet was that she added what she wants the work to feel like as part of her goals. She says, “I wanted to work in a calm, fun environment, which makes decisions easier to make.” I also think shifting from thinking about goals, how you want the experience of the process to be, I don’t know, that’s not a concept that I’d heard before, but definitely something I want to use in 2022.
**Craig Mazin:**
I like that too. Look, in the U.S. the goal always has a dollar sign in front of it. We’re trained this way from birth. The whole thing is basically fame and fortune, fame and fortune, fame and fortune. When you look among the class of the famous unfortunate, you find a lot of misery and bad behavior, because humans are human, as it turns out.
**John August:**
We should also call out Ashley Nicole Black for her new deal at Warner Brothers. She’s joining Craig over there in HBO Max land.
**Craig Mazin:**
See, that was a goal that just happened. I doubt that was her goal. It’s a symptom of her good work.
**John August:**
Indeed.
**Craig Mazin:**
It’s a process symptom. Well done.
**John August:**
Any last thoughts on goals, Mr. Jack Thorne?
**Jack Thorne:**
I’m interested in the notion that, because the show that you’re referring to, which I know you probably get bored of talking about, but the show that you’re referring to happened despite setting a goal with Chernobyl, and yet that was you taking a fork in the road, wasn’t it? That was you going, “I don’t want to write the sort of shows I’ve done before, so I’m going to take a fork in the road.” That is you setting yourself a goal of working in a new genre, working in a new way, and challenging yourself in a way that you hadn’t challenged yourself before to do a certain type of work. By doing that, and I think that you’re probably the starkest example of someone that’s done that, of writers that I can think of, you changed the whole trajectory of your working life. Is that not a goal? Is that not a, “I am going to put my head down on a stone and rub it until I get to a different place for myself.”
**John August:**
What a metaphor that was.
**Craig Mazin:**
I don’t know if it was a rubbing stone. I think I wanted to do it because I felt like it was worth doing. When I did it, there was no promise of anything. Really the only promise was that it would likely just be ignored. Nor did I know if I could do it. I just wanted to. It to me very much was there was no real money involved, there was no guarantee of anything, nor was I doing it with any expectation that you would need to be watched. I honestly thought that it would mostly end up being a thing that substitute teachers would show the social studies class on a rainy day in high school. It really was not goal-oriented. A lot of what I do, I’m very haphazard about a lot of things, I have to admit. When I find that I start thinking about how to create outcomes, that’s actually where I get into trouble, because artificial things start to seep their way in. Maybe I’m a bad person to ask this question to, because my career has been weird and meandering and confusing. There’s not a lot of shape to it. I have a lot of notes on the narrative of my own life and career. It’s not a well told story. Weird fits and starts. You have a much better narrative, Jack Thorne. That’s a story. I like that story. That’s a good one.
**Jack Thorne:**
The distinction between going, “If I do this, I’m going to win an Emmy,” and, “If I do this, then I might find a tad more professional well-being in my soul,” I found your example very motivating and very interesting in terms of the choices we make for ourselves. That is a goal, is it not? I suppose it’s just that that interests me.
**Craig Mazin:**
I think that sometimes people underestimate the joy I had in prior work to all that, because I really did enjoy them.
**Jack Thorne:**
I’m not saying you didn’t. If your character was singing the I want song, you used the word I want, there would be a moment where you were making a film that you were enjoying and you said, “I want to write about the Soviet Union, and I feel like I’ve got a way of singing about the Soviet Union,” and then the audience would be on their feet.
**Craig Mazin:**
See, that’s the thing about writing. I love that this is something that was specifically targeted by Franchesca Ramsey to creatives, is that there’s nothing in between you and the doing of a creative thing, unless it requires a lot of money, but writing doesn’t. You don’t even need to get to goal step. If you want, and I did want to write something, write it. That’s the best part. It’s not even a goal. It’s there. You can do it. You can paint whatever you want. You can write whatever you want. You can sing whatever you want. All that’s there. Now are people going to watch it? Is it going to get made? Will it be popular? Are you going to get money? Will you get a big deal? All that stuff happens after.
**John August:**
It’s completely out of your control, which is of course-
**Craig Mazin:**
It’s completely out of your control, exactly. In a weird way, if your goal is to write something amazing, you can take that write out of the goal column and put it right into the I’m doing it today. You don’t have to wait. A goal to me isn’t the future. Maybe I just am confused about the concept. There’s nothing stopping you right now today from writing anything you want. It’s free, which is wonderful.
**John August:**
Now in our discussions of goals, Megana has in our little workflow here a year in review. Our goal with Scriptnotes was not to have 500 episodes in 10 years in Scriptnotes, but-
**Craig Mazin:**
Jesus.
**John August:**
We hit that-
**Craig Mazin:**
Thank god that wasn’t a goal-
**John August:**
… this last year.
**Craig Mazin:**
… because I wouldn’t have done it.
**John August:**
Lord no. We were listened to in 198 different countries.
**Craig Mazin:**
Oh god.
**John August:**
We had 2.15 million downloads so far this year in 2021.
**Craig Mazin:**
Oh my god. Now wait, with that 2.15 million downloads, I presume that’s just three people that just keep redownloading it over and over.
**John August:**
It’s all bots. It’s bots all the way down.
**Craig Mazin:**
It’s bots. Just bots.
**John August:**
A bit of housekeeping, we’re hoping to do another random advice episode. That’s this episode where we just answer random listener questions that don’t have anything to do with writing at all. It could be about relationships. It could be about real estate. It could be about the proper fork to use for a certain meal. If you have random advice questions, send those into Megana, ask@johnaugust.com, and we’ll get a special list of those together and we’ll answer random things that are not about writing.
**Craig Mazin:**
That’ll be fun. We should have Jack on for that as well. I think Jack should be the new … Let’s just have him all the time.
**John August:**
Absolutely. It’s time for our one cool things. Craig, do you have a one cool thing?
**Craig Mazin:**
No, I don’t.
**John August:**
Jack Thorne, you got the memo. Did you find a one cool thing to bring in?
**Jack Thorne:**
I’ve got two.
**Craig Mazin:**
Thank god.
**Jack Thorne:**
One of which is slightly embarrassing.
**Craig Mazin:**
Good. I’ll take that one. That one’s mine.
**Jack Thorne:**
Craig chose me for One Cool Thing six, seven years ago. I don’t know how long ago it was.
**Craig Mazin:**
I would call that early Thorne period. America still didn’t know.
**Jack Thorne:**
It was a highlight of my life and a really beautiful thing and it made me spill my water. Sounds like I wet myself. I almost said made me spill my tea, and then I was like, I don’t drink tea. I don’t drink any caffeine. One of my one cool things is Craig Mazin, who appears like he is a misanthrope and seems to present like a misanthrope, and yet is incredibly kind. I once went to lunch with him wearing Ray Bans and he laughed at me for about an hour, but it was still … His ability to give time to things that he shouldn’t give time to is a very, very kind thing, and so he is one of my one cool things.
**Craig Mazin:**
Thank you, Jack Thorne.
**Jack Thorne:**
If that’s all right.
**Craig Mazin:**
Jack, I think you had another less Craig-oriented one cool thing.
**Jack Thorne:**
Which is authentic and celebratory portrayals of Father Christmas, because I find it very annoying that Father Christmas, I have a five-year-old, is frequently portrayed in our modern world as a dark, despairing figure or someone with a take on it. We’ve watched Santa Claus the movie, the Dudley Moore film from 1985 twice this week, and we’re probably going to watch it a third time, purely because Elliott, my son, finds the Father Christmas in it so authentic to his impression of what Father Christmas should be. I don’t know whether Father Christmas should be white or any of those things, but a jolly person who is having a good time is a good thing, and we need more of him I think.
**Craig Mazin:**
Can I ask, this might seem like an odd question, but who’s Father Christmas? We don’t have him here. Who’s that?
**John August:**
That’s Santa Claus.
**Jack Thorne:**
Santa Claus.
**Craig Mazin:**
Oh, Santa Claus. Oh, Santa Claus.
**Jack Thorne:**
You don’t call him Father Christmas?
**John August:**
No, we call him Santa Claus. There is more of this in the bonus segments. Trust me.
**Craig Mazin:**
Megana, have you ever heard of Father Christmas?
**Megana Rao:**
I have.
**John August:**
I’ve heard of it.
**Megana Rao:**
I have.
**Craig Mazin:**
Wait, hold on. Now I know. It’s from the Kinks song, (singing).
**John August:**
It’s not from the Kinks song. It’s a thing that exists and the Kinks mentioned it.
**Craig Mazin:**
I thought the Kinks invented it. All right. So much for that.
**John August:**
My one cool thing is also Christmas-related. This last week I fell down a rabbit hole of the Wikipedia list of common misconceptions, which if you have not read it, you should just spend an hour of your life looking through the Wikipedia list of common misconceptions. Mine is that the Bible does not explicitly say that three magi came to visit baby Jesus, does not mention a Father Christmas or Santa Claus either, nor does it mention that there were kings or rode on camels, that their names were Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. The three magi are inferred because there were three gifts. Basically the three kings who come to visit baby Jesus in the Christmas story, that was just made up sometime in the third century. We don’t really know where came from, but not part of the original Christmas story. My one cool thing. That is our show for this week. Jack Thorne, thank you so much for joining us.
**Craig Mazin:**
Thank you, Jack.
**Jack Thorne:**
Thank you for having me. I’m very sorry for talking quite a lot.
**Craig Mazin:**
No, that’s why you’re here.
**John August:**
Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Nico Mansy, if you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes there at @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. Jack Thorne, are you on Twitter?
**Jack Thorne:**
Not really, no. No. It sent my brain mad.
**John August:**
That’s fine.
**Craig Mazin:**
Me too.
**John August:**
You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and sweatshirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. The sweatshirts just came and they are actually genuinely the softest things I have experienced in a sweatshirt. Craig, your sweatshirt should be there, if you ordered that first batch. Mine came yesterday. Check your mail. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. We’ll learn from Jack Thorne what a British person would call a bonus segment and other words that don’t make sense on either side of the pond. Thank you all very much.
New Speaker:
BONUS SEGMENT
**John August:**
We’re back. Jack Thorne, as you were talking, I was writing out some of the things you said that were-
**Craig Mazin:**
Ridiculous.
**John August:**
… distinctly British. You said Graeae are this wonderful company. You used are because the company is plural, but we would say Graeae is this wonderful company. Pluralism is a thing that is different between American English and British English is you would say are and we would say is.
**Jack Thorne:**
I wouldn’t assume that I speak good English. I’m not a very educated person, so I wouldn’t assume that [crosstalk 01:04:06].
**Craig Mazin:**
This is outrageous.
**John August:**
This humility.
**Craig Mazin:**
This is outrageous.
**John August:**
You said, “I remember ringing my parents.” We never ring our parents at all here.
**Craig Mazin:**
We call them.
**John August:**
We call them. We don’t ring them.
**Craig Mazin:**
Then oddly, when people are describing names in England, they will typically say, “Oh, I met a guy, he’s called Jack,” and here we would say, “He’s named Jack.”
**John August:**
British English still does that thing like [inaudible 01:04:29] you’re calling somebody. You call somebody the same way you phone them, which is strange. Are you ringing your parents if you’re ringing them on their mobile phones?
**Jack Thorne:**
Yes, yes, still ringing my parents. I would still say that, yes.
**John August:**
Now you’ve written for both the UK and for American audiences. Do you change anything in your actual writing if you know it’s going to Warner Brothers rather than to the BBC?
**Jack Thorne:**
Yes, and will use U.S. spellings. Now I say I do that. I have an assistant called Mariella who is rather brilliant and does that and makes sure that I make sense in another country.
**Craig Mazin:**
I had the opposite experience. Jane Featherstone, who is a very small person, and yet a giant person in-
**Jack Thorne:**
She is.
**Craig Mazin:**
… British person, she was rather insistent, and I think reasonably so, that as we were a European production on Chernobyl that I ought to use English things like torch instead of flashlight. You wouldn’t go into the hospital. You would be in hospital. I was trying to think. Color and even spelling, which doesn’t show up on screen, but color and favor with a U.
**Jack Thorne:**
Honor.
**Craig Mazin:**
Honor, which is actually fun to do. Then there were certain things too like firemen. We have firemen, and you guys have fire brigade.
**John August:**
[crosstalk 01:05:55].
**Jack Thorne:**
We have firemen, but if they’re a collective then they’re a fire brigade.
**Craig Mazin:**
You call the fire brigade. There’s a line in Chernobyl where he’s like, “There’s a fire,” and he goes, “Call the fire brigade,” but originally he said, “Call the fire department,” because that’s what we call it, the fire department. She’s like, “No one calls that here.” That was it. When Jane tells you to do something, you do it.
**Jack Thorne:**
Jane is always right.
**Craig Mazin:**
Yep.
**John August:**
Growing up, sometime in about fourth grade or something I recognized that British people put the U’s in the words, and I was just obsessed with putting the U’s in the words. I’d put U’s in words that they couldn’t possibly exist. I would try to do it. All my school essays I would do it. Sometimes I’d get flagged for it, sometimes I wouldn’t. I’m wondering if it was just an early case of cultural appropriation. I just desperately wanted to not be this Colorado kid. I wanted to be this international student. Craig, did you ever do the U’s in your words?
**Craig Mazin:**
No, but I think that the cultural appropriation was taking the language and bringing it here. That’s cultural reappropriation. I never did that. That would probably get you beaten up on Staten Island, John. I got to be honest with you. That, by the way, the other thing that sometimes, we mentioned fanny pack earlier, so in America fanny is your butt, and a fanny pack is that silly pouch that travelers wear with the belt that goes around their butt and they put their money in it. In England fanny is cruel slang for vulva, I think would be fair to say. There are certain differences like that.
**John August:**
There’s a word for cigarette that we don’t use here.
**Jack Thorne:**
Do you know what we call a fanny pack?
**Craig Mazin:**
You call it a bum bag.
**Jack Thorne:**
A bum bag, yeah.
**Craig Mazin:**
Now if you say bum bag in the U.S., people will assume that that’s something that involves a hobo. It is entirely different. Also I’ve noticed in England the C word, which is quite a verboten term here, is tossed around like it’s nothing over there.
**John August:**
It becomes really challenging, because you’re not sure whether that person, a British person’s using it in a sexually offensive way, in a way that it’s going to cause a lawsuit, or if they’re just speaking their language.
**Craig Mazin:**
I think they’re speaking their language.
**Jack Thorne:**
Try being in a rehearsal full of 50 people and just using it as part of your sentences, because that’s who you are, and then just looking at their faces as they stare back at you in literal sheer horror.
**Craig Mazin:**
I actually had the reverse experience where spending so much time in Europe with Brits and then coming back to the U.S. and people like, “I’m sorry, what?” I’m like, “Oh, right, sorry. I’m not [crosstalk 01:08:33]-”
**John August:**
“You can’t say that.”
**Craig Mazin:**
“… anymore. It doesn’t work that way anymore.” We do speak a common language, but there are these fascinating. Really it’s the structural differences that get me, the things like called and named and in hospital. He’s in hospital.
**John August:**
I would say as a screenwriter, when I’m working on a production that’s going to be shooting in the UK, I’m not sticking U’s in my words where they don’t need to be there, but I am mindful if there’s a thing that’s going to translate wrong or feel different in the other place or if I can just get away from that problem. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is an example of we wanted the movie to feel like it didn’t exist either in the U.S. or the UK. The cars drive down the middle of the road. The bill he picks up out of the street is not a British pound or American dollar. We’re deliberately in no place. That’s great, but then everyone speaks with a British accent, so I guess we are still in the UK.
**Craig Mazin:**
That’s how that works.
**Jack Thorne:**
I love that film, and it felt very British to me. Even if it wasn’t intended to be, it felt like that to me.
**Craig Mazin:**
One of the other challenges that screenwriters face, and I think we maybe talked about this on the show before, is in the U.S. we use eight and a half by 11 paper. In the UK we use A4. They’re so close to being the same, but they’re not the same.
**Craig Mazin:**
It’s outrageous.
**John August:**
A4 paper always looks wrong to me. Mathematically it makes so much more sense.
**Craig Mazin:**
Of course.
**John August:**
It’s such a smarter design for paper.
**Craig Mazin:**
As is the metric system.
**John August:**
100%.
**Craig Mazin:**
That’s the nice thing about England is you guys straddle the metric system and the imperial system, which I like. You haven’t quite let it go, which is good.
**Jack Thorne:**
I think we firmly believe in the imperial system.
**Craig Mazin:**
You believe in the imperial system unless it comes down to things like liters of petrol, litres of petrol.
**Jack Thorne:**
Yes, we do, but you can also see gallons. There’s a separate measure for gallons.
**Craig Mazin:**
Very good. Wow. This plus the blue passports, England is back.
**John August:**
Now on a practical matter, if you were working on something like you’re working on His Dark Materials, which was a complicated production. There were American companies involved. There were probably British companies involved as well. Were your scripts done on A4? Were they done on eight and a half by eleven? Did you just make a choice early on and just live with it?
**Jack Thorne:**
I didn’t even think about it. I just opened final draft and just used whatever format. I guess other people might’ve changed it, but I don’t think so. Those sorts of questions, I think our industry’s a lot more haphazard than yours. We don’t really ever deal with them. No one complains. I guess I just kept doing it the same way that I was doing it.
**John August:**
I ran into it on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We were using A4 paper, and the Warner Brothers script department, which is a whole notorious thing, we could talk about a whole rant about the Warner Brothers script department, would send it back to us in not A4 paper, and so the scripts would be longer and we’d get all these concerns about budget. It’s because you put it on different paper. It’s the exact same script.
**Craig Mazin:**
Oh wow.
**John August:**
Drives me crazy.
**Craig Mazin:**
A4.
**John August:**
A4.
**Craig Mazin:**
A4.
**John August:**
[crosstalk 01:11:24].
**Jack Thorne:**
I’m so sorry.
**John August:**
Jack Thorne-
**Craig Mazin:**
That’s Britain.
**John August:**
Again, don’t apologize for everything. Far too much.
**Jack Thorne:**
I’m afraid my country, the imperial system and everything else that comes out of my country, gets away with the fact that we are probably responsible for more evil than any other country in the world.
**Craig Mazin:**
Certainly A4 is just maybe the worst thing that Britain ever did, A4, top of the heap, followed by the slavery and colonization.
**John August:**
Jack Thorne, thanks so much.
**Jack Thorne:**
Thank you so much.
**Craig Mazin:**
Thank you, Jack.
Links:
* [Jack Thorne’s MacTaggart Lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxUZPMBRIPU)
* [Jack Thorne Launches Underlying Health Conditions Pressure Group, Publishes Major Report Into Disabled Representation in TV Industry](https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/jack-thorne-underlying-health-conditions-1235125435/)
* [1 in 4 Coalition](https://www.1in4coalition.org/)
* [Ashley Nicole Black and Francesca Ramsey Twitter Thread](https://twitter.com/ashleyn1cole/status/1460703224285908993?s=20)
* [Santa Claus: The Movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089961/) a celebratory portrayal of Father Christmas
* [Wikipedia List of Misconceptions](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions?wprov=wppw1)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Jack Thorne](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2113666/) on IMDb
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nico Mansy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/530standard.mp3).