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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-premise).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 610 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what is it even about? We are discussing the premise, the very foundation of story, upon which we construct our takes. We also have a ton of follow-up on AI and language, listener questions, and more. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, it’s back to school season. We’ll reminisce about pencils and notebooks and what we do and don’t miss about being in school.

**Craig:** Oh my god, that’s like, we’ll reminisce about penny candy.

**John:** Ah, indeed. I love it.

**Craig:** Pencils and notebooks, what?

**John:** A preview for our listeners, I have such distinct olfactory memories, actually, of back to school season, like the smell of glue and paste and when you open up a new thing of Mead paper and the notebooks. I love it all.

**Craig:** Listen, it’s going to be a Gen X fest.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** We’re gonna talk you through all the pink erasers and-

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** … the little plasticky zip-loc pencil holders that would go on your three-ring binder. Oh, we got it all, my friends.

**John:** Yeah, plus the new jeans that are really too stiff when you’re first trying to break them in.

**Craig:** New jeans. Hey, guess what? Jeans used to be made out of the same stuff they use to cover old boats.

**John:** Now they use them to make the new WGA T-shirts.

**Craig:** That’s right, exactly. They use that now to punish us, in our hair shirts. Yes, all true, all true.

**John:** It’ll be fun. We’ll start with some actual news. In the headlines this week, there was a ruling saying that AI-created art is not copyrightable. This was a bid. Stephen Thaler is an artist, a person who made something or had his machine make something. He wanted to register it for copyright. The copyright office said, “Nope.” The judge in the case said, “Yeah, the copyright did the wrong thing. That is a no from me, dog. You cannot say that is a thing that you created that is going to be subject to copyright.”

It is interesting. There’s been a lot of little moments that have come along this way. I’ve testified on the WGA’s behalf in terms of our perspective on copyright and AI. It’s going to be an interesting area to follow over the next couple years about whether things that are made by AIs can be copyrighted and in what circumstances.

**Craig:** I think Stephen Thaler, I believe he owns some sort of AI business. I don’t think he’s an artist in and of himself. I could be wrong. Maybe he considers himself one. To me, this was a slam dunk. There is no reason to imagine that AI would have copyright production, any more than there’s a reason to think that AI would have freedom of speech protection. AI is not a person.

If there’s one thing we know, that I think we can all agree on when it comes to the Constitution – and copyright is enshrined in the United States Constitution – it is that the people who wrote it were writing it about people and did not imagine, predict that there would be artificial intelligence. There wasn’t even a cognate for it.

Sometimes people point out that the Second Amendment was written at a time when guns needed to be loaded slowly with a rod and powder and that the founding fathers did not foresee assault weapons. True, but there were guns. At least we know, okay, so there was a gun. Guns have gotten crazy. All right, we can discuss. There were no computers, no calculators. There wasn’t even an adding machine. There was nothing. Copyright is for people.

I did read the decision. Sometimes you read these things, and you can just tell that the judge is like, “Oh, come on. Really? No.” It was very much a no. I foresee that that will continue. I cannot imagine that this would survive in challenges. I don’t care who’s on the Supreme Court. I really don’t. Unless the Supreme Court is entirely made up of people that own AI businesses, I just don’t see how anybody could ever argue that AI-created stuff qualifies for copyright.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to the pdf of the decision, which is great. People should read through it. The article I’ll also link to talks about some of the other challenges to copyright that have come up over the years. Of course, you and I, Craig, we both work for corporations, and corporations are retaining the copyright on the things we do, because we are doing work for hire. I think that was part of Stephen Thaler’s argument here is that the machine was essentially work for hire and the same kind of principle should apply here.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** What I argued in front of the U.S. Copyright Office is that copyright was initially intended to protect… There was always a human author. It was always about the authorship. While the final copyright might transfer to somebody else or transfer to a corporation, it was originally intended to protect that author and that author’s expression and to foster more expression from authors. That is not a thing that a machine knows or wants to do.

**Craig:** No. Work for hire was about commissioning work. You could commission it from people. Again, there was no understanding or conception or ability to foresee that you could commission work from something that wasn’t alive.

For instance, nobody would’ve argued that if somebody had, I don’t know, a loom that could operate itself, that that would be creating works of art. Player pianos, interestingly, created all sorts of issues around copyright. That led to a whole understanding of mechanical copies and things like that and how mechanical copying was in and of itself a derivative of copyright.

We do not commission work. I think work for hire and the commissioning actually started in, I don’t know, prerevolutionary time with silversmiths, people like Paul Revere, I suppose.

**John:** It’s all Paul Revere’s fault.

**Craig:** They would come up with a design and say, “Listen, you work in my factory. I do all the silver stuff. Come up with a design of something. I’ll make a bunch of buckles. I’m going to own the buckle copyright if you want to work here.” That became the way that functioned.

You cannot commission something that is not alive, because you can’t pay it. It’s not a thing. So work for hire requires payment. It requires employment. You cannot employ something that isn’t alive. That’s not what employment is. Employment is paying a human for a thing.

**John:** The use of technology has also come up in copyright over the years. As photography came to be, they had to decide, a photograph taken by a camera, is that copyrightable, and is it to the person who took the photo, and if it’s to the person who took the photo, does it apply to the monkey who takes a photo. There famously was a monkey who took a selfie. Who owns the copyright to that selfie?

**Craig:** What courts have found is that humans causing something to be created is an essential part of copyright. If a camera falls off the back of a truck and the take a picture button gets hit, and it takes a picture, welcome to public domain. No one caused it to be created.

Animals cannot cause something to be created in an intentional sense, or at least in the sense that we say is necessary for copyright. No, selfies by animals, pictures by animals, paintings by elephants, none of it can be considered copyrightable, nor can a human say, “I am causing an animal to create something. Therefore, I should have the copyright on this.”

**John:** Where I think the decisions will ultimately come down, and it’s trying to draw that line of, when a human being uses AI programs to create a work of art, or to create anything that would normally be subject to copyright, where is that line, where it’s like, okay, that human gets the copyright claim. Caselaw will figure that out.

**Craig:** That’s a real thing. That’s happening now, and to the extent that there are elements in there that you can say are unique. This is the key. People need to look at some of the language underpinning all of this, but the most important word is “unique.” Unique work expressed in fixed form. Unique is key.

If people are using AI to make something, but the AI elements that they’re employing are not unique, it’s gonna be very hard for them to qualify for things, because other people can… It’s just basically, you’re remixing chunks of stuff that somebody else has created.

**John:** While all culture is remixing, how you’re doing it and the things you’re using to do it with does matter.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly. You can remix to the extent that, okay, I’m gonna write a song that’s gonna hint at a little phrase that was in this piece of music and maybe do a variation of something else, and it’s unique.

What you can’t do on your own, just because, is do Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys, and then not have to deal with the fact that you’re using copyrighted works that you are remixing. That is gonna be a mess, because AI itself can’t really exist without the input of stuff that somebody made.

**John:** Craig, on this listening session, I gave my little testimony, but then I also got to listen in as other people gave theirs. This was an interesting thought experiment, which is gonna not even be a thought experiment soon. This will come up, and it’ll become an issue.

Let’s take a game like Red Dead Redemption. You would agree that the company that makes Red Dead Redemption can copyright the material that’s in Red Dead Redemption. Someone wrote all the stuff that’s in there. There’s an ability to protect that material, correct?

**Craig:** Yes. Rockstar commissioned a lot of people on a work-for-hire basis. Rockstar owns the copyright to Red Dead Redemption. Correct.

**John:** Imagine a future version of Red Dead Redemption where the dialogue and situations that occur within Red Dead Redemption are not the product of people writing things, but instead of AI generating, in real time, within the game itself, those scenarios, the dialogue, what’s happening, creating characterizations. Would that material be copyrightable by Rockstar Games?

**Craig:** It would, because Rockstar is creating a derivative work of their own copyrighted material.

**John:** Okay. Defensible, but also challenging to protect in certain ways. If it wasn’t IP that was clearly already owned, then you can imagine scenarios in which there is, inside a computer game, new material being created, and a real question, a live question, of whether that material created by AI is protectable.

**Craig:** They would have to be able to show that their AI… Let’s just call it a black box. You put stuff into the black box. Stuff comes out of the black box. They would have to show that they only exclusively fed the black box stuff that they had 100% intellectual property control over. At that point, I don’t see how you can argue that the black box somehow undoes that.

Now, if they say, we’re gonna put in all of our stuff, plus we’re also gonna feed the black box 30 Westerns, now you got a problem. Then I think they can’t. That’s where it gets interesting. I think it’s actually, weirdly, not that complicated, as long as you understand how copyright works and what you can and can’t do and what it means to own something. Either you do or you don’t. If you don’t, you can’t half-own it. You own it or you don’t.

**John:** Other news this last week, Disney is releasing on Blu-ray Disc… Blu-ray Discs still exist, apparently.

**Craig:** Yes, they do.

**John:** Mandalorian, Loki, WandaVision, and some other titles. Just notable because you don’t hear about Blu-ray or DVD releases that often. There’s always that concern of shows will disappear off their services, and then no one will ever be able to find it. This is a counterexample, where these things are so popular that Disney recognizes, people will pay us money for these things that have special features on them, and they believe they can make a buck on it. What’s your reaction to some stuff coming out on disc?

**Craig:** Just last week I received my 4K and Blu-ray copies of The Last of Us on DVD.

**John:** Fantastic. Talk to us about that and also what is the sales pitch for a consumer. Why would a person want that, versus watching it on HBO Max?

**Craig:** Quality. It just simply comes down to playback quality. It doesn’t matter how fast your internet connection is. Let’s say it’s maximum speed. It still doesn’t matter, because in order to put the signal out in an efficient way across the world, every streaming service has to compress the image, and the sound to some extent, much less. Really, the image has to be compressed in such a way that it’s deliverable.

When you are getting 4K in particular, but also Blu-rays, it’s just higher resolution than what you’re getting over a streaming service. 4K would be the maximum resolution. In fact, technically, we didn’t even shoot the season in 4K. We were going to shoot the next season in true 4K. Then we went through an HDR process, and it gets up-ressed, and magically, I don’t know, something happens.

**John:** Probably AI.

**Craig:** It’s probably AI.

**John:** It genuinely is probably AI. It’s pattern matching to figure out what the missing pixels would be.

**Craig:** I have no idea. It’s probably more algorithmic than AI. The bottom line is, there’s no reason to buy any of these things unless you really want to see it at its best, which of course, as a cinephile, I do, for certain things.

Also, as our screens get bigger at home, the flaws of streaming will become more and more evident. You would think that as time goes on, speeds would get faster and faster, and therefore the ability to send something through at full resolution would be closer and closer. But the problem is because everything is now going through the same pipe. They have to feed that pipe across the world to billions of people. It’s gonna be a while, I think, before we have that kind of infrastructure. Owning these things on DVD at full resolution is as close as you can get to permanency, as long as they keep manufacturing the equipment to play them back.

**John:** That’s gonna be the question. We do have a Blu-ray player, but we got it specifically because Stuart Friedel, formerly Scriptnotes podcast producer, has purchased, for my daughter, a Blu-ray copy of Freaks and Geeks, because she’d never seen Freaks and Geeks. He got her a Blu-ray copy, and we realized we don’t have a Blu-ray player. We got a Blu-ray player so she could watch Freaks and Geeks. I think she watched an episode.

**Craig:** Stuart got you a gift that ended up costing you a lot of money.

**John:** It did. It did. It cost us a lot. This news that these titles are coming out on disc, I’m excited for those creators and showrunners and everyone who worked on them, because they know there’s some permanent copy of this, which years from now you can look back at, which is fantastic. Reflecting on my own experience, it’s been two or three years since I’ve played anything off of a disc. It’s just the reality. I don’t know what your experience has been.

**Craig:** Similar. I think that where home video on DVD, VHS, used to be this enormous market, at this point, it’s more akin to the way laser discs used to be, something that people who really care about image quality purchase. It’s more of a niche marketplace. It is a little bit of a prestigious kind of, “Look, you can even own it for yourself at full la da da da.” That’s terrific, but as you note, this is not something that they do for everything.

Luckily, I’ve had it for Chernobyl and for The Last of Us, because when I was writing movies, there’s DVDs for all of those things, because there was DVDs for everything then. So far, I haven’t written anything that could theoretically be disappeared off the planet, or as the kids would say, yeeted, or you know what? I don’t even think they say that anymore. I bet yeeted is 10 years old now.

**John:** Yeah, it’s moved on. It’s a historical term.

**Craig:** Yeeted got yeeted.

**John:** If you’re listening to this podcast 10 years from now, and we say yeeted, and you don’t know what we’re talking about, or you do know it, and Craig was wrong, and it did come back, please write-

**Craig:** It’s going to come back.

**John:** … to future producer, Adam Middlemarch, and tell Adam what happened.

**Craig:** Now we have to comb the hospital records for an Adam Middlemarch being born.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Find him and just be like, “You have been chosen. It is your fate.”

**John:** “You have been chosen.”

**Craig:** “You will fulfill your destiny.”

**John:** We have some follow-up. Drew, talk us through. This first one, I’ll tell, his name is Adam Lisagor, because it’s hard to guess how you would pronounce that name. He’s a very smart writer, actor, producer, director person and a friend of mine. He wrote back about our conversation on large language models in 607.

**Drew Marquardt:** Adam Lisagor writes, “To Craig’s question of why we don’t like hearing our names over and over again, prefer using pronoun variables for comfort, my best guess is it’s a mix of two things. First, it’s a conservation of energy. Naming something with specificity requires effort, and naming something with generality requires less effort. We’d prefer to just not have to think so hard.

“Second, conservation of cortisol and our limbic system’s threat detection, because usually, hearing your name is a signal that something needs your attention immediately, can induce panic, like a new email alert tone. When there’s context, your name can be a really nice sound. When there’s less context, it causes stress. That’s my best guess.

“But I’ve been thinking a lot about why we would choose to use so many permutations of words to convey an idea instead of always trying to stick to the same words as the path of least resistance and best communication. I guess the best answer is that’s what makes us human. We derive so much joy from infinitely combining and recombining the elements to new and surprising outcomes, even at the expense of efficiency, even when it causes miscommunication. I guess that’s why writers write. When you find exactly the right new permutation of words, the link you can create with the receiver is that much more powerful. I’m not high right now.”

**John:** Two basic points here. The first is his pronouns argument, is that we use pronouns not just for simplicity, but also because it’s just more comfortable, because you’re not calling the person out every time by name. You don’t ring the bell as hard when you use the pronoun. Is that striking you as all accurate?

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t buy the conservation of energy theory. When we talk about where we live, we don’t say, “I live in town,” although I suppose I say, “I live in the city.” There’s things that we refer to specifically all the time.

I do think that there’s something to the notion that your name is an attention grabber. Attention, what we know, if you keep ringing a bell over and over and over, it just starts to disappear. Our brains can’t handle repetitive alerts like that. Yes, that makes sense. It takes a little bit of the edge off of that. I agree. I don’t think he’s high right now. He might be high right now.

**John:** As he wrote this email, he probably wasn’t high. His second point is about basically, our language could be simpler. We could choose to speak in simpler words. We’ve definitely seen examples of cases where you’re limited now to 115 words you have to communicate. You can get it done.

There’s a game we played in the office a few weeks ago called Poetry for Neanderthals, where you can only use single-syllable words. It’s difficult, but it’s very doable to get your point across. The ability to mix things up and really surprise yourself and everyone else around you by how you’re stringing words together is what makes language delightful.

**Craig:** Agreed. I like your observation there, not-high-at-the-time Adam Lisagor.

**John:** We have some more follow-up on Esperanto.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** I love Esperanto.

**Craig:** We can’t kill this topic any more than we can kill the fake language Esperanto. It just keeps coming back.

**Drew:** You’re going to get a couple knocks on this one, Craig.

**Craig:** Of course I will.

**Drew:** Mark F writes, “One point that pricked up my ears was Craig’s reference to Esperanto being an aspiration of recent vintage. I just happened to be reading about Esperanto in the wonderful book, Humanly Possible, a historical overview of humanism by Sarah Bakewell. She includes a chapter on Ludwik Zamenhof, who originated Esperanto in the 1870s, with the ambition of making a universal language that would break down barriers and help promote a more humanistic civilization across cultures.

“An incredible part of the story is that Zamenhof developed the language as a teenager, but before he was able to work on introducing it to society, his father locked away all his language notebooks, to force the young man to focus his energies on studying to become a doctor. He was sent to Russia to study medicine, but when he returned, he discovered his father had actually burned the notebooks, at which point he started over and rebuilt the language from memory. Amazing.”

**Craig:** I’m really on board with his dad. I think Ludwik Zamenhof’s dad was spot-on.

**John:** Craig, this is the first time I knew that Zamenhof had worked on this as a teenager. That teenager idealism does still ring through in the language, in Esperanto. I’ve of course picked it up a couple times. It’s on my Duolingo little things I can study. It is clever in many ways. It’s so ambitiously unambitious in a way. It’s almost an example of how few words do you need, because it has a limited vocabulary by default, but it’s logical in ways that are all really appealing. No one is ever going to speak it in a meaningful way, because it’s just-

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** There’s not gonna be any native speakers of it, and so therefore, it’s never going to catch on. I still find it delightful.

**Craig:** Regardless of when Esperanto was originally conceived and then burnt and then reconceived, culturally it did seem like it had a moment in the ’50s and ’60s and then rapidly went away. I’m sure there were lots of moments along the way, between 1870 and when it finally… Although again, it will never end. Esperanto is the Ayn Rand of languages. It’s just one of these things where it’s like, guys, it doesn’t work. Let it go. They won’t go.

**John:** Like communism. There’s never been a true communist country.

**Craig:** Exactly, nor will there be. There’s a reason for that. Now all the Marxists are gonna write in. Guys, it’s not gonna happen. Let it go.

**John:** But maybe like Marxism, you can say, what is it that’s fascinating about this idea, and how can you apply it to actual, real places where real people are living? Here’s my generous take on it. Looking at Esperanto and while it did work, it probably got a lot of people curious about how languages actually really do work.

That probably could’ve started a whole generation of folks who were more curious to learn about the actual languages that people out there in the world are speaking, and the quest for what is the universal grammar that’s underneath all these languages, like what is it about our brains that is causing us to create the same patterns again and again and again, and why languages broadly work in very similar ways, when we can imagine that they could work, that they just don’t work.

**Craig:** That is remarkably generous.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** I don’t think Esperanto did a goddamn thing.

**John:** People with the little green stars, Esperanto speakers.

**Craig:** Esperanto speakers, yes, they can all talk to each other at the world’s most boring conference.

**John:** We will have universal translators very soon. Arguably, we have them right now in that-

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s called English.

**John:** Also, what’s on our phones right now, those translate features are really good.

**Craig:** They’re really good. They are really good.

**John:** It’ll become less important. Our last bit of follow-up here is about lingua franca, and it really pertains to this.

**Drew:** Chris writes, “As a fellow language nerd, I enjoyed Episode 607, but I have to correct Craig’s assertion that the term lingua franca derives from the fact that French was once the common language for international communication. In fact, lingua franca was spoken throughout the Mediterranean, where Europeans came into contact with people from the Middle East and Africa, for whom Franks was a general term for Europeans. Lingua franca was the language of the Franks.

“Scholars argue quite a bit about whether lingua franca really qualified as its own language or was more of a pidgin dialect, but in any case, the languages to which it was the closest were Italian dialects, not French. Some version of lingua franca was still spoken in North Africa into the 19th century, but a Frenchman would not have understood it.”

**Craig:** That is fascinating. I did not know that. Lingua franca is a combination of Italian and French and other stuff, but yeah, I guess more akin to Italian than… It’s its own language. It was the Esperanto of its time, except that it emerged, I presume naturally, as, Chris says, a pidgin dialect as opposed to-

**John:** Yeah, which is when you have people who can’t speak the same language have to figure out how to get along, you get a pidgin. Then if their kids speak that as a creole, which is a more formalized version, a new language is formed.

I want to defend you here, Craig, because you were talking about lingua franca in the way that we typically use it, rather than the historical terms, because we now talk about lingua franca as being the actual default or the bridge language in a place. English is a lingua franca for a lot of places, where it’s just like, the British language is the common language that people speak. If we throw in that Wikipedia link there.

**Craig:** Again, you’re being very kind. I think I just screwed up, because I’m pretty sure that, it sounds like, I can’t remember exactly, but I probably said something like, “Lingua franca, which comes from French, because that was the language of diplomacy,” which it was. I’m sure I referenced the Olympics and the fact that they constantly would repeat everything in French in the Olympics for some reason. It made sense in my brain, but I was wrong.

This is the kind of thing that… I have to say, some people don’t like people like Chris at parties. “Well, actually… ” But I do. By the way, I also appreciate that Chris did not use the word “actually,” even though I’m sure Chris really wanted to. Thank you, Chris.

**John:** He said “in fact,” which is the gentleman’s “actually.”

**Craig:** Could be a she

**John:** Absolutely. 100% true. I don’t know why I jumped to that conclusion.

**Craig:** Because you are a-

**John:** I’m a monster.

**Craig:** You’re a monster. You’re a cancelable monster. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate the correction. You are completely correct. I was entirely wrong. Now I know something that I can bother other people about.

**John:** I love it. Hey, Craig, let’s talk about the premise. Our marquee topic here in the weekly Inneresting newsletter, which is sort of the print version of Scriptnotes, Chris Csont had picked an old blog post I did back in 2016, where I was responding to something that Michael Tabb had written for Script Magazine.

In that, Tabb was talking about how a premise is the core belief system of a script and the lifeblood of a story. I was arguing, “What you’re talking about seems great. I really wouldn’t call that the premise. Greek scholars might call that the premise, but I would really say that is the thesis, that is the dramatic question.”

I wanted to talk with you, Craig, about what we mean by the premise, what we mean by a thesis, and really what we mean when someone says, “What is your movie about? What is your story about?” Because that about is really two very different things. It can be about what is the TV Guide’s synopsis, it can be talking about that log line, or it could be like, what is it emotionally about for the characters within, what is it about for the writer, what is the purpose behind the work. Sometimes when we have challenges talking with people about their work, I think sometimes we’re really not understanding what we mean by “about” when we ask, “What is this about?”

**Craig:** This is a great question. I tend to answer as follows when people say, “What’s your show about? What’s your movie about?” I’ll say, “What it’s about is blah blah blah, but what it’s really about is blah blah blah.”

What it’s really about, that’s the theme, that’s the central dramatic question, whatever vocabulary you want for that. What is it about to me is the plot premise, what’s happening, literally what’s the basic, simple thing of what’s happening in your show. What it’s about, it’s about the nuclear disaster that happened. It’s about a guy that has to take a girl who might have the cure for worldwide plague from point A to point B. It is the hardware premise, because that is the very first thing that will hit people’s eyes and ears when you put a trailer out, for instance, or a teaser.

**John:** That sort of log line description, for The Martian, is an astronaut stranded on Mars has to find a way home. That is a good example of, it’s explaining what the problem is and what the quest of the movie is. It feels like, oh, how would you do that? That’s intriguing. It feels like there’s a question mark to that.

Sometimes we’re talking about the story area. What is your movie about? It’s about Hawaiian indigenous rights. Great. Or it’s about fatherhood, which is a broad, general theme, but fatherhood is not a central dramatic question. It’s not a thing you’re necessarily grappling with.

**Craig:** I try and avoid topics as a premise, because a topic just is a topic. Okay, it’s about indigenous rights in Polynesia. Okay, that’s a topic. That can be a term paper. It could be a nonfiction book. But what is the premise of the movie or show?

**John:** If it’s about a tribal leader leading a revolution against some other people for indigenous rights in this one Polynesian island, that is specific.

**Craig:** A premise has occurred. We need to know what some big, huge thing is happening. Typically, it’s the big, huge thing that happens very early on that is the thing. Most people, by the way, out there in the world, the vast majority of the audience, will never get past that “what’s it about” when they’re telling other people what it’s about.

When we’re talking about this with potential people, to buy it, act in it, direct it, write it, whatever it is that we’re trying to get somebody to do when we’re communicating this within our industry, it’s very important to know the both what it’s about, because if it’s super high-concept, people may get very excited, like, “Whoa, these three guys get together to fight an outbreak of ghosts in Manhattan? Very high concept. I can see how that movie… It’s a comedy. Okay, got it.”

Then what’s it about-about? Then maybe in a circumstance like this, there’s very, very little. It’s about somebody going from being cynical to a believer. That’s cool. But there are other situations where, what’s it about, it’s about one baseball game of no importance, that happened in 1976, between two teams that weren’t even in contention, for a pennant. But what it’s really about is da da da da. Then you’re like, “Oh, this is fascinating.” We need to know both. It’s very important.

**John:** Not only do you need to be able to communicate both, you need to really deeply understand both. I was on a phone call yesterday with a young writer, talking about her project. Her two abouts didn’t really match up, because she could tell me both abouts. I just didn’t think they were fundamentally compatible. That’s really the heart of our conversation.

She was doing a period musical about a young woman trying to get over a breakup and move on. Okay, I see that as a plot premise, I guess, and her inner emotion. But what it’s really about is this writer’s own feelings of exile after being forced to leave the country.

I said, “Okay, I get those two things separately. I don’t see how you’re drawing the connections there. Okay, that feeling of exile and loneliness, sure, but I don’t see how those two things are going to tie together with everything else you’re describing here. I think maybe you’re going to have to honestly change one of your abouts, to get something that’s actually going to be writeable. I think the reason why you’re struggling is you’re trying to write two different incompatible movies. I think that’s why you’re finding it so difficult to have scenes that actually resonate and have a story that feels that it gets you to a meaningful conclusion.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s so important. There’s only one reason for the plot premise to exist, and that is to ultimately convey, in some form or shape, the “what it’s really about” premise. But there’s only one reason for the “what it’s really about” premise to exist, and that is to live inside of the “what happens” premise. They are connected, inherently.

Typically, we will think of a plot premise first. But the very next job should be, “Okay, but what would that serve? What could I learn or note or be fascinated by, even if it’s incredibly simple? What sort of thing would make this interesting once I have absorbed the reality of what it is?”

The opposite is also true. If we’re like, “You know what? I really… ” A lot of people start things with their own experiences. “I had an experience where I’ve lost somebody, and I experienced grief, and I want to write a story about grief.” Okay. “But also, one of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was skeet shooting. I want to write about grief, set against the world of skeet shooting.”

Your common love of things is not enough. They are not purposefully reflecting each other. They are simply living side by side. One has to purposely reflect the other. They must serve each other. It must make sense. Otherwise, like you said, you’re just going to have one thing floating on top of another, and nobody wants that.

**John:** If you have that inner premise and no external premise, the inner premise could be a great poem. You can just have free-floating feelings and analysis of questions. It could be an essay. But it’s not going to have characters and a story that can actually get you to a place, because that’s the social contract you’re making with an audience is that, if you’ve given your attention, I will tell a story that will be meaningful, and it will take you on a journey.

There’s not gonna be a journey if it’s just, “This is what I think about a thing.” If you just have a central dramatic question or this feeling you want to explore, that’s not gonna be a movie. That’s not gonna be a story. That’s just a thing. Maybe it’s a song. But that’s all you got.

**Craig:** Yeah, precisely. We sometimes get a little reductive about this stuff. That’s why I don’t like the whole pitch contest thing, even though I’ve judged them. It boils things down to only thinking about these premises like polishing these premises to sharp edges and points when they don’t need to be. They don’t even need to be interesting. The premise can be utterly boring if the “what it’s really about” is fascinating, and vice versa.

God knows how many times I’ve said it. We talked about it at length in the How to Write a Movie episode of our podcast. The “what it’s really about” of Finding Nemo is so banal and so dumb fortune cookie, it’s almost giggleable. But it’s what’s perfect about it, is that you sometimes want to take something that’s so simple and obvious and then explain it through the most remarkable premise, plot premise, so that you finally get it.

It’s weird. Sometimes the simplest things just fly right over our heads, because they’re so cliché, they don’t even sink into our skin. We need to be reminded through fascinating plots and vice versa. Sometimes the simplest plot is what you need to absorb something that’s very complicated.

**John:** Absolutely. I can think of many films I love, including many great indie films, where you look at the description, you’re like, “That’s not enough for a movie.” You Can Count On Me, it’s a woman’s sort of shiftless brother moves home. It’s like, is that it? There’s not a lot of plot, story to it. It’s terrific, because it’s actually exploring the rarely asked questions about how adult siblings get along and what the nature of that relationship can and should be. Both are good things. I’m saying, don’t freak out if they’re not equal weight for you. But they have to serve each other, no matter what.

There’s a project I’m hoping, whenever the Strike is resolved, to take out. I am genuinely very, very excited about the movie poster premise of it all and what you’re gonna see in the trailer, but even more excited about the “what it’s actually really about” of it all. Those two things I think are gonna marry really well together. I’d say I’m excited by the flashy, what’s in the trailer of it all, but I’m really excited to write the deeply what it’s about, if I get a chance to do so.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** We’ll hope.

**Craig:** That’s true. We have to hope. I don’t want to just go presume that it’s gonna be fantastic. I agree with you. First of all, we have to… You said, “Whenever the Strike ends.” If the Strike. Let’s just say if.

**John:** Oh, come now.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** Craig, no.

**Craig:** Craig, no. Craig. Craig.

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** Craig. No, I believe it’ll end.

**John:** It’ll end.

**Craig:** Everything ends, John.

**John:** Everything ends.

**Craig:** Everything ends.

**John:** The heat death of the universe.

**Craig:** That’s right, John. One day the Sun will devour us.

**John:** Memento mori. Remember that you will die.

**Craig:** Craig.

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** Craig, no!

**John:** Memento mori!

**Craig:** Craig, no! We should do some listener questions. We’ve probably built up quite a few.

**John:** We have. Drew, start us off.

**Drew:** Our first one comes from Johan on Twitter. He writes, “Hey, John and Craig. Is the whole starting a script with FADE IN actually just a myth? I think I see it in like 5% of the American scripts I’ve read through the years. Seems like a huge waste of space. Cheers.”

**Craig:** “A huge waste of space.”

**John:** Craig, do you write FADE IN?

**Craig:** No, but does it really seem like “a huge waste of space?” It’s one line. Who cares?

**John:** It is one line, but also, it’s the first line. If your first line is a useless line, I’d say get rid of it.

**Craig:** Look, I don’t use it. I think it is superfluous. Also, not every film fades in.

**John:** No, it doesn’t.

**Craig:** Often, you just start with a boop, where you just pop in. You don’t need to start a script with anything there than INTERIOR, EXTERIOR, blah-dah-dee blah, or even not.

**John:** Or not that.

**Craig:** You could start with just we hear a bunch of sounds or whatever.

**John:** Or just an image, because it’s not even clear where you are.

**Craig:** Exactly. That said, it is not “a huge waste of space.” It is precisely line. You can absorb it.

**John:** Absolutely. Now we’re gonna get all the people who are so angry at us. It’s like the CUT TOs and the we hears and the we sees.

**Craig:** I like that. Do it.

**John:** Do it. Write in.

**Craig:** Let them fight.

**John:** Waste our time. Waste Drew’s time, because he won’t put it in the outline for us.

**Craig:** It seems like a huge waste of time. What’s next?

**Drew:** Patrick writes, “Apart from supplying the budget, what services do the studios actually provide during the production of a movie? If you got the money elsewhere, as per your billionaire episode, would you still need to work with the studios? Equipment, studio space, crews, cast, post facilities, marketing companies, etc, are all available elsewhere, right? Are studios just glorified banks? Is it all about the distribution?”

**John:** Aha.

**Craig:** Cutting right to it.

**John:** He’s challenging the fundamental premise of the studios.

**Craig:** I think he’s confirming the fundamental premise of the studios.

**John:** Craig, you can talk us through. Also, Drew just graduated from the Stark Program, so he’ll have a perspective on what studios do. Craig, start us off.

**Craig:** I think Patrick’s put his finger on exactly why we do use them. Studios are, in fact, a combination of a distribution facility, a bank, and an advertising agency. That is what they are. The rest is what we do. But what they do is they pay for it, they advertise it, and then they put it out. That’s it. That’s what they do.

**John:** It’s easy to confuse the fact that they have physical lots where you can shoot films, and they obviously have some equipment there, and they have facilities there for doing post. But of course, Craig and I will both tell you that so often, a show that is for CBS will actually shoot on, like, Universal stages, because that’s what was available. It’s not like they’re always shooting their own things on their own lots. They do that wherever they could do it.

There are, of course, lots of movies that were made completely outside of the system. There are independent films and other things that are sold after they are produced, to a company that distributes them. But it’s that distribution function and marketing function that’s really, I think, the heart of why there still is a modern American studio system.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are stages everywhere.

**John:** Everywhere.

**Craig:** There are post facilities everywhere. Sometimes when things are independently financed, you take away the bank aspect of the studio, but you’re still maintaining the marketing, the advertising aspect, and the distribution aspect, which is why independent films are constantly looking to get distribution from studios. That’s sort of how it goes.

**John:** We talked about Legendary Pictures. Legendary, it’s kind of a studio. They definitely have money. They do their own development of stuff. They can put stuff in production. They have money to put stuff in production, but they’re not a distribution company. I’m sure they have a lot of sway in the marketing, but they don’t have unilateral control over the marketing of things.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** They partner up with other companies for distribution. Drew, any insights that you have from having just completed the Stark Program and knowing… You’ve had a studio management course recently.

**Drew:** You guys have nailed it. I think marketing and distribution is obviously so key. I think it seems so easy for indie producers or indie filmmakers or people outside the studio system, that we would be able to jump in, and the idea of, oh, you can get some money together and make a movie. But without that distribution… Marketing costs, I think it’s a million dollars per 100 screens, just to try and get you to the place where you’re gonna break even on that money.

Then I think for people, for writers and for artists, it becomes an institutional check too. You can try and make a career outside of it, but I’m not sure. I think you need to have that to have a certain longevity.

**John:** Maybe so. One point I want to make about distribution is you need an ongoing distribution program. Basically, you can’t just spin up in a distribution company once, to distribute one movie, and then wind it all back down.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** You need to have ongoing people who do that, not just so you have the expertise to do it, but also, to collect the money that you made in those theaters, you have to have another movie coming out, so you can say, “Hey, deadbeat exhibitor, before we give you this next movie, you gotta pay us what you owe us.” That historically has been an incredibly important part of why studios who have spun up and done one or two or three years of movies have failed, because they couldn’t get the money back in, because they didn’t have the ongoing pipeline of product.

**Craig:** Money goes out instantly, comes back slowly. You also need a library to keep you afloat. You need to have the ability to absorb that slow return. Also, when it comes to distribution, there is a leverage when you’re dealing with…

Let’s just deal with theaters, which are having a nice little bounce-back. Hooray. There’s a limited amount of theaters. Do you want Batman? Yeah, you do want Batman if you’re a theater owner. I need you to also take this thing. You get to where, as if you just have this thing, and they’re like, “We don’t want to show that.” I don’t have a Batman to make you show it.

You’re absolutely right. There is a reason why the only new studios that are appearing are from companies that are already enormous. Really, Netflix was kind of the only one to emerge without having been a legacy studio or a preexisting massive entity, like Apple or Amazon. But even then, Netflix has absorbed an insane amount of venture capital. It is a massive endeavor to start one of these things from scratch. The war field is littered with the bodies of companies that tried and failed.

**John:** We’re phrasing everything in terms of movies, but the same thing happens in TV. If a studio has a TV show that they’ve made, that they want to then sell around the world, they need to have a team that sells that show around the world and collects the money from around the world.

If they have Designing Women, and they want to sell it to Portugal, and some Portuguese company wants to air it, they have to make that contract, enforce that contract, collect the money. That’s just a lot of overhead. You can’t expect one individual to do that. It just takes a lot of people and bodies to do it.

**Craig:** It takes a lot of people, which is why you can’t really create one of these things as a single-use entity, because the amount of people required, lawyers, financiers, to keep the pipeline functioning, it just is not warranted by a single-use entity.

The HBO is an interesting case, because they have certain, unlike Netflix or Amazon or Apple, which is just one worldwide, or Disney Plus, for instance. Everybody just logs on to the one thing. HBO still has linear. They have Max. They have Max LatAm. They have Max Nordic. There’s some local versions of it around the world.

Then for most places internationally, they’re making good old-fashioned distribution deals. For instance, in the United Kingdom, HBO material, through a deal that the studio made with Sky, is shown on Sky in the UK. In Canada, it’s shown on an outlet called Crave. Every single one of those deals has to be negotiated and forced, managed, renewed, evaluated. John, the amount of PowerPoints, we can’t imagine. We can’t imagine.

**John:** Obviously, Craig doesn’t have to worry about each of those individual deals. Craig might be asked to go to travel to some place to hype up the show as it’s being released in Canada, but he’s not responsible for negotiating the Canadian deal.

**Craig:** I don’t have to do any of that.

**John:** He doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to.

**Craig:** Thank god, because I would be like, “I’d love for Canadians to see it, but guys, how about just free? It’s free.”

**John:** It’s free. It’s free. I remember Rachel Bloom came to Paris while I was living in Paris, because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend had just started airing on its new network, and they wanted her to go there and promote it. She’s like, “I’ll go there and promote it.” We hung out. We drank some wine. It was nice.

I don’t want to get off this topic though without saying that just because it’s hard to build up an entire studio distribution marketing arm doesn’t mean that it’s hard for any given billionaire to make the production part of it. The production part of it’s actually the easier part. You make a thing, and you sell it to a distributor who does all the rest of that. We would love more people to do that, to do what Legendary does, to do what other companies have done to create that, because that’s awesome.

**Craig:** There is a lot of money in the world. There are only a few studios that are capable of marketing and distributing a film. Yes, lots of money. Now, traditionally, investing in movies and television has been a great way to lose a billion dollars.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s like opening a vineyard. It’s like, oh, it’s a great way to make a little money off of a lot of money.

**Craig:** You know how to make a million dollars in the wine business? Start with a billion dollars. It’s definitely a thing. But it has always been, I think for a certain segment of independent financiers, a labor of love. Patron of the arts is a thing. Nobody who supports the production of Broadway shows, for instance, nobody goes into that thinking, “I’m gonna make a gazillion dollars.”

**John:** “I’m gonna be rich.”

**Craig:** No. You are doing it because you love it. Now, you may still be a hard-charging guy who’s probably corrupt, because Broadway accounting makes Hollywood accounting look absolutely spotless. Nonetheless, the point is, you can make a whole lot more money just handing it to a hedge fund and just sitting back.

There is still a value to the Medici-style patron of the arts. Those people exist. Those entities exist. Every now and then, a very wealthy scion will go into that business. The Ellisons, for instance, both Ellison siblings have done so.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And have led to the creation of some fantastic stuff.

**John:** Absolutely. You look at the success of A24, and as horribly toxic as they were, The Weinstein Company at its peak recognized the ability to make and market a certain kind of movie and distribute a certain kind of movie that did really well for them and did well for the industry, at least in terms of the quality of material they were able to put out there and some of the artists they were able to introduce. I don’t want to say it’s impossible to do it, but it’s not possible to compete on the big studio level with just a billion dollars.

**Craig:** No, it is very difficult. It may be the case that the lesson of the Weinsteins is that it’s only possible to be successful in going to war against those big studios if you are an absolute shameless son of a bitch. But who knows?

**John:** Who knows?

**Craig:** Look. A24, there are companies that do quite well.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I don’t mean to take things away. A24 really is the new Miramax. They really are. They seem to be doing it quite well.

**John:** Fantastic. Let’s try one more quick question here.

**Craig:** CR asks, “I want to ask if having log lines or summaries of some of my original unsold scripts posted to a personal website with a prompt saying, ‘If you’d like to read this, please contact me at whatever email for the full script,’ is remotely a good idea. I’m friends with several amateur artists trying to break into their respective industries. One does a web comic posted to her personal website. She was telling me to start finding ways to give myself an internet footprint, so if someone wants to find me, there’s something to find. She recommended a website.

“The only problem is, what do I put on this website if I have nothing sold? I can’t just put up random pieces of writing like an artist might post sketches. I thought about putting final versions of original scripts I have up, but I’m not sure if I’m comfortable just having my unsold scripts there for the taking.”

**John:** My first instinct is, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. I just don’t think that’s actually gonna be successful for you. I’m curious what our listeners think, because we obviously have 10 years of aspiring screenwriters who have listened to this podcast. I’m curious whether any of them have done anything like this and found it to be successful in terms of getting people to read it.

My other instinct is, let people read your writing, but maybe just put up the first 10 pages so they can see, and if they want to read more, they can read more. Craig, what’s your instinct?

**Craig:** I don’t understand why you can’t put up random pieces of writing, like an artist might post sketches. Throw a couple of scenes on. Throw one scene on. Throw one scene on with a storyboard. Maybe your friend who does a web comic can… Throw her a couple of bucks and have her do a little… Why not? I don’t understand why. Nobody wants to read a whole script anyway. Everyone hates reading scripts.

Also, you say, “I’m not sure if I’m comfortable just having my unsold scripts there for the taking.” What are you afraid of? You have the copyright on them. They’re there. You’ve published them on the web. Register them with the United States Copyright Office for whatever it is, 100 bucks, and then put them there. Why worry? Dude, no one’s stealing your script, man.

**John:** No one’s stealing your script.

**Craig:** No one’s stealing it.

**John:** If it’s on the web, an AI will scrape it. They’ve already scraped it. But you know what? They’re gonna scrape everything anyway. We can’t stop it.

**Craig:** You should be so lucky, because then you can point back and say, “This was copyrighted.” Now the people that scraped it and folded it into whatever have to pay you a lot. No, I think there is no problem whatsoever. Think about this. Photographers do it all the time.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** Photographers take a picture. It is their copyright. They put it on the internet. Anyone can take it, copy it, and stick it somewhere. People don’t stick it in anything that’s actually legit and moneymaking, because they’re gonna get sued, and it’s gonna cost them money. They’ll throw it all over a bunch of crap that isn’t gonna make money, but also, they’re not pretending that they took the picture. I just don’t think this is a problem.

I think, I have always said this, the paranoia that people are gonna steal your unsold script is not warranted. You should be far more concerned about the odds, the minuscule chance that somebody who can make a difference in your life is also gonna find it and also gonna read it and also gonna like it. That tiny, little lottery victory is worth the chance that some dingdong somewhere is gonna take your pages and put them into his unsold script. It’s not a problem.

**John:** It doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** It doesn’t happen. Even if it did, you would have recourse. I just wouldn’t worry about it.

**John:** Agreed. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a holdover from our live show. We were gonna do One Cool Things. We ran long, and it was messy and chaotic.

**Craig:** Just say Natasha Lyonne. My belovedly messy and chaotic Natasha Lyonne.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is an article by Danielle Campoamor in Marie Claire. Headline is, We Need to See More Parents Having Abortions in Film and Television. The point is that if you look at, in film and TV, whenever you do see a character having an abortion, it is a young, unmarried white girl. That’s not actually the majority of abortions in America. It’s actually people who already have children are the ones who are getting the most abortions in the US. So rarely do we see that portrayed on screen. Literally, in 2020, of characters who had abortions on film, 73% were white, and one third were teenagers, and not a single one of them was a parent.

It’s just arguing for, we need to have representation of what reality is, because people see themselves in that and see the choices they need to make reflected in those characters. That gets people thinking about abortion in a different way, because I think our image of what it is is just that unmarried teen mom, and that’s just not the reality. It’s actually people who already have multiple kids and are deciding whether to have another child.

**Craig:** I completely sympathize with this. I think it’s important to get that message out. I’m not sure drama is necessarily the best way to do it. The problem is a little bit like showing… I bet you if we cataloged the portrayals of leukemia on film, you would also see a predominance of children and teenagers, maybe kids, or rather, young adults in their 20s. What you wouldn’t see are a lot of people in their 70s or 80s or something like that, because nobody cares, because it’s not dramatic.

The problem is the reality of abortion is it’s not dramatic. This is just the stark reality. It’s not dramatic. People who are in committed relationships, with three kids, and a woman gets pregnant, and they decide rationally, oh yeah, no, actually, this was not a pregnancy we wanted. She goes to a clinic. She goes to a gynecologist. There is an abortion. It’s done. Move on. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it’s fun. But it’s not dramatic.

That’s specifically the point I think that Danielle’s making is that what we tend to concentrate on is the overdramatic abortion scenario, a 13-year-old white girl, because white girls. Oh, god, white girl. That’s what we concentrate on. Therein lies the problem, is that we are dramatists.

We’ve talked about medical shows and legal shows. They’re soaking in this problem. They’re just not building medical shows around the mundane medical needs of people, nor are they building legal shows around the vast predominance of legal cases, which are boring and result in settlements between people in quiet rooms.

I understand. I think it’s a fair critique. I think the critique needs to be acknowledged. I think it is important. For instance, what I would argue is that at the end of an episode or a movie about or that contains such an abortion storyline, it would be important to actually put this information up on screen. That’s more, I think, actionable than just forcing non-dramatic situations into a product that is supposed to be entertaining and dramatic. It’s a tricky thing to do, but that’s where I would go with it myself. I’m sure no one will have any thoughts or comments about this.

But as somebody that actively and aggressively supports reproductive rights and access to reproductive rights in this country, I just want to make sure that we don’t end up getting stuck on too much of a hook as dramatists, to portray situations that are inherently not dramatic.

**John:** The article itself actually points out Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as an exception to the rule, because on that show, Rachel and Aline had a character who was a mom of two kids, who had an abortion. It wasn’t a big deal. I think it was such a smart choice to have the character who was facing this decision not be Rachel Bloom’s character, but her friend, who is a central character, but is not the unwed young mother. I think there are definitely ways to do it.

I guess, Craig, I would just challenge that it’s not necessarily that we need to wedge this into more things. I’ve not even seen a movie that it happens in, or it even be the central thing in a movie. I’ve never seen it come up as an issue in this stuff. It feels like it could. There’s gonna be interesting ways to do it, and unexpected ways. We have such a stereotype of who a character is who has an abortion. It’s great to always challenge those stereotypes.

**Craig:** I completely agree with that. Listen, I guess in a way, I’m almost being more aggressive about it, by saying that we should just put facts on screen, white letters on black, and just say, “What you’ve just seen is a dramatization, or is drama. Understand, however, this is the reality,” da da da da da da da da da, to aggressively deromanticize and dedramatize the truth of how abortions occur, not only in our country but around the world, and have always done.

But I agree with you. I’m not suggesting that it’s not possible to do. Of course it is. Nor is there a way to do it in a way where there is no burden of drama on it. Really, what I’m saying is I don’t want to unfairly judge works of art that do portray-

**John:** I get that.

**Craig:** … the most dramatic form of abortion, particularly because I suspect in most of those dramatizations, the characters do end up either having an abortion or relaying a positive perspective of that essential reproductive right. Could be wrong about that.

**John:** I think what we’re both saying is we don’t need fewer portrayals of abortion. We want more portrayals of abortion, and among those, maybe a broader range of experiences.

**Craig:** With an acknowledgement of the truth, because I think what Danielle’s writing about is incredibly important. People don’t understand how this actually functions. We are typically, in this country, always afraid of the wrong thing.

My One Cool Thing is just as much of a hot topic. It is not. We gotta take a break from some of the serious stuff and talk about things that are even more serious, like Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, boys.

**John:** It’s Dungeons and Dragons adjacent. You don’t actually have to play D and D to play this game.

**Craig:** You don’t. This is sort of exciting. Again, not for everybody, but for boys and girls who are dorks like us, and who do like role-playing games. There is a new board game out. This is not a typical role-playing game of the sort you might see on Critical Role or the kind that John and I play on a weekly basis, sometimes on a biweekly basis. This is a board game version of Dungeons and Dragons that is playable in one shot, I think they estimate over the course of two hours, which is not wildly nuts. It’s like a nice, long Monopoly game. It’s called Dungeons and Dragons: Trials of Tempus.

This is an officially licensed product, so it gets to use all of the characters, classes, spells, and so forths from Dungeons and Dragons. It was created by two friends of mine, along with a fellow I don’t know, Adam Carasso, and then my friends, Thor Knai and Kyle Newman. It’s excellent if you enjoy nerdery like we do.

What’s really interesting about it is you get to do something that we generally don’t get to do when we’re playing D and D, which is fight against each other. You get divided into two parties. The two parties are rivals in an heroic adventure. Normally, when I’m DMing, technically I suppose it’s like the DM versus the players, but I think that makes you a bad DM. I think it’s the DM with the players. The point is we’re all gonna get through this and have a great time and go through highs and lows and all the rest. This is more of a traditional “our team wins.”

It’s got all sorts of D and D-ish things about it. I know the overlap between D and D players and board game players is almost 100%, so I think you might like it. Check it out, Dungeons and Dragons: Trials of Tempus, freshly out, available online and all sorts of places, including Schmamazon.

**John:** I checked this out when I was at your house this last time. It is beautifully put together. It’s in a very heavy box. It’s full of figurines and cards and things and all the accoutrement that you love in a board game. I’m excited to play it with you.

**Craig:** (Speaks French.)

**John:** (Speaks French.) That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Adam Pineless. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Craig, we gotta talk merch.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** We have T-shirts, and they’re great. They’re at Cotton Bureau, including the new Scriptnotes University T-shirt and sweatshirt.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Craig, have you even seen this?

**Craig:** No, but I want a Scriptnotes University… Is there a hoodie?

**John:** Of course there’s a hoodie, but also just a normal sweatshirt, a collared sweatshirt.

**Craig:** I never wear those.

**John:** I’m gonna paste a link in the Workflowy here so you can see it.

**Craig:** What I need is a hoodie.

**John:** There’s hoodies.

**Craig:** I’m getting one.

**John:** Our hoodies are good.

**Craig:** You know Cotton Bureau, by the way, used to make the blank T-shirt in the Stuart tri-blend?

**John:** They don’t do it anymore?

**Craig:** They don’t do it anymore. They stopped.

**John:** Oh, wow.

**Craig:** It’s such a shame. I’m checking out… I love the look of it. Oh, but this doesn’t show me… Oh, it doesn’t have a hoodie. Oh yeah, it does.

**John:** It does have a hoodie, yes.

**Craig:** But it’s not a zip hoodie.

**John:** Oh, you want a zip hoodie.

**Craig:** Yeah, I want a zip-

**John:** We’ll figure it out.

**Craig:** John.

**John:** We’ll figure it out.

**Craig:** John.

**John:** The problem is the zipper would go through the logo itself. That’s the problem with a zip hoodie.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely true. Ugh.

**John:** It has a pullover crew neck. The pullover crew neck is what you would think about for a sweatshirt.

**Craig:** What about doing a zip one where you take the Scriptnotes University and just make it a bit smaller and put it on one side? I don’t want to screw up our merchandise methods. I’m just saying. A tank top? Wow. Who’s walking around in the Scriptnotes University tank top? That’s cool. Aw, there’s a onesie. Aw.

**John:** There’s a onesie. See?

**Craig:** Aw, so cute.

**John:** Make them for everybody. This was inspired by a Scriptnotes listener who wrote in. She wants to remain anonymous. She said, “I really feel like I learned more from Scriptnotes University than I did from actual film school. I really want a Scriptnotes University T-shirt, sweatshirt.” We’re now making this for her and for everybody else. If you zoom in, you’ll see that the little logo at the center has a typewriter. It’s surrounded by brads. It says “scriptum notas” and “ira and ratio,” which is umbrage and reason.

**Craig:** I love it. I love it.

**John:** Established 2011.

**Craig:** Established 2011, Scriptnotes University is objectively superior to every film school in the world and costs far less. I’m just saying it. I don’t care. I’m saying it now constantly. It’s just a fact. I know you guys went to Stark and everything. I’m just saying it. It’s a fact. We’re just better.

**John:** Speaking of college, any listeners who are college students, reminder that you can get Highland 2 for free for the student license. You just write in. There’s a link in the show notes. Also, just go to Quote-Unquote Apps. If you have a student ID, if you have a student dot-edu address, you get it for free. Why would you not want to do that?

We also have the new XL version of Writer Emergency Pack in the store at writeremergency.com. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one Craig and I are about to record about going back to school.

**Craig:** Back to school.

**John:** Craig and Drew, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Drew:** Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Oh, Craig. Megana was back from her trip, and she texted you and me, saying, “Oh, I was at Target, and I saw that it’s now spooky season, because they have Halloween stuff out.”

**Craig:** Freaking August.

**John:** Megana, it’s not spooky season yet-

**Craig:** it’s not.

**John:** … because it’s still back to school season. Back-to-school season is the best time of year. I loved back-to-school season. I didn’t like necessarily going back to school, but I loved school supplies. I loved stocking up for the new year.

**Craig:** Always fun, yes. Fresh, new stuff. Crisp, new stuff. I was the sort of kid that would just ruin his notebook or binder over the course of the first two months. To have a fresh, new binder, a new notebook, with that weird marble cover that makes no sense, all of that stuff was wonderful, and getting my new pencils, and pens, which we weren’t really allowed to use, until we were in, what, 7th grade or something?

**John:** For a while, we were allowed to use the erasable pens, which-

**Craig:** Those stank.

**John:** I’m sure they still exist, but no one uses erasable pens anymore.

**Craig:** What was it called, Paper Mate?

**John:** Paper Mate.

**Craig:** Paper Mate. Those stank. Poor lefties were just erasing their little-

**John:** That smear.

**Craig:** It was just so sad. Those stank. Protractor.

**John:** Oh yeah, compass.

**Craig:** Compass, all that great stuff. That weird eraser, that big, chunky, pink, trapezoidal, or parallelogrammatic.

**John:** I want to know, how did that form come to be, because where it’s slanted, it’s-

**Craig:** It’s a parallelogram.

**John:** It’s a parallelogram. That’s what it is.

**Craig:** It’s a parallelogram.

**John:** On the side. It’s a parallelogram extended as a solid.

**Craig:** What was it? Was it a Pearl? Was that what it’s called, Pearl Eraser?

**John:** Yeah, Pearl Eraser. Yeah, Pearl Eraser. A very distinct smell.

**Craig:** So distinct.

**John:** You’re not rubbing through the paper, but you can smell that burning rubber to it.

**Craig:** You know what? It’s by the Paper Mate company, and it’s called the Pink Pearl Eraser. It is one of those products still available, of course, that seemingly will never change. The script on it that says Pink Pearl and all that, it just will never change.

**John:** Why would you change it? It’s already perfect.

**Craig:** It’s kind of perfect. It does have that weird smell. Occasionally, it would crack.

**John:** Yeah, because it would dry out over the course of the year too. It was much better when it’s fresh out of the package.

**Craig:** Everything is.

**John:** A few months in, it’s pretty bad.

**Craig:** Everything is better. Also, we did have new clothes, which in my case meant going to Sears and buying-

**John:** Sears or JC Penney’s.

**Craig:** Yeah. On Staten Island, you would go to Sears, and you would have to buy all of your winter clothes, because that’s when they were available, because for some reason, they would only have winter clothes in the summer and summer clothes in the winter, which made me crazy. We were all in the same lower middle class economic stratum. We would get to school, and everybody’s wearing the exact same coat, this weird polyester thing with fake fur and a bright orange inside. Did you have that one?

**John:** I didn’t have that one, but I know exactly what you’re talking about. I also had this maroon color coat that was my coat for a couple years.

**Craig:** There was that. There were your jeans, your new sneakers. Everything was fresh, fresh, fresh.

**John:** You did not have hand-me-downs, because you were the oldest.

**Craig:** I was the oldest, yes.

**John:** I got a lot of hand-me-downs.

**Craig:** My younger sibling was a girl, my sister. She wasn’t really getting my stuff. That’s probably why our stuff was so shitty, because you could only use it once. It was all really cheap. I had a lot of Wrangler shirts. You know those Western style button-downs?

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** You’d get a haircut. Your hair’s all combed. You had to look super clean and neat on day one. This ended on day one. Day two, you could be an absolute rolling, lice-filled wreck. But day one, spotless.

**John:** Now, did you have school photos on day one, or was it in that first week? When were your school photos taken?

**Craig:** That’s a really interesting question. I can’t remember. Maybe it was in the first couple of weeks.

**John:** I think it was the first school week. I do remember, because there was another day where you had to actually look pretty good and bring a comb, or they’d give you one of the incredibly sharp, painful, disposable combs to run through your hair. Every year, I would have to get my photos retaken, because I just could not smile properly.

**Craig:** Was there some… Emotionally damaged or-

**John:** I would make the wrong choice in that last millisecond before the shutter went off.

**Craig:** Was it the kind of thing where you would smile and everybody would be terrified, like look evil?

**John:** No. I would just be looking away or something. I would get nervous by the eye contact.

**Craig:** I do remember, it was always like every year, you would just be in the same arrangement. I was generally taller, and so I would be in the back, next to my tall friend. Man, every now and then, somebody will send me something like, “Oh my god, look. Your former classmate, who’s on Facebook, put this thing up from 3rd grade.” They’ll copy and send me the photo, because I’m not on Facebook. I’m just like, “What am I wearing? What is this weird, horrible, nylon disco outfit that my parents have put me in?” It was just nightmarish.

**John:** I think it’s more fun to look at what the teachers were wearing, because the teachers were actually indicative of what adults were wearing at the time. Like, oh my god, how was that comfortable? That looks like polyester death.

**Craig:** Everyone was wearing some sort of plastic clothing.

**John:** Not a tri-blend. No. It was actually just all plastic.

**Craig:** A uni-blend of some sort of cancer fiber that we were all breathing in. You know what? It was also a lovely time, because I’m sure it was like this for you, for us in New York, the weather was getting cooler. Finally, summer was ending. Fall was sweeping in. Fall in New York is lovely. There’s also all the fun fall stuff. It’s not spooky season. I just want to be clear. It was just more like apple cider and whatever. I don’t know. Leaves.

**John:** I remember we would get the Ditto machined copy of like, this is what you need to bring for your school supplies. I just loved that, checking off the things. You had to bring a box of Kleenex, because somebody, mostly me, I would go through all the Kleenex is the classroom, because my nose was always runny.

**Craig:** You were the snot kid.

**John:** I was snot kid, because I had terrible allergies in a time before people understood what allergies were, apparently.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Now, I take medicines for them, but at that time I didn’t have them.

**Craig:** There was always a kid with snot. I guess it was you.

**John:** It was me.

**Craig:** Then we would also have to bring a shoebox, which all the girls or resourceful boys or non-resourceful boys’ mothers would cover in wallpaper or newspaper or something to make it look pretty. That was our school supply box. We would have our Elmer’s glue and our safety scissor and whatever else was on that Ditto sheet, which I’m sure, Drew, you are absolutely falling asleep here, but let me just wake you up for a second and explain.

We did not get emails listing what we required. No. A teacher hand-wrote a list of things on this toxic piece of disgusting purple paper, that was then stuck to a large roller, coated in even more disgusting purple fluid. Then they would roll it with their hands. As they would roll it, it would stick onto another piece of paper, send that piece of paper off, pull in another piece of paper, and thus, like a small Gutenberg printing press, made of purple death. Each one of those things stank, and yet we all loved the smell of it.

**John:** You did, because you’d get a fresh Ditto machine, you’d just stick it up to your-

**Craig:** Everyone.

**John:** Stick the paper up and inhale it, yeah.

**Craig:** Everyone was snorting whatever was in that. I don’t even want to know what was in it. We were absolutely huffing paint, in the classroom, by the way. The teacher would be like, “Go ahead, kids. Snort it up.” Then we would go to work. That’s what we would get. What a time. What a time to be alive.

**John:** My olfactory memories of that age are so distinct, because I also remember when you have heads down for Thumbs Up, Seven Up on a rainy day, I remember what the desk would smell like. It would smell like this weird cleaner, whatever they used to clean the desks. I have that memory firmly in my head.

**Craig:** Same. It’s funny, you went to school halfway across the country from me, and our desks smelled exactly the same.

**John:** Absolutely. It was not quite urine, but it’s almost that. It was an ammonia-ish kind of thing to it.

**Craig:** It was ammonia. It was this weird, rank ammonia smell. It’s a disgusting smell. The desktop was some horrible, again, plasticky, lacquery thing.

**John:** It looked like wood, but it was not wood.

**Craig:** It also had a little bit of a sour milk smell to it. It just was disgusting.

**John:** Craig, did you have a number line taped to the top of your desk?

**Craig:** Of course we did. Of course. We all had a number line when we were learning addition and subtraction. Also, lining up in size order. Drew, did you ever have to line up in size order?

**Drew:** Yeah. I was always at the front because I was tiny.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw, little Drew.

**Craig:** Aw, little Drew. Oh my god, he was in the front.

**John:** We were almost always in alphabetical order, especially if we were going to lunch, because we had to go through the lunch line. If you were buying lunch, they would check your name off on the little logbook.

**Craig:** I see. That actually makes sense. Lining up in size order seems unnecessarily cruel to everyone on either extreme of the line. Even if you weren’t on the extreme of the line, if you put two boys, if they happen to be next to each other in the size-order line, there would almost certainly be a shoving fight over who was taller. Just pointless. Why? What is this size order thing? Who came up with that? What does it even matter what the order is? What does it matter?

**John:** They want to make sure Drew gets his milk first.

**Craig:** Because he needed it. They’re like, “There’s only one thing that’s gonna make this kid grow: warm, under-refrigerated milk.”

**John:** In a cardboard container.

**Craig:** That has the picture of a lost child on it.

**John:** Indeed. Drew, what are we forgetting about back-to-school?

**Drew:** Oh, my god.

**Craig:** He’s like, “You guys are from a different time.”

**Drew:** No, the smell is real, but I can never delineate where the smell is cleaning product and what is just the smell of children.

**John:** That’s true.

**Drew:** Maybe that sounds strange, but-

**Craig:** It really does sound strange.

**Drew:** It does.

**Craig:** That’s really upsetting.

**Drew:** Should probably walk that back, but yeah.

**Craig:** I just like the idea of a small Drew just walking around, just sniffing.

**John:** Sniffing.

**Craig:** Everyone’s like, “Oh my god, what is with that kid? Oh, leave him alone. He’s small.” They didn’t know what the Ditto fluid was. Ditto fluid.

**Drew:** I wonder when they retired the Ditto machines, because I definitely went to a school that did not have up-to-date equipment by any stretch of the imagination, and we didn’t have one, which makes me feel like they must’ve-

**John:** At your point, it was all photocopies, right?

**Drew:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Here’s a website that says mimeographs, that was the technical name, “The classroom chore that smelled so good.” I’m just looking to see if they actually identify what was in there. The duplicator fluid was methanol and isopropanol, so basically-

**John:** Alcohols.

**Craig:** … alcohol, but non-drinkable alcohol, the kind of alcohol that makes you blind. That’s what we were snorting. Hooray.

**Drew:** In my generation, we had the markers that ended up, I think had to be the same stuff that kids would just stick straight in their nostril.

**John:** Craig, you and I didn’t really have markers as much, because even Sharpies were late in my career. We had some marker things, but it wasn’t a default thing. I didn’t go to school with Crayola markers at the start. Did you?

**Craig:** They were much later on. We typically went to school with a box of Crayola crayons. The classic was the 64… I have one. I bought one of them just off of eBay for two bucks. I loved it. It was a proper 1970s era 64 Crayola crayons with the crayon sharpener in the back, which didn’t-

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** … sharpen shit.

**John:** No, but you didn’t really need to. Of course, the pink color was labeled Flesh, because that was the default white.

**Craig:** Yes, Flesh was that, yes, was a slightly whitey peach-ish. I don’t even think Flesh was my color of flesh. It was really for John and Melissa.

**John:** Basically, yeah. It’s a difference between my very tanned legs and my very pale ankles. It’s the pale ankle color.

**Craig:** It’s the pale ankle color, yeah. Flesh, it was like, oh, you’re very light. That is back when things weren’t quite the way they are. There was also Indian Red. That was a color, Indian Red. They’re not red, and they’re also not Indians, but okay, Crayola. That’s how we grew up. We had the Crayola thing and, oh yeah, man, the tape. Magic Tape was a huge deal.

**John:** Oh, Magic Tape, a huge innovation.

**Craig:** Yes. Before Magic Tape, Drew, regular Scotch Tape was shiny as hell.

**John:** Yeah, it was shiny and gross.

**Craig:** You’d put it on something, and it would just reflect like a mirror. Then somebody over there came up with this matte finish, called it Magic Tape. It was invisible. Everybody lost their crap.

**John:** Those 3M scientists, we don’t talk enough about the innovations they had. Magic Tape. Then they had the Post-It notes.

**Craig:** Oh my god, absolutely. They’re geniuses over there, absolute wizards.

**John:** Oh, question for both of you. Were you required to… You got your textbooks, or your math book or your science book.

**Craig:** Cover it?

**John:** Did you have to put a cover on them?

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Was it like part of your task is, okay, now you have to put on this cover?

**Craig:** Book covers, yes.

**John:** Loved them.

**Craig:** Which I bet you made your own book covers.

**John:** Yeah, out of paper bags, for sure.

**Craig:** I knew you would. I knew it. Now, you’ve seen me attempt to do crafts, so you know that I could not. My mom would have to do it. Then eventually, I got my sister to start doing it. If it ripped in class, you would get in trouble. I don’t know why. I would ask one of the kids sitting next to me. I’m like, “Can you fix my da da?” Then they would, because everybody just understood I was helpless.

**John:** They would rip off a piece of their shiny tape and fix your book cover.

**Craig:** Yes, just so shiny. So shiny. Inside the textbook, sometimes it would be like “this book is the property of” and then there’d be one kid after another, and it’s stamped. What was that about? Who needs to know?

**John:** I loved that.

**Craig:** Yeah, like, “Oh my god.”

**John:** They had the history. “Did you know that some of these kids are dead by now, and they owned this book.”

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** They got sent off to war.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Some of these people who were reading this book had been sent off to Vietnam, and I’m reading this book.

**Craig:** I’m reading this book on vocabulary, and the last kid who had it died in Inchon. It’s all very grim. I gotta say, man, every generation has its ups and downs and things, but you know what? Generation X, we’re pretty great.

**John:** We’re pretty great.

**Craig:** Does anyone hate us? I don’t think anyone hates us.

**John:** No, because we’re a small generation too.

**Craig:** We’re small. We’re kind of like, “Whatever, man.” We were still there when computers came around. We reminisce, but not like, “And our way was better.” We’re usually reminiscing in a way of like, “God, that sucked.” We like everybody except the Boomers. Nobody likes the Boomers. Let’s face it.

**John:** We grew up mostly with a fear of nuclear war.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re terrified. We’re all right.

**John:** We’re all right.

**Craig:** Last question for you, Drew, on back-to-school week. Are there people that don’t like Generation X, or is there a generation that you think is opposed-

**Drew:** To Gen X?

**Craig:** … naturally to Generation X?

**Drew:** I don’t think so. I think you guys are truly safe, because my generation looked up to you. I’m firmly Millennial. We looked up to you. You were creating all the content when we were growing up. I think Gen Z likes you much more than us, because we’re very cringey to Gen Z, because we’re very cringey in general.

**Craig:** Yeah, you guys are special. You know what? It’s not your fault. Your echo Boomers. You’re the children of Boomers. You are trying to outrun a legacy in your blood, and you’re doing all right.

**Drew:** We can’t escape it though.

**Craig:** It’s tough. It’s a tough one. That was amazing. I wish it were back-to-school week every week.

**John:** I love it. Drew and Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Drew:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable, Judge Says in Ruling That Could Give Hollywood Studios Pause](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ai-works-not-copyrightable-studios-1235570316/) by Winston Cho for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Thaler v. Perlmutter](https://www.scribd.com/document/665871482/Thaler-v-Perlmutter#)
* [The Mandalorian, Loki, And WandaVision Are Getting Limited Edition 4K And Blu-Ray Releases](https://www.slashfilm.com/1371265/mandalorian-loki-wandavision-getting-limited-edition-4k-blu-ray-releases/) by Ryan Scott for Slash Film
* [Lingua franca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca)
* [Where Story Begins – Premise](https://scriptmag.com/features/script-notes-where-story-begins-premise) by Michael Tabb for Script Magazine
* [The premise, or what’s the point?](https://johnaugust.com/2016/the-premise-or-whats-the-point) by John August
* [We Need to See More Parents Having Abortions in Film and Television](https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a35802152/parents-having-abortions-on-tv-films/) by Danielle Campoamor for Marie Claire
* [Dungeons & Dragons: Trials of Tempus](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/385546/dungeons-dragons-trials-tempus)
* [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/)
* [Writer Emergency Pack XL](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/writer-emergency-pack-xl)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Pineless ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and is edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/610standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/scriptnotes-live-at-dynasty-typewriter-in-la).

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

**Emcee:** All right, now without further ado, the hosts with the most, John August and Craig Mazin.

**Craig Mazin:** Wow. Wow.

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

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

**John:** You are here for Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are…

**Audience:** Interesting to screenwriters.

**John:** Wow. Incredible here.

**Craig:** Incredible.

**John:** First off, we need to thank the LA Philharmonic Orchestra. It is remarkable to be here at the Hollywood Bowl, a dream come true.

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous. Probably the mics that we’re talking into are pretty close to the stage, so we’re probably only picking up maybe the first couple of rows-

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** … in the Garden Boxes.

**John:** I can the energy out here in this-

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** … iconic location.

**Craig:** What a dream.

**John:** 15,000 people?

**Craig:** Thousand.

**John:** I’d never envision this in our-

**Craig:** And the weather.

**John:** Great. A few sprinkles, but just the best thing.

**Craig:** Lovely.

**John:** Needed a little rain here.

**Craig:** You know what? That felt so good, because everything’s been going so great lately, so it’s nice that we have this going on for ourselves.

**John:** It’s nice that we have a little bit of a moment here. Today I was out on the picket lines, and we were talking about-

(Audience cheers)

**John:** Oh, hey. Phew! I worried we were going to have some anti-writer people here in the crowd. I was out on the picket lines. I talked about, oh, we have a live show tonight. It’s like, oh, did you plan for it to be on the 100th day of the Strike? Today is the 100th day of the Strike. Did we plan this?

**Craig:** We did.

**John:** A hundred percent. Craig said, “John, whatever you do, make sure the Strike goes on for at least-“

**Craig:** Slow walk this thing.

**John:** Yeah, 100 days. Now, it’s smooth sailing from here on forward.

**Craig:** John, to be clear, you do have a little bit of a weird and creepy, and what I honestly think is somewhat a bit of an anti-union secret. I think it’s probably important for you to come clean about it.

**John:** I thought that was green room rules. I thought we didn’t-

**Craig:** No. Fuck that.

**John:** All right. I think people could agree that I’m generally a pro-union, pro-WGA person.

**Craig:** That’s what I thought.

**John:** I would never disparage anything about the WGA. But 100 days in, there’s something I want to get off my chest, is that I believe the iconic blue official WGA Strike T-shirts… I love them as an image. I love wearing it there. I love seeing a field of blue. Fantastic. They are not comfortable shirts.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** They are really uncomfortable shirts.

**Craig:** In fact, they may have been manufactured by the AMPTP.

**John:** The official blue shirts are union-made, and the union is not the probably here. They are 100 percent cotton. We learned from our own Scriptnotes producer, Stuart Friedel, his sense of softness, what do we need for a T-shirt to be comfortable?

**Craig:** You need a tri-blend, John.

**John:** You need a tri-blend.

**Craig:** You need a tri-blend.

**John:** You need a tri-blend.

**Craig:** Tri-blend.

**John:** They are not tri-blend shirts.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** They’re not comfortable to wear.

**Craig:** No. They are hair shirts. I don’t like them at all. They chafe your nipples. Do not wear.

**John:** Here’s what I think about it. I have shirts that I wear because I choose to wear them, and there are shirts where like, you’ve now joined the army, here’s your uniform. They don’t ask soldiers is your camouflage comfortable. That’s not their concern.

**Craig:** They actually might. I got to tell you, I think that we have the worst of it.

**John:** We have a show that’s chockablock full with amazing guests. Quinta Brunson is here.

**Craig:** Someone named Natasha Lyonne is here.

**John:** These are guests who are not only incredibly talented writers, they are also actors. As members of SAG-AFTRA, there are certain specific restrictions on what they should be talking about. They are not going to be talking about their specific shows and programs that you know them for, but instead, we can talk about the craft, the art.

**Craig:** Which we do anyway. We’re not really press junkety question people. As we go through the show, if you’re wondering, hey, why don’t they mention muh or meep, it’s because we just don’t want to get them in trouble with their union. Also, I’m in that union too.

**John:** You are, yeah.

**Craig:** I’m in SAG.

**John:** You’re in SAG.

**Craig:** I’m in SAG. I’m an actor.

**John:** You’re an actor.

**Craig:** I’m a real actor.

**John:** I almost said the word. I said half the word of a show that you were in.

**Craig:** You can say it. That didn’t break the rule. You’re not in SAG.

**John:** Duncan Crabtree-Ireland is sitting right out there. He’s got a sniper rifle, so if we say the wrong thing-

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We are going to talk about how they got started, how they got to this place they are today, but we are also going to have some fun. We’re going to play some games. We’ll do some audience Q and A.

**Craig:** With slightly stricter rules, because you guys really can’t talk about those shows either. That’s fine. That’s no big deal. I wanted to introduce somebody really quickly who’s going to be with us today. You’re going to be seeing him floating around over there. That’s Elliot Aronson. Elliot is going to be our ASL interpreter tonight. Elliot also was the ASL interpreter… I can say a show that was on the air, right?

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:05:31].

**Craig:** I’m going to do it. He worked for The Last of Us. He was Kevionn Woodard’s ASL interpreter.

**John:** I think he’s a former One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** He is a One Cool Thing. He will always be One Cool Thing. I’m sort of annoyed that he’s not signing right now, because I would force him to have to sign about himself and talk about himself as an incredibly handsome person and a wonderful guy whose name is Elliot. This is me. I am Elliot, and I’m amazing. He’s never going to get a chance to do that again.

**John:** Let’s get started, Craig. Our very first guest is a writer, a producer, an actress, a comedian. Last year, she was listed as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year. We’ve wanted her on the show forever, Craig, and now we can finally have her. Welcome, Quinta Brunson.

**Quinta Brunson:** Hi, everybody. Hi. How’s it going?

**John:** Quinta.

**Quinta:** Yes?

**John:** Backstage you talked about that you are not a huge podcast listener.

**Quinta:** No.

**Craig:** Me either.

**Quinta:** Or doer.

**John:** Or doer. Thank you for making an exception for us here.

**Quinta:** Of course.

**John:** You actually have some history with Hollywood Heart.

**Quinta:** Yes. I used to do improv at Hollywood Heart. This was probably the summer of, what’s this called, 2023. Then that was probably maybe six, seven years ago. I did improv shows with my troupe, Summercon [ph]. It was four of us. We would just do improv and then have the kids come up and join us at the camp, which is on a really scary… You guys, it’s on this hill.

**John:** Oh, no.

**Craig:** We’re trying to raise money to get them off the hill.

**Quinta:** It is terrifying.

**Craig:** Describe the hill.

**Quinta:** The hill is something of your nightmares. You know when you go in those canyons around here, and you’re like, “Whoa, this is crazy,” but then you get used to them because you’ve been in LA for a while? This shit, it’s like going to Bowser’s castle. It is insane. It’s windy. You feel like you’re going to… Kids, because we just talked about mortality back there, they don’t know that they can die, so they’re not afraid.

**Craig:** You’ve told them.

**Quinta:** Yeah. I think that’s why Hollywood Heart didn’t invite me back, because I put it in my improv. I just was motivated to tell the truth.

**Craig:** I like that most of your bits were just about how shitty that camp was. That’s pretty awesome.

**Quinta:** The camp is beautiful. It’s just the road on the way up there.

**Craig:** I see. It’s getting there.

**Quinta:** It’s in heaven. It’s so high up. This is why I don’t love to talk. I’m not talking correctly, you guys, because I’m not-

**Craig:** You’re out of practice.

**Quinta:** I should be a writers’ room. I’m not doing well with sentences.

**Craig:** We’ll work you through it. It’s going to be all right.

**John:** Quinta, before you were traumatizing children in this improv group, what is your comedy background? How did you get started? What was the spark? How did you actually go from like, “I like comedy,” to, “I’m doing it.”

**Quinta:** It was the connection between my siblings and I. My siblings are all significantly older than me. My closest sibling is eight years older than me. He hated me, because he was the baby for so long, and then I came along. He really didn’t like me. I was like, “I gotta win this guy over,” truly. That was a big motivator for me. He really liked Ace Ventura. He hated me. We had a Jack and Jill door. Do you guys know what that is? Between our bedrooms.

**Craig:** I had one of those.

**John:** Like The Brady Brunch.

**Quinta:** Yeah. He just couldn’t stand that he was sharing his space with this freaking baby. Then I would see him watching Ace Ventura and laughing really loud with his friends. I was like, “I can make my butt talk too. I can do that.” I started mimicking what was happening in the movies, and he would laugh, and he would like me.

I just started liking comedy, because that was a connecting factor between all of my siblings and I. My oldest brother, he loved the Kings of Comedy, so I would do impressions of Steve Harvey on that. Then my sisters, they were great, because they had different tastes. My one sister loved In Living Color, but the other sister loved SNL. One sister loved Martin. The other loved Conan. She was into late-night shows. It just became a way for me to connect with everyone. Same thing with my parents, who are also really old. I watched The Brady Bunch with them. I just like this.

Then high school, when it became taste to me, because I loved it so much, and I knew so much more about comedy than everyone else that I would bring DVDs to school and be like, “This is what you need to be watching. This is the new shit in the streets.” They’re like, “What the fuck is Napoleon Dynamite?” I’m like, “You’ll learn. You’ll learn.” Remember that? Remember when you gave someone a DVD, and it meant something?

**Craig:** I don’t know how young they are. DVDs were these round things.

**Quinta:** You gave it to them. You were like, “Return it.” You trusted them to return your only copy.

**Craig:** Not scratched.

**Quinta:** Not scratched.

**Craig:** Not scratched.

**Quinta:** That meant something to me to bring that. Then college, I was really good. I was a good student all my life, but then I just started fucking around. I was like, I don’t care about what I’m doing. I was an advertising major. Then I was just watching SNL one night and was like, where did these people all go to do this? That’s when I learned about Second City. Then that’s when I actually learned that I could do it for a living, because that was the change, and like, okay, this can be my career.

**Craig:** You mentioned growing up in Philly.

**Audience member:** Woo!

**Craig:** All right.

**Quinta:** Yay!

**Craig:** Philly’s got its own… It’s got an interesting comedy tradition. One of the things I’ve noticed about people that come out of Philly, especially people in comedy, like Kevin Hart or Rob McElhenney, is that it’s not a chip on the shoulder as much as, “You underestimate me at your own peril,” which is a very Philadelphia kind of vibe.

**Quinta:** Yes, absolutely. Love it.

**Craig:** I just want to ask you how you bring a little bit of the place you came from to your voice and how you apply that to writing and what you do.

**Quinta:** That is an excellent question.

**Craig:** Thank you!

**Quinta:** I love this.

**Craig:** Show over.

**Quinta:** I feel like I live my whole life like an underdog. I think my comedic voice, the projects that I have done all deal with underdog, underestimated characters and stories. Philadelphia as a city is the little cousin to New York. No one thinks of us until we…

**Craig:** Until you get stuck there.

**Quinta:** Get stuck there, or when you make it to a Super Bowl, everyone’s like, “Oh.” It’s like, yeah, we have a good fucking team. What are you watching? I was so mad during the Super Bowl last year when people were like, “Oh, the Eagles.” Bitch, the whole fucking season-

**Craig:** They won just a few years earlier.

**Quinta:** … was incredible. What are you talking about?

**Craig:** That’s Philly.

**Quinta:** It’s really frustrating. It’s also a really foolish city. We have that statue of Rocky. That is so foolish. We believe in ourselves so hard that even when you come… Allen Iverson is an honorary Philadelphian. I don’t think of where he’s from. To me, he’s from Philly, because he became a part of the underdog story. I say all that to say it’s just a city that makes you believe in the underdog more than any other city I think in America, but I still want to be the underdog, so maybe not as much as any other city.

**Craig:** You have to be an underdog in the race to be the underdog.

**Quinta:** Yeah. I had a hard time during the last two years of my life, where I was losing my underdog status.

**John:** Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a little rough.

**Quinta:** My friends started clowning me a little bit. They’re like, “Bitch,” because I’d be saying stuff like, “Oh, man, I don’t know if I can get in this club, but we going to try.”

**Craig:** They’re like, “Bitch.”

**Quinta:** Like, “Yeah, you’re going to get in the club.” Stuff like that. I’m dealing with that.

**Craig:** 100 Most Influential People of the Year.

**John:** This underdog thing of yours, the first thing that broke for you was Girl Who Had Never Been on a Good Date.

**Quinta:** On a Nice Date, yeah.

**John:** On a Nice Date, which Instagram video, not even reels, an early Instagram thing. Talk to us about decision to do those and what happened when those caught.

**Quinta:** Instagram wasn’t Instagram yet. It was 2013. The platform had just gotten video. I was just fucking around. I just wanted to make my friends who followed me… I might’ve had, I don’t know, maybe 1,000 followers, just friends from college and friends from high school and stuff. I just wanted to put up videos to make them laugh. I really was just testing out the platform, I guess. We didn’t even speak like this back then.

**John:** I know.

**Quinta:** We weren’t saying platform. We were just like, “Yeah, my Instagram account.” The first video that I posted had just gone viral, which that wasn’t even a thing besides describing YouTube, virality in that way. I saw an opportunity to capitalize off of it. I was like, “I’ll keep making them. People like it. This is the same as garnering an audience where people come to see you at shows. It’s word of mouth.”

I was a person who was really, really against the internet. I despised YouTubers. I despised just the internet. At the time, I was doing improv at ImprovOlympic, which no longer exists. I was like, “I’m a stage performer. I can’t be doing this.” But I came to accept it. It really helped kick off my career, so I’m very grateful for it.

**Craig:** We have spent a long time, over a decade now, teaching about writing and our business, to people, through this podcast. Your mother was a public schoolteacher?

**Quinta:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Both of my parents were public schoolteachers.

**Quinta:** Oh.

**Craig:** We have that shared experience. I’m curious if coming from a teacher the way you did, what you think about the way writing is taught, because we have an issue with the way writing is taught and the general education of writers, and I guess also the education of how to work in the entertainment business. I’m curious, as somebody who comes from that tradition, what you think about how we are doing things and who we’re bringing in and how we’re helping them or teaching them.

**Quinta:** I think there should be a little bit more focus for writers on, you said it, how to also do business and how to communicate with partners, whether it be other people in a room, a writers’ room or a studio or a network, because you can be really talented and not know how to communicate your idea, not know how to communicate it even on paper. You could have just such an incredible story in your head and write it down. Sure, amazing to you and your two friends. Do you know how to communicate it to other people who don’t come from the same background as you, who don’t speak the same language as you? When I’m writing-

**Craig:** A show. Let’s just stipulate.

**Quinta:** When I’m writing a show-

**Craig:** A show.

**Quinta:** … and I decide that I would like it to be for a broad audience, I think, will a person in Korea understand this? Yes, it’s in a different language, but will they understand it if it’s translated into their language?

I think that’s a huge thing that people miss out on. Even if you’re writing it in English and you’re writing it for Americans, why don’t you test and see if someone in France can understand this story, because I think that’s such a huge part of writing is just clearcut storytelling. It can be done on a wide, complicated scale. We’ve seen huge movies do it very, very well. It can be done on a small scale, like with a TV show. Does the story make sense to other people who aren’t you and aren’t your friends from school? Is that a good answer? I wish that was taught more.

**Craig:** I think it’s a great answer.

**John:** It’s a great answer. Before you started working on official Hollywood things, you were working at Buzzfeed for a time. It seemed like you had a chance to do a lot of stuff. Were you writing, performing, editing, all that, the whole cycle?

**Quinta:** Writing, performing, producing, editing. Producing was the biggest thing I got out of Buzzfeed, because we had a $300 budget to make videos. Man, that made me scrappy. My brain is just forever scrappy in that way. Even if I receive a big budget, it’s just still working on that $300 in a way. I have to be told, “Expand your mind. You have more money.” Those are the things I…

Editing too. I’m so grateful for learning how to edit there. That is another thing that I feel like anyone who is making something, if you can, spend time with an editor. Make sure you take yourself to an editor suite. Just get on the equipment yourself and start fucking around, just to see. It’s another part of it. Is your story communicating to the editor? It’s such a huge-

**Craig:** It’s how you finish. It’s the end of the writing. We think writing ends when we stop typing. If the point is to make, so there’s your production, and then the editing really is, it’s your final draft.

**Quinta:** Yeah, but if people never sit with an editor or-

**Craig:** They don’t know.

**Quinta:** … get on the programs themselves, they don’t know.

**Craig:** I remember the first time I saw the things that I was writing being edited, I wanted to barf, because I realized how far off I was, or also just how impotent my plan was. In my mind, I was like, “I have thought of it, and therefore it will be.”

**Quinta:** I think that I got a real appreciation for editors from Steven Spielberg. I was obsessed with Jurassic Park when I was little. I found everything he ever talked about, wrote, did, any video I could find. When YouTube came around, I just got on… Who’s that guy?

**Craig:** He is our ASL interpreter.

**Quinta:** Oh, hey.

**Craig:** You weren’t here for that part.

**Quinta:** I wasn’t.

**Craig:** Did you think he was-

**Quinta:** I was like, “Everybody’s cool with this?”

**Craig:** You think that we were about to get jumped?

**Quinta:** I did. I carry my purse because my shank’s in here. I was like, do we need to-

**Craig:** Like I said, Philadelphia.

**Quinta:** Seriously.

**Craig:** That’s how it used to be at the old Veterans Stadium.

**Quinta:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Someone runs out there.

**Quinta:** Hello. Thank you. Where has he been the whole time?

**Craig:** He was down there, but I think the person that he’s interpreting for has arrived is my guess.

**Quinta:** Wow. That’s amazing.

**Craig:** He sprung into action. His name is Elliot. He’s wonderful.

**Quinta:** Hi, Elliot. That’s amazing that you have that. That’s great.

**Craig:** I’m glad that he’s up there, because now I once again-

**Quinta:** It’s really cool.

**Craig:** … have to say that Elliot is a wonderful, handsome person, and once again, he needs to sign it, which is spectacular.

**Quinta:** You should tell people that. I think Natasha’s going to lose her shit.

**Craig:** No, I’m going to going to. I want to see that.

**Quinta:** Wait. I watched Steven Spielberg talk about editing when I was younger. I was like, “Man, the editor’s the final part. He said he couldn’t do this without the editors.” There was a video of him sitting with the editors, working on Jurassic Park. The editor that really blew my mind when I was little, I was like, “Oh my god, he worked on Star Wars too. This is fucking crazy.” It just really painted the picture to me that they were a vital part of the process.

One of my favorite editors, Richie, he and I share a brain. I did one show that I sold to… It doesn’t exist anymore. It was Verizon’s platform. I had an editor who was Argentinian.

**Audience member:** Woo!

**Quinta:** Okay. Yeah. What a diverse audience.

**Craig:** One person from Philly, one person from Argentina.

**Quinta:** Super diverse.

**Craig:** Everyone else from Silver Lake, I presume.

**Quinta:** Some from Echo Park.

**Craig:** Yes, of course. It’s West Echo.

**Quinta:** I made this show. It was poorly written. I’ll say that. I think it’s great to get an opportunity to poorly write something for a digital platform that won’t exist anymore. The editor didn’t get it. I was like, “This rhythmically is missing something then. I’m going to take myself back to the drawing board of writing.”

That show was actually my first attempt at a mockumentary. That taught me another thing, like, okay, the rhythm of a mockumentary is different than the rhythm of another single-cam, which is different from a multi-cam. I have to write with that in mind. I have to make sure I can communicate it to someone who is an editor, who is not from where I’m from and may not pick up the same cues. It needs to be in the script properly, so that they know how to cut and know what they’re doing. That was such a big learning experience for me at Buzzfeed.

**Craig:** Do we have time for one more question?

**John:** One last question just for Craig.

**Craig:** One last question real fast. Speed round. You mentioned failing.

**Quinta:** Failing, yeah.

**Craig:** One of the things that’s interesting about people that work in a room, as you might, on a show, if you’re going to be failing, a lot of times you’re failing in front of a lot of people. I wonder, do you give yourself some space to go fail privately in quiet and then come back-

**Quinta:** Yes.

**Craig:** … into the room to be like-

**Quinta:** Oh, in the room?

**Craig:** I’m saying can you give yourself a place to go dance like no one’s watching and then come back and dance like other people are watching?

**Quinta:** Hm. That’s such a good question. I like to find safe spaces to fail. That used to be stand-up. I don’t feel comfortable failing at that anymore. I recently did a show with Brett Goldstein from (bleeps).

**Craig:** Other shows.

**Quinta:** In (bleeps).

**Craig:** From some shows. From some shows.

**Quinta:** From (bleeps).

**Craig:** She’ll get it. [Indiscernible 00:23:27].

**Quinta:** Oh, shit, I can’t talk. I’m sorry.

**Craig:** It’s okay.

**John:** Duncan, put down the rifle.

**Quinta:** Safe space to fail.

**Craig:** Safe space to fail.

**Quinta:** That helps make my point. This feels like a safe space to fail. The stage feels like a safe space to fail for me. Brett’s show, first I didn’t want to do it. I’m like, I’m not ready. I was like, you know what? I need to go on a stage and fail out loud and fail with an audience. It’s almost never a fail. It’s a good experience. We have a human experience together. I got to do improv for the first time in forever. That felt really good.

I like to play video games that I’m not good at, because that makes me feel like I’m failing. I like to lose, but I’m competitive, so I like to win, so that makes me better. I try to make food. I’m not good at that. Fail every single time in the kitchen, but I keep trying. I just find other spaces to fail in. In my room, I’m A1. I’m not a failure.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Quinta Brunson, thank you for the most [crosstalk 00:24:28].

**Craig:** Thank you, Quinta. Thank you.

**Quinta:** That was really fun.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Come back at the end. We’ll do some questions.

**Quinta:** I’ll see you in a little bit.

**John:** That was the fun part of the show.

**Craig:** Now it’s going to get weird.

**John:** Craig, this is the 608th episode of Scriptnotes that we’ve done.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

**John:** It’s a lot.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

**John:** In addition to the main show, for the last year we’ve had the Scriptnotes Sidecasts that Drew and Megana have been helping out with. Huge props for them.

**Craig:** Let’s give them a hand. Amazing.

**John:** Drew and Megana! I think understandably, we’re always approaching things from the writer’s perspective.

**Craig:** Of course, yes.

**John:** Tonight I was hoping we could hear from the other side, which is why I reached out to the AMPTP to see if we could get their response to some of our concerns. To my surprise, they said yes. Everyone, if you could please welcome AMPTP spokesperson Nancy Sullivan.

**Craig:** Yay-ish. There she is.

**John:** Thank you for being here. Thank you.

**Craig:** Hi.

**John:** Hi.

**Nancy Sullivan:** Wow, this is a theater. I’ve only been to the theater one time. I saw Cats when I was seven. I love that show.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Nancy, thank you so very much for agreeing to be on the show.

**Craig:** I should warn you, this may not be the friendliest audience for you.

**Nancy:** I have to say, it’s just such an honor to be here. I’m such a fan of your show.

**Craig:** Really?

**Nancy:** Oh, of course, a huge fan, especially those episodes where you sit down with filmmakers and showrunners and really get into the minutiae of the craft. Huge fan. Huge fan.

**Craig:** I have to say, that is legitimately a surprise. I would not have pegged an AMPTP person as a cinephile.

**Nancy:** Oh, no, no, you have me wrong. I’ve always been obsessed with film and TV. I remember, in fact, watching Amadeus with my father. I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. I was just being blown away by what Miloš Forman accomplished with the cinematography and the mise-en-scène and his reversal of the classic protagonist-antagonist relationship not just in dialog, but in the blocking and the framing of these two candlelit warriors always in a battle that they didn’t know it was about.

**Craig:** You were eight?

**Nancy:** Or nine.

**John:** Nancy, honestly, I was probably watching The Love Boat when I was nine. That blows me away.

**Nancy:** I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Is it just me, or is her smile terrifying?

**John:** Yeah. You were watching Amadeus?

**Nancy:** I was watching this masterpiece, Amadeus. His name is Miloš Forman, so it’s actually pronounced Amadeus [ah-mah-DAY-oosh]. I said, “Daddy! I know what I want to do, Daddy! I want to do this. I want to work with the greatest writers and filmmakers in the world and find a way to crush them economically for the benefit of multinational corporations.”

**Craig:** There it is.

**Nancy:** Let me explain. If you look at great artists throughout history, what is the unifying theme? Hardship. Suffering. Emile Zola, I believe it was, wrote, “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” If I can help make that work almost unsurvivable, if I can bring filmmakers to the edge of ruin, take away every bit of comfort and safety that they have, then true art is possible.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Nancy:** Thank you.

**John:** That is some Fountainhead shit there.

**Nancy:** Fun fact, my bat mitzvah was themed around the works of Ayn Rand.

**Craig:** Your name is Sullivan, and you had a bat mitzvah. Okay, anyway. Let me get this straight. You’re saying that you joined the AMPTP because you wanted to make great art by punishing the people who make it?

**Nancy:** Oh, no no no. No no no. Craig, Craig, I think you’re misunderstanding me. I’ve dedicated my career to the genius visionaries who make film and television. By that, of course, I’m referring to the studio bosses, because they write the checks. They’re the ones saying, “Let’s make a show based on a zombie video game.”

**Craig:** They’re not zombies.

**Nancy:** They’re not, right. That’s so sweet. You’re so sweet, because here’s the thing. If I’d shown a picture of one of those, whatever you call them, creatures to 100 people and said, “What do you think this is?” do you know what all 100 would say? They’d say they were zombies. They’re zombies.

**Craig:** They’re not zombies.

**Nancy:** They’re zombies with mushroom hats.

**Craig:** They’re not zombies. They’re not zombies.

**Nancy:** They’re zombies with-

**Craig:** They’re not zombies.

**Nancy:** They’re zombies-

**Craig:** They’re not zombies.

**Nancy:** … with mushroom fascinators.

**Craig:** They’re not zombies. They’re not zombies.

**Nancy:** They’re zombies.

**Craig:** They’re not zombies!

**Nancy:** They’re zombies!

**Craig:** They’re not zombies.

**John:** Back to the topic here. I think it sounds like what you’re saying, Nancy, is that you’re okay imposing unnecessary-

**Nancy:** Necessary suffering, go on.

**John:** … suffering on writers and actors, and not in the pursuit of profit, but instead, of some kind of warped vision of artistic integrity?

**Nancy:** I never said actors. As Alfred Hitchcock [hitch-KAAKH] I think once said-

**Craig:** Oh, come on.

**Nancy:** … actors are cattle. Of course they’re cattle. You don’t see them typing with their hooves. For actors, our approach is basically herd management. You want to make sure you have enough, but not too many. That’s why we’re so excited about AI, about scanning actors’ faces and bodies so we can recreate them digitally. It’s like having all the free beef you want.

**John:** That’s horrible, but not surprising. Last month, an anonymous studio source was quoted saying the endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.

**Nancy:** I know. Horrible. We would never say anything like that on the record. Off the record, we might float that out there, see what kind of reaction it gets, and then maybe walk it back. Back to Amadeus, Mozart was on the edge of ruin for most of his career. While Salieri is portrayed as complicit, in reality it was systemic under-evaluation of the arts and the misaligned incentives of the patronage system that put Mozart in that situation.

**Craig:** You’re saying that like it’s a good thing.

**Nancy:** I’m saying we have to change the system so that writers and filmmakers, and sure, even actors, are properly oppressed, so that great art can flourish. There was no WGA back when Orson Welles made Citizen Kane.

**John:** Let me guess, Charles Foster Kane-

**Nancy:** Hero.

**Craig:** Okay. Nancy. Jewish Nancy Sullivan, let’s cut to the chase. We’re now 100 days into the Writers Strike. The companies are facing growing pressure, because the pipeline is empty, and the projects that aren’t finished cannot be promoted. When is the AMPTP going to get serious about coming back to the table to resolve this?

**Nancy:** Sorry. No comment on that, guys. Wouldn’t want to leak it to the press. Wink.

**John:** AMPTP spokesperson Nancy Sullivan, everyone.

**Craig:** She does look a whole lot like Rachel Bloom.

**John:** Rachel Bloom, everyone.

**Craig:** That was hard. I almost didn’t like Rachel Bloom.

**John:** It’s tough. That’s tough.

**Craig:** You make it hard. You make it hard, kid.

**Rachel Bloom:** To like me?

**Craig:** To not like you.

**John:** Rachel Bloom, you are often at this theater, because you have been doing your one-woman show, which is here for a little bit longer, then you’ll go to New York. Tell us about your show. You can say this because it’s a stage thing.

**Rachel:** It’s a stage thing. It is not in the union. It’s such a weird time we’re in where theater is the most stable industry you could be in. For the past couple years, I’ve been working on this show that is now called Death, Let Me Do My Show, which is about various experiences, thank you, that I’ve had with death. I’ve been using this theater primarily to workshop it a lot. It is going off-Broadway in September. We will be at the Lucille Lortel Theatre September 6th through the 30th. It’s a very beautiful theater. We just decided to do one more show in LA before we go. That will be here on August 26th. All of the proceeds are going to go, I believe probably to the Entertainment Community Fund.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Rachel Bloom, thank you so much.

**Rachel:** Thank you.

**John:** You’re going to come back for questions.

**Craig:** Now shit’s about to get real.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** This is the warmup.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Do you want to do this one?

**Craig:** Sure. Our next guest is an actor, writer, producer, and director. She was also listed as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year. What the fuck are we doing wrong, by the way?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Let us welcome out the great, one and only Natasha Lyonne.

**Natasha Lyonne:** Hello, everyone. I brought a lot of supplies.

**Craig:** You can share my table with me if you want.

**Natasha:** You know what? You’re a real sweetie, cutie, honey-baby.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Natasha:** So are you, John. So are you.

**John:** Thank you. Natasha kept apologizing to me backstage in the green room like I was offended. I’m not. I’m delighted by you.

**Natasha:** It’s just that Craig and I, we get very riled up when we’re together.

**Craig:** It’s a situation.

**Natasha:** Then I felt apologetic that maybe we’d gone too hard, too fast. We were doing bits about shekels. There was a lot of bits.

**Craig:** There was a lot of stuff going.

**Natasha:** If you don’t know what a shekel is, you don’t need to.

**Craig:** She brings the State Island out of me. I don’t know what to do. It’s just what happens. I get very Staten. Then I start talking like I used to talk. Then it’s a whole fucking thing.

**Natasha:** Then we get into a whole thing. The next thing we know-

**Craig:** Let’s code switch back. We’re code switching.

**Natasha:** We’re code switching.

**Craig:** Here’s my neutral podcast voice.

**Natasha:** The thing is, I don’t know, as the second Time 100 guest, I like to keep it very neutral.

**Craig:** That’s actually creeping me out.

**Natasha:** This is how I talk. I’ve always been this way.

**John:** NPR host voice. I love it.

**Natasha:** I architected a thing, a building. I’m an architect.

**Craig:** We’ve failed to mention that in your intro.

**Natasha:** I do think it was weird that you didn’t bring it up, because I dropped out of architect stuff in order to get into the biz.

**Craig:** Yes, just like most architecture students who refer to it as stuff.

**Natasha:** I was like, “Blueprints, blueprints, a script,” I said. You’re welcome. I was 4, and now I’m 44. That means I’m getting younger every day. This is what it’s like. You just don’t care anymore. It’s day 100 of the Strike, folks. I have not worked since December.

**Craig:** Everyone’s going a little nuts.

**Natasha:** We are heading towards September.

**Craig:** You’re doing great.

**Natasha:** I thought I was going to get a lot done this year. I’ll be honest.

**Craig:** No, nothing’s happening.

**Natasha:** All those years, but really. Anyway. Quit smoking. Endure this. I’m going to be like John Houston with a cigar in an interview, or Sean Penn anywhere I guess.

**Craig:** Keep going.

**Natasha:** I’m just saying people that smoke publicly in interviews.

**Craig:** You can hear it, I think. You can literally hear the vape on the microphone.

**John:** We know this because Craig used to vape in the early episodes.

**Craig:** I still do.

**Natasha:** You know what? It’s the ride of life. Take the ride. Buy the ticket. Take the ride. Anyway.

**Craig:** We’re not going to ask any questions, are we?

**John:** I’m going to try to ask a question.

**Craig:** What’s the point? Why bother?

**Natasha:** What it’s about is community.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**Natasha:** If you look at Bergman’s birthday, Stanley Kubrick writes him a letter and he says, “Great work.” Now we’re seeing it freaking dying. Everybody’s coming out. Coppola’s writing notes. You know what I mean? It’s about community.

**Craig:** I don’t.

**Natasha:** That’s my point. That was the answer to your question. I thought this was a Jeopardy format.

**Craig:** Hang on.

**John:** It is a Jeopardy format.

**Craig:** Just hang on, John. Just hang on, baby. You’re doing great. Amazing. I legitimately have a question.

**Natasha:** I’m from New York.

**Craig:** What?

**Natasha:** Yes, please.

**Craig:** This is a legit question. I looked on IMDb.

**John:** He did research.

**Craig:** I did research for this. They list your writing credits, your directing credits, acting credits. I have 26 credits. Natasha, do you know how many you have?

**Natasha:** 27. It’s like that game where you go one … The Price is right.

**Craig:** Just say one, $1.

**Natasha:** $1. $1.

**Craig:** You have 152 credits.

**Natasha:** Thus the attitude problem. There’s been many, many, many years.

**Craig:** I haven’t gotten to the question yet.

**Natasha:** It’s an endurance test. If you just stick around long enough, it’s like being an old, old turtle. What’s the question, please?

**Craig:** Thank god.

**Natasha:** Yes, Craigy.

**Craig:** It strikes me that after all these years, almost 30 years, I’ve got these 26 credits, I’ve worked on these things. There’s so much that I can learn from experience. Actors, especially somebody that started as a kid, you will, as an actor like yourself, get so much more experience on set and in production, acting. I’m curious, what wisdom have you learned from all of that time, that writers who have maybe only been on a set once or twice might not know? What can you share with us that you’ve learned every?

**Natasha:** I’m not going to look at you I think for the rest of it.

**Craig:** I think that’s a great idea.

**Natasha:** I’m also look out at the distant … Just so you know, I’m nearsighted. Genuinely, it is a Fossie-esque experience. I would say something I learned when I transitioned into the writers’ room, for example, on… I guess I won’t mention any shows. Let’s say on certain shows or certain movies, I would see an ellipses, and I would think, oh my god, I’ve gotta nail this.

I’m somebody who, despite my personality, is actually quite obsessive and a workaholic and perfectionist, obsessive about the work, and in all areas, too much so. I would think that there was something in there that I was missing. I would go to the writer, or I would go to the monitor area.

**Craig:** Video village.

**Natasha:** Video village. I would try to go searching or something. I think then later, as a writer, the great discovery was there was no there, that oftentimes, it was a cheat for any number of reasons, especially when in showrunning or in directing, once you’re doing that, you’re like…

The great gift about acting while you’re doing that is you know why scenes got cut, or why entire storylines or a C-storyline, so that actually, the connection between this moment to this moment, we had to cut that entire deli sequence for budget reasons, that’s why it’s not there.

Weirdly, it was like once I started writing for myself, or even if… First of all, I’m usually collaborating, so I wouldn’t want to take that credit for myself. I would say that as I was working with writers’ rooms and working with other creators and things like this, that was when I really became a good actor, in a way, because I understood the space in between, of the motivation, or even the backstory of how we got there, because I was the guy in the room on the whiteboard or something.

**Craig:** Actually, it’s the other way for you, in a sense, that the writing helped you be a better actor.

**Natasha:** It’s funny, because I’m only so old relative to how young I was-

**Craig:** Great insight.

**Natasha:** … on some level.

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:41:13].

**Natasha:** Which is to say, it would’ve been great if show biz was like, hey, we’re going to give this to you at 24 or 34, but they wanted to really hold out. I think in many ways it’s because of that fallback energy that we respond to so much as actors that are so seasoned, of a Gene Hackman in Night Movies or Jeff Bridges in Lebowski, or Bill Murray has that sort of energy, or Harry Dean Stanton, a sense of like, “I don’t even really want to be here.” Like Peter Falk. Like, “Please, film anything but me.” I think that comes from also that, if you truly understand the motivation.

Then I would say as a writer, additionally what I learned, and as a director, just from loving actors… Sam Rockwell made me start working with his acting coach against my will, because I’d never taken a lesson. I was at film school at Tisch at 15, but I never did anything with it. I dropped out. I was very offended that they wanted me to pay tuition, because the teenagers, they were watching Apocalypse Now. I was like, “If you’re watching Apocalypse Now, why are you in film school? You should’ve already seen this movie. That’s what would make one go to film school, theoretically.”

**Craig:** It’s a little weird.

**Natasha:** I was supposed to be a double major with philosophy, and they were out of classes. Their classes were full up. I just didn’t understand why they wanted my money at that point. I was like, “This is not what I came here for.” I was like, “Are you going to pay?”

**Craig:** They weren’t going to pay you. Elliot, do you need any Gatorade? How are you doing over there?

**Natasha:** Sam introduced me to this guy, Terry Knickerbocker, who’s a great acting coach. What I would do with him is I would actually sit there with the laptop open and go over every other character’s motivation as well and type in real time, to make sure that I wouldn’t be this jag-off on set who was only taking care, let’s say, of… So that way, I had answers for other people. I don’t know that I always succeeded, but I would try to really build out and make sure that everybody was protected in terms of their motives, basically.

**Craig:** Exactly, that you understand that both sides of-

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**John:** What I hear you saying though is, as an actor you’re approaching character from one perspective. You’re approaching what is it that I’m going to do. As a writer, you’re approaching character from a much more macro, whole perspective, because you have to think about-

**Natasha:** I gotta tell you, first of all, what’s most challenging about the Strike I think for all of us is the atrophying of the brain that you’re experiencing here in real time. It kills me to not be at a whiteboard and in a room. I love the excitement of ideas. I love all of it. I love storyboarding. I love this big, holistic thinking about things and making sure that it’s okay. I love the math of it, whenever I’m doing music budgets and trying to calculate it all. I love it so much more in 3D.

Also, weirdly, I think as just an actor, this weird thing happens where you need other people’s approval, and also you need to get hired. It’s incredible to have that autonomy suddenly. It’s such a gift.

Also, I would go to video village, seeking the feedback. Really, what you find out is that if you’re doing a good enough job, nobody talks to you. Once you’re at video village and you’re actually a producer, being a writer, producer, whatever, director, you discover that usually what’s happening in video village is a panic attack about something the next day, like so-and-so did not make their flight, we’ve gotta rearrange the day. What’s happening there is everybody’s talking about tomorrow with the first AD and trying to figure out how to fucking save this fiasco. They’re not talking about your scene. Otherwise, you would know, because you’d fucked up your scene, and they would be talking to you.

It was also a big revelation that I think made it much more fun for when I was just acting in something, because it was no longer a head trip of a curiosity of, did I do okay?

**Craig:** There wasn’t this constant loop of, the director comes over and gives you a thumb up or thumb down.

**Natasha:** Exactly.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right. If you’re doing a good job on the day, directing, it’s a little bit like being a parent that’s driving a car, and everybody in the car trusts that the parent is a good driver, and so they can fall asleep.

**Natasha:** I would say also other things made me a better actor to work with, for hire. I’m looking for work, obviously. I’m hoping somebody has a job.

**Craig:** Can’t work right now.

**Natasha:** Oh, right, SAG Strike. Anyway, so the other thing I would notice is, it’s so funny now, when I’m directing, and I’m sure it’s the same for you, that when you try to convince somebody of whatever, especially if you have a heavyweight or like an Ellen Burstyn or a Nolte or something, and you’re like, “I was sort of thinking, what if you were here. It’s just an idea. Maybe then we went there,” but really it’s because there’s a fucking window there, and the light’s going to change, and if you sit here, I’m fucked or whatever.

**Craig:** Have you ever tried to just say that?

**Natasha:** Sometimes I do. I think the reason I bring up people that are such giants is because it’s very intimidating to-

**Craig:** Yes, it is.

**Natasha:** … try to explain to somebody that’s a giant. Usually, the way I came up, there was time. I think it was probably because it was film, not digital. There wasn’t a sense of like, let’s just go.

**Craig:** That’s a good point.

**Natasha:** If you think about Raging Bull or something, this final monologue, they probably really had to rehearse, I don’t know, so that they didn’t-

**Craig:** Run out the mag.

**Natasha:** … run out of film, run out of the mag, and make sure that everything, the lighting was perfect and all that stuff. Usually, it was about a private rehearsal, and then everybody else comes in and that kind of thing. I’m sorry, now we’re not getting to the game. I see you’re stressing about time.

**John:** No, no, no, no.

**Natasha:** It’s okay. I’m just trying to tell the kids the truth.

Once upon a time, it used to be that it was this private thing, where the actors would work with the director on figuring out the blocking. As it’s evolved, especially in television, I think, it’s more about things are pre-shot-listed in order to make these impossible fucking days, because Prestige TV especially has become so dense that it’s unmakeable.

You’re doing everything you can to be like, “Hey, I really need you to sit here, because the sun is going to set.” It’s easier, I would say, to do, and it’s easier to understand then. I’m like, “Oh, so you want… Got it. Let me help you. Okay. I’ll just sit right here, and then you have your shot.”

**Craig:** I do love a pro.

**Natasha:** It’s interesting in so many ways, the evolution of that. Sorry for the long answer.

**Craig:** No, it was a great answer.

**John:** A fantastic answer.

**Craig:** That’s why you’re here, my friend.

**Natasha:** I’m here to party, baby.

**Craig:** We did not bring you on for the short little bursts.

**Natasha:** I am sorry.

**Craig:** I like that you assumed this, “I have finished. Now you will entertain me.”

**Natasha:** I just felt like I talked a while.

**Craig:** You did a great job, kid.

**Natasha:** I just felt like the answer needed to be complete.

**Craig:** It was.

**Natasha:** I didn’t want to give you a fake answer.

**John:** Let us welcome back out Rachel Bloom and Quinta Brunson. Hi. You can ask from there. Ask from there, and we’ll say it out loud.

**Audience Member:** This is a question about adapting a book. My question is, how often do you run into problems as far as what characters to pick in the screenplay itself? How much push back do you get from the authors as far as what percentage of essentially characters you’re using from the book itself and what percentage of characters you’re coming up with whatever is best for the story? How does that work?

**Natasha:** Actually, I don’t know if I can say the name of this person, but she’s wonderful. She’s like the lady Thomas Pynchon or something. She’s brilliant. It was so intimidating to write her this letter to ask for this book that I wanted to do since I was a child. I wrote it with two lovely ladies. I’m not even sure if I can say who they are. I’m not sure the rules of the game.

**Craig:** I think you can say people’s names.

**Natasha:** Oh, great. I wrote it with Liz and Carly, who created GLOW, and who I love. I love those ladies. It’s a bunch of short stories. We really had to make those questions. We ultimately went a certain way. I think it’s excellent.

The funny feedback I want to give you is… It is a very high-concept thing, almost magical realism, let’s say, without being too specific. In the first seven pages of the book, she’s a loser lawyer, this character. Then we were told by the studio that really what they responded to, even though they had greenlit and paid for it, that really what they responded to was the lawyer part.

I just want to say that what was weird was it took so much nerve to write this lady Thomas Pynchon this letter to beg her for this book I’ve loved my whole life, and then to have Liz and Carly be down to, all of us write this thing together, and the amount of work we put in to create this lady Cohen brothers meets Guillermo del Toro world, and then be told that really it was …

The oddity of this business is that the thing that you think is going to be the trouble spot, it’s usually some fucking eighth thing over there, inevitably, that’s like, literally, “Oh, we really liked the part that she was a lawyer and that she was dating this guy.” I said, “Do you mean you want The Practice or Abby McBeal or something?” They were like, “That would be great.” It was so weird. The three of us were texting each other like, “What is happening in this moment?”

**Craig:** It sounds like what she’s saying is you’ll never see the person that kills you. That’s comforting advice.

**Natasha:** Do you find that?

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. There are circumstances where the network or the studio may have strong feelings like there, but there are also circumstances where sometimes everybody’s aligned except the author. That’s not uncommon. Authors can be precious about things, just like we all can. I have been lucky to adapt something with someone that was great and understood the point of the adaptation.

I think our job is probably not to worry too much about the author. If you actually love it, you love that material, you would … I think grown-up, responsible artists will understand that a different medium has different needs, hopefully.

**Natasha:** It is really challenging. I’m thinking actually about another book that I really wanted to adapt, that at first seemed like it was going to be a go, and we were so in sync, and then really it did fall apart.

**John:** I had one of those too, where I went in, I got the book set up at a studio, and then I was in conversation with the author about, okay, as we introduce this character, we have to think about cinematically how we’re going to first encounter this character. She’s like, “Oh, no, no, you can’t change a thing. It has to be exactly the way it was in the book.”

**Natasha:** That’s what was so weird was I thought that we were having the same conversation for so long, and then suddenly, we weren’t. The other thing I think that’s interesting, which is not exactly an answer to your question, but that’s obviously not my bag, is that so much of what I was so in love with in this book was the dialog and how dense it was and just how brilliant of a writer she is, and realized that in script, that dialog felt insane. It just didn’t feel necessarily like people talking, so that we had to actually change so much of … Do you know what I mean?

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

**Quinta:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You have to adapt. Smart authors understand.

**Natasha:** I’m like, there’s so much material here, and then you get in there and-

**Craig:** Not as much as you thought.

**Quinta:** I feel like that reminds me of what I was saying earlier about communicating to the audience. Sometimes with a adaptation, you just can’t have that same monologue from the book. Maybe you can. God bless if you can. That’s incredible, or the same amount of dialog. It has to be able to translate on screen in a certain way.

I haven’t adapted yet, but I have been in material that’s been adapted. I’ve had the feeling of wanting to express, this feels like too much for anyone to want to listen to on camera, in a comedy especially. Nobody feels like fucking sitting there and hearing you say something that was written for that long. I have nothing else to add to that, by the way. I haven’t adapted anything, but as an actor, I [00:54:04]-

**Natasha:** The other one is … Sorry. The other one that I think is interesting is when you try to adapt inner monologue. That’s so tricky, that you realize that the book that you fell in love with, it’s like you can see it in your mind. You have the vision of it, so you can see the world you’re going to build. Then you realize that it’s essentially internal.

**Quinta:** That’s exactly what I mean.

**Craig:** There are some great novels that have made some bad movies. Then there have some … The Godfather was pulp. It was just a pulpy novel that made a great movie. It was just awesome plot, big, awesome characters.

**Natasha:** Arguably, Raymond Chandler, why he’s-

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**Natasha:** … so good at … That genre translates well.

**Craig:** It just goes right-

**Quinta:** Have you read the Jurassic Park book?

**Natasha:** No.

**John:** No.

**Rachel:** It’s pretty good.

**Quinta:** Rachel.

**Craig:** That doesn’t seem like what she was going to say.

**Quinta:** Rachel. That is the most boring-

**Rachel:** Yeah, it’s plodding, but it’s not terrible.

**Quinta:** Lord.

**Rachel:** It’s Jurassic Park.

**Quinta:** That’s a book I’m like, they say pterodactyl one more time, I’m going to throw this fucking book out the window.

**Craig:** You had to know they were going to say pterodactyl a few times.

**Quinta:** Too sciencey. I don’t want to see all that science on screen, something that they understood. We don’t want to see that. It’s good.

**Craig:** It was a good adaptation.

**Rachel:** I think also, when this struck, I was in the middle, for the first time of my career, of working on some adaptations. I’m actually working on something right now that’s a podcast/musical, so not in WGA, that I can talk about a little bit.

What I think is interesting about adaptation is … I learned this when I took my first musical theater class. I’m going to relate everything back to musical theater. I apologize. When you’re writing a musical, the first question you’re supposed to ask is, what about making this a musical improves upon the subject matter, or am I just making it a music because IP sells?

I think that that should be the question for any piece of adaptation is, what can I add to this material, what’s my point of view on this that can add to this canon of material, as opposed to being redundant or worse?

**Craig:** Good answer.

**John:** Good answer.

**Craig:** Good answer.

**John:** This is normally the part of the podcast where we’d do One Cool Things.

**Rachel:** Wait. Didn’t someone win the right to ask a question?

**John:** Oh, shit. We completely forgot that. Who won it? Back there. I see the hand waving. Rachel Bloom saving the podcast yet again.

**Quinta:** The right.

**John:** You.

**Craig:** Nice.

**Quinta:** Didn’t someone win the right to ask a question?

**John:** Do you have a question for us?

**Audience Member:** I do.

**John:** Ask your question. Thank you so much, Rachel.

**Audience Member:** Oh, I’ve got a microphone too. I actually have a question about directing. Natasha, you talked about how the schedules are crazy, and there’s this constant push to go, go, go, go. One of the things that I struggle with on set a lot is when producers or first ADs tell me to shoot a rehearsal. I don’t know how to respond to them politely with, no, I absolutely do not want to shoot the rehearsal. I wonder if the people on stage had recommendations for how I can politely say fuck no?

**Natasha:** Is that directed at me? I’m happy to answer.

**Audience Member:** Everybody.

**Natasha:** I would just say, in the first place, there is nothing really to fear in the arts. I guess just an illusion of fear. I think it’s always very useful to remember that we’re all going to die. I think that the stakes-

**Quinta:** True. So true.

**Natasha:** There is a sense of false stakes that get created around-

**Craig:** The stakes couldn’t be lower.

**Natasha:** The truth is that you’re just trying to make art and do the best you can. That’s all you can do. In a weird way, it also becomes a question of path of least resistance is sometimes in your favor of being like, “Great, why don’t we shoot this useless rehearsal so we can see why we shouldn’t shoot the rehearsal,” or alternatively, you can say, “Simply because we’re not ready.” I think that both things are valid in a way.

**Craig:** Is this for television?

**Audience Member:** Yeah. I work in both.

**Craig:** For television, we do have the luxury of doing the thing that you were talking about, that a lot of times you can’t. We do get to have a private rehearsal, and then we bring in the crew for crew show, and then we talk about the shots. By the time we start shooting, we’ve already gone through it, which is nice.

If you say to the showrunner, “Look, I don’t ask for much. The one thing I just want that I like is to have a couple of rehearsals. It just makes me feel better and better,” and say, “If I can do that, the actors know there’s nothing running, so they’re not burning all their rocket fuel.” Hopefully, they would recognize that that just makes you more comfortable.

**Natasha:** Or also, the truth is that sometimes you can tell them, “It’ll actually go quicker if we do this.” Sometimes I get very excited, and I’m like, “Oh, let’s shoot this. Let’s shoot that.” If you’re with the right camera operator, sometimes they’ll have fun doing it. Other times, actually, rehearsal really does save time in a way, because it’s not just for the actors and the director. It’s actually so that everybody has focus marks.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Natasha:** It’s going to be a mess. You can tell them also, “Hey, it’ll actually save time.” It’s true that the camera department really does not love that game.

**Craig:** Nobody does.

**Natasha:** Even if actors like to be like, “Hey, let’s just fucking try one.”

**Craig:** You gotta do a walkthrough. They gotta put the tape on the floor. They gotta do all this.

**John:** Quinta, on a show like yours, you might have different directors coming through, doing different episodes. Will they have different working styles?

**Quinta:** You.

**John:** You as an actor in that situation, but also a producer, have to adjust. What is that like?

**Quinta:** The main director that I work with, his name is Randall Einhorn, and he’s fantastic. He’s really great at establishing tone and also relationship with every director who comes in. I think that’s a big part of it too. The other directors coming to set the week before get a hold of how we work. The show that I work on currently is weekly. It’s fast. We’re filming while we’re airing. We don’t really have a lot of time. Our first priority is saving time.

I was thinking about that question. Randall is so good at being like, “I don’t want to do that.” That’s it. He’s like, “I don’t want to do that.” It’ll be like, “Yeah. Okay. Guess what? You’re the director. You’re running the show.” Now, in my state though, it’s a different situation. That’s very family. I would never even ask for that.

For another person coming in, if they want to shoot it, they would say, “I think this would make me feel good, just to get it, just to have.” Especially on a mockumentary, it can be beneficial sometimes. It’s like, “All right, cool, we’ll give it … ” I think it’s just about clear communication, like you said. The stakes are very low. We are not saving lives. Clear communication will help us, just, “What do you need? What do I need? What do you need?”

**Natasha:** That is the weirdest part I think about what we do, and in a weird way, life in general, but certainly making movies and making TV and all this shit that we do and writers’ rooms and studios and networks. It feels like the stakes are just so high. Part of me, as an adrenaline junkie, loves that. Really, they’re just not. That’s where you start losing humanity and all these other things. Everybody is a human being that deserves to get what they need. It’s just making art, so it should feel good, but it feels so scary, the time. It’s always time is the enemy. I would say time is a bigger enemy than money.

**Craig:** Which the director is the person worrying about the most, usually, because as the day drips away, when I’m directing, that’s the thing that I’m aware of is that my options are dwindling. Time is scary. Sometimes, also keep in mind that when you are visiting a show, the producers know things about the actors that you don’t.

**Rachel:** That’s a great point.

**Quinta:** Huge.

**Craig:** Some of them really do not like that rehearsal stuff at all.

**Quinta:** Yeah, they don’t.

**Craig:** They’re just like, “I know what I’m doing. Let’s go. Let’s shoot.” Part of it’s cultural too.

**Quinta:** Some people really want it.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Quinta:** For sure.

**Natasha:** It is also though that thing of knowing, whatever, kill your darlings or whatever. In your shot list, the things that felt like such a dream and being okay, you gotta go through that day, and you’re like, “That’s done, that’s done, and that one’s out, and we’re going to really focus on this.”

It’s so crazy that, also, that’s why preparedness, I just believe in it so much, of being overly prepared so you can be loose, because the more time … Even if I’m a visiting director on a show or something, I always try so hard to spend time with the first AD and the DP, really walking through every single shot we’re going to do, in an effort to be prepared for if the producer, who is really the boss at that point, not the director, if it’s not an auteur special, then really feeling like we’re prepared for the situation.

**Rachel:** On the show I did that I will not name, but it was the show that I did, I have a very small bladder, and I like to drink. I have a steady drip of tea, and I pee a lot. The AD, I found out in Season 4, let every director … My pee breaks were built into the schedule, because they know I needed that, otherwise I’d piss my pants. I thought that was very communicative of him.

**Quinta:** Nice.

**John:** Nice. Don’t know actors would piss themselves.

**Craig:** I think that’s why SAG is on a strike, to get that enshrined in the agreement.

**John:** Build that back in the contract.

**Craig:** Pee breaks.

**John:** Are we doing One Cool Things or not, Craig?

**Craig:** Let’s just roll right to the finish line.

**John:** Let’s roll to the finish line and do some thank yous.

**Natasha:** Not One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** You know what? We’ll catch up on those.

**John:** We’ll catch up on-

**Craig:** We do it literally 608 times.

**John:** I’ll save mine for next week.

**Craig:** We’re good. It’s all good.

**John:** You can email Craig and tell him what you want to recommend if you have a thing.

**Natasha:** All right, I’ll send him some bucks.

**John:** We have some thank yous to get out to people.

**Craig:** We do.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced, of course, by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Drew!

**Rachel:** Woo!

**Quinta:** Drew!

**Craig:** Woo woo!

**John:** Who did a phenomenal job putting together tonight’s show.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you very much, Drew. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, who is here.

**Craig:** Yay. There you are. Hi.

**John:** Who also did our music this week. Thank you so much, Matthew. Thank you to Hollywood Heart and Dynasty Typewriter for hosting us. For folks listening at home, the thing about being at the Hollywood Bowl, that was a joke. We really weren’t.

**Craig:** We really are not at the-

**John:** The Hollywood Bowl.

**Craig:** I know, shock. Of course, thank you to our ASL interpreter, Elliot Aronson.

**Quinta:** Oh, yay.

**John:** Elliot.

**Craig:** Who remains incredibly handsome and really good at his job.

**John:** We of course have to thank our incredible guests, Natasha Lyonne.

**Craig:** Natasha Lyonne.

**John:** Quinta Brunson.

**Craig:** Quinta Brunson.

**John:** Rachel Bloom.

**Craig:** Rachel Bloom.

**John:** Make sure you get tickets to see Rachel Bloom’s show either here or in New York. It’s at rachelbloomshow.com.

**Craig:** Thank you to everybody in the audience here in the room and listening at home and in your car. It is so much fun getting to do this live.

**John:** Thank you all, and have a great night.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Rachel:** Thanks, everybody.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Natasha and Craig, our experience has been that the film and television industry is full of people who will tell you what you want to hear, whether it’s true or whether it’s not true. To make sure that we’re keeping our skills sharp during this work stoppage, I thought we might play a little game with our audience members. We have three audience members who volunteered to help out in a segment we’re calling That Sounds Familiar. Jax, if we could bring up the house lights a little bit. Our three guests, I see a Number 1. Number 1, if you could make your way around to this microphone stand over here.

**Natasha:** Wow, three boys. All right. I see it’s a Mae West production.

**Craig:** What the fuck?

**Natasha:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t know. What happened?

**Natasha:** I’m not here. I don’t exist. I’m a melting clock. Just leave me alone. I don’t know why you invited me here.

**Craig:** Melting clock.

**Natasha:** I could’ve gotten here at 9:00.

**Craig:** For charity.

**Natasha:** I was on the 101.

**Craig:** You did a great job. Let’s play a game.

**Natasha:** I was bumping into cars like it was The Matrix.

**Craig:** Let’s play a game.

**Natasha:** Yes, gentlemen. I’m ready for the game.

**John:** Contestant Number 1, could you introduce yourself and tell us something fascinating about you?

**Contestant 1:** My name is Eric Wandry, and I’m the oldest of 13 kids.

**John:** What? Oh my god. Contestant Number 2, tell us something interesting about you.

**Contestant 2:** My name is Eric Wandry, and I’m the oldest of 13 kids.

**John:** Oh, shit.

**Natasha:** Oh, I see. This is a little tricky. I’m sorry, sir.

**John:** Contestant Number 3-

**Natasha:** Where is your sticker?

**John:** Could you introduce yourself and tell us something interesting about yourself?

**Natasha:** Where is your sticker, sir, the other gentleman? Thank you. A little respect for the game. Thank you.

**John:** It’s a sticker. Get going. Could you tell us about yourself?

****Contestant 3:**** I’m Eric Wandry and I’m eldest of 15 kids, 13 kids.

**Natasha:** Wow. You know what?

**Craig:** We’ve narrowed it down to two.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s a 50/50.

**Natasha:** You didn’t even want to be here. Is it against their well?

**Craig:** You rattled him.

**Natasha:** I’m assuming they’re volunteers.

**Craig:** You rattled him.

**Natasha:** I didn’t rattle.

**Craig:** You rattled him.

**Natasha:** They were trying to be the same person. He was missing the sticker.

**John:** He was missing a sticker. You rattled him. [Indiscernible 01:08:11]. I’m not intimidated, but I could see [crosstalk 01:08:13].

**Craig:** Also, John’s rattled.

**John:** I’m not. I’m not.

**Natasha:** When people say that, I feel like it’s because I’m a woman, and then I regret my entire life.

**Craig:** No, no, no, it’s not because you’re a woman.

**Natasha:** How can I help?

**Craig:** What are we going to do?

**John:** One of these people-

**Craig:** How can I help.

**John:** … is lying. One of them is telling exactly the truth.

**Craig:** We can eliminate Number 3.

**John:** One of them is telling the truth, and one of them is lying. We can ask up to five questions of these people. What questions do we want to ask? Craig, how do you help narrow this down?

**Natasha:** I want to ask about religion right away.

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Go. Do it. Go.

**Natasha:** Number 1.

**Craig:** This is to Number 1.

**Natasha:** Excuse me, so what religion are you?

**Contestant 1:** I come from a Catholic background.

**Natasha:** Interesting. Another question. Are your parents still together?

**Contestant 1:** No.

**Natasha:** Interesting that you hesitated. Is that because of trauma? The body keeps the score. Or just because of lying?

**Contestant 1:** One of them passed away.

**Natasha:** Wow.

**Craig:** Welcome to the Natasha Lyonne show.

**Natasha:** Touche, Number 1.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Natasha:** Touche.

**John:** Touche.

**Natasha:** All right, Number 2. Are you guys also asking questions?

**John:** We can ask questions too.

**Craig:** At this point it’s all you.

**Natasha:** Please do it as you … I’ll take a little nap.

**Craig:** I’m thrilled with how this is going right now.

**Natasha:** No, no, no, no, no. I’ll be here. Go off on Number 2.

**John:** I’m curious about geography. Eric Number 2, where did you grow up?

**Contestant 2:** Indiana. Small-town Indiana.

**John:** Contestant Number 3, where did you grow up?

****Contestant 3:**** Waterbury, Connecticut.

**John:** Waterbury, Connecticut.

**Craig:** Can I ask a question of Number 2?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Number 2, you said that you were the oldest of 13, is that right? What is the name of the youngest?

**Contestant 2:** Melissa.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Natasha:** Melissa Rivers?

**Craig:** Yes, Melissa Rivers.

**Natasha:** I’m just here to help. I’m just here to help. I’m taking a backseat. What?

**Craig:** I want to ask a question of Number 1.

**Natasha:** Mustache, why? No, I like it, but is it a family thing? Do all your siblings have mustaches?

**Contestant 1:** I’m the only one.

**Natasha:** That was not your question.

**Craig:** How many boys and how many girls?

**Contestant 1:** Seven boys, six girls.

**Natasha:** Again, the hesitation is …

**John:** I have a question. I’ll ask for Number 2. You’re the oldest of 13. Is everyone biologically related, from the same parents, or is it a Brady Bunch situation? Talk to us about the relationship to these people.

**Natasha:** Are your parents in an open relationship?

**Contestant 2:** No, everybody’s together. Everyone’s a big happy family. It’s all biological, everyone.

**Natasha:** What religion are you?

**Contestant 2:** Christian.

**Natasha:** A lot of Christians here. You guys [indiscernible 01:11:07] Craig around.

**Craig:** You and I are the Jewish population of this.

**Natasha:** Don’t tell them.

**Craig:** They know. They know. They’ve looked at our faces.

**John:** Eric Number 2, I’m curious, talk to us about a family vacation and the most that your family’s ever been on vacation and how that went.

**Contestant 2:** It was kind of tricky, obviously, because of how big the family was. We would generally go to areas that were adjacent to where I grew up. We would go to the lakes. We would go in the mountains, if we could get that far. It was generally-

**Natasha:** What do you mean if you could get that far?

**Contestant 2:** Because Indiana’s geographically not that close to mountains, but we could-

**Craig:** There was nowhere to go is what he’s saying.

**Contestant 2:** Yeah. We could get there.

**Natasha:** What kind of a car were you guys in?

**Contestant 2:** We had several because of the size of the family.

**Craig:** This guy’s the guy.

**Natasha:** Hold on. I can’t tell.

**Craig:** This guy is the guy. What are we doing? He’s the guy.

**Natasha:** I’m sorry, what kind of cars?

**Contestant 2:** We had two trucks and a station wagon.

**Natasha:** Only two parents?

**Contestant 2:** Only two parents.

**Natasha:** Until the eldest was driving the third car?

**Contestant 2:** Yeah. I was pretty much the babysitter for most of my childhood.

**Craig:** What are we doing? This is the guy.

**John:** I’m not convinced.

**Natasha:** I’m with you, honey.

**Craig:** I’m sold. I’m sold.

**Natasha:** I’m not sure about-

**John:** Should we vote now?

**Craig:** I’m ready to vote.

**John:** I think I’m ready to vote.

**Craig:** I’m ready to vote.

**Natasha:** I’ll do whatever you guys want.

**Craig:** I don’t care. I don’t care if I lose.

**Natasha:** How much money is in it?

**Craig:** [Indiscernible 01:12:27].

**John:** The stakes could not be higher. It is bragging rights for this segment of Scriptnotes. A lot.

**Craig:** I got 200 Canadian in that wallet [crosstalk 01:12:38].

**Natasha:** You brought your wallet onstage.

**Craig:** Always.

**Natasha:** That makes me very concerned about leaving my passport back there.

**John:** Quinta did bring her purse out.

**Natasha:** By the way, always bring your passport, because you never know when you might need to leave the country.

**Craig:** You never know.

**Natasha:** That’s another piece of advice.

**Craig:** Let’s vote.

**John:** Let’s vote.

**Craig:** Let’s vote.

**John:** Who on stage believes it’s Contestant Number 3? Who believes it’s Contestant Number 2?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**John:** The audience too, applause? Who thinks it’s Contestant Number 1? That’s me.

**Natasha:** A little.

**Craig:** A little? You and I think it’s 2. He thinks it’s 1.

**John:** No, I think we voted for … Who’d you vote for, 1?

**Craig:** No, 2.

**Natasha:** I went 50/50 because I wasn’t following.

**Craig:** I thought you said [crosstalk 01:13:22].

**Natasha:** When you involved the audience, I didn’t realize it was only up to us. I thought it was a-

**Craig:** The stakes could not be higher.

**Natasha:** Sure, I’ll go with 2, honey.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Natasha:** We’re going with two.

**Craig:** Aw. Thank you.

**John:** Contestant Number 2, are you the oldest of 13 kids?

**Contestant 2:** I’m an only child.

**John:** Whoa.

**Craig:** Nicely done. Nicely done! You sick fuck!

**John:** Contestant Number 3, are you the oldest of 13 kids?

**Contestant 1:** When he said that the whole family was in a van, you should’ve known that when you’re the eldest of 13, that the groups of kids don’t all know each other. The younger group-

**Craig:** Is this a yes?

**Contestant 1:** … they were out of the house before I even-

**Natasha:** Is Number 3 the guy?

**Craig:** I think it’s Number 3. You said 15.

****Contestant 3:**** Yeah, I was nervous.

**Craig:** Oh, wow.

**John:** Contestant 3-

**Craig:** You rattled him. You rattled him.

**John:** Are you genuinely the Eric who’s the oldest-

**Craig:** You rattled him.

**John:** … of 13 kids?

**Craig:** You’re the one.

****Contestant 3:**** I’m the oldest.

**Craig:** You’re the one.

**John:** Holy shit!

**Natasha:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Contestant Number 1-

**Natasha:** Pathological liar.

**John:** How big is your family?

**Contestant 1:** I’m the oldest of 13 kids.

**John:** Oh, you are genuinely the oldest of 13 kids.

**Contestant 1:** Yes.

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

**John:** I thought the game was over.

**Natasha:** Now I’m confused.

**Craig:** What the fuck is going on?

**John:** It was Number 1. It was Number 1. Number 3 was still playing. We’re good. We’re good. The game is over.

**Craig:** Oh, Number 3 was still playing. Number 3 was like that soldier who doesn’t know the war is over.

**John:** The war is over.

**Craig:** You can go home now.

**John:** I was so confused there.

**Craig:** That’s outstanding.

**Natasha:** Wow.

**Craig:** I gotta be honest, Number 2 should be in prison. That’s a dangerous man.

**Natasha:** He’s an only child.

**Craig:** That’s a real dangerous man.

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** The way he said only child, he’s like, “After I killed my siblings, I was an only child.”

**John:** Here’s how we got these people. I emailed out to our Scriptnotes listeners who were going to be in the audience, and I said, “Hey, do you have a really interesting story about your life that we could use on this, or are you really good at playing Mafia/Werewolf?” That’s what you are.

**Natasha:** Have you played the new game, Werewolf?

**John:** Thank the three of you very much for doing this. Let’s give them a [indiscernible 01:15:21].

**Natasha:** I’m just kidding.

**Craig:** Thank you guys. That was outstanding.

**Natasha:** Number 3, I’m sorry.

Links:

* [HollywoodHEART](https://www.hollywoodheart.org/)
* Quinta Brunson on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6708435/) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/quintab)
* Rachel Bloom on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3417385/) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/racheldoesstuff/)
* Natasha Lyonne on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005169/) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/nlyonne/)
* Quinta Brunson’s [The Girl Who’s Never Been on a Nice Date](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op2pK_w8_oY)
* Quinta Brunson on [BuzzFeed](https://www.buzzfeed.com/quintab)
* [Rachel Bloom: Death, Let Me Do My Show](https://www.rachelbloomshow.com/) at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, New York City
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Our ASL interpreter was Elliott Aronson
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/608standardv2.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/character-and-story-fit).

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

Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 606 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

How do you know if you got the right characters for your story, and whether you got the right story for your characters? To help us solve this crucial piece of matchmaking, we welcome back Pamela Ribon, a screenwriter whose credits include Moana, Ralph Breaks the Internet, and the new Netflix feature, Nimona. Her short film, My Year of Dicks, was not only a previous One Cool Thing, it’s also an Oscar nominee. It made Craig giggle every time I said it. Welcome back, Pammy.

**Pamela Ribon:** Hi. Thank you for having me.

**John:** I’m so excited to have you on the podcast again. Full disclosure, you moderated a session very recently about screenwriting, and your questions were so brilliant so insightful, and you’re leading of the discussion. I actually suppressed my need to take over all those things. You know what I’m talking about.

**Pamela:** I do. This is the highest praise I’ve ever received. Thank you so much.

**John:** They were so, so good that I stopped myself in answering questions and didn’t try to redirect the question. I recognize you as a fellow podcast host. If at any point you feel you need to elevate yourself from just guest to podcast co-host, feel free.

**Pamela:** I will be your Craig as much as you need. I will take umbrage, but you will find that I’m a more empathetic umbrage person.

**John:** Yeah, but you have strong opinions though, and I like that too. You have strong opinions about craft. I really want to dig in and talk about craft. I also want to talk about recapping, because you were a recapper. I want to talk about that relationship between writing about film and television and writing film and television, what that is. I’ve got some listener questions. I’m excited to get to it.

Also, for a Bonus Segment for Premium members, I want to talk about your podcast, because you have a podcast called Listen to Sassy, which is all going through the back issues of Sassy Magazine and discussing the relevance then and the relevance now?

**Pamela:** Yes, and the official issues of Sassy Magazine, because there are some that we might say aren’t canon.

**John:** Wow. I did not even know that. I’m learning even as we start this podcast. Hey, let’s jump into this. Let’s talk about character and character fit, because this is a large part of the discussion we had a few weeks ago as we were talking. You started with a really smart question, which was, what is your favorite character that you did not create. I don’t remember what your answer for that question was yourself. What is a character that you wish you had created?

**Pamela:** What’s interesting is I wouldn’t have answered this in any other room, but the room we were in and the conversation we were having led me to answer Annie. What I’m going to say right now is Paddington in Paddington 2.

**John:** Let’s talk about Paddington in Paddington 2, because it’s a great movie. It’s a great character. Talk to us about, why is that a perfect movie for Paddington to be in, and vice versa.

**Pamela:** Part of why Paddington is perfect in Paddington 2… That movie is perfect. Perfect movie. This movie, imagine like double XL. This movie is perfect, because when you know what Paddington wants, from being a little bit in a book, which only this movie could do, from us knowing his backstory, which just happened, we’re just in. We’re just in. I remember saying out loud, “This is perfect.”

It’s not easy. I was so awed by how you can bring every single person in the whole wide world to understand, what if I could walk this person I love through the world, because of the book. I just need this book. I grew up with The NeverEnding Story and Annie. I think in the room, I answered Annie.

**John:** You did. I remember you answering Annie.

**Pamela:** Definitely. You love her.

**John:** Annie and Paddington are similar characters, in that they are not hugely flawed characters who have to learn a valuable lesson that transforms them. They start the movie with clean and simple wants. The movie wants to give it to them, but will make it difficult along the way.

**Pamela:** I think I am drawn to those characters, like in Whale Rider, or going all the way to the other end, secretary. I think I am drawn to characters who know who they are, but the world doesn’t understand them.

**John:** That’s so fascinating, because usually we think about, movies are journey of self-discovery, so over the course of the movie, the character has to learn about themselves and challenge their assumptions about what they’re able to do, in order to conquer the problem in front of them and to transform the world in front of them. They have to transform themselves in order to transform the world.

I think I brought this up in the room. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie Bucket is not a character who has to go through a big arc. The character in the book, he is a good kid from the start. I kept fighting these studio notes from like, “Oh, Charlie has to want it more. We have to see him struggle.” No, he’s actually a good, perfect kid. He does need to change the world around him, but he’s changing it in the way an antagonist changes the world, rather than protagonist. He doesn’t have to exit the movie profoundly changed from how he entered into it.

**Pamela:** I always think of characters are moving right, being right. I have a problem when they’re always moving right, always being right. I do think you have to find this balance of, you’re right, the world needs to know you’re right, and because the world is bending, you actually learn you can be wrong inside that right. That’s that end of second act feeling of, “Oh, shit. I didn’t have it all figured out, because no one let me grow.”

**John:** Let’s back up and talk about character and story fit, because I think so often, we are lectured that story comes from character, character want is what drives story. It’s true, but also, that’s generally not the starting place for an idea.

An idea is generally about like, “This is the world in which I want to tell the story. I want to tell a story about a character who does blank blank blank.” Then you’re backing into, who is the best, most appropriate character to put into that story.

It’s not so clean. It’s like, “I’m going to create a character in a vacuum and then set them in a world for a story.” That just never happens. It’s not a thing that a writer almost ever really experiences. Instead, they’re like, “This is the place in which the story needs to happen. Now we need to find who is the perfect character to tell that story.”

I’m wondering if we can talk about some animated movies, because they often are cleaner ways to get into this. For something like Moana, which you were writing on, was this like, “We want to tell a story about Pacific Islanders and this universe,” and then you had to find a character, or was there a clear like, “We want to tell a story of a chieftain’s daughter who goes on this quest.” What was the back and forth between the two of them?

**Pamela:** It’s a little of what you said on both sides, and also neither, let me say.

**John:** Perfect. That’s what it is. It’s complicated.

**Pamela:** It’s very complicated. I come in right after Taika Waititi had written a draft. My first day was a table read, which you’re just in the story trust, day one, like, “Welcome to this.”

I would say a lot of times, I am brought in when people are very comfortable with structure, they understand where they want it to go, but perhaps their female character could use some help owning the film.

**John:** Making sure they’re not a passenger in the film, but actually driving the film.

**Pamela:** Maui’s a very dominant character. In Taika’s hands, he was beyond charismatic, so what do you do? Moana at the time was only 13. She had a bunch of brothers. She wasn’t allowed to sail because she was a girl. That is where we started during my time there.

**John:** A lot had been done before you got there, so it wasn’t a completely clean slate. When you’re thinking about a movie from scratch, it’s that balance. Most of our listeners are probably thinking of their own thing they want to do. They will look through books that will tell them, oh, story comes from character. We’ve said it on the podcast. They may be beating themselves up, like, “I need to find this perfect character, and then the story will come out of that.”

That’s not necessarily a good solution, because I’ve had experiences where I absolutely love this character, I’ve been down a draft with a character, and I love this person, and they are just not the right person to base this movie around. I made the wrong choice. We often talk about how sidekicks steal movies, because they are characters who are just more interesting to watch in the world that we’ve created for ourselves.

**Pamela:** They’re there because your protagonist has to be on a straight line, and so they aren’t always allowed to be so chaotically funny. We enjoy our sidekicks, because they can just keep nudging at that protagonist, to say, “I think you need to change. I think you need to change. What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see what’s wrong with you? Isn’t it better to live like me?” That sidekick has some growing to learn. The protagonist is what’s actually going to help the world.

**John:** Exactly. I think back to Big Fish. For the adaptation of Big Fish, there’s a book that I could base it off of, but the book is really thin, and it only has sketches of these characters and situations. I went into the adaptation knowing who Edward was, knowing who Will, the son, was, which is basically a proxy for me. I knew that Will had a French wife, which I just created because I needed someone for him to talk to. Then I had to figure out everything else.

Those characters can feel very functional along the way. They’re getting me through a section of story. Then the trick is to make them feel like those were characters who were always there, who always had a reason and a purpose and own their life, you could make a story about them, even though they really were just functional for me in this story to tell this one bit of it. It’s that sleight of hand, where you feel like, oh, any one of these people could drive the story, but of course they couldn’t, because it has to be about this one time, event that this one character is going through.

**Pamela:** Going back to the question you asked me earlier, this is not true, but Taika likes to joke that all that’s left in the script from what he did is exterior ocean day. It’s not true. It’s not true, but it’s a very funny joke.

That was the part, going back to that question, that was interesting, because you had so many scenes that had no walls, they had no props. You’re two people maybe, or just Moana, on a boat. Ocean. Exterior ocean day. That is not a world that is populated.

When you think about moving on to something like Ralph Breaks the Internet, where the whole world is very important. In fact, you can’t make some of these characters exist until you understand what this internet world looks like in the, quote unquote, room they might be in. You’re like, “Oh, I understand a knowledge base, a data search engine was that character.” In terms of Moana, you have the endless sea.

**John:** Can I ask you a question? I remember looking at the initial posters. I went in and saw early art on Moana. I got a talking through of who the different characters were. Some of those characters did not make it through to the movie. I can say that specifically there was a poster that released that showed the pig on the boat.

I feel like my instinct was that some of those characters were brought along on the journey just so there would be stuff to do on those boat journeys, as we were off on sea, exterior ocean day. They ultimately were not crucial to the story. They probably got trimmed, maybe late in the process. That’s the kind of discovery that can happen in animation particularly, because you just got to keep iterating and iterating and iterating. Without spoiling, revealing any NDA stuff, am I kind of right?

**Pamela:** Listen. Look. How old is this? Are these NDAs still happening? I feel like I’m just going to tell you. First of all, like I said, she was younger when I was writing on the script.

I can talk to you about Pua, who was named Kuni [ph] when I was working on it, because kuni means pig. So does Pua. That pig originally went with her, because you also learned how she had rescued this pig as a little tiny runt that was going to be left to die. She brought that pig home and raised that pig. That was her pig.

There was something about having Pua along on the journey that made the stakes a little too high. I totally understand this was past my time, but you’re just like, “She can’t just leave the boat.” I knew this feeling. She left the boat to go somewhere else. You’re like, “I don’t care about Hei Hei, but you can’t leave Pua. He’s such a sweet piggy.”

**John:** No one cares about the chicken.

**Pamela:** Yeah. The sweet piggy can’t be… It became too high of stakes, actually, for her to continue her journey. I do understand Pua’s going to stay home, because otherwise, you’ve brought a puppy on your boat, and how are you supposed to leave that puppy in a lava realm? You just can’t. It’s too scary.

**John:** Let’s talk about the room and animation, because we had Jennifer Lee on the show, and she was talking about her experience on Frozen and coming in at a place where they had a lot of the pieces, and they couldn’t make all the pieces fit. A lot of it was figuring out, “Okay, what do we have here? How do we get back to this central relationship? How do we make this all work?”

As a feature writer, I’m mostly used to working alone, or I get notes from a person, or I work with a director. There’s TV writers who are used to working in a room of other writers. As an animation writer, you can find yourself in situations where you’re at these big tables, where it’s not just other writers, it’s a bunch of other people from other departments. You’re all having to talk through these things. You’re having to figure out how do we synthesize these ideas and get back to a place.

If you’re the writer who’s coming in on a project like Moana or Ralph Breaks the Internet, how do you take all that in and synthesize this and give them back something they need? At what point do you stop talking and start writing and show scenes? What is that like for you?

**Pamela:** Much like in TV, it’s different in every room. It’s led by that showrunner, who will be your director, or directors. They set the tone. Moana and Ralph and Smurfs, so whatever, each one is a very different room.

I would say what’s interesting, coming into animation when I did, was a real specific change, probably Pixar led, of, hey, a writer might have something to say in this room and might have some reason to be talking to you.

What I found really cool was, this might be because I moved around a lot, but part of it was looking at each room and going, “Oh, okay. Oh, so now I’m talking to mostly visual artists,” whose brains are already adding. They take a sequence and think of it as five minutes. They’re already adding and plussing, which is why we have the best stuff in animation, because each person is really filling it to the top of their own game.

How do you talk to that person without stifling them, while also explaining, like, “You don’t have to think about the other 88 minutes, but I do. This scene is great. Put everything you want in it, but just make sure this happens and this happens and at the end it’s this. If we can do that together, if you do that on your own… ”

I think I prefer working with storyboard artists, because they’re able to give me what exterior ocean day looks like, or interior Fale night. I don’t really know what that means. Interior Ebay day. Once I can see what they see, I can show them what I think they should say. Then together, we can make something that you can pitch back to a director, that is more fully formed than either of us can do on our own.

You don’t get that option often in a TV writing room, unless you’re off in a B-room or whatever, and you’re all like, “Let’s hope these jokes make it.” It’s the same skill.

**John:** In TV though, you don’t have the chance to iterate, where you see, “What was this? What did it look like? Great. Now let’s go back,” because in TV, ultimately you’re still delivering a script, which will then go off to another group of people who will make the show. You’ll have, hopefully, writers there to help oversee it. You don’t get that chance to like, “Oh, everyone’s looking at the same thing. What are we going to do for this next pass?”

**Pamela:** I started in more multi-cams. You did have a rehearsal. Everybody’s on their feet. Everybody’s giving input. You also have a lot of weird downtime, because you’re a staff writer, and learning what to do with all of that time and then learning what everyone else does. I would say for any room I’m in or any job I’m on, while doing the job, I also want to know, what can I learn from this?

**John:** Of course.

**Pamela:** I would say that, from working in IBM tech support before I moved out to LA, all the way to anime dub jobs or working in reality television and recapping, all of that leads into what I’m doing in a Disney room, where I’m talking to people who are seeing what I’m saying, before I’m even done saying what I’m saying, and just knowing how to pick up all these words, which you do as a writer once you’re in the edit bay or you’re in casting or whatever. These are just different words. It’s their language.

**John:** Now, I have made a lot of animated movies, but weirdly, the movies that I’ve worked on have been much more like traditional features, where I’ve delivered a script, here’s the script, or I will get reel back, but then I’ll change stuff in the reels. It’s not been that sort of collaborative thing, because it’s mostly been stop-motion.

In stop-motion, you get that one shot to shoot something, and there’s not the iteration there is in either traditional animation or computer animation. We don’t get to do the kinds of things you see in Disney features. I remember going in on some Disney features that I was shocked what a mess the project was, and like, “Is this coming out in a year? Are you serious?”

**Pamela:** That’s a good screening five is what I’m going to guess, when you’re running screening four, screening five of a-

**John:** I’m like, “Oh, god.” Then somehow, it does come together, which is just remarkable. It’s a strange thing for me to see. You have to trust the process that you’ll get there, to the right place. I guess you don’t always get to the right place, but you often get to the right place.

**Pamela:** It’s tough to trust the process, I think, depending on where you are in the situation. How do you trust the process when you’re not given access to the whole thing all the time?

**John:** That’s the thing. In many cases, I haven’t gotten full access, or it was so clear, the movie is shooting in London, and I just know they’re going to make it happen, or it’s Tim Burton, he’s going to shoot exactly what’s there, and so it’s going to work.

Giving up control for any writer on any project is part of it. It’s recognizing that it’s never going to be exactly what you saw in your head. With animation, sometimes the timelines are so long and the iterations are so many, that you could really lose a sense of what the intention was.

**Pamela:** Yeah. I think the trick is knowing that you’re usually not the first, and probably not going to be the last, unless you’re like, “This movie’s coming out in six months. I got it. I got it. I’m going to get credit. It’s going to be great.”

You just stay very invested, in the time that you’re there, to do the thing that you know the movie needs the most work in, which is either our main characters, our dynamic of our most important relationship is not zinging, or, “Man, this first act is too long. How can we care about them sooner?” and shoot the movie.

Animation in particular I think needs long first acts, that eventually we cut, once the movie is like, I feel this moment, the movie has begun. That takes a little while to find.

**John:** The gears click in.

**Pamela:** Yes, because the last thing animation looks for are characters.

**John:** Say more about that.

**Pamela:** They start from a world that’s impossible to do in live action, or you do it in live action. You have to start in this like, “What is the internet? What would the internet look like?” Just taking that one as an easy answer.

Once you try to figure out how a place can be both something you’ve never seen before and a place that feels like, “Of course I’ve been here, because I’m here all the time theoretically, but I’ve never seen it,” then you’re like, “Who should go through this journey and make us feel the most like us going through this crazy world we’ve never seen before?”

**John:** Yeah, but in this case of the internet, you have characters you’re bringing back for another movie. Yes, you’re going to create supporting characters who are going to be exactly right for that, but you cannot create your two central characters. You have to create a world that is going to challenge them and their relationship and still be rewarding for the world itself. That’s a big ask.

**Pamela:** That’s very astute, because you’re taking two characters who only know old-school video games and an arcade that’s not visited as often, because there’s this internet. What would they do in this infinite world?

There was a want at one point that kicked off the movie. It didn’t last, but it’s still one of my favorites, where Vanellope could see a little bit beyond the door every time the arcade was closed. The only thing she could see was Yoshinoya beef bowl. She just wanted to know what that… It just sounded so perfect.

**John:** Oh my god, what a great lyric to sing. (singing:) Yoshinoya. Yoshinoya.

**Pamela:** (singing:) Yoshinoya beef bowl. She was just like, “Doesn’t it sound perfect? I just want to know what it is. I want to eat it if I can, or swim in it if I must. I just want to know what that is.” That was that idea of eventually Slaughter Race, of, I want to know this thing that makes me feel like that’s where I’m supposed to be. Originally, they were just going to get online and try to find the Yoshinoya people. I think we moved into bitter yearnings.

That’s the idea of how do you get a character that you know and love, in a sequel, how do you get a character you know and love to want just the next step, so that you have the same wonderful feelings that you’re visiting your old friends, but you have a new adventure? That’s very hard in a sequel, because your protagonist is arced.

**John:** Yeah. They’ve gotten all the way through it. Toy Story, god bless them. Those characters arced and arced, and we’re going to make them arc more. It’s a challenge.

**Pamela:** We’re going to get hard in there. We’re going to cause forever scars on people who watch this.

**John:** Let’s go back to some of your forever scars. I want to talk about recapping, because for folks who don’t know, could you explain what recapping is or was? Because I feel like there’s a whole generation that may have just not experienced this as a thing, but it was so important to me as a person who was growing up on the internet.

**Pamela:** First, imagine the internet as a place where you read. You just read. You go there to read more about what you saw. It is something you’re doing to look like you’re working. That’s what’s great about the fact that it’s a lot of reading. You look very busy.

Television Without Pity started as Mighty Big TV, which was actually an offshoot of DawsonsWrap, which Tara Ariano and Sarah Bunting and Dave Cole had made, which was recapping Dawson’s Creek episodes. It’s the idea of, you’re sitting on a couch with a friend, and the two of you are talking the entire episode of your favorite guilty pleasure, because it’s way more fun to watch something like that with a friend.

When Television Without Pity came out as Mighty Big TV, I don’t even remember how many there were the first year, 10 shows maybe. I don’t know. It was a bunch of us that had been writing on their other sites, like Hissyfit and Fametracker.

**John:** What year would this have been? I looked it up on Wikipedia.

**Pamela:** Is it ’98 or ’99?

**John:** It’s ’98. ’98 is when the first one was.

**Pamela:** I know where I worked. I still have my first recap handwritten in a Mead notebook. It is 20-something pages, handwritten, of Get Real. Get Real.

**John:** Get Real.

**Pamela:** Do you know Get Real? You shouldn’t, but let’s see if you can remember one actor from Get Real. It was on Fox on Wednesday nights.

**John:** That helps. Greg Evigan?

**Pamela:** Nope, but I love where you’re starting.

**John:** Tell me who. Give me an actor.

**Pamela:** Anne Hathaway.

**John:** Wow, Anne Hathaway on a Fox show.

**Pamela:** I’m not done. Are you ready? Eric Christian Olsen.

**John:** Oh yeah, of course.

**Pamela:** Jesse Eisenberg.

**John:** Wow, nice.

**Pamela:** Taryn Manning. Jon Tenney, and others.

**John:** That was the same year as Go. It was when we were filming Go. It’s that caliber of those people.

**Pamela:** I was learning about you while I was writing for Get Real. The reason that most people didn’t see it and it didn’t last forever was, it was on opposite a new show called The West Wing.

**John:** Yeah, I’ve heard of that show. There’s a guy, Aaron Sorkin was the guy who wrote that.

**Pamela:** Yeah, he’s still around. I hear he’s still doing things. Good for him.

**John:** You were assigned to recap Get Real, or you volunteered to recap Get Real.

**Pamela:** I was assigned it.

**John:** What does a recap consist of? The show’s airing live on Fox. How quickly are you supposed to be putting up this recap? How long was a recap? Really, what is the purpose of a recap?

**Pamela:** It morphed over the years. I moved on to things like Gilmore Girls, which I did for five years. Over the years, and as it got popular, we had to deal with what those demands were.

I would say originally, you had to record that so that you could watch it again. Later, we used to have to do these recaplets, which were very fast, here’s what you missed, if you were just waiting the next morning to find out what happened, and you missed it, because you used to be able to miss television.

Essentially, you would then write these, I did call them dissertations, because they felt that way, where you took each scene or each episode and talked about where the characters were on their journey, what was happening, and often, how you felt as a viewer watching this. That led to jokes, and sometimes inside jokes.

I had these two patron saint of televisions, I don’t know if you remember this, from gift shops. There were these glow-in-the-dark Saint Clares. And they were the patron saint of television. And I had two under my TV. And I used to let them sometimes do some dialog when I was bored with an episode.

You would just try to make an entertaining recap, which was, “Here’s what happened scene by scene. Here’s where it’s working. Here’s where I don’t like it.” It’s weird to say now, because it does feel like it’s common now to see these versions everywhere. They would be 12 to 20 Word doc pages of deep diving into what’s going on.

The people who were reading it and writing back, that was also really early internet feedback, a forum that was super popular, that then became something that you know people in LA and writers’ rooms were reading and changing the writers… It makes so much sense to me now that a writers’ room is obsessed with the one thing writing about writers.

**John:** That’s what I want to get into, because that feedback loop has to be really strange. It would be impossible if somebody were recapping my show and actually deep diving into it, to not read that thing and think about that thing, because that person is a super fan, but also a super critic. It’s the person who wants the show to be better, the person who’s studying the show more obsessively than-

**Pamela:** Anyone.

**John:** … some of those writers in the room.

**Pamela:** It’s your actual audience in many ways, and accessible in a way that we had not had before. It’s not a Nielsen. There’s no dial I could hit. I was telling you, “Here’s where I felt my intelligence was insulted. Here’s where I cried and called my mom.” That’s feedback. How could that not affect a room?

I think often now about a story editor or a co-producer who read a recap and was like, “That’s fucking what I said. When we were pitching this out, I knew this was a problem. No one listened to me. Now here she is saying this is insulting and I wish it were this.” I wonder what it did to a writers’ room back then to have anybody validating someone whose job in the room is to not be validated, but to be a part of the room.

**John:** The tone of recapping was also very specific, because it was love, but it was also snark. We were coming out of Spy magazine, Entertainment Weekly. There was a tone there that was very specific. It was smart. It wasn’t mean, but it was poky.

Did you ever scale back your snark? How did you moderate the tone of these things? A Gilmore Girls, it feels like you’re going to approach that differently than you would approach maybe a reality competition show. Talk to us about that.

**Pamela:** That’s why I didn’t really do many of those. I have a lot of thoughts about snark, having grown up with it, into it, and out of it. I think for me, snark was important. I don’t know that we need snark right now. I think snark at the time was important to say, “Can’t we do better than this? Is this enough? Is this okay?” I think now when we say, “Is this okay? Is this enough?” we say it like we all know that this is wrong and someone isn’t addressing what’s already wrong. I think snark at the time was, we’re just supposed to be fine with this, but we all know that maybe this is not good enough.

I would see sometimes snark taken to a mean place. That was just never the idea. We’re not just here to call this person an asshole. Let’s back it up with some things.

**John:** It’s important to note that recaps are always talking about the characters and not the actors. Is that correct?

**Pamela:** Yeah. Yes. Sometimes that actor blurs. Sometimes you’re like, “This actor is acting in my scene with a character.” I couldn’t recap now. I definitely couldn’t.

When I started working in reality television, where I was a logger, which meant I watched unedited footage of The Bachelor, in the middle of the night, until 5:00 in the morning, and wrote everything I saw, and flagged anything that was maybe interesting to a writer. That’ll mess your brain up.

**John:** I’m sure. It just burns a hole. It’s like doing coverage on scripts, where just like, “Oh god, I’m reading all these scripts. None of this will ever get made. I have to write this detailed synopsis of the things that don’t actually make sense.”

In the case of logging, you’re just looking at all the raw footage and seeing is there any moment that’s worth pulling out here, so that the editors can snip that out, and some assistant editor could keep in a bin to put into the cut. Lord.

**Pamela:** I was a pretty good logger, but I shouldn’t have been a logger, which is probably true to anybody, if you read what I wrote. I had to watch two hours of Lorenzo Lamas on a motorcycle. Not a lot to pull from there.

**John:** No one should have to do that.

**Pamela:** I watched a guy make salmon. I also watched a girl sit alone in a room that they wouldn’t let her leave, waiting on a date that was running late because of time, just because of producers and the show. That wasn’t what they were going to show. I ended up making a fake monologue for her, because I couldn’t stare at this shot of a girl sitting alone at a table, not moving, for two hours of my own life.

**John:** You weren’t allowed to fast-forward through that?

**Pamela:** No. What if she does anything interesting?

**John:** I just feel like a little command-J there and speed through there and just see if she’s now… Wow.

**Pamela:** You’re also supposed to, a little bit, transcribe. Sometimes someone would open the door and be like, “Are you thirsty?” She’d be like, “I’m okay.” If she rubs her nose in a way where you could use that clip later-

**John:** That’s right.

**Pamela:** … that’s it. You’re watching the whole thing. I also got the flu during that. It made me have an idea for a book that I wrote, because I think that’s what my brain does is when my time is being wasted, I start thinking a way out.

**John:** What this could mean, how this could be worthwhile outside of this impossibly not worthwhile thing you’re doing.

**Pamela:** Where that helps in animation is you can get so stuck on a moment that needs to happen that nobody can back all the way up. Also, most of the people in the room shouldn’t back all the way up. A writer can go, “Okay, oh my gosh. I’m just going to take a hundred steps back and look. Why are we doing this? What needs to happen later? Why are we even here right now? We know what needs to happen later.”

I think that is the benefit of a writer in the room with everybody at the intensity and sophicity [sic] level that storyboard artists have to and should be owners of what they’re given, and the director or directors have to be owners of thousands of people asking them questions.

The benefit of your writer, if you know what to do with your writer, your writer just looks at you and goes, “That’ll work,” like in surgery. “That’ll work. This is great. That won’t work, and I’ll tell you why.” A director that can be a little bit flexible with the writer, and think through that without feeling like someone’s yanking your Jenga, that’s a great writer-director relationship, to go, “Thank you. You are my scaffolding. Will my characters be okay through this new shiny thing that I think is really funny?” You just figure out all the iterations so that you can keep all the parts you really loved and get rid of the parts that weren’t working.

I think by the time you get to screening seven or eight, I always think of them as seasons, you’re like, “We have the villain from Season 2 talking to the love interest from Season 4. Now it’s really going. It’s all the things we liked in Season 1. It’s all working.”

**John:** So often, as I come in to work on movies that are going in production or about to go in production or in crisis, it is those conversations where everyone has their opinions. They’re trying to make their movie, but they’re not all the same movie. As the writer, I have to come in and understand which movie each person’s trying to make and get them onto the same page and honor the choices that they’re trying to do and get them to all making the same movie. It’s a writing skill, but it’s very much a psychology skill.

**Pamela:** Definitely.

**John:** It’s being comfortable in the room, making people feel heard, but also leading them to a decision. It’s like a hostage negotiator.

**Pamela:** I always think of it as the therapist. “How does this script feel for you today? Are you up here? Are you down here?” The difficulty is, some of the people in the room are empowered all the way to level 10, and some people know they’re actually level 11 or 12 or 13, but they haven’t told anyone. You can sense as the writer, where you’re like, “Oh, I can help this person’s vision, but it’s ultimately this group’s mandate. How can I make everyone feel good and still be myself? Why did you bring me in? You could hire a therapist, but you actually need someone who can make these characters sing in the way that you’re all hoping for, the feeling you’re looking for.”

**John:** It’s always so tough when you’re trying to deal with the actor and the director, and you realize the actor and director have tension with each other about a completely unrelated thing, that is sometimes a wardrobe thing, and that you’re not going to be able to get an agreement on the two of them on the story point because of this other thing. You just have to accept that and, again, do your best work and try to provide what the movie needs, even if it’s not necessarily solving this crisis moment right in front of you. It’s tough. Sometimes just remembering that it’s hard and it’s not your fault that it’s hard. It’s hard because it’s hard.

**Pamela:** It’s hard because it’s hard. I think what’s unique about animation is you do get a lot of shots on goal, and so you can hear what you heard in the room and what you recorded and all the different takes that you asked, because you couldn’t possibly guess. They’re not in a room together. You don’t often have these actors acting together. You’re putting together does this feel right. You’re like, “Oh, you know what it is, is we rushed this part.”

You can go in the edit bay and record something really fast and put it up in scratch, and see does that work, where you’re just like, “I’m so sorry, Ralph. I didn’t know.” You’re like, “Does that make everything better?” Before you’ve booked everybody and cost all this money, you can try it in these little places. There’s no other world where you get to do that.

**John:** In live action features and television, you can do some little things. You can put in some scratch. You can make some experiments. You’re never going to really get people back. If you’re ADR-ing lines, something’s gone wrong generally, so it’s tough.

**Pamela:** In animation, you have so many more chances to have them. What you don’t want is for them to come in and go, “What happened to this awesome arc I used to have?” They’re like, “We had to throw it out, because it turns out you’re not the main character.” These aren’t things you can say. One shouldn’t, if you want your actor. You want all the talent to be as excited as they should be about the part that they’re in, because they’re so great. How can you keep a lot of it from them, so that they don’t feel, “Oh, it’s my responsibility to get back to what it used to be,” because it isn’t. It just isn’t. Nobody’s working against their talents.

To be able to be in a room and have everybody scratch these characters a lot, which is what we did in Ralph, it was five or six of us doing all the voices, until we were like, “We’re ready to go.” Then an actor could really go forward with these scenes.

In the case of that film, there were some actors who wanted to be in the room together when they acted, and we could make that happen. Then a lot of times, it was just me reading with Gal Gadot, just being like, “Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. It’s going to be fine. I’ll just sit here in a room with Gal Gadot and hope she likes it.”

**John:** If you’re in there with Gal Gadot, are you playing Sarah Silverman’s character? Are you doing the voice opposite her?

**Pamela:** Yeah.

**John:** It feels kind of right?

**Pamela:** Yeah, so she has something to play with.

**John:** Fun.

**Pamela:** And vice versa. I also was Gal for Sarah. You want them to be able to look at… They have someone to look at. You’re in a room that has nothing. Exterior ocean day, interior recording studio afternoon. Nobody’s in hair and makeup. Nobody looks like the character they’re playing. I’m trying to be very quiet and not pick up on their mic. I want her to feel as there as she can be, so that we can have a real moment, because a lot of those scenes were, for Vanellope, heart-to-hearts with Gal’s character.

That room is silent. I’ve been in the room recording, where you can’t hear the other room. You’ll say a line three times, and then you just see them all talking, and maybe even fighting, but you can’t hear any of it. You’re just like, “Cool, cool.” They’ll come back and be like, “That was fine.” You’re like, “I know that wasn’t fine.”

**John:** That wasn’t. There was disagreement.

**Pamela:** Someone’s mad at someone. If you’re in that quiet, quiet room with an actor, the nice thing is you get to be together on stage and just make a scene happen. It’s something I could’ve never predicted would happen in my life, but I’ve been in a quiet, tiny room with some really incredible performers and gotten to see what they look like when they’re acting, without anything but themselves.

**John:** Exciting.

**Pamela:** It helps as a writer.

**John:** Absolutely. That experience of just, we’ve written dialog, but how do we actually make this line land, is tough.

**Pamela:** Because they don’t have their body, they don’t have their hair, they don’t have a smirk. They don’t have their fucking gorgeous eyes. They have what they can say.

To get someone still enough to also be screaming in pain sometimes, but still, but not stomping or clapping or anything that we are naturally, like the slapping of thighs that every actor wants to do. You can’t do any of it. It is so limiting, that at least the life vest, whatever I am over them, the buoy, whatever it is, someone else that you can look at and go, “Can I at least say these lines with you?” It’s very helpful.

I find it an honor to be able to be in those situations where they’re also saying the things that you wrote. If they just look at you and go, “Is that right?” As a writer, you very rarely get to be like, “What do you want to say? How can we make this happen?” That’s great.

**John:** It is great. Let’s answer some listener questions.

**Pamela:** Yay.

**John:** We have a couple of little crafty ones I thought might be good. Drew, can you start us off with Denise?

**Drew Marquardt:** Denise writes, “What criteria do you use to choose the sex of a character, mainly supporting characters, when it could go either way? Do you play against type, or do you go conservative?”

**John:** Sex and gender of characters and assumptions about who that doctor, that engineer should be, what the mix is. Pamela, what’s your instinct? If there’s no reason why a character needs to be male or female, what are you thinking?

**Pamela:** My instinct is something I haven’t seen before. That’s where I’ll start, if it can happen. I have also seen where I didn’t do that. I thought I was doing something I hadn’t seen before, and then someone would flag, that character is actually pretty stereotypical, that you’re using to have your new scene in with this other character.

That’s something I learned, where I’m trying so hard to make a protagonist unique that I will accidentally surround them in something you’ve seen before, to help show how unique they are. Let’s call it the first and last time that that was flagged, I really was like, wow, I would’ve never noticed that I had done that without someone going, “What if it’s not this other person in the room that you’ve seen before?”

**John:** We’ve talked on the podcast before about Black judge syndrome, Black lieutenant syndrome. I don’t know if I ever mentioned this on the podcast, but there was a project I was brought in to rewrite, and the main character had a sister who was gone a lot. The draft I received, she was a flight attendant. In the rewrite, I made her a pilot. The producer said, “No, there are no women pilots.” I’m like, “But… ” The female producer said, “There are no women pilots.” I’m like, “I don’t know, I think there might be more female pilots than there are female producers at your level.”

It was a really strange comment, because I thought the pilot thing actually made a lot of sense. It tracked more with this woman’s sense of responsibility and control of her life. I got shut down, so she’s a flight attendant in the final movie. I think it’s always worth pushing against those things.

What I would caution Denise though is look at the choices you’re making. If the choice is going to be distracting in a way that pulls from your story, think about why that is and how do you have it support the needs of that scene, rather than pushing against the needs of that scene.

**Pamela:** It’s also seeing where and when your movie is set, and so that character can be different than default, because theoretically you’re past now. I wrote on a space thing where I wanted an astronaut that was essentially Lizzo.

**John:** Great.

**Pamela:** It was pretty soon after the thousand tampons for Sally Ride and all that stuff of like, “Women in space, what do you need?” Even maybe you can make a suit that is not just one suit for a dude. Even that, in exciting that character, which I was like, “This is where that should be,” there were times when I noticed I was trying to over-explain why that was okay. That wasn’t my job in the script, to pitch why this character was okay. It should just be, and also this character, because we’re in the future, and maybe we’re evolved. We can make space suits in other sizes.

**John:** I was talking with a writer about his script, and there was a police lieutenant. There’s a police detective and a police lieutenant in it. They had a scene in the police lieutenant’s office about the police detective overstepping. I’m like, “I don’t think you can have that scene. I just don’t know that there’s a version of that scene that is not going to feel tropey tropey tropey trope. We’ve seen the TV version of that just too many times. You’re going to have to change. I would say just get it out of that office. See if that lieutenant’s actually the crucial person to be giving that information or if you even need to get that information, because it’s just such a stock moment. It’s not just a stock character. It’s a stock moment to have your cop protagonist be challenged by the authority figure on this thing. You need to find a different way into it.”

**Pamela:** Once you’ve seen puppets do that scene…

**John:** Absolutely.

**Pamela:** Once puppets have done it, you get to retire the scene. You get to say, “Here we are. The puppets have done it. We’re done here.”

**John:** Let’s go to Bradley’s question.

**Drew:** Bradley asks, “What do you do when you realize you’ve grossly underestimated your page count? How can I better construct my outlines so I’m landing closer to my goals? I’m working from a 37-page detailed outline, and the parts I expected to land around page 25 or 30 are actually landing around page 45. At this rate, this spec is going to wind up around 140 pages instead of the 100 pages I planned. In retrospect, I may have overstuffed the outline.

Generally, I find cutting huge swaths of the script to be much harder than cutting an outline, but I’m already midstream, and the story feels like it’s working. What would you do in this situation? Finish the story and then cut, or go back to the drawing board, re-outline, and start over? How can I change my outlines to more accurately gauge how long something will be in a script?”

**John:** Bradley, I think you’re fine. I think something that’s 45 pages, they thought was going to be 30, that’s a really common scenario for me. Pamela, I see you nodding here.

**Pamela:** Yeah, for sure. I was like, “You’ve gone past your outline pages?” I find myself with the opposite problem all the time.

**John:** Oh, really?

**Pamela:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** You’re a big outliner? You outline deep deep deep?

**Pamela:** No. My scripts end up being short short short. I don’t like to outline, which is probably my why scripts end up short. I think what Bradley’s got is a trilogy he doesn’t know about. Write the whole thing, and then figure out, when I’m reading this, when do I think the movie has begun. Probably page 28 if your script’s that long. You’ll find your midpoint is something different than you thought it was. Then a lot of that stuff was just for you to know your characters really well. You’ll figure out, oh, these first 15 pages are actually better as a one-page scene, or this thing happens in a gas station. We learn all of that stuff. I find that to be the fun part.

I don’t like first drafts, but that second draft of, “Oh, here’s what I’m working with. How do I make it look like a real script?” is fun to go, “This is too long. This is too short. This isn’t enough.” I find a lot what I think will be my end of second act is actually the midpoint, because I think that’s going to be huge, but when I make the whole thing, I’m like, “Oh, that wasn’t as big as where I ended up going.” That end of Act 2 is actually that midpoint moment of, “This is actually much bigger than we ever thought.”

If I end up in something that is let’s say 120 pages, I don’t know if that ever happens, but let’s say I get into 118 when I want 99. That’s usually what I find, is I’ve missed where the moment of everybody going, “This is bigger than we thought it was. I have more moments for bad guys closing in than I thought.”

**John:** Like you, I’m by my nature not a planner, and so I’m not a person who does detailed outlines, except on projects where I’ve been required to do it. Then it’s always like, “Oh my gosh, I have this outline. I know what it is, the next thing I need to do. That’s exciting. I know what my daily work is going to be, a little bit more clearly.”

Writing the Arlo Finch books, with those, I would have a sense of like, “Oh, this is what happens in this sequence.” I would think, “Oh, this will be a chapter,” and it’ll be three. I could never accurately predict it.

Now that I have 20 years of screenwriting experience, I have a much better sense of how many pages it’s going to take to do a thing, how many pages it’s going to take to do a moment and land that. You’re probably new, Bradley, and so this is all the first time you’re experiencing it. I would say don’t be so worried about the match of your outline to your script. You’re just trying to figure out how many pages it takes to deliver a moment. It’s not a function of your outline. It’s a function of how you write.

**Pamela:** That’s right, Bradley. You’ll learn as you do this more often, where you’re like, “Oh, that’s going to take me five days. That’s actually three pages. This outline is so long in the beginning, but it’s really only going to be four pages. For you to understand what I’m talking about, I’m going to take three or four pages of outline space to just explain this crazy world that you may not understand, because you haven’t seen it before. It’s not your fault. I have to walk you through how we got to why we’re making this film.”

That stuff probably won’t go in your script, because you have an establishing shot or an opening scene that says all of that, that your outline can’t. Your outline can’t. It’s not for your script. Your outline’s not for your script. Your outline is for other people to let you go write your script.

**John:** Or your outline is for yourself, to remind you what it is… It’s the plan for your plan. If it’s helpful for your process, that’s great. I just often feel like writers get forced into outlines that don’t ultimately serve them well. They get handcuffed to outlines that were never the right plan for making the movie.

**Pamela:** What I do for that, I think of a beat sheet, but I really am making a Claire Danes board of notes and lines and all kinds of things that will eventually all mostly go into the script. You can’t hand that to anyone. When I think of a beat sheet, that’s for me. That’s a cleaned up version of my chaos on the wall. It’s just for me. An outline, just a pitch. It’s a book report of what you’re about to write. I try not to do a lot of dialog in an outline. I will do it if you end up in these script-ment places where you’re doing a treatment script half thing. You can do it in an outline.

What I think is missing a lot, that helps you so much if you can put it in there, is your tone. If a outline reads dry, people are going to be worried about your script. The faster your outline sounds like what you’re writing and how the characters live, the more successful that outline’s going to be. You don’t have to worry about how many pages. It can actually be even shorter for what you show people. You can keep your 40-page outline, but you can give them 18 pages of a tight version of what it feels like to watch your film.

**John:** Exactly. While I have you here, when we were at the Austin Film Festival, I remember sitting in the restaurant, and Craig came down. He was incredibly sick, and then he went back up. You talked through this project that you were pitching. If I get this wrong, correct me.

How you were pitching this, it was all on Zoom, but you would start the Zoom meeting and talk to the executives you were pitching to. They’d say, “At this moment, we’re going to give you a link that you can click through, and you can all watch this prepared video that is the pitch, and then rejoin us on the Zoom.” Is that what you actually did?

**Pamela:** Yeah. This started because we had lockdown. Originally, we were all going to be in a room. I was working with animators in Austin. They were like, “Oh, our travel budget got cut. We’re not allowed to fly anywhere. What is it, two weeks?” I was like, “It’s going to be a little longer than two weeks.” I said, “Let’s duplicate the feeling of pitching in the room.”

I tell everybody this still. I still do it. What’s great about making your own 8 to 13-minute Vimeo pitch is you are controlling it. You only do it once. You get to give it to everyone and say, “Hey, here’s this. You’ve met us all. You think we’re great. Instead of staring at my eyes not looking at you, here’s something where I’ve given you visuals while I’m talking, and I’m showing you what the thing will feel like.

This was Slam, for my graphic novels. I ended in a sizzle reel that I got to make with a talented editor, and show them not just what the pilot would be or why I’m here, or here are other people doing roller derby, and where it was at in the state at the time of lockdown, because they were one of the first sports to come back, because they had COVID protocols and figured out how to do it.

**John:** Roller derby’s a great sport. The community around roller derby’s fantastic.

**Pamela:** It also for a long time was the fastest-growing female sport in the world. It was the first sport to include transgender people. If you identified female, you got to skate. It 100% is a forward-moving sport that is completely do-it-yourself. There’s no big business coming in and changing things. Even within that, there are factions of, “I want to go to the Olympics. I want to be Mamie Thigh-senhower because I’m a kindergarten teacher.” How does a sport move when you’ve lowered an age to 18? All of these things to be able to put into a video.

As I said, there’s no way you’re going to want to be amped enough to watch more roller derby without seeing some roller derby. Being able to put all of that in a pitch that I said, “Just go watch it, however you like to consume your media. We’ll all be here in 13 minutes, and we’ll talk some more.” It just let people come back excited to talk and really helped. I like it a lot.

I learned this from animation, of giving something for people to look at so they don’t have to stare at you and feel bad when they’re writing notes or feel bad if they’re thinking about dinner. They just do. Sometimes I stopped a pitch and been like, “Oh, it’s so late. It’s 5:00 on a Friday, and the sun’s going down behind me. I can already tell I said feminist and all of you shut down. We could just stop right here.” I don’t know, I’m always trying to find a way to humanize the experience.

Being able to like, “We’re talking about something you’re going to see, so go see a little of it. If you like it, we can talk more about what it might be like to make it together,” I love it. It’s a lot of control.

**John:** It’s a lot of control. It’s a lot of upfront work to make that thing. I’ve also been in the situation where I’ve done the exact same pitch to 13 different places, with a slide deck, that Megana was driving the slides as I was talking, so there was stuff to look at. It was a beast. The best version of it, I was just on rails. I felt so bad for the producers who had to sit through me giving the exact same presentation 13 times. A video does feel like it’s more choice.

**Pamela:** I also think what happens when you’re going to have to do it 13 times with producers who are in the room, listening to you do the show, they’re going to have opinions after the fifth, sixth, seventh, what’s next. You find yourself doing even more free work to hone it to what maybe we think the mandate is over here. Then you got to change it again for the next one. You end up rewriting your pitch a lot.

If you can be like, “You’re in or you’re out on this show.” Roller derby is a good example. You’re in or you’re out. You like this or you don’t. Please don’t make me figure out this version and that version, because you can talk to me about, “Can we do this, because that’s more what we’re into?” That’s a conversation, as opposed to me trying to guess whatever you were told that morning is the new thing you’re supposed to be looking for. It’s a lot easier to put something down that doesn’t sell if you know you really gave it your best.

**John:** True.

**Pamela:** I know it is a lot more work at the beginning, but you spend all that time really getting to know the show or the film or whatever. You spend a lot of time doing that to be able to make a presentation.

I have an acting degree. I really was horrible at pitching, until one of my friends was like, “This is the only time we’re asked on stage. You’ve got 20 minutes.” I was like, “I’m making a show. I’m making a show.” When I think of it as the one-person show about this, it is less annoying, because the pitch is not the script. It’s just this one little moment for this little thing. The script is not the film or the show. It’s one little moment to get hundreds or thousands of people on board to make the thing.

Breaking them into these milestones has been helpful, because they’re all hard, and we all want to procrastinate. If you can know that you’re actually thinking while you’re procrastinating, it feels like you’re not working. What you’re doing is giving yourself a minute to go, “Something’s not working, and that’s why I’m not working.”

**John:** The devil’s advocate, I do want to bring up, because we’ve talked about the rise of pitch decks on the show, is that this is an escalation even well beyond pitch decks. If a writer’s being asked to do this on spec, that’s a huge commitment of time and space. This goes beyond.

**Pamela:** No one’s asked me to do it. I’ve had to convince a couple of people, “Let me go show you what it is,” because it is hard to understand. You’re going to make a Vimeo. They do. You’re making a short.

**John:** Do it for something that you control, but not for someone else’s project, not someone else’s IP.

**Pamela:** I’m trying to think if I did it for someone else’s IP. Once. Once. You know what? In this case, I ended up… Whatever. We can talk about that some other day, all our heartbreaks. I’m glad I made that. If I hadn’t gone all the way to make that full-on, “Here is the pitch. This is what it looks like. This is the sizzle reel,” I mean this, it would’ve been harder to not get that gig.

**John:** Let’s do some One Cool Things. I see that you are a prepared cohost. I see two things in the Workflowy here. What’s your One Cool Thing or your two Cool Things?

**Pamela:** It’s One Cool Thing, but one’s an intro to explain why my One Cool Thing, because we’re talking about character. Judd Apatow has some great books about talking to funny people and writers about their process. One of the things that he has said… I’ve never met Judd. I don’t know him. One of the things that he has said he uses to get deeper into both himself and therefore his characters, is self-help books.

Esther Perel, I feel like when I’m telling someone something that’s a podcast on its fourth season, perhaps most of you have already heard of it. However, I will say that what Esther is very great at is getting into why these dynamics are happening between people. That’s the best part of characters. Why are these two or these three or this family or this ensemble of office workers going through this together? What is it where they’re going to step on each other’s insecurities, secrets, and, for lack of a better word, traumas? I think that what she does with such compassion and empathy is allow people the space to learn.

Anyway, she has a brand new season. She’s also doing some Premium subscriber stuff. That’s new, where there’s extra bonus things. If you haven’t listened to Where Do We Begin, usually they’re a one-time session with a client or a couple, and it’s an edited situation. She never meets them again.

**John:** I like that.

**Pamela:** It’s fascinating. You drop right into a crisis moment. She also has a How’s Work. I think it’s called How’s Work, where she does it with business partners, because it’s another relationship that can sometimes need-

**John:** Me and Craig are going to have to sign up for this.

**Pamela:** Oh my gosh, I would listen-

**John:** It would be the best.

**Pamela:** … to you guys. It would be so good. It would be so good. I barely know what Esther looks like, because I don’t want to see.

**John:** It’s always best when you don’t know what a podcast host looks like.

**Pamela:** Her voice is wonderful.

**John:** They’ll have different faces in my brain.

**Pamela:** She’s also, through the pandemic, ended up making a game of cards that no one will play with me, because no one wants to do these questions. I tried to bring this up with some group in some sort of pandemic moment, where I was like, “I have this deck of cards. It’s called Where Should We Begin. It’s just these questions.” My friends were like, “We were already having a conversation.” I was like, “No, I know.” They were like, “We were just talking, and now you’re-”

**John:** You’re making it a thing. You’re making it work.

**Pamela:** “You’re making it a thing. You’re making this work. You’re making me uncomfortable. Why are you asking me about a moment I wish I had shined in?” I was like, “I hear you. I hear you.” I was always that kid who was grabbing those books at the bookstore that were like, 100 questions to ask your best friends or 300 questions about sex and love. I just think that when you’re on a road trip and you’re asking someone next to you, “What did you wish you had won in high school that you didn’t get?” you find out so much about that person.

That’s also the stuff that we’re looking for in these scripts to be like, flashback. “I didn’t win this. This was my dream, my wish, and it didn’t come true, so I’m taking all these coins back.” That’s how we get that stuff of knowing this is a person who’s been many persons before this person.

I think that’s the longest version of a One Cool Thing to say here’s a podcast that’s many years old. If you haven’t heard Esther Perel yet, I highly recommend it.

**John:** I will listen to it. My One Cool Thing is an article from a couple weeks ago. Evan Osnos writing for the New Yorker. It’s about “How to Hire a Pop Star for your Private Party.” These are bar mitzvahs, private parties, by the ultra wealthy, who bring in a pop star to perform at them. We see Jennifer Lopez doing something for a million dollars or whatever.

The story centers around Flo-Rida, who is playing bar mitzvahs and other events. He has one big song he’s known for. He makes good money otherwise. What I really liked about this article and Flo-Rida in it is that he’s not resentful. It’s not a sad story. He’s not doing this because he feels like he has to. He’s doing this out of a sense of professionalism. He’s a really good entertainer. This is a way that he gets to entertain these crowds and give them exactly what they need.

For all of the potentially gross stuff about just the ultra wealthy doing these events, it made me happy and hopeful for a future for some of these artists who are not going to be in the mainstream but still have a venue for making money and making their art.

**Pamela:** Have you ever tried to figure out how much it would cost to make a dream come true musically, pop star-wise, for a party or an event?

**John:** I never have. I do remember back in college, I ran the student activities board, because of course I ran the student activities board. We could bring in events. We could bring in bands and stuff for that. At some point you could just get a list of like, this is how many thousands of dollars each of these groups cost. It was exciting to feel that power, like, “I have a $200,000 budget. I could do these things.”

**Pamela:** My husband once just, not just once, but enough that I knew it was a real thing, said he would love to hear Roxette with a full philharmonicy orchestra for one night. I was like, “I feel like this is an attainable goal.” I was wrong. I was wrong. It’s not an attainable goal. First of all, they were a lot of money. Then I was like, “What if it’s just a string quartet playing in a room? That’s fun. We eat a meal or something.” I learned from people who do this professionally, they’re like, “Why would we learn so many Roxette songs? We’ll never do it again. That’s so much time of ours.” I was like, “That’s fascinating.”

**John:** Wow.

**Pamela:** “I can’t pay for that kind of time for all of you.” I was like, “What about four of you?” They’re like, “Still, no one wants to do this. Where are we going to find a singer? Get a cover band.” That’s not what he wanted.

**John:** No, he wanted Roxette.

**Pamela:** So much money. So much money to make your dreams come true.

**John:** You pay for experiences, not things. That’s what we’ve learned, is that the experiences are what really matter, not material possessions.

**Pamela:** I didn’t have that kind of cash. It was a lot. Not now, but someone at the time could’ve made that happen, but it was not me. I was like, “Oh, I see. Oh, I see.” You get used to it when you’re working in film and television of like, “Here’s this. What do you need? Here, you’re in the Griffith Observatory. Look at all the stars. What star do you need?” You get a bit out of your reality and go, “I’m sure Roxette would love to work with the LA Phil.”

**John:** They’re chomping at the bit.

**Pamela:** No. It’s hard. Good for Flo-Rida. I understand that. It’s like a TED Talk as a musician. You’re like, “I get to come in, perform for people who are… “ That’s what Britney’s Vegas residency was theoretically. That’s what I thought I was doing.

**John:** Absolutely. It wasn’t a hostage situation, which apparently it was.

**Pamela:** Not what I thought at the time. You never know. I’m glad for Flo-Rida, but I do think a lot of people are in bar mitzvah hostage situations.

**John:** That may be the title of the episode.

**Pamela:** Great. Glad I could help.

**John:** That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Pamela:** Yay.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Adam Pineless. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. It’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. This week on the picket line, I saw two vintage Scriptnotes T-shirts or related Scriptnotes T-shirts that I’d never seen out in the wild before, which was very exciting. It’s always fun to see those T-shirts out there.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on Listen to Sassy. Pamela Ribon, what an absolute pleasure it is to have you on the podcast and be talking with you.

**Pamela:** Thank you. I like to be the anti-Craig. Whenever you need me again, I will bring anti-umbrage to your podcast.

**John:** [Indiscernible 01:07:43] embrace.

**Pamela:** I love your role. You’re doing it. You’re doing it.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** One of the main reasons I was so excited to have you on this podcast is you are also the host of another podcast, so therefore you’re a podcast professional and know how to do all the things. Talk to us about Listen to Sassy, in which you are going back through issues of Sassy magazine. Start us off, because I can picture Sassy magazine, but I never read it, because I was not the target audience, what was Sassy magazine, and why is it relevant today?

**Pamela:** You probably weren’t the target audience. Perhaps you saw its male spin-off, Dirt.

**John:** Oh, Dirt, okay, yeah.

**Pamela:** That was for you. They were like, “I know you’re reading Sassy.”

**John:** Dudes.

**Pamela:** “Dudes, what about skaters?” Dirt. And Spike Jonze, lots of Spike Jonze. The people I do this podcast with, Tara Ariano and David T. Cole, are professionals all the way back from Television Without Pity, as we were discussing earlier. They have their own podcast things.

During the lockdown, I was on a sad run. I got a text from Tara that said, “My pandemic thing was buying every issue of Sassy magazine ever. Do you want to do a podcast?” I just stopped. I stopped running, and I said, “Yes, yes, a million times yes,” not knowing what I was getting into time-wise, preparedness-wise. It’s a lot of work. I think you know this. Craig doesn’t, but you do.

We take every issue, which I also got my own Ebay-ed version of now. I now have every Sassy. We take every issue, and we break it into first teen life, then pop culture, and then the fashion and the magazine sections. Then our fourth one is, we call slumber party, which are calls and letters. We take the quiz, like a slumber party.

We started with the very first issue, which was 1988. We are at 1990 right now. We’ll be going until ’94 or ’95. I can’t remember when. That was when Sassy changed ownerships and just became a different then. Then Jane Pratt ended up making Jane magazine, which then became the website xoJane, which some of you are now like, “I remember this.”

Back, back, back in the day, Sassy magazine was an alternate to YM and Seventeen. Instead of talking about how to get asked to prom or six ways to wear your makeup, those things are in there, but what it began with really are, here are kids who got pregnant, here is death row, this is what suicide is like, this is what the skinhead movement is doing right now in the ‘90s, and then didn’t pull punches with celebrity interviews, and could be what one might say is the beginning of snark, of that, “Why do I have to love Tiffany or the New Kids, when REM and Keanu Reeves are right here?”

One of the things about going back to Sassy, which starting on Television Without Pity and Mighty Big TV and Hissyfit and Fametracker, one of the things that drew me to that site and writing for Tara and Dave and Sarah in particular was they did a thing where they would, as editors, come in and make little notes inside your recap, of jokes off your joke or inside jokes about all of us. That was what Sassy did.

Sassy made it feel like you’re in a room with all these young people in New York, and we’re all just excited about Michael Hutchence and a Meg Ryan movie we just saw, but Winona Ryder-y, in terms of an older sister who’s telling you, “Here’s some music you might like.” I had an older cousin who was like this for me.

I was in a small town outside Houston. Before then, I was in a small town of Jackson, Mississippi, and no internet. To have a magazine say, “Do you feel not like everyone else? Are you mad about fur? Are you mad about meat? Do you want to know how to be a vegan? Do you want to know how to protest the circus?” There was all that, early activism stuff, of you can be 13 and still change the world, and then also what about John Waters, or what are indie things?

For me, it was Sassy magazine and Rolling Stone magazine were how I figured out there was a world outside the world I was in. I really appreciated the way that they wrote to someone young, to say, “You might be young, but you have agency in your world.” We wouldn’t have Rookie Mag without it. We wouldn’t have a lot of the things that we have now. I think Teen Vogue right now shows a lot of-

**John:** Yeah, it does that.

**Pamela:** Is the newest better version.

**John:** Talk to me though about the advertising in it, because magazines were ad vehicles, and that’s how they made their money was ads, not by the actual cover price of the magazine. What are the ads in there? Are they all makeup? What kind of stuff do you see in there?

**Pamela:** There’s a lot of makeup and vision streetwear and Bongo. Bongo the whole time. My whole teenage years were some girls, but in some short jeans, and me being like, “How can I have this butt?” Instead of it being Guess, which I guess there was a little bit of, it was more counterculture clothing or maybe even… I’m trying to think. There’s still Debbie Gibson in the ads, even if in the articles it’s about not. It’s about B-52s or whatever.

They actually ended up having problems with their advertisers. They lost a lot of advertisers at a certain point, because people were writing in, parents and church people were writing in about, “They’re talking about birth control, and they’re talking about sex, and they’re talking about these things that are not, quote unquote, proper.” We’re currently in the lean years, where you could tell they were having to deal with, how do you get an advertiser, but also stay true to your audience that is very grateful for no bullshit.

**John:** The way that magazines and film and TV writing have overlap, or the way that we always want to portray magazines in film and TV is just so fascinating. They’re always the backdrop we go back to, because it’s a bunch of people in a room who can say smart things, we believe they’re saying smart things, so we make our female characters editors at magazines. We make them young teen journalists or young magazine writers, because it’s glamorous. We believe they can be wearing that fashion if they’re in New York City.

Jane Pratt as a character seems great too. Has there been a fictional version of her on anything, that sense of that magazine founder? I think back to our high fashion people we always make as characters, but has Jane Pratt ever been one of those?

**Pamela:** First of all, I would say that Sex and the City is doing some of that that you’re talking about. So does Girls and all of that stuff. These are aspiring New York friends who are chatting. That’s what Sassy felt like. Skate Kitchen being more the modern version of what I think feels like Sassy magazine. A show that tried to do it, The Bold Type. That was close. That was a modern version of… Even Ugly Betty, if we’re going to get into the weird versions of how glamorous is this world.

What was fun about Sassy wasn’t so much that they were all in New York, because they were like, “I’m in New York, and that’s why I just saw Sting on an elevator.” They sounded like they could’ve come from wherever we were.

They also had contests for the Sassiest girl in America. You just felt like you were part of the magazine. I don’t know there’s any other magazine that made me feel like this came in the mail once a month to say to me, “Hi. How are you? Here’s what you want to see and hear next. Here’s what you’re going to want to talk about when you really are talking to your friends about real things.”

It’s a little difficult to go back. I was doing My Year of Dicks the same time I was doing Listen to Sassy, so I was really reliving my high school years. What’s tough about Sassy is how much Johnny Depp love is in there, which I had 3000 percent at the time. Now, as a other side of Johnny Depp person, you’re having to think about who you were then and who you are now and how much this magazine actually gave me a guide for who I wanted to be and how I wanted to do it. I know I’m not the only one, because you can see it in all these other, particularly female writers of now, who are like, “Sassy made me think I could do this as myself.”

**John:** Big sister energy feels like a good thing to put out in the world.

**Pamela:** Knowledgeable big sister energy.

**John:** Exactly. The podcast is Listen to Sassy. It’s listentosassy.com. People can find all the back-episodes. Pamela Ribon, what an absolute delight to talk with you.

**Pamela:** Thank you so much. This has been fun.

**John:** Great.

Links:

* [Pamela Ribon](https://pamie.com/) on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0962596/)
* [Listen To Sassy](https://listentosassy.com/)
* [Television Without Pity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Without_Pity)
* [Get Real (1999-2000)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212662/) on IMDb
* [How to Hire a Pop Star for Your Private Party](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/05/how-to-hire-a-pop-star-for-your-private-party) by Evan Osnos for The New Yorker
* [The Secret to Judd Apatow’s Comedy? A Huge Library of Self-Help Books](https://www.gq.com/story/judd-apatow-self-help-book-interview) by Clay Skipper
* [Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel](https://www.estherperel.com/podcast)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Pineless ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).