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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 700 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we are doing something we haven’t done since 2020, a live show with our listeners on Zoom and on YouTube. Hello, listeners. Like a lot of things about the pandemic, we only half remember what we’re doing. [laughter] While we’re still an audio-first podcast, we are going to be doing some things in this episode that benefit from being able to share screens and look at things.

If you’re listening to the audio version at home or your car and happen to be close to a screen, consider going back and watching some of this later on YouTube because there’s actually images to see. We’ll also be answering listener questions live on air, including a few in the bonus segment for our premium members. To help us celebrate 700 episodes, we are joined by some Scriptnotes champions over the years. Let us welcome to the podcast, Stuart Friedel, our very first producer of the show.

Craig: Stuart.

John: Stuart.

[applause]

Stuart Friedel: There we go. Hi.

John: Oh, my God. Look at that background. Stuart Friedel.

Craig: Oh. Such a good background. Classic.

Stuart: I need a Scriptnotes poster or LP or something to put on the back.

John: Yes. We’re going to release the whole show on vinyl. It’s a lot of vinyl, but it’s worth it. I’m just to have that for that perfect audio quality.

Stuart: It’s a weight. It’s for working out.

John: Absolutely. We have Megan McDonell, Scriptnotes producer. Megan McDonell, welcome back to Scriptnotes.

[applause]

Craig: It’s Megan.

John: Oh, my gosh. We’re so excited to see you.

Craig: Another good background.

Megan McDonell: Thank you.

John: Megan, you were a crucial part of the professionalization, I think, of Scriptnotes because when Stuart first came on board, it was– [laughter] We were just winging it. We were just trying to figure out what it was. We didn’t know how long it was going to go.

Craig: He’s right there.

John: He’s right there.

Stuart: It is true. It’s absolutely true.

[laughter]

John: You were a crucial part of that and also helped me out so much with the launch podcast, which we were, again, figuring out along the way. How are you, Megan?

Megan: I’m great. It’s nice to be here. Thanks for including me.

John: Of course. Drew, do we have Megana?

Drew Marquardt: We do.

Craig: We always have Megana.

John: Megana Rao is the producer who people first heard on the air. I think she was the one who sort of crossed the barrier and became like, “Of course, it’s Megana. She’s talking on the show.” Megana, it is always a joy to have you here. Oh, my gosh, it’s Megana.

[applause]

Megana Rao: Hello.

Craig: Megana, she was really the first star, right? Maybe the only star. I don’t really think you or I qualify, but Megana gets stopped on the street. I’m sorry.

Megana: I hate that you can see my face.

[laughter]

Craig: You look beautiful.

Megana: Oh, I just want to cower.

Craig: You have such great hair. Look at this.

Megana: Wait, where is your beard?

Craig: Oh, I got rid of it.

John: He got rid of his beard and the hair on top of his head. He’s basically just trying to steal my look.

Craig: I did. I do like it when people are like, “Where’s your beard?” I’m like, “Where do you think?” Yes, it doesn’t come off in one piece.

[laughter]

John: Ripped it off. Yes, absolutely. Is this with hair and makeup? It’s back in the van. Megana, thank you again for being awesome on the show and for joining us here today. If Stuart was the originator of the show, he was the one who got the train running. Megana sped it along and got us figuring out a little more stuff. You were the heart, the soul, the smile, the laugh of the show.

Megana: Oh, thank you.

John: Then there’s Drew, but whatever.

Craig: It’s just really hard to work for John. That’s what I’m getting.

Drew: Grinds you down.

John: Now, the very first episodes of the show were edited by either me or by Stuart, but at a certain point, we’re like, “Somebody who don’t know what they’re doing should be doing this.” That’d be Matthew Chilelli. Matthew Chilelli, cross from post-production into production. Join us here on the Zoom as we celebrate 700 episodes.

Craig: Ooh.

[laughter]

Matthew Chilelli: I beamed in somehow.

John: Oh, wow. Yes, Matthew. He had to pipe in a studio background so it would feel really impressive. That’s actually where you do all the work on the show. It’s like this high-tech launch center for the show.

Matthew: Absolutely. It’s so you can’t see my husband working behind me.

John: Yes, there is that.

Craig: I like that Matthew works in a studio that is carefully painted to be blurry.

Matthew: Yes.

John: That’s good stuff. That’s a highly selective focus. 700 episodes, guys. Thank you so much for getting us here. I have to say, 700, Craig will attest to, that was always my goal was to make it to 700 episodes. [laughter] I said that from episode two. It’s like, “My goal is just to make it to 700 episodes.”

Craig: Had you said that, I would have been gone within minutes.

John: Yes. As we talked about in episode 100, I was hoping to make it to 100 and had no instincts beyond that point. It’s crazy that we’re here now. With a book coming out, so many people on this Zoom were so crucial to getting this book in good fighting shape. Drew, we’ve been getting a bunch of people sending in their receipts from the pre-orders. Thank you to everybody who’s ordering this book. It’s out December 2nd worldwide. People should order it now so that there’s enough copies so that everybody can enjoy the book for the holidays.

I have a topic that I want to discuss with this group before we move into other things, which is how do you talk about a movie or a show without spoilers and where is the boundary between, “Okay, this is just a thing in popular culture we need to talk about,” versus, “This is a spoiler and I have to be really careful to discuss this thing.” The specific thing is the movie Weapons, which I really enjoyed, and it went in without any spoilers at all, which was fantastic. I managed to not know anything about the movie.

Yet there’s, I think I want to talk about on the show in a very specific way that I think won’t ruin things, but what is our feeling about talking about a thing without ruining a thing for other people? Craig, start with you. What’s your instinct when it comes to a spoiler?

Craig: I think I’m pretty good about this. There are things that I feel like, okay, if you know this, it actually won’t ruin any surprise. In fact, you’re going to hear about this or find out about it as part of the general setup of the movie or story. I’ve been trying to get everybody to watch Hunting Wives, and it’s worked because it’s the number one show on Netflix, I assume because of me.

John: Yes, absolutely. You are the salesperson for it.

Craig: Yes. When I talk about it, I’m like, “Okay, none of this is a spoiler. It’s going to sound spoilery. You’re going to hear about this as part of the setup.” I feel like setup is fair game. Once you get past setup, then you get into that territory of, “Are you ever going to watch this or not? Because then I’ll just tell you what happens.” [laughter] I keep it inside of setup. I think that’s safe.

John: Stuart, what’s your feeling on spoilers?

Stuart: I think it’s context dependent, and it is dependent on the person hearing to make their boundaries known. If you want to talk about a movie on a podcast that’s educational about movies and how to make movies, I think you just need to tell the audience, “Tune out now,” and then go ahead and talk. Don’t hold back the efficacy of the conversation because you don’t want to offend somebody who had the opportunity to push stop.

John: Now, Megan McDonell, you’ve been working on a lot of shows that are either under NDA, so of course, you can’t talk about those things. Even a WandaVision, you know what’s coming up. You have a sense of what it is. When on WandaVision, did you start talking about– was it only after an episode dropped or after you made sure that people had a week to watch it? What’s your feeling about it?

Megan: Stuff I’ve worked on? I don’t know. I still don’t talk about it. [laughter] I’m context dependent. I’m one of the people that spoilers don’t affect me at all. Like, “Oh, he was dead the whole time?” This does not affect my enjoyment of the movie. [chuckles]

Stuart: What movie would that be?

John: Stuart Little, which is so surprising. I had no idea that mouse was dead the whole time. It was dead?

Craig: That would have been an improvement. No offense to E.B. White, but that would have been awesome.

John: Now, Megana, you and I are chatting a lot about things, and I feel like we have a good shorthand. We have a friendship where you can say like, “Oh, have you seen this thing? Are you going to watch this thing? Can we talk about this?” How about you with your other friends and people around you? How do you communicate about what you want to know and what you don’t want to know?

Megana: I’m like Meg and Stuart, especially working in this industry. Spoilers are just craft. If there’s a big twist coming up and you tell me about it, it’s like then I’m watching it with a different lens, being like, “Okay, how did they set this up? How does this work?” I do try to be respectful for people who don’t work in film and entertainment and not spoil things for them. I feel like as soon as you land at LAX, spoilers are free game.

Craig: Wow.

John: Yes. I also feel like there’s some time limit that happens where Mike hasn’t watched Severance, but it’s like, I might watch Severance. It’s like, oh, well, I can’t talk about anything Severance-wise in your presence. On work Zooms, just for daily office stuff, we do have to have a conversation about like, “Okay, are we going to talk about this thing or not talk about this thing, or people will mute themselves during part of it,” which can be rough.

Specifically, the thing I want to talk about in Weapons, which I really genuinely think we can have a good conversation about without any spoilers, is midway through the movie, a character is introduced for the first time. I thought it was a really smart introduction in that an assistant comes into the office and says, “Your two o’clock is here.” He’s like, “Okay, send her in.” She just lingers a bit to set up, “Do you know who this person is?” This is so strange and weird. There’s a lot of screen time spent on what would just be, you could cut out the scene, but it was so important because it sets up this expectation of the audience.

It’s like, “Who is this person coming through the door?” Without it, we would not have an appreciation for, like, “Oh, wow, that is just so odd.” It made me believe that we out of the world more that like this assistant was like, “This is a strange situation that’s about to happen.” I just really enjoyed that. To me, it doesn’t feel like a spoiler. You’re going to encounter that moment, and you’ll say, “Oh, John talked about that,” but I didn’t ruin anything for you, hopefully.

Craig: Feels ruined.

John: I’ve ruined the movie for you?

Craig: Yes.

Megana: I’m holding back tears now, actually, I really am upset.

John: I’m sorry.

Craig: That’s Megana’s upset?

[laughter]

John: A giant beaming smile.

Craig: Yes.

John: Matthew, did you see Weapons, and do you know the moment I’m talking about?

Matthew: No, I haven’t seen it yet, but I still feel like that’s fine to talk about and also not that this is a judgment at all, but editing this show so many things have been ruined for me [laughter] plot-wise, and then I just keep it inside and turn it off and don’t share with anybody, but it hasn’t affected my enjoyment of movies.

Craig: You just let it out. You just shared it. Now everyone knows. I feel terribly guilty. Here’s why I feel guilty. I never even considered that. I took you for granted, and I’m sorry. I’m not going to stop. I’m going to keep doing it. At least now, I’ll be guilty along the way instead of just suddenly all at once on YouTube.

John: Yes, there’s two things I’m realizing now that we’re doing this live, is that first off, all the mistakes that Matthew cuts out, and it’s mostly my verbal mess-ups that Matthew fixes that he can’t fix on a live stream, which is great, good for the world. Second, there’s so many cases, not every episode, but every second or third episode, where Craig and I will say, “Oh, Matthew, you have to cut that out. What I just said cannot be in the air.” You know as much stuff that is sealed in the vault. So good.

Craig: Because Matthew’s so good about cutting all this out and you rely on him, what people don’t know is that John and Drew have the exact same thing they do when they do a verbal flub. Matthew, can you do it for us? I know you know what it is.

Matthew: Oh, right, yes. It’s almost the sound of a tape rewinding. As a person, it’s like, you’re in the middle of something, it’s like, “If you don’t put it up, blah, blah, and then you go back to the beginning. [laughter]

Craig: Yes, it’s [onomatopoeia]. It’s like that.

John: I listen to the Slate podcasts, and when their hosts mess up, they must be trained to go, “3, 2, 1,” and they read the line, and so it works for them. Every once in a while, a 3, 2, 1 will make it into the show, and like, love it, oh, just, it so reveals the process behind stuff.

Craig: That’s what lets us know it’s not AI.

John: Yes, before we get to our main topic here, we have two little bits of news. Drew, we have a new video in the ScriptNotes channel. This is on Breaking Bad, it’s Vince Gilligan’s interview, and it’s really well cut together.

Drew: Yes, it’s a really good one. It’s him just talking about how to be a good showrunner and running a room, and it’s really great.

John: That was a great episode. You have a new Weekend Read collection up this week.

Drew: We do, we’re back to school.

John: What are some of the titles in the back-to-school collection?

Drew: We’ve got 10 Things I Hate About You, Big Little Lies, Bottoms, Clueless, Dead Poets Society, Dear White People, Easy A, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Friday Night Lights, Mean Girls, Napoleon Dynamite, Never Have I Ever, School Days… loads. Wednesday.

Craig: Do you have Back to School?

John: The Rodney Dangerfield classic?

Drew: Ironically, no.

Craig: What the?

John: Some of those scripts are really hard to find, Craig. For some reason, there’s not a staggering demand for people trying to find those scripts.

Craig: That script actually is a really well-structured.

John: Oh.

Craig: It’s very well done for like a classic comedy. The structure was actually quite smart.

John: While he’s going to hype up Back to School, I’m going to hype up Bottoms just for folks who haven’t seen Bottoms for whatever reason. It is gonzo, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s why these people are stars.” They’re just so well done. All right, a topic for the group. Since we have a screen that we can all look at together, and our listeners can look at the screen together with us, I wanted to talk about the challenge that all writers face about how we describe the things we see in our head, so that the readers are seeing the same things in their heads.

Today, this exercise, Drew put together this slideshow of images we took off of ShotDeck. These are all from different movies and TV shows, or documentaries, all that we’ve pulled from there. What I want us to do is work together to figure out how would we describe this thing in a screenplay so that our readers are seeing the same thing that we’re hoping for them to see. We’re calling this People, Places, and Things. We’ll start with four different people, and we’ll talk about who these characters are and if this was the first time we’re showing them on screen, what would we talk about?

Because Craig, I know you love to talk about hair, and wardrobe, and makeup, and all those things, and help us get character details. Let’s start with our first image here. For folks who are just listening at home, again, you should really look at the YouTube for this so you can see what the images are, but it is a woman in an office situation. Craig, you’re looking at this. Who is this woman? What are we seeing? What are the details that you think might make it into a scene description for her?

Craig: Depending on where we are, if this is the beginning of the scene, I would probably make a point of saying intentionally whether or not this is how it actually turns out. Medium close on Brenda, 50s, standard office attire, practical short blonde hair, sitting in an office populated by late ‘90s, early 2000 equipment. She looks appropriately tired for a nine-to-fiver.

John: Those are all things I love about that. I love Brenda as a name for her. It feels like it puts her in the right decade. I get what that is for her. There’s something about her expression that I feel is good to sell, and you can give that one sentence. She has a face that she’s always looked like she just smelled something terrible. [laughter] There’s something uncomfortable about her. I like standard office wardrobe, but also, it’s like sort of a fun pattern underneath a blue blazer that she’s trying to inject some spark there under this.

Craig: And failing.

John: And failing, yes. If we were talking about the overall thing, it’s like flat office lighting is doing her no favors. It’s not a glamorous look. Stuart, Megan, Megana, do you have any more suggestions for things we might talk about with this woman if this were the first time we were seeing her on screen?

Stuart: I’d say something like, in a happier life, she’d be a school librarian.

John: I like that. It’s sort of the “as if” or the replacement thing gives her a sense of who she is.

Megan: I might mention something in relation to who she’s talking to. If she’s talking to her main character, maybe something like– and she is not pleased to see this guy.

[laughs]

John: Yes, I like that a lot, because it gives you a sense of relationship to the space around her and to what’s actually really going to happen in the scene. Megana, anything else jumping out for you about her?

Megana: Just a suit jacket that doesn’t quite fit. Shoulder pads that extend beyond the shoulders.

Craig: Maybe that was her look.

[laughter]

John: It’s probably clothes that she’s had for the last eight years. She has a standard uniform and hasn’t updated it with time. That feels fun. Drew, show us what this is from. It’s the Snowtown Murders, written by Shaun Grant. Jenny Hallam is the actor we’re seeing there.

Cool. Next up, we have another young woman in this case. The image we’re seeing, if you’re not watching this, is a young woman. She’s sitting on the grass. The wind is blowing through her hair. She’s looking over her right shoulder. It is a beautiful painted– it feels like a painted backdrop, but it’s outdoorsy grasslands. Who wants to start with this image? It’s so striking, but I want to know if this was the first time we’re seeing this character, how do we describe her?

Craig: If this is the first time, I would say something like, again, medium-close on, let’s call her Anita. I’m going to say late teens.

John: Yes. Age is ambiguous in a way that I think is worth noting.

Craig: Late teens, staring off at everything and nothing at the same time. She sits in a windy field somewhere in the great plains. Her hair blows in the wind, as beautiful, messy as it would be done up.

John: Yes. The wind catching her hair is such a striking thing about this. We have to establish that her hair is long. That feels important. I think we need to acknowledge her race, and as the writers, we can choose what we want to say here, but mixed race. I think we need to acknowledge that she’s not white because there’s that default white thing that happens.

Craig: Isn’t that the default white thing? We didn’t talk about the last lady being white. I don’t know if her race is relevant here. It’s hard to say. I don’t know.

John: Yes. Choosing Anita doesn’t tip us one way or another, but if we could pick a name that would obviously it’s still on race.

Craig: Why did I say Anita? Is anyone named Anita anymore?

John: No.

Craig: No. Possibly it’s cool. [laughter] I don’t know. I just went with Anita.

John: Stuart.

Stuart: You bring up a good point here that I think applied to the last one, too, with era and decade. There is a little bit of context that informs what’s important about the character and what happened at casting.

John: Yes. That’s a great point, too, because we haven’t been talking so much about character here, but I think Craig was noticing that she’s looking off to the side. Basically, she feels like an observer. She’s constantly surveying things. What I see there doesn’t feel like an extroverted character, it feels like someone who sits at the edge of things and observes, as perhaps like a sniper energy rather than a driver. Megan, Megana, other thoughts?

Megan: Back to the air thing, I feel like there’s a little bit of a timelessness about the scenario, which I might mention if it’s worth mentioning.

Megana: There’s something nice about how she’s holding her knees and holding herself together, but seems very comfortable outside with this windswept hair.

John: Let’s talk about wardrobe because of at least what we’re seeing with wardrobe, because I thought it was so helpful with our previous example. She’s wearing a tank top. Megan, Megana, what would you describe that as? At least as far as what we’re seeing.

Megana: A spaghetti strap.

John: That could be jean shorts, it could be jeans. We’re seeing a bit of denim there.

Craig: Jorts. I’ve never typed the word jorts in the script, but I’m tempted. It’s hard to tell exactly.

Stuart: It seems like an outfit that could be like out of any time and any place, but depending on the time and place would inform if it were a hipster getting ready to go to the mall, or like in modern day, or if it was something from the thrift store bin in a small town, or not even a town, in a rural–

Craig: Also, I think in an image like this, one thing I never shy away from is just saying, she’s beautiful. Because I believe that beauty should be an intentional thing. Meaning, we don’t just, everybody, it’s like, okay, there are shows where everybody just happens to be beautiful, it’s part of the tone of the show, I get that. In something that’s a little bit more grounded, not everybody is beautiful. Beautiful people are beautiful, and they’re notable, and so someone like this, I think you need to point it out. It feels relevant.

John: Yes, we’re talking about her and trying to describe her, but if we were describing the overall scene, I feel like I’d also want to call out the watercolor sky behind her. Everything feels painterly, and she feels like she’s in a painting at every moment. Craig, your point about, like, she’s beautiful, especially within the context of this world, is notable, because anybody who would see her in this world would acknowledge that she’s beautiful.

Stuart: It’s a beautiful shot. If it’s the first time we’re meeting her, too, I don’t want to direct on the page too much, but it does feel like a very intentional placement within the frame where she’s looking and where she’s looking back.

Craig: It’s hard to call those things out. It’s hard to call out placement of frame, but what I do think you can do as the advocate for always directing on the page, if it’s important here, John mentioned this watercolor sky, is to say, she’s somewhere in an open plane that stretches on forever. Long lens turns the background into this beautiful watercolor blur.

John: That helps me see what I’m looking at. Drew, show us what this is from.

Drew: This is not the first time we meet her, but I included from the script, the first time we meet the character.

John: The actor is Taylor Russell. This is from Bones and All, screenplay by David Kajganich. First time trying to pronounce that. We have a description from the script. It says, “Maren, 17, mixed race, haltingly plays Sibelius’ Swan of Tuonela. She wears a cardigan big enough to be her father’s and no jewelry or makeup. Sherry, 17, comes in looking more like an American teen in 1988. Oversized top, lip gloss, and bangs.” That oversized cardigan feels right. It feels like it’s not what we’re seeing on screen right now, but it feels like the same clothing vibe.

No jewelry or makeup also feels like what we’re seeing here.
Craig: I was pretty close with Anita. Maren, Anita, very similar.

[laughter]

John: The script did call out mixed race for her, which I have not seen the movie, so I don’t know whether that becomes an important plot point. It very well could. All right, our next example, let’s take a look at a gentleman here. [chuckling] For folks who are at home and can’t see this, we have an older man looking just off center of lens.

Craig: [laughs] Oh my God. What did they do to Scott Glenn?

John: They did a lot to Scott Glenn because it’s not Scott Glenn.

Craig: That’s not?

John: No. That’s Ed Harris.

Craig: Oh, sorry, it’s Ed Harris. You know why I do that? I do this all the time because Ed Harris was John Glenn in The Right Stuff, I believe, and so I just Scott Glenn Ed Harris constantly. What did they do to Ed Harris? They turned him into the Crypt Keeper.

John: Yes, I cannot look at this without seeing Crypt Keeper, and I feel like you’re going to go for it, and why not?

Craig: Just say Crypt Keeper.

John: A very tan bald man with long pale brown hair hanging like a broken crown. You have to describe that he’s both bald and has long hair.

Craig: Crypt Keeper.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: It’s right there.

John: It is.

Craig: I would say it.

John: Yes, I think you say Crypt Keeper. The glasses also feel important. He’s wearing almost like Bjorn Borg glasses. They feel like very ‘70s thin-framed glasses. His shirt is specific and wonderful. It feels like a rare find in the ‘80s bin. A lot of it’s just great.

Stuart: I’m always cognizant of trying to match my prose to the tone of the script, so I wouldn’t necessarily say this in everything, but I think he looks like Dave Gruber Allen’s mean older brother.

John: I wonder if we could marry Crypt Keeper and how tan he is. He’s like a South Florida Crypt Keeper.

Craig: Yes, weathered skin, Crypt Keeper style hair flows from his otherwise bald head. He has the strange panache of an aging hippie who is now stuck as a motel clerk in Tallahassee.

John: It’s worth noting that you were able to read Motel Clerk just because, in the background, we see a bunch of keys hanging on a board and just shows how economical you can be in terms of setting up where somebody is and what a place is. Those keys did the job.

Craig: Unless he’s a key maker.

John: Megan, Megana, any other thoughts on our Ed Harris here?

Megan: Not really. There’s something about his eyes that feel worth mentioning. I don’t know if they feel like wet or something, but there’s like a sparkle, maybe that I would mention.

John: Yes, I think that’s a good point because they do still catch the light even though they’re sunk pretty deep in there, and they’re hidden behind the glasses.

Craig: I would also add, even though he’s not Scott Glenn, you can’t help but feel like maybe something about him.

John: A Scott Glenn presence. Also, granted, we know this is Ed Harris, but even though I didn’t know this was Ed Harris, I have a sense of what his voice probably sounds like, which is like a raspy smoker’s voice. You sense the age in it. Show us what this is from, Drew. This is from Love Lies Bleeding, written by Rose Glass and Weronika-

Craig: The great Rose Glass.

John: -Tofilska. All right, our last person. This is actually two people. What we’re seeing is two kids on a basketball court. The one on the right is holding a basketball. He’s walking next to his friend, who is counting something emphatically on his fingers. How do we talk about these boys? How do we set them up individually and together? Let’s assume that they are principal characters in a story, and this is the first time we’re meeting them. All of our attention goes to the one on the left because he’s counting and he just has an energy to him.

He has this purple sweatshirt that feels great and iconic to him. The way he’s counting, making his points on his fingers, he talks with his hands clearly. It feels like a thing you can establish early on about him. He has gold-framed glasses. They both have high and tight hair, so I don’t know if that establishes them well. The one on the left has a rounder face. What else are we calling out about these two?

Craig: On the page, since you have to do this before you get here, right? We have two kids, about 10 or 11 years old, on a basketball court. Let’s call Brian taller, thin, quieter, nervous. Walks holding the ball with his friend. Let’s call him Anthony. Shorter, stockier, constantly talking, emphatic, bright colors. He’s smaller, but he’s the one who stands out.

John: Yes, smaller but a giant personality, a giant presence.

Stuart: Feels like LeBron and Maverick Carter. [laughter] Anthony focuses on the stats so that Brian can keep his focus on the game.

Craig: I like that.

John: Megana, what are you thinking?

Megana: There’s also something about their expression which lets you know that these characters have this conversation or this argument several times a day.

John: Yes, we want to hear that in a scene that follows. The first lineup needs to be from, we’re calling him Anthony on the left, and just him listing all the points of things. It just feels so right. Yes, you can get some of that in the description, but the first bits of dialogue are going to tell us a lot about what their dynamic is. Let’s just show what this is from. This is from He Got Game, written by Spike Lee. I would say Anthony on the left feels like a Spike Lee character. I feel like I see him, and I love to see him in these movies.

All right, so that’s people. Let’s talk about some places. These are some settings for actual movies that have happened. This first thing we’re seeing, they’re islands. There’s cliffy islands in a very blue sea. Let’s be more specific about where we are. If this is a setting that we’re traveling to in the movie, imagine this is a helicopter shot bringing us in here.

How are we describing this? Megan, let’s start with you. If this is a thing that you’re putting into your story as an establishing shot, how might you describe what you’re seeing?

Megan: I would call it like an untouched island in a beautiful blue sea, not a person or a building. I don’t know. I feel like dinosaurs should be here.

John: Yes. It feels super vibrant. One of the challenges with the island is my default goes to survivory desert island, and this is not that. To me, this feels like Greece or Thailand, but high cliffs are what really establish it, that it’s like a forest atop cliffs over this vibrant blue sea.

Craig: I’d probably go for a sprawl of islands just so that we get the sense it’s not just one, because that’s what people go to, sprawl of islands, high-cliffed islands, covered with low, dense clumps of trees. They sit amidst the peaceful blue water. We’re not in the open ocean. I hate describing shots like this, personally. I hate it, it’s just–

John: People skip it.

Craig: Yes, because like–

John: Because nothing happens.

Craig: Right, the truth is, in a shot like this, just looking at it as a picture, because the drone isn’t moving, this isn’t a moving picture for us, but would be in whatever it is, it just feels like a tourist, like a pamphlet cover. If it were moving, then maybe something would be happening, but really, it’s just sort of establishing.

John: Yes, it is establishing. Any more thoughts? Megana?

Megana: Okay, say this is the first shot of your movie, and you are establishing tone through this, there’s something so glossy about this image. It makes me feel like this is going to be like a fun rom-com or a screener sort of thing.

John: Yes, I feel like Meryl Streep is going to be singing a song at the edge of one of these cliffs.

Megana: I was just going to ask, like, how you guys would describe this image to set up the tone of that.

Craig: I wouldn’t. This is not to me, like you can’t set up the tone of a movie with this, because you might as well just say opening, fairly conventional shot of beautiful islands. [laughter] This is going to be one of those. You don’t want to do that, you don’t want to undermine your own cause.

John: Craig, I’ll say, like, if you’re talking though about bright, joy– I don’t want to say joyful sunlight, but a sense of, like, it’s bright and sunny and fun and poppy, that feels like a certain thing. Describing the weather and the tone and the mood, because these same islands in the middle of a rainstorm would feel very different and feel very dark. Establishing the tone of a place, you can do.

Craig: I would want to connect that to people.

John: Yes, I agree.

Stuart: It feels to me like this is the flyover shot before we get to the layer of the bad guy in an Austin Powers, like a parody of a spy movie.

Craig: To me, I feel like this is midway through a rom-com, they’ve arrived at this beautiful lagoon. Then this is the shot revealing how beautiful it is, although there are no boats here. Who the hell even knows? [laughs] I don’t know.

Stuart: In any of those contexts, there are different ways to do a one-line, quick establishing. If it’s a parody of a spy movie, I’d say the craggy cliffs of a Windows default background. If it were a rom-com, I’d say uninhabited seas, we might be the only people for miles. One, it doesn’t even go on the line two, but either way, quick and snappy.

John: Everyone thinks this is something funny or it’s a rom-com. It’s not, it’s Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Screenplay by Andrew Adamson, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely.

Craig: This is why we were struggling. This isn’t even on earth.

John: Yes, it’s not.

Craig: This is Narnia, you guys. Really, the way I would describe this is, Narnian Islands in the great whatever sea. Beautiful Narnian Islands.

John: Cerulean seas, yes.

Craig: Yes, it’s Narnia.

John: It’s Narnia, dude.

Craig: Of course.

John: Of course. All right, we’ll be getting back to Narnia with Greta’s new movie. I’m excited to see that happening. All right, next setting. Speaking of villain’s lair. In the shot we’re seeing, there’s a very overcast, a storm, but we’re seeing this, I guess we can call it brutalist, but brutalist modernist building that it’s all concrete and glass. We’re seeing soldiers or police people approaching the front doors of it. How do we talk about this? To me, it feels like a Tetris piece that’s turned into a house. I think you want to talk about the square angles of it all. It feels like some sort of discarded piece of a puzzle.

Craig: To me, this would be all about the movement. A single file line of SWAT team members move guns out, pointed forward towards the glass wall of an angular, concrete, and glass modern home, two stories, sitting in the middle of this absurdly perfect lawn under gray skies. The house is actually not– it’s John Wick house, basically. It’s like a smaller John Wick house. Oh, actually, there’s a whole other row of soldiers. Sorry, there are two lines of soldiers. It’s hard to tell because the other ones were blending into the background.
Yes, I would just say SWAT soldiers in two streaming single-file lines move towards an angular concrete and glass home.

John: Yes. I might also, clad entirely in black. There’s something futuristic about just how black and minimalist the police officers themselves are. Megan, Megana, Stuart, other thoughts on describing this shot?

Megan: I got to go talk about that hedge. It’s extremely perfectly manicured.

John: Yes, it’s all straight lines in this space. All right, let’s show what this is from. Mickey 17, written by Bong Joon Ho.

Craig: They haven’t seen it.

John: Yes, I saw it and it’s a little, I don’t remember the shot in the movie, but it is delightful, and it feels of like a part of the movie.

Craig: It’s on earth. It’s not on Narnia, so it’s fair.

John: This one is on earth, and it looks like– What we’re looking at is a shot of what seems to be a Middle Eastern city. It is all tan, multi-story buildings jammed incredibly tight together. This is a very long lens that is making everything seem incredibly compressed. Buildings nearly fill the frame with just a tiny strip of white sky at the summit of this. Hey, if you put this shot in a movie, we know we’re someplace Pacific in the world. I do like this as an establishing shot. How else would you describe this? What’s interesting to say about this?

Craig: One road, there’s one road.

John: A single multi-lane road bisects an incredibly dense city of all yellow concrete buildings.

Craig: What city is it? That’s what I would do. I would say, da, da, da, and then point out a compact sprawl of hundreds of squat yellow buildings. They all look the same.

John: Yes, the uniformity of it is, I think what’s so striking about the image. What was this from, Drew?

Drew: This is from War Dogs.

Craig: Oh, yes. My boy, Todd Phillips.

John: Do you know what city this is supposed to be, Craig? I feel like this is probably Jordan, maybe?

Craig: I can’t remember, I’m going to guess Middle East. I don’t know where it was set versus where they shot it, but sounds right.

John: Great, but that was fun. We’ve never done that on our show before, and I liked it as an exercise to go through this. Let’s do some listener questions. We have some listeners who have joined us on the Zoom, and so bring them on. I’ll have them ask their question. All right, first we have Eddie.

Craig: Eddie.

Eddie Hamilton: Hello. My name’s Eddie Hamilton from London. I’m a film editor. I’ve listened to every single episode of Scriptnotes since the show started.

John: Incredible.

Eddie: I started around episode 40, and I listened to the back and listened every week. It’s the only podcast to listen to every week. My question is, John and Craig, please, would you briefly discuss your experiences of rewriting and restructuring your own scripts and advising other filmmakers while in post-production? Editing is the final rewrite. Every movie I’ve cut has been refined enormously once the shoot is over, and the editorial adventure begins after the first assembly, and I would love to hear your perspective on this, please.

John: Yes, it’s a great question, Eddie. My experience with movies, specifically in post, where I’ve not directed the thing, generally I’ve gotten them up to production, and then I’ve walked away and done other things. Then I’ve come back, and I’ve seen that first assembly, that first cut or first audience screening, and I find where I’m most helpful is coming in with a set of notes that is really responding to the movie that I saw, that it has a memory of what the intentions were behind those things, but it’s not trying to get us back to the script that I wrote.

It’s really reflecting, this is the experience of watching the movie now. This is where I was curious, where I got confused. These are the opportunities I see, and I try to be the first person with the most clearest notes. I give those to the director or the producer. They agree with what they agree with, and then they bring those to the editor and start working on the next cut.

Eddie: Are you always invited in?

John: I am not always invited in. In the movies that have turned out well, I’ve basically always been invited in to do that function, and I feel like in many cases, like on Go, I was there for every frame shot, but in movies where I wasn’t, like Big Fish, being able to have some fresh eyes was so important because I could have the memory of, like, this was the intention, but this is what I’m actually seeing was really helpful because editors, obviously, they’re finding all this footage. They know what they have and what they don’t have.
I’m just looking at sort of, here’s what I’m seeing. Here’s where I’m engaging. Craig.

Craig: Actually, I was talking about this last night with– I did an event with Tim Good, who is one of our editors on The Last of Us and is yet again nominated for an Emmy, and we talked about this very thing. Once I get into the edit, I’m really trying to work with what I know we have, which is, it’s different. There are times where I will watch an editor’s cut and go, “Okay, this scene, I’m not going to give you notes on this scene. I’m going to give you the script back, read it. Go back to the script now, because you edited what you saw, but the script had more information.”

I want you to go back and conform this, not moment by moment, but feeling by feeling, speeds, adjustments, tempos. It’ll give you a sense of when to get close, when to further back, and then we’ll go from that. Usually, it’s pretty close. What you’re talking about, Eddie, that does happen sometimes, is you will watch and you’ll go, “Okay, structurally, our theory was incorrect.” I’ll give you an example. Our second episode of season two, for which Tim is nominated for an Emmy, initially, there’s this battle that’s taking place at Jackson, and then there’s this encounter that’s happening in a ski lodge.

We go back and forth between them a few times, and what we found was once Kaitlyn Dever says to Pedro Pascal, “I know who you are, and I’m going to kill you,” we can’t leave. We really can’t leave, and so we did some restructuring there, which worked, and there’s a lot of problem-solving to that, and it’s a joy because you understand you’re doing the right thing. You have to be as open to the new possibilities as you can be, and you also have to be as respectful of what led you to that point as you can be.

If you can have both of those in balance, then you are able to steer back towards the plan when needing, and you’re able to steer away into something better when you are needing it.

Eddie: That’s great. When I saw that episode, as an editor, all that intercutting and the structuring of the battle, I could feel how hard that was because I’ve done that on many films, and so I contacted Tim on Instagram. [laughter] I gave him a massive thumbs up and said, “Dude, that episode rocked, and congratulations. Just editor to editor, I wanted to let that your hard work was seen and understood, and appreciated from another post-production expert who’s sharing your pain. When I’m watching that episode, I can feel the amount of work that went into it to balance all the plates.”

It was astonishing, it was really great. The episode that you did about giving notes to producers or producers giving notes to writers applies to editors as well, and I make careful notes. I quite often tell my assistants when they ask me about getting notes in the edit and how to respond, don’t lead with your personal pain, all that stuff you said, Craig, it’s totally valid for editorial as well. If anyone is working with editors, please have a listen to that episode. Anyway, thank you so much for your time.

John: Thank you so much for listening to all the episodes, it’s incredible.

Craig: It’s amazing.

Eddie: My pleasure.

John: Thank you.

Craig: Thank you, Eddie.

Drew: Next question is from Ruta.

Craig: I may be wrong, but I believe we have a Lithuanian in the room.

Ruta: It is true.

John: Ruta, thank you for joining us on this live show. What question could we try to answer for you?

Ruta: Thank you so much for having me as a person with a question on the show. On episode number 626, I think Craig mentioned that accents are a little bit like actor bait, and it can become a trap for them. I was wondering if you know of any production designer baits. Is there anything you’d like designers not to do when bringing your scripts to screen?

John: Oh, it’s such a good question. Man, I could go on for a long time about this. Let me talk about like great examples of production designers who just got it and ran with it. I’m like, “Oh my God, thank you so much.” On Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alex McDowell and his team would e-mail me with like, “This is what we’re thinking about for the newspapers on the wall of Willy Wonka’s father’s house.” It’s like, “Great, that’s a thing that I can engage with, I can help out with that.” What you’re showing me is, oh, you really do get, like, who this person is, and that is fantastic.

Where I have had issues in the past with production designers who will take a scene they see in the script and create a whole new setting for a thing that doesn’t exist. Or there was an animated project where I delivered a script, and they were showing me scenes that did not exist in the script. That’s not helpful for me. I think you’re going too far with the world-building. You’re trying to paint way outside the lines of what this project needs to be. Craig, bait for production designers.

Craig: One thing that comes to mind, when you have a script where there is a town, oftentimes it’s a fantasy or it’s science fiction, but there’s some sort of place. What ends up happening is production designers working within the framework of the space that they have in the footprint will often over-design the street. There’s like a street of 12 things, and everybody walks the set and goes, “Oh my God, look at how great this is.” You’re like, “Yes, but what’s down the street? What’s on the next street over? Why is every scene only on the street?”

Suddenly, even if you extend it digitally, the town feels very small. Over-designing portions of a thing that you’re going to be stuck in over and over and over. When we made the Boston QZ or when we made Jackson, I was like, “Let’s not throw all of our resources onto one street.” Give me a little side streets. Give me little alleys. Give me little tiny things that we can do because we’re going to want variety more than anything. It’s more important than the one big “ooh-aah” shot variety. Spread it out a bit and let’s see what we can do.

Sounds like maybe, Ruta, you are a production designer or you work in an art department?

Ruta: That is the truth. I am a production designer, yes.

Craig: Great. You know what I’m talking about.

Ruta: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: Generally speaking, production designers these days do a very good job of integrating with the visual effects supervisor to work hand in hand with production to make sure that they are building enough practical for the actors to be inside, but also leaving space then for visual effects to complete things beyond that. Poor Ruta knows that everybody in the creative side wants the production designer to build the world, and then somebody from the production manager’s office comes in and says, “You have 12 cents.”

The compromise is always there. That one street B, that’s what I would call it.

John: Last bit I’ll say is that really great production design, and I think the point I was trying to get to in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is that it’s specific and that it feels specific to the needs of the scene and who that character is who would live in that space. That is the right instinct. The only danger is sometimes they can spend so much effort to create a character that doesn’t exist or doesn’t sort of mean anything, that you’ve wasted some time.

I would always prefer a specific place rather than a place that is just looks cool and doesn’t actually resonate, doesn’t tell me anything about who the people are who live and work in that space. Ruta, thank you so much for your question.

Craig: Great question.

Ruta: Thank you so much. I love your podcast.

Craig: Oh, thanks. Thank you.

Drew: Next up, we have Caroline.

Craig: Caroline.

****Caroline:**** Hello, long-time listener. I guess since 2020, really.

Craig: That’s a while.

Caroline: Yes, I guess I’ve been doing a lot longer. My question is a bit existential. It’s what do you think of people that leave the film industry? I’ve been working in it for almost 10 years and have found it to be quite detrimental to my mental health and with the lack of routine, low pay, long hours, high-stress environments, slimy, unprofessional producers. I work in posts. I have kept plugging away for the next gig, hoping it’ll be better, but I’m just not sure if it makes sense to keep going on the roller coaster that is having a job in film.

I’m sort of damned if I do. Have you ever had your own doubts about the longevity of having a career in this industry, and how do I work smarter and not harder in this line of work? How do you rationalize it all?

John: Oh, Caroline.

Craig: Ooh, I said brief question. The answer is no, yes, maybe three. The answer is three.

John: First off, this resonates with me because I’ve just been having this conversation so many times over the last few years with people who are like, “I don’t know whether to stay or to go, whether to, what actually makes sense.” What I like about your question is you are trying to face this honestly and look at what is best for you in this moment and what is best for you long-term. You aren’t making assumptions about how things are going to shape up and how it’s all going to be like, that you’re one job away from everything being perfect.

I love working in the film industry, but the film industry and the television industry can suck. Your job is not who you are. Your job shouldn’t be your identity. It sounds like you have other things that probably are considering, at least for what you would do if you weren’t going to do post. It’s worth taking those things seriously. We don’t know what the future is going to hold, but if you’re relatively young in this industry, you’ve been doing this for a while, it’s okay to leave if you decide you want to leave.

You don’t need my permission or Craig’s permission or anybody’s permission, but you need to be able to feel okay about going on because it doesn’t mean that you failed. It means that you recognize it wasn’t for you if that’s a choice you decide to make. Craig?

Craig: Yes, the very first question you ask is, what do you think about people that lead?

John: Hear us. Yes.

Craig: No problem. There’s no judgment whatsoever. The same way I feel about people that were in real estate and decided to make a switch, also. It’s whatever’s– This isn’t like, “Oh my God, she couldn’t hack it.” She couldn’t hack it, would be a thing if you were trying to be a Navy SEAL, I guess?

John: Yes.

Craig: No. This is a business like any other. John’s absolutely right. You can transition to something else whenever you want, as you wish, but I can tell that you– Well, I can’t tell. I suspect that you don’t want to. I suspect that you would like to stay. I suspect that you love it. I suspect that the problem you’re dealing with is the frustration of not being able to do the thing you love in a way that feels good.

We’ve been there, all of us, every single person who does this. That’s in different ways. We have all gotten it in different ways. There’s ways that the business treats you poorly because of your gender or your race. I always like to say like, and then underneath that, because you’re there. A lot of people will just treat you bad because you’re there, which is brutal.

Show business is one of the few things that people are so passionate about, they are willing to bear an enormous amount of bad behavior in order to keep going. What I think is important is that you’ve identified that you have a limit. Setting up boundaries is important. If in your mind, you’re giving yourself permission to go, you will immediately feel quite a bit freer.

See, one of the problems is when we feel trapped, that’s when we feel powerless. You’re not trapped, ever. You can get up and go. Yes, it may mean that you’re not able to do the thing that you really want to do, but you might find that just knowing you can get up and go will give you a little bit more confidence to go, “I’m good at my job. I love being here. This is my boundary.”

What the bullies know is that there are systems in place to keep them from bullying. Those are real. I think you should take advantage of those if those moments come. The difficulty of getting work, that is the cross we bear.

John: Yes, that’s the structural problem of what we’re in.

Craig: That is. I wish I could tell you that there was a moment or an event or a thing where you will wake up one day and go, “Oh, I’m in this business now forever. They’ll never let me go,” which is what happens when you’re good at what you do and you get to that place where suddenly they realize it.

The most frustrating thing is you were you all along. You’re just waiting for them to flip their own switch to get it. In your circumstance, with my guess, I would say don’t quit yet. I feel like you don’t want to. Give it a go as best you can with your boundaries firmly in place. If that doesn’t work, then you know what? There is an unfelt joy that is waiting for you in something else. I do not believe we are meant for one thing in this world.

John: Caroline, one of the things that this is reminding me of is that there’s so many books about, oh, transitioning careers, or moving from this job to that job. They are always focusing on people who show up and go to work at a normal job.

The things that we do, which is scape work and we are imposed or us as writers, piecing together a bunch of different things to create enough of a career, is just so challenging and so different. If you decide that you love this work in post, but you don’t love going gig to gig to gig, it may be worth looking for, like, what are the positions that let you do the things you love that are more like a job rather than this?

You can actually not have to stress about the next gig, the next gig, the next gig. Working at a post house or a place that is like a longer-running thing, so you’re not constantly seeking the next thing, might feel better. I think Craig’s advice, on the whole, I think is really good. Is this resonating with you? Is this helpful at all?

Caroline: Yes, it’s a bit heavier than the other questions. It’s almost quite spiritual in a way, to have to think about this like existential question and to really just be in touch with myself and know what I need.

John: Yes, and listen, there aren’t great career coaches for stuff like this. There’s not an industry for that. I think just having a structured conversation with somebody about, these are my priorities and these are what I’m setting as my boundaries might also be helpful too.

If you can find somebody like that, it could just be a friend, but it’s where you both hold each other accountable for like, these are my red lines, these are the choices I want to make, that could help you as well.

Caroline: Totally.

John: Caroline, thank you so much.

Craig: Hang in there, Caroline.

John: Drew, let’s do one more question, and then we’ll save these other questions for the bonus segment.

Drew: Sounds good. Let’s do– This next question is from Sarah.

Craig: Do you think it’s going to be Sarah with an A or an H? Quick guess– Oh, too late, it’s H. Oh, it could be either. This could be Sarah Hadelman, or it could be Sarah Adelman. I think it’s Sarah Adelman.

Sarah Adelman: You’re correct. Jew, H, you got to go do it.

Craig: Jew.

Sarah: Yes.

Craig: Jew knows Jew. Sarah, welcome to the podcast. Welcome to our live show. What question can we try to answer for you today?

Sarah: Sure. I’m Sarah. I’m a stand-up comedian and writer, and I finally sent my first feature script to my lit manager, and she gave me really helpful notes. One of the biggest ones will require redeveloping the male love interest for my female lead.

I originally wrote him as a super naive, big-eyed guy from the Midwest who’s intimidated by my spunky female girl. She has suggested that I change him to be a little cooler so we can root for him, a little less pathetic, for lack of a better term. I really want to make this change, but I’ve lived with this man in my head for a year as I wrote the script.

Should I give him a new name and just totally rewrite him? How do I let go of the original person? How do I make sure that I’m not just adding new traits to someone who already existed, so it becomes like a caricature? How do I deal with that I’m going to miss him even though I want him?

John: Who gave you this note? Was it your agent, you said?

Craig: Literary manager.

John: Manager?

Craig: Yes.

Sarah: Sorry, Craig.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, it’s okay.

John: You know where this is going?

Sarah: I know. I love her.

John: Fire the manager.

Craig: No, you don’t have to fire her.

John: Sarah, you think this note is actually the right note for the script. You think it actually will improve the script. That’s all that matters. No matter where it came from. She thinks it’s the right choice for it.

My instinct, Craig, is she needs to rename the character because otherwise she’s going to try to be gluing things onto the existing character that she already wrote. I think she needs to create a clean space in her head for who this new character is. What’s your instinct?

Craig: There’s something about this character that matters to you. There was something about this character that made him your instinct to pair with her. There’s something about her, therefore, that is relevant here. Get to that. Figure out what that is. That something, hopefully, you can preserve. Also, you don’t need to say goodbye to this guy. You’re making a new guy. What’s this character’s name currently?

Sarah: Milo.

Craig: Milo. Let’s say you’re going to make a new character called Adam. Your female lead, her name is?

Sarah: Katerina.

Craig: Katerina goes over to Adam’s house, and he’s just got to go quickly deal with his idiot brother, Milo, who’s there, and who they can talk about and who may– You know what I’m saying? He doesn’t have to go away. If there’s value to him there, then keep it.

I guess that’s really what I’m getting to, is don’t ignore what your instincts were. They were your instincts for a reason. Follow that thread as you do, but also then really do think, hey, who is this other guy, and how can I get as attached to him and as protective of him because of the way his purpose interacts with hers?

John: My suspicion, though, is, Sarah, you will fall in love with this new guy, too. The old guy’s like, oh yes, I learned a lot from him, but this is the right guy to be in this movie relationship now. I think it’s a really smart question, though, because it shows that you’re thinking about what your intentions are, but you’re also thinking about what’s actually working.

That’s the crucial cycle that we’re going through is rewriting it’s really recognizing what worked, what didn’t work, and how to move forward, and not being too precious about the things you loved. Good luck.

Sarah: Thanks, guys.

John: You got this.

Sarah: I love you.

Craig: Thanks.

Sarah: I really love you.

Craig: We love you too.

John: Thank you. Big hugs. All right. My one cool thing is a thing that’s going to seem so obvious, but for folks who are not working in the film industry or theater, you might not know about spike tape. I want to sing the praises of spike tape. Spike tape are these little narrow colored tapes. We use them on film sets and on stage to mark where things belong on stage or on the set.

It could be actors’ marks. It could be where things are placed. You put it down, you take it up. It’s a really stiff tape. It doesn’t leave bad marks, but have some of these around the house because there are things you want to label.

We just did it for, we’re repainting and redoing a bunch of the windows. That’s the noise you hear in the background. We marked this purple tape is for the screens to go in these places. It’s just useful when you need to identify things, and you can write on it. It’s smart stuff. It’s a spike tape. It’s just delightful. You will find yourself using it all the time.

Craig: I had no idea that was– I just called it marking tape because the AC would just come with this marking tape to mark stuff.

John: I’ve always called it spike tape.

Craig: Spike tape.

John: I find it just incredibly useful. I love it.

Stuart: A store on Magnolia and Burbank that has the rainbow of every imaginable color.

John: That’s what you want. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the cheapo Amazon version. I love– God, Megan, I remember when we went to the– We had to get a special light for one of our live shows.

We had to go set up an account to get a light for one of our live shows. It was so fun to be in a place that just had like all the film stuff you could ever want. It’s so great. All the supplies.

Craig, what’s your one cool thing?

Craig: My one cool thing this week is Bridge Base Online. I don’t know if any of you play Bridge.

John: I don’t. Tell us about Bridge Base.

Craig: I’ve played Bridge in the past, and I loved it. My wife and I would play with her parents. We can’t play with them anymore because they’re dead.

John: Yes, it’s hard.

Craig: It just doesn’t work well. They were great Bridge players. They were competitive Bridge players in New York in the 60s, like ranked and everything. They were really good. Melissa and I were more like, we learned in college, and we would play. There was like a bunch of people in our little eating clubs, which is a stupid Princeton term, that we’d play Bridge.

I played easy Bridge. I learned quite a bit playing with my in-laws. Melissa and I haven’t played forever. The thing about Bridge is you need four people. It is a fantastic game. It’s a game that is very simple to understand in terms of the rules, but all the complexity and joy is in the bidding and the strategy.

There is a website called Bridge Base Online that is just this massive venue for, you can play against the computer, you can play 1,000 hands, you can do practice sessions, you can learn bidding conventions. You can also play pickup games with about 14 trillion people. The reason I started looking back at this is because Melissa’s been playing a lot herself on her phone.
Then our friend, Dave Shukan, who I’ve mentioned before on the podcast, puzzle master, lawyer extraordinaire, and exceptional bridge player, no surprise, had been talking to us. He’s been playing quite a bit himself. If you are interested in learning how to play Bridge, or you just feel like doing a little solo practice, bridgebase.com.

John: I love it.

Craig: Yes.

John: That is our show for this week. It’s produced, as always, by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Oh, thank you, Matthew Chilelli, right there. Matthew, for this week’s outro, pick one of your favorite ones from the past, one of the ones you’ve done, and let’s play that again.

Craig: One of yours.

John: One of yours. It has to be one of yours.

Craig: Yours.

John: If you have an outro, you can send a link, blah– See, that’s what I did.

Craig: See, that’s it.

John: Blah, blah.

Craig: That was it.

John: That’s what I did.

Craig: I’m so glad it happened.

John: It happened live. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes. We have t-shirts and hoodies, and drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about in today’s episode. With the email, you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Oh my gosh, thank you to all our premium subscribers. We sent out the notice to them about this live show. Drew, how many questions did we get in from those?

Drew: Hundreds of questions. I woke up with hundreds in my inbox. They were all great. It was so hard to pick.

John: Yes.

Craig: Oh, at least one of them was bad.

Drew: Not a single one.

Craig: Mmm-hmm.

Drew: Mmm-hmm.

John: We’re going to be answering a few more of those live in the bonus segment for premium members. We’re also holding on to those questions because so many of them were so good, we’ll save them for future episodes.

The one coolest thing, so at least four of the coolest things are already on this Zoom right now, which are our previous Scriptnotes producers and our editor, Matthew Chilelli. Megana Rao, Megan McDonald, Stuart Friedel, Matthew Chilelli. Thank you so much for all your hard work on this.

Drew, thank you so much for your hard work every week on this show. You guys are the best. Thank you everybody who watched us live on YouTube. That’s so exciting. Bye, guys.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Let’s answer another question, if we can.

Craig: Yes.

Drew: Okay. We have Ben Adams coming up.

John: What a great name. Ben Adams.

Craig: Ben Adams.

John: It feels like a founding father, a merged founding father.

Craig: Founding father’s ne’er-do-well brother.

John: That’s what it is.

Ben Adams: That’s exactly right. Funny, because I always get picked for jury duty with that name, because I’m like a founding father’s name.

John: Yes. That’s good stuff.

Craig: I’d pick you.

John: Ben, what kind of question might we be able to answer for you today?

Ben: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on. I’m so thrilled. My question is, a little preface here, I’m going to be shooting a short film rom-com next month with some friends. My script, I feel like, is ready, but I keep hearing things about having alt lines or alternative lines on set.

I have so little experience with that, and so I want to know how many alt lines are good to have for jokes. How many is too many? I want to give my actors room to improvise, but at the same time not lose the meaning of the scene. I just am trying to figure out a good middle ground of how many to have on set.

John: That’s a great question. We had Brittany Nichols on the show a while back, and she was talking about Abbott Elementary. They do come to set with like a whole series of alt lines they’ll go after they’ve gotten through a take, and they’ll practice other things for specific stuff to replace.

I think it’s good for you to have those in your back pocket. I wouldn’t share them with your actors ahead of time. I would say really look at what’s happening in front of the lens in the moment before you change setups, and then see what feels good to explore.

That’s a chance for you to, okay, here are some things I’m thinking. Let’s see if any of these work or land, and then that opens the door for them to try some different things themselves, in the Apatow sense of, you shoot a couple clean and then you get messy. Craig, what’s been your experience with alt lines?

Craig: Never wrote them for the comedies. When I was working, like for instance, on the Hangover movies, Todd and I would write the lines we wanted to hear. Then on the day, first of all, you’re going to have funny actors, and you’re also going to feel things, right?

You may feel in the moment like, eh, it’s not quite working, is it? Then you just do a little powwow. What would be better? Or why don’t we try this? Why don’t we try that? An actor may just toss something out in the moment. You’re like, “Ooh, that was great.”

Todd and I used to have Zach Galifianakis repeatedly would come up with the best lines after we had turned around and the camera wasn’t on him, and we’re like, “Zach, got to go do this, too, when the lens is pointing at you.”

Also, a guy like Zach, it’s every take, he could have a new line that’s amazing. You find those there. There’s something that is so wonderfully spontaneous about those. If you prepare them– First of all, you’re inviting people to go, “Well, I don’t want to say this, but I will say that.” Remember also, lines interact.

John: Yes, totally.

Craig: If somebody is going to get an alt here, the response is going to be different. We would let that happen on the day.

John: Here’s what I think, going back to the Abbott Elementary example, when she has alts for things, when a person has a funny name for a thing or a funny thing they call the other person, having alts for that snipers those comments, because then, it’s not inviting a different response back on the other side.

It’s a little more clean. You can see what works. I would say on your list of priorities for what you should be thinking about going into this rom-com shoot, it’s pretty low on that list of priorities. Really think about all the other stuff and making sure that you have all the materials to make the best possible scene.

Craig: Agreed.

Ben: I have my shot list, my storyboards, my script. I have all my actors, and everyone agreed to do it for zero dollars, which is great. I have good friends. I called in all my favors. Really quickly, I invited my friend, Tom, who’s now a SAG actor. He was starring it, but he’s like, “Sorry, you got to pay me now.” I go, “Oh, do you still want to come on set and be funny?” He goes, “Sure.” He’s going to maybe help me riff. Do you recommend that? Is that cool?

John: There are people who that works out great for. Behind the scenes on a lot of the Apatow movies, they were just finding people around who just did stuff. If your friend’s helping you, great. If you’re finding it’s not actually helping and it’s slowing stuff down, you can send your friend away, or you can go grab pizza or something.

Craig: That said, ethical point of view, if he’s in the Writer’s Guild, no. If you’re a Writer’s Guild member, you can’t work for free. You can’t work for free.

Ben: Okay. Got it. Yes. As far as I know, he’s not. He just got his SAG card, and this was like– We were talking about doing it together. Then he said, “Hey, sorry, I got this feature,” and I’m like, “Oh, okay, cool. Let’s do it right.” I’m still figuring that out because I’m new. Thank you all so much. This was such a thrill. This kind of thing makes me a guest, right?

John: Yes, you’re now a guest on Scriptnotes.

Craig: Yes.

Ben: All right. Thanks, all. Appreciate you.

Drew: Two more. Next one is from Katie. Hello, Katie.

****Katie:**** Hello. Hi. Thank you guys for having me on.

John: Thank you very much for coming on and for waiting to ask your question. What can we help you with?

Katie: I was wondering, how do you guys, with your fingers in so many pies being projects at once, how do you handle working on multiple projects? Whether you have something that you’re pitching while you’re working on something being developed while you also are in production or even distribution on another project, how do you find brain space to not forget about one?

John: It’s a great question. Increasingly, I’ve had a bunch of stuff recently that I’ve had to. On a given day, I may be pitching on one project, having a meeting about a different project, and writing the other thing that I’m writing. It can be tough to switch gears, except they’re all in clean lanes.
I try to prioritize, this is the thing I’m writing, I need to block out this time to actually do productive work. The stuff that I’m pitching on or meeting on, I find in the half hour before thing, I can get my brain back up to speed on what that thing is. I’ll go back through the notes, find the stuff, and get myself there.

I’ve said this on the podcast many times, I’m sure, over the years, but with a new project, I’ll try to make myself a playlist in music for, like, these are the songs that remind me about it. Sometimes playing that will also get me back in the mood for something.

There’s times where it’ll be like two months since I’ve thought about this thing. Hearing those tracks gets me excited about it again and reminds me like, “Oh, that’s right, this is what this project feels like.” Craig, you’ve had to do this.

Craig: Sure. There are some people who really are producers at heart, and they love working on lots of things at once, because there is an entrepreneurial aspect to their character. There are other people who are a bit more monk-like, I think.

John: I think you’re monk-like, I’m more produce-y, yes.

Craig: Yes. I’m a full focus-on-a-thing guy. I do still– There are things that I help develop with other writers and filmmakers. When it comes to what I’m doing, I can write one thing at a time, really, because I put everything of myself in it, 100%, all the way tunnel vision-y. That’s just one of the ways that our mental architecture is expressed, and everybody’s is different.

If you find yourself really struggling to do that, it may just be that your brain is attuned to the narrow lane. There’s nothing wrong with that. You just follow the path of least resistance because it’s hard enough. Why make it harder by moving against? If you’re a righty, don’t throw a ball with your left hand.

John: It’s such good general advice, is so much of this is recognizing what are your patterns and not trying to label those as bad habits or something like, no, this is just how stuff works for me. The first couple of projects you’re writing, you’re still learning what actually works for you.

Sure, try some different things, see what– Maybe you write first thing in the morning, maybe you write last thing at night. Maybe you are a person who can juggle a bunch of different stuff, and you enjoy that. The cross-pollination between the things is helpful for you or it’s not. If you recognize what works for you, then you can really pursue that.

Katie: Awesome, thank you guys.

John: Katie, thank you so much for the question.

Katie: As a Tallahassee native, love it being thrown out there. Thank you, Craig.

Craig: Felt good, felt good.

John: All right, last up, we have Kathleen, yes.

Craig: With a K.

John: It is with a K. It’s very rare to see a Kathleen with a C. It’s not impossible, but I’ve seen very few.

Craig: Yes, there’s not a lot of Cathies. Kathy, you’ll see.

John: Kathy, a lot, for sure.

Craig: Yes, but no, Kathleen, I agree.

John: Hello, Kathleen with a K.

Craig: Hi, Kathleen with a K.

Kathleen: Hello from the Jersey Shore.

Craig: Hey, what part, where?

Kathleen: I’m in Ocean City right now, but–

Craig: Nice.

Kathleen: Yes.

Craig: Freehold.

Kathleen: Thank you, guys. I’m a longtime fan of the show.

John: We really appreciate you being here. Thank you for joining us.

Kathleen: Thank you for having me, John. I appreciate it. This is a question I have about options. I’m a novelist. I’m not a bestseller. I’ve had a couple of projects optioned in the past. I never expect anything to get made. I’m just happy to have interest from Hollywood. My last project was optioned in 2022 for about two years.

Then, around the same time, Netflix was developing pretty much a very similar show over the same period of time. It came out last month. It was our number one show. It’s already renewed for a second season. Then I was told by people in the industry this happens all the time.

I know ideas are not copyrightable. I’ve heard that from you guys many times, and I’m totally in agreement with that. I guess I’m wondering, do studios option projects just to kill them if they’re very similar? Is there a line that’s crossed?

Craig: Not really.

Kathleen: Is it–? Not really.

Craig: Not really.

John: No. It’s not one of those sorts of like catch and kill situations with like sexual harassment lawsuits or anything like that. It’s not like, “Oh, that’s the thing out there. Let’s take that off the market.” I genuinely believe that does not happen at all.

In your situation, I think one of the things that is exciting is that you wrote a book that’s like, “Oh yes, that should be a series.” Everyone’s like, “Yes, that should be a series.” There’s now evidence that would be a great series. It may mean that what happened was too close to this other hit series that people aren’t going to want to adapt your book.

I got to feel like it helps put you on the radar. I don’t know whether your Goodreads reviewers and folks who are enjoying your book are pointing out that this book existed before this, and it was effing great. People should read this if they want a book in the same spirit. I would take it as a win if you can find a way to take that as a win.

Kathleen: Yes, I think I’m trying. I think it’s my family and friends who are watching it and saying, “This is so close, this is pretty much your book.” Then they’re saying, “If you litigate, that costs so much money. Do you reach out and just say, what’s the deal here?” It’s always my time to sit back and do nothing, but–

Craig: Of course, we have to guard against, a sense of passivity or doormatism. We don’t want to be a doormat. I don’t know the book, and I don’t know the series. We don’t know the details. All I can tell you is that, no, Hollywood generally does not option material to not make it, or because it’s too close to something else.

They’re not worried about something that’s too close when it’s fiction in particular. There’s already been something that’s been a series like that seven years ago, and there’s going to be another one eight years from now. The similarities will occur, particularly if you’re writing in a genre space.

Yes, family and friends who love you have a focus bias because they’ve read the book carefully, and now they’re looking for comparisons, and they will find them. When you read a lot of the lawsuits that get filed, it does consist of a lot of like. “This is almost the same. All they changed was this or this,” which you can do.

I’m not suggesting that it’s impossible. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t seek legal advice. Since you’re asking what our instinct is, our instinct is almost always no, that people are not looking to steal your book at all. Was it the same producer that optioned the book and made the show?

Kathleen: It’s the same studio, so it was under.

Craig: In particular, if it’s Netflix, they make 14 million shows. There’s probably 12 other novelists who are like, “Hey, you know, that’s not–”

John: Kathleen, I want to focus on this win you have. I bet there’s a bunch of people who’ve written books who are like, “Wait, she’s had multiple things optioned? I’ve never had anything optioned. That seems pretty great.” What have been your conversations with those producers?

I have to feel like they must feel some validation of, not only was our instinct right that this was a good thing, I want to see what her next thing is. Second question is, they optioned it, but was there ever a script? Where did it get to? Were there other writers? What happened on that front?

Craig: Yes. Was there a script?

Kathleen: There was a script. I opted not to be involved in writing the script because I don’t like to get in the way of something being adapted. I was like, if it’s going to get made, then I’ll stay out of the way. There was a script. There was a team attached to it. There was a showrunner.

John: Oh, so, Lord, they did not kill it. They spent some serious money. I’m sure those people are all heartbroken, too, that the series didn’t move forward. No, they were intending to make that show.

Craig: Yes. If, for instance, they optioned a novel for a low amount of money. Let’s say they get away with like, hey, what, we’re making a show, but there’s this other novel out there, and you said it wasn’t a bestseller.

Right off the bat, if it were a bestseller, maybe they’re like, “Oh my God, we’ve got to go get that out of the way.” Then they would have to spend a lot of money on the rights alone. For something that’s a smaller amount, why would they spend a dollar more?

John: Here’s the scenario that I feel is plausible, is that we want to make a movie in this space. They’ve read your book, and they’ve read something else, or whatever the other project was. Let’s get some R&D, basically, and do this stuff.

They’re like, “Okay, we have two things we can do. Which of these two things are we going to do? Who do we like the elements of better? Which one has more momentum?” That’s the one they picked. It sucks when it’s not yours, but you’re talking to two folks on this podcast who’ve had 60 movies not made. We can tell you that it’s par for the course.

Craig: There was a WGA writer writing a script. The WGA also is careful about chain of title. For instance, if there were some sort of co-mingling or shenanigans, then the Writers Guild, the writer of that script, based on your novel, would be like, “Excuse me, you guys took my stuff, clearly.” Then the Writers Guild would say, “Yes, you guys have co-mingled two chains of title, and now you have to deal with credit issues.”

John: The producers who are different producers would also be fighting over that. It would be a bigger mess.

Craig: Everybody would be fighting.

John: Yes, it wouldn’t just be your fight.

Craig: Yes. I think you can tell your family and friends, “Thank you, I love you, I appreciate you guys looking out for me.” It sometimes feels worse when people are trying to convince you that you’ve been done dirty.

John: Yes.

Craig: You can start to feel like a doormat. You’re not. You’re a professional. You went through a professional process. The outcome that occurred is common. You keep moving forward. Your job is to write books.

John: Yes.

Craig: Not to dwell. You keep writing books.

John: Kathleen, it’s a great question. I’m really glad we sort of had this discussion on it. It was great. Congratulations. It’s–

Craig: For real.

John: I’m not just waving it away. For any novelist to get their feelings, not just optioned, but they went and hired people and got a script, and they got a show together, that’s really far down the process and the pike, and will set you up for the next time because I think you’re on more people’s radar because that book went that far.

Kathleen: Okay. That makes me feel better. Thank you.

Craig: Good. Good.

John: Thank you all. Thank you, Kathleen. Thank you, everybody who listened to the live stream. This was really fun.

Craig: -and watched.

John: and watched, and watched. Drew, thank you for putting this together. This was a lot of new, first-time things for you, so thank you for doing it.

Drew: Thank you, guys.

Craig: Nailed it.

John: Nailed it. This was really fun.

Drew: Thank you.

John: Last time we tried to do this in 2020, man, it was a scramble. This felt really good.

Craig: This was great. We’ll do it in episode 1400.

John: Yes. Perfect. Established. Whoever’s taking notes–

Craig: I’ll be so withered.

John: You’ll be at Harris with a cryptkeeper.

Craig: I could theoretically do it.

John: You could totally do it. Honestly, either one of us could do it. We just need to get the wig appliance.

Craig: Actually, you can do it. I think your hair–

John: I got that base.

Drew: It would work.

Craig: Your hair grows straight.

John: Yes, it does grow straight. It’s true.

Craig: I would just get some sort of curly. It would be very Hasidic.

John: Yes. All right, guys. Thank you both. Bye.

Craig: Bye.

Links:

• Watch episode 700 on YouTube!
• Stuart Friedel, Megan McDonell, and Megana Rao
• Weapons
• The Hunting Wives on Netflix
• Vince Gilligan YouTube video
• Our Back to School collection on Weekend Read
• Play along with People, Places and Things: Woman one, woman two, man one, kid duo, oceanside, house, and city.
• Scriptnotes Episode 399: Notes on Notes
• Spike tape
• Bridge Base Online
• Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 698 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we discuss movies that never existed, from high-profile projects that got shelved at the last minute, to our own experiences with unmade projects. Then, it’s time for some listener questions covering multi-language dialogue and multi-part movies, among other things.

In our bonus segment for premium members, if no one paid us to write screenplays anymore, Craig, if they would never get made, would we continue to write them as a form?

Craig: Uh. [chuckles]

John: Yes, you have an hour to think about that.

Craig: I don’t know if I need an hour, but all right.

John: We’ll talk about the pros and cons of the screenplay format. It’s a literary thing independent of a way to make a movie. Craig, this last week, I ran the San Francisco Half Marathon.

Craig: Congrats.

John: Which was really fun. I’d done the second half of it six years ago. This week, I did the first half. As I was running it, I was thinking like, “I wonder if Craig knows these things.” How do they know when a racer crosses the finish line? How do they know the time of a racer?

Craig: If I had to guess, I don’t think it’s as fancy as like an RFID tag in a bib.

John: It is an RFID tag in a bib.

Craig: Oh, it is? It is as fancy as that.

John: The day before the race, you go and you pick up your bib, and that’s the thing you have paper-clipped onto your shirt, or we have little fancy magnets now because we’re fancy. On the back of that bib is an RFID tag, and so as you’re running the race, you’re constantly passing through gates that are tracking that you ran through. There’s an app that you install on your phone-

Craig: For friends and family to follow on.

John: -to find you, but also, it tells you in real time what your pace is.

Craig: Oh, so you actually carry a phone with you as you’re running?

John: I do carry a phone with me as I’m running.

Craig: Because that’s extra weight.

John: It’s extra weight, but it’s fine. Most people are, I think, are running with phones these days.

Craig: Running with phones, yes. It would be rough if you were tracking this, your loved one is in a marathon and they just stop.

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: They stop for a long time, then you hear sirens. It’s rough.

John: It’s not good.

Craig: No.

John: It’s helpful for your friends and family because that way, they can figure out where you are on the race, so they can come and cheer you on on a certain place.

Craig: Yes, that makes absolute sense. It’s a nicer scenario than the one I suggested.

John: The whole idea of RFID and tracking leads to a bigger question because earlier this summer, I was on a cruise in Alaska. On this boat, you wear this little medallion that has an RFID with you, and it’s super handy because, again, you pull up the app and it’s like, “I want a cup of coffee.” Wherever you are on the boat, [crosstalk] press one button, they find you, they bring you this stuff. It’s nice.

Craig: Oh, they’re bringing it to you?

John: They bring it to you, not to your cabin, just to you-

Craig: To you.

John: -directly, wherever you are.

Craig: Yes, right now, I guess our phones are that thing, but eventually, we’ll all be chipped at birth.

John: Both the race and the cruise ship were cases where that kind of constant surveillance I liked, but I don’t want to have it everywhere all the time. I don’t want to be forced into it.

Craig: No, I don’t want to have a situation where a corporation can track me wherever I go, although, currently, that is the situation I have. Let’s face it.

John: It is, yes.

Craig: They know everything. I was just thinking in my mind, if you did start to chip human beings at birth.

John: Yes, because you’re a parent who wants to know where your kid is.

Craig: Let’s say the state has decided. In our rougher scenario, every human shall be chipped. I’m trying to think biologically where to put this so that it won’t be dislodged by growth. I’m struggling. I think everything grows. Nothing is fully sized when you’re born, not even one little tiny thing.

John: Yes, your eyes are bigger, proportionally bigger, but the eyes are still going to continue to grow.

Craig: Everything grows, so I don’t know where to put it.

Drew Marquardt: With animals, they’d put it under the skin and it sits on top.

Craig: Animals grow, yes, and they don’t grow as much as we do. Humans are ridiculous. We’re born so stupidly small compared to–

John: Early because–

Craig: Early, because of our dumb heads.

John: Otherwise, we wouldn’t fit through the birth canal.

Craig: Yes, but I think you could put it under the skin, I suppose. I just wonder if it would get irritated, or it could move, it could shift.

John: Yes, you might swap that at a certain point.

Craig: Yes, maybe you do like a little baby tag. Then you do a kid tag. It’d be great. Kids would love it.

John: Oh, fantastic. Alrighty, the issue of tracking your kids and turning on Find My Friends and Find My is a thing. I remember talking with you at a certain point, and we realized that I think our daughters are at the same concert in Boston. You’re like, “Let me pull up,” and was like, “Oh yes, she’s there.” You did that. I didn’t do that because I sort of have an unspoken thing that I don’t find my friends when she’s not in Los Angeles.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting. I never have to look at it, but when Jessie was in school in Boston, I never went to go look for her. I would look for Melissa, like, “Where’s my wife?” Always at the tennis. The tennis is where she is. It has a list. It’s like, “Melissa is 8 miles away. Jessica is 3,000-something miles away.” Then I’d be like, “Oh yes, look, there she is in Boston somewhere.”

John: I only share location with family. I don’t share with

Drew. That feels like–

Craig: I share my location with Drew, which is weird.

John: It’s just strange. Yes.

Craig: I just want him to know. No, just family. Just really, just actually, not even my full family, just Melissa and Jessica. You know what I don’t use enough? When you are meeting somebody somewhere in a large public place, you can share your location with them, which obviously Drew and his generation does constantly. I’m like, “Oh yes, I forgot.”

John: Yes. I will do that temporarily, but I don’t do it with friends. Drew, do you share your location with any friends?

Drew: I only do the temporary. Even me and my wife don’t share. We don’t have Find my Friends.

Craig: What? Oh wow.

John: Wow.

Drew: Pure trust.

Craig: It’s not about trust. It’s not like I think, “Oh, she’s going whoring again.” I–

John: To me, it’s always like, how close is Mike to being home?

Craig: Yes, exactly. If I’m going to order food, should I see if she’s going to be here or–?

Drew: I don’t know. It feels like a threshold that because I haven’t crossed it yet, I don’t want to cross it yet.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: You’re up to something.

Drew: [laughs]

John: It’s all– [crosstalk]

Craig: I am absolutely [unintelligible 00:06:01] Drew is up to something.

Drew: I’m whoring.

Craig: You’re whoring?

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I love whore as a verb–

John: He’s a secret assassin. He’s out there killing people.

Craig: Not anymore.

John: Not anymore. Some follow up. Hey, remember we wrote a book?

Craig: Oh my goodness. We wrote a book, and John, I have an author page-

John: On Amazon.

Craig: -on Amazon, which as you can imagine is populated with almost nothing. It’s got my picture.

John: Yes, got your picture. People have been sending Drew their pre-order receipts, which is great.

Craig: Amazing. How are we doing? Are we going to be doing a lot of signing?

Drew: We have about 150 so far.

Craig: Oh, that’s pretty good. Of just people that sent receipts?

Drew: Just people who sent receipts.

John: Oh. A reminder, if you pre-order the book from wherever you order it from, so not just Amazon, but any place– [crosstalk]

Craig: Sure, anywhere.

John: Send your little receipt through to Drew, ask@johnaugust.com, and we will send you something cool. We’re not quite sure what it’s going to be yet. It could be a bonus chapter. It could be some successful video report.

Craig: It could be a brand new car.

John: It could be something cool, but we’ll send that out well before the book comes out.

Craig: Do we have any sense, other than the receipts that you have received, does Amazon tell you how many people are buying it or–?

John: Pre-ordering it? I think Crown, our publisher in the US, has had this,-

Craig: Oh, they got– [crosstalk]

John: -and so at some point, they’ll tell us.

Craig: At some point they’ll give us the bad news.

John: They’ll say, “We’re really worried, John, Craig.”

Craig: [laughs]

John: No, I think they’re happy with almost anything.

Craig: Wow.

John: No, because here’s the thing, it’s–

Craig: That’s a low bar.

John: There are books that need to be giant hits out of the gate and needs to hit those lists. We are a catalog title, where there’s like, we’re evergreen.

Craig: We are not the latest Stephen King novel.

John: Yes. Questions that I got off of Reddit and other people asking, audio book. Yes, if you see, there’s a listing with a little button for audio book, there’s plans for an audio book. There’s nothing to announce yet, but there’s going to be an audio book. It’s not me and Craig talking.

Craig: Should we just get Ryan Reynolds to do it? [laughs] Just hold Ryan down and force him to do it at some point?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’ll be fun.

John: Yes, good.

Craig: Because occasionally, in the middle of an audio book, you get the sense that the person reading it is a hostage. [chuckles] They try and run, and there’s scuffle, and then they come back and resume reading.

John: For the podcast, they did lauch about the [unintelligible 00:08:02] books. The episode I did about the audiobook was actually really fascinating because I met the guy in LA, who actually recorded the book, and just his whole process was great and crazy.

Crown came to us and said like, “Hey, do you and Craig want to record the audiobook?” I’m like, “No. We record a podcast every week, and that’s plenty. No. No, thank you.

Craig: Yes, it’s too much reading.

John: It’ll be great to have a real professional do it.

Craig: Yes, terrific, so Ryan Reynolds?

John: Or somebody like Ryan Reynolds.

Craig: Yes, somebody bigger.

John: Yes.

Craig: Tom Hanks? [chuckles]

John: Yes. Crown said we should go for Tom Hanks.

Craig: Tom Hanks would be great.

John: Yes.

Craig: is he doing stuff? We’ll check into it.

John: I’ve heard that the Britney Spears biography that is read by Michelle Williams is incredible, so maybe Michelle Williams should be the choice.

Drew: That would be perfect.

Craig: That’s kind of amazing.

John: The person who I think is actually going to record it, is actually listening to the podcast right now, and he’s so upset that–

Craig: He’s like, “I’m an effin’ person.”

John: He’s an effin’ person in the world.

Craig: I’m an effin’ person.

John: Other questions were about the international versions, and so, there are no plans right now for a translation, probably because if you’re listening to this podcast, you speak English, you can probably read English. People ask about like, “Oh, I want to buy it in Europe. I want to buy it in Asia. Where do I get it from?” I asked, and the real answer is, wherever you get your English books is where you should go, so go to whatever bookstore or whatever online site is that you buy books in English, because they will have it. They’ll either get the US or the UK version. They’re both basically the same.

Craig: Yes, it’s an interesting question. I suppose that the marketplace will determine these things, if there’s a clamoring from a particular country. I’m looking at you, Brazil.

John: Yes, my agent was saying that there are cases, you’ll be in India, and you’ll see the US and the UK version side by side on a shelf. That’s just what happens.

Craig: Does just that color is spelled differently?

John: No. Honestly, the UK version is not changing our spelling.

Craig: What is the difference? Page size?

John: I think page size and slightly different pricing.

Craig: Oh.

John: Because of imports and–

Craig: What, tariffs?

John: Tariffs and things.

Craig: What? What? What?

John: What? What? What? Books are physical things that are printed in places. Other bits of follow up. My game Birdigo that I made with Corey Martin is out now on Steam. It’s a whopping $8.49.

Craig: Oh my God.

John: It’s a huge burden.

Craig: Ugh.

John: Ugh. We’ve gotten so many good reviews in the press,-

Craig: Great.

John: -and we’re currently 100% positive on Steam itself, which is great.

Craig: Only 100%?

John: Only 100%.

Craig: If I go in there just as a jerk, I can get it to 99%? [chuckles]

John: Weirdly, it would actually help us a little bit because how Steam ratings work is that it’s based on total number of reviews. We’re at the threshold where we’re listed as positive, but once we get to the next threshold of reviews, which is 50 or 100, then it becomes very positive.

Craig: I see.

John: Then it becomes overwhelmingly positive.

Craig: I see.

John: If you are a person like Craig who has played the game and enjoyed it and want to leave us a review, leave us a review because it actually does help.

Craig: That makes sense because if you put something on there, you could say, “Hey, I’m going to get 50 of my friends to do a review.” They need to know that it’s more than just the friends and family. I get that.

John: Yes, so that’s what–

Craig: That’s fantastic.

John: Yes, that’s good news.

Craig: Birdigo.

John: More follow up. Last week, we talked about Solar Storms as part of How Would This Be A Movie. Drew, what did we hear?

Drew: Multiple people wrote in that it sounded very much like the novel Aurora by a former Scriptnotes guest, David Koepp.

John: David Koepp, that hack.

Craig: Koepp, what can he do? By the way, David Koepp has quietly crushed the Summer Box office. Everyone was going on about Superman and Fantastic Four. Meanwhile, Jurassic, Jurassic-ness?

John: The Jurassic World Rebirth.

Craig: Jurassic World Rebirth has done better than both of those movies. It’s just massive.

John: Massive. Massive.

Craig: It’s like it’s grossed like almost $800 million globally. That’s David Koepp still doing it.

John: Also, Presence, a movie that Drew and I both saw, directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Drew: Black Bag too.

John: Yes, Black Bag also.

Drew: Black Bag is great.

John: Just killing it.

Craig: Just Koepp, just–

John: Keopp it in. Koepping it real.

Craig: You cannot beat David Koepp. Also, side note, and we’ve had him on this, one of the loveliest people. Just incredible guy. Love him.

John: Love it. I should not be surprised that he saw the scientific thing that exists in the world. It’s like, I should–

Craig: Of course he did.

John: I should write a book about this.

Craig: Yes, he’s sort of casually predicted that we would eventually get that and fumble it. Although, if you have a David Koepp novel, and it has not yet been turned into a movie, that is an indication that it should not be a movie because you know people must have tried.

John: Yes. What’s wrong with a book that it’s not–?

Craig: I think the book is probably great, it’s just that it’s not movie-ish.

John: Maybe.

Craig: How does that not happen?

John: He’s so angry now listening to this podcast.

Craig: I hope he is.

John: Yes. We were talking back in Episode 675 about lost genres or genres that people should see at least one example of a movie in. A bunch of people wrote in with recommendations for genres that people need to at least see one thing in. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Andrew writes, “Yakuza films, they are more often than not just as economical as noir films, but even more stylish, cynical, and tragic.” He recommends Pale Flower from 1964.

John: I’ve not seen any of these in the genre, and I think it’s a good recommendation.

Craig: Sure.

John: What else do we got?

Drew: John James recommends giallo, which is Italian horror.

Craig: Of course, yes, no.

Drew: Dario Argento’s Deep Red.

Craig: No.

Drew: No?

Craig: No. Not for me.

Drew: Not for you?

Craig: I’ve seen some of it. It’s not for me. It’s gross.

John: I’ve seen an Argento movie, and I do understand it as a genre. It’s just nothing for me. Either too, but it’s–

Craig: Right, other people, sure.

John: Should see it.

Craig: I think Suspiria-

John: Suspiria, yes.

Craig: -that’s the one to see, and then you would know.

Drew: I think nerds say that that’s not quite a giallo for some reason.

John: Oh.

Craig: No.

Drew: That would be my pick.

Craig: Nerds say that?

Drew: Yes.

Craig: I’m not going to listen. Let’s see if some of them write in. [chuckles]

John: What if we said like, David Koepp’s genre is dinosaurs, and then it’s just like, “Oh, but I also made Black Bag.” There’s no dinosaurs in Black Bag.

Craig: Black Bag’s not quite a dinosaur film. Then we’re like, “Yes, it is, nerds.”

Drew: [chuckles] Absolutely, and they just get angry.

John: Because this is about old spies and young spies.

Craig: Yes, it’s dinosaurs.

Drew: Dwayne writes, “Post-Michael Moore Americana documentaries, featuring cheeky editing, eccentric people, and small stories about the alluring weirdness of pre-9/11 Middle America. Documentaries like Hands on a Hard Body, or American Movie, or Wonderland.”

Craig: You know what? I’ve seen two of those movies. Yes, they were both interesting snapshots of a time.

John: Yes. Also like a style in editing. It’s good to point out what it is. It’s not that Michael Moore’s sort of like, “Here’s a broad statement about a thing.” It’s very specific on people and behaviors.

Craig: Hands on a Hard Body probably got 40% of its audience just from title confusion. Just brilliant.

John: Love it. So good.

Craig: Do you know what Hands on a Hard Body is though?

John: Absolutely, it says something about–

Craig: Oh, you might have seen even the show. They made a show.

John: Yes, they made a Broadway show of it.

Craig: Yes, I saw that show.

John: I never saw the show, but how are the songs? Were they–?” [crosstalk]

Craig: I remember there was one great one. I remember that. There was one really good, like eleven o’clock-ish kind of number.

John: How was the truck? Was the truck good?

Craig: The truck was great. They had it on a turntable, and the cast had to keep their hands on it. Although they were allowed to sort of like astral project forward to sing their solos and then move back to the truck.

John: Oh yes, that makes sense.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes. Did you ever see Waitress either on stage or-

Craig: No.

John: -the musical version? It’s one of the rare cases where they captured the Broadway version and really filmed it in a way that’s impressive. I’d recommend it for people who want to see it. Last one.

Drew: Last one is Aldo says, “If John likes Memories of a Murder, he’ll probably dig Cure by Kiyoshi Kurosawa in the Japanese horror genre.

John: I don’t know very much about Japanese horror, and that’s another good recommendation for me. If we could combine Yakuza horror,-

Craig: I’m sure that’s good.

John: -that’s has to have– Oh my God. As I said the sentence, like that one can happen.

Craig: Japanese horror is pretty cool. I had a pretty cool moment. Then Korea came along and just ate its lunch-

John: Yes, crazy.

Craig: -for East-Asian horror films. Kairo, aka Pulse is Japanese, they tried to– Well, they attempted to adapt it here in the US. Didn’t go well, but that movie has one of the scariest single scenes in it where basically, nothing happens. Totally worth it for that. Just the scene of a ghost walking down a hallway. It was very cool.

John: Love it.

Craig: If you know, you know.

John: Some more follow up. We had Scott Frank on and we’re talking about writing education.

Drew: Tim says, “I’m a high school film and TV teacher, and I’ll admit I’ve been guilty of teaching structure as a shortcut to storytelling, mostly because I don’t get much time with my hundred plus students before we need to move on to the rest of film and TV production. The conversation about craft versus voice really landed.

The Scott Frank school of screenwriting seems to emphasize practice as a path to discovering voice, which also helps to answer a question I’ve been wrestling with. Why teach students to write screenplays if AI can do it better than most of them? The answer is ChatGPT doesn’t have a unique voice, we do. This year, I hope to shift my focus to helping students find their voice and maybe a little less on the proper use of a parenthetical.”

Craig: Oh, wonderful. That sounds great. Because structure and all the rest of it, these parentheticals, margins, rules, format, all that stuff, you can pick that stuff up in three days if you feel like it. What you can’t pick up in three days is knowing what to write. I could certainly see a class where everybody has to write the same scene, and they have to rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it, until it’s something special. This is how you find your voice.

John: Love it.

Drew: More follow up, this one from Kate. “I’m a playwright and I teach theater at a small high school. I actually had to step into this job mid-year when the other teacher had to leave unexpectedly. I was so excited because in addition to my theater classes, I’d be teaching a screenwriting and playwriting course. The previous teacher had focused a lot on pitching outlines and working on index cards. Students wanted to talk about their ideas, but had trouble putting anything on the page.

I often got the feeling that students felt stuck or afraid when it was time to write their projects because they had an outline that they had to follow. Almost like they were afraid to write a scene because it may be wrong or different from their original outline. When you suggested writing short scenes with no pressure to be part of a larger script, I was practically fist pumping in my car. Yes, short exercises give young writers permission to experiment. Be messy, make mistakes. This is how we learned to write.”

Craig: Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Look, we may be changing things one teaching program at a time. Again, here’s your assignment, a scene. Write it, rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it. Have your classmates perform it. Rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it. If you could take a class where you end up with one great three-page scene, you’ve come so far, baby.

John: Absolutely. Because you would probably have started this class thinking, “I cannot do this thing. I have no idea what this looks like in my head,” but the ability to actually visualize, “Okay, this is what’s happening in the scene, that I can picture the whole thing. I can hear the whole thing. Now I’m going to capture it down on paper in a way that makes sense,” is so crucial.

A thing I did for myself when I was in high school, I think, is I had an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I had recorded on probably VHS. I just went and transcribed it, and then actually tried to write what the actual scene would look like on the page. That’s a good practice too, just like how do you– You see a thing, but what does it actually look like in words on paper?

Craig: Yes. The iteration, I think, is an incredibly important thing. I think that that’s not given enough attention. Being forced to rewrite the same thing over and over, it sounds bad, except you write a scene and then you share it. It is exposed. You learn how it’s landing. People give you feedback. Are we bored? Are we interested? Do we have questions? This doesn’t make sense. Or I’m just bored. What else could you do here? How could this be richer? What does the room smell like, look like? All those wonderful things we do. Then you rewrite, and you rewrite, and you rewrite. At some point, you’re going to find something.

John: Yes. As you talked about in the episode, acting classes are so helpful because that paradigm of just like, you have to be on your feet and doing a scene and you’re getting feedback on it. It’s just like, you just have to do it.

Craig: You have to do it.

John: You can’t talk about acting a lot.

Craig: Because you’re performing the scene, you are required to think about the things that happen in between your lines. Where were you the moment before? Massively important. How did that statement land with you? Are you lying? All these wonderful things need to be in the scene you write when people are learning how to write. If they’re concentrating on hitting the fricking midpoint, whatever the hell, they’re just not going to get it.

John: All right, let’s go to our main topic today, which is movies that never were. I’m not quite sure how this idea came to me. It could have been an article I read, but this week, I got thinking back about giant movies that never happened, things I sort of know about or I’ve heard about, but it never actually became movies that we saw in the theaters.

A lot of these are superhero movies. There was the Tim Burton version of Superman with Nicolas Cage.

Craig: Yes, I remember that.

John: McG Superman that had a script by JJ Abrams. Okay. James Cameron’s Spider-Man. I’d actually read that script a zillion years ago.

Craig: Oh, okay.

John: It was a, Spider-Man versus Electro. There was like a–

Craig: Oh, which they ended up doing anyway.

John: Yes. There was a Justice League that was supposed to be directed by George Miller.

Craig: Oh.

John: Yes. I think it was around the time of the earlier Record strike. Of course the Batgirl movie that was actually shot, but then it got shelved.

Craig: It got shelved.

John: Which is a really rare situation. Superhero movies are really common for this, but also Jodorowsky’s Dune is sort of legendary. There’s a documentary about that. Then Mouse Guard, which was the very expensive adaptation of a beloved children’s book or middle-grade book that Wes Ball I think was supposed to direct. They pulled at it the very last minute.

Craig: There are also these movies that I’m sure you either wrote on or somebody asked you to write on them that have been floating around seemingly forever.

John: Yes. Did you ever work on Bob: The Musical?

Craig: No, but I know that Alec Berg did.

John: Yes, I wrote on it. The amount of money spent on scripts for that movie, it’s got to be astronomical. Real composers did songs for it.

Craig: There are things like this.

John: Here’s the good scene of Bob: The Musical, a man who hates musicals wakes up and discovers he’s in a musical and has to get out of the musical. It’s a comedy in the world of a Liar Liar or those kinds of things.

Craig: Sure. Which it sounds like the premise of Schmigadoon!, which obviously came after the 800 years of development of Bob: The Musical. Yes, they’re just these movies. I remember in the ‘90s working on Stretch Armstrong. There are movies that they really wanted to make out of a toy or an object. Eight Ball’s been floating around for a while, the Magic Eight Ball. Then Monopoly. Monopoly–

John: Oh, yes. There have been so many versions of Monopoly.
Craig: I think they announced a new one recently. Every year, a new Monopoly is going to not happen.
[laughter]

Craig: It’s actually kind of amusing that that’s the property that people lose so much money on. [laughs]

John: Let’s just talk about the pure development projects. Because Monopoly, as far as I know, never went to pre-production, never spent that money. It was probably just on scripts.

Craig: Yes, endless development.

John: The endless development things, sometimes it’s all with one company. Therefore, it’s one property that has hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of script fees against it. Some cases, which I suspect is the Monopoly case, they didn’t set up this place or that place or this place or that place. Those all become new projects, essentially.

Craig: The rights lapse.

John: Therefore, the studio burned a certain amount of money on a script, but they can’t make the property anymore.

Craig: Clue they’ve been trying to redo again. Risk is one that was going around for a while. What are you supposed to do with that exactly?

John: No. Yes. There’s a version of that movie that could have been terrific, but we never saw it.

Craig: Board games are not a great idea to adapt. I understand why everybody went for them.

John: Yes, it’s a recognizable title.

Craig: Clue–

John: Clue is a better idea than most. It actually has characters.

Craig: The Clue that was made is a cult classic and I love it. It is probably the one that’s most– Because there’s a narrative to it. Someone killed somebody with a thing in a place. Monopoly, Risk, they’re just words we know.

John: Here we’re talking about the IP that is just like, is that even a really good idea for a movie? In other cases, like they are good ideas for movies that are based on a really good book.

Craig: They just don’t seem to be able to happen.

John: Absolutely. Let’s talk about the things that don’t happen and why-

Craig: Sure.

John: -they don’t happen. Sometimes there’s a piece of talent who was keyly involved in getting it set up and getting the momentum going on it. Like a Will Smith. I’ve been on a couple of really expensive projects with Will Smith that didn’t go forward. He loses interest or another thing comes up in front of it. When a director or a star has like 10 projects, nine of those aren’t happening generally. Sometimes you’re one of those things. People are gambling like this is going to be the one that they’ll say yes to.

Craig: Sometimes there’s projects where everybody, it feels like, is tight. The pressure to make it, the costs of the rights, some sort of window to get an actor or a director makes everybody tight. Everyone’s tense. Everything is overexamined, overthought, overanalyzed, and nothing can survive that generally. Nothing is natural about that process. Everything is hyper-coordinated, and you end up with a hyper-coordinated script, which nobody wants to make.

John: Some cases it’s not the script that was ultimately the problem though. It was that to actually make the movie, it just became impossibly expensive.

Craig: There is that BioShock.

John: Yes, so BioShock is a great, great property, but the world building in it is so expensive that it’s hard to justify making that as the movie. They’re trying to do it as a series now, we’ll see what that is, but those are real issues.

Craig: I think now in the era of these big streaming shows, it’s doable to do BioShock, for sure. I do remember being on the Universal lot. There was a building that used to be Ivan Reitman’s company, Montecito. It’s a big building, and they had all this great Ghostbusters stuff in there, and then–

John: Was that the big blue house or a different one?

Craig: No, it wasn’t big blue house. It was more like this squarish modernish building. It was pretty cool. It was near the big blue house. Then it got taken over by Gore Verbinski when they were well on their way to making that BioShock. I remember going in there, I think to meet with Gore, and there was a big daddy– I don’t know [unintelligible 00:26:23] Just this big oldie timey diver suit with a drill hand, full life size in the lobby. I’m like, “Oh, this is going to be awesome.”

John: Then, it didn’t happen.

Craig: Then, it didn’t happen.

John: Let’s talk about that because more than I think the money you’re spending on scripts, that kind of R&D where you’re actually starting to really go into prep, that’s where you’re spending some real money. There was a project I was on a few years ago that I finally asked, “What actually happened?” I realized and I was told, they spent tens of billions of dollars that I did not know they were spending on storyboards and everything else.

That momentum, it’s a weird thing. You think, “Oh, it’s a sunk cost policy, so therefore, they’ll make it because we have to keep going because we already spent all this money,” but at a certain point, they realized like, oh, no, no, that the movie itself is going to be too expensive to make and we have to stop.

Craig: One of the things that is true about Hollywood, and I’m not sure it’s quite as true in other industries, is that there’s much more turnover. Now, Hollywood has actually been a fairly stable place leadership-wise over the last few years. When you look at how long Donna Langley has been running Universal, Bob Iger came back to continue to run Disney.

Generally speaking, every three, four years, somebody got kicked out and a new person got put in, and that was the point where they would sit down, look at stuff and go, “This isn’t my Concorde fallacy.

John: No.

Craig: -this thing is absolutely turning around.” They would just drop the axe on those things knowing full well that they couldn’t be blamed for the money that was spent. They could only be rewarded for not spending more money. In that regard, Hollywood had these weird safeguards against the sunk cost fallacy.

John: I’m sure there is a corollary to the sunk cost fallacy where if someone just recognizes it doesn’t matter how much we’ve spent before. With the project I see right now, is there a way to go forward and have this make sense?

Craig: Yes, that’s the fallacy part, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: Somebody else comes in and goes, “Oh, I see we’ve all been engaging in the sunk cost fallacy on this. It’s over.” That’s a traumatic thing. When we talk about storyboards, and a large statue, and rooms of people that are trying to find locations. There’s a lot of jobs. A lot of those jobs at least used to be here too. Now, those too start to go away.

John: There’s other issues that come up. Once you think you’re making a movie, you’re starting to reserve a stage space, and so you’re like, “Oh my God, we need to shoot this in Australia. We need to shoot this in London. We need to scramble to get these things,” so you’re putting holds on things. I remember talking with a producer who coming out of the pandemic, it was like, “We have to reserve stage space, but I think we’re going to be okay to start shooting, but I’m not sure we’re going to be–“ Just having to make these calls, because it’s like, you can be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on a stage that you’ve rented that you can’t actually use.

Craig: Stage space is probably the largest pressure behind ratings for any network streamer to decide if they’re going to renew a show. They may be on the fence ratings-wise, but while they’re there, somebody from that show is going to say, “If you don’t renew us in the next week, we won’t have stages and we won’t be able to make the show.”

John: No.

Craig: “Are we going or are we not?” Stage space is the thing that makes some places– As attractive as the tax credits may be. For instance, in Australia, not a ton of stages.

John: No.

Craig: UK, amazing tax credits but not as many stages as you would think.

John: When I was shooting my one and only TV show up in Toronto, it was at a Canadian boom. There were so many things shooting in Canada, we couldn’t find stage spaces, so we ended up having to shoot like a warehouse.

Craig: Warehouses.

John: That was not really meant to be this. I’m sure you ran into similar situations like Calgary was not intended to have as much production as you were doing.

Craig: No, Calgary had one facility that was actually constructed to be stage space. The other large facility was two massive warehouses that they had retrofitted, but barely. In Vancouver there are both kinds, but there are a lot. Part of our thing, we’re going to be up there I think going side by side with Shogun this time, so Justin, and Rachel, and I are like, “Hey, are you using this person?” “Yes.” “Can I have that?” “No.” Where are your stages? Who’s your makeup person? It’s been a lot of that.

They have constructed more stage space there. When you look at other places the other issue is size of stages. Northern Ireland built quite a few stages during the Game of Thrones boom, but size like sometimes you need an enormous. Then there are the specialty stages, like at Warner Brothers, which has 20-something stages that are currently sitting mostly empty. Just tragedy. They have one, I think it’s stage 16, with the floor actually, you can remove the floor and it’s got a pit, which is very cool for all sorts of interesting things.

John: Let’s talk about this from a writer’s point of view and how this matters and what to think about with this. Some of the properties you mentioned early on, like the superhero movies or the things that are based on titles, the reason why a screenwriter might pursue them and take them is because they will pay you money to do the thing. It’s not like some wildfire. They’re actually going to pay you your quote to do a thing, and that can be great and that’s fantastic. I always go into those jobs knowing it’s like I might so naive to think like I’m the one person who’s going to crack the Monopoly movie that everyone else has been trying to do.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. I remember I think somebody had asked Ted Elliott around the time that the third Pirates movie came out, and they were saying, “How do you pick projects? Because people come to you and offer you things. What kind of movie do you want to write?” He said, “Movies that are getting made.” [chuckles] That was it.

John: That’s always been my answer about what genre- [crosstalk]

Craig: Genre is movies that are getting made. Yes, when you take one of those jobs, you have to know I am seventh in a line of 14.

John: You have to go in both hoping and expecting that it’s going to work, and then also, holding your heart a place that like, I understand why it could not work.

Craig: Yes, it’s a job. Yes. Everyone’s looking at it that way too. Sometimes the executives are like, “We don’t know why somebody made some deal with a wraith and we have to make this film or we’ll be cursed forever. We don’t want to, so we don’t really care.”

John: I want to distinguish between those two things. Listen, this is the luxury of where I’m at in my career, that I don’t pursue those things that I just don’t care about. Like Drew will say, like a lot of stuff comes my way, and it’s like, “No, that’s not for me.” I’ll often say like, “That’s not for me, but there’s a writer out there who will love that, and I’m so excited for them to do that adaptation of–

Craig: Monopoly.

John: Yes. There’s somebody who said that’s their favorite property at all time, but I try not to approach those jobs with such cynicism. For a weekly, if I’m just going on to fix a problem for a person–

Craig: Yes, I’ll do anything for a week.

John: Yes. Oh I know some of the movies you’ve worked on.

Craig: I’ve worked on just Extraordinary Girl. I’ll work on anything for a week. What do I care? You know what? I can’t make it worse.

John: No.

Craig: I try, I do my best, I make sure to listen to everybody, and I improve it. I really do.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: I do the job I’m paid to do. What I know is, and I’ve said this at times to them, I’m like, “I just want you to know I’m making this corpse okay for an open coffin funeral. That’s what I’m doing. Just so you guys know. This is not a patient I can cure, but you’ll be able to look at it.”
[laughter]

Craig: They’re like, “Great. We thank you. That’s what we were hoping for. We just want mom to be able to see her boy there in his little suit. Sometimes that even that’s hard.

John: Yes. Sometimes there’s just this fundamental problems.

Craig: Yes, but I’m always honest about it, but yes, for a week. To actually do a movie– When I started out, there are movies where I’m like, It’s job. A job’s a job.

John: A job’s a job.

Craig: I got to to it. I need money. You know what, I will learn along the way.

John: I did.

Craig: I did. I will also gain fans along the way. People that hire writers. Everybody calls everybody and asks. They all have their lists. Writers move up and down the list.

John: I was on Zoom this week with an executive who I’ve known and then talked about parties and had meetings with for 30 years. I’ve never worked with him or for him, but like, “Oh it’s great to catch up with you, Michael. I’ve not seen you.” I’ve not had a chance to do it, and it would be great to be able to do this project with him.” Going and knowing like it may not happen, and it’s okay also it doesn’t happen.

Craig: Sure, yes. There are some things you can just sort of smell the curse on them.

John: Yes, and I will run away from those. I’ve also learned, it’s like, “Oh, there’s this terrible person who’s attached to this intellectual property.” I will never touch it because that person, I cannot have in my life at all.

Craig: Correct. There are things where people start talking about them, and I think, “Oh, this is– Oh. Oh.”

John: Sure, yes.

Craig: “I wonder why this hasn’t–“

John: Absolutely. I remember loving that book and like, “Oh that guy.”

Craig: “Oh, this person’s involved.” Goodbye.

John: All right, let’s get to some listener questions. What do we got first, Drew?

Drew: Vanessa writes, “I’ve been listening to your podcast for a while now, and every time the intro comes around and the chime starts playing, I think I’ve heard that before. This email is asking if the chime is fully original or inspired by a movie or something like it.”

John: That is the “boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.” That is a thing I wrote originally for my short film, The Remnants. I thought I just needed a quick little intro that I sort of felt like The Office, but even quicker than that. I think it’s original, but you can actually find it in other things. Over the years, people have said like, “Oh, I found this theme from the ‘70s, which actually that has the same chord progressions.” It’s so simple that–

Craig: Yes, I know, it’s five notes. It’s five notes. Of course. It’s five notes that resolve. Yes, it will be in other things. It’s not like an identifiable jingle from any popular thing. Yes, but sure, you can find a five note progression before. There’s no new five note progression.

John: I will say, as we come up to episode 700, one of my favorite things about the show is that our incredible listeners starting with Matthew [unintelligible 00:37:03] who did so many of the incredible early intro, but just have taken those five notes and just done remarkable things with them. I’ll have a new one this week and every week. Please keep sending in your interpretations of the intro to make our outros.

Craig: Love it.

Drew: Larry writes, “”What’s the best way to watch a movie to put money back in the pockets of the people who made it? I half remember at one point that renting something out iTunes was better for y’all, but I feel like perhaps that’s out of date.”

Craig: No, that’s in date.

John: In date. We’re talking about the rental on iTunes or Amazon or wherever you rent those things. That rate is actually really good for us.

Craig: That is the best residual rate we have of anything. We got that all the way back in 2000. Yes, 2000, I’m pretty sure it was, or 2001. I think we got it mostly because the companies hadn’t really caught on yet. They were like, “What are you? Okay.” I remember the deal was that they refused to do sales. It was they were just like, “We’ll give you rentals. We’ll give you a great rate on rentals.”

John: If I’m this is a movie that I want to watch and I feel like I’m going to watch it once, I will rent it. If the movie is like, I think I may want to watch it again or if there’s something like an adaptation, I’ll buy it off of iTunes. Listen, there’s times where it’s like, “Oh, it’s got to go be streaming someplace,” and it’s like, “Sure, I’ll spend like two minutes to look see if it’s streaming someplace,” but just buy the movie or rent the movie because it’s just, I just have it.

Craig: I will say too that is very nice that he’s asking, but the truth is, the nicest way to watch anything, assuming you’re not pirating, is to watch it however you want. Rent, buy, stream, add support, doesn’t matter, just do it. Then, if you like it, tell other people to watch it too because the that’s the best residual rate we get is popularity. Spread the word, and that’s as best you can do, but you don’t need to be too concerned about the ethical viewing. [chuckles]

John: Yes, as long as you’re not pirating it, you’re making ethical choices. My movie The Nines, I think it’s it showed up on streaming every once in a while, but it’s basically always been a purchase or download, and so just like it’s cheap, it’s like $3.99 to rent the movie. Just watch the movie. It’s a good movie.

Craig: Just watch that.

John: Just watch the movie.

Craig: It’s all good.

Drew: Jeremy writes, “As a non-american, I’m horrified to watch what’s happening in your country, and my screenwriter brain was wondering how you would go about writing it in a humane, empathetic way. How do you write scripts in the era of neo-fascism that won’t dehumanize those who suffer most?”

Craig: I’m not sure I understand the question.

John: Yes, I think we may be some language barriers here, but I think I take this to mean like recognizing that your country’s is falling into fascism, how do you go approach writing movies, and does that change how we’re thinking about the stories we’re trying to tell and the choices we’re making?

Craig: if you’re writing a story that touches upon themes like that, then yes, you would want to touch on things, the part that I’m not quite getting is the, how do you be humane?

John: Humane. I think, from the context of the whole email, it’s something along the lines of like, if you’re writing about these big things, making sure that you’re thinking about the people who are affected by these big things.

Craig: Isn’t that what you would be writing about?

John: Here’s an example I can take from my own life. A project that we’ll see if I can end up getting it set up, but there’s a big military and international cooperation aspect of it, and it’s like, oh, it’s a different movie now than it would have been three or four years ago.

Craig: Sure.

John: Just because our allies are not our allies again. Europe isn’t necessarily on our side, and so those things change. You have to understand that, but in pitching it, it was actually nice to be able to say, “No, this is actually a moment where international cooperation becomes incredibly important, an outside threat unites us all together about a thing,” and that felt good and useful. In terms of, I’m not writing, I don’t have an extra appeal writing something dystopian and bleak, I think because I’m living in a bleak, dystopian moment, and I also know that I’m not going to get joy from writing that, but I also know that no one’s going to want to make that.

Craig: Right. I guess people have been writing about fascistic regimes, terroristic regimes, repressive regimes forever, whether they live in them or not. We are all, as artists, impacted by what’s going on around us. I don’t think it should be a challenge for anybody to write victims humanely.

I think sometimes there is an undertone of fear in some of the questions we get, and I don’t mean fear of fascistic regimes, although we should have that and quite a bit of it, fear that we’ll make a mistake in our writing. You use the phrase, make sure to, which is a very defensive position when you’re writing. I just want to make sure that I don’t blank, or I want to make sure I don’t blank. Make sure that you write something good, true and honest. If you do, some characters are going to be ugly, and I mean ugly on the inside, and like all of us, some victims will be imperfect. That’s part of what makes it true, interesting, and upsetting.

The weird attraction that Spielberg gave Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List, that strange hypnotic power he had, made that interesting more than just, there’s the dickhead Nazi. Because he understood that the truer that person gets, the scarier he gets. Yes, I wouldn’t worry so much. I would just write what’s true.

John: Absolutely, and I also need to recognize that your movie, when it happens, will resonate with the culture of the time that it comes out. The most recent Superman movie really resonates with this moment that we’re in terms of world crisis, and yet it was two years ago, three years ago, that it got put in motion. It wasn’t actually responding to the moment that we’re in, it’s just because of when it comes out, it resonates with the world that it’s actually in.

Craig: Yes, things take on stuff. I wasn’t thinking about, Donald Trump wasn’t the president when I started working on Chernobyl. Truth wasn’t necessarily under global attack at that moment. If you write about things that are evergreen concerns for humanity, and you write them truly, without fear of making a ‘mistake,’ then I think you’re off to a good start.

John: Let’s go to this question here from John about stamina.

Drew: “I’m quite fortunately a consistently working writer who has had a handful of produced credits, and I feel like I’m firmly in the prime of my career. I’m suddenly becoming very aware that my stamina as a writer is nowhere near where it used to be. I’m starting to have more anxiety over whether this means I’m losing my love for the job, or that sometime soon I won’t be able to do it at a high level anymore. Then I stress over the actual work itself. Do you have any tips for how to keep your energy for the job up when you know that you’ll never be the version of yourself that you were 10 or 20 years ago?”

John: Oh, for sure. Yes, I nod with all of this, and I do recognize it. I think, John, you already have the insight of that you’re just never the same person you were at 20 or at 30. Because on those, I could stay up to like four in the morning writing a thing, and my life was just different. It was before I had kids. We often talk about how kids are just career killers.

Craig: Vampires.

John: Vampires sucking away at your life and your time, and yet, I’m still productive. I still get a lot done. I think if you actually look at the output of work that I’m able to do now, it hasn’t really diminished much. I have found my habits changing, and I do write in shorter sprints and get stuff done, but stuff does still happen. You can both recognize that your stamina has changed and not panic that it makes it incapable for you to write stuff.

Craig: This is one of those areas where– first of all, John, I’ve felt all of those things that you’re feeling, and I feel all of them. The other day, I had lunch with Brian Johnson the other day, and we were both talking about how like, “Are we just slowing down?” It feels like we’re slowing down, but the work keeps coming, so the problem is feels like. It feels like it sometimes.

I think part of it is because, okay, John says he’s in the prime of his career. What that tells me is he’s done enough work now at a professional level, seen enough of it go in and out of the machinery to have improved. As you improve, it becomes harder to write because you can’t write garbage the way you used to. When you start out, you’re just wee, right? I’m awesome. Because you don’t know enough to know that you’re not. You’re freer. It’s a lovely feeling. Then later, after life has beaten that a lot of you, but also after you create a little bit more of a sense of inner scrutiny, then the crucible of your own judgment becomes much hotter.

Yes, then it is a little harder, and it can feel like you’re losing stamina, but you’re not. You’re just more exacting, so you know more. You have the burden of knowledge, John. Your anxiety is normal. Just make sure to not draw any conclusions from it. You’ve made a mistake of drawing a conclusion from it. You think because you’re anxious, you are in trouble. You are not, you’re just anxious.

One of the things I’ve really tried to accept as I’m getting older now is that part of why I do what I do is because my brain is attuned to scary things. Everybody that we write about, we’re usually writing about somebody that’s afraid of something. We have very fear-attuned minds. No surprise, I’m afraid all the time. I just have to accept that is part of the package of doing what we do. What you’re feeling right now is incredibly normal. It’s actually a fantastic sign that you are a good professional writer. If you felt as free now as you did when you started, oh boy, I don’t know what to say. Something’s wrong with you.

John: If you were a professional athlete, you would have the same kind of questions, like, I don’t have the same stamina as I did earlier in your career. It’s like, well, that’s true. That’s objectively true. You can actually measure those sort of things. What we would have is experience, technique and all the other things that make it worthwhile. Unlike a professional athlete, there is no forced retirement date. You’re never going to break your back and be unable to play again.

At a certain point, you may decide you don’t want to keep doing it, which is great, but that’s not what I’m hearing in this letter. I think I agree with Craig, it’s just anxiety and fear.
Craig: Yes, you’re not at the place yet where you actually are slowing down and preparing to stop. That will be a different feeling. I don’t think I’m at that place yet.

John: A friend of mine did retire and he actually is a writer friend who worked in TV for many, many years and it’s just like, “Yeah, I’m done.” I love it for him.

Craig: Listen, in the throes of certain phases of making a large TV show, I fantasize about just pulling the old ripcord, but I know that it’s not time yet. Really what I’m reacting to there is this is hard.

John: It’s hard.

Craig: When things are hard, there’s a little boy or girl in us that wants to quit. Then there’s our memory of our mom, dad, coach, older sibling, somebody saying, “You can want to quit, don’t yet, don’t.”

John: In the time of doing this podcast is when I started distance running. I will say that it’s been a useful metaphor for some of this stuff because it’s like, you just want to stop running. You just want to stop and just walk for a while. It’s like, no, but you actually, you really can just keep running and you just keep running.

Craig: You’ll be fine though, John. You’re in a good spot, actually, weirdly. It’s an encouraging question.

John: Let’s take two more questions, first from Kat here.

Drew: I wonder if you could settle a rumbling question for my university peers and I.

John: We can.

Craig: For my university peers and me.

John: Sure.

Craig: I’m just going to correct right away. For me, object of the preposition.

John: We understand that it’s standard to render non-English languages as English on the page with the indication in parentheses that it is in Mandarin or whatever the language is, potentially mentioning whether or not it should be subtitled. Then along came Celine Song, who, as you’re aware, used Korean text on the page in past lives, setting an industry precedent by writing bilingually with all Korean translated into English.

My tutor has said that for the purposes of the degree with Celine’s industry precedent, I can use Chinese in my script. I would very much like to use this. Characters speak in their native language unless noted otherwise. Where rendered in English, the dialogue will be subtitled. Where written in Mandarin or Taiwanese is the intention not to use subtitles.
My cohort feels this would be unacceptable. to the industry. I could be getting the characters to say all sorts of nasties, unbeknownst to the producers.

What are your thoughts on the wider industry acceptance of having small parts of the script unintelligible?

Craig: The answer is in the question. Celine, by the way, one of the best people. I like that when she did that, it became an industry precedent and therefore is now allowable at universities. That just tells me how broken the university instruction system is around screenwriting.

John: Because if there’s one movie from a filmmaker that was successful, now, I guess, sure.

Craig: What was the point of all of that dogmatic nonsense to begin with? The answer is do whatever you want. Clearly do whatever you want. She was nominated for an Oscar. Why is this person worried about what the university will think?

John: All choices you’re making have pros and cons. It’s the question of like, is it a problem that certain blocks of text in your script will not be intelligible to a person who only speaks English? It could be, but maybe it’s absolutely fine. You won’t know until you try it. Yes, if it makes sense for you, you should do it.

Craig: The whole point is to say to an English reader, you won’t understand this. Isn’t that the point?

John: Yes.

Craig: So, do it. The idea that you would be putting in stuff that so like, after the movie comes out, they’re like, oh my God, one of those characters said the Holocaust didn’t happen. That’s not a thing.

John: That’s not happening.

Craig: It’s not happening. That’s such a not worry. Who asked this question?

Drew: Kat.

Craig: Kat, listen, you write this however you want. If you are a good writer, Kat, who is going to succeed as a screenwriter, you are already beyond the concerns of this university. You have already escaped its surly bonds. If you’re not, you’re not, so it doesn’t matter. You write whatever you want.

John: Last question here from Henry.

Drew: A few big films recently are the first of a multi-part series, and while I’ve enjoyed watching them, I always leave the theater feeling that I’ve only seen half a movie. I think there’s something off with the structure here, where they’re basically making one really long film instead of discrete parts that can be watched on their own, because I don’t feel this way with, say, The Empire Strikes Back or The Fellowship of the Ring. Do John and Craig have any insight into what’s going on here?

Craig: Money.

[laughter]

I mean money’s going on. Harry Potter, the seventh book, was broken into two books, because it was very long, and I think they looked at it and they were like, okay, so on the one side, a very long movie. First of all, people don’t like to see very long movies, so we’re going to lose some people. Two, fewer showings per day on a blockbuster, we’re going to lose some money, or we split into two and we get two hit movies.

John: Let’s say, hypothetically, there was a screenwriter who was approached with the property of Wicked, and was just like, so Wicked, you could do it as one long movie.

Craig: Somebody smart.

John: Somebody smart would say like, no, and actually, let’s approach it from the start, saying like, what if at the act break, we actually split it into two movies? How do we make sure that the first movie is as rewarding and successful as possible, and the second movie is as rewarding and successful as possible? I think Wicked made completely the right choice.

Craig: Oh, I’m sure they did.

[laughter]

John: Now, Henry, I will say that there have been some movies recently where I did feel a little bit of that, what, because I wasn’t expecting it. That rug pull can be a thing. I felt a little bit on the last Spider-Verse movie, where it was like, oh, wow, I really thought we were going to resolve this, and we didn’t, it’s just a cliffhanger. Same thing happens in the 28 Years Later, where the movie resolves nicely, but then there’s a code that’s not a post-credit scene, that just basically sets up the whole next movie. I’m like, wait, what?

Craig: Right. Certain things have built-in dotted lines that you could see yourself folding or tearing the page. Wicked is obviously one of them. It has a huge intermission, and the last song before the intermission is Defying Gravity and as I recall, someone saying to the people there, “How in God’s name can you sit around after Defying Gravity?” Defying Gravity happens, roll credits, go home. There are certain circumstances where it makes absolute sense.

There are movies like Harry Potter, where you’re like, look, you’ve been on this ride for six movies. Let us give you a larger feast for seven and eight. Henry, I do know what you mean, and I think sometimes there’s been a little bit of indulgence. It’s that same indulgence I see in limited series sometimes, where it’s like, oh, this is a seven or eight episode limited series. It should have been a five episode limited series.

John: There’s some padding and some, oh, yes.

Craig: It’s just some sort of stretch and pull and froth, and yes, I can see that is sort of happening as movies try to accomplish some of the things that television series can accomplish. In television, we can just work with a bigger canvas, and movies want that, but I know what you mean, and I think we all smell it when it’s happening.

John: The Avengers finale, which was a split over two parts, I enjoyed the entire experience, but I really couldn’t tell you what happened in one part versus the other part. It’s just like, it was a big two-part thing.

Craig: Again, if you have successfully laid out another sequel, I don’t know how many movies we’re talking about at any given point in that one. I think it was four total, right? Then, okay, if you want the finale to be a big, big finish, sure. If you’re just starting and you’re like, hey, or if it’s part of a series, but it’s not really like, each one of the series is its own thing.

For instance, I don’t know how many James Bond movies we’re up to, but if the next James Bond movie, just being made by Denis Villeneuve, it’s going to be awesome. If the next James Bond movie did that, it wouldn’t necessarily be earned because James Bond isn’t like, okay, it’s one, two, three, done. Avengers, I got that. They want to do a big finish. [crosstalk] Yes, I’m cool with that.

John: I’m cool with that, too. It’s time for one cool things. My one cool thing is actually on the back of my phone right now, Craig, I’m going to show it to you.

Craig: Great.

John: It’s called the Mott Magnetic Wallet Stand.

Craig: This is very much in my interest.

John: It is a little thing that magnetically clips to the back of your phone, and it magnetically clips down, so you can have it be a stand vertically.

Craig: I didn’t think that was going to be what it was.

John: Or horizontally.

Craig: Okay, that is cool. For what that is, what I thought I was getting shown was one of those back of the phone wallet replacers.

John: It is awesome. In that little slot, you can put two cards.

Craig: Two cards?

John: Only two cards now. If you want more than that, you’d need a different thing.

Craig: This is very slim.

John: It’s slim, and I don’t use a case on my phone.

Craig: Really?

John: I’ve never used cases on my phone.

Craig: Interesting.

John: Not for a very long time. I also use it, just I loop a finger through it and just to help hold my phone, so that I’m not bending my pinky– I’m not holding the weight of it on my pinky.

Craig: What would you call the color of that, out of curiosity?

John: I would call it–

Craig: I have a color in mind, but I don’t know if I’m right.

John: Purple is probably the closest, but I think purple is a scrappier than that.

Craig: I’m going to say mauve.

John: Mauve, okay, yes.

Craig: But is that right?

John: That was my go, Mauve. Mauve, yes.

Drew: Mauve.

John: Yes, it’s a good color, I like it.

Craig: It’s like a grayish purple.

John: Yes, I like it. If you’re looking for something to help hold onto your iPhone, the Mott Magnetic Wallet Stand, it’s like $28.

Craig: That’s fantastic. Oh, 28, that’s not bad. Just a little bit more than that, and you can get the Scriptnotes book.

John: Yes, delivered to your home.

Craig: Really, if you had a choice, I would say Scriptnotes.

John: I haven’t put it out, but as soon as I put it, it’s also available as a e-book. People are like, oh.

Craig: Of course, and that’s even cheaper, I assume.

John: People ask about the paperback, and there’s not currently plans for a paperback. We’ll see.

Craig: If it does well, there will be a paperback.

John: Probably, but there’s also increasingly some books are just never going to paperback, because-

Craig: Because the e-book sort of takes that place.

John: It does, and it’s also, our D&D books are never paperbacks, because they would rip apart. For something that you’re referring to a lot, it could be useful.

Craig: Sure. I remember my Syd Field book was paperback, and I’m sure the many Save the Cats is paperbacks.

John: Yes, are paperbacks.

Craig: My one cool thing this week is a podcast that I appeared on as a guest. I don’t know if it’s– it must be out by now. The podcast is called Total Party Skill.

John: I’m guessing it’s a D&D podcast.

Craig: You know it, a little take on Total Party Kill, and it is a Dungeons & Dragons podcast that is, I wouldn’t say hosted the podcasters, are Gabe Greenspan, Dylan McCollum, and the delightfully named George Primavera. George Primavera, by the way, sounds like a bad character name, like– [chuckles]

John: Yes. Oh, 100%.

Craig: Yes, like Gene Parmesan from– [laughs] George Primavera, and all three of these guys were absolute gentlemen and scholars, all three deeply, deeply well-versed in Dungeons & Dragons as players and DMs. They’re just fun.

John: That’s great.

Craig: We had a fun–

John: You’re not playing the game, you’re just talking through stuff?

Craig: The topics, one topic was just, “Okay, it’s been a minute since we’ve got the 2024 rules. Now that we’ve had a chance to play with them for a while, what are the things that we really love? What are some of the pain points of things we don’t love?” We had a pretty good in-depth discussion of that.
Then they did a little fun draft where we were drafting classes.

John: Right.

Craig: The question was, you’re drafting classes to survive an apocalypse. Then, I think they’re a Patreon thing. One of their Patreon subscribers wrote in to say, “Oh, here’s a name of something. What would you home brew this thing to be? Item, spell, weapon, what would it be?” It was just a joy talking with those guys talking with those guys.

John: Love it. Sounds great.

Craig: Check it out, Total Party Skill, on wherever you get your podcasts.

John: I listen to so many podcasts, and deliberately have not added any D&D podcasts, because that’s just too much. I’m sure there’s so much good content that would just eat up more of my time.

Craig: You know I don’t listen to podcasts, but I actually will listen to this podcast.

John: That’s great.

Craig: Not the one I’m on, the other ones.

John: For Craig to start listening to a podcast is a pretty big deal.

Craig: It’s got to got to be about D&D, basically.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, and edited by Matthew Ciarlelli. Outro this week is by Steve Piotrowski. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

You will find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this show each and every week, along with our videos and other things.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those backup episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on whether we would still write screenplays if we weren’t going to sell screenplays.

[laughs]

Thank you for pre-ordering the book. Pre-order those books and send those receipts to drewaskatjohnaugust.com, and we will send you something cool. Thanks, Craig. Thanks Drew.

Craig: Thank you.

[music]

John: This bonus topic came from a question. Drew, would you read us the question?

Drew: Your recent Scott Frank episode wrapped up with a bout of brutal honesty concerning the likelihood that any of us will have a career in screenwriting. I realized this was in an effort to encourage folks to be unique, advice I think I need myself, but I’d love to hear your perspectives on the idea of art for art’s sake. If, for whatever reason, nobody could ever pay you for a script again, would you still write them?

Craig: I wonder if Fraser– it feels like Fraser’s really asking this for themselves. Do I have permission to write screenplays if I’m not doing it professionally? The answer is, absolutely. I think for me, it’s a different question because I’ve written 4,000 scripts now and drafts and versions and things, and so, would I want to do it just for fun? No. I don’t think that’s a thing anymore. I would always want it to have a purpose just because I would.

If I hadn’t done so much screenwriting, I could see absolutely doing it for enjoyment.

John: I take this more as a question about the format of screenwriting as a worthwhile literary pursuit or a thing to spend your time on if it weren’t in the pursuit of actually making it into a movie or making it into a TV show. I agree with you. If I hadn’t done this job for so long, I could start writing screenplays.

I enjoy the form. I think it’s a great form, but it’s not a very shareable form. It’s not a form that other people are going to read and enjoy with you. I think having written books, and I have a graphic novel coming out next year, having written other things, I think there’s better stuff to write that for people out there in the world to read. You don’t have to write for other people to read stuff. You can just write for your own purposes and your own self.

Given what I like to do, I think I do like to write for other people to read it. I think books or stage musicals, or other things would be a better– it’s how I would spend my time.

Craig: One thing that this prompts is the idea that people pursue artistic expression for its own sake because it makes them feel good. It is part of our behavior as humans. We want to express ourselves creatively and artistically. I think it’s important that anyone give themselves permission to do so, as long as they acknowledge that they are not entitled to an audience.

If you want to write songs to make yourself happy, just don’t force your family to listen to 12 of them. You can play one maybe at Christmas, see how it goes. If you want to write a book or a poem or screenplay, great. Don’t make everyone read it. If people want to, great. I guess my point is, if you’re doing it for yourself, do it for yourself with no expectation because I think sometimes people say they’re doing it for themselves. What they really want is for everybody to tell them how great they are, and that’s a different thing.

John: It is. I feel like Fraser’s question is especially relevant in this era of increasingly powerful AIs that can generate things that look like the work that we’re doing, and just do it with seemingly effortlessly. Why even bother spending the emotional time and energy to write a thing when I can just generate a thing?

I still think there is meaning and value, and there’s discovery that happens when you’re actually trying to write a thing that is unique and wonderful. Those moments when I’ve written something, even if no one read it, I felt really good to have written it. Yes, fantastic, but I don’t necessarily need that to be a screenplay form. It could be something else.

Craig: It’s its own pleasure, right? If Fraser wants to write a screenplay because he enjoys writing screenplays and he’s able to accept that perhaps he may not write professionally, but that’s okay, he just likes writing, then that’s fantastic. There doesn’t need to be any reason to do that because there’s really no reason to do anything if we consider our mortality. What’s the point of anything? There is none. You die, so really, do you need to paint that painting? No.

We do it because it feels good. It helps us figure ourselves out and it might help us connect to one person. Beyond that, yes, just lower the requirements.

John: I always love the stories when they find some person who died and they find all this incredible writing or all these paintings that this person did. It’s like, oh my God, this person would have been a known artist, but they just chose not to do it or whatever circumstances, they didn’t. The work still is valuable and if they still enjoyed doing that thing, they did it for their own.

Craig: It’s not valuable for them anymore.

John: Intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. They did it because it was meaningful to them.

Craig: Absolutely, it felt good. Then there’s the counterpart to that, which is the Kafka situation where while Kafka’s alive, he goes, “You know what, I hate all of this, I’m burning most of it.” No, don’t, and he did. That can happen too.

John: It can.

Craig: I think, make a good point, there are authors that are discovered posthumously, there are artists that are discovered posthumously, but it just doesn’t matter, actually. If you’ve decided it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Certainly, I would say, give yourself permission for it to not matter.
I wish I liked writing screenplays enough to just wake up and go, “You know what I’m going to do today? I’m going to write some screenplay. Make myself feel good.”

John: Yes, that’s not me.

Craig: It’s not me. That’s the way I approach solving puzzles.

John: Playing D&D.

Craig: Playing D&D. Playing D&D, what’s the point of that?

John: No, it’s absolutely pointless.

Craig: Fellowship.

John: It is fellowship.

Craig: Fellowship, and it feels good. It’s fun, it’s interesting.

John: It’s problem solving.

Craig: It’s problem solving, but it’s creative. We get to–

John: Collaborative.

Craig: It’s collaborative, it’s creative. We get to express ourselves, does all these things. For its own sake, we are not critical role. Look, if we wanted to go, hey, some platformer, even if we went to the critical role people were like, hey, it’s me and John, and we’ve got Tom Morello and Dan Weiss and Chris Morgan, and all these cool da-da-da, Phil. Hey, we’re going to go ahead and just do it. Yes, they’d be like, yes, we’ll do it. You can make money off of it.

John: It would ruin it.

Craig: Of course, it would ruin it.

John: It would ruin it.

Craig: It would be horrible.

John: Also, the things we say around the table would get us canceled immediately.

Craig: I don’t think we would make it past a minute, but even if we could, the point is we’ve never even considered it because we don’t need it.

John: No.

Craig: Not because it’s that we don’t need money, it’s that we just don’t need to do it for a reason. It is ontological.

John: Also, we’re happily amateur D&D players.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Yes, and so I want to shout out to community theater because community theater is pointless, and also amazing and wonderful.

Craig: It is professionally pointless, but it fills people’s spirits and souls. And Waiting for Guffman, if that is not the most beautiful love letter to community theater, I don’t know what is.

John: Love it. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

Craig: Thanks.

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You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 696 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what do screenwriters need to know about working with directors? This question is so foundational that producer Drew Marquardt has cut together a new compendium on just this topic. Drew, what are we hearing today?

Drew Marquardt: We’re going to start all the way back in Episode 4 from September 2011. We’re going to talk about working with directors as a screenwriter. It’s everything from that working relationship to set etiquette and all the way through post.

John: I love when we go back to the very early episodes where Craig and I have just no idea what we’re doing in a podcast.

Drew: Craig sounds bubbly in this one almost.

John: Yes. Weird. Yes. Yes. What happened to Craig Mazin?

Drew: What happened?

John: So much happened to Craig Mazin. He’s still fine. What’s the second episode we’re going to talk about?

Drew: Then we’re going to go to Episode 176. It starts as advice to a first-time director. In this case, it’s our own Matthew Chilelli. It’s how to run a set. It’s how to prep your shot list. It’s working with actors. It’s all that good stuff. Then from there, we’re going to look at the perfect director. We had that The Perfect series for a while. This outlines just sort of the ideal qualities of that writer-director relationship.

John: Fantastic. It’s weird that 172 episodes later we’re coming back to that topic. That’s still 10 years ago.

Drew: I know.

John: Just so much time has passed.

Drew: We’ve touched on directors a lot.

John: I think we’ve talked about directors a lot, but we haven’t done sort of special segments on them because I think we covered it pretty well. Now we are unearthing it from the archive and talking about it today.

In our bonus segment for our premium members, you, Drew Marquardt, are just about to be a director, again, yourself. You’re about to go off and direct a project. You suggested we talk about something that you’re experiencing for the first time about trying to cast actors.

Drew: Yes. I got my first round of rejections, like roundly rejected. It’s a strange feeling. I’d love to talk through it.

John: You were an actor before this. You’ve been rejected before, but now you’re being rejected by actors.

Drew: In a totally new way.

John: It’s a whole new way. This industry is mostly about rejection and it’s sort of on one side of the fence or the other.

Drew: Truly.

John: All right. We’ll dig into that. Listen to these two compendium bits from previous episodes. We’ll be back at the end for one cool things and then an other wrap up business. Thanks, Drew.

Drew: Thanks.

(Episode 4)

John: Today we want to talk about directors and how screenwriters deal with directors, and what that relationship is like. Some templates for thinking about how you would work with a director on a project. You’ve had many movies shot and have all of your director experiences been fantastic?

Craig Mazin: No. [laughs]

John: That’s weird.

Craig: No. I mean I think I’ve had more good ones than– I really only had one weird one. Mostly though they’ve been good, I would say. Mostly good.

John: Yes. I’d say most of mine have been pretty good, and some of the good ones were ones where I wasn’t all that involved with the project from the beginning. I just came in and did some work and helped them out. They went off and shot the movie and good luck and Godspeed.

Other times I’ve been on board the project from the very beginning, and a director comes on board. You’re trying to get them up to speed with where you’re at. So let’s aim more towards that from-inception kind of relationship because I think that’s more what our audience is listening for.

Also, we’re talking about movies. That relationship between a writer and a director in television is very, very different. The writer in television has more power but also has responsibility to the overall continuity of the show. The director is there to get what needs to be shot on the page, onto film, and into the episode.

Craig: Yes, in television the director doesn’t have to determine who is going to be playing these roles, what they’re dressing like, what the sets should look like, what the tone of the product is. All those things have been determined already. I mean that’s the massive gulf between feature directing and television directing.

John: Well, all those things we talk about are the crucial things that a director is doing while the director is getting up to speed with the script and thinking about making the movie. So let’s just start talking about all the stuff that a director needs to do because it’s tempting to think about, “Oh, the director is responsible for the story and for getting the story told.”

Yes, that’s one of his or her jobs, but so much of a director’s time as you’re approaching making a move is really dealing with completely different things that have nothing to do with the script itself. So recognizing that you as a screenwriter are essentially a department when it comes to making a movie.

You are going to be one of his meetings over the course of the day, but he’s also talking to the costume designer, the production designer, the cinematographer, the editors, the producers, the casting directors. As a giant village who’s come together to make this movie, he’s the village chief and you’re one of the villagers. Recognizing that difference is a hard thing to sometimes to get up to speed with.

Craig: Yes, we are very focused in on what we are responsible for. Like you said, that’s the story. As it turns out, that is the most important part of this whole thing. The story is more important than the costumes, the locations, where the lights are going to go, and what the makeup should look like. But all those things flow from the story and are mission-critical to making a good movie.

You have to look at every department as necessary. The story is the thing that’s driving everything. It’s just a question of time. Throughout the day he still has to sit there and figure out what the cars should be in the scene where, okay, and then she pulls up in her car. What car? Here, I got pictures of cars for you. That’s where you want to blow your brains out as a director.

Or we have a scene where there’s a party, and he’s going to crash the party and deliver a speech to the girl. Okay, well, how many people are at the party? What ages are they? Are they different races? How are they dressed? Is it upscale? Is it downscale? The billions of questions that start to bury the director in quicksand soak up so much time, and they all have to be answered. They’re all theoretically part of some cohesive vision.

John: A crucial thing that a smart screenwriter pointed out to me once is that as a screenwriter, you’re the only person who’s already seen the movie. So when you approach your first meeting as the director you have to remember that you already made the movie in your head. You can see the whole thing.

The director, he or she, hasn’t seen the whole thing yet and is still trying to figure out what the movie looks like and is starting to answer those thousands of questions ahead of time. If they want to go through every page of the script with you, it’s not necessarily because they have a problem with it. They’re just trying to figure it out.

Your job a lot of times is to almost be like an interpreter as if the script was written in some other language, and you have to help talk it through with them so that it can be understandable in their language and they understand what your intention was, who are these characters in the scene, what is important, and how they’re going to get through that.

Because ultimately the smart directors realize that they’re going to be on the set at four in the morning after very long days of shooting. They have two hours until the sun rises, and that actor is going to come to him and be saying like, “What am I supposed to be doing in this scene?” They have to be able to have an answer.

So the times where I’ve been most exhausted with a director, I’ve always tried to remember that, “Okay, that’s right. They’re trying to figure this all out, too.”

Craig: Yes, and you’re smart because you’re putting the movie first. It’s tempting to put your own ego and what you’ve invested in the screenplay first, but the point of the screenplay is the movie. What you’re talking about is helping the director do the best job they can do in realizing their vision and your vision and your intention. So obviously, part of that is explaining your intention and defending your intention.

Another part of it is recognizing that they have to do it for real. The movie that you saw in your head? That can’t ever be a movie because in your movie people move like they do in dreams. They’re on one end of the room. Now they’re on the other end of the room. Time speeds up and slows down in accordance with the importance of the moment.

But in a movie, time moves at one second per second. [laughs] You can’t speed it up, really, or slow it down. I mean, you can a little bit here and there, but there are demands of production that force the director to, frankly, make a less amazing, wonderful, kind of translucent thing than you have in your brain, which is this kind of shimmering dream of whatever your movie was.

That said, the more specific you are in your head about the movie — Like I wrote a blog piece once that says, “You can’t just walk into a building.” You should know if your character walks into a building, see the building. You may not want to waste a bunch of space on the page describing the building, but sooner or later someone’s going to say, “What building did you have in mind?” It’s good to know.

If you drop your jaw and go, “Uh, I don’t know. A building,” you’re expressing a different philosophy than everybody else in the movie. Because they have a job to actually shoot something. If you start saying, “Ah, who cares, it doesn’t matter,” or implying, “Who cares, it doesn’t matter,” you’ve put this thing between you and them.

John: You should be able to have an answer for any question that comes up. So rather than having generic type of like, “This is a police station.” Well, what kind of police station is this like? Where are we at in the police station?
The very first movie I was involved with, the first movie of mine that got produced, was Go. On that movie, fortunately Doug Liman had me super-involved. I was not only on set every moment, but every moment of pre-production I was there, too.

It was a great experience for us to get in the same brain space about what was important, what kinds of things we were going to see. But I always had an answer. It wasn’t always going to be the same answer as Doug’s, but when asked, or occasionally when not asked, but when I saw something going in the opposite direction, I could volunteer my opinion of like, “This is what the intention of this was.” Always couched in terms of like, “These are the other options I could see being out there, but this is what the actual intention of this thing was.”

From casting, from what locations we’re picking to, just the style of the world. Like how rundown of a grocery store are we at, and where are we at in this grocery store. The script reflected a lot of those things, but you’re not ever going to be able to have all those details on the page. They were in my head, though, like I had filmed it well enough in my head that I could at least give them my answer for how things were supposed to be.

Craig: Yes. That’s important. By the way, that is a help for a director.

Look, I’ve worked primarily with two directors, David Zucker and Todd Phillips — both incredibly different guys, very different filmmakers, different kinds of movies. But they’ve both been very generous with me, and they’ve included me as a partner. One of the parts of that contract that I honor is if they don’t get it — let’s say I express my intention as best I can, and they just don’t get it — it’s important for me to stop and go, “Here’s the deal.”

It doesn’t really matter if I get it. If they don’t get it, I have to figure out something else that they do get that satisfies whatever this intention is, because they have to do it. They’re the ones that actually have to relay it. Just as I think when you are directing, and your actor looks at you and says, “I just don’t get this,” you got to think about how to either make them see so that they can internalize and perform it, or find another way in.

The director has to be an adult enough to sublimate his own desires and ego to make the moment with the actors work, and the writer has to do the same for the director. Everybody ultimately has to be subordinate to the movie.

So when I work with those guys, they’re kind enough to let me on their set — and it’s their set — and they want me there, and I am respectful enough to help them. By help them, I mean help the movie, not the script.

John: Let’s talk about being on the set, and let’s talk set etiquette. I found a range of experiences on being the writer on the set. With Go, I was at the monitor for every shot. I had the contacts on, the little ear pieces on. We had a little hand-held monitor so if I needed to walk away from the camera, I could see what they were setting up and run back if something was not going to work right.

With those, I could always talk directly to Doug, and I had to talk directly to Doug because the camera was on his shoulder. So there really were no private conversations. Like I had to come up to him and say like, “What Sarah did was great. It’s going to be a problem when we cut to this next thing here, because we’re setting the expectation…” I would try to give a note that both validated what just happened, but also explain why I was coming up and talking to him. So that he could then turn to Sarah and say like, “Yes, what he just said,” and shoot the next take.

Other cases, like on Big Fish, first day of shooting we’re in Montgomery, Alabama. Tim picked a really easy day of stuff to shoot, which is a smart choice. A really simple thing where Billy Crudup is coming to talk with Jessica Lange.

So I’m watching on the monitor, and I see one little thing, “Oh, I should tell Tim that, that there’s a little moment, opportunity there.” I go up, I pull him aside, it’s like, “Tim, that was great what she just did. But there’s also the chance here when he’s there, and there might be a little moment here.” And I could see like these garage doors go down in front of his eyes.

Craig: [laughs]

John: I realized, this is not going to be the kind of set relationship we have. He doesn’t want me to be chumming with those notes, and it’s a very good idea for me to go back to Los Angeles.

Craig: [laughs]

John: There wasn’t a problem. There wasn’t a disagreement, there wasn’t anything like that. But that wasn’t the way he wanted to work, and I wasn’t going to be able to have a lot of input on the choices made on the set.

Craig: Well, surprise surprise, the directors are as different to each other as we are to each other. I mean, David Zucker and I essentially would co-direct. We sat together at the monitor — I don’t think we would ever move on unless we both agreed to move on. Occasionally, he wouldn’t even care if I gave notes to the actors. We walked through the setups together in the morning. We set the blocking together. We very much worked hand-in-hand.

Not at all the case with Todd Phillips, who is a very different kind of director, and certainly a more traditional one. Todd is the captain of the set 100 percent. As he’s pointed out, I think the way he’s put it is, “I don’t need you to be here.” [laughs] “I’ve made plenty of movies without you. That said, if you’d like to be here, it could be helpful.”

So I take that to heart. I mean, I don’t think I maybe…With that relationship, it’s really just about picking those moments where you think I’m going to just say, “Okay, this is something that matters to me that’s really important, and I’m going to share that with him.” Either he’s going to go, “Shut up, stupid,” or, “Yes, that’s a good idea.” But I pick those moments carefully and few and far between. Frankly, he’s pretty good at what he does, and he’s the sort of very independent director.

One thing that I want to make clear about directing: so much of it has to do with confidence. You need to feel confident in your own vision. Some directors, their confidence goes up the more direct and obvious help they get. Other directors, their confidence goes down.

I understand that. I’m kind of that way myself. You and I write on our own. We don’t have writing partners. I always feel like I should be able to move this boulder myself. So you have to learn which kind of director you’re dealing with. If it’s a director that likes moving the boulder himself, just pick your moments carefully, and don’t be a nudge.

John: One of the luxuries of being a writer on the set is if you’re watching the monitor and you see something that you can fix and you have a good idea, you can speak up and have a good idea. If you see something that’s not working and you don’t know how to fix it, you can just sit there and shut up.

Craig: [laughs] Yes, exactly.

John: Versus the director, who every time he calls, “Cut,” there’s 20 eyes looking at him saying, “Okay, what are we going to do next?” And the director has to figure out who he needs to talk with, about what needs to change, has to figure out what wasn’t working about that moment.

Craig: Yes.

John: So giving that person the space to be able to do that and hopefully help where you can help him or her make that next thing happen.

Craig: That’s a good point. I will say — I don’t care who the director is — give them a little bit of time to find it. No director is going to get it on take one. Well, occasionally magic happens. But the point is, if you watch a take and you go, “Oh, no,” after watching that take, it’s for the same reason people would say, “Oh, no,” if they read the first thing you typed in the morning.

It’s beginning. The process is beginning. Don’t overreact. Don’t jump in there and say, “It’s not working. It’s not working.” Believe me, they know. Everybody knows. [laughs] It’s fine. You have all day to shoot two and a half pages, let the director do what they do.

The only times I ever discuss things with Todd, for instance, is if I thought, “Okay, here’s just another way of approaching this.” Someone once said, “Don’t ever show up with problems, just show up with solutions.” Give them an alternative. If they like it, they’ll do it.

John: Another director who I’ve worked with twice is McG. I love McG. McG can be frustrating at times, but I do love McG. What I love about McG is his energy and his passion. It’s hard to connect with McG on a story level often, but it’s easy to connect with him on a, “This is what it’s going to feel like,” level.

I think no matter who you’re talking with as a director, early on in those conversations, have conversations about tone and feeling, and what this is like to you. A lot of times you end up watching other movies with directors or talking about references. With Tim Burton I could just go into his office, and he’ll have water-color painted a lot of scenes from the script. It says, “Okay, I get what this world is like as he sees it.”

Like for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I was very specific about a lot of the stuff in it, but like the Oompa-Loompas, how is he going to do the Oompa-Loompas? Then you go into his office, and you see he has this scale drawing of what the Oompa-Loompas are like standing next to all the different characters. You can just see everybody in their wardrobe, it’s like, “Oh, okay. I get what this movie is like to Tim.” Then every other conversation I have can be about supporting that vision of how he sees the world of Willy Wonka versus what I might have had in my head originally.

Craig: That’s a good way in with directors who aren’t also prominently screenwriters. In working with David and Todd, I’m working with writers, because they’re screenwriters in their own right. That, actually, also dramatically changes the way you approach that relationship. Because with both of those guys, I’ve been writing partners.

So I don’t have to do quite as much ambassadorship with the script to them because we all wrote it together. That also takes an enormous burden off of me — or I guess not even a burden, because there’s no burden on me, it’s just a worry that I don’t have to have. Because the truth is I know that they actually sat here and worked through this scene with me. We made it together. They’ve seen it in their heads. It makes sense to them. That’s a big relief.

John: It’s great when you have that opportunity to work with a writer-director who actually can generally understand the writing process on that. I think there’s a misconception that because of the perils of auteur theory is that all directors really come from a place of story, and understand story, and have a great grasp of what the narrative of something is. A lot of them don’t.

Some of the best directors, I think, are the ones who are very upfront about that’s not their strongest suit. Just like we don’t expect every director to be a master of cinematography, we don’t expect every director to be a master of visual effects. There are some who are great at figuring out all the pieces of a story and how to move from the beginning to the end, and there’s others who are really good at getting that story up onto the screen. Recognizing which kind of director you are working with early on is crucial with that.

One of the places where I feel like I think I’m good at, which I think a lot of screenwriters will tend to be good at once they have some experience with it, is editing. We’re often the right people to come into the editing room after there’s a director’s first cut to help talk through, “This is what’s not working, and this is what we may want to talk about changing.”
We talked about that first test screening, which is just incredibly nerve-wracking. Especially if you’re the director, of course, because you’ve been staring at this thing on an Avid screen for eight weeks, 12 weeks, trying to get things to work, and you have no idea if it actually works.

As a screenwriter, you’re watching it a lot of times blind. You just don’t know what movie it is that they ended up making. Where I’ve been most helpful to directors, I think, honestly, is being that first set of notes after the test screening and saying like, “These are the things that were awesome. These are the things that worked great. These are the things we had challenges with, and here are some ways we might want to talk about changing them.” Being that first person with the best notes is a helpful role for a screenwriter, I think.

Craig: I totally agree. To that end, here’s just a bit of practical advice. If you want to be a screenwriter that collaborates with filmmakers beyond just, “Congrats, we’re making your movie. See you at the premier,” you need to understand the process of editing. You can’t approach it like you’re just sitting there watching a show going, “I don’t know. I didn’t get this part,” or, “Why…it’s just boring here.”

You have to understand how editing works, and you have to be able to speak the language of editing. Because ultimately, you need to — if you’re going to give advice, and it’s going to be a solution-oriented advice — you need to be able to say, “In this scene, how about just cutting the head” “How about taking this much off, and just keeping that line there?” “I know that you might have a problem with that because let’s say they’ve been talking up to that line and it’s all one shot, but do you have any coverage where you can establish them quietly and then just go in for that line?”

If you can talk like that, then your advice is usable, and it’s also clinical. Because remember, the director is going to be about as fragile as a human can be when they’re showing that cut for the first time. It’s truly nerve-wracking. So try and get some kind of handle on how editing actually works.

The other thing I was going to add was just when you were talking about directors who write and don’t write, comedy, it’s very rare — I don’t know why, it’s just the way it is — I don’t know any successful comedy, or repeatedly successful comedy directors, that don’t write. I don’t know if you can direct comedy if you don’t write. I’m not sure you can.

John: I’m sure if we spent a few minutes on that we’d find some really good directors who aren’t writers, but all of my favorite comedies I can think of have writer-directors behind them.

Craig: Yes. I mean, if you look at the guys doing it now, Phillips, Apatow– I think Dobkin writes. Dobkin may be an example, actually. Because Wedding Crashers is awesome. I don’t know if he writes.

John: I don’t perceive him as being a writer.

Craig: Yes, well, then maybe I’m wrong.

John: [laughs]

Craig: Look at that. There you go. [laughs] Mazin’s wrong again.

John: We’re out about time, but let’s talk through some general advice for screenwriters dealing with directors. First off, the question of when a director becomes involved. Like, I may come on board this project which it’s the director’s idea. So I would be coming in, working very closely in collaboration with him, which can be really great and exciting, but can also be exhausting, because you feel him trying to shoot the movie while it’s still being-

Craig: Yes, yes.

John: -while it’s still at a very raw state. It can be great because it can be a really good collaboration. It could just take a lot of time. More often, you will have written something, and now a director comes on board. Your responsibility is to have a meeting of the minds where you can instill what was going on in your head to him or her, and she can communicate back to you like what she sees for the project.

That’s where I’m at right now with Susan Stroman on Big Fish, where I’ve had now 12 years to work with Big Fish in various forms, and she has to process what I’ve done and pull out of me what she needs to make it on the stage.

Craig: Yes. If the director isn’t writing with you, I think it’s best to give yourself a little distance. Just like they need to get takes one through three in before anybody starts yapping in their ear, I feel like the writer needs some space to just write the script.

So if the director’s not writing, as long as everybody is connected on the vision and the rough idea of what the story is, you just…Yes, it’s not a good idea to have them over your shoulder while you’re doing it. Look, even editors get to do an assembly.

John: Yes. They give everyone a chance.

Craig: Everybody needs their shot. Yes.

John: As you get closer to production, you have to accept the fact that you are going to become another department. Whatever close, one-on-one relationship you have with the director, it’s going to be a little bit more distant just because his or her time is going to be divided between a bunch of different people who need answers out of him — line producers, ADs, every department head wants as much time as they can possibly get.

So hopefully most of the big issues have been solved. Hopefully you feel like you really have a movie. If you get a chance to do a table reading, that’s awesome, because it’s the only way you’ll ever know that the actors read the script at least once. [laughs]

Craig: Well, and it’s your chance, too, to kind of…It’s your last shot at rewriting before they start shooting.

John: Yes.

Craig: Start to hear what works and what doesn’t.

John: And if there’s lines that an actor literally can’t say, you have to change them. You can’t make an actor say a line that he or she doesn’t understand.

Craig: Yes. They’re human beings. Use your actors to the best of their abilities. They’re all unique, and they’re there because they can do something we can’t, so make the best use of them. You’re right, as you approach production, understand that you’re a department, but be the best department. Be the department that the director turns to at the beginning of the day and the end of the day. Be the safe port in the storm.

You are technically — not technically. If you do it right, you’re really the only person that they can look at and say, “You and I both get this. Everybody else is looking like the blind men at the elephant. They’re feeling the piece of the elephant they feel, you and I can see the movie.” Be that person.

John: Sometimes I’ll have a producer on set who actually has the whole movie in his or her head, but more often, you’re going to be the only person around who has a understanding of what the whole story is, and how this little piece fits into the whole bigger piece.

Craig: That’s right.

John: The classic stories are always like the director decides to, “Oh, I really like that actress. Let’s throw her into this scene, just in the background.” The screenwriter says, “No, no, you don’t remember! She’s already dead!” A lot of times you are that person who remembers that. There’s a script supervisor who’s there, and his or her job is to check for some things like that, but you’re the person who remembers why everything is the way something is.

Craig: Yes. I love script supervisors, but they’re not narrative supervisors. That’s the difference. They’re supervising the day’s work on the page and making sure that when you shoot things out of sequence, “Okay. Show me the Polaroid of what they look like in the scene before so I can make sure they match up.”

John: “Coffee cup right hand, coffee cup left hand.”

Craig: Yes. Exactly. “You should be looking camera left and not camera right.” But we are the ones that technically we should know the narrative better than anybody.

John: We’re the story supervisors.

Craig: So to speak, yes.

John: Then I would say, whatever your function is on the set, you’ll go away for a while, and the director will do his or her cut. You’ll get a chance to see it, and that’s hopefully a time where you can be a real help and a real ally to the director in getting the best version of this movie done. Because you had your shot at making the movie when you wrote the script, he has his shot shooting it and doing that first cut, and that final product is what you’re pushing to.

You’re always trying to write a movie, you weren’t trying to write a script.

Craig: Exactly, exactly. So just let the document go. Once the cameras are rolling, let it go. Every morning you take that piece of paper, the two and a half or three pieces of paper, look at them, love them, and then say goodbye to them. Because by the end of the day, they’re just paper, and now it’s movie. So service the movie.

John: Definitely.

(Episode 176)

John: Our first is a question that comes from Matthew Chilelli who is the person who edits this podcast. So, he wrote this question and I said, you know what, we’ll answer your question on the air and you’ll get to hear it first because you’ll edit the episode that has the answer to your question.

So, Matthew Chilelli and his writing partner are directing a movie that they raised money for on Kickstarter. His question was what advice would you give to a first-time director of his own script. I’m like that’s a great question. I had some thoughts, and I’m sure Craig will have some thoughts, too, because we both directed and we both learned a lot.

My quick bullet points of advice is to remember that you’re not there to throw a party. One of my sort of first real worries about directing a movie is I wanted everyone to be happy. I wanted to make sure that the set was comfortable and that everyone was having a good time. Then I realized, you know what, this isn’t a party. It’s not my job to make sure everyone is having a good time. It’s my job to make sure that everyone has the information they need so they can do their jobs really, really well.

Once I stopped thinking about myself as host and started thinking of myself as the person who is directing the movie, things got much happier and better and everyone was happier.

You will be facing a thousand questions. I was terrified of the thousand questions. Should it be a green shirt or a red shirt? Like this? Like this? Do you want a wider lens, a tighter lens? Here are some things: you will usually have an answer. And just pick an answer. And answers are great. Although you can also say, “I don’t know.” And you can solicit their opinions. You can figure out sort of what the choices really mean.

You can also say, “None of the above.” And if the none of the choices that are presented to you are the correct choices, say none of the above and let them come back to you with more choices.

While you’re directing, always remember what the intention is of the scene and what the intention is of the moment. Because when you’re in the middle of directing a scene and things are going crazy and you’re turning around shooting from one side to the other side and things are just nuts, it’s so easy to forget what the scene is actually about. And so making notes to yourself before the day starts, like the scene is about this is incredibly useful. Like the minimum viable scene will be about this, rely on that.

If you are directing actors, directing actors I find works best with verbs. So, it’s very hard for an actor to be happy, be sad, be angrier. Give an actor a verb to play. So you can say don’t let him walk through that door. Or, you can sort of give them a simile. Can we try that same moment but as if he’s just said the most horrifying thing imaginable to you? That’s something an actor can do. An actor can’t be an adjective. So, those are my quick run throughs of advice.

Craig: All spectacular suggestions. I agree with every single one of them.

John: Cool.

Craig: I’ll only add the following.

John: Please.

Craig: When you’re directing a movie that it’s your first time and you’ve written the script, you will have a natural tendency to want to be the person that is defending the guy that came before you, the screenwriter. So, in other situations where we’ve written a script and somebody else directs it we go, oh my god, what are you doing to my screenplay, and it’s bad. And you think, well, when I get in there I can defend this.

However, that’s not the person you should be worrying about. When you direct, the person that you should be solely concerned with is the you in the future who is in the editing room. That’s the person you’re taking care of. That is the person who needs you right now to figure this out.

So, give that person options. When you’re a first-time director, you may think I’ve figured out, I know exactly what I want to do with this. And you may think that’s the name of the game. But sometimes the name of the game is collect options. And then you’re going to find this movie and write this movie in editorial. And Matthew is an editor, so he understands this better than most. To that end, I believe in shot-listing, particularly for a first-time director, and especially if you’re dealing with limited time which typically a first-time director is.

You don’t have a lot of days where you can go, “Yes, we didn’t figure it out today, I’ll figure it out tomorrow.” It doesn’t go that way for you. You’ve got to get the day’s work done. So, shot-list.

As a writer we are obviously absorbed with all writerly things: character, dialogue, theme, scenario. As a director, take a moment to just think about aesthetics. Think about your color palette. Think about movies that look the way you want this movie to look. Think about how you want to move the camera. Do you want long lenses, wide lenses? By the way, if you’re not sure what those things are, pick up a book. There are all sorts of instructional things online now so you can learn.

But really think about how you want it to look, how you want the camera to move and feel, because that is essentially the directorial equivalent of theme for the screenwriter. And without theme as a screenwriter we tend to just wander without some sort of unifying visual concept as a director. You’re just collecting footage and making a big TV show.

So, work on all of those things, but most importantly really, really care for your future self who will be in editorial because that future self is the one who is going to — every director, first-time, 20th time, at some point in editorial will curse themselves for what they didn’t do. So, you want to try and limit the amount of cursing of yourself you end up doing.

John: I think that’s fantastic advice. Let’s talk about what shot-list is, because I think sometimes people get confused about that term. So, there is storyboarding, and storyboarding is when you are sort of sketching out what you think the shots are going to be like to build a sequence. A shot-list is a much more practical thing. It’s literally a thing you’re probably holding in your hand, which is like a bullet point list of these are the shots I need to make this scene.

Craig: Right.

John: And that’s something you probably would do in preproduction. You’d figure out like what the shot-list would be for a scene. But honestly it’s a thing you might do in the morning before you’ve started that day’s work and you’re going to hopefully have people you can trust and talk through that shot-list with.

The people who are so crucial are your first AD. And your director of photography. And I found it to be so useful to like walk through with Nancy Schreiber, my DP, and my line producer, like these are the shots I need in this scene. And she could tell me like, “Okay, well let’s prioritize this and prioritize this because of light.” That was so useful.

Also, when you’re making your shot-list, prioritize within that. Because there are going to be some shots you’re just not going to get. And so you need to be able to tell the scenes, even if you never got that second close-up that you really wanted, okay, but that’s why you put that at the bottom of your list. So, no matter if you’re making a tiny movie or a giant movie, there is going to be stuff that you just don’t get. And protecting that future editor self, you want to make sure you get as much of the stuff you do need and this extra stuff is just gravy.

Craig: That’s absolutely right. That is a perfect description of a shot-list. And what you find as a first-time director is that directing — whatever you thought about directing is wrong. And that a huge amount of what directing is is breaking moments down geometrically. It is literally figuring out how to capture a moment through angles. And the angles could be moving and they could be different sizes, but ultimately you’re fracturing a moment into various geometric angles that will be repeated so that you can edit them together.

And understanding the geometry of your scene is really important before you shot-list, because sometimes if you think about it you’ll say I don’t want to break this down. I actually think this is a one-er. I think that’s how this works. I don’t want coverage here. I want this to be about these two people playing something in the moment together. And if it’s a one-er and you know it’s a one-er, no problem. Everything is a tradeoff, right? You’ll probably do nine takes of that, but there’s no more coverage, so you’re done with it, right.

If you’re doing traditional coverage with two people talking, you’ve got yourself a master, and overs, and closes. Okay. So, you don’t have to do as many takes of each one, but there’s a lot more setups.

So, one thing to do as the first-time director of your own screenplay is to go through your screenplay and start asking yourself this question: how would this moment be best broken down geometrically? What do I want to see and how? It will help you make your shot-list. And then as you said your DP and your first AD will have all sorts of great ideas to add to it and to make it more efficient.

John: One last thing, thinking about that future person you’re going to be when you’re in the editing room, a lot of times as you’re watching a shot happen before you you say like, oh, that was good, but this thing wasn’t good, that thing — like it was almost right, but this wasn’t quite right. If you know you’re going to be cutting it, it doesn’t have to be flawless all the way through. It would be great if it were flawless, where you had that one take that’s fantastic, but pushing for that eighth take to try to get one perfect take through on one person’s coverage is almost never worth it.

Craig: Yes.

John: If you know you have the moments, if you know that I can see and feel what this is like, then you’re wasting a lot of your day to try to get to that perfect eighth take when you have the stuff you need in those earlier takes.

Craig: It’s why you need — before you direct anything you must have experience editing something. You must. You need to know where the scissors come in and where the scissors can’t come in. You need to know when something is married to something else so if one half of it is no good and one half of it is good, it’s no good.

But Matthew happily has that experience, so that’s a huge part of it. It’s how you figure out how to break a moment down very often.

John: Yup. So, a great segue to our next topic which is our Perfect Series. And this time it’s the Perfect Director. So, I want to take a look at the perfect director from the writer’s point of view since we’re a mostly a writer’s podcast. But also from what a perfect director looks like from an actor’s point of view, from different department heads’ point of view. Because how does a director do her job the best and what are the tools and techniques she’s using to make the best movie. So, obviously a very wide topic, but Craig how should we start?

Craig: Well, let’s start with what we’re most comfortable with, I suppose, which is how — what we want from a screenwriting point of view when we work with a director what do we want. And I’m going to dispense with the obvious ones. We want them to be good. [laughs] We want them to know how to shoot. We want them to be visually interesting. We want them to know how to work with great actors. We want them to be really specific, make terrific choices. But, of course, what a lot of screenwriters will say is we want them to shoot the script.

Well, I don’t want the director to shoot the script. I want the director to shoot the movie of the script. But here is what I want most of all: I want the director to presume respectfully that if something is in the script it’s there for a reason. I think the biggest mistake directors make vis-a-vis screenwriters is when they read a screenplay they presume that some of it is just whatever. There’s moments that have to happen, but then there are moments inside of the moments that are like, eh, you know what, I actually would love to do this, or I’d love to do that or it would be more fun if the camera was here, more fun if the camera is there. This just feels like a waste of time.

And, not always, depending on the quality of the screenwriter, but I would argue if it’s a good screenwriter 99% of the time that is a huge mistake.

John: Yes.

Craig: It is not a mistake to ask the screenwriter how can we do this differently. It is a mistake to say quite arrogantly, “Some of this isn’t important.” It is as much of a mistake as it would be to open up a human body during surgery, grab a hold of some little gibbet and go, “Eh, this probably doesn’t mean anything,” and just pull it out.

Because we put things in on purpose. Then, of course, what happens is, three or four weeks later, you might get a call like, “Oh, this doesn’t make sense.” Yes, well, because you took that thing out and you didn’t realize, because you hadn’t lived in it the way I did. When you want to change things in a screenplay, and it’s perfectly fine to say, “Look, we’re changing it, we must change it for the following reasons, even if one of the reasons is my directorial taste.” Tell me, how can I change this so that I don’t hurt anything? First, do no harm. That’s what I want from a director more than anything else in terms of how they interact with me. That involves, obviously, a certain amount of respect and acknowledgement that the screenplay isn’t just a suggestion or even a blueprint, which I’ve never understood, but rather is a conceptualized movie.

John: What I’m looking for in a director is that someone who can come in and channel this vision of a movie onto the screen. It’s really a person who can experience the movie internally and then has the skills to be able to put that up on a screen. That is such a unique skill set. There are people who are just amazingly good at it and who can do things that I would just never think of to do. That’s what gets me so excited, is when a director who can just do these amazing things. I cannot underscore enough is that I don’t want this person to make my script.

I want this person to make my movie and make her version of my movie. I want that movie to be fantastic. When there’s suggestions or changes or concerns or things they don’t like, that’s awesome. Let’s talk those through, but don’t try to change them on the set without getting some feedback, because yes, everything that’s in the script was there for a reason. There’s a reason why this whole carefully constructed puzzle fits together one way. There’s other ways it could be assembled, but there was one way it was supposed to work. If you can talk with me about that beforehand, that’s awesome.

In those first conversations, a lot of those first conversations with the director is basically just talking through the whole movie so I get a sense of what the movie looks like in the director’s head. Sometimes that really does mean as a screenwriter, I’m explaining scenes and like, well, I wrote it and now I’m actually talking through the whole explanation of it, but it’s so important that we’d be on the same page, literally the same page written, but also the same idea about what the intentions are of those scenes.

The times where things have gone not especially well have been cases where the director really thought the scene was about something completely different than what I thought the scene was about. It’s fine for us to have a difference of opinion, but we didn’t even have a difference of opinion. He just shot a different scene than what I meant that scene to be. Then that scene no longer shows up at the movie, and there’s problems.

Craig: Absolutely true. The other thing that I think the perfect director exhibits is patience. Now, directing, I’ve said this before many times, directing a movie, a feature film, is the hardest job in show business. Directors cannot be patient with everybody. In fact, most directors really have only a very tiny amount of patience that they reserve entirely for their actors. They must be patient with their actors because if they yell at their actors or are impatient with their actors, they’re getting bad performances.

Of course, this is all about what they’re getting on screen from their human beings, unless they’re all computer-generated robots. I would ask the perfect director to extend that patience to actors, to writers, that we need actually the same amount of patience. The reason I say that is not because we’re sensitive flowers, but rather because you will get a better movie if you’re patient with the screenwriter. Frankly, there are a lot of directors who are least patient with the screenwriter.

They find the screenwriter and the screenplay to be this offensive reminder that this world that they’re creating is not entirely their world. It’s disruptive of their confidence. I understand that. There are screenwriters who get fussy about changes. The perfect director is patient with the screenwriter because they will get better work, and they will make a better movie if they are. I always tell my fellow screenwriters to be patient in return to the director. They need us at our best in order to survive, and we are all in the same boat of trying to make a good movie. A good director is patient with the screenwriter.

John: You talk about how incredibly hard the director’s job is, and I completely agree. It’s like you’re a general leading your troops into battle. The crucial thing is that you have to have the trust of your troops. Your crew has to trust and believe that you have a vision for how you’re going to win this fight, how you’re going to succeed in doing this thing. That means that you had a lot of planning. You really knew what you were going to do ahead of time.

You’re able to read the lay of the land and see, like, okay, on the day we’ve arrived at this location, this location is different than how I expected it to be. I’m flexible enough to roll with what needs to actually happen because the directors who are inflexible, who everything has to be exactly the way that they had storyboarded it, are not going to be able to roll with the changes and roll with the punches. The great directors can also recognize and really remember the intention of the scene.

If an improv moment comes up that’s actually better than what was there, they will be able to incorporate it and be able to both have the version of the scene as it existed, but also recognize this new version is better, funnier, more dramatic. It does something unique and wonderful. I’m so glad I’m going to have that in the editing room as well.

Craig: Right. Yes. That reminds me, just another bit of advice, going backwards for Matthew Chilelli as he approaches his first movie. A good director leads the crew, but also understands that the crew will not be able to tell her or him that they’re making a good movie. All the crew sees are dailies. That’s what they see. They see live dailies going on, and they may see funny moments, and they may see an actor do a hysterical thing or a beautiful thing. As the old saying goes, there’s nothing better than your dailies, and there’s nothing worse than your first cut. They don’t know what the movie is.

John: They don’t.

Craig: Don’t ask them what they think, and don’t be encouraged or discouraged if they offer their opinions. No one except for you and your editor has any sense, really, of the movie that is going to result. You’re the only ones that have seen the completed jigsaw puzzle. You’re just making pieces now, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: Don’t overreact to that whole thing. In comedy, we called it dailies laugh, where the crew just goes, “Oh my God,” and they’ll come up to you at lunch. “That was so funny.” In your heart, you know, “Ah, it’s getting cut out of the movie.” There’s something about those moments, those moments that are so funny in the moment, so often just do not live in the matrix of the put-together film.

John: Yes. Any last bits of summary for our perfect director? I don’t think there’s one– I would say there’s not one perfect archetype for a director, and I’ve worked with directors who I love who are vastly different from each other, and that’s fine, that’s okay. They all have different ways of communicating their vision to their department heads and to me, and to everybody else who has to see what it is. Sometimes it’s not immediately clear to me, I have no idea what you’re doing, but it all works.

The directors who I admire as a viewer, I don’t necessarily know what they’re like on the set, but if people are working with them again and again, there’s probably something that they’re doing that’s really, really good. They’re probably treating their crews with respect. They’re probably able to communicate what it is that they’re trying to do, so people can do their very best jobs. They’re able to inspire the best work out of people, and that’s how you make great movies.

Craig: Yes, I think that frankly, the best directors, the directors that I love, as I run down the list in my mind, they’re either writers or they really respect writers. The directors that I find ultimately are disposable, who disappear or who just make stuff I don’t like, are directors that are notorious for not giving a crap about the script, that the script is a ha-ha-ha, I’m a director.

[music]

John: All right. We are back in 2025. I had to actually think about what year we were in.

Drew: It’s a weird year.

John: It’s time for one cool thing. My one cool thing is also very nostalgic-driven. Way back in the day, I loved HyperCard. I’ve probably talked about this on the show before, but, Drew, you’re probably too young to remember even what HyperCard was.

Drew: I don’t know what HyperCard is at all.

John: HyperCard was not a programming language. It was a thing that came with Macintoshes for a certain number of years that you could build these things called stacks, which were– Before web pages, but they were things you could build to do cool things. You could build games out of them. You had buttons and fields you could drag around. It was how a lot of people got started understanding programming, and also the sense of objects that had scripts. It was a really foundational, important way of how I got to appreciate computers.

Drew: Now that you say that, I think I was there when you and Jordan Mechner were talking about HyperCard.

John: Fantastic. HyperCard was great. There’s a new app called Scrappy, which is a web app, which reminds me a lot of the things I loved about HyperCard, because in the back of my head, I always thought like, “Oh, it would be fun to build something that was like a new HyperCard.” These folks went out and did it. It is a very bare-bones, but surprisingly clever demonstration test project that talks through things you might want to build in Scrappy that are just one-purpose, one-time things. It’s a fun little toolbox.

Drew: Oh, I love these things. These are the things that I feel like, especially for kids, getting the sort of foundational building blocks of working with computers, and more than just pointing and clicking kind of thing. I am terrible at this, so I should probably do it.

John: One of the things I loved about HyperCard is that the distinction between building a thing and using a thing are very minor. It’s not like you have to commit to a build, and then you run it and see if it works. You just click on either your pointer, like a finger, or your arrow. Either you’re editing it or you’re designing it, you can do both at the same time, which was a thing I loved so much about HyperCard.

Drew: It’s the computer equivalent of potato clocks.

John: Yes. Oh, yes, great, simple. Fun things to play with. If you’re nostalgic for old school programming or just feel like something to spend some time on, Scrappy, and I’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

Drew: I love it.

John: What do you have for us?

Drew: I, last weekend, went to Mount Wilson for the first time, which, if you’re in Los Angeles, Mount Wilson is an observatory that– It feels high above us and far away, but it’s actually really close, and it’s really, really cool. It’s where all of the early physics discoveries were made in the early 20th century. Einstein was there and all that stuff. It’s a place that I’ve heard about so many times, but when we had the fires earlier this year, it was severely threatened. It was one of those places that, actually, I ended up only thinking about when we would have fires, being like, “Oh, I need to go to Mount Wilson before that’s gone eventually.” It’s so cool.

John: Talk to me about the experience of visiting Mount Wilson. Did you have to get tickets because there was timed entries or anything like that?

Drew: There’s timed entries on the weekends. They said to get there early that they sell out. We didn’t have any issue with that. You don’t get to look in the telescope for the weekend tours. Those are specific nighttime tours, and those ones you have to be hawkish and look online, and that kind of thing. We’re going to do that now. They just do tours of the grounds on the weekends, and it’s a working research facility still. One reason, though, that I would encourage everyone to see it is because of all the cuts to the NSF.

They’re hurting for money a little bit, even though they’re basically a national park with these incredible telescopes and towers and working scientists. One scientist just has her dog sitting there. There’s a lab dog, and you just get to go through, and they get to talk to you about space and the universe and all that stuff.

John: How many people that were touring this place were adults versus families with kids?

Drew: It was mostly adults. There was one family with kids. It was the best tour group I’ve ever been with. It seemed like a lot of people who had jobs at JPL-

John: Oh, sure.

Drew: -or local scientists, so people were curious and asking really good questions. I think part of the reason I had such a great time is because our tour group was actually adults, and it wasn’t just like awe and clap. It was thoughtful, and it was considerate, and it was really cool.

John: One thing I often forget, but I think people outside of Los Angeles may not even be aware of is that in addition to Hollywood, Southern California is also the home to the aerospace industry, and so we have JPL and other big manufacturers of satellites and things like that, so we also have a bunch of smart people here, and it’s fun sometimes going to see smart people in their domain.

Drew: Yes, going to that space. Also, so Mount Wilson does movie screenings up in their things, so they’re showing Contact soon and all sorts of stuff. There’s fun reasons to go up there. I think they have musicians come up and do stuff. I just loved it, and I’ve been here for a decade and never made my way up.

John: I’ve been here for multiple decades, and I’ve never been up there, so we’ll put that on the list. It’s worth the trip. Cool. Drew, thank you for putting together this compendium episode.

Drew: Of course. It was really fun.

John: It’s Scriptnotes. It’s produced by Drew Marquardt, with segments this week produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions that we often answer on the show. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You will find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube, just search for Scriptnotes.

We have t-shirts, hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find all those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. As always, we really do appreciate our premium subscribers. You make it possible for Drew and Matthew, and everyone else to do this show every week. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on casting as a director, as opposed to being an actor–

Drew: Getting very rejected.

John: Drew, thanks so much.

Drew: Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Drew Marquardt, you’re about to head off and shoot a short film. It’s a short film that I’ve read the script of. It is delightful. You have two lead roles in this short film, and you are trying to cast them. Talk to us about the process of casting a short film in Los Angeles.

Drew: The first thing we did is we hired a casting director. You can go out to breakdown services yourself if you’re doing it. The main mistake I did is I didn’t take your and Craig’s advice of writing to the things that I have, and I wrote a short film about two elderly people, basically. Which was exciting to me because it felt like a thing I hadn’t seen before, but I don’t have those things. I think first thing is, if you’re in Los Angeles, write for your actor friends and don’t go out and cast.

We hired a casting director, partly because I had hoped to get names, or faces if not names.

John: Actors you’re like, “Oh, yes, I’ve seen them in things.”

Drew: That person.

John: Yes.

Drew: Great character actors. Sure. Because there’s so many great character actors, especially, so I’m looking in the 75 to 90 range, and I was like, there’s so many of those people around.

John: They won’t do the nudity required in the role.

Drew: They won’t do the nudity for the role. [laughs]

John: I’m kidding.

Drew: My casting director reached out to them, and I wrote cover letters for all of these people who I’ve seen for decades. Another factor here is we don’t have any money, and short films don’t have any money. I’m learning that all of these confluences of factors really play into it, because I had naively thought like, “Well, what else are they doing?” This is just a good weekend thing, and it would be hours towards SAG Health Insurance or something like that. We could come at it from that angle. In reality, I think they’ve got nothing to prove. They’re very comfortable, and getting them interested is a little bit more difficult than I thought it was going to be.

John: Yes. You had come at this from the other side. Back in the day, you were auditioning for things, stuff was coming your way, and you were passing on some things. As an actor, what were things you would pass on? Is it things like, I don’t want to go to [unintelligible 00:56:22], I don’t want to–

Drew: [laughs] No, I think at the time, I would’ve loved to go to [unintelligible 00:56:26]. I think it was not being confident in the director. It would be usually someone– I’m going to flatter myself and say young, like me, but who might be slightly inexperienced, and wondering where the funding was coming from, especially if it’s low-budget. I did a few low-budget things because I liked the script so much.

John: How did they turn out?

Drew: They turned out okay.

John: Yes, I’m realizing now, I’ve never actually seen any of your cinematic work.

Drew: Can you imagine? It was just all very bad. There was one I did for a bunch of students in Bournemouth in the UK, and at the time, they had a producer from The King’s Speech attached on the stuff, and the script was really cool. It felt like a young Trainspotting-y thing. Then, it turns out that they just loved smoking pot, and we shot a whole thing all summer, but it morphed into something. They lost that producer, so there wasn’t a ton of money, and we just had like a Canon D5, or whatever they were shooting stuff with, and there was all the enthusiasm, but…

I think just the thread of the story got lost. It’s out there, the scenes make no sense, sort of, it’s just a jumble of things. That one was probably one of those ones that honestly felt like a cautionary tale, because I’d come at it with this enthusiasm, then you see how it falls apart, especially if people don’t have their shit together. From that point on, I was weary of everything that came across my desk, so to speak, that felt like that. Yes, I understand people’s reticence with a smaller project like this.

John: I think about casting on short films I’ve done. The first short film I shot was beyond film school, but the first real short film I shot was God with Melissa McCarthy. Melissa was someone who I had seen in an early cut of Go. She was cast in a very minor role in Go, and I’m like, “Wow, she’s phenomenal. I need to write something for her immediately.” I wrote that for her. We talked about writing for what things you feel like you can control, and that was, I think, I could control it, and I could cast around her with other very smart, funny people.

During the first writer’s strike, I shot a short called The Remnants. Both of these are online, we’ll put links in the show notes to both of these. The Remnants was an interesting case where I wrote this thing not for any specific people; we actually had to cast it. I went to a casting director, Robert Ulrich, who I’d worked with on some TV projects, and we just cast it, but it was a weird time to be doing anything because it was during the strike, the WGA was encouraging other weird little indie short films to shoot, because why not?

We got together a really good group of actors, but it was weird to have written this thing without having a sense of who was going to be playing these parts from the very start.

Drew: God, I’m sure. That one seemed to come together pretty well, too, because I feel like you had locations and stuff, reading the script on that, and then also seeing the short. It feels like it was pretty similar.

John: On the outside, it does seem similar. They’re both written for mostly a single location and all that tracks, but the first one was literally in my apartment, so I could shoot it there. The second one, I didn’t have that apartment, so I was just finding somebody’s apartment we could borrow for the two days it took to shoot the thing.

Drew: I will say, so with this project that I’m working on, other than casting, it’s been pretty charmed. We’ve had a lot of people donate some really wonderful stuff, and with Film Independent giving us fiscal sponsorship. There’s been a lot of wonderful things coming in.

This is what I wanted to ask you about. Another thing that a casting director does really quick is they send out an avail check to people, saying, “Are you available for these dates?” For everyone, they’re like, “Yes, and we’re ready to work.”

We said, “Here’s the script, and here’s how much money we have,” and they said, “Never mind.” It’s teasing apart for me what’s the problem– I don’t want to compromise the idea of the short, and that is its own thing. But do I take this as feedback or not?

John: Oh, I would not take that as too much feedback. I think it may be a sense of– I think you have the right internal model for what some of these actors are saying no to. I think they’re saying, “It’s not worth it for me to go do this.” You only need two actors, and the right two actors will be out there and will be the right people to do it. The whole tech avail versus not actually available check is fascinating because I’ve also heard that happen in Broadway, where we’ll reach out on tech avails for people, and then you follow up, and it’s like, “Oh, but they really don’t want to play that smaller part.” That becomes the issue.

Drew: Sure. That makes sense. Once you get the details, it changes how things go about that.

John: The other thing I would keep in mind is that sometimes actors may say no because they’re trying to keep themselves open for another thing, like a TV thing that will actually pay some money, and you get that.

Drew: Totally.

John: As you get closer to the dates, in a weird way, things may open up a little bit.

Drew: That’s helpful. Yes, I think when you don’t get the people in your head, do you feel that changes things for you down the line, into production? Do you feel like–

John: Yes, sometimes you have to adapt with the batch of people that you’ve cast and what their abilities are, what their strengths and weaknesses are, whether you believe them in that part, but I don’t know. You didn’t write Yeti. These are really recognizable Midwestern humans. I don’t think it’s going to be a challenge for you to find these people down the road. If not, I’m reaching back to the Robert Eggers episode because he was talking about his short film where they had a puppet-

Drew: Puppets.

John: -[crosstalk]. Maybe it’s just puppets. Maybe that’s really the secret that we didn’t consider. Some Henson folks who come in there and give you some puppets.

Drew: I keep having fantasies. I’m like, “I should just do this animated.” I’ll just animate it, and then I can get someone in a booth for a day to just give a couple lines and don’t have to worry about it.

John: Yes. Right now, people are crashing their cars and saying, “Animation is not easier.” [crosstalk]

Drew: No, it’s not.

John: It takes so much of your time. I think aiming a camera at these things will be the right choice, but puppets are pretty great, too.

Drew: Puppets will be fun.

John: Well, good luck, Drew. We’ll obviously keep the Scriptnotes listenership posted on updates as the show progresses.

Drew: Thank you so much, and thanks for your help.

Links:

• Episode 4 – Working with directors
• Episode 176 – Advice to a First-Time Director
• Scrappy
• HyperCard
• Mount Wilson Observatory
• John’s shorts God and The Remnants
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Segments produced by Stuart Friedel. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: [singing] My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 693 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you introduce an idea to the audience? We’ll discuss setups that don’t feel like setups and, most importantly, make your audience feel smart. First, we have a lot of follow-up from listeners, some actual news, and some listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, I want to discuss The New York Times feature on the top 100 movies of the century so far.

Craig: Oh good, a list. Yay.

John: A list, but also there’s the meta around the list. I think it’s, actually, probably more interesting than the list itself.

Craig: Okay, I’m up for that.

John: You get to see different filmmakers and actors give their top 10 list, which is a performative, revealing kind of thing.

Craig: [laughs]

John: I want to discuss that. We’ll keep that as a special feature for our bonus, people who get to hear our unfiltered takes on these lists.

Craig: Where did Scary Movie 3 land?

John: It tops out on so many lists. It’s crazy.

Craig: It should be in there. Should be top seven.

John: Yes. Spoiler, I have no movies in the official big 100 list.

Craig: Well, I’m going to go ahead and presume I don’t either. [chuckles]

John: You don’t, you don’t. Perhaps we can make some more movies with all the new California tax credit money coming.

News this week that California legislators have voted to more than double the state’s film and television tax credit program and raising the cap to $750 million from $330 million. Basically, a proposed 35% tax credit, which is up from 25%. Most importantly, there’s more money available there to be spending on productions that are shot and posted here in California.

Craig: Yes. Let’s look at this as good news, bad news. Good news, more.

John: More.

Craig: Certainly, double sounds like a lot. Bad news, it is not a lot. It is still not what I would call a competitive program with basically anywhere else where Hollywood goes. Comparing it to the tax credit programs in Canada or Georgia, New Mexico, Louisiana, even New York, UK, it’s just not competitive with those, but it is less non-competitive than it used to be, right? It’s a good trend.

The hope is that the government can watch this work and go, “Hey, we’re not losing money on this. This isn’t a disaster. In fact, we could afford to be more aggressive later.” If this begins a trend, that’s great. The other interesting factor for this legislation, I believe, is that it limits the tax credit to a certain budget. A show can’t come in that costs $300 million and gobble up $300 million at this thing.

John: How these tax credits are structured is there are certain categories and budget levels of which the funds are tiered towards. Smaller movies and very small movies can get smaller amounts, but you’re right that one thing can’t take up all the money.

Craig: Right, which sounds good, but here’s the bad news part. The bad news part is that large productions tend to push way more into the economy, and they provide much more stability. For instance, if you have a show like, let’s say, Fallout, Fallout’s a big show. They spend a lot of money. They also take a lot of time to shoot. There will be more stability, more employees for a longer amount of time.

Those shows tend to also have multiple seasons, which means there is some ability for crew to say, “Hey, I now have a life where I work on this show, which will work steadily for the next X amount of years.” If the tax credit is chopped up among a lot of one shot things, you lose that sense of stability, because the point of this all is, “Hey, how do we provide a living to people, an actual manageable living?”

John: Well, it’s important to note that these tax credits are about jobs. They’re specifically about reimbursing money spent on people’s employment, people’s salaries for the work that they’re doing. That’s what you’re trying to base it on. Your point is well-taken that you’re spending a lot more of those on these big productions. That goes on longer. That has a bigger effect. I just say, the counterpoint is that by spreading around to smaller productions, too, you’re enabling a wider number of people to get these things. You may be able to incentivize production in places that don’t otherwise get it that aren’t big production hubs. There’s reasons also to be providing tax credits for smaller things.

Craig: Absolutely. Everything’s a choice. When you are dealing with scarcity, you have to make a choice. These other places that I mentioned don’t really have much in the way of scarcity. They don’t really have effective caps like this. If you want to make a small movie in Alberta or if you want to make a large television show in Alberta, you’re both getting it. You’re both getting the benefit of this.

For California, the calculus is we’d like to hire more individual people as opposed to hiring fewer individual people more consistently. That’s the trade-off you have when you aren’t going for large– Large television productions will pump the most money into a system in the most reliable and lengthy way. We don’t have that yet, but I think this is a good sign that something is happening.

If we can hopefully prove that this isn’t some sort of problem and people can get over the fact that the tax credits go right back to these massive corporations, then perhaps California will start to edge its way towards competitive because California has an inherent edge, which is this is where people live. There are costs associated with shooting elsewhere. A promising thing, this is not ideal, but we don’t need ideal right now. We just needed something.

John: Absolutely. The other factor is that with this kind of tax credit, actors and directors and producers and other folks involved in the movie can say, “No, no, I want to shoot in California,” and there’s math that can actually make it more sense to shoot in California. It ultimately come down to more individual decision-makers about the choice to shoot in California than just it is impossible budgetarily to shoot here.

Craig: Yes. People have been working on this lottery system where, if you’re lucky enough, you get what that limited tax credit program was. Our friend, Derek, who makes the new show Countdown on Amazon Prime, they won the lottery. They were able to shoot here in California. I went to go see the first episode at their premiere. You get up there in front of people and you say, “Oh, I would like to thank blah-blah-blah,” and everyone applauds, “Yay.” Derek said, “I’m very proud of the fact that we’re able to shoot this show entirely here in Los Angeles.”

The cheer from that crowd, it was like a cheer of like, “Finally.” It made me sad in a way that that was so special. It shouldn’t be special. It should be the norm. Let’s see how we do.

John: Yes. While we’re talking about numbers, we can talk about the WGA annual report. Each year, the Writers Guild of America West publishes an annual report, which is basically all their financials, but also reports on how the membership is doing and basically what number of writers reported earnings, what the total earnings were, differences between screen, which is basically television and streaming, versus theatrical. We’ve talked about these over the entire course of the Scriptnotes podcast. Craig, what are you seeing here as you’re looking through these numbers? We’ll put a link in the show notes to the PDF.

Craig: Well, these reports have a lot of stuff going on, but we tend to look at two things when we do this, you and I. One is, how many people are working? The other is, how much money are we making for the writing we do and for the residuals that we are all collectively receiving? Let’s talk about the number of writers working. It’s not great. It’s bad.

John: 5,228 writers reported earnings in 2024. Those numbers will go up a little bit just with late reporting, but it’s down 9.4% for the previous year. It’s really down from the high, which is 6,910, which was back in 2022.

Craig: Yes, the thing that’s really frightening to me is that it’s down. You’re absolutely right that these numbers from the prior year will always be a bit compressed because they don’t have all the data in yet, but it should be way, way up at this point, even so, from prior year, because the prior year was impacted obviously by the strike. If you just look at 2019, 6,833 writers reported earnings. In 2024, we’re looking at 5,228. That’s bad. That’s more than 1,000.

John: It’s a big drop. Yet, Craig, if we were to roll back even earlier before, we’re at the top 2015, 2016. I don’t have those numbers in front of me, but you and I both know that the membership used to be smaller. The number of writers in the guild grew with the rise of streaming. With the rise of streaming series, there were more jobs than there ever have been before. I think what we’re really looking here is a retrenchment in the number of series shot. That’s really what it comes down to is there’s less development. There’s less things being shot. There’s fewer writers being hired because there are fewer shows. There was a huge growth with the growth of streaming that appears to be pulling back.

Craig: Yes, we know for sure that there was retraction in the amount of shows. What we don’t quite yet know is how we’re doing in terms of the average number of people employed per show. Obviously, that was something that was important during the strike to the Writers Guild to create minimum room sizes, which they did. Minimum room sizes are minimums. Those minimum room sizes were smaller than, say, what I think the Writers Guild would hope would be an ideal room size.

John: What was a classically-sized room.

Craig: Right.

John: There are rooms like The Simpsons, which seem to have 30 writers in them. The overall size of rooms has gone down noticeably.

Craig: Yes, I guess the point is, regardless of why, if people are walking around out there going, “It is tough out here,” the answer is yes. Factually, numerically, there are fewer jobs.

John: The corollary to this is the actual amount of earnings has gone up. The earnings were up 12.7% from last year. There are fewer writers working, but those writers who are working appear to be bringing in more money. That is not entirely unexpected. If the people who are not working are the people who were earning the least, and people who are working now are earning significantly above scale, that would be one reason to expect that this number did increase.

Craig: Yes, it does look like the percentage over the prior year, of course, is up because, again, strike. Let’s just say again, going back to 2019, there are about 1,600 fewer writers. The total earnings, only $300 million less. I can’t do the per-writer number here quickly, but it looks like it’s higher, yes.

John: I think the changes you would see here is during the real boom time of streaming, there were a lot more writers working in streaming who are working probably at scale in those lower-level positions. With fewer shows happening, with fewer writers being hired at those levels, the actual amount per writer has gone up. That would make sense.

Craig: Yes. It doesn’t surprise me a ton because so much of our earnings is pegged to scale because so much in television–

John: Especially in television.

Craig: Yes. If you have more and more people who are working as writer/producers in television, which has become far more common as the rooms have shrunk down, so much of the writer income will be pegged to just minimums because it’s the producer income that’s flexible. That will go up by roughly 3% across every three years. I think it is something like that. That’s not super surprising to me. I think we probably are in a place that’s right now in terms of the amount of writers working that is similar to what it was in the earlier parts of the 2010s.

That’s my gut. Let’s also break it out for a moment in terms of screen and television because our poor screenwriters is always, “Let’s start with feature writing,” which has been hammered over time. It’s not terrible news. We look like we’re starting to recover here. 2024, about 1,900 writers working in features compared to 2019, 2,350. Again, that 1,900 is a little low. I would imagine it’ll end up in the low 2000s, which means it’s not that far off actually.

John: We show as being down 3%, but that 3% could become 0% when, actually, the late reporting comes in. The dollars are up already 14.2% versus the previous year.

Craig: Yes, but, again, okay, here’s the problem with the previous year. Previous year is a strike year, right? Everything looks great compared to 2023.

John: Very good, so we have to compare it to–

Craig: Yes.

John: If you jump back several years, it’s just lower than it was.

Craig: Yes, it’s not great. I think the per-writer amount is down. It looks like it’s down to me significantly, which-

John: -which honestly matches my anecdotal experience just talking to people, talking to reps. It’s harder to make the big deals. It’s harder to bump people’s quotes.

Craig: Yes, and this is an area where you will see the market reflected in total earnings as opposed to television because, in television, the market does put a lot of flexible money in producing fees. In screen, it doesn’t. Screen is generally an overscaled thing. The market is reflected in these numbers, and it doesn’t look great. It does look down, but it’s not horrifying.

It’s not what it was five years ago. Just not as good. In television, yes, it’s weird. It’s like the money actually per writer is doing fine. It’s just the amount of writers has plummeted. That’s where the real plummeting has occurred. In 2019, 5,581 writers in television. In 2024, 4,117. Let’s call it even 4,500 by the time the year ends. That’s a thousand fewer. That’s a lot.

John: Let’s quickly touch on residuals. Residuals are, of course, all the monies that writers get paid for their work when it’s reused off of not its original airing of things or not its original screening, but down the road. It used to be DVD money and other things like that. Those numbers have increased. The five-year change is 19.3% up total residuals. We can put in the chart that shows TV residuals versus theatrical residuals.

They’re both up. In any individual category like DVD or network stuff, those things have fallen off a cliff over the last 10 years. What we now call new media, which is streaming, which is everything else, which is all the things that the guild had to fight for over these years to increase those rates, those have made up the difference. Those are the bulk of what the residuals are that writers are getting paid.

Craig: Yes, so there are some good news in here. They have all these categories, and they’ll show you the percent changes for all of them. Again, skip the 2023 to 2024. Just go 2019 to 2024. All these numbers look either horrible or great, but they’re irrelevant in terms of percent. It’s really the percentage of what. What we see, the most important two are new media reuse for SVOD and new media reuse for non-SVOD, meaning, okay, streaming video on demand, and I guess ad-supported or whatever. I don’t know what else.

John: It’s also direct buys through iTunes, through Prime Video, and such.

Craig: Those things are up dramatically. That’s where the bulk of our residual income comes from, by far. Those numbers are good. The trend there is great.

John: Last year, writers brought in $562 million in residuals. That’s great. That’s money going to individual writers. It’s important to understand that in the Writers Guild, those residuals go directly to the writer. It doesn’t go into any big slush fund for the guild itself. Those monies are paid out to individual writers. Writers pay percentage fees back to the guild, but the overall pool goes to those writers. Those are crucial quarterly checks that help smooth out the ups and downs of the business.

Craig: Right. The fear that those would be eliminated, I think the guild, through its efforts and through the efforts of the membership, particularly this last strike, is going to help because of the way it did lock in some success-based residuals for streaming. It looks like we’re going to be okay on that front. Theatrical residuals. For screenwriters, it’s doing quite well, I would say, overall. Just flat-out numbers look much better. These are spread over, not the writers that we just described as working. These are spread over all writers who got anything ever.

John: Got a credit on a teleplay, on a screenplay, yes.

Craig: In 1998. It’s for everything. The residual picture looks pretty healthy. I think the big challenge for the Writers Guild is going to be employment. That’s what it’s going to be because, ultimately, it’s the employment now that drives residuals later.

John: It’s also crucial to understand that the Writers Guild represents the writers who are working, but it does not get writers jobs. The actual frustrating experience of not being able to land a job because there’s not a show to be made is not a thing that the guild directly controls, or we will lose members who will time out of their eligibility to be active members of the guild because they won’t have worked for a while. That’s a thing that’s just going to happen.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. There’s a number in here that is such a fascinating one. Then I think we probably covered the financial thing. They do a little review of the legal department. What they do is they break out the various kinds of cases that the legal department brings against the companies. Cases for initial compensation or for pension and health, or they screwed up the credits, whatever it may be. They list the amount of monies that they’ve collected.

I think the trend is that the legal department is seemingly getting a bit more aggressive because the compensation they’re collecting is more, but there’s one number that I would love to find out what the deal is. Let’s just look at residuals. In 2018, they collected $6.5 million in penalties for residuals that the companies didn’t pay. Next year was $2.3 million. Next year was $946,000. The next year was $12 million. 2023, it was $2 million. 2024 is $9 million.

It’s always between nothing and $10 million. In 2022, they collected $70 million in residuals penalties. I want to know what that is. Was that one massive case against Netflix or something?

John: If I’m remembering correctly, it could have been the Netflix case, or, basically, the case of made-for-streaming movies, and what happens with a made-for-streaming movie and what basis they have to be paid out on. I suspect that is what you’re looking at. It’s really a judgment.

Craig: It’s massive.

John: Yes.

Craig: Anyway, it looks like the legal department is being pretty aggressive, which is great.

John: It’s what you want.

Craig: Yes, they have a ton of open cases, which sometimes means they’re just not mulching through cases. In this, based on what I’m looking at here, it looks like there’s a ton of open cases because they keep opening more cases.

John: Yes, that’s what you want.

Craig: Which is good.

John: Money well spent is getting writers paid.

Craig: Yes.

John: All right, let us talk about some follow-up here. First off, we have a correction. Drew, help us out. On Episode 689, we were talking about postmodernism, and it’s not a surprise that we may have said something wrong.

Drew Marquardt: Marion writes, “I want to write to say that the Disney corporate headquarters was designed by Michael Graves, not Robert Venturi, and the product line for Target was also designed by Graves. I’m going to intentionally avoid discussing whether or not the building’s terrible, but I must confess that I’m an architect, and I own several of the Michael Graves pieces from Target.”

Craig: Okay, so we thought it was Robert Venturi. Michael Graves is a very famous architect. The Disney corporate headquarters is a bad building.

John: Yes.

[laughter]

John: Both things can be true, yes.

Craig: I will confess that when you look at the–

John: I love looking at it.

Craig: It’s incredible. From the outside, that building is a masterpiece. If you have to actually work in it or even just go to a meeting in it, horrible.

John: The building causes physical pain upon entering.

Craig: It is the most startling misuse of space, but outside, it looks great.

John: Yes, and so another reminder that Craig and I can make mistakes even without ChatGPT. We can just make mistakes out of our own brain.

Craig: Isn’t that amazing?

John: It really is. We have some follow-up about AI video and VFX because we’ve talked in Episode 689, how visual effects is going to be greatly impacted by AI, just because obviously. We have feedback from Lee in Montreal.

Craig: Okay.

Drew: “I’m speaking as someone who has worked in VFX for 30 years at Weta, MPC, Rhythm & Hues, Sony Imageworks, Cinesite, and DNEG. What has been killing VFX in the past couple of years has been a lack of greenlit projects, not generative AI. We’ve lost thousands of jobs. Many of whom are already leaving the industry before AI will have a real impact. Generative AI, as we see on social media, isn’t yet good enough to meet the exacting standards of Hollywood clients. My question for you as showrunners and directors is, as generative AI gets more powerful, would you want to hire a couple of people directly as part of your production team to sit in a corner and try to generate all of your project’s VFX content using generative AI, or would you still hire a VFX supervisor and proven vendors to execute your brief?”

Craig: All right.

John: Craig, so you’re hiring people more directly than I am, but I think it’s a real question of like, how much stuff do you feel like you might take internally to the team versus your classic way of working with vendors? What are you thinking?

Craig: Well, first of all, Lee, my heart goes out to you because you’ve worked at two companies that have imploded. MPC and Rhythm & Hues. Because of The Last of Us, we do a ton of work with Weta and DNEG. Yes, there has been an interesting shift in the business where there was– I would say in 2020, 2021, the world was actually terrified that there weren’t enough VFX artists out there for the amount of work that had been greenlit, and then there was this massive retraction.

The VFX industry hires people in waves. It’s almost like large corporate farming interests that bring people in for harvests and then lay them off. There’s a lot of like, “You’re hired,” “You’re laid off.” There’s not a lot of good, consistent work there, and it is a mess. That said, generative AI to me is the answer to nothing. I rely heavily on my VFX supervisor, Alex Wang, and our proven vendors, including Weta and DNEG. The only thing that we do in-house is a small amount of work that is still regular VFX work.

We’ll have an in-house group that handles traditional VFX work, not through AI, but that is of very simple nature. Doing split screens or some very simple comp work or beauty fixes where there’s a blemish that you want to just get rid of, or things like that that aren’t a bloater running through the snow, it makes sense to actually have an in-house team that handles some of that stuff. The idea that we would have anybody sitting there using generative AI to make creative choices or even begin creative thinking is not something I have on my show, and it will not be.

John: Yes, I think this point you’re making about, there’s stuff that used to be visual effects, but it got pulled back into editorial, that it’s things you’re doing much closer to the source, because you can. That makes sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the tools that come out of generative AI, we talked before about sound fixes, there’ll be things like beauty fixes.

There’ll be some things, which I suspect over the course of the next few years, will get pulled closer to the editorial flow rather than the visual effects flow. That makes sense. I do wonder if there are going to be some movies and some shows for which the visual effects and the pre-visualization, all of that process gets to be much blurrier. Almost in the way that animation goes from storyboarding to things much more quickly.

I suspect that we’ll see some new workflows and some models for this kind of stuff. I agree with Craig, and what we’ve always stressed with these tools, is that you want to make sure that the person who’s using these technologies is the person whose job it is actually to do, to create the final thing. Whatever these technologies in generative AI can create, you want the person who is the visual effects supervisor, the visual effects artist, to be using them because that’s a creative artistic thing they’re doing. It’s not just done by some random person sitting over there at a desk.

Craig: [chuckles] Yes, there is no doubt, AI that is being used inside of tasks. A very simple visual effect thing to do is a comp. I have a guy. He’s standing in front of a green screen. The wind is moving, so his hair is blowing around. Now, we have a comp that goes behind him. Somebody has to deal with all the hair in front of the green screen, and that may be stuff that, internally, they’re using AI to do.

It is not creative work. It is just rote work. Highlight and roto every single piece of hair. If AI can do that more quickly than somebody with a tablet, yes, of course, that’s going to happen just like– I don’t necessarily think of the filters in Photoshop as AI, even though, in a sense, they are. They’re algorithms, really, very fancy algorithms. The artistry, no. You’re right. There is a lot of connection now.

Our editors work right next to the visual effects team while we’re shooting up in Canada in a way that the visual effects department now works very closely with the art department. Production design and visual effects are now– I think of them as one big group because there’s such a blending that has occurred. We also integrate VFX with the makeup department. It’s touching everything.

It’s funny, Lee. We do the opposite of what you’re wondering about. Rather than having generative AI kicking out some concepts or things, we use illustrators like actual artists, like illustrative artists, to start, the most human possible way to start, because I find that where you start will tend to be where you start. If you start with generative AI, the path to the end begins with crap. I wish you the best, Lee. I hope you’re doing okay out there. It sounds like, based on the description, that you are indeed still doing okay. Hang in there. We treasure the work that you do.

John: All right. Also in Episode 689, we talked about verticals, which are those stories for your phone, its video, lots of little chapters.

Craig: Oh yes.

John: I was sure that we’d have somebody in our listenership who’s written for these. Risky Business wrote in because he has written for verticals.

Drew: Risky Business writes, “I spent six months writing for ReelShorts. As a writer, it was terrible.”

Craig: What?

Drew: “The first 10 chapters were poured over with repeated rewrites until all the joy was taken out of them. Pretty much, they didn’t care. The rest of the story had little oversight as they didn’t expect people to watch. The CEO repeatedly criticized the writers in company-wide messages while giving 100% of the credit for success to the editors, all while paying $22 an hour with no work orders between feedback cycles and a constant, ‘Your contract can be canceled at any time,’ hanging over your head, and expectation that you’d be immediately available the second they had feedback, which sometimes took over a week to receive.”

“It ended up being less than minimum wage to basically hold all the blame for a possible failure poured on you from the entire company. Creative decisions were made entirely by algorithms based on what was selling, the whole prediction model that Hollywood is always trying to master contracted by the short production schedule. I’ve not had the pleasure of joining any union, but the success of ReelShorts definitely scares me. If the model succeeds, AI will definitely be writing the scripts, and the CEO can have his dreams of never having to rely on a writer’s creativity again.”

John: Yes, so what Risky is describing really feels like the fears you have when you talk to folks who’ve written at Netflix. The softer Netflix version is they’ll tell you like, “Our data shows that people don’t like to see cats in the first three minutes of a show,” or they’ll have some specific things like, “Okay, we can’t do that.” Fine, whatever, but the feedback mechanism is so much longer there.

With something like ReelShorts, all they’re trying to get you to do is to watch through enough episodes that you’ll hit the buy button and then watch the rest of it. The rest of it doesn’t have to be good because they don’t really care. As long as you hit that buy button, you’ve stayed on board. That is just toxic to storytelling. It’s the opposite of anything you would want to do, and yet writers are being paid to do it.

Craig: Based on this and based on what you just said, my prediction is that this thing implodes because it feels like the sort of thing that will be carried briefly by some TikTok wave or sense of novelty, and then everybody will catch on. Once you pay your subscription, it’s crap, and it doesn’t matter. They’ll get bored, and they’ll move on. Regardless, right now, they exist. They sound like a sweatshop.

Let’s just say that this sounds horrible. I don’t really see what the point is of working there because you’re not writing. Just to be clear, sometimes people will bait hooks with the worm of at least you’re writing. This is not writing. It seems like writing, but it’s not. If it is paying, as Risky Business says here, $22 an hour and eventually less than minimum wage because of the overtime that gets baked in there, go work somewhere else.

Work at Starbucks and write something you care about and love. There’s nothing here. There’s neither a ladder for promotion. There is not the ability to get better as a writer. There’s not the ability to make relationships that are going to serve you throughout your career. There’s no value here to you as a writer, none. I would say that I would not advise anyone to work there.

John: If people think we’re being a little unfair to this one company, I will say, we’ll put a link in the show notes to a Time magazine interview with Joey Jia, who is the CEO there. One of the questions they ask is, “Who writes the content on ReelShort? There are reports that some of the content sounds like they’ve been written by AI.” The answer is, “If AI could write the content and make money right away, I would do everything with AI.” Great. Well, he’s not hiding the ball there.

Craig: Yes, no, but then he says, “No, it’s our in-house editors.” This is backing up our friend who’s writing in where the editors get all the credit. We have an in-house editor, also an in-house screenwriting team. People say, “Oh, your content is really like AI. I disagree.” Well, it doesn’t really matter, as far as I’m concerned, what people think the content is. All that I care about is the health, security, and quality of life for professional writers in our business. I don’t see any reason to work at this place. If they were paying $50 an hour, we’d have to have a discussion.

John: Try to?

Craig: No, just go work at Starbucks.

John: Yes, agreed. All right, let’s transition from that dystopian view to– This last week, I got to have the utopian version of that, which is I was an advisor for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.

Craig: Great.

John: For 25 years, I’ve now worked at the Screenwriters Lab, which is crazy. For folks who don’t know what that is, they bring in filmmakers who are working on their next feature. In the summer labs, they will have already shot two of the scenes from their things, just up on a mountain with random actors, just to test stuff out. Then there’s a screenwriting lab that’s just one week afterwards, which we talk through about what they’ve learned, where they’re at with their script. We give them specific feedback.

I describe it as being like, “We are your friend with a pickup truck who shows up to help you move from where you were to your new place. We’re not going to tell you how to do stuff, but we’re there to help you carry your couch.” One of the best things about this process is that you get to talk to other really smart screenwriters who are talking about the projects that they’re working on with their advisees. Some quotes I wrote down. Robin Swicord says, “Act 1 is the suitcase you pack for the journey,” which just feels so smart and right.

Craig: That’s true.

John: I love that. Stephen Gaghan was talking about how he likes to do a transition pass. After finishing a draft, he’ll set it aside for a second and go back and just look at all the transitions, like transitions from scene to scene, but really from idea to idea, even within scenes, and just really focus on how you’re moving from this place to that place. It’s such a smart idea. I’ve never thought to actually just spend one pass through just looking at the transitions.

Craig: Well, I love that because we talk about transitions all the time. That’s the thing that separates scripts that turn into things that feel like not smooth unities, and then the ones that do. So far, Robin and Stephen are A+.

John: Absolutely. Liz Hannah, who’s been on the show several times out of joy, one of the things she likes to do is to actually literally retype the script. She’ll have it open in one window, have a clean document, and actually retype the whole thing. She gets it back in her fingers. Obviously, you’re changing things along the way. That is a kind of thing I would not do, but I really appreciate the instinct behind that. That feels, I don’t know, just a way to get it back into your bones.

Craig: That’s one of those classic bits of advice that is either going to be 100% useful or 0% useful, depending on the person, because if it works for you, oh, my God, it’s probably a revelation.

John: Yes.

Craig: If it doesn’t, well, then you tried it once, and you don’t have to do it again. [chuckles]

John: Absolutely. The thing I also really enjoy about the labs is, as an advisor, I’m looking at three different projects. These were three very different projects. In two of the projects, I noticed a thing that we needed to do. It never really occurred to me before. In both projects, we got to a place where we needed the characters to confront specific dramatic questions in the third act, concepts, but there was no real good way to introduce them there at that moment.

We needed to set them up earlier, but it could feel really forced. It was really the conversation about, how do we introduce ideas so that they’re available to the audience when we get there later on so that we put them into the world of the movie? It’s not exposition exactly. It’s not where we’re saying like, “Oh, to launch the missile, you have to turn these two keys.”

It’s more abstract. It’s how you introduce an idea rather than a fact, an idea like, what does it even mean to own land, or can you ever trust someone who’s betrayed you? You’re priming the audience for those questions. I just want to spend a few minutes, Craig, talking about this need. It’s a thing I’ve found myself doing all the time but never really being aware that I was doing it.

Craig: Sure, and this is one of the craftier bits of our jobs. It is calculated. This is palming something as a magician.

John: It’s magic trick.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. We could go on and on about why it’s more satisfying, but it doesn’t matter. We just know it is more satisfying if something emerges in the third act that feels like, “Oh, it has been there the whole time. We just missed it as characters.” Now, we see it as opposed to just realizing it then late.

John: One of the projects, I’m talking in very vague terms here, but it’s set present day, but hinges on something that happened in that region during World War II. If that were to come up just out of the blue in the third act, it’s going to feel weird and forced. If we bring it up randomly in Act 1, it’s going to feel like a setup. You’re going to feel the setup-ness on it. You’re looking for ways. You can introduce the notion of World War II, the notion of the history here without feeling like, “Okay, this has the objective of doing this thing.”

The answers for that is you’re always looking at, what is the present-tense problem? What is the present-tense need of the scene that brings up this idea so it feels natural to the moment that you’re in and, of course, seeds us for later on, that it feels like, “Oh, of course, the characters are having this discussion. Of course, this thing is being shown here,” or the scene that you’re currently in, and the audience has no idea that’s going to pay off later on?

Craig: Yes, there are two ways of going about this, and I strongly prefer one of them. One way is to introduce the idea in a manner that is not objectionable. An objectionable way is somebody goes, “By the way, you know what it is interesting that right here, which was the site of a World War II battle 30 years ago, happens to be the place where–” and then you go, “Okay.” Well, that is objectionable. A non-objectionable way would be like, they walk by and they see a sign like, “This place was a World War I site. This was a thing. This is World War II.” That’s interesting, and it’s not objectionable because it–

John: Like, “What happened to that church?” “Oh, it was this battle in World War II.”

Craig: Not objectionable. That’s one method, not objectionable. I strongly prefer the other method, which is essential, that when you are introducing this, it is the point of a moment, such that you believe it’s over. There is information here that I need you to know for a point right now that matters, that has nothing to do with why it’s going to be relevant later, because then you don’t feel at all like it’s superfluous. The ultimate trick to me is to make people believe that you are not palming a coin. You are actually holding a coin in your hand for a reason. Then later, it’s revealed, oh, also this.

John: Some examples from movies that might be helpful here. In Finding Nemo, Dory has a joke early on about, “Oh, I speak whale.” It just feels like that’s the thing that Dory would say. It’s a funny joke in the moment, but then later on, she actually does speak whale to a whale. It’s like, “Oh, I did not think that was a setup.” It’s just so much more rewarding because they got it in there without it feeling like a setup at the time. Or in A Quiet Place, the daughter’s cochlear implant is malfunctioning. It feels like you know why they’re doing that. It’s like, “Oh, that’s going to become a problem for this character.” You don’t feel like, oh, that’s actually going to be a solution to the things down the road.

Craig: That feels essential to me. I need you to understand that this person goes through a problem. It is a problem right now we have to solve. You will, in your human story eating mind, go, “Oh, this was important for me to understand a character, what their challenges are, what they want and need, how they relate to their parents, what they need from their parents.” There is meat there. It mattered. That’s better than what I would call the non-objectionable.

John: Absolutely. There was a bottle thought here. It’s like, “Oh, why are you telling me this?” Some of what we’re talking about has obvious overlap with what we’ve talked about before in terms of exposition. I know this specifically because I was looking through the exposition chapter in Scriptnotes book. In terms of sometimes you’re direct, sometimes you’re indirect. I want to make sure we’re also thinking about, sometimes I just need to prime the audience for a concept, or just the notion of a thing that could happen within the course of this movie.

Sometimes it’s bringing up an analogous situation. In one of my scripts, it ultimately hinges on trust. I have one of my characters listening to a call-in radio show. They’re talking about this husband’s betrayed her, and I can’t ever forgive that. Just setting up the idea of trust as being a thematic element is natural to do in a way that is going to pay off later on, but it doesn’t feel like it’s hitting you over the head in the moment.

Craig: It’s got to have its own reason to live there. If it has its own reason to live, no one will think, “Oh, that’s weird that they mentioned that. I wonder if it’ll come up later.” We’re all very good at picking that thing out. If it has its own reason to exist, you’ve solved the problem. Sometimes I think people are so worried about hiding it that they contort themselves into pretzels to make something blend in so casually that it’s almost not a thing at all. Unnecessary and usually sweatier than just confronting it head-on and making it be a thing that matters right now.

John: Absolutely. All right. Let’s get to a couple of listener questions. Drew, start us off.

Drew: Sarah writes, “I’m a screenwriter from the Netherlands whose secret side ambition is to someday direct music videos. After watching the excellent new music video for Sabrina Carpenter’s Manchild, however, I’m at a loss. How would you even start communicating the idea for a project like that? As a screenwriter, I just cannot imagine how this would look on the page. At the same time, it seems impossible to pull this off without a script. I know directing music videos is an incredibly specific skill on its own, but I’m very curious what your thoughts would be. Also, what are some of your favorite music videos?”

John: All right. Drew, it’s so interesting that the listener wrote in with this question because you would actually put this music video on the slack, because you’re like, “Wait, is this AI?” I was like, “I don’t think it’s AI. I think it’s just a lot of hard work.” Then we looked back through the behind-the-scenes of these directors working on stuff. It’s like, “Oh, no, they just work really hard.” There’s just a lot of setups and a lot of visual effects. It is a very good video.

Sarah, I’m going to challenge your question. Most of these music videos do not have a script the way that Craig and I are doing scripts. They tend to have documents that lay out the overall vision for something. It might be a one-page brief of what this is, what the concept is, but then they’re going to have a lot of storyboards, setups, a listing of things for these are the moments that we’re shooting that become the production plan for everybody else, the equivalent of the script that they would use for breakdown, for scheduling, for wardrobe. I would be shocked if there’s anything that looks like a script for this music video.

Craig: Definitely. I think, Sarah, this is one of those deals where it’s a very what I call, directorish thing. No one comes in with a screenplay. In fact, I imagine that there never was anything like that here. This feels so much like somebody comes in with the mood board and crazy pictures of wacky cars on the road. What if you cut one in half and it’s so surreal and da, da, da, and the palettes will be this and this and we’ll do these colors.

Then you start to tell this little story that you imagine that you could just describe, like basically she’s hitchhiking, going from one crazy place to another, and blah, blah, blah.

Then you start storyboarding. I don’t see why you would need a screenplay for this. It feels very storyboardy. The way they shoot these things, I would imagine, is to get lots and lots of little mini movies that they then cut together to make 12 movies that seem like they’re going on all at the same time, and then edit it all together. The thing about a music video like this is there is no real coherent structure to it. The structure is the song. The song provides the structure.

John: Absolutely. The music can exist in this liminal dream state. It doesn’t have to make narrative sense. That’s one of the joys of it. You also asked our favorite music videos. We had Daniels on, so I would say Turn Down for What is an incredible music video.

Craig: So good.

John: I would say David Fincher’s Express Yourself by Madonna is incredible in terms of it actually does have a narrative storytelling drive. It’s inspired by First Land’s Metropolis. It is just really well done and does tell a story. It does all the music video things it needs to do so well. That’s a highlight for me. Craig, any other ones that jump out for you?

Craig: There have been so many great ones. Some of them do decide, “Hey, what we’re going to do is we’re going to tell a story that isn’t really reflected in the lyrics of the song, but we’re going to pick something else.” Take On Me is one of the great videos of all time by A-ha. They really told a story based on the movie Altered States. That’s what they did. They said, “What if we did an Altered States?” The idea was it was a man that lives in comics who’s trying to become real, all the way to him slamming back and forth against the walls, just like William Hurt. Great.

A lot of music videos are about showing awesome visuals that have nothing to do with the lyrics whatsoever. If I looked at the lyrics for Manchild, I don’t know if I’m going to see anything there– I’m actually looking at them right now, that would indicate this is what you would do. There’s nothing in here that implies we should be on the road going through a series of hitchhiking moments with crazy visual effects. They’re just letting the structure of the song give you structure, knowing full well, the entire thing is going to be over in, what, three minutes or so. Just delight me with visuals that maybe progressively get crazier, a little bit of an ironic ending, and you’re done.

John: The one other one which I’ll put in the show notes is Riz Ahmed’s The Long Goodbye, which I’m looking up now, it’s directed by Aneil Karia. When it starts, it’s so slice of life. It’s just a short film, basically, that eventually the song starts, and it gets into a thing. It’s a situation where I can imagine there probably was some scripting there because there’s a lot of characters. The verisimilitude of just the space that they’re in and the conversations feels like it could be scripted before it gets to the actual big events.

I don’t want to say much more. It’s 11 minutes. It’s worth watching it. I think it got a–

Craig: It won an Oscar.

John: Did it win the Oscar in 2022?

Craig: I think it did.

John: It’s remarkable. I’d point that out as another example of the music video that probably had something resembling a script at some point, but that’s more the exception rather than the rule.

Craig: You can do basically anything you want. That was a short film. It was 11 minutes long. You could do a Phil Collins music video for Billy, Don’t You Lose My Number I think it was called, where the whole music video was music video directors pitching him ideas for the music video for that song, and then them doing parodies of other music videos. You can do whatever you want. [chuckles] Everything from story to not.

John: I celebrate what has been made possible by the music video because yes, we had commercials before that, but I think just we’ve had a lot of great directors come out of music videos, but also just a lot of cool art and a lot of cool just ways of thinking about visual storytelling that have come out of music videos.

Craig: Absolutely. Music videos and commercials are both interesting places where new things are invented, or things that are subcultural get pulled up into culture. Madonna very famously pulled Vogue up out of the subculture.

Drew: Let’s do one last question here, one from anonymous. “I’ve been working in the legal field for over 10 years, and a couple years ago put my undergrad English degree to use and started screenwriting. My two features have had great feedback, including from a friend who’s a professional screenwriter with several credits. That friend is encouraging me to set up meetings in LA with agents and managers and has made recommendations on who to reach out to.

Here’s the problem. In this world, with this president, at this time, should I, as a transgender person, be open about my identity? I know that being trans has at times limited opportunity as a lawyer, but that hasn’t stopped me. Just altered my trajectory a little. One script I wrote features a trans protagonist, and my other screenplays have strong queer themes. Now I’m wondering if an agency or studio would view a trans writer as a liability they would be unwilling to take on during this administration. Happy Pride, and I hope that those in the generation behind me won’t have to worry like this.”

John: Happy Pride, anonymous. Obviously, I’ve been out my entire career. Easier for a gay man to be out. Being out as a cisgendered gay person is a different lived experience than being a trans person. Everything just means a different thing for me and for your experience. I think the fact that you are writing material with trans characters is going to naturally raise the question of whether you have the lived experience to be writing these things and be reflecting the things on the page. My instinct is you’re probably going to want to be open about your identity from the start. That’s just my first blush instinct, correct? Craig, what are you feeling?

Craig: I come at this just from a purely analytical point of view. I think about the business and the way people function here, so I’ll be very cold and calculating. In my cold and calculating way, I think you’re absolutely right, John, that it is a plus if people are considering a feature script that is about a trans person, if the trans person is centered in that story. Or, as you point out anonymous, you have screenplays with other strong queer themes. The first question they’re going to ask is “Who are you?”

That’s not to say that they might go, “Oh, you’re not trans? Then screw you. You can’t do this.” It’ll be considered a strong plus. I think the challenge you have is not whether or not being out as a trans person is going to impact you. I don’t believe it will. If it impacts you, it’ll impact you positively, I think, given your scripts. The challenge you’re going to have is that the interest in that kind of story right now has been reduced dramatically because these wonderful corporations, no matter how progressive they pretend to be, are always with their finger in the air, checking the wind direction.

Right now, I don’t think there’s a big push in Hollywood to be telling trans stories or queer stories. I think that there’s still some, but I think it’s been reduced. I think that there’s a natural reactivity to what they detect is some sort of backlash trend. That would be a bit of a challenge. Remember, the wheel of things turns slowly. You, as a producer, may say, “With the script I have right now, probably not a great time to walk over there into the chairman’s office and say, ‘Can I have $20 million to make this movie about a trans person?” In five years, they may be cool with it again, and it takes time for stuff.

Your job, anonymous, now that you’re starting to be a screenwriter, is to just get hired to do something. Whether they buy your script, or they love your writing, and then want you to work on something else, get yourself into the world of being a writer. My feeling is that I am not transgender, but I have people in my family very close to me who are. I think about these things all the time. The choice of whether or not you want to be out is more important than just how it impacts your career. I would say that question needs to be resolved by you for so many reasons in so many ways. That ultimately is your choice, but I do not think it would hurt you.

John: I think we’re in agreement here. If we have listeners who have more opinions on this, more specifically informed opinions, we’ll always be happy to hear them. All right. Craig, it’s time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing is this feature written up by Alvin Chang in The Pudding. I love The Pudding. It’s a website that does great deep dives and moving infographics on different topics. This one is called 30 Minutes with a Stranger, and it comes from this project called the Candor Corpus, which recorded 1,700 conversations between strangers.

How they would have these conversations is it was through a– It’s not a mechanical trick, but one of those sites where you get paid by the hour to do stuff. They would set up these people to have a 30-minute conversation that was recorded. They would ask these people before the conversation, right at the start of the conversation, middle conversation, and after the conversation, how they were feeling. Basically, what their emotional state was.

They would do this for all these conversations. The people who were in the study didn’t realize is that they were being set up with people who were like them. Age, demographics, ethnic background, political affiliation, and also people who were diametrically opposed to them. They could really see what is it like to have a conversation with somebody whose politics you fundamentally disagree with, who’s much older than you, much younger than you?

Craig, how do people feel about conversations with someone they generally matched up with versus someone who’s very different than them? What do you think the outcome of the conversations generally was? Did people feel better or worse after the conversations?

Craig: The optimist in me says that there was no difference.

John: The optimist is correct. People felt better after the conversations across the board. It really didn’t matter whether they were matched in those demographic terms or not. Even political affiliation, people generally felt better after conversations, which is what, again, you hope but worry that it’s not going to be true. It’s basically the experience of people just need to talk to people, and people like to talk to people. We are wired to talk to people. It doesn’t matter who you talk to. The experience of talking to people is positive for your emotional health.

Craig: Thank God there isn’t an entire industry designed on getting us to hate each other so that we click on stuff more and see more ads. This is the misery, the misery of social media, that it has taken something that is one of the few positives that we have. That when you just can talk to somebody, you can connect with them on a human basis, that is about things that are far more important and far more relevant than the superficial. It has turned it into shouting. Just basically thrown everybody into a shouting arena and have them scream at each other. This is a wonderful thing. I’m glad he did this. This is great.

John: I think the other crucial distinction here is social media allows you to take anonymous drive-by potshots at people.

Craig: Exactly.

John: It’s not conversation.

Craig: That’s right.

John: There’s a difference of actual conversation. Where there’s a back and forth where you actually have to listen, is a fundamentally different thing. We are wired to do it, and we just don’t create structures to do it as much as we need to.

Craig: I think that social media basically creates the conditions in which sociopaths are always living. Normal people look at each other, there is a human connection, they have a conversation. If you remove the human connection and you can just yell at somebody’s @ blankety blank, you are now living in the sociopath space. You do not detect their humanity at all, and now you can just do what you want. Horrible.

John: I’ve greatly scaled back my social media. Not to your extent, but to a large extent. There’s been times where someone has come at me weirdly aggressively, and it’s hard to do it. If I can just do the judo move of just honestly and emotionally responding to them, it does throw off the thing. It’s like, “Wait, people are just expecting to punch back.” When you don’t punch back, it throws them off. I don’t know. People say so many things they would never say to your face.

Craig: Of course.

John: I wish there was an option to like, “Great, let’s get on right now. Here’s my phone number. Call me and we’ll talk about this.”

Craig: I used to do things like that, and then I realized I could do this all day. It doesn’t matter. [crosstalk] There’s 12,000 other people.

John: There’s no winning.

Craig: This guy might be screwing with me anyway. He might be DMing his friend, going, “Oh my God. I got this guy talking to me now. LOL. What should I do?” It’s not real. It’s just not real social interaction. It doesn’t deserve our mind.

John: Just don’t talk to people.

Craig: I’ll tell you what deserves our mind, John. D&D and Chris Perkins. My one cool thing this week is Chris Perkins. Who is Chris Perkins? If you know, you know. Chris Perkins was the senior producer for Dungeons & Dragons and was a story genius for D&D and the general D&D world for so long. He just retired from Wizards of the Coast recently. He’s actually joined the whole crew over there at Critical Role, which is with Jeremy Crawford. John, you’ve heard me probably say Jeremy Crawford a few times at the table.

John: Jeremy Crawford is known as being the rules guru of D&D.
Craig Mazin: Jeremy was rules guru, and Chris was story guru. That’s very, very reductive, and I apologize to both of them. [chuckles] They had lots to do with each other and their work that they all did together. Both of them went, “You know what? Our time at Wizards is done. We’re going to move on and just join Critical Role, have some fun over there.”

Together, those guys really did help create the most successful edition of Dungeons & Dragons ever, 5th edition, which was released in 2014. Chris did do some work on the recent version that came out, the 2024. Those of us who play owe him a lot. For instance, Chris was the lead story designer for Curse of Strahd, which was the thing that brought Ravenloft, which has been around forever, into 5th edition. Anyway, I got a chance to meet Chris and actually play D&D with him. I’m playing, someone’s running Lost Mines of Phandelver.

John: Ah, the classic.

Craig: The classic. The intro story from 5th edition, which I’ve now played, DM’d, played, and played, he is playing with us, and he designed a lot of this.

John: So fun.

Craig: It is fun when the DM’s, someone goes, “Is the water coming out in a trickle, or is it a lot?” The DM’s like, “I’m looking. I think it’s a trickle.” Then right next to me, Chris goes, “No, it’s a lot.” [laughs] He’s fantastic. Really, Chris, I guess, and Jeremy. I should lump Jeremy Crawford in there as well. Both those guys are my one cool thing for helping with so many other people. I want to be clear, revitalizing Dungeons & Dragons and making it as super popular as it is today.

John: I got a chance to talk to Christopher Perkins, coming on three years ago, about wizard stuff, and so super smart, and that whole team. Not a surprise that he is just as great around a table as he is at writing these incredible rule books. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, it’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, our author this week is by Spencer Lackey.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You will find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have a new crafty episode. It was me and Christina Hudson talking action.

Craig, it’s one of the situations where video really is better than just the audio version of it because we can show you the screenplay as the scene is happening and see what’s on the page. Take a look at that one. You’ll find t-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware all at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in an email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the best movies of the 21st century. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Thank you, Drew.

Drew: Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Great. Craig, this past week, the New York Times has launched a feature which is looking at the top 100 movies of the 25 years of this century that we’ve been through so far. You can see their full list. Their full list has many of the movies you’d expect to see there. Craig, have you gone through and actually done the feature? Have you clicked through to see which of those movies you’ve seen so far?

Craig: Yes, I’m scrolling.

John: You’re scrolling. I’ve seen 80 of the 100, which is better than I expected.

Craig: Yes, that’s pretty good.

John: Because there aren’t a lot of esoteric, strange ones on there. There’s just things I just didn’t happen to see. They tended to be foreign films. They’ve always been on the list. I’ve never gotten to see them. It was crazy to me that Anora wasn’t on the list. I think that’s just recency problem is so that people aren’t thinking about stuff like I think Norrish would be on my top 10 list. I really thought the most interesting part about this, and Max Reid, who has been on our show before, pointed this out, is that there’s a separate list that the New York Times pushed of the people’s top 10 lists. That was partly how they made this whole big list.

It’s so fascinating to click through and see what are people’s top 10 lists like Mark Birbiglia. I’ll link in the show notes for that. Mark Birbiglia’s top 10, Children of Men, Frances Ha, Hot Fuzz, Idiocracy, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Sideways-

Craig: Great.

John: -Spotlight, Superbad, Squid and the Whale, and Up.

Craig: Wow. I love how comedy-heavy that is, of course.

John: Yes, which should totally make sense for Mark Birbiglia. Five of those movies are already on the top 100 list, five of them are not. It’s easy to see why you’re making the case for any one of those movies. Sometimes movies speak to you individually. They may not speak to everybody. Any list is going to be evening out the odd choices of an individual person. It’s just fun to see what people put there. Also the fact that it’s– I don’t want to say it’s performative, but you know this is going to become public. You might make choices there that reflect an intention on what you’re trying to communicate about, who you are based on what the top 10 things are that you’re recommending to people.

Craig: Can I ask a question?

John: Please.

Craig: I understand this is very much like religion. I know most people are religious, and I know most people believe in God and angels. I don’t. I never have. More to the point, it is not an active choice to disbelieve. I just don’t. Why do people make lists? What is this?

John: A couple of things I can think about. Why do people individually make lists? I don’t have a letterbox, but many people have a letterbox, and they have a public setting on a letterbox so everyone can see how they’re rating different movies. I think there’s a sense of how you want to put yourself out there in the world, how you want to have people perceive you, what you want to show as being your taste. Producer Drew Marquardt, have you gone through this? Have you marked which of these movies you’ve seen?

Drew: I did. Not to brag, I’ve seen 93.

John: 93? It’s incredible. Did you make your own individual top 10 list?

Drew: I did, but it’s impossible to do because 10 is too much to reduce to. Yes, I could show it to you, but it feels embarrassing in some way.

John: That’s the thing, too. I wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing my top 10 list. If I think about movies of all time, it’s easier for me to reach for these are iconic things, where Clueless and Aliens will always be in that top 10. Those would be super high here.

As I was going through this process with the top 100 movies, I was thinking about which of these would be on my top 10 list. Some of them I remember liking, but I haven’t gone back and rewatched them. I don’t know if I actually think they’re the best things ever, or maybe I’m just forgetting. A spoiler, Mulholland Drive is either number one or very high up there. I remember liking Mulholland Drive, but I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about it. I would never put it in my top 10 list because I just don’t remember it well enough. I feel like anything you put in your top 10 list, you should have to be able to speak for five minutes about why it’s so good.

Craig: Why is anything anything?? Honestly, this is my issue with this stuff is there’s an instinct, I think, among critics to rank stuff because that’s what they do. They’re pretending to have some analytical ability to quantify and qualify art, which is a ridiculous concept on its face. When you really look at it, it’s just absurd. When you dig underneath the hood of what it means to even describe something as having quality and how individual that is between you and the thing that you’re analyzing, all of it is absurd. Then the ranking of it feels vaguely masturbatory to me, designed to, I don’t know, create some authoritative hierarchy that is impossible to do and also pointless to do.

I think it’s actually demeaning to everything. If I’m Bong Joon Ho and I look on this and I go–

John: Parasite’s number one, that’s right.

Craig: Parasite’s number one. I don’t feel good. I’m like, “Wait.” Then Paul Thomas Anderson’s supposed to be looking at me going, “I didn’t do as well as you did with There Will Be Blood.” If anybody were to say to me, “Hey, I need you to do me a favor. Tell me which one is better, There Will Be Blood or Parasite?” I would say, “You’re an idiot.” That’s an idiot question that an idiot would pose because there is no ability to– first of all, why compare them at all? Second of all, why not just enjoy them both? Do you know what I mean?

John: I agree with you that comparing one to the other is crazy. Any of the films that are in this top 100 list are going to be, by default, really good movies. Here’s the argument I’ll make for why it’s useful for people to share their top 10 lists, or at least “Here’s a movie that you should absolutely check out.” I cannot remember which filmmaker it was, but some filmmaker recently was talking about how important Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona was to them. I’m like, “I have no idea what this movie is, but sure.” I put it on my list and I looked it up, and Mike was out of town one night, so I was like, “I’ll watch Persona.” I dug it. It was really weird.

It’s never going to be on my top 10 list, but it was so specific and strange, and I would never have thought to watch it if this filmmaker– I can’t remember which filmmaker it was, hadn’t talked about how important it was for their work. I think that is potentially the good and the joy of this is it’s exposing me to things that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen. In the case of the 20 movies that I haven’t seen, I was reminded, “Oh, you know what? I should probably check these out because there’s a reason why so many people like these movies that made it into the top 100.”

Craig: Sure. This is why I have no problem when people say, “Here are 20 movies from the 2000s I loved,” and list them in alphabetical order, because otherwise, what is the point of this? This numbering is so dumb. It is so anti-art. There isn’t a single director or screenwriter represented on this list, I believe. I swear to you. Not one who would go, “You know what? Yes, I’m glad that I was–“ I don’t think Denis Villeneuve is going, “Oh good, Arrival 29. That’s right. Just not quite as good as Dark Knight, but definitely a little bit better than Lost in Translation.” What?

John: I will say, there are many people who Big Fish is one of their favorite films, but it didn’t end up in the top 100, and it could have ended up in the top 100. I did look for it [unintelligible 01:10:15], it was not there. I do feel a little bit of that, but anywhere in that top 100, I would have celebrated. It wouldn’t have mattered where it ranked in this thing. It would have been nice to see that there. Yes, I get you. I agree.

I think this list is so much more helpful, though, for a person working in this industry now than the AFI top 100 movies of all time. Because when I look at those things like, [crosstalk] Citizen Kane or Meet Me in St. Louis, yes, those are classic films. That is not telling me at all about what it is to work in industry now. I think if you are coming into this industry today, you should have watched a lot of these movies because the people who made these movies are the people who are still running this industry.

Craig: Yes, this is a collection of fantastic movies, don’t get me wrong. There’s not one of these where I went, “Oh, I hate that.” There are a few where I’m like, “I’ve never heard of that, but that’s okay. That’s fine. Maybe I’ll check it out.” That’s fine, but this is why I love the AFI event at the end of the year, where they say, “Here are the 10 movies that we really loved this year. Here are the 10 TV shows we really loved.” No ranking, no award, no best, no competition.

This ranking thing, everyone has become a little film critic where they have to rank things, and then they argue over your number one is number your three. It’s really just them attacking each other’s taste, and it is performative. To me, this is a sell, this is an ad. [crosstalk] This is just the New York Times going, “Hey, click.”

John: [unintelligible 01:11:53] creating a little event for itself. Yes, I get it.

Craig: I swear to you, I feel like it is cheapening to– all of these really, there isn’t one thing here where I’m going, “Oh, that’s not–“ They’re all beautiful art, and they should all be celebrated, and putting them in a ranking, I hear David Lynch. I hear his voice. Did you ever see that interview where it’s early on in the days of the iPhone, where they’re talking about, “What do you think about people that might watch some of your movies on a phone?”

He’s like, “Why would you watch a movie on a phone? On a fucking phone?” This is a fucking list. I just can’t think of something David Lynch would be less interested in than a fucking list. Now, I could be wrong. The late, great David Lynch might actually have loved a list, I don’t know. In my mind, he hated them. Sorry about the f-bombs.

John: No, that’s all right.

Craig: Cool.

John: Thanks, Craig. Thanks Drew.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Links:

• The Best Movies of the 21st Century by NY Times
• California lawmakers approve expanded $750-million film tax credit program by Samantha Masunaga for LA Times
• WGA Annual Report – employment and earnings, residuals
• Michael Graves
• How ReelShort CEO Joey Jia Used a Chinese Trend to Disrupt the U.S. Entertainment Industry by Chad De Guzman for Time Magazine
• Sundance Labs
• Sabrina Carpenter – Manchild
• DJ Snake, Lil Jon – Turn Down for What
• Madonna – Vogue
• a-ha – Take On Me
• Riz Ahmed – The Long Goodbye
• Phil Collins – Don’t Lose My Number
• 30 minutes with a stranger by Alvin Chang for The Pudding
• Chris Perkins
• Mike Birbiglia’s top ten movies of the 21st century
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.