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

**Craig Mazin:** Hi, folks. In today’s episode, there is some language, some salty language, so if you’re in the car with your children, go ahead and stop playing it or put the earmuffs on.

**Chris McQuarrie:** What the [bleeps] are you talking about?

**Craig:** Wow.

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 596 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. In ancient times, our ancestors looked to the heavens and noticed unfamiliar objects moving amid the stars. Aristotle theorized these were dry exhalations of earth that caught fire high in the atmosphere. Later, the Romans observed that these objects return on a regular cycle, like small planets with eccentric orbits. Today we know these periodic visitors as comets and look forward to their appearance in the night sky.

For Scriptnotes, our comet is writer-director-producer Christopher McQuarrie, who first appeared on Episode 300, then Episode 400. On that episode, we invited him to come back on Episode 600, which is very nearly here. As we prepare to record that, I asked Drew Marquardt, our producer, to put together a compendium episode to remind us what Chris said the last two times he was on the show. Drew, what are we going to hear today?

**Drew Marquardt:** We’re going to hear Chris talk about making big movies. Obviously, he’s very good at that. He’s got these incredible insights, not just on how these movies get made but where these stories come from and where they’re going in the future on film and TV.

**John:** Great. I recalled these two episodes being recorded pretty clearly. The first one, I was living in Paris, and he came to the hotel. I went to his hotel. He had just come back from filming Mission: Impossible, which was filming in Paris at the time. We had a great conversation. Craig was, in theory, kind of on the episode. He was Skyped in a little bit.

**Drew:** He comes in at the end. There wasn’t enough [inaudible 00:01:46].

**John:** It was basically me and Chris. The other one, Chris McQuarrie was sitting right in the chair that you’re sitting in, and he was talking and theorizing about films.

**Drew:** I’ll be honest, I came out of these last two episodes with such a Chris McQuarrie crush that if he does come back, if the comet returns, I’m going to have to-

**John:** The comet will return. You had not listened to these episodes, but you had gone through the transcripts because you were working on them for the book, right?

**Drew:** Correct.

**John:** Great. That was a whole summer ago. You were an intern last year.

**Drew:** Oh my gosh, yeah. That’s been a year.

**John:** A whole year has passed.

**Drew:** What was amazing going through those two is he’s working on this massive scale, but the advice he has for young writers and directors is really careful and really thoughtful and really incredible.

**John:** I find he’s a good balance of idealistic and pragmatic. As I hear him talk about other films that he’s worked on or helped out on, it’s very much like, what do you need to do to actually make the movie happen on the day and deliver something that the audience wants to actually watch. Sometimes that can be a hard thing to be in both worlds at the same time.

**Drew:** He’s never cynical, which is great.

**John:** That’s correct. We’re going to listen to things cut together from both those first two things, so there’s going to be some sound shifts. It’s fine. We got Matthew Chilelli cutting them together. It’s going to be great. Talk to us about what’s going to happen in the bonus segment for premium members.

**Drew:** In the bonus segment, you, Craig, and Chris are going to talk about spoof movies, which Craig has a lot of experience with and Chris has a broad knowledge about.

**John:** Fantastic. Drew, thank you for putting together this edited episode, and we will have the real Chris McQuarrie with us here soon.

**Drew:** I’m excited.

**John:** Chris McQuarrie, welcome back.

**Chris:** Thank you very much for having me.

**Craig:** The deal is every 100 episodes we have worked up enough tolerance to have McQuarrie back.

**Chris:** You know, Craig–

**Craig:** Here we go.

**Chris:** You weren’t here for the last one.

**Craig:** That’s why it wasn’t very good.

**Chris:** I miss that.

**Craig:** I can tell. Chris McQuarrie and I have been engaged in a, what, 15-year-long argument about everything.

**Chris:** About everything.

**Craig:** Literally everything.

**Chris:** It’s not so much an argument as it is a–

**Craig:** It’s a love story at this point.

**Chris:** It’s the duelists.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly.

**Chris:** I think that’s how you would describe our relationship.

**Craig:** Correct. You wake up in the morning, you go to work, fighting this man you must fight.

**John:** Back in Episode 300, I was talking to you, we were both living in Paris because you were directing Mission: Impossible. It hadn’t come out yet. You were in the middle of shooting it. It turned out really well, so congratulations on that.

**Chris:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**Chris:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** And two more to come.

**Chris:** Two more to come.

**Craig:** The idea is you’ll make these until they kill you? Meaning the movies are going to kill you.

**Chris:** It’s more likely that they will kill me than they will kill Tom Cruise.

**Craig:** No, nothing kills Tom Cruise. You’ve proven that. By the way, openly attempting to murder him through film. I mean, everyone knows what you’re doing.

**Chris:** I have been described as his enabler. He describes me as his enabler. I’m not actually trying to kill him, I’m just trying to–

**Craig:** Could have fooled me.

**Chris:** He would be doing most of this stuff–

**Craig:** Movie number one, let’s drown him. Movie number two, oh, hang him off a plane.

**Chris:** The drowning I don’t think he would try to do.

**Craig:** Then let’s drown him. Then let’s make him hurtle from a roof. Oh, he broke a bone. Too bad. Keep going.

**Chris:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Wow, you’re killing him in front of us.

**Chris:** I’m whittling him away.

**John:** Go back ten years ago and did you think you’d be directing big blockbuster movies?

**Chris:** No.

**John:** You were a writer of big movies, and I thought you were at the apex of writing those big blockbuster movies. I sort of assumed you’d keep doing that. I was surprised that you ended up wanting to direct them. What was the change?

**Chris:** Somebody asked me. I directed The Way of the Gun in ’99 in the hopes that The Way of the Gun would be a steppingstone. I tried to do what Rian Johnson did with his career. I was going to direct the little movie, and then a slightly bigger movie, and a slightly bigger movie until I got to direct the big movie I wanted to direct. And that first movie was not successful. You could even go so far as to call it a tremendous bomb. I guess it’s not a tremendous bomb only in that it wasn’t a big enough movie to be considered a tremendous bomb.

**John:** Absolutely. I have one of those too.

**Chris:** Boy, people really reacted quite angrily to it. No matter what I did over the next seven years to get another movie off the ground, I couldn’t. I was working on two fronts. I was working as a rewrite guy, and I was writing my own stuff, trying to get it made as a director, and was getting nowhere.

It wasn’t until Valkyrie when I let go of something that was mine to direct and opted to be the producer on that movie. As a producer, I learned so much more about both writing and directing than I ever did writing and directing my own movie.

**John:** Talk about the difference, because when you’re doing Way of the Gun, you had the responsibilities for everything. We talked about the bag of money. You’re dealing with all the department heads. You’re making those thousand choices a day, which always sort of terrified me about directing. What was it about producing a big movie like Valkyrie? It is just a fundamentally different beast from making a smaller movie like Way of the Gun? What was the change in Valkyrie?

**Chris:** Yes, the size and scope of the movie and also dealing with Tom Cruise, who at the time I did not know and couldn’t safely assume anything about him. My intention was to take a producing credit for having put the movie together, but not actually go make the movie. I really didn’t want to do it.

Paula Wagner, who was still with Tom at the time, was running United Artists, which was the studio making the movie. Paula took me out to lunch to tell me they were making the movie and said, “Now, I understand you’re producing the film.” My intention was to say yes, but-

**John:** You’re really going to do that.

**Chris:** Yeah, but no, I’m not. I sensed immediately how I answered that question would have a profound effect on my career. Instead of saying no, I said, “I am now.” She said, “Good, because I’ve been on set with Tom for the last 25 years. This is the first time I won’t be able to be on set with him. I want you to be there as Tom’s guy. I need somebody to be there day to day with Tom.”

I found myself very suddenly thrust into this position, which I had never anticipated. Tom quite graciously took me under his wing. He understood that my relationship with Bryan Singer was such that I could communicate with Bryan more effectively and probably with more force than Tom could. It allowed Tom to have a very comfortable relationship with Bryan. He never had to push Bryan. All he had to do was create with Bryan. Then he would come to me and say, “Hey, here’s what I think we should be doing.” Tom and I worked together very well on that movie, and that sort of translated into the next thing and the next thing.

The next job was we worked on a draft of The Tourist together, which is how I ended up on that movie. He dropped out of The Tourist and then called me up to do Ghost Protocol. He called me up to do Ghost Protocol after reading Jack Reacher, which was not something to which he was originally attached.

**John:** Jack Reacher was a project you adapted from the book originally?

**Chris:** Yeah. Don Granger, who was also at UA, and who had been at Cruise/Wagner before that, he’s at Skydance now. Don Granger saw the writing on the wall, saw that UA was not going to be a going concern. He said, “I’ve got this series of books at Cruise/Wagner, and I think this is the best prospect at getting a franchise made.” He offered me the movie, and I said, “I’ll do it on the condition that the studio offers me the movie to direct. I’m not going to ask for permission to direct movies anymore. I’ve been doing it for 10 years and getting nowhere,” and they did.

I handed Tom that script to read as the producer. He called me the next day and said, “Script’s great. I need you to get on a plane and come up to Vancouver right now. We’re working on Mission: Impossible, and I need your help.”

Now I was thrust into a very big movie, bigger than Valkyrie, and it was a movie that more than halfway through the show was in a critical state of confusion as to what the story was. Having worked on Valkyrie and having had that crash course in movie-making, I now understood, okay, here are the resources I have. Here are the scenes that have been shot. Here are the scenes that haven’t been shot. Here’s the sets they haven’t built. Here’s the sets they haven’t struck. Here are the roles that they haven’t cast yet.

I had to make a puzzle out of things you had and things you didn’t have yet. I could only reshoot what I still had sets for, sets they hadn’t torn down. It gave me this sort of creative puzzle to solve. My first six days of my one week on the movie… I was originally only supposed to go for a week. My first six days were just meeting with department heads and saying, “Okay, these are the sets you still have. Can I get rid of this set? Can I move these resources somewhere else? If I have this idea, is there something you can build?”

Without ever having to stop and think about how daunting the task was, it gave me this fundamental grassroots understanding of how those big movies functioned, so that when it came my time to do it, I had a better understanding of the allocation of resources. It’s very interesting that that career trajectory is the exception and not the rule.

For me to have made an $8.5 million movie, didn’t make another movie for 12 years… That was a $60 million movie with Valkyrie in the middle, which was like $70 million, but I wasn’t directing. The budgets continued to get bigger over time. Now what you have is a guy directs a $5 million movie. The studio says, “Hey, that movie cost $5 million, made $60 million. Let’s give him $100 million, and he’ll make a billion.”

That’s a very, very, very hard turn for a lot of filmmakers to make. Now I have another career, which is coming on to those movies and supporting that director and saying, “Okay, so now you’re making your big movie. Here’s what’s important,” because what happens with a lot of those guys is they haven’t gone through the trial by fire where they realize there’s only so much reinventing the wheel can take.

They’re still coming at it like an indie filmmaker, but somebody has given them $200 million and a giant franchise. They don’t really want to believe that they’re making mass entertainment, and they struggle against that. I’ve seen two kinds of filmmakers in that. There are the filmmakers who very quickly listen to reason and adapt and survive. And then there are the ones who just their movies get taken away from them.

**John:** Yeah, we can think of the ones whose movies got taken away, or the really bad scenarios there. If you are coming in to be a director whisperer on a project, at what point is there a realization that there’s going to be a problem? Are they bringing you in right when that person is hired on to say like this person is going to be a consigliere to you, or it’s like something has gone horribly awry and now let’s get Chris McQuarrie there to help?

**Chris:** There’s a sweet spot I call four in and four out. If you’re four weeks out from shooting or four weeks into shooting, you’re in this zone where you’re so freaked out, you’ll do anything the doctor says. If you’re any deeper into production, you kind of get entrenched and you get blinders on and you’re afraid to change anything. If you’re too far out, you’re afraid to change anything because you think, oh, it’s too daunting a task.

There was one movie in particular that’s coming out. I’m very interested to see it. I won’t say its name. I begged the director not to go in the direction he was going, because I really did believe in the material and I thought it was wonderful. There was one specific plot element that completely degraded the main character of the film. I said, “If you just take this thing away, your movie will become really powerful.”

There was a visual idea. There was clearly an obsession with this particular idea, and there was a refusal to recognize that this very idea that gives you one visual aspect of the movie is going to tear the movie down.

He said, “It’s just too much work.” I said, “You’ve got nine months. You don’t realize how many times you can reinvent this movie.” More importantly, because of the movies I’d worked on, I come into a movie like that and say, “I’m not going to change anything about your movie. I’m not going to change the sets. I’m not going to introduce new characters. I’m going to take the resources you have and kind of reconfigure your movie to give it a more emotional journey,” because that’s really all I care about.

It took me a long time to learn that. I was an information guy. It was what I was telling the audience. I was a writer who was all about dialogue. I’ve since learned about emotional drag. That’s my catchphrase.

**John:** That four weeks in, four weeks out thing is really interesting because you look at these filmmakers who are coming from… Like you and I on our first movies. Four weeks, you’re almost done with your movie on a $5 million movie. It’s a very different thing. We’ve both also been involved with these movies that just shoot for forever.

You and I both have helped out on those movies where you come in when the train is already running. Generally if we’re coming in as a screenwriter, we’re just there to fix the visible screenwriting problems, and so we’re not doing the thing of what you’re talking about with Mission: Impossible where you actually had to sort of talk to all the department heads and really get their buy-in.

A couple times we’ve had guests on the show, Drew Goddard, or David Lindelof recently, who talked about the big opportunity, the thing that changed everything was coming into a project that was in crisis. It was the TV show that was going down, that didn’t have any more scripts. In this case it was a movie that was swirling around. That’s also been true in my career. It’s the editing rooms where they couldn’t find the movie that I could come back in and actually really help. Those are the moments.

If you haven’t had both the courage to step up when those things happen, but also the education to sort of know what are the right questions to ask, how to push for the best thing, it can be really daunting. If I were that filmmaker that you’re coming in to help, I would be scared to ask for help, because that’s an admission of failure. That’s an admission that someone made a mistake in hiring me to do this job.

**Chris:** Yes. It’s the moment in Terminator when he says, “Come with me if you want to live.” You walk in and you say to that director, “Here’s what’s happening on your movie and here’s what’s going to happen.”

There was one director in particular. His movie was in trouble. He was four weeks in. There was going to be a big change. The script was going to be gutted. There was a lot of panic. I said, “Can I just go in and talk to him for half an hour before you guys all come in, so that he doesn’t feel like I’m the studio hatchet man?” I have had that happen too. I have had studios try to manipulate that. They try to position me as being the hatchet man, and I won’t do it. I’ll go to bat for the director every time.

I walked in and I told him, “Here’s what’s going to happen. They’re going to come in and they’re going to say these are the things we want in the movie. A lot of them are ideas that I have suggested for how to fix your movie. I’m going to strongly urge you to say, ‘I’ve heard everything that Chris has suggested. I don’t like any of it. I don’t think any of it works, but if you think that’s what the movie needs, I look forward to seeing how it turns out.’“

I said, “What you will then do is you will put the responsibility that has been placed on you onto the producers. The producers will feel that you are working to make their movie. The studio will feel that you’re working to serve what they ultimately need served.” He didn’t do it.

We had another meeting. Half an hour before, I went in and said, “Now remember, just say this, and the pressure will come off of you.” He didn’t do it again. Eventually, everything he was afraid would manifest itself manifested itself. I don’t even think by the time he was through the process he even recognized that his movie had been taken over. His worst nightmare happened. That was the other thing. When you’re talking about working on those movies that are falling apart, you have an emotional detachment that you wouldn’t have if it was your own story.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Chris:** You’re able to come into it and say, “There’s a clarity that I have on everybody else’s movies that I will never have on my own movie.” I’m dying right now in the middle of Mission: Impossible, trying to figure out the turn on page 70. I know what happens in Act Three. I know what’s supposed to happen, but I can’t quite figure out how to get there. If it wasn’t my movie, I would parachute in and just be like, “Oh, you just have to do this.” It’s just so much easier when it’s not your baby.

Especially when you’re writing for studios, you get to a place where you go, “I know what I should write. If I didn’t have to turn right here, and I could turn left, I’d know where this movie would go.” That’s the thing you’re always struggling-

**John:** You’re trying to find a way to finesse it so it feels like it’s a natural turn, that it’s not just now we cut to a new sequence, because we all know the directors who would just like, “On the wall here, I have all the different sequences. Find a way to connect them all together. Go.” Those are the jobs I despise and ultimately get out of, because I don’t want to just be the person who is stringing those things together.

**Chris:** Oh, it’s soul-sucking work. It really is.

**John:** It pays well, but it kills you. You’re responsible for just creating a trailer for the moments that are happening in front of you. It’s maddening.

**Chris:** It’s funny you say that, because that’s another thing that we think about now. Since just before Rogue Nation, the lesson I learned, having had fights with the studio about the marketing of Jack Reacher, my first meeting on Rogue Nation I just went to marketing and said, “Tell me what to do. Tell me what you need so that I’m not fighting with you.” That has evolved for me, so that in this movie, Tom and I have a rule, you give marketing one shot a day. Every day you get a trailer shot. It’s like, doesn’t matter what-

**John:** That’s great.

**Chris:** You look at it and go, “Yep, that could be in a trailer. Okay, send it away.” Then they’re happy. They’re invested in your movie as opposed to you’re fighting them. We also know that movies like this need lines like, “You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane, Mr. Bond.” I don’t know what that means in the context of the rest of the movie. I don’t ever particularly feel that he is a kite in a hurricane in that movie. The sexiness of that line in a trailer is really effective. You develop a sense for where those lines might go in a movie. We have little placeholders.

There’s a scene between Tom Cruise and Sean Harris in this movie, and we have a blank space there, where it’s like that’s where we know the villain is going to say something that is going to communicate the story of the movie in that one soundbite. I never really thought that way until this franchise.

**John:** If you think about people who run TV shows, they have to think about this episode of television that they’re making, but they have to be thinking of the whole series. They have to be thinking of how am I going to keep this thing on the air. It sounds like part of what you’re doing is that realization that you’re responsible not only for this two hours of entertainment, but you’re responsible for this giant ship that is going to be sailing through its berth and the success of that. It’s not just these two hours of film. It’s everything around it. It’s this universe of marketing around it that you also have to be aware of, and from an early time. You can’t just make your movie, then get involved with the marketing.

**Chris:** Yes. What is Mission? It’s the life of whatever this thing is, so that your movie leaves it so that another chapter in the franchise can exist. I guess that’s where jumping the shark comes in. You worry all the time. “Am I taking this in a way that it can’t go?”

We had a big conversation about tone, because Brad Bird really changed the tone of the franchise, and Rogue Nation embraced that tone completely. At the beginning of this I said to Tom, “I don’t think we can do that three in a row. I think now it’s going to become cute. I think we need to take it another direction still.” We did, but now we find ourselves going, “Are we going where Bond went, where Bond became serious?”

**John:** Dark and serious.

**Chris:** It’s another kind of tone, which, by the way, has not hurt their bottom line at all. They’ve really found their place, but we can’t go there. We were sort of laughing because we were looking at Rogue Nation and saying, “Thanks, Bond, for not doing that anymore, so we’ll do it.” Now we’re looking at it and going, “We can’t keep doing that.” We suddenly hit that same wall and understood why Bond went the way they did. We’re at this kind of emotional crossroads with the franchise, saying how dramatic can you take Mission? It’s not going to a dark place. It’s going to a more emotionally dramatic place.

**John:** When we were making Charlie’s Angels, when we started making the second one, I talked to the team and I described it as like I really want to approach this as we made an amazing pilot and now we’re going to make that first episode of the TV show that actually – of the series that really is the series. Where we sort of learned everything from the pilot and now we’re going to make the most amazing one. And we didn’t. Spoiler. It was as much of a trouble and more so than the first one.

But that was sort of the fantasy. You want to be able to make the sort of movie series. Marvel is able to do it remarkably well. DC, we’re yet to see whether they’re going to be able to make a franchise-y series out of the things they’re trying to do, but it’s laudable. You understand why people want to do it.

**Chris:** DC has a tough road to hoe because they’ve got to do something different than Marvel. Marvel has staked a claim so strongly in a very specific tone. Marvel has Kevin Feige, who is not a traditional studio head. He’s not a traditional producer. He is a producer of the old school. That’s what producers used to be like in Hollywood. They were the guys who came in and said, “This is the movie.” I guess the closest analog in something other than comic book movies is somebody like a Scott Rudin, who really he owns the material and he is a filmmaker in his own right and has specific control.

Warner Bros has to do something to differentiate itself from that. What is that? There’s Christopher Nolan’s Batman, but that’s not a universe. That’s one character, whereas Iron Man and the Marvel universe sort of set the tone for all those other movies.

If you had told me even a year before it came out that Captain America would work as a movie, or that Thor would work as a movie, that I’d find those characters appealing, that I’d actually find Captain America one of the more appealing characters in the Marvel universe, I just would have laughed at you. We had grown up seeing so many bad attempts inn these really cheesy TV movie ways. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen some of those Captain Marvel movies.

**John:** They’re amazing.

**Chris:** Oh my god. Oh my god. It will be very interesting to see how DC defines themselves.

**John:** So we used to make things like St. Elmo’s Fire, The Big Chill, Breakfast Club, Big Fish, Terms of Endearment. So we used to make things that had big casts, where a bunch of folks came together, where characters did grow and change but it was an ensemble. It wasn’t sort of one character’s story. Is that a thing we’re going to be making on the big screen soon? We’ll start with what is the essence of that kind of story. What is the essence of an ensemble dramedy?

**Craig:** Let’s make McQuarrie take a shot at that one.

**Chris:** It seems to me as I’m running through the list that you just – nostalgia is a big part of it. It’s my understanding that somebody did a breakdown of why people go to see movies and the number one reason was to have a nostalgic experience. An emotional nostalgic experience. I think that probably plays into sports as well, especially plays into why a lot of sports movies seem to go–

**Craig:** Back in time.

**Chris:** Back to that. And you look at The Big Chill. The Big Chill was very much a nostalgic movie.

**John:** It’s a reunion of friends who had separated.

**Chris:** St. Elmo’s Fire, while it wasn’t a nostalgic movie, they were at a specific turning point in their life. They were kind of looking back at—

**Craig:** See, to me that’s it. We have a group of people that represent some kind of contemporary arrangement, whether we’re catching them later or they were contemporary or we’re in their contemporariness, like for instance The Breakfast Club. But they are at a moment where things are changing, and we watch that happen. That to me is the essence of these things. But for the love of god, I cannot imagine anyone putting this on a screen anymore. It just doesn’t seem like they will. It’s a bummer.

**John:** Yeah, it’s tragic. I mean, on a big screen. I think you can absolutely make these for streaming.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** But in so many ways though, the one-hour series have sort of taken, even like short series have taken the place of these, where you can see those characters grow over the course–

**Chris:** Oh, This is Us.

**Craig:** This is Us.

**John:** This is Us as a movie.

**Chris:** Modern Family.

**Craig:** Correct. And interestingly Dan Fogelman–

**John:** Yeah, he tried to do it as a movie.

**Craig:** He sort of tried to do it as a movie. He tried This is Us as a movie and it didn’t connect with audiences. But he’s obviously incredibly good at it because tens of millions of people watch This is Us and it gets all these awards. There is something, I don’t know, we used to be able to go and watch this – maybe it’s just that we used to expect less. You know, we would go to the movie theater and we weren’t asking to have our brains blown out the back of our skulls.

**Chris:** I went to see Hell or High Water.

**John:** Oh, which is fantastic.

**Chris:** Which I loved. And I was talking to Tim Talbot shortly thereafter and I said, “Did you see Hell or High Water?” And he said, “Yes.” I said, “What did you think about it?” He goes, “That was a great movie. In 1987 that would have been a good movie.” But he’s right in that that sort of… I remember going to the movies every weekend. It was not an event. Now when you ask anybody under the age of 25 why they go to the movies, they will say in one form or another, “Because I have to go.” They want to be part of a discussion.

I tried to get to see Avengers, which I finally saw yesterday, as quickly as I could, because I was tired of having a self-imposed media bubble. There were things in that movie I really didn’t want ruined. Getting to that state, whereas the stories that we’re talking about, what television does so well now especially is there is a collective history.

If you tried to tune into Game of Thrones now, you don’t understand. The number of people who are saying three years into Mad Men going, “Yeah, I tried to get into that show and I just couldn’t.” It’s like, of course not. If you turn middle of Season Three, none of this makes any sense.

**Craig:** Start at the beginning. That’s true. But I do think that one of the problems for… I remember going to see St. Elmo’s Fire. And my expectation was that I was going to see a group of people that were somewhat older than me dealing with problems. And I knew at some point somebody was going to like… I think Rob Lowe was going to light a torch on fire with some hairspray or something, and Demi Moore was in a corner, super dramatic. And I thought, okay, I’m going to see some sort of human drama. That would not do it anymore. Now when people go to the movie theater it’s like, well, this is going to pin me back and it’s going to blow my mind. And I’m going to see stuff and it’s going to be an event.

**Chris:** An event.

**Craig:** An event. I just think people go to the movies for a different reason now.

**Chris:** But don’t you think also what you can get from television is very different than what we could get from television?

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** No question.

**Chris:** You could not make Game of Thrones as a feature film. Any of the content in Game of Thrones would be NC17.

**Craig:** Nor could you have made it for television prior to this kind of strange change.

**Chris:** Yes. It’s the networks. As soon as basic cable met the British model of television, which was you make a good television show and when it stops being good you – when it reaches the end you stop.

**Craig:** Isn’t that nice?

**Chris:** Yes, it’s lovely.

**Craig:** You know what? This is going to be six episodes long. Great.

**Chris:** Yeah, or six episodes this season instead of 22 every season.

**Craig:** Which is why I take my hat off to people like Derek Haas who are still doing it, not just on one show, but multiple shows. I mean, the amount of story that has to be generated by those guys is bananas. But yes, the format has become not just flexible, but there is no format. It doesn’t matter.

**John:** Let’s take the jokes out of biblical epics, and/or sword and sandals movies. So things like Gladiator, Ben-Hur, Noah, Passion of the Christ. King in Heaven. Spartacus. Ten Commandments. Braveheart, to some degree. Lawrence of Arabia. Like we used to make these things. That was actually a staple of original Hollywood. We have the giant ranches here because we used to make these epics.

**Chris:** Giant movies.

**John:** Giant movies. We don’t make them anymore.

**Chris:** No, because they don’t win awards anymore.

**John:** They don’t win awards anymore.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** Even though Game of Thrones is being show on smaller screens, it is that kind of sword and sandals thing.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** We’re making them, but we’re making them for smaller screen.

**Craig:** TV. No question.

**Chris:** I have a very large television. It’s not terribly expensive. I would imagine a lot of people have maxed their credit cards for a large TV.

**Craig:** You’re comparing your large TV to the TV you grew up with, which was like the TV I grew up. That 9-inch black and white thing in the kitchen, with the single antenna shooting out.

**Chris:** It was a letterbox.

**Craig:** Correct. But my kids only know those TVs. But those TVs are still not – I mean, they’re not movies.

**Chris:** No.

**Craig:** It’s not a movie screen.

**Chris:** No. But most people, the way their viewing habits are now, we’re making a Mission: Impossible. We have an IMAX segment in it. And people are saying, well why don’t you just shoot the whole thing in IMAX?

**Craig:** No one is going to watch it.

**Chris:** It’s never going to be seen again. You’re making this balance. And there are times I’ll be framing a shot, and Cruise will walk up to me and go, “You know when this is on the big screen and I pull my phone out of my pocket—”

**Craig:** Here it is.

**Chris:** This is the screen now. It’s not that it will only be watched on television, but for the life of the film.

**Craig:** For the life of it. Primarily.

**Chris:** The theatrical lifespan of a movie is 12 weeks.

**Craig:** Whoa. 12 weeks. What is this hit movie you’ve got that’s in there 12 weeks?

**Chris:** I’m talking like by the end it’s in eight theaters.

**Craig:** Yes. Correct.

**Chris:** I’m giving a conservative—

**Craig:** Really it’s four weeks is what it is.

**Chris:** Four weeks. Yeah.

**Craig:** It used to be months.

**Chris:** Yes.

**Craig:** It is now about four weeks.

**John:** So what is the essence of these biblical epics we’re talking about? So if you’re talking about a Gladiator or a Ben-Hur, it is a character in a long ago time, typically a Roman time, who is coming up against an authority system. He is leading, it’s always a he in these movies, is leading–

**Chris:** It’s a Christ figure against Rome.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Christ figure against Rome.

**Craig:** That’s exactly what it is. Every single time. Christ figure against Rome. Doesn’t matter what you do.

**Chris:** Doesn’t matter if it’s Rome or not Rome. Doesn’t matter if it’s Christ or not Christ.

**Craig:** That’s what Braveheart is. That’s what Ten Commandments is. Even when it’s Jews it’s still a Christ figure against Rome. Some hero will rise in a kind of faded destiny way, usually out of nothing. And they have special powers, special abilities. They are spat on, tortured, hurt. Their family is killed. They are persecuted. And ultimately they do some incredibly self-sacrificial thing and the world is saved. And the last scene is people sitting around going, “God, he was awesome.”

**Chris:** He was a great man.

**Craig:** He was a great man.

**Chris:** And it’s always a man.

**Craig:** And it’s always a man.

**Chris:** Yes. A lot of this conversation seems to be about how technology has disrupted what we imagined the plane of cinema to be. There seems to be a really clear shift.

**Craig:** And just wait.

**Chris:** From no home video, to home video, to no home video again. Now it’s home theater. Now it’s home – it’s content. That’s where I think the line is blurring. It’s big screen/small screen.

**Craig:** And the amount that’s available now is – and the resources that are being poured into it. I mean, better or worse, however you want to chop up the money, there was just way less money. I mean, there were five studios and they gave you some studio. And there were three networks and they gave you some money.

But now we’ve got just billions and billions rushing in to make more and more stuff. It is transforming things. But there aren’t that many more screens. In fact, I’d probably argue there are fewer screens than there used to be.

**John:** Well, there’s not more time. There’s not more time for people to view things. And so even though we have new people coming in and new distribution outlets, we have new money chasing new things–

**Craig:** Time is a flat circle.

**John:** Yes. And so we don’t have the ability to watch more things. And so we have to choose how we’re going to do this.

**Chris:** I’m looking at the–

**John:** So I skipped over some things. Is there a genre there you want to tackle?

**Chris:** Westerns.

**John:** Let’s talk about westerns.

**Craig:** Hmm, westerns.

**John:** On this show we’ve talked about Unforgiven. We’ve talked about 3:10 to Yuma. We’ve talked about sort of westerns. But what is it about westerns that you think can be suited towards the big screen. Because also we had Scott Frank on who talked about his great Netflix show.

**Craig:** Godless.

**John:** Godless. Which was sort of exploding what a normal western—

**Craig:** Meant to be a movie. Written as a script.

**Chris:** He struggled with it for years, right? He was trying to get it down to something movie size.

**Craig:** Well, and he does it with all of his movies. But, I mean, look, it was movie size. It’s just that what he was struggling was to get somebody to pay for it as a movie. Because essentially people kept saying well the western is dead, the western is dead, the western is dead.

**Chris:** And that which is the WWII movie is dead. You hear about this all the time. And then the number of times I’ve seen a dead genre—

**Craig:** Everything is dead until it’s not.

**Chris:** Yeah. Dunkirk was a really great example of a dead genre that people don’t go to see anymore.

**Craig:** My favorite example is nothing could have been a deader genre than pirate movies.

**John:** Oh yeah, of course.

**Craig:** Pirate movies. Not only dead—

**Chris:** Do you remember Pirates with Walter Matthau?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Chris:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** But before they made Pirates of the Caribbean we had Cutthroat Island which had sank an entire, like a hedge fund disappeared.

**Chris:** It killed Carolco.

**Craig:** Yeah, Carolco. An entire company was dead. And before that–

**Chris:** Killed careers.

**Craig:** Careers. Renny Harlin. And then – and the thought of making a pirates movie was considered almost obscene.

**John:** Yeah.

**Chris:** Yes.

**Craig:** And…

**John:** Pirates of the Caribbean. Just takes one.

**Craig:** There we go.

**John:** It didn’t start a new genre. There weren’t like other pirates movies coming after that. It was only the one pirate movie.

**Craig:** Exactly. Everybody else was like you know what, let’s let them have it. We’re still not making pirate movies.

**Chris:** We’re still not making pirate movies. And it so specifically hinges around a kind of storytelling and a character. Johnny Depp.

**Craig:** And a brand.

**Chris:** Exactly.

**Craig:** I mean, just built in.

**John:** It was also supernatural. So you had a supernatural vibe to it which is different than other stuff.

**Chris:** But the western, Unforgiven represented a shift towards deconstructionist from which the genre never seemed to – 3:10 to Yuma was its own darker western. Godless was its own. What I miss – what I’d love to see is—

**Craig:** Shane.

**Chris:** The Magnificent 7. And Shane. Silverado. The Big Country. Movies that are more of an adventure and more a morality tale as opposed to – watch slow west.

**Craig:** It’s never going to happen. It’s gone. It’s over.

**Chris:** I will fight you on that.

**Craig:** Well, look, I think as a country and a culture we have lost the ability to go back to the kind of idealized west. We just know too much.

**Chris:** No, I don’t think it’s idealized. I think – you look at The Big Country, it’s not idealized. The country is rough, but a man walks into it who refuses to play by those rules. And I think that’s – if you take westerns there are two kinds. There are kind of westerns noirs where the west just chews you up and spits you out. And there’s the place where one can prove one’s self.

**Craig:** Sure.

**Chris:** And it’s this rough and lawless place where somebody, you know.

**Craig:** Maybe a book would do it.

**John:** A book might do it. I mean, I think it comes back to the discussion we had with the ensemble dramedies which is that we used to go to see those movies that didn’t have a lot of high stakes in them because that was fine. We needed to go see a movie.

**Craig:** What the hell else were you going to do on a Saturday afternoon?

**John:** And so I just wonder that this non-deconstructed western that is just truly a western whether it’s actually going to get people to go out to see it on a screen.

**Chris:** Hell or High Water.

**John:** Hell or High Water—

**Chris:** It was contemporary but it’s a western.

**John:** It totally is.

**Chris:** It’s a bank-robbing—

**John:** It’s a pickup truck western and I loved it for what it was able to do. But that was not a breakout smash hit. It was a good performer, but it was not—

**Chris:** I think it did OK financially and it got nominated for Best Picture.

**John:** It did, absolutely.

**Chris:** Which for movies of that size is kind of the – that’s your life blood to keep in the theaters for another—

**Craig:** John Lee Hancock has kind of made a western in a sense with The Highwaymen.

**Chris:** The Highwaymen. Sure.

**Craig:** But, again, Netflix. I mean, and that’s where John Lee lives now. You know, those are the movies he’s going to be making now because – and here’s a guy who made, I don’t know, $14 billion for Warner Bros and Alcon with The Blind Side. And today I don’t think they make The Blind Side for theatrical. That’s what’s happened. I fear that we have lost something kind of permanently in the economics of making these movies. And it may have literally just come down to the cost of marketing. Because—

**Chris:** That’s everything.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, Netflix, the way they market their movie is they don’t. It’s just there.

**Chris:** When you turn on Netflix they’re like, hey, do you want to watch this?

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Absolutely. And they bought every billboard in Los Angeles but that’s just for us.

**Chris:** But here’s the upside to that. Here’s the less than dystopian way of looking at that. In the current culture where the business is suddenly waking up to the fact that they have to diversify, this is something I experience a lot on the movies that I get called in to come in and do fixes on. The business was predicated on a male director makes a $5 million movie that makes $50 million. Let’s give him $200 million in hopes it makes $1 billion. Women were not afforded those same undeserved opportunities.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Chris:** Which they are now.

**Craig:** And were punished—

**Chris:** And were punished – exactly.

**Craig:** If they didn’t do the impossible.

**Chris:** Whereas the way to look at Netflix is Netflix could be the farm system. Now there’s many more movies being made for lower budgets creating – and I see lots of women directing television now.

**Craig:** Way more opportunity.

**Chris:** The director lists that I’m now being handed for the TV shows I’m working on are 50/50 and you’re actually looking at, oh, that person is being hired for the quality of their work, which is very encouraging. Is it possible that what we end up with is – you know how the Oscars have sort of divided into—?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Chris:** You know, there’s Oscar movies and there’s money-making movies. Now could there be there’s Netflix movies and there’s feature films? And that the feature films because of marketing requirements need to be bigger movies that make more money. And then Netflix becomes the farm system that teaches people how to do stuff. You could live within the Netflix bubble and make a 14, a 25, and a $60 million movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think we’re there. I mean, I think that’s where we are. The real question is, is there any kind – well, question number one. Is there mobility from Netflix type of movies or other TV movies to the big ones? Or do people even want to go? Because here’s the thing. I think a lot of filmmakers don’t – you know, we were talking to Mari Heller about this.

Mari Heller made this incredible movie, Diary of a Teenage Girl. It was amazing. And people came to her and they’re like here’s this huge superhero movie, you want to do it? And she was like I feel like I’m supposed to, because we’re trying to advance the cause of female directors and we’re trying to get into those big seats, but I don’t want to. I want to do this.

**Chris:** Well, there’s no point in making it if – you look at her and that dilemma knowing that – having nothing to do with who is directing a movie how those movies get made. The script is not ready.

**Craig:** Yep. [laughs]

**Chris:** The movie is going in three weeks.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Chris:** You’ve never done anything like this.

**Craig:** The actor is kind of in charge.

**Chris:** The producer, whose name is on a bunch of giant movies, will not be there.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Chris:** And this is all going to be your fault. Do you still want to do it?

**Craig:** It is really terrifying.

**Chris:** Correct. And again, it takes a special kind of director to get into that kind of trouble and then accept the help when they bring it in. Because you are essentially now, it’s very embarrassing. You’re at a point where you’re in way over your head. And not because – this is not hubris. They’re promised support, and then it’s just not there. So now suddenly you lose control of your movie. It takes a lot having never been through the process to know that it’s all going to be OK in the end. When the movie works you’ll still get credit.

**Craig:** That’s a lot to have faith in.

**Chris:** It’s very wounding. So I can see somebody looking at that and saying—

**Craig:** Nah.

**Chris:** But there’s the other side of that is the grass is always greener. You’re going to have people making big giant movies. Michael Bay made Pain & Gain because he really wanted to make it. Michael Bay, some part of Michael Bay – I don’t care, any filmmaker you can name at that level – some part of them wants to make their little movie about—

**Craig:** Their podium movie.

**Chris:** [laughs] They want to make their podium movie.

**Craig:** They want to make their podium movie.

**Chris:** Yes, and the same thing I would imagine is just – the Duffer Brothers have some big feature they want to do.

**Craig:** Big ass dumb movie they want to do.

**Chris:** Yes, they’ve got some big ass-

**John:** Comparing that to your life as a screenwriter, there are definitely days where you or I, we don’t want to sit down and write that thing. It’s almost always torture to actually get me at the computer.

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** But at least with the director, you have a call time on the sheet. Like someone is going to pick you up and take you there. And then you’re going to be responsible for those decisions. And that’s terrifying and there are definitely days I don’t want to get in the van, but once you’re there, there’s a whole bunch of people there who are there to help you. And there’s at least some plan for what you are supposed to do. There was some assignment you were given. Like this is the thing that is theoretically on the call sheet. So, we got this location, we got these people, it should be something like this. And you can figure it out.

And, you know, some of my favorite days in directing were things had gone horribly wrong, or there’s a rainstorm and it won’t match cut into anything else, but we have to shoot this. It’s the only day on this location. And you just make it work. It’s going back to remembering like, OK, what is this actually supposed to be about. What is here that we can use to do this and how can we sort of make this problem seem like a solution?

**Chris:** Screenwriting is pushing a rock up a hill. And directing is running downhill with the rock behind you. [laughs] That’s really what it is. It’s going, and it’s going to crush you if you don’t run. But, also, the other night we were – I think this was in our first or second week of shooting. We were at the Grand Palais. We had this big sequence at the Grand Palais. We had all these extras. And extras in France get paid quite a bit of money. So, you had to pick and choose what nights you had a lot of extras. And finally we were shooting outside the Grand Palais. There’s a scene where Tom and Vanessa Kirby and another character come – and Henry Cavill all come running out of the Grand Palais.

And there’s a big event inside. And that night there’s 150 extras. And we put the camera in front of the building and Tom and Vanessa and Henry come walking out and they’re just like three people and 150 extras barely – it’s just deserted. And you came from this big event inside to suddenly – it’s so big. There was nothing you can do.

And the cinematographer loved the building. And he said, “But this is great. This is a great shot of the Grand Palais.” And I said, “But it’s deserted. How do we make 150 people look like a thousand people?” And instead of shooting the outside of the building looking in, we went inside the building and put a long lens on the camera and created a narrow funnel of people and had the actors rushing through the door with all the extras coming towards you. And it turned into this…

The fun of it was we were shooting Mission: Impossible, but we were making an independent film. We were like I only have 150 people. What do I do to make this shot big? And we had the best time that night. That was like really one of the more fun attacks we had. It was great.

**John:** So, switching just for our last topic here, if a strike had occurred while you were making this movie, like what do you do?

**Chris:** Well, we had an emergency plan in place, assuming that if there was going to be a strike, on the day that the contract ran out, we were hedging our bets and saying there will probably be a 10-day extension. There wasn’t the feeling that it was acrimonious and that a strike was just going to happen that moment.

I had a friend who is a writer friend of mine who I have worked with on other movies and he was on deck. And if there was an extension, he was ready to get on a plane, fly out, and during that 10 days we were going to generate as many pages as we possibly could. And then we figured the lights were going to go out.

**John:** So you get past your page 70 thing. You just have something you can shoot at page 70.

**Chris:** You had to have something you could shoot.

**John:** Our friend Aline Brosh McKenna calls that the rocky shoals. It’s that point where the movie is transitioning from sort of one thing before it becomes that third act. It’s often a challenge in scripts, but it’s often a challenge in cuts. So I sympathize.

**Chris:** Yeah. It’s funny, on the last one, that wasn’t the problem. On the last one it was how does this movie end. I know the ending of the movie quite vividly. I don’t know – there’s this weird middle bit that’s happening in London. And I know what the last five pages of it are. I know there’s a confrontation that Ethan has at the end of that, which is this scene that I really love. And what happened was when we sensed that the strike was coming, I had all of these action scenes that had been storyboarded and worked out and in many cases prevised, but no one had ever written a page of those sequences.

There was something like 30 pages of material that existed in concept. We were building sets and rigs and all sorts of things. I just didn’t have them in script form. So I had this friend – the storyboard artist called him and said here’s everything we’re doing. And he took that 30 pages off of my docket. He wasn’t creating anything, but he was writing it in script form so that I could more quickly rewrite it. And he wrote this one scene, but not in any way, shape, or form the way I would have shot it, but inspired this idea where I was like, oh my god, I’ve got this really fun idea. So we know what that sequence is now. Or at least we know how that sequence ends. I just don’t know how it begins.

**John:** One of the things that was a big topic of the WGA negotiations was the move to shorter seasons and sort of how writers were being held for a very long time on these shorter seasons. And their writing fees was being applied against producing fees. But we see also a change happening in features where there are these mini rooms where they are bringing together a bunch of screenwriters, some really high levels, some newbies, and they’re working through a giant property. So they’ll take–

**Chris:** Transformers.

**John:** Transformers was an early example of that, where they’ll say, OK, we’re going to spend four weeks and figure out Transformers and generate, you know, a TV series and three movies and we’re going to figure out what this all is. Where do you see yourself fitting into that universe?

**Chris:** I believe you can create all of the Transformers stuff you want. You can build out the whole universe. You can finish all the screenplays. It goes back to the very beginning of the conversation we were having. When the rubber hits the road, that’s all going to change. They’re going to call you. They’re going to call me. They’re going to call Drew. They’re going to call somebody in at some point and go, “None of this works. It was all great in theory, but we just suddenly…”

An actor drops out. Or the budget changes. And things happen. What I try to impress upon writers going into it now, I believe the future belongs to the writer-producer. That is not to say you have to be named a producer on the movie. But that you need to be able to function on a level where you are – you need to understand editing. You need to understand elements of physical production. The more you understand that, the more valuable you will be to those people. The more you’re selling yourself and not your writing.

Writers right now – and I did it for a long, long time – tend to believe I’m going to write this script and the script is the commodity. It’s not. It’s your ability to write a script that is the commodity. The truth of the matter is, if everybody could write they’d do it. They wouldn’t call us. The fact that the strike was going to happen and had people nervous, if we went on strike, movies just – nobody would write it. It’s a lonely, miserable, very difficult particular skill. And everybody thinks they can do it. I think the same way everybody feels like playing guitar looks like it would be easy.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. Yeah, just pick it up. Just strumming.

**Chris:** Well, yeah, you teach me the basics. You teach me a couple of chords and I’m like, oh, this is very easy. Then show me Van Halen and say do that. And, by the way, do it with two weeks before you’re going on stage. In those writer’s rooms and things like that, this thing with the television seasons that they’re dealing with now. The nature of television is changing and it created a really prickly situation in this atmosphere with the strike.

I can see the studios looking at it and saying, “Well, yeah, now there are only 10 episodes. There used to be 22 and now there’s 10. Why should we pay you more if there’s only 10?” And we’re saying, “But wait, you’re taking us off the market for this much time.”

The studio’s argument is going to be, “Go and create your own show.” It’s going to thin the herd out. It’s going to define who those writer-producers are. And I think what it’s going to do is it’s going to shape writers’ opinions of themselves. Writers have been trained to believe that they are simultaneously necessary and totally dependent, that you can’t make a movie without a screenplay, but I can’t get my screenplay made unless you buy it and validate me. And now you’re at a place where you can be more a part of the process.

Here’s the dirty little secret, and it’s something you know better than anybody. A lot of directors don’t know how to direct. They simply don’t know how to do it. They have some specific skill or some specific vision, or a team around them that helped them, but a great many of them don’t really understand the fundamentals of storytelling as much as they understand some specific visual style.

As a writer who understands editing, you will be invaluable to that director. You may not get the glory. You may not get the credit, but if those things aren’t important to you, if being valuable is what’s important to you, you will always work. And that was really the big change for me in my career. I wanted very much to be in control of my own destiny. And by letting go of that control, my destiny has become that much more in my control.

You were asking me at the beginning, you know, how did you – did you ever expect that you would be directing these blockbusters. I very distinctly remember when I was trying to get Valkyrie made, and I thought Valkyrie was going to be a little movie, no one would read it. It didn’t matter who I was or where I came from. They’d hear it’s about the German generals who, and they were done. They didn’t care.

When Bryan Singer attached himself, people were then offering to make it without having to read it. And I had a very painful realization which was I’ll never be at the level to direct the things that I really want to do. Booth and Valkyrie and The Last Mission and things like that. All my history stuff. Because I’m never going to direct X-Men. And X-Men gets you to a level where you can step down to do a Valkyrie. I’m just never going to get there. So I let go of that dream. And in doing that I became a producer on Valkyrie, which led to rewriting Mission: Impossible, which led to Jack Reacher, Edge of Tomorrow. And on Edge of Tomorrow, Tom said, “You should direct the next Mission.”

So I never aimed for that target. I just showed up at work saying how can I help you make your film. How can I help you make your movie better? And not worrying about where the path was taking me.

**John:** That’s our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Our earlier segments were produced by Megana Rao and Godwin Jabangwe. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Since it’s a throwback episode, let’s do a Matthew Chilelli throwback outro.

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 can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to feature with Chris McQuarrie and Craig talking about spoof movies. Drew, thanks for a fun show.

**Drew:** My pleasure.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, can we skip ahead to something that you know especially well? Spoofs and parodies.

**Craig:** Spoofs and parodies.

**Chris:** Spoofs and parodies.

**John:** So movies like Airplane, Spaceballs, Not Another Teen Movie, Scary Movie series, MacGruber, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Superhero Movie. Tropic Thunder. Shaun of the Dead. Vampires Suck. Austin Powers. Blazing Saddles. We’re not making many of these movies now. And I have a theory why, but I’m curious what your theory is why we don’t make these movies.

**Craig:** As David Zucker would repeatedly say, “Spoof is dead.” And his thing is that he would say spoof is dead, he said it before spoof came back. Spoof was dead. I remember Jim Abrahams saying that he was mixing Mafia, a Jane Austen movie, Jane Austen’s Mafia.

**Chris:** Jane Austen’s Mafia.

**Craig:** And he walked down the hall where they were mixing and on another mixing stage they were mixing There’s Something About Mary. And he just sort of watched a few minutes of it and then went back and said, “Yeah, we’re fucked. Our time is over.”

And it was over. And then the Wayans Brothers brought it back with Scary Movie. But following the success of Scary Movie, and 2, and 3, and 4, there was this sudden – suddenly they were everywhere. And the marketplace was flooded with a lot of cheap stuff. And honestly as one of the people that wrote Scary Movie 3 and 4, I mean, the pressure that we were under from the Weinsteins to make those movies as quickly as possible was brutal. And we couldn’t do them as well as we wanted to do them. And we did them with David Zucker and Pat Proft and Jim Abrahams.

So by the time all that unraveled it was mostly I think killed at the moment by just the marketplace being flooded. But also you got the sense pretty quickly that the Internet was essentially mooting the entire point of this.

**John:** Yes. That was my instinct.

**Craig:** Because every joke, I mean, we used to be like, OK, you want to make fun of this movie. Well, four or five nights from now Leno is going to do the joke. Well, now they’re doing the jokes while they’re watching things. There’s no more time. It’s over.

**Chris:** That’s very true.

**Craig:** It’s over.

**Chris:** Everything is – yeah, the Internet is a spoof.

**Craig:** The Internet is essentially a spoof machine.

**John:** There’s no way to make the movie quick enough to do it. And even like on YouTube they can do the crappy effects version of that joke anyway.

**Chris:** Blazing Saddles is on this list. It is a spoof but it is a spoof with a higher purpose.

**John:** So it’s not a spoof of any one movie, it’s taking genre conventions–

**Craig:** Of a genre.

**Chris:** Of a genre.

**John:** And Shaun of the Dead is a great example of like taking the genre conventions and upending them in a way that’s—

**Chris:** Well that’s a mashup.

**John:** Yeah.

**Chris:** And a great one.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** It’s still I would say really hard now. I mean, Airplane was a direct spoof of a movie called Zero Hour from 1956 or something, or 1955, which no one had seen. That was sort of the oddity of Airplane that they just did this random thing. But somewhere along the line spoofs became connected to either genres as a whole or when it got really bad pop culture. And that’s when it just all to me absolutely fell apart. There’s probably room for somebody to make a spoof of some weird movie that has been forgotten.

**Chris:** Well, but and Austin Powers is taking shots at movies along with Bond. Matt Helm. And some really–

**Craig:** In Like Flint.

**Chris:** Yeah, In Like Flint. When the phone rings, that’s directly taken from In Like Flint.

**John:** But you look at the ones of these that we feel like you could still make is that these films actually have individualized characters who sort of have an arc and have a point of view. And the movie doesn’t exist just to make fun of the movie that came before it. The character is existing within a world and is consistent within a world. So Austin Powers is a spoof of another kind of character, but is also a character himself. And Dr. Evil is a character himself.

**Chris:** Yes. And it’s a time travel comedy in a way. They both are, at least two of the three are.

**Craig:** I mean, the people that kind of come the closest now to doing spoof and parody in their own way is Chris and Phil.

**John:** Lord and Miller. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Lord and Miller in a weird way do. I mean, Lego has certain spoof aspects to it.

**John:** Their Spider Man also has aspects of like it’s an awareness of where this is fitting inside the culture.

**Chris:** Meta.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s meta. Their Jump Street movies are kind of spoofing Jump Street.

**John:** Oh yes.

**Craig:** Like it’s a self-spoof. But it’s different. It’s not like, I mean, thank god, by the way. Because honestly nothing is harder than writing those things. I will never work harder in my life than I did writing Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4. It was just—

**Chris:** It’s one of the reasons Chernobyl is not as funny.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. It took the jokes out.

**John:** It took all the comedy out.

**Chris:** You didn’t make the effort. I know.

Links:

* Original Chris McQuarrie episodes [300](https://johnaugust.com/2017/from-writer-to-writer-director) and [400](https://johnaugust.com/2019/movies-they-dont-make-anymore)
* [Chris McQuarrie](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0003160/) on IMDb
* [Chris McQuarrie]([https://twitter.com/chrismcquarrie](https://www.instagram.com/christophermcquarrie)) on Instagram
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* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [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))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt (from episodes originally produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and Godwin Jabangwe), and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](https://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/596standard.mp3).

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

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

Hi.

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

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

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

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

**Audience:** Screenwriting.

**John:** And?

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

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

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

**Craig:** Literally no one.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Megan right there!

**John:** There she is!

**Craig:** Hey!

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

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

**John:** Stuart’s sick, oh, no!

**Craig:** Seriously sick?

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

**Craig:** Oh, fuck him.

**John:** We’ll be fine. Craig.

**Craig:** Yes?

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

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

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

**Craig:** We might’ve.

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

**Craig:** This is nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** The spooky season.

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

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

**Craig:** Segue man.

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

**Craig:** That’s about right.

**John:** That’s about right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Joel Kim Booster:** Hey.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Joel:** Hi, guys.

**Craig:** Hi.

**John:** Joel Kim Booster.

**Craig:** Welcome to the couch.

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

**Joel:** Thank you.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s scary.

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

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

**Joel:** I’m raw dogging it.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, no.

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

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

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

**John:** That does help, doesn’t it?

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

**Craig:** You can’t fire yourself.

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

**Craig:** They got poorer.

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

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

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

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

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

**Joel:** Yeah, absolutely.

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

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

**John:** Laughter.

**Joel:** Of course.

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

**Joel:** I’m definitely doing that.

**Craig:** Stop it.

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

**John:** Make people laugh.

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

**Craig:** Interesting.

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

**Craig:** Working for them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Quibi.

**John:** Vertical video.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** You’re learning.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh my god.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Maya Rudolph.

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

**Craig:** Good.

**Joel:** Writing it on spec.

**Craig:** That’s good. I’m glad.

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

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

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

**Craig:** I don’t watch things.

**John:** Craig doesn’t.

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

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

**Joel:** Yeah, absolutely.

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

**Craig:** Thank you, Joel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** I’m there all the time.

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

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

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

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

**John:** We identified Item 1.

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

**John:** Item 1.

**Craig:** Item 1.

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

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

**Audience Member:** Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Bullshit.

**John:** Oh, man.

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

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

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

**John:** Pumpkin spice.

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

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

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

**John:** It got nothing.

**Craig:** Silence.

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

**Craig:** Here we go.

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

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

**John:** It could be Shrek.

**Craig:** And two tickets…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Ticket 3559389.

**Audience Member:** It’s me.

**Craig:** I’m so sorry.

**John:** Hooray!

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

**John:** “It’s me.” I’m sorry.

**Craig:** “It’s me.”

**John:** “It’s me.”

**Craig:** “It’s me.”

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

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

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

**Craig:** Here we go.

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

**Craig:** Realer than that?

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

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

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

**Craig:** What if they’re an idiot?

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

**Craig:** I love it.

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

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

**Audience Member:** It’s me.

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

**Craig:** “It’s me.”

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

**John:** Sure, we’ll do it again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** People want this.

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

**Audience Member:** Yay.

**Craig:** Hey!

**John:** Hooray! Hooray.

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

**John:** “Yay.”

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

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

**Craig:** “Yay.”

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

**Craig:** Here we go.

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s a lot.

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

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

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

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

**Audience Member:** That’s me!

**John:** Hooray!

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

**John:** I’m excited about that.

**Craig:** Thank you!

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

**Audience Member:** Skullduggery.

**John:** Skullduggery.

**Craig:** That’s a good title.

**John:** Everyone listen for Skullduggery.

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

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

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

**John:** Wow.

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

**John:** Oh my god.

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

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

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

**John:** They’re not all giggles.

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

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

**Craig:** Hollywood Heart.

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

**Craig:** No question.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Dickheads.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Make things better.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Here we go.

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

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

**Manager:** God.

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

**Manager:** That’s what she said.

**John:** God.

**Craig:** Chad. Chad.

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

**Craig:** No, Chad.

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

**Craig:** Do you?

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s real.

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

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

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

**Craig:** No.

**John:** You sound like that.

**Craig:** I don’t sound like that.

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

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

**Craig:** No.

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

**John:** No, you don’t-

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, please.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** No.

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

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

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

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

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** What’s the process?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Manager:** Listen, man.

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

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

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

**Manager:** Yes.

**Craig:** Great.

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

**Craig:** Can’t say that.

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

**Craig:** Can’t say that.

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

**Craig:** Can’t say that.

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

**Craig:** There’s coding.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** You don’t do anything!

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

**Craig:** Shmuli?

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

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

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

**Craig:** All of them?

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

**John:** That wasn’t Gandhi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** No.

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

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

**Craig:** That’s fair.

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

**Craig:** He did the line.

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

**Craig:** He did the line.

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

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

**Craig:** Sorkining.

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

**Craig:** He’s still Sorkining.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Manager:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Ike Barinholtz, everyone!

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

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

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

**Craig:** I gotta say-

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

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

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

**Craig:** Absolutely fucking dreadful.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** God.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Nice people.

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

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

**John:** People who make things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Starring myself.

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

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

**John:** Her feature debut.

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

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

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

**John:** Welcome to the couch.

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

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

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

**John:** Sorry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** No.

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

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

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

**Craig:** The TikToks.

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

**Craig:** The act breaks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s how they did it?

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

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s fucking France.

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

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

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

**John:** Megan, would you…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Ah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Those are great.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Same but different.

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

**Craig:** Learn nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Megan:** Great.

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

**Megan:** Find a dog.

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

**John:** Really?

**Craig:** It basically is.

**Aline:** Never stopped me before.

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

**Craig:** It is.

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

**Craig:** I agree with that.

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

**Craig:** I agree.

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

**Craig:** That would be bad.

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

**Craig:** Episodes.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Ish.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Finish-ish.

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

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

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

**Megan:** Oh god, that’s great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Go on.

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

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

**Megan:** Sorry.

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, Aline.

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

**Craig:** Ego death.

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

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

**John:** Often monstrous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Efficient.

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

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

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

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

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

**Aline:** “What an asshole.”

**Craig:** Now you’re the dick.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Here we go.

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

**Megan:** Oh, no.

**Craig:** Here we go.

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

**Craig:** And a little description.

**John:** … and a little description.

**Aline:** Can we confer?

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

**Craig:** And the platform.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s it.

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

**Craig:** Here we go.

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

**Craig:** Is it real?

**Megan:** It’s on Apple TV.

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

**Aline:** I have watched.

**Craig:** They nailed it.

**John:** They nailed it.

**Craig:** That is correct.

**John:** One for you.

**Craig:** Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

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

**John:** It’s streaming.

**Megan:** The CW?

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

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

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

**Megan:** I don’t know, Hulu?

**Craig:** Tell them.

**Aline:** It’s on Netflix.

**Craig:** It is on Netflix.

**John:** Netflix.

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

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

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

**John:** Now it gets hard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** It won’t hurt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** No.

**Megan:** It’s not real.

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

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

**Craig:** You’re incorrect.

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

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

**Aline:** That’s on FX.

**Megan:** That’s real. That’s on FX.

**Aline:** That’s Jeff Bridges.

**Megan:** On Hulu.

**Craig:** Hulu, you’re right.

**Aline:** No, it’s FX for Hulu.

**Megan:** FX for Hulu.

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

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

**Craig:** You got it.

**John:** You got it.

**Craig:** You nailed it.

**John:** You got it!

**Craig:** It’s correct.

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

**Craig:** Nice work.

**John:** Irma Vep.

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

**Craig:** Good Lord.

**John:** Jesus.

**Aline:** It stars the beautiful-

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

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

**Craig:** Correct.

**Megan:** Wow.

**Craig:** Mostly Fine.

**Aline:** I don’t…

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

**Aline:** Sure.

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

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

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

**Megan:** Sure.

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

**Megan:** No, that’s not real.

**Aline:** No, that can’t be.

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

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

**Megan:** That’s real.

**Aline:** Rutherford Falls, yeah.

**John:** Where?

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

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

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

**John:** Yes, that’s great.

**Aline:** The showrunner’s name is-

**Megan:** Sierra Ornelas.

**Aline:** … Sierra Ornelas.

**John:** Where is it?

**Aline:** It’s on…

**Craig:** I’ll give you a hint. Meh!

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

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

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

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

**Aline:** It’s on Apple?

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

**Craig:** Gulp.

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

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

**John:** Woke.

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

**Craig:** Wow.

**Aline:** It was on Hulu.

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

**John:** Yeah, dear God.

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

**Aline:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

**Megan:** Freeform?

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

**John:** Real. Netflix.

**Craig:** It’s on Netflix.

**Aline:** Netflix.

**Megan:** There you go.

**Craig:** Heartbreak High.

**John:** Chapelwaite.

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

**John:** I don’t know. You tell me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Chapelwaite.

**John:** Chapelwaite.

**Craig:** Chapelwaite.

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

**Craig:** Is it real?

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

**Aline:** Epix!

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

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

**Aline:** What?

**Craig:** Wendy.

**Aline:** Wendy.

**Craig:** Not Wendy Williams.

**John:** Yeah, Wendy.

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

**Aline:** Yes, please.

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

**Aline:** No, that’s not a show.

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

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

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

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

**Megan:** That’s true.

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

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

**John:** The Last Kingdom.

**Megan:** That’s real.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Well done.

**Megan:** Nice.

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

**Aline:** Oh, great.

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

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

**Craig:** Not after tonight.

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

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

**Ike:** Who is Ike Barinholtz?

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

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

**John:** Nope.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes, Megana Rao.

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

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

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

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

**John:** It is.

**Megan:** It’s very spooky.

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

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

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

**John:** Aw.

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

**Aline:** Aw.

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

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

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

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

**Joel:** She’s so sick of us.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Oh, man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Joel:** There you go.

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

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

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

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

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

**Megan:** Why?

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

**Megan:** Yes.

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

**Megan:** “Who?”

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yay.

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

**Craig:** Brand.

**John:** Brand.

**Craig:** Brand.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Or don’t tweet at all.

**Ike:** That’s another option.

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

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

**John:** A question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** “I don’t know.”

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

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

**Ike:** It’s a workweek.

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

**Craig:** Nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Ike:** It’s not cool.

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

**Ike:** Those morons.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Great.

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

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

**John:** Yeah, one space.

**Craig:** Yass.

**Megan:** No.

**Joel:** No.

**Craig:** Bones.

**Megan:** No.

**Craig:** Bones. Bones.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** The period does it.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Fuck those words.

**Ike:** How about you?

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

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

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

**John:** That’s a small hill.

**Craig:** He stole my answer.

**John:** Megana, one more.

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

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

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

**Ike:** Global warming, hunger.

**Craig:** My cat dying.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Hope.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Megan, they don’t know.

**Megan:** Sorry.

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

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

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

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

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

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.

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

**Craig:** That’s the other myth.

**Joel:** That’s the other option.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We gotta get that.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Of course.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Hello, folks.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Thank you.

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

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

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

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

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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