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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. A standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin, and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, I will be solo hosting, but joined by the creator and showrunner of FX’s Say Nothing, Joshua Zetumer.

We’ll talk about that show, which is one of my favorites of 2024, if not my favorite of 2024, as well as answer some listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, and this is probably going to be a surprise to Joshua, he and I will put on our urban planner and civil engineer hats to answer what I think is a fairly easy question. How would we make Los Angeles function better? Joshua, welcome to the show.

Joshua Zetumer: Thank you for having me. I’ve listened to the show. I love the show. I’m a big fan of yours as well. So I’m really excited to be here.

Craig: Oh, go on.

Joshua: No. I can go on. I can go on.

Craig: Please don’t.

Joshua: No, I’ll just say one thing, which was Chernobyl was very much a model in my mind in how to do a limited series right and was a huge influence on Say Nothing. I’ll be excited to talk to you about that.

Craig: Well, we will get into that. Whatever influenced you, tip of the hat, because as I said, it was one of my favorite shows of 2024. I think it’s a fantastic show, and I really want to dig into, from the writing point of view, how you put it together and ask you some interesting questions about both the nature of your process and the show itself, the story.

Before we do that, some interesting little bits of biographic detail on you. First, your parents are both psychiatrists, so I think I’m really, really sorry, but I’m not sure. I think that’s better than therapists, probably.

Joshua: I feel like it’s worse than therapists. I feel like neo-Freudians at the dinner table is like maybe worse than like a touchy-feely LA therapist because they’ll really just put it all on themselves since that the Freudians blame the parents for everything.

Craig: Right. I’m sure they were blaming their parents at the same time. Poor grandma and grandpa.

Joshua: That’s right.

Craig: That’s right.

Joshua: It echoes down the line.

Craig: Oh, yes. More interesting than that to me, I guess when you were in high school, you were a jazz drummer.

Joshua: This is true. Yes. I was a drummer, and I was going to try to be a professional drummer for a long time. My childhood was very much like shrinks and punk in San Diego, which is where I’m from, and which is infinitely uncool to be from San Diego. I was like the indoor kid, having an existential crisis while everyone else was enjoying the beach.

Craig: Well, that’s what I would have done also, just so you know. Also, love playing the drums, probably not as good as you, and people that say jazz drummer are always very, very good, I feel like–

Joshua: Or just very pretentious, or just deeply lame. [chuckles]

Craig: Fair. Fair. You can play poorly and call it polyrhythm. I’ve seen this happen.

Joshua: What kind of stuff do you play, may I ask?

Craig: I was mostly just good old– still occasionally I’ll play, but just good old standard rock and roll stuff. Nothing– I actually never got into like the full punk, tu nda, tu nda, tu nda. Jazz drumming to me is– well, first of all, I just couldn’t do the traditional grip anyway, to start with. Then I was like I’m decent with rudiments, but not like jazz drummer good. I always felt like jazz drummers are like the wizards of drummers, and guys like me are just like the warlocks of drummers.

Joshua: [laughs] I definitely– it may be a stretch to call me a jazz drummer, I certainly studied a lot of jazz in college, and I felt like I tried to apply it to other styles. I think for me, those were always my heroes. The jazz guys were always my heroes, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams, because they were so unapproachable in their skill level, and it was something I really aspired to. Ultimately, I remember there was a really dark joke that I think someone told me when I was 20 years old, when I was really studying, which was like, maybe you’ve heard it, “What’s the difference between a jazz musician and a large pizza? A large pizza can feed a family of four.”

Craig: Oh, wow.

Joshua: That’s-

Craig: A fact. It’s a tough life. You picked, I think, a similarly tough path. “Oh, I think I’ll try and do the thing that’s even less likely to work out,” which is becoming a professional screenwriter, and yet you have. You, like me, mostly working, were working in features, you worked on Quantum of Solace, I’m jealous that you got to work on a James Bond movie because I’m a huge Bond nut, you did the RoboCop reboot, which I thought was terrific, and you also did Patriots Day in 2016, which is also an excellent film. Then you went, “I think I’m going to–“

Let’s talk about Say Nothing and some facts for our listeners. Say Nothing, the limited series, is based on the book, Say Nothing, A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe, who’s also a lovely man.

It is a nine-episode series that follows the story of two sisters, Dolours and Marion Price, who joined the IRA as young women in the early ‘70s, and through that story of idealism, liberation, oppression, terrorism, imprisonment, and murder, we get what I think, this is me editorializing, the best and most complete portrayal of the complicated reality of who the IRA was, and what they achieved, and what they failed to achieve. This miniseries was not your first attempt to write about the IRA, as I understand.

Joshua: No, that’s right. My first job writing in Hollywood was writing a script about the IRA, actually for Leonardo DiCaprio, when I was 26 years old, and that film never got made, but it got me steeped in the troubles long before taking on Say Nothing. The movie that I wrote for Leonardo DiCaprio was going to be– I didn’t want to call him Leo, just there, I had a moment of being like, “I can’t call him Leo,” but it was going to be produced by David Benioff, who created Game of Thrones, of course, and then Brad Simpson, who’s one of the producers on Say Nothing.

So when the book came out, Brad had a very early option on the book, and I think I was one of the first people he thought of because I was good friends with him and I’m one of his friends who happened to be a writer who knew the history of Northern Ireland pretty well. He slipped me the book and it just instantly became my favorite book. I thought it was just an extraordinary piece of writing, and also, I just thought, upon reading it, there’s just no way in hell it’s ever going to get made, just because Hollywood is so fear-based and the idea of doing an ambitious period show set in Northern Ireland, the odds of getting it greenlit seem like they were maybe 5%, no matter how good the book was.

The show was also like un-pitchable. It’s a very awkward pitch. If you pitch it, it’s about two Catholic sisters in Belfast who joined the IRA, and then you follow them on a 30-year journey from idealism to disillusionment. That pitch does not make studio executives see dollar signs. Now, when I look at it on the platform, it’s on Hulu, I can’t believe that it got made. It feels like I got away with robbing a bank, honestly. It’s on Disney Plus outside the US, and so I see this show about Irish paramilitaries like up there next to Buzz Lightyear, and I just cackle at the very idea that somebody was ballsy enough to make it. I spent five years doing the show that I actually got it done.

It is a testament to everybody involved that it got made. Not only my producers who are Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson at Color Force, they’re super pugnacious. They really fight for the projects. Then also John Landgraf and Gina at FX. I don’t want to shill for FX, but truly like they believed in the book, they really believed in the scripts, and they believed in the cast, and that they were willing to make a show that was period, that had no stars, that was limited, that was doing everything that you’re really told not to do. I’m just really grateful that they said yes.

Craig: I know a little something about that process because I went through it with HBO, and you’re right, you have to find some people who are willing to do a thing that probably won’t work. By won’t work I mean gathering viewership and capturing people’s imaginations. Because when we tell these stories based on real-life events and we spread them out over the time they require, there is a worry, I think, in everyone’s mind that it’s going to turn into the thing that substitute teachers show when they come in because they need to do something for the social studies class. And our job, I think, is to try and convince people that, in fact, this story isn’t going to be homework, it’s going to be gripping.

I think what you achieved, we’ll go through how, but I want to ask a simple question. When you set yourself down to lay this thing out, how much were you thinking about the audience and how much were you thinking about how to keep people riveted? Because you kept me riveted through every episode, and because it’s over 30 years of time, you are telling stories about barely young adults. You’re telling stories about women who are, in their 50s and they’re the same people living completely different kinds of lives because of the way things stretch out.

All the events that occur, all the people– you had the same problem I had with Chernobyl. Everybody sounded the same and looked the same. It’s like a collection of white people with Russian names. You have a collection of white people with Irish names. How concerned were you about grasping the audience and holding them?

Joshua: I love a show that doesn’t tell you too much. I love a show that does not spoon-feed. I think there’s a certain amount of table setting you have to do with Irish history that is mostly just jammed into the pilot that I just had to do. The show had to do two things to me. This is actually what made the adaptation such an extremely high degree of difficulty was I wanted a show that was like The Wire. I’m not going to compare it to The Wire because it’s not The Wire, nothing is The Wire. I want a show that was extremely authentic down to all the granular details. And I wanted to capture the spirit of Belfast, which is like very contradictory at times.

At the same time, I wanted to make Say Nothing for a global audience– needed to make it for a global audience who had never heard of the troubles, frankly. I think that was the tightrope of doing the show. When it came to exposition and telling the audience things, you have your narrators, which Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes are looking back on their youth and the world can be very forbidding at times. You need a guide if you’re unfamiliar with the troubles and that device, though a little shop worn, I think is very organic to the story and so it was very useful.

Then beyond that initial table setting, I really want the audience to play catch up. I love getting invested in a world. I love when I don’t know everything and I’m not spoon-fed. I think that was actually honestly a big creative, not argument, but discussion, because as a writer, I’m like really, really allergic to exposition. I love the paranoid thrillers of the early ‘70s where you just dropped into a situation with like Harry in the conversation and you’re just wondering who this guy is and what he does and you’re not spoon-fed any information.

Craig: It sounds like there was a little bit of give and take on that because I have the same thing on my end of things. There’s always a request for clarity, I guess, is that. You’ll say spoon-fed and the people on the other side of the argument will say clarity. For writers who are moving through the system maybe for the first time, that can be quite a shock. How do you navigate those conversations and get what you want?

Joshua: You underline things in the script.

[laughter]

Joshua: You just go back in your second draft and you underline multiple times.

Craig: That works?

Joshua: No, it does work. No, I have done that. I’ve definitely, not on Say Nothing, but on another project, I definitely did get some notes. I felt they had already been addressed, and so in the next draft, I went back and underlined and the executive probably got what I was doing and was like, “I’m going to leave him alone.”

I think there are the compromises you can make that will destroy your work and there are the compromises you can make that will actually be really useful. You have to know the difference, I think, because you can’t be a horrible dick the whole time. You can be really close to a horrible dick the whole time, but you can’t cross that line. You just have to know where that line is, I think.

There’s that book, Difficult Men, about all the showrunners. Running a show, you realize how they became so difficult because there’s such a degree of control that you have to maintain. Really, it’s just about how do you maintain the level of control to get what you want without turning into a monster. That’s–

Craig: Let’s dig into that because like you, I came from features where we don’t have the authority. In fact, we are often in this unenviable position of being the person who knows the most and yet has the least amount of decision-making to do because they put the director in charge. Now, over here in television, you are put in charge. This may have been your first major dose of authority, but not only just over the creative aspects of the show, but also other people working on the show. Did you have other writers on the show or were you a–

Joshua: I had a brilliant writer’s room, honestly.

Craig: Fantastic.

Joshua: If I have time, I would love to just tell you everyone who wrote on the show because–

Craig: Run through it and talk to me a little bit about how you went from a guy alone in his room writing stuff and being told by directors or producers, “Mia, mia, mia” to a guy who is in charge of a show and also now in charge of writers.

Joshua: I think you’re only as good as your writers, I think, especially in a show like this. I was an outsider telling this story, which meant that I’m an American telling a story whose characters have a life that is as far from my life as you could possibly imagine. That meant that I had to treat it with a fundamental respect. I think it meant an insane, like a crazy research process for me, which was years long. Honestly, I think I probably spent nine months just writing the pilot because of the language, frankly, and trying to teach myself to write in a Belfast accent without speaking in a Belfast accent myself, which was just a whole exhaustive process. This is not your question though.

I wanted to make sure when I had my first writer’s room that we had a ton of different perspectives. We had a multitude of different perspectives. The writers who also worked on the show with me, we had Joe Murtagh, who created Woman in the Wall and is a show runner in his own right. Joe is a writer who is of Irish descent, was raised in London, and writes amazing action and his dialogue is hysterically funny. We had Claire Barron, who is a formidable New York playwright who’s been nominated for a Pulitzer and had brilliant insight, particularly into the sisters.

Claire wrote Episode 6, which is the hunger strike episode, which is one of my just absolute favorites.

Craig: Yes, remarkable.

Joshua: When the cast read that episode, they were crying. It’s just a very powerful episode. Then we had Kirsten Sheridan, who’s the daughter of director Jim Sheridan, who’s–

Craig: Oh, wow.

Joshua: Yes. She’s been nominated for an Oscar for co-writing In America.

Craig: Sure. Sure.

Joshua: Her writing is super earthy and humane, and she’s also great with subtext. I was running it, and we had these four different writers, myself included, whose writing was all just wildly different, as different as could be. For whatever reason, the alchemy in the room was just great. It was the writer’s room that you dream of having, where there were no toxic personalities. Everybody was friends, and it just ended up being a wonderful experience. I don’t want to speak for the other writers because who knows what they secretly think.

Craig: Well, they probably will say that you were almost a complete dick, but not–

Joshua: I actually think they would say that. I actually think they would because I definitely–

Craig: “He’s almost a complete dick.”

Joshua: I work really hard, and I try to get the people around me to work really hard and do their best work. It also should be said, we also had Patrick as an executive producer, who was dropping in and out, talking about the history. We have this murderer’s row of talented people all trying to wrangle this massive book. The whole thing, by the way, took place over Zoom during the pandemic, during peak COVID.

Craig: Oh, boy.

Joshua: Me and Kirsten were in LA, Clare was in New York, and Joe was in Madrid. It was crazy. It wasn’t a unique writer’s room because a lot of people were doing that, but it was certainly the thing that got us through COVID, I think, for a couple of us.

Craig: That is a fairly impressive room. You’re gathering up all this great work from all these people. Of course, you’re generating your own work as you go. The thing that impressed me so much, one of the many things that impressed me so much about Say Nothing is the tone. Because the tone, there’s probably a million ways to go wrong and one way to go right. I think I’ve seen a lot of things go wrong with stories like this. The tone here was so gorgeously grounded. It felt so authentic. It wasn’t trying too hard. I also loved how the show found beauty in the plain, the mundane, the faces, wonderful faces. No one was too gorgeous.

Joshua: I think Anthony Boyle would totally take offense of that, but we’ll move on.

Craig: [laughs] He’s very handsome.

Joshua: He’s a handsome man.

Craig: He’s very handsome. You didn’t have a model suddenly in the middle of it. Everything felt deeply detailed and deeply real. How do you keep that tone consistent when you are pulling in so much work from other people whose minds work slightly– Everybody’s mind works differently.

Joshua: Yes. I love that you asked that question because the tone was the thing that I felt most protective of throughout the process. Really, throughout the shoot, into post specifically, I felt like my job was really to just protect the tone and to make sure that really delicate balance between comedy and tragedy was maintained. I think that that’s a facet of a lot of Irish storytelling, obviously, that you can laugh in the darkest of times, and that idea had to be shot through the whole thing.

Otherwise, it wasn’t going to work because the subject matter is so grim. You have prison, you have a hunger strike, you have orphaned children, you have people who have done terrible things in the name of their country, and then realized it was all for nothing. It’s literally could be as bleak as a show gets. The idea that it had to have humor and heart, that was always at the center of it. I think, to your point about intimacy, I think when you have a historical show, my least favorite thing in a historical show, the characters are talking about history with the knowledge that they’re living in history and you’re like making a show about punk and the characters are like, “This is what punk is” or whatever, when nobody was saying that.

So for me, I was just trying to create intimate scenes between people and then let the scope of the canvas deal with the historical details. It was really about just being very aware of what was happening historically, but then throwing everything out. Fortunately, the conceit of the show, at least for the first half, is that these are kids. These are kids who are suddenly given power over life and death, who are suddenly thrust into the center of history and have to figure out what to do, but they’re still making decisions with brains that are, you could argue, not even fully formed. You stop developing as a person when you’re 25, and these were kids who were 22 and even teenagers.

For me, it was trying to capture the experience of okay, what would it feel like to be 19 when the world around you has suddenly turned upside down and the civilization that you’re living in has suddenly adopted violence and what would it be like if you really wanted social change and thought violence was the only way to get it, but you were a teenager? That’s at the heart of the show.

Craig: That also poses an interesting challenge because, as I’ve said many times on the show, my least favorite note is the character isn’t likable enough because I think that’s a compliment.

Joshua: Yes, I agree.

Craig: However, people need to relate to characters. For instance, you have an incredible character, a British military man named Frank Kitson played by Rory Kinnear, who is in a number of ways, a villain. He certainly represents the oppression of the British Empire, yet he’s also fascinating and you admire him. He’s possibly autistic, it’s hard to get a read on him, but he’s so gorgeously smart that you find yourself leaning towards him. Similarly, at the heart of the story, the two main characters, Dolours and Marian, are doing terrible things. At some point, how do you manage those slippery slopes of both humanizing people regardless of what they did, without drifting into, say, apologia?

Joshua: Yes, I think in the case of Frank Kitson, I would quibble a tiny bit in that I don’t think I’m humanizing him. I don’t think he was– He’s somebody who, when you do the research, he’s virtually impossible to humanize. At the same time, he’s ruthlessly, brutally effective at sowing distrust amid the IRA. He’s really good at what he does despite being, undeniably, a dark, dark individual.

Craig: But brilliant.

Joshua: But brilliant, yes. I think there’s another element of it too, which is you can obviously do the tricks that screenwriters do, which is you make everyone around him dumb, which is an old screenwriting trick. I think you can either make it so they’re keystone cops or you can make them smart and him smarter, which is usually the better thing to do. In the case with this show, I wanted a slightly more comedic tone because I did not want the sort of newsreel version of Frank Kitson that I feel like we’ve seen before from stuff about the troubles. I wanted him to be funny.

On the page, Frank Kitson was very funny. I think it’s one of the reasons they greenlit the show was because the stuff with the British, it was really engaging. It did not feel like a dour political drama. I think they greenlit the show because of the tone, to be honest. Then Rory showed up on set and he was so fucking funny and so deft at understanding what the tone of the show was. Because that’s the thing you have to do. Your actors have to know about the dance you’re doing between comedy and tragedy as well. Otherwise, you’re dead. You get an actor who doesn’t understand the tone, especially in the part like that, and the show completely falls apart.

Everybody needs to know the show that they’re making, and Rory really understood the tone. There was one moment when he showed up– I’m embarrassed to say this, I probably shouldn’t say this. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow night and tell you to cut it.

Craig: Let’s find out.

Joshua: Yes, let’s find out. He shows up on set and first of all, he’s like already Frank Kitson when he gets there. We have one conversation in the makeup chair and then he’s in character and the Director Mike Lennox and I are both intimidated by him and going like, “Is he Kitson right now? We can’t tell, or is this just his vibe?” Then he does a scene– his first scene was when he is with the two lieutenants who are around him, and the guys playing the lieutenants are also incredibly funny. They’re doing it and they’re saying the lines are in the script, but it’s just so funny that I actually went to Mike Lennox, I tapped him on the shoulder and I was like, “Is it too funny?”

I just had a moment of going– because you’re making the show that is incredibly politically sensitive, and you’re finding out the tone while you’re shooting when your actor’s reading out the line.

You have the tone on the page, you don’t know what it’s going to look like. I’m like, “Should we get one that’s a little more serious, just to have it in our back pocket, in case this is too far?” Mike goes over, and Mike directed all of Derry Girls, so he knows his way around a comedy. He goes over to the actors, and talks to them for five minutes, and then comes back, sort of like hangdog, and he looks at me and he just goes like, “I don’t know how to make them any less funny.” He’s so good. I guess this is the tone.

Craig: It starts when he lands. He gets out of a helicopter and his lieutenants say, “How’s the trip over?” He looks at them with dead eyes and goes, “45 minutes,” which is awesome. Maybe it was 48, I don’t know.

Joshua: That was right.

Craig: He’ll do everything in an instant. I love how compact and efficient that was. Let’s talk a little bit about the big argument at the heart of this. You touched on it, but if you could, I have my answer. I know what I think this show is about, and I’m right, of course. I’ll give you a chance to see if you’re correct about your own show. This is, I think, of value to anybody that’s trying to write something that is a sprawling historical epic that covers many, many years. You and I have both done this. I think what we both know is the events themselves aren’t enough. There is some glue that makes a cohesive point, even if that point is debatable, and hopefully, it is. What was there for you in the very center of this?

Joshua: The challenge, of course, is that with something like this, there’s not one thing. There’s actually like three or four. I’m really curious which one is the right one according to–

Craig: I’ll tell you.

Joshua: Don’t worry, you’ll let me know.

Craig: I’ll tell you. Yes, I’ll let you know.

Joshua: No, I think for me, there’s so much there and I would actually make two thematic points about it. I think the big one is that it’s about both the romance of radical politics and also the cost of those politics, that you can have acts of violence that have a terrible cost to them for both the victims and for the perpetrators as well. That you can get swept up in something when you’re young and then have to live with those decisions for the rest of your life. This idea that there would be an emotional cost, not only for the individual but also for the entire society, I think that was something I was really interested in. That was point one. Then there’s another thing, I don’t know if that’s right. You tell me if that feels right.

Craig: You’re almost right. Let’s hear what number two is.

Joshua: I think number two was just about this idea of silence and this idea that the price of peace is silence. That if you are going to have a country go from violence to peace, I think for a lot of people in Northern Ireland, people who’ve committed acts of violence and had acts of violence done to them, that the cost of that is that you don’t talk about it, that you don’t talk about the past and you bury it. I think the reason that I wanted to do the show in the beginning– this is actually deeply embarrassing, but I was raised by therapists, as we said, and for me, it was like all emotions are on the table. I was in a house where you were expected to talk about your feelings. That can be good and it can also be bad.

The alternative is having all this trauma– we all have trauma. Having all this trauma and not talking about it. For me, it was about the idea of the destructive power of silence and what it can do to a person to have this thing inside you and not be able to get it out. This idea of unprocessed trauma, both for the victims and the perpetrators, I think that was something that was at the heart of it for me.

Craig: Those are pretty good answers. I’m going to combine them a little bit in my answer, which is the correct answer. I will say to people, if you have not yet seen Say Nothing, you will experience a series of shocking events and startling events that you can imagine having to hold inside as a secret would be very difficult. I assure you, as you’re going through that process, you still have yet to see the thing that is the most upsetting and the one that really feels like, how can you hold this inside? I’ll tell you for me, and I’m joking, I don’t really know, but as a viewer, what struck me about the show was that it articulated something that I think we all struggle with when we have hopes and desires to make the world a better place.

That is that it may be impossible to experience an ideological war and still remain idealistic when it’s over. That it might actually be impossible because the people who inspire everybody through ideas are necessarily throwing a lot of those people onto a fire, whether they are murdered or killed or injured themselves, or spiritually, they die because of things they do to other people. They become pawns in a larger movement that ultimately becomes political. I found that tragedy to be beautiful and moving. The story of people who cared so much because they were inspired to care so much and were possibly necessarily abandoned and betrayed, which, by the way, and I don’t know. Does that sound like something–

Joshua: No, I love it. I love it. I think you should just– You send me the recording and I can just play it back. I can transcribe it. I can start using it in interviews. I think it’s really good.

Craig: You just, you just Venmo me and you can have whatever you want. That leads us to, I guess my final question that revolves around the narrative of the show, and that is Gerry Fucking Adams. Gerry Adams– here’s what I knew, going into things. I was not a student of the IRA. What I knew was there was an ongoing battle between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants/the British government in Northern Ireland, which was possessed by the UK. That battle was between the IRA and the British primarily than the, I guess the Northern Irish police. It involved bombings and it also involved terrorism perpetrated by the IRA and oppressive acts perpetrated by the government.

I know Sunday Bloody Sunday, we all do because we love U2. I knew that Gerry Adams, was– this is what I thought, as an American I thought, “Oh, and then there’s this guy, Gerry Adams, who helped make peace. He’s good. He’s the head of Sinn Fein, which is the political party in Northern Ireland that is part of the British Parliament that figured out how to get to the Good Friday Accords,” I believe it’s called. Good Friday Agreement?

Joshua: Good Friday Agreement. Yes.

Craig: Good Friday Agreement, which essentially ended the troubles. Here’s what your show taught me. Gerry Fucking Adams, as they refer to him over and over, “Gerry Fucking Adams,” was the head of the IRA. He was in charge of the IRA. He was the person who was ordering the terroristic attacks. Perhaps more distressingly, or at least equally distressingly, he was also the person who was ordering the internal purges of people, Irish Catholics, who were believed to be touts, informants to the British, whether they were or not. The show, in fact, is framed around the story of a mother of seven children, or nine?

Joshua: 10, actually.

Craig: 10?

Joshua: I think in the apartment you only see, I believe, eight.

Craig: I was trying to count. There’s a lot of kids. A single mother of 10 children who was murdered by the IRA because she was suspected to be an informant. Yet, “Gerry Fucking Adams,” who, by becoming this political leader and essentially denying that he ever was part of the IRA, he becomes the interesting villain of the story. It’s his betrayal of everybody around him that’s so shocking. What you do, and this is fascinating to me, you are telling this story, and he’s still here. Gerry Adams is still alive. Gerry Adams was a member of the UK Parliament as leader of the Sinn Féin party for 35 years.

He only stepped down six years ago, in part because of some of the revelations about what happened back then. He still denies that he was even a member of the IRA, much less the leader. You found what I think is the most brilliant way to tell the story exactly the way you wanted without getting sued and it made it better. Talk to me about the amazing disclaimers that you ran at the end of every episode.

Joshua: The disclaimers are a way for us– really, this is not an answer that’s going to be satisfying for you. The disclaimers are actually a way to give Gerry his due in a way. I think it would have been morally wrong to not include them. I think on the one hand, we needed people to know that Gerry has always denied being a member of the IRA. I think when to do it and how to do it was obviously a conversation between me, the producers and the legal department. The answer that we came up with was we’re going to do it after every episode.

That kind of repetition, I think for people, creates its own feeling, which is purely unintentional on my part. I would give a disclaimer to the disclaimer and I would say that any feelings you may have about Gerry Adams are not the intention of the artist creating the show and are purely up to the viewer and their own emotional state.

Craig: Well this viewer over here, every time that disclaimer came up, I went, “Wow.” It’s an incredible story, so beautifully told, gorgeously cast. I looked up, I was like, “Who cast this? Oh, Nina Gold. Of course.”

Joshua: There you go.

Craig: Nina Gold who cast Chernobyl.

Joshua: I read an interview with her about the casting process on Chernobyl. That was one of the reasons why it had to be her.

Craig: You chose wisely.

Joshua: I would love to talk about Nina. Can I just go back and say one thing about Gerry Adams just before we move on, just beyond the disclaimer? I think one thing I would say, his role within the IRA, whether he’s running the IRA or not running the IRA, is fundamentally very murky. The IRA had an army council who– you see the old guard, in Episode 3, of other men who are the leadership. His relationship with them has always been very murky. Either way, the show depicts him as being very high up the chain of command in the IRA. I think there is something about–

Craig: The Big Guy.

Joshua: He’s called The Big Guy.

Craig: The Big Lad. The Big Lad.

Joshua: The Big Lad, yes. One of the things I just want people to take away was this fundamental contradiction about Gerry Adams, which is that on the one hand, he has a major hand in the peace process and on the other, his role in the IRA undoubtedly led to the deaths of many, many people. I think that fundamental discomfort that you should feel towards the character, I think that was something I was trying to achieve was that I wanted him, as a character, to make us uncomfortable. We shouldn’t know how we feel about him in the end of the show. I think that’s something that I really wanted, honestly, for all the characters, with the exception of the victims, of course, who are-

Craig: Blameless.

Joshua: -in many ways– No, and in many ways, the heroes of the story. Laura Donnelly playing Helen McConville, is unambiguously the hero of the story and one who is left at the end of the film. I was very adamant that the last shot would be her. She’s left holding the bag. Everybody else, you’re supposed to be kept off balance about them, where they have Dolours, of course, has her sensitivity, her humanity, and also her willingness to kill and die for her beliefs, all of which should throw you off. That was really the goal, I think, with everyone. Anyway, I just wanted to–

Craig: You got there. It was perfectly done in that by the time it concluded, I was uncomfortable with all of them. I wouldn’t know because I ask a simple question when I’m watching these things, “What would happen if I were to walk in a room and meet that person? If I were to meet them, if they were alive– Dolours is not, but if they were, how would that go and how would I feel?” The answer is I don’t know.

What’s so beautiful about your show is that it depicts this very complicated thing, which is violence in service of idea that is almost always depicted stupidly. You depict it with such intelligence and grace. Congratulations on the show. Would you be interested, because you’re so smart, in helping me answer some listener questions?

Joshua: Oh, God. I love the little bit of flattery that’s really supposed to make me say yes.

Craig: Oh, you are the child of psychiatrists.

Joshua: Oh, my God.

Craig: None of my tricks are working. How about this? I’m going to order you to answer some of the questions.

Joshua: I’m good. Unless you want to talk about Nina Gold, I’m good to answer the questions.

Craig: Oh, well, I think Nina would be blushing right now, and I can hear her saying, “Oh, God, no.”

Joshua: She’s a wizard.

Craig: She’s a wizard, and she’s a wonderful person who consistently casts things brilliantly. She casts Game of Thrones. She casts Chernobyl. She casts Say Nothing. She’s just an amazing person. A wonderful person. So well done again, Nina Gold. You’ve done it again.

Drew, would you be so kind as to give us a listener question that we could theoretically answer?

Drew Marquardt: Yes. This question comes from Riley. Riley writes, “I finally got an agent at one of the big three agencies to read one of my scripts, and just before the holidays, he told me we would talk after the holidays, which would be January 6th. I messaged him the morning of the 7th, and he replied that he was currently evacuating his home in the Palisades. On January 10th, I sent him a message saying, basically, I’m so sorry for what he’s going through. I hope he and his family are safe, and of course, no need to respond.
I didn’t mention the meeting or the script.

I haven’t heard from him since, which I totally understand. I honestly can’t imagine what all he’s having to deal with right now. First and foremost, I want to be respectful and compassionate about his situation. I also know the industry is taking an overall hit right now, and I imagine that alongside his personal issues, his current clients are probably reaching out to find out what’s going on with their careers and projects.

Do you think there’s even any time, energy, or bandwidth for him taking on a new writer right this time? And how long should I wait to follow up? I don’t want to reach out too soon and have him say, ‘Never mind. The timing isn’t right. Best of luck,’ but I also don’t want to fall through the cracks or jeopardize this potential opportunity. I also don’t feel comfortable sending the script elsewhere before talking to him first.”

Joshua: We’re going to have to workshop this one because there is not an easy answer for this one.

Craig: No. What do you think?

Joshua: Everything’s upside down right now. I think it’s been upside down for the last couple weeks. I do think that probably Riley is correct in that the agent is probably concerned about their current clients and not thinking immediately about signing new talent. I also know that it can make you incredibly itchy when you’ve turned something in and you’re waiting for a response. I don’t think that Riley should wait for the agent and I think they should try to use any leverage they have to make other inroads.

As far as the timing, the timing is the big question for me. You can wait for months to get an answer from a single person. It’s why Hollywood takes so long to do anything. So I think if they have other relationships, they should use them. Everything is still underwater here. I would at least give it another week for things to get back to relative normal would be my guess.

Craig: Yes, I think you’re right there. Riley, the issue is you aren’t a client there. My guess is this agent is probably not doing a great job of calling back his actual clients because his house may have burned down. If not, evacuation is a brutal thing to go through. I’m going to say I agree with Joshua. You don’t want to stand on ceremony here. He got the script. He has it. He didn’t write back. If you have three other agents that are excited to read this thing, yes, send it. You don’t belong to anybody just yet. I know I like to remind people that agents work for us. We don’t work for them.

I think probably you don’t need to text them again. You just wait now. Joshua says, if you have other opportunities, go for them. There is no hard rule here. He certainly would not be able to say later, “How could you do this to me?” He’s had the script.

Let’s go with Mauro, or perhaps Mauro, in Canada. Drew, what does Mauro wonder about?

Drew: What do you guys recommend to study or watch or practice in order to keep the audience’s emotions in mind when writing? What I mean is taking the reader and hopefully viewer on an emotional journey in an effective way on every page.

Craig: Questions like this always blow my mind.

Joshua: No, but actually, God.

Craig: If you have an answer, that would be great.

Joshua: No. I have sort of an answer, but it’s an annoying answer, which is read the basics, learn the basics, go read the screenplay to Rocky or whatever movie, older movie gets you excited. Find an artist you like and read all their work and then really try hard not to imitate them. I think the bigger thing for me is actually that writers need to go out and live and you have to have life experience truly in order to write something great so that you’re– which is like a corny thing to say, but I really believe it.

When you’re writing, we have a culture that recycles everything right now. A lot of it. For a long time, we’ve been in a backwards-facing culture where we want to make movies that are like the movies we grew up on because that’s the easier thing to do. It’s very easy to go out and say, “I want to make a movie like Fargo, so I’m going to go write a movie that is like Fargo.” Then what you have is a movie that’s like Fargo, but not as good as Fargo. I think the thing that I would really try to do, really recommend is using your personal relationships and saying, “What would it be like if I was writing about my mom?” but doing it on a bigger canvas?

What would it be if– I wrote television and wanted to write television because of The Sopranos. That was David Chase writing about his mom on a bigger canvas. Ultimately, he’s very open about his relationship with his mother being like the seed of The Sopranos. That I think is what artists should be doing. I think you should quietly observe your parents and your friends and just think about writing from the inside out, as they say, after learning the fundamentals. That would be really my recommendation.

Craig: That is probably a more useful answer than the one I’ll give, Mauro, which is to say, I don’t recommend that you study or watch or practice this at all, because if you’re studying it or practicing it, it’s not going to be right. What you’re really getting at, Mauro, is something that is innate to writing and it has to be developed over time. And I think is probably the function of experience. It is the fragmentation of your own brain so that not only are you yourself taking care of all the things that the script needs to be, but you’re also all the individual characters and you’re also the character that’s listening and not talking.

You are also the audience watching all of it. I return to my audience section of my mind all the time. As an audience member, I’m like, do I care? I’m like, how does that make me feel? Just as you need to quadruplicate yourself into four characters in a scene, you also need to be the audience. That is a developed skill. You have to start with some kind of innate understanding of humans and humanity. I completely agree with Joshua that part of this is just going out there and living, but a big part of it is writing stuff down, shooting it, even if you have to shoot it on your camera, watching people watch it, you’ll probably want to throw up and you’ll learn.

Oh, my God, I remember the very first time I sat in the theater and watched something that I had written on screen. It was like I was seeing it for the first time because I was fully the audience and my level of judgment and scrutiny skyrocketed because now I’m a customer. I don’t give a shit what’s happening in the kitchen. I don’t care if the fish delivery was late or the gas stove wasn’t working. I want an awesome plate of food. I don’t care about anything else.

That was a painful wake-up call. I would urge you more to go through as many painful wake-up calls as possible because it’ll speed the process along.

Joshua: That’s a really interesting answer. You asked this question to me earlier about the viewer and your relationship to the audience. I just agree with you so much that the experience of watching your own stuff, it’s just so important. The idea of going out and shooting something just like, yes, please, everyone should be doing that. Everybody should know, even if you don’t shoot it, even if you just give it to some friends to act, even if they’re terrible. Just doing that feels so important.

Then there’s this thing that happens for me where you ultimately stop paying attention to the audience when you write. You tell me if you disagree, but I feel like the artist or the writer or whatever has to be fundamentally very selfish. You have to just care about yourself and the kind of things that you would want to see. Otherwise, you’re fucked.

Craig: That’s you as the audience, right?

Joshua: Yes, it is.

Craig: That’s my point.

Joshua: It’s the same.

Craig: You’re saying, “I want to see this.”

Joshua: I’m saying don’t think about people who are different from you and what they might like-

Craig: Right, don’t do that.

Joshua: -because that’s when you’re dead, right?

Craig: That’s calculating and chasing and that’s horrible.

Joshua: I really think like I just have a feeling like Chris Nolan likes Chris Nolan movies and Michael Bay likes Michael Bay movies, and ultimately, these are biggest directors are trying to on some level make themselves happy.

Craig: That’s a great point. To amend, Mauro, when you are being the audience in your mind, you’re being you as an audience member. Not imagining a demographic or a room full of people. Just you, like what is this working on you? I’ll tell you, the first time you write something and then start tearing up as you’re writing it, that’s when you know that you’ve gotten there, unless you’re writing a comedy. That never happens.

I think we have time for one more question. Victor writes in with a question about citing sources, which is something that I think Joshua and I know a little bit about. Drew, what does Victor ask?

Drew: “I’m working on a historical drama screenplay based on real events and attempting to stay as accurate as possible. This includes taking notes and at times quoting directly from a few books that have accounts of events within the period, as well as biographies and published collections of letters from people involved to use their own words where possible. If this were to be produced, would I need to cite of these somehow, or only the book that is most directly concerned with the time frame and events that I’m writing about?”

Craig: Did you have to go through this rigorous process that I had to go through on Chernobyl?

Joshua: Oh, yes. There was a cite-your-source process with the legal department for virtually everything. You go first. What was it like for you on Chernobyl, which, by the way, I just have not gotten the chance to wax, poetic?

Craig: Oh, geez.

Joshua: No, I won’t. It’s just, it’s such an amazing piece of work. That like the balance between genre and drama, whatever you would call it, the balance of genre filmmaking and genre writing and non-genre writing was just like really at the heart of-

Craig: Thank you.

Joshua: -at the top of mind. You not only made this incredible piece of entertainment, but then also, it felt like it was capturing a fundamental truth that I think, and I think that’s what we’re all trying to search for. You state it so overtly at the cost of the lie right at the beginning. Then you’re like, “This is the thesis, and now I’m going to decimate you with how I illustrate that thesis.” I just thought, beautifully done.

Craig: Thank you. I’m very happy that decimation occurred. As I was going on the journey towards decimation, I had lots of books I was drawing from, some documentaries. I wish I had known ahead of time that I was going to have to go back and provide the sources specifically for all that stuff for HBO. They have a very rigorous guy who is going to stress test everything. It was really just an inefficient process on my end because I had to go back and go, “Okay, at least I have a pretty good memory. This was from this book, this was from this book.” I can hand all those books over, hand over all those sources, hand over the documentaries and say, “Okay, all of this worked out.” There were some interesting questions and challenges, but overall, I think maybe I had to slightly change one thing for legal purposes. I think it was somebody’s name. How did it go for you?

Joshua: Similarly, just extremely rigorous with the legal team. I think there was, you’re citing your sources for everything you want to do. They know that you’re not making a documentary, which is, I think, they know that a certain amount of artistic license has to be taken in any show, but beyond that, they’re pretty strict. All that stuff is very carefully vetted and it’s a challenging but worthwhile process to stress test the thing that you’re making. I would also say though, I would want to add one thing which is probably not the question and tell me if you experienced this, that the research can become a crutch at times.

Craig: Oh, of course, yes.

Joshua: You can have this desire, which probably you and I both had along with the listener, to make it absolutely as accurate as possible. Ultimately, I think in my case, and certainly Craig in your case as well, you can’t know what was said in every room. Because in the case of Say Nothing, it’s about the IRA, it’s a culture of secrecy.

Craig: You say nothing.

Joshua: Yes, exactly. Yours deals with state secrets and things like that. Ultimately, you have to do the research and do as much of it as you can. It’s like a musician practicing scales. You practice your scales, and you practice your scales, and you do your rudiments, or whatever, over and over. Then, at some point, you have to trust that you’ve built enough of a solid foundation that you can go and you can actually just play. Ultimately, do your homework. Do a ton of homework. Do more than you think you need.

Then, at some point, you got to let it go and go and write. Then if it’s lucky enough to be made, which is, of course, a very high bar, only then will you really have to deal with the scrutiny of a legal department. I think you should probably write the best story that you can first, and then hope it survives that process second.

Craig: Fantastic answer. I think we covered all those bases really well for our listeners. Congratulations to you and me for doing so great. Drew, I think we deserve a gold star. It’s time for our one cool thing. It can be anything at all, small or large. I’ll start with mine because it’s so wonderfully stupid today. My one cool thing is eating ice cream as an adult.

Joshua: I love it. I love this one cool thing, by the way, despite being lactose intolerant.

Craig: Same. Ice cream in my mind for so long has been associated with like sin, a weakness, bad health. It’s also like food for children. Every kid has probably gone a little crazy on ice cream, but a little bit of ice cream every now and then, I have to say as an adult, is a lovely thing. It’s just a reminder of something that is elegantly delicious that has been there our whole lives. It is the ultimate comfort food. My method is to put some ice cream in a tiny bowl. This way you won’t go crazy. Because as we get older, it’s a little harder.

Do not eat out of a carton. Folks, stop eating out of a carton. Only bad things will happen from that. Also, you have permission, I grant you permission, from one adult to another, to just eat regular ice cream if you want. You’re not obligated to chase the adult flavors. If you want, whatever, rosemary, chive and black pepper ice cream, that’s fine, do it. If you like vanilla, that’s awesome. One cool thing, if you’re an adult, give it a try, just a little bit of ice cream.

Joshua: I love that. My postscript ritual, whenever any draft goes in, is McDonald’s ice cream and bourbon, which is embarrassing to admit as an adult man-

Craig: Wow. Nice.

Joshua: -but it should be like cigarettes, and I don’t know, something more grown up, but it’s not.

Craig: That’s awesome. What is your one cool thing this week?

Joshua: Mine is less fun and whimsical. Mine is a book that you have maybe read, which is a book about the origins of punk rock called Please Kill Me. Are you familiar with this book?

Craig: I have not, no.

Joshua: Oh my God, it’s so good. It’s an oral history of the early days of punk in New York and then in London from the late ’60s to I think the ’80s. It’s an incredible oral history that really captures a scene and a particular moment in time and makes you envious to not be living in the center of culture, during the peak of culture. Even more than that, I think I’ve said this a few times, but there are moments in the book that you really can’t get out of your mind, that go beyond just rock and roll excess.

I think, I may be getting this wrong, but Iggy Pop is up there doing his very particular thing, birthing a new genre of music, inventing punk. In the process, people are pissed off, and they throw bottles, and he proceeds to roll around in the broken glass as a power move to be like the ultimate “fuck you” to the audience and shock and appall people and continue the show while he’s all cut up and things like that. I think the thing about it that is so incredible to me is that it was this time when art was really dangerous.

It was this time when you could go to a performance and anything could happen. I feel like that is the thing that we’re missing in the age of corporate consolidation. That we’re missing this element of danger and we’re missing this element of like– This is extremely lofty, so forgive me if this is like really pretentious, but I feel like on some level, the question that artists need to ask themselves is, what am I risking by saying the thing I’m going to say? In the case of Iggy, it’s like great bodily harm and death, right?

Craig: Right.

Joshua: I feel like that idea that the artist is supposed to be a risk taker, which is so hard right now with got-you culture and cancel culture and all these things, I feel like that is an important thing to remember that somehow there should be this element of danger. That book captures that spirit in incredibly vivid ways. That would be my–

Craig: All right. That’s Please Kill Me, which is what I say every morning when I wake up, just to myself. Just to myself, please kill me.

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

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. I love drinkware, this is my new favorite word. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the e-mail you get each week as a premium subscriber and thank you to all of our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this every week. Finally, you can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net where you can get all of the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record now on how to make Los Angeles function better.

Joshua, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Joshua: Thank you so much for having me, I really enjoyed it.

[Bonus Segment]

Craig: Okay, Joshua, so this is magic wand time. We just went through this convulsion here in Los Angeles because of the fires and that prompted me to think about the ways our city, and I believe you live here in Los Angeles now.

Joshua: Yes.

Craig: The ways our city could be improved in a functioning way to help. We’re not going to address social problems like mental health right now or unhoused populations or crime. This is just like civil engineering stuff. Let’s start with this question: Should we, after the fires, start to think about leaving some of these places alone? Meaning, should we rebuild in areas where we know fires and mudslides are going to occur?

Joshua: This is a truly tragic question, right? Because as I go through Los Angeles, the dream of LA is that you can be in nature and also be steps away from the city, that nature is at your door. Now this idea that the neighborhoods that are the most ensconced in nature are the most vulnerable is truly tragic. I live in the foothills and I’m unsure if I have to move. I, of course, like everyone, have multiple people in my life who just lost everything. The idea of whether or not we should be rebuilding, it’s a really tricky one. I feel like, as the idealist in me says we shouldn’t give up on that dream.

I think the part of me that wants to be cheeky, if I’m allowed to be cheeky even in a moment like this, is that yes, we should rebuild and everybody should be legally obligated to get a pool. Every home should have a pool and it should include one of the machines that is a real thing that sucks the water out of your pool and uses it to spray down your house. I know a guy who had a pool, had this device installed, and saved his home because the water from the pool was sucked out and covered his house.

Craig: I think that’s–

Joshua: Not a real answer, but like–

Craig: No, but let’s put that under general zoning ideas. It does seem to me that in areas where we know the homes are going to be extremely vulnerable to fire, that we have to improve the infrastructure and we probably have to improve it through zoning. Some of it has already occurred. There are building codes that make homes far more, I wouldn’t say fireproof, but I would say fire resistant. The problem is that those codes were introduced, I think in 2012 or something or 2008, and nothing is grandfathered in because nobody’s going to rebuild their house to match the code.

So, so many of the homes that were built before then, and that’s the majority of homes in LA, are vulnerable. I think zoning laws perhaps coming up with, okay, if you’re in a vulnerable area, you need to install this kind of thing. That makes total sense to me. The other question I have, or it’s just an idea is, I think it’s important to look at some neighborhoods where we know there’s really only one way in.

There are certain areas where there’s one main road. If that main road is blocked off, you can’t get in there either with emergency equipment or evacuation is incredibly difficult.
Because, if you’re in Benedict Canyon, that’s Benedict Canyon. Should we be targeting some of those places and creating additional arteries for movement?

Joshua: When it comes to the canyons, in a perfect world, yes, of course, you would want more than one way out of Laurel Canyon, right? I suppose there are two, there’s this side of the hill and that side of the hill.

Craig: Mulholland and that’s it.

Joshua: But the actual cost of creating multiple exits feels, I’m sure, incredibly daunting to a city that’s already facing enormous unhoused populations, et cetera. I don’t know. You would want to hope that putting in a reservoir that strategically placed reservoirs might help, but the problem is we also have droughts. That’s another piece of the puzzle. I believe that there was a reservoir that they were supposed to be drawing from for the Palisades fire that was dry. Then I heard that they were taking the water from the Hollywood Reservoir to put out the Hollywood fire, which worked, right?

Craig: Right. I think, from what I’ve read, that the Palisades Reservoir probably would not have made enough of a difference, that that fire was just so brutal. Also, nobody could fly. That debate will be going on forever, probably, whether or not it would have mattered. Again, I’m using my magic wand here, but let’s talk a little bit about cost, because anything we do to improve this is always going to come with this enormous cost. That drives me over into traffic, which is another problem that we have in Los Angeles. I’m just trying to make it function better.

We’ve spent an enormous amount of money on creating public transportation, a metro line. Will we finish all of that in time for it to still matter? Are we heading towards a place where either working from home removes an enormous amount of traffic from the freeways, or automatic driving essentially eliminates traffic, because if every car on the road is automatic, self-driving, there is no traffic because there’s no rubbernecking, there’s no accidents.

Joshua: It’s Minority Report, basically.

Craig: It’s Minority Report, exactly. Do you think our future, that LA will function better with more mass transportation or more self-driving buses and cars?

Joshua: Cynically, I think that it will get so bad that half the people will leave and then we’ll be fine. [laughter] No, I think I–

Craig: That’s also a thing.

Joshua: I actually don’t think that self-driving cars will get there to the point where everybody has them in order to get to Minority Report. Everybody needs to have them, every single person. Because you picture Minority Report with the one old Chevy Nova in the middle of the beautifully flowing ribbon of traffic, just causing entanglements. I just feel like, no, maybe in 150 years, but by then, everything’s going to be on fire every other week unless we can fix our global problem of fixing the environment, which is the real issue, right?

I feel, no, just cynically, I don’t think we can look to self-driving cars to save us. Certainly, if the people who are trying to create self-driving cars are the same people who are trying to create them for the next 20 years, make of that what you will, I think we’ll be in trouble. Get over there. No, I think we’ve got to go work it out. I do think that mass exodus is on the table.

Craig: Mass exodus would certainly solve a lot of traffic problems. Here’s something that I think would make Los Angeles function better, at least be more enjoyable. Los Angeles is enormously spread out, we know this, it’s famously spread out, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have, in fact, I think it’s an argument that it makes it even easier to have a very large central park. We have Griffith Park, which is enormous, but it’s like in the hills and its mountains and valleys and hiking.

What we don’t have is that great park in the middle of a city that people can enjoy, that’s beautiful, that is an oasis. It would require, again, enormous amount of public domain and the knocking down of a lot of things, but it seems to me like we could use it.

Joshua: I love that idea. I was just in London for-

Craig: There you go.

Joshua: -a long period of time making the show, and they call the parks, the lungs of London. That was the thing that I liked most about the city. I’d never spent a lot of time there in the past. That was the thing that I think I enjoyed most. I think we could just wipe out everybody who lives in Hancock Park and then just put it all there. No, exactly–

Craig: Wow. That’s where I’m at. That’s literally where I am.

Joshua: That’s where you’re proposing?

Craig: Not in my backyard.

Joshua: No, but where would you put it though? Because I do agree, it’s much better. What we have drawing the people now are like the Rick Caruso mega malls, which are not the lungs of Los Angeles, right?

Craig: No, they are not.

Joshua: We have the Grove and the Americana and that is not doing it.

Craig: There is Pan Pacific Park, which I think could be expanded. The Motion Picture Academy, of which I am surprisingly a member, is certainly screaming right now at the thought that their beautiful new museum and headquarters would be knocked down for park. That seems like a nice place and I also think as you head further south, maybe south of the like the 10, there’s also some nice areas where, again, there’s a lot of commercial stuff which would have to be like, yes, there’s a cost. You have to eliminate things.

You wouldn’t want to eliminate residences, but if we could find some places that are– or downtown, some old train yards and whatever, I would love the idea. I used to live in La Cañada and we would go over to Huntington Park in Pasadena, which is beautiful and we could use one of those.

Joshua: I agree. I would also say that it dovetails into the first question, which is it does feel like the safe way to get nature in your city, right? It is not actually like living in the foothills. It’s going to Central Park. It’s going to Richmond Park or Hyde Park or whatever.

Craig: Hyde Park, exactly. One of the things that I think would make Los Angeles function better is the elimination of jurisdictional fragmentation. I think the rest of the country and the world was very surprised by something we’re all quite used to here, which is 12 different police departments plus the county, plus the state. We’ve got LAPD, but we also have the Pasadena Police Department. We also have Santa Monica Police. We also have West Hollywood Sheriff’s Officers as part of the county. We have California Highway Patrol.

Sometimes they don’t talk to each other. Sometimes you pull up and you’re like, “Oh yes, we’re LA Fire Department.” That’s LA County across the street. The county has to come there and put that fire out. We’re going to put this fire out on this. Everybody else is looking at us like, “Just to make the one thing.” If we could combine it all into one thing, I think that probably would be better. It would be enormous, but I think it would be better.

Joshua: I’m completely with you. I think you see the same thing in medicine, right? Where like, my family’s all doctors. My brother’s a hospitalist. None of the hospitals can communicate with each other because they all speak a different coded language to do their databases. Similarly with law enforcement, I know that lack of communication, certainly when there are crises, and if the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire are any indication, there’s going to be a lot more of those. Responding very quickly is like, right at the heart of stopping some of those events.

I’m in complete agreement. I think, no doubt, they have their bureaucratic reasons, but certainly.

Craig: Oh, yes. Oh, they’re not going to change.

Joshua: I just know mostly the LAPD and the sheriffs, right? There are strange relationships where there will be corruption cases within one department and the other department remains untouched and all that.

Craig: My magic wand is going to try one more thing, and this is perhaps the most magical thinking of them all. The one thing that I think would make Los Angeles function vastly better would be a completely new airport. Air travel, which was once the domain of the wealthy, is now completely democratized. People from every socioeconomic stratus fly, and all of us in Los Angeles, unless we’re lucky enough to go somewhere super local and we can make it to Burbank, we’re all going to Los Angeles International Airport, LAX, which is ancient and stupid.

It is a stupidly designed airport where you have to roll around in a horrible oval loop, everybody’s smashed together. The terminals are subject to refurbishing at great expense, and by the time they’re done refurbishing it, it’s already old and stupid-looking. Security-wise, I think it’s a complete disaster. They’re building a monorail to help move people back and forth, which everybody hates and also probably won’t be done by the Olympics. LAX is just a nightmare. The problem, of course, with building an entire new airport is money, sure, and space.

Airports need an enormous amount of space. If you can build a brand new airport, where would you put it?

Joshua: Oh wow. Obviously, I agree with you. The LAX is the worst airport one could envision. If one were to design an airport built around all the things you don’t want to do, I think you would have LAX. Just to do one Devil’s Advocate, it’s not even a Devil’s Advocate, it’s just, have you ever seen a film called Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round?

Craig: No.

Joshua: There is a film where, I think it’s a heist movie, it’s an old heist movie, the third act of the film takes place at LAX. You get to see LAX in all of its period glory, with the cars that are the right cars, the cars that were intended to be driving there, with all of that beautiful mid-century detailing that it once had before it just became a shit show, and it’s actually really fucking cool in that movie. You realize that it was just built at a time when there was just so much less traffic, and now it’s just congested, it’s worse than the Trader Joe’s parking lot of your nightmares.

If I was going to build it some, can I still wipe out all the people in Hancock Park? Is that still a thing?

Craig: You could. I would take a wipeout here, although that’s really going to be a snarled traffic situation.

Joshua: It’ll be bad.

Craig: And really loud.

Joshua: All I can say is, if we’re waving the magic wand, the Burbank Airport is a delight, I absolutely love flying out of Burbank, it’s quaint. Perhaps if we could just amplify its size and make it our major airport, we would get a chance to redesign the parking, but that would be– if I have advice for anybody moving to LA, it is always fly out of Burbank if you can.

Craig: Yes, fly out of Burbank and take Fountain.

Joshua: That’s right.

Craig: I think we’ve done the best we can to come up with some things that will absolutely never happen to make Los Angeles function better. Almost certainly what will happen is we don’t change at all, and we go through some convulsions from time to time. It is the cost of living here in the city we love. Joshua Zetumer, thank you so much for spending your time with us today, such a fan of your work. Congratulations on Say Nothing, and hopefully we’ll get you back on the show one of these days.

Joshua: That would be great. Thank you for having me.

Links:

• Say Nothing
• Joshua Zetumer
• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
• Difficult Men by Brett Martin
• Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has even more swearing than usual, so if you’re in a car with your kids, this is a standard warning about that.

[applause]

Craig Mazin: Hi. Hello.

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

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is the holiday live show of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are–

Audience: Interesting to screenwriters.

Craig: Every time they do it, they get more and more bored.

John: Yes.

Craig: Interesting to screen–

John: I know. It feels like an obligation. It feels like a chore, but it’s never a chore.

Craig: It’s a little bit like Christmas.

John: Aww. Do you enjoy Christmas? Do you enjoy the holidays?

Craig: I actually love Christmas.

John: I know you like cooking. You like baking.

Craig: I do, but also, I love Christmas because when I was a kid I wasn’t allowed to have Christmas, because Jew.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That was a real thing when I was growing up. Yes, sure. I wanted a Christmas tree and I just thought, “Oh, we can at least get a Christmas tree.” No.

John: No Christmas tree?

Craig: No, because that meant you were “giving in.”

John: See, last night, I was over at Aline’s house, Aline Brosh McKenna from — you know, our Joan Rivers — and she was having a Christmas tree decorating party. It was really, really fun, so I thought maybe you got to have that joy, but no?

Craig: Does it look like I’ve ever had any joy? That’s not what happens, but I do, I love Christmas time. I love Christmas stuff. I love Christmas music. I love the time of year. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m like a little elf.

John: Yes, and you’ve got some red socks on. One thing I always love about this show is this show is a benefit for Hollywood HEART. Let’s remember what Hollywood HEART is. They are a great charity that provides summer camping experiences for kids who otherwise would not be able to go to summer camp. We want to support them every year, so this is a benefit for them. Thank you everybody who bought a ticket tonight. Thank you for great charity. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Thank you, Hollywood HEART for having us.

Craig: It’s great to do this each year, and we give how much? Half of the money to them?

John: We give every single penny out of tonight goes to them, plus we are chipping in on top of that, so we’re matching dollar for dollar. Everything raised here is going to Hollywood HEART. Sorry. Sorry, Craig.

Craig: Okay. Fine.

John: All right. You’re going to have to sell another show or something to make up for what we’re giving up tonight.

Craig: Fine.

John: Let’s talk about tonight. Tonight we have three very special guests. Oh, here’s the thing. The people who are listening to this at home who are clicking through their podcast player, they know who’s on the show, but you in the audience, I don’t think you do. Do you?

Audience: No.

John: Oh, this is pretty exciting.

Craig: Or, they’re like, they just get up and walk out.

John: Like, oh, my God, they’re storming the doors. First off, we have Jac Schaefer, creator of WandaVision and Agatha All Along. She is here to walk us down that Witches’ road. We’ll ask her all sorts of questions about how she put that show together and also why it kind of made me want to become a lesbian. There’s something about that show that just pulled me over in that strange direction.

Craig: How’s it going?

John: It’s going pretty well.

Craig: Great.

John: Looking at Aubrey Plaza and I’m like, yeah, I see that.

Craig: Same. Then we’ll sit down with Brian Jordan Alvarez and Stephanie Koenig of English Teacher. That’s right. To talk about their hit series and how to work with your bestie without killing each other, which I think you and I have done a really good job of.

John: I think we’ve done a pretty good job. We can always get some more help. We can always get some more hints from the experts there. And not intentionally, Craig, but somehow we booked the creators of the gayest shows of the season.

Craig: I’m going to give them a run for their money, I’ve got to be honest with you.

John: All right. Season two, right?

Craig: Yes.

John: All right, and Craig, you have a special game that we’re going to play.

Craig: Yes, we’re going to do a special little Christmas song game in the middle of the show. I’m very excited about it. It’s got a little twist.

John: Craig put it all in the workflow, but he’s like, “Don’t look at it,” so I didn’t look at it. It’s a surprise to me as well.

Craig: You will be a contestant.

John: I’ll be a contestant.

Craig: There will be two exciting guest contestants.

John: Yes. Who just found out they’re going to be a guest contestant. We’re so excited for that. We’re also going to have a raffle, which is raising more money for this incredible charity of Hollywood HEART. Now, there’s three things you can win in this raffle. One of them is a guaranteed audience question.

Craig: Otherwise known as a GAQ.

John: Yes. If you put your name in for the– I hear Megana’s voice laughing. I’m so excited.

Craig: She’s the only one that really loves me.

John: If you put in a thing for raffle, you could get a chance to ask a question of us and this amazing panel. So it’s time to be thinking about what question would you want to ask?

Craig: Yes. you certainly don’t want to flop on the Christmas show.

John: No, you better ask a good fucking question.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes.

Craig: Whoa.

John: Yes, I just swore. That’s how serious I am about this.

Craig: Oh, my.

John: I know, the vapors. We should not waste any more time. Let’s bring out Jac Schaefer, is a writer, director, and a showrunner who created two very witchy series. Jac Schaefer.

[applause]

[Music: The Ballad of the Witches’ Road]

Jac Shaeffer: Oh, I got a little lost on my witches’ road to the stage.

John: Yes, you got to go follow the arrows.

Jac: There were arrows, it couldn’t have been easier.

John: So we played you out to the Witches’ Road song. I want to start with that question. How early in the creation of Agatha All Along, which is so spectacular, but how early did that you know that okay, we need a song, and the song is not going to be theme music, but it’s actually be a fundamental part of the narrative of the series.

Jac: We always knew there would be music because it was so central to WandaVision. I had sort of a checklist for when we decided to do the Agatha show. Here are the things we need. We need another bop, or bops, plural. We need hair, makeup, wardrobe. We need opportunities to see her conning. We needed a meta piece. We needed to examine some form of tropes. The music piece sort of dovetailed with a larger mantra that I had, which is I wanted the show to be a spell. That was my sort of guiding light. As we sort of worked it in the room, I think it was probably three weeks in that it became that the song is the spell. It started as like, it’s the thing that opens the road. It’s the spell that opens the road. Then as we worked it more, it became it’s actually– I’m spoiling everything if you haven’t watched it.

John: I was just going to say that.

Jac: Sorry. Have you seen the show?

John: If you have not seen WandaVision, leave right now and go home and watch it, then listen to the episode afterwards.

Jac: Yes. It became it’s actually the con. It’s Agatha’s con. It’s the spell she is placing on the characters around her, on witches globally and, this was my big aspiration, on the audience. That it’s, she’s pulling one over on the audience with this centuries-long con that is the song.

Craig: In listening to you talk about it, it just sort of reinforces this question I’m dying to ask you. Because in your show and the way your narrative is structured, there seemingly is infinite possibilities. You could do almost anything. I love that you put these interesting restrictions on yourself. I’m really interested when you said work it, right? You guys can go down so many different witches’ roads. How do which ones feel consistent with some sort of, I don’t want to say rules, but a consistency when the nature of supernatural narrative is that you can kind of do whatever you want.

Jac: It takes so much discipline. And it’s something that I learned on WandaVision. Because Wanda’s power is that she can make anything happen, and that’s too much and too big. So in order for it to hold together and be satisfying for the audience, we have to put restrictions on that kind of in every way. One of the early discoveries on WandaVision was we knew we were going to do Wanda and Vision and sitcoms. It was actually Kevin Feige who early on helped us realize that we needed to limit the sitcoms we were doing. Because there’s workplace sitcoms. We were looking at Cheers. We were looking at Seinfeld. We were looking at Golden Girls. We were looking at all kinds of stuff, but it didn’t have any rigor. There wasn’t any reason.

John: Rigor. Great word.

Jac: Because it was like, what is Wanda after? Wanda is after the perfect nuclear family. That actually then pushed to the side All in the Family. It even pushed Roseanne to the side, because any sort of like larger social commentary or reflection, any political element, we were only entertaining aspirational family sitcoms. That was a revelation to me, what that did for us, because it meant that the themes were so supported and her journey was so supported. Then we applied that same ethos and that same sort of restriction in Agatha All Along. It was all about Agatha’s journey and supporting these characters and truly what is a witch? That’s what we came back to every time.

Craig: Got it.

John: That question of what is a witch is what you went into this writer’s room with. As you assembled your team, one thing I really like about how you set up Agatha All Along, is that it is sort of a heist. You’re putting together a team in order to perform a heist, which is to sort of get down this witches’ road. You were assembling a team of writers for this writer’s room. How much did you know on that first day? What could you tell them about, this is what the show is going to be about, let’s work a way to get there.

Jac: Yes. I like to have a very robust document going in that says, here’s what we have, here’s what we’re missing, here is what I desperately want to achieve. With the Agatha document, at the top, it said, “The show is a spell.” Then it was sort of explaining conceptually what I meant by that. For me, it was like The NeverEnding Story, it was The Usual Suspects. It was these pieces where at the end, there is a twist that feels right, but you realize you have been duped, and it’s expansive.

With The NeverEnding Story, it’s like, the whole thing unfolds and you realize you’ve been a part of it the whole time. That’s a children’s movie, but it turned my head around. It was an ecstatic feeling. That was the aspiration, is how do we pull the audience into our coven? One of the ways you do that is you hire the Lopez’s to write an earworm. The song really did cast a spell, and that is a trick of a lot of really talented people. The document is also very brass tacks of like, here are the characters we’re looking at, here is who– Like the Marvel rules to things, it’s like here’s who’s on deck for us. Should we partake? Here’s who we have to stay away from.

I was desperate to have them do a Fleetwood Mac style performance. I didn’t know how it fit. I didn’t know what it was, but I was like, I have this bee in my bonnet and it’s never going to go away. That ended up leading to, has everyone seen the live performance of Fleetwood Mac in their reunions?

Craig: Silver Springs.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: The greatest moment of all time.

Jac: The greatest moment of all time.

Craig: When she screams her anger in his face. Stevie Nicks is singing this song and she’s just singing it right into Lindsay Buckingham’s face.

Jac: Into his face.

Craig: Because it’s about him. I’ll follow you down and I’ll haunt you.

Jac: I will haunt you.

Craig: I will haunt you.

Jac: The sound of my voice will haunt you–

Craig: Forever. He’s like-

[laughter]

and she’s like, no, no, I’m going to say it again.

Jac: She’s like, “I am currently casting a hex on your face-

Craig: It’s incredible, you’ve got to google it.

Jac: -with my talent, with my anger.” I made the room watch it. I talked to the Lopezes about it. I was like, “This is what we’re doing because I believe I saw a witch.” Every time I watch that clip, I’m like, “That’s a fucking witch.”

Craig: She was known as the white witch. That’s what I think they called her, the white witch. Is that right?

Jac: She’s what– she is still on the planet. She’s somewhere.

John: Oh, no, she’s still here.

Jac: Praise Stevie, don’t come at me. That was in the document, was like a thing that I’m like, this is a dream. If we can integrate this in a way that makes sense, let’s do that. We didn’t know the Witches’ road, that was a missing piece. That’s something I call the container, like I need a container and–

Craig: Go into that a little more like as a practical tip.

Jac: I’m relatively new to television, I’m more of a feature person. What I find like enchanting about TV and also terrifying is that it can go in a million directions. How do you organize your episodes? What makes sense to me, and I also love non-linear storytelling, but like, what do you hang on to? The container for me is the thing that holds it all together. In WandaVision, the container is the hex. She created this hex. We made all the rules to the hex. We made sort of like all the sort of limitations of it and how it works and how she sort of has to understand it.

We had a vocabulary for what the different things were. We called them weirdnesses when something odd would happen. On the page, when we were in sitcom mode, the page would look normal. Then when we were stepping out, it would be italicized and have some bold in it. It needed to be organized in that way. That was my first time working with what I call the container.

Then for Agatha, I knew her character inside and out. I knew this was a story of a liar and that the point A to point B was, she’s a liar, we get to see her truth. I knew we were doing her and Billy and what that journey was and what it meant, but I didn’t know where were they going to be. How do we justify–

Craig: What are we supposed to write?

Jac: Yes. What’s the world and how do we make it big enough for the show, but contained enough where it doesn’t fly off into outer space? The road became that thing.

John: Now, one of the challenges you’re facing as you’re coming up on Agatha, which is after WandaVision, we sort of have an expectation of what Agatha All Along is going to be like.

Jac: Yes.

John: You know that each episode has to do certain things, but that the audience is going to have a discussion and an expectation of like, oh, this is this thing, this is this thing. How much, as you were putting together episodes, were you trying to anticipate this is what the internet is going to think is happening next and here’s how we honor that, stay ahead of that, use that to our advantage.

Jac: I don’t really think about it like the internet. I think about it– I’m constantly thinking about an audience’s experience, because what I want more than anything is I want that gasp. That like the moment where your brain starts to anticipate, “Oh my God, is that what’s happening?” That it is and you were right. Oh my God, and that thrill of that. Then, I also want everyone to laugh and it’s great when people cry and it’s great when people sing, but like that sort of thrill that makes you lean forward. What I wanted with this one, like it was so exciting when we hatched– Megan McDonnell is here, and she was one of the writers on episode four in WandaVision. Episode four where we stepped out of the sitcom.

One of the things that I loved about– I’m talking a lot about WandaVision because they’re–

Craig: You worked on it, that’s fine.

Jac: I did. I sort of diagnosed for myself that a sitcom lulls you, that you get into this place of comfort. I can count on one hand the times when a sitcom deviated and how distressing that was and how it made me– Like in Growing Pains when Carol Seaver’s boyfriend died, played by Matthew Perry. I was like, I’m going to throw up. This is not supposed to happen in this world. The idea that we could lull the audience three episodes of like, we’re moving through time and we’re going to episode style each time. Right? This feels good. This feels good.

Craig: Get people in a rut, get them leaning.

Jac: Yes. Then episode four would be like, just kidding. We’re back in the MCU with a different character. We’re like back in time. I wanted to do that again, but I was like, well, we can’t do it in episode four, so we did it in episode six. I tried to bundle it with the mystery of this team. This time when we get our step out bottle episode and we’re backfilling, we’re getting so much more information that the audience has been craving. It’s sort of– If that answers your question.

John: Absolutely. You’re really thinking about how do you make episode by episode so rewarding for the audience that they’re desperate to see the next episode. You and Craig both have the luxury or not like the way TV should be made, which is that week by week, there’s that weekly anticipation of the next episode. Now somebody can stream it all at once, but if they’re watching it in the real time, they’re part of a cultural moment, like trying to figure out what’s happening next.

Jac: Right. I love the theories. They make me really sick and keep me up at night, but like that audience engagement, it’s incredible.

Craig: Do you ever have that moment where you’re looking through some stuff and it’s–

Jac: It’s a better idea than I had?

Craig: No.

Jac: It happens a lot.

Craig: That’s actually never happened to me.

[laughter]

But people are trying to figure out like, this is what’s going to happen, this is what’s going to happen. The more sure they are, the wronger they are. Then one sort of random person says literally everything correct.

Jac: Tiny little voice.

Craig: They don’t even get told no, they’re just ignored.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: Yes, I’m like, you, a screenwriter.

Jac: I know. I wish I could think of an example of when that happened-

Craig: I want to rescue them, you know.

Jac: -a couple of time. I know. I want to be like, oh, I see you.

Craig: Yes, you got it.

Jac: You’re so smart.

Craig: There was like a guy that was like, here’s how I think every episode is going to start and finish in season one of The Last of Us. Nailed it. Nailed it. I was like, gah.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: Everyone’s like, shut up.

Jac: There’s this incredible TikToker and it’s terrible that I don’t know her name. If anyone knows who I’m talking about, please shout her name, she’s really great. She did a hilarious video. I can swear and say–

John: Yes, we understand.

Craig: You fucking can.

Jac: Great.

Craig: It’s fucking Christmas.

Jac: She did this hilarious fucking thing, where she was talking about like– She was like, “What kind of like cunty theater kid queen made The Witches’ Road? Like, ooh, the trial is we got to down a bottle of Merlot. We’ve got to like all like perform like Fleetwood Mac. We got to get together and be a band.” She was like, “Who’s the queen doing this?” And then it’s Billy Maximoff.

Craig: Yes.

Jac: Yes. I sent it to the room and I was like, “This is too delicious. I hope she feels rad when she realizes that she was right all along.”

Craig: That’s gorgeous.

John: Let’s talk about your room. Let’s talk about the room and who you assembled and why you pick the writers you pick. Obviously, you had that first session where they’re getting this document and your goals and plans for it. How do you like to run a room? What does a room look like to you?

Jac: I love assembling a room. I love running a room. I had no idea that this was– I wanted to direct and it turns out I wanted to be a showrunner. The working with a team of brains who are also awesome, fun, smart, funny, great people. It’s just the best. It’s so great. Don’t tell my children. I’m like the greatest joy of my life is working in a writers room. When I was doing WandaVision, I was terrified and I got some really good advice. One of them was my friend, Chris Addison, told me that it’s not my job to have the best idea in the room. It’s my job to be the keeper of the vision. I was like, I can totally do that.

I look for idea machines. I look for people who just think crazy thoughts, but I have of slots. On Agatha, first of all, there were some POVs that I needed to service that I could not do myself. That was crucial. I had chairs for those perspectives. That was going to be vital. Then there were people that I knew from WandaVision who were really suited to this spinoff show that was quite different from WandaVision. It had a different sensibility. It was about sort of bringing the people that I already knew who had the right dimensions to them.

When I look at a room, the first thing is that the people need to be kind and respectful. That’s always where I start, because I personally can’t work if there’s tension or disrespect or anything unpleasant like that, and it also has to be fun. When I read scripts, what I look for like specs and stuff is I look for audacious ideas. I don’t care if people can stick the landing. I don’t care if the end comes apart as long as you gave a shot. It’s really the like, what is the weirdest thing that someone tried really hard to have it hold water on the page?

Craig: Bravery.

Jac: Yes. I hired Giovanna Sarquis on Agatha because she had a character in her spec who was a mother and I believed the mother. Giovanna is a younger woman. She doesn’t have children. I was like, how did she write this middle-aged mom in a way that felt raw? It’s about that. It’s like once I have– Like I hired Jason Rostovsky and he is like a goth horror guy. I was like, I’ve nailed that piece. Then when I’m looking at the other chairs, like that’s covered, so what do I need over here? It’s a toolbox. It’s so fun.

John: Awesome.

Craig: Do we have time for one more question?

John: One more question.

Craig: One real fast one. Just talk a little bit about the challenges of protagonizing someone, because Agatha wasn’t the protagonist and now she’s sort of. Well clearly.

Jac: She’s a protagonist of her own story. That’s for sure.

John: Anti-hero.

Craig: How do you protagonize a character in such a way that doesn’t negate what came before, because side characters are fun and villains are fun and they’re not accountable the way that protagonists are?

Jac: First of all, thank you for not asking how do you make a character like Agatha likable?

Craig: Fuck that. It’s the worst note in history.

Jac: It’s the worst.

Craig: We’ve talked about that before.

Jac: Of course, as a writer you would never say that. Protagonize someone. It wasn’t hard because Kathryn had brought so much to the role of Agatha, so much more than was on the page for WandaVision. We were like, okay, she’s Mrs. Roper and she’s Rhoda and she’s all these other things. Kathryn can do that in her sleep. Then we wanted her to be this like scenery chewing centuries old witch. We’re like, Kathryn can do that as well. Kathryn brought all this texture about what she really wanted, what Agatha wanted. To protagonize, to use your awesome word, this character into her own show, it was following those threads.

Craig: It was already like raring to get out and do it.

Jac: Also, in film school, the like want versus need, I always had a hard time with that. But Agatha, it’s like so clear. She wants power, she needs community. End of story. That’s really what led to the thrust of the show or the kickoff, is like the most hated witch has to form a coven. You have the longest runway.

Craig: Great. Love that. Love that. All right. Interesting.

John: I think it’s time for your game, Craig. Talk us through what we want to do here.

Craig: Oh boy, here we go. Okay.

John: First off, we need to bring up two very special guests.

Craig: Yes, we got to get some guests going.

John: Holidays are a time for family. Let’s bring back some Scriptnotes family here. Two former producers of the Script Notes podcast, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. Can you guys come up?

Craig: Megan and Megana.

[applause]

Craig: Megana, is it true that you just flew back from India literally just to be in this game?

Megana Rao: I was in India.

Craig: Did you literally just got on a plane to be here.

Megana: Yes.

Craig: Thank you.

Megana: Yes.

Craig: For my game?

Megana: Yes.

Craig: Clearly not the case.

Megana: I am hours off of a plane. I also want to put that out there.

Craig: Excellent.

John: Absolutely. All right. Do you guys enjoy– These are Christmas songs we’re doing?

Craig: Yes.

John: Do you guys enjoy Christmas songs?

Craig: Oh, apparently not.

John: Megan MacDonnell, did you grow up with Christmas songs?

Megan MacDonnell: I love a Christmas song.

Jac: Megan MacDonnell is Christmas.

Craig: She’s Christmas.

Jac: Let’s be clear.

Craig: She’s Christmas.

Megana: Do we get to be on the same team?

John: You’re all on one team?

Craig: You can be on the team too.

John: All right.

Craig: Here, let’s switch seats.

Megana: Okay. Fantastic.

Craig: As you guys know, every now and again, John and I like to do a three-page challenge. Today, we’re going to be doing a little Christmas song game. Of course, because we’re writers, I like to concentrate on lyrics. We’re going to be doing a Christmas song three word challenge. Here’s how it goes. I have picked the strangest three words I could find in a Christmas song. They’re in a row, they’re not random. For instance if they were Deck the Halls, it might be “boughs of holly,” and then you go, oh it’s Deck the Halls. That’s it.

I’m just going to give you three words, you have to tell me the Christmas song. If you know it out there, don’t shout it out, just raise you hand.

Megana: Do we shout it out, or we have–?

Craig: You can confer, you can shout. You guys can shout. You guys can do anything you want. You can shout. You can confer. Let’s start with this one: Every mother’s child. Here we go.

Megan: Every mother’s child. Oh, that’s wrong.

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: This is awesome.

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: Does anyone out there know?

Megan: I’ll be home for Christmas? No that’s–

Craig: No.

Megan: No, I’m not saying. That wasn’t an official guess. That wasn’t an official guess.

Craig: Oh.

Megan: What about–

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: Someone’s ready to go in the front row it looks like.

Megana: Silent Night? Sorry, that was my answer.

Craig: No, this show is only like– It’s not five days long.

Megan: So we’re not qualified.

Jac: I can almost hear it.

Audience: The Christmas Song?

Craig: Yes. The Christmas song, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. Every mother’s child is going to spy to see if reindeer really know how to fly.

John: All right.

Megana: Oh, wow.

Craig: All right. See. It’s hard.

John: It’s hard.

Megan: Stop with this game.

Craig: Ready? How about this one, you ding-dongs. I love this one, because this one really speaks to me. How you’ll hate.

John: How you’ll hate.

Craig: How you’ll hate.

Jac: Can we do Christmas movies?

Craig: No.

Jac: I don’t know, Wheelhouse.

Craig: I love saying no like Hannibal Lecter. No.

Megan: How you’ll hate to come in from the snow or something like that?

Craig: Yes, you’re very close. How you’ll hate going out in the storm–

John: Baby it’s cold outside.

Craig: Well, that’s part– No, it’s not. It’s, but if you really hold me tight, all the way home, you’ll be warm.

Audience: Let it Snow.

Craig: Yes. Are you from Australia? Oh, great. I thought I heard let it snorr.

John: Let is snow, all right.

Craig: It is. It was let it snow.

A platinum mine.

Megan: Santa Baby?

Craig: Yes. Santa Baby.

John: That’s a dime.

Craig: Yes.

Megana: You’re so good at this.

Megan: No I’m not, that’s my first win.

Craig: Okay, we’re cooking now. All right, this one is weird. I don’t know why this is in a Christmas song at all. This one speaks to you Jaq: Scary ghost stories.

Megan: [humming] Long ago.

John: Scary ghost stories.

Megana: Is that it?

Megan: Tales of the glories of Christmas. What is the song?

Craig: Yes. [humming]

John: It’s not my favorite things, it’s–

Craig: [humming]

Megan: It’s the most wonderful time–

Craig: Yes, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.

John: It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

Craig: This turned into name that tune, but with so many notes.

The kids bunch.

John: The kids bunch?

Craig: The kids bunch.

John: The kids bunch uo, I assume. Is it a verb?

Megana: The kids would like to bunch up.

John: The kids bunch.

Craig: I like the analysis. Anyone?

Audience: Silver Bells.

Craig: Yes, it’s Silver bells.

Megan: Nice.

Craig: See the kids bunch. This is Santa’s big scene. I told the three words. This one you’ll get: The tree tops glisten.

John: [humming]

Craig: Oh, my God.

Megana: When the tree tops glisten.

Craig: You just said she was the– Yes.

John: Tree tops glisten.

Craig: Keep going. And children listen. To hear sleigh bells in the snow.

John: I’m dreaming of a White Christmas.

Craig: Yes, you are. White Christmas.

Jac: Apparently this is not how my brain works.

Craig: If you don’t get this one, I’m going to lose my mind.

Megana: Me neither.

Craig: Do you recall?

John: Frosty the snowman.

Jac: Rudolph the red nosed reindeer. I got it. I got one.

Craig: Yes. All right: Some pumpkin pie. It’s hard.

Megana: You got it. You got it.

Megan: I’m this close. It’s close. Nope.

Craig: Nope.

Megan: Is it rocking around…?

Craig: Yes it is. Rocking around the Christmas tree.

John: All right.

Craig: All right. Two more: You didn’t hear.

Jac: I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.

Craig: Oh, God. We’re going to turn to the audience?

Megan: What’s the lyric?

Craig: You didn’t hear.

John: You didn’t hear.

Craig: I case you didn’t hear.

Megan: Oh, by golly [crosstalk]

Craig: Yes, of a Holly Jolly Christmas.

Jac: These are all the same song. Right?

Craig: They are not. Last one. Then I’m going to ask a trivia question that connects them all. I know: a circus clown.

Megan: Yes, then we’ll pretend that he’s Parson Brown, it’s Frosted Snowman.

Craig: No. No. No.

Megan: Yes it is.

Craig: No, it’s not Parson brown…

Megan: We’ll pretend that he’s a circus clown.

Craig: Yes.

Megan: It’s not called Frosty the Snowman?

Craig: We’ll have lots of fun with Mister Snowman. Until the other kids come and knock him down. Does that sound like Frosty the Snowman to you? No.

John: Winter Wonderland.

Craig: Yes, you’re walking in a Winter Wonderland.

Megan: Wow, you’re so right. It wasn’t Snowman. Snowman is the clown.

Megana: So certain.

Megan: I was so certain.

Craig: No. All of these are linked by one commonality that isn’t that they’re about Christmas. I’m going to read the names again, see if you can tell. If you know in the audience raise your hand. You’re ready? Maybe they already know. The Christmas song, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. Let It Snow, Santa Baby, It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Silver Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, Holly Jolly Christmas, Walking in a Winter Wonderland.

John: They were all written for movies.

Craig: No.

John: All right.

Craig: That was a great guess. I’ll give you a hint. The answer begins with they were all written.

John: Same composer.

Craig: No.

Megana: Same year.

Craig: No. We have a guess.

Audience: They were all written by Jews.

Craig: Yes.

[applause]

They were all written by Jews. You’re welcome. Great job. Great job.

John: Well done.

Craig: Front row crushing it out here.

Jac: I feel like you deserve a prize.

Craig: Thanks for playing.

Megana: Because that was really good. You guys did great.

John: We did, yes.

Megan: Yes, yes.

John: Phenomenal.

Craig: You did great.

Megana: All contributed equally.

Craig: Yes.

John: Megana, Megan, Jac. Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, guys. Thank you.

[applause]

I love how scared you were. They were all written by Jews. Because if you’re wrong, that’s, what?

John: What?

Craig: Jeez.

John: Oh, my God.

Craig: What the fuck, man. Who are we letting in?

John: I will say as a non-Jewish person, saying the word Jew just by itself is always still a little terrifying to me.

Craig: I’ll give you a pass.

John: All right. Let’s move on with our show. Our next guests have been working together as writers, directors, and actors for almost a decade, making dozens of shorts, web series, three feature films for YouTube. Now they are in one of my favorite shows of the whole year, English Teacher. Please welcome its creator, Brian Jordan Alvarez, and its co-writer and co-star, Stephanie Koenig.

[music]

Stephanie: Thanks for bringing the chairs and couches from my living room.

Brian: Thanks for bringing the chairs and couches in general. We didn’t want to have to bring these ourselves.

John: We try to keep our guests comfortable if possible. Could you hear backstage? Could you identify any of the lyrics in that song?

Stephanie: Yes.

Craig: All right.

Stephanie: What song? Wait, no. The Christmas songs?

Craig: The Christmas songs. Did you do it?

Brian: She was guessing them backstage. Yes.

Stephanie: I understand a couple.

John: You should have said you got them all. Yes. You had an opportunity.

Stephanie: No, I think I really only got one.

Craig: Oh.

Stephanie: I was singing it, and then I had to sing the whole thing to get to the refrain.

Craig: It’s hard because every Christmas song does have three weird fucking words in there, all just for no reason. Yes, and I went right for them.

Brian: Wait, what was the common thread between all of them?

Craig: They were all written by Jews.

Stephanie: Wow.

Craig: No, you didn’t believe me.

Brian: I don’t know whether– I don’t know how to react to this.

John: See, I didn’t either Brian.

Craig: Are you angry?

Brian: No, I just don’t want to have the– I don’t know if you’re kidding.

Craig: I’m not kidding.

Brian: Okay, you’re not kidding. Great.

Craig: I swear to God, I’m not kidding.

Brian: That’s very amazing.

Craig: They were all written by Jews.

Stephanie: Wow, that’s great.

Craig: Apparently John gets nervous when I say Jew.

John: No. When you say Jew, it’s great.

Craig: Oh.

John: It’s when I say it that I feel so bad.

Craig: Well, because you yell it.

[laughter]

Craig: Let’s talk about English Teacher for a moment.

John: Brian and Stephanie, so in this award season, we’re seeing a lot of co-stars who will come on and do interviews for things. They’re just the best of friends when they’re on camera and the cameras are rolling, and you’re always like, do they actually like each other whatsoever? Now, the two of you are genuinely friends in real life. Is that true? You guys have known each other for a minute.

Brian: A long time. 11 years going on 12, I think.

Stephanie: It’s 11 years now. That’s crazy. We hang out all the time.

Brian: We hang out all the time.

Craig: That’s not convincing. We hang out all the time. We’re best friends.

John: Because we hang out some, too-

Craig: We do.

John: -but we also work together, then we have to do stuff together. How do you guys manage a relationship of being friends, but also co-workers who are doing stuff together? Are there tensions? What are things you guys have learned over the years making so many things together about keeping your friendship, but also a professional relationship?

Brian: I don’t think it’s been very hard. We focus on, making sure the friendship is primary. I think that’s the only– If ever we need a reminder, it’s just like, well, the friendship is more important.

Stephanie: Correct.

Brian: The work is– It’s like a privilege.

Stephanie: It’s all the same. It feels all the same.

Brian: It’s all the same thing, yes.

Stephanie: Because when we first met, we met at a student short film.

Brian: Student film.

Stephanie: Student film, we were like the adults in a UC Santa Barbara.

Brian: Yes, we were like the sort of lame hired actors in a student film.

Stephanie: Yes, we really had not much happening.

Brian: We didn’t have anything going on.

Craig: It sounds great.

Brian: Her commercial agent was in the process of dropping her.

Stephanie: Just dropped me, yes.

Craig: Oh, God.

Stephanie: I think she had just sent the email out.

Brian: I don’t think I had representation at all.

Stephanie: I remember the first day on set, we were making jokes about getting dropped. What was the joke? It was something like–

Brian: You were doing the–

Stephanie: Listen, we think you’re great. If at any point you get funnier or you know, if you’re getting prettier, reach back out.

Brian: You were pretending that you were your agent talking to you and I was being you. You were saying, “We’re dropping you because we just have so many people who are better and better looking.”

Stephanie: Yes. You had said the only way we’re going to actually– Because you meet friends when you’re an adult. It’s like you have to really try.

Brian: You have to find an excuse to keep getting together.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. He was like, we should make something to keep hanging out.

Brian: Then we worked on a short that then we didn’t end up finishing.

Stephanie: Never went anywhere. We didn’t make–

Brian: Then we started making sketches. The first night I met her, I was like, so this is the funniest person in the known universe.

Stephanie: That’s what I thought about you.

Brian: Thank you.

John: Aaaw.

Brian: We’ve gotten less funny over time and we’re still supporting each other as–

Craig: On the slow–

Stephanie: I’m now the funniest person in Sherman Oaks.

Craig: Still, that’s legit.

Stephanie: It’s big. It’s big.

John: A thing we talk about on the podcast a lot is, we’ll have listeners write in saying, oh, what should I do? I need to break in. We tell people, make stuff. You guys just made stuff. You’ve made so many things.

Brian: I know.

John: If you look through, your YouTube, you guys have been working–

Craig: You made a song about sitting.

Brian: I know. I did. I’m doing it right now. Crushing it.

Stephanie: Oh, my God.

Craig: Crushing it.

Brian: This thing of telling people, just go out and make your own thing. I keep wondering if there’s ever going to be some new answer to how to break– Because that’s been the real answer for the last 15 years. I think we got lucky because– Maybe we weren’t even at the very beginning of this, but there was a time when you had to spend $100,000 to get a movie made yourself in 1990 or whatever. Then there was the time when you were like, people have these cameras that they thought were good digital cameras. I think they were Panasonics, because it’s big. They’d be like, oh, yes, we’re shooting an indie on this thing. I’d be like, that looks like shit. It looked like a handy cam, I was like, that’s not– I don’t know.

We ended up coming to, into being able to make stuff at a time when– Even very specifically camera-wise, we were shooting our sketches on the Blackmagic Pocket that had a really cinematic look. I had an eye for this stuff, but, the tech was just– It was also when YouTube was just a few years old. You could post something that really looked a bit like a movie on your YouTube channel and then that’s global for anybody who wants to watch it. I guess whenever you come up, you’re finding how to make it work. We would have done that in any era, I think. I think we were lucky in some ways.

Stephanie: What was great was your YouTube channel was sort of like a network of your stuff. I would put– Because I didn’t have a–

Brian: Yes, later when it started gaining steam.

Stephanie: Yes, later. It was just nice to go, okay, well, I’m going to make something for us and put it on your channel, and I know that there’s going to be an audience there.

Brian: Because you made this amazing movie, Spy Movie, that was us as spies, and it was a full feature and then we put it on the YouTube channel and people loved it.

John: That’s great. Talk to us about, the transition between you’re making stuff for yourself versus making stuff for other people, because you both as actors, went off and did other things. You managed to steal so many scenes on Will & Grace in ways that were just absolutely criminal.

Brian: I still have them in my house.

John: Yes, that’s great, you took the scenes with you.

Brian: I’m very grateful to Max Mutchnick and [crosstalk]

John: Stephanie, you were doing other stuff too, but was it hard to think about, okay, we also need to do some stuff together. How do you? As you’re going off and doing your own things and having your own successes, you still want to do stuff together. Is that hard to find those balance?

Brian: It’s so organic.

Stephanie: Yes. It’s just coming out of, how much fun it is to make stuff. Spy Movie was just like, oh, wouldn’t that be so funny if we were two dumb spies? Dumb.

Craig: In terms of that sense of this feels natural, I’m curious, when it comes to your show, were you guys just feeling like, hey, we’re adults now, and who are these children, and what are they about? Because what I find so fascinating about the show is that normally high school shows are about the kids, and this one is not. This is fascinating to me.

Brian: Right. We needed to be the leads. We needed the lead roles, yes.

Craig: That’s actually a great fucking answer. Ask a fancy question, you’re like, idiot, we need to be leads.

Brian: No, this show, maybe it’s more organic. I unfortunately don’t put a ton of analytical thought into most of the things I’m making before I make them. Then as they grow, they end up becoming smarter and deeper, maybe. Really, I was like, this felt like an environment that would make sense. It was also just, Paul Sims, who’s a genius and is TV royalty and has made so many amazing things. He essentially cold called me through my agent because he had seen my stuff online. He was like, “We need to make a TV show together. I did Atlanta with Donald Glover. I’m doing What We Do in the Shadows.” He’s done a million things, he’s amazing.

It was also a little bit fortunately in a moment, or I don’t know if it was fortunate, but it was in a moment when I had given up on making things in the system. I was really focused on acting. I was saying, look, I just came off Will & Grace. I’m doing this movie, Megan, coming up. At that time I had booked the role of Megan, then they changed the part to– I’m just kidding.

Megan, you guys know Megan?

Craig: That would have been better.

Brian: Paul was like, “We need to make a show.” I was like, “Oh, I don’t think I can. I’ve tried before. I don’t know how to get through that TV system.” He was like, “I’m going to show you. You’re coming out of retirement. We’re making a television show.” It was like this moment when someone comes down from heaven and is like, I believe in you. Then it’s literally like, oh my God, I got to go write something. Then I just was like, I don’t know, I’m like a teacher at a high school, and Stephanie’s there and we’re at lunch– Really, it was like that.

Craig: What did he show you in terms of– Well, okay, so you had some experiences as a writer, you mean, trying to work the system.

Brian: We’d had a few developments deals.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. It was like a lot of shows that we were both in. We were like trying to make a show specifically where we were always including each other.

Brian: Yes, able to do our thing.

Craig: Yes, you were getting frustrated as you went through.

Brian: I mean, they just didn’t end up getting made. It wasn’t any more frustrating than anything.

John: Talk to us about it. What did Paul Sims bring into the process that was new to you, that was different to you, that got it passing?

Brian: Every part of it was completely foreign to me. I was just like used to doing everything by myself and just with my friends. Any time there was any somebody being like, we think you should do this instead. I was like, this feels insane. Then like, Paul’s like, it’s okay, you’re going to survive, basically. It’s like, why don’t you just try doing it and maybe it’ll work. Then I would be like, all right. Then the show gets better. Then eventually you’re like, this show is way better than anything I could have made by myself. What the hell happened here?

I got lucky because it’s like, it’s not just anybody who’s giving you, it’s like Paul Sims, it’s like really intelligent people.

Stephanie: Jonathan Krisel.

Brian: Krisel, John Landgraf. These are the best of the best. They’re changing your show very gently. They’re still preserving the whole DNA, golden fiber at the center of your show. This is what people say to me when they see it now, having known my work for years, they go, “Oh my God, your voice survived. Your voice actually got on TV.” That is to their credit, because they know how to make it better and better, but to not break that spirit at the center of it. What I’m saying is like, some places would have made my show worse, but this show I look at it and I go, this is infinitely better than what I started with. It’s John Landgraf, Kate Lambert, Jonathan Frank, Paul Sims, Jonathan Krisel, even our line producer, Kate Dean, Dave King. There’s just high level help of people that have made 20 shows and they just know what’s good.

Especially Paul, I was with him the other day. I was just realizing, I was like, this guy can see story. I once heard of a DP who could just see light in a different way. He can just see what light is doing and Paul can just see story through everything.

Stephanie: Yes. This is like a separate thing, but to see Brian, because I had, worked with him so much on our little sets where we’re putting iPhones in our bras and strapping these bandages around our belly to record sound.

Brian: Yes, for lavalier mics, we would use iPhones with these bandages.

Stephanie: To save on not hiring any sound guy because we didn’t have any money.

Brian: Save the money we didn’t have.

Stephanie: Just like rigging the lights and bringing all the gear and setting up the camera, all that stuff. It was so cool to watch a hundred people do all of that especially on the stuff that Brian was directing, because he’s also showrunning as well. It wasn’t weird. It wasn’t like a different– It felt exactly the same, but he wasn’t having to carry anything.

Brian: Right. That was the thing about making stuff ourselves for so long. It’s hauling the equipment gear.

Craig: It’s the worst thing, and the food is a little better.

Stephanie: The food is great, yes. You don’t have to remember what and be like, I got to go feed them. I got to go feed everybody.

John: We talked about your voice surviving through the process. One of the things about the Evan character, which is so wonderful, is that we see him taking a stand and then realizing that his stand is sort of indefensible or he doesn’t actually– He wants to be the person who fully believes what he’s doing.

Brian: Are you just talking about a specific episode or in general?

John: The gun episode is one of the examples. Also, when a kid comes in and says– Comes out to you, it’s like, what should I do? It’s like, fuck you, yes, talk to someone your age, this is not my experience.

Craig: Go be gay out there. Everybody else is gay. Yes, it’s pretty awesome.

Brian: Thanks. I love that scene.

John: Talk to us about like, those moments and figuring them out on the page, figuring them out on the pitch to the page to how they go through, because it’s your voice. You have to say like, well, no, this will work in my voice. Talk to us about that.

Brian: We have a great writer’s room. It’s a really specific group, and it came together very slowly. I even remember saying to Paul, there are these two guys that write on Shadows and I keep seeing their tweets and it’s Zach Dunn and Jake Bender. Paul was like, “Oh, that’s funny. They were asking about if they would maybe be able to come write on English Teacher with you.” It just came together really organically over time. Essentially we have a great writer’s room and we build these stories that I love and that have this real funny bone. Then beyond that, with the execution, and this comes to Krisel, Jonathan Kreisel too, the execution is where it gets all that flavor, but it’s in the writing too.

I talk a lot about texture, what’s special, one thing that we’re good at is this texture of the show, the way people talk over each other and the way people are reacting to each other. I just think it’s all of that. It’s like we’re writing the best stories we can, but then when we’re on set, we’re trying to figure out right then how to make it funnier. We do it a lot of different ways. We trust our editors, Antonia de Barros and Mike Giambra. They love us sending as many options as we can.

So I’ll do a take where I’m going huge and I’ll do a take where I barely move my face and I’ll do a take that’s like somewhere in the middle. Then we’ll do a take that’s almost– I’ll tell them, okay, now say anything you want, do one that’s like– Doesn’t have to be all improv, but just anything you want to say, like we’ve got the camera on you, so just go for it. Then some that are perfectly descript.

Stephanie: To talk about that scene where the kid is asking for his advice on being gay and he thinks he wants to come out and stuff. I think he’s really good at this, which I’ve noticed in like our sketches.

Brian: Spelling everything correctly.

Stephanie: He knows how to use the apostrophes. There’s a lot of apostrophes in that monologue.

Brian: Unnecessary.

Stephanie: No, it’s like the surprising turns, the left turns that he takes really well in comedies and what makes us laugh so hard.

Brian: Yes, because that’s what we were doing in our sketches too, was sort of being like, you expect this joke and then boom, it does this other thing.

Stephanie: Yes, so I think that’s what the show does so well, is you’re like, you’re getting led into something and then it like takes a left turn.

Craig: I think to do that as well as you guys do, you do need to be in touch with the world around you in a very real way, because that can go on, right? The same concept could be incredibly not funny and sort of upsetting, and then in that case–

Brian: You know what I think the secret sauce is to that? To this exact thing you’re talking about?

Craig: Yes.

Brian: I think it’s the acting.

Craig: Oh.

John: Oh, yes.

Brian: Maybe I shouldn’t say that.

Craig: But you’re saying you’re a good actor.

Brian: Me and everybody else on the show. No, I mean, playing things hyper real.

Craig: Grounded.

Brian: It’s amazing writing, and then you have to have really good, not just good acting, like Oscar winning acting, just acting that knows how to make that joke ripe. I say this because I’m not talking about my own performance. I’m saying like, we really care about the acting on our show.

Craig: It’s serious business.

Brian: We talk about it and we direct it and we need the performances to be a certain way to sell that joke. That moment specifically, when the kid says, “I’m gay,” and then the camera spins around, “I’m like, what? Just go talk to somebody in the hall about this. I can’t help you with this.” Yes, it’s an acting thing and the kid performing it really real. There’s this character in this field trip episode, Sharon, like we call her like stone-faced mom, right?

John: Yes, incredible.

Stephanie: Yes, she was stone faced mom.

Brian: She’s obsessed with these games that these kids are playing. Her acting is so brilliant. We saw all these different tapes for it and everybody was being funny and playing the joke. Then we got her tape and she was playing it like it was like an Oscar movie. We’re like, this was the most serious thing that’s ever happened. She’s like, have you heard about these games that these kids are playing?

Stephanie: We were all like obsessed, obsessively watching the tape.

Brian: it’s only the final piece on an amazing joke, but it’s another critical piece and I think it’s something. Jonathan Krisel also really cares about acting. If you watch Baskets, the acting in that is just hyper natural.

John: Very much so.

Brian: What’s the name of the person who played the mom in the–

Craig: Oh, Louie Anderson.

Brian: Yes. It’s so natural and that’s what we’re going for. Even telling the editors–

Stephanie: It’s the editing, yes.

Brian: -leave the little things where people say things wrong-

Stephanie: The mistakes, yes.

Brian: -or stumble on their words and make people talk over each other.

Stephanie: Like in reality, yes.

Craig: Yes. It’s a testament to you guys how technically good you are. I know that you’re saying you sort of almost stumbled into this situation and somebody plucks you out from the things you do. You have to be very, very smart to come– It needs the smartest people. The attention to detail and how serious you have to be about being funny, it’s incredible and it really shows.

Stephanie: It is also just in the writer’s room. We are like dying laughing.

Brian: Dying laughing, yes.

Stephanie: It’s probably most writer’s rooms for comedies, it’s like the joke that keeps making us laugh will stick in the episode. We’re like, “God, that still makes us laugh so hard.”

John: Talk us through the process of getting a half-hour script out of this. In that writer’s room, you’re coming up with the outline, you’re coming up with the beat, so this is what’s basically going to happen, these are the scenes. One person goes off and writes and brings back a script and then you’re workshopping it or what happens?

Brian: Oh, we’re in the nitty-gritty.

John: Oh, yeah, this is the podcast where we talk about the nitty-gritty.

Stephanie: Scriptnotes.

Brian: Okay. Yes, do we tell you? Do we tell you our process? We’re beating out the story as a group and then generally we’re sending somebody off to outline, and the outline is an outline, but it’s relatively detailed and then somebody goes off to script.

John: Is the outline funny or is the outline just-?

Stephanie: Yes.

Brian: Ideally, yes. Like Stephanie’s outline was fucking funny. [crosstalk]

Stephanie: I thought my outline was so funny.

Brian: Yes. I would say the outline is not as funny as the final script.

John: I would hope. Yes.

Brian: The outline’s not full of dialogue and the dialogue is a large part of also what’s funny, so.

Stephanie: Very true.

Brian: Yes, each part being as funny as possible is certainly ideal.

Stephanie: What I loved so much was it felt so– I felt going off and writing Powderpuff, I was like so taken care of by the story because we had really broken it. We do that with each episode. We would like really all together like break the funniest thing in the scene.

Brian: Yes, I often think going off to script is one of the least labor intensive parts because the outline is so– then you’re just dancing on the outline, but yeah.

Stephanie: It’s like it feels all easy. Isn’t that?

John: Making a TV show is easy is what I’m taking from this. Yes, so easy. Everyone can do it. Why aren’t we all doing it?

Brian: Why aren’t you guys doing it?

John: [crosstalk] We? Come on.

Brian: We have all the best writers.

Stephanie: Actually, only easy because it’s like the funniest people in there.

Brian: Yes. Dave King, Zach Dunn, Jake Bender, Emmy Blotnick. Shanna. You guys know Jeremy and Rajat?

Audience Member: Yes.

Stephanie: So funny.

John: Some people do.

Brian: You got [unintelligible 00:52:50] heading the house.

Craig: These guys know literally everything, by the way.

John: They do. They answer the questions.

Craig: These guys know everything about everything. Geniuses.

John: They should be hosting a podcast.

Brian: Geniuses.

John: Congratulations on your show.

Brian: Thank you.

John: We cannot wait to see what you guys do next.

Brian: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Stephanie: Thank you for having us.

Craig: My pleasure. Thank you.

John: All right. This is the time of the podcast where we do one cool things. Things we want to recommend to our listeners at home, to our audience here tonight. Jac, start us off because you warned that you might have two one cool things.

Jac: Oh, I’ve been sweating this for the 24 hours that I knew we had to do this. I already feel like I’m failing. The thing I am recommending to everybody is the English Teacher. In lieu of that, because everybody here’s a fan, I really loved My Old Ass. I don’t know if anyone has seen that. I think that movie is spectacular. I think it’s a Thanksgiving movie. I think it’s about gratitude. I saw it over Thanksgiving. I did a lot of crying. Aubrey is fantastic in it. Then just to be weird, I’m also going to do a song that is an obsession of mine from Billy Joel’s lesser worshipped era, Downeaster ‘Alexa’. Does anybody know that song?

Craig: Of course. Of course.

Jac: It is a song that really inspires me to write because I feel it’s very atmospheric and it’s very rousing and it conjures a place and a person and it’s very salty. Yes, it’s an inspiring piece of pop music.

Craig: It is Billy Joel’s finest nautical theme song.

Jac: That is correct.

Craig: No question. No question.

Jac: A little weird fact for y’all.

Craig: Excellent. Fantastic.

John: Hey, Brian, do you have one cool thing to share with us?

Brian: I started watching the Netflix reality show about people over 50 dating each other called Later Daters.

John: That’s a very good title.

Brian: It was excellent. I recommend it. There’s one woman in it who’s a total star.

John: Excellent. Nice.

Stephanie: You love reality TV so much.

Craig: I don’t like that we’re in a category that’s called later.

[laughter]

Craig: That’s fucked up.

John: We’re married. We’re good.

Craig: I might be over 55– We’re married, but if we did date, it would be like we should make a reality show out of you.
[laughter]

Brian: That’s freaky.

John: Stephanie, what do you have to recommend?

Stephanie: Wait, can I do two too?

John: Of course, you can do two.

Stephanie: Okay. One’s a quick one. It’s like get yourself a sun lamp. It’s one of those lamps that kind of that same warm lighting that was glazed over you guys.

Brian: You mean like a full spectrum?

Stephanie: It’s a yellow– that. You can have that in your room. At night, you’re like, “Oh God.” It just takes you to a good place. Then real quick, I would say I suggest escape rooms for dating.

Brian: Yes.

John: Sure.

Stephanie: Just a couple– Take one other person that you’re dating to an escape room.

Brian: Especially if you’re over 50.

[laughter]

Craig: We got to book. Hell yes.

John: Stephanie, that is such a good idea. Tell us more because it feels like it reveals something about a person that we’d like–

Craig: Because we love escape rooms.

Stephanie: Do you?

John: We love it. We do escape rooms all the time.

Craig: Obsessed.

John: We’re going some escape rooms things after this.

Stephanie: Okay. Really?

John: Oh, yes. [crosstalk]

Stephanie: The reason I got the idea is because me and my husband will do that. It’s like, “Do you want to go out to dinner?” “No. We’re going to go to an escape room.”

Craig: How many have you guys done, you think?

Brian: 25?

Craig: Oh my God. 25?

Stephanie: 60.

Craig: 60?

John: I’m sure.

Craig: I don’t even think they have that many.

Brian: We’re in triple digits for sure.

Jac: Do you do it with strangers? That sounds weird.

Stephanie: No.

Craig: In the early days, you did.

Stephanie: If they’re open.

Craig: That was like an issue. In the early days, they were like, “We’ve got shove 12 people in.” No one does that anymore.
Stephanie: No.

Jac: You can do it just you and a date?

Stephanie: Yes. With a friend or someone you love or somebody you might love. It does tell a lot about a person.

Craig: Are they dumb, for instance?

Stephanie: That. That. If you’re a really competitive person, it’s like you may want another competitive person who’s like, “This is serious. I don’t want any hints,” and that’ll be for you. You could really suss somebody out if they’re really upset about you not getting something right. If there was a fight in the escape room, it’s like you’re done.

Craig: Wouldn’t the worst person be somebody that is just like, “Why does this even matter?”

Stephanie: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: Date over. Over.

Stephanie: Yes. I’d be like, “Get out. Let me finish it.”

Craig: Yes. Exactly. Go home. I need to escape.

Stephanie: I need to do Welcome To Jumanji alone.

John: That’s a good one.

Stephanie: That’s one of them.

Craig: That’s a good one. Amazing.

John: Craig, what you got?

Craig: My one cool thing, Thin Mint Bites. Have you had these?

John: No. Tell us.

Craig: Oh my God. Thin Mints.

John: Yes, it’s delicious.

Craig: Girl Scouts in combination with Satan. I always thought that the thing about Thin Mints that are so good is the crunchy bit, but there’s just not enough crunchy bit. Then these bastards came up with a way to turn it into this little tiny ball. It’s all crunch with just a little bit of the chocolate on the outside. You feel like, “Oh, I’m just eating one little bit.” Then it’s like bla, bla, bla. They’ve perfected something that I thought was perfect. Christmas time, guys. Thin Mint Bites.

John: Treat yourself.

Craig: Thin Mint Bites. Fantastic.

John: Excellent. My recommendation, one cool thing that’s also very good for Christmas time, it is a show, it’s like number two on Netflix. I’m not the first person to discover the show. It is A Man on the Inside. It is a show by Mike Schur, who’s been on the podcast. He did Parks and Rec, he did The Good Place. You’ll see our own Megan Amram on the show, in a small part.

The star is Ted Danson. He is a retired professor who’s being sent undercover into a retirement home. It is really light and it’s just delightful. Then because it’s so light, it’s like a sitcom, it’s able to hit some surprisingly serious themes of mortality and just losing your sense of autonomy. Really well done. I say Christmas time because it’s actually a show you can put on with your extended family who don’t like each other and you can all watch the same thing and no one will object to it. It’s nice to have TV that is just a common experience for everyone. A Man on the Inside on Netflix.

Craig: Amazing.

Stephanie: Great rec.

John: All right. It is time for our thank yous. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew Marquardt, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, Drew.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also wrote our music tonight. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at JohnAugust.com. That’s also where you find all the transcripts going back 12 years. We’ll have lots of links to things that we talked about tonight, including your shorts and all the other stuff that you guys have done. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They make great Christmas presents. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments. Thank you to all our premium members. Do we have any premium members in the house tonight?

Craig: Oh, amazing.

John: Oh, my God. Look at that, so good.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Premium members also get first notice about live events like we’re doing tonight. Thank you to Brian Jordan Alvarez, to Stephanie Koenig, to Jac Schaeffer.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Do you want to do stuff?

Craig: Sure. Thank you to Kasey Anderson and everyone at Hollywood HEART. Remember, you can learn more about their programs at HollywoodHEART.org. Also thank you to Dax Jordan and everyone in the booth. Thank you to Missy Steele, Mary Sadler, and everyone at Dynasty Typewriter. Thank you to all of you. It is so much fun to get to do this live. Thank you guys for showing up and making us feel welcome.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Appreciate it.

John: Have a great night.

Craig: Have a great night.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, it is time for our audience questions. If we can bring up the house lights a little bit, and if we can bring our producer, Drew Marquardt here.

Craig: Yay, Drew.

John: Sometimes, Craig, in the past, you’ve run into situations where people seem confused about the idea of a question, and you try to give them instructions, and yet still it doesn’t quite work.

Craig: It’s amazing. Every time there’s one.

John: I thought this time we might do some modeling of behavior. Drew, this is an actual question that came in to ask at JohnAugust.com, a legit question, but maybe you could be an audience member asking a question.

Drew Marquardt: Hi, guys. Big fan.

Craig: Get to the question.

Drew: A writer friend of mine recently asked me what I’ll be getting my reps for Christmas, and my answer was I didn’t know that was a thing. Is that a thing? If so, what should I get them?

Craig: That was in the form of a question. It was concise. Loved it.

John: Loved it. Let’s talk about getting your reps, your managers, your publicists, the folks who work for you on your behalf, getting them holiday presents. What do we think? Suggestions?

Craig: Their publicists are here, so they got to lie about that.

John: All right. Let’s think about other folks.

Craig: Like the agents.

John: The agents. Agents or agents assistants.

Craig: Agents assistants, yes.

John: All right. Talk to us about this, because back in the day, I used to know my agents assistants because I would talk to them on the phone all the time, and we don’t talk on the phone that much. I’m just emailing people now.

Craig: Right. Also, back in the day, we were probably sort of their age and we were all sweating it out. Now, it is a nice thing if you can remember and so just make the list of– and it’s a good old fashioned Amazon gift card or an Apple gift card or something like that, so that you don’t have to like use brain power and, “Oh, I wonder what John would like,” whatever. It’s a nice thing to do. The agents deserve nothing. Nothing. They get 10%. That’s enough. It’s enough.

John: Craig’s gift to a manager is not firing them.

Craig: What manager?

John: What manager? Jac, do you have any guidance? What do you think about gifts for your reps?

Jac: This is tricky. It’s making me real nervous. What I do think, like for up and coming writers, I would say you do not need to get anything of monetary value for your representation. I think that holiday gifting in the industry is something that happens when you cross that invisible line into some form of success. I started noticing I was getting gifts from people I wouldn’t have expected to get gifts from after WandaVision.

I am sort of just getting my gifting together because I feel like a puppy that’s learning from like the bigger dogs. I would say, early in your career, absolutely not. Later, you’re sort of indicated. I think the types of gifts that the people who are making money in the industry, it’s like I do think always, always acknowledging a person is the thing. Calling someone by name, wishing them well, sending them an email, giving some lip service to what they have done for you is you can never go wrong with that.

Craig: Great answer.

Brian: I keep it simple. I get each member of my team a brand new car.

John: Okay. Good. Do you let them pick the color?

Brian: No, I pick the color.

John: Drew, thank you for that question. That was a great question.

Craig: Thank you, Drew.

[applause]

John: All right. Now, if you are an audience member who would like to ask a question of us, of our panel up here, this is the time you can line up. Now, John, remember you can ask the first question if you choose to ask the question, but there’s no pressure.

Audience Member: All right. Just for the younger, like the up and coming, just breaking in and are about to spend 8 to 10 years grinding and probably overthinking as you are, like you’re in it though, but you’re at the very beginning. What is the advice? The one thing that sort of, and it’s usually I feel like something simple you would tell yourself.
Craig: What is the advice that we would give our younger selves?

John: Yes.

Brian: Do less, more often.

Craig: Oh. I like that.

Brian: I got that from somebody else, but I’ve been doing that my whole life. Do less, more often.

Stephanie: Like a brick a day is going to build a house?

Brian: Yes. You can build a house by putting one brick down a day.

Stephanie: I would add to that and say, whatever energy you’re putting into something, like energy in will match out. It might not be what you’re expecting, but it always– it’s like if you’re putting it in every day, something will happen.

Brian: Right. There’s no wasted energy. You could spend four years working on a project that doesn’t work out, but that energy will be the thing that made your next project work.

Craig: I like that. What about you? Do you have anything?

Jac: I would say the feeling that you get when you’re like at a bar telling a friend a story and you’re loving telling them the story and they’re loving hearing it and they’re hanging on your every word, channel that into your work.

Craig: Yes. Nice. Ooh.

Brian: Nobody’s ever hung on my every word.

Craig: Lots of snapping. Love that. John, you got any?

John: I do. I will say that too often you’re looking for who is the person who is a few steps ahead of me who could help me out. That’s the mistake. Look for people who are at your level who are trying to do the things you’re trying to do. Make friends with them. Help on their short films. They’ll help on your short films. Rise together with a group.

Jac: So good.

Craig: I love that. I’ll leave you with this very simple one. Do the work. Work. So much calculating, so much guessing, so much thinking, planning, wondering, blah-blah-blah. Do the work. Just do the work. That’ll get you there.

John: John, thank you for your question.

Audience: Good copy.

[applause]

John: Nicely done. Hello. What is your name and what is your question?

Brandt: Hello, my name is Brandt. My question is mainly for Craig, so ‘70s and ‘80s, Airplane, Naked Gun, huge movies, spoof movies. Then ‘90s, early 2000s, Scary Movie and Austin Powers. Today, from 2010s to today, there’s really no spoof movies around. I’m just questioning why you think that is.

Craig: An opportunity first to say rest in peace to Jim Abrahams, who is one of the three members of Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker, and a wonderful man. I think the reason is actually a lot to do with what you were talking about earlier with the way timing and technology works. Back then, a movie would come out and people would talk about it amongst themselves. No one would be talking to each other across the country or the world. Then somebody would say, “Here’s a funny version of that.”

Everything is parodied instantly and publicly, second by second. A parody or spoof is ancient by the time next week rolls around. There’s just no way. When Jerry and Jim and David made Airplane, they were spoofing a movie called Zero Hour that no one had seen from the 1950s. No one lets you do that anymore. No one’s interested in that. It turned into this weird pop culture machine. They are remaking Naked Gun and Seth MacFarlane making it with Liam Neeson, which that’s fucking exciting.

Brandt: Definitely.

Craig: I don’t know if you’ve seen his thing on Ricky Gervais’ Show where he’s, “Let’s do some improvisational comedy.” It’s fucking incredible.

Jac: Even as the Lego cop. He’s so funny.

Craig: Yes, that Lego cop. He’s just like that when he was like the deadpan– that’s my hope, but it’s unfortunately technology.

John: Stephanie, you were about to say something?

Stephanie: I made a spoof and you should watch it if you’re craving.

Craig: Oh, okay.

John: What’s the spoof?

Stephanie: It’s called A Spy Movie. You can watch it on YouTube.

Brandt: Yes. I definitely will.

Craig: How about that?

Stephanie: It works.

Brian: It works. It’s amazing.

Stephanie: It’s because it’s not specifically-

Brian: It’s not topical.

Stephanie: Yes. It’s not parodying– like it’s not doing the exact copy of the scene and remaking it. It’s actually just going–

Brian: The genre?

Stephanie: Yes. Yes, so you have to be less specific about it.

Craig: I think that’s exactly right.

John: Great. Brant, thank you so much.

Brandt: Awesome. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

Stephanie: I’m like shameless plug.

John: Hello. What is your name? What is your question?

Ken: Hi. My name is Ken. It’s for everyone on the panel. When you have a story idea, whether it’s for like an original feature or an episode of something or even just a scene, when you have that first spark, what do you immediately do to get that sort of seed to sprout to become something other than a passing notion? Then, by the same token, when you get further on in that idea and you hit what Aline Brosh McKenna calls the Rocky Shoals and you slow down. What do you do to remember what really sparked you about it in the first place?

John: For me, my first instinct is I do just write it down just so I don’t completely lose it, so I have like a stack of next cards and just like write down the idea so I don’t lose it. There’s something that resonates with me that’ll keep me thinking back about it. If it’s an idea that I do forget about next week, it was never that good of an idea. It’s the ones that keep demanding brain time like, “Oh, that’s a really good idea. I have to remember what that is.” I see some nodding.

Jac: Yes, I agree with that. For me, this is very specific to me, so this isn’t necessarily advice. I find that if I have something I’m excited about, if I tell someone about it, the magic goes away. The longer I keep something secret, the more I nurture it because I am thirsting for the day that I share it. The more sacred– and I can tell when something is very sacred because I have the discipline not to be like, “I had this really cool idea,” Even to my husband, like I just protect it, protect it, protect it.

For me, that works. That’s sort of like hoarding, “It’s my secret treasure,” spurs me on. Then later, when it gets bad, there are people in my life who they’re light helps me. Megan McDonald is one of them, like truly. There are personalities that if I talk to them about the thing, they have a natural energy that reminds me what I love and I can continue.

Stephanie: I follow that. The magic, it going away, is so huge.

Jac: Leaves the building, it’s so sad.

Stephanie: My husband gets so mad at me when I tell somebody an idea that I’ve had. He’s like, “It’s gone, girl. It’s gone.” It’s like 80% of the time I’m like, “Yes, I don’t like that idea anymore.”

John: Great. Thank you very much for your question.

Craig: Thank you.

Christy: Hi, I’m Christy and I’m an actor who’s dabbling in screenwriting. I was wondering if you had any specific, especially because we have some actresses who are like obviously doing more than dabbling.

Brian: What is that can in your hand?

Christy: Oh, it’s wine.

Brian: Oh, nice. You were kind of holding it out.

Jac: I thought you were filming us or something.

Craig: I thought it was a phone.

Christy: It was like a cheers, like top of the morning.

Craig: Okay, cheers. Yes.

Brian: Yes. I’ve been drinking. Yes. I love it. Do you remember your question?

Craig: You’re saying you’re an actor and–?

Brian: Some advice on being an actor and then transitioning to writing.

Stephanie: Yes. Okay. I strongly suggest it’s similar to what John was saying is like finding people that are in a similar position as you that make you laugh or you trust their creativity and you make stuff with them. I don’t know. I just think it’s easier with community as an actor when you’re specifically writing something for you to be into. You usually want to make it. You want to show that it’s just– and it was so helpful to– I swear to God, I would not be up here if I wasn’t also writing stuff for myself. The auditions, the endless auditions that people are like, “Next, next, next. They are not interested,” which is insane.

Brian: Because she’s so fucking good.

Stephanie: It’s just crazy to me. Yes, there’s been so many rejections. Actually, it was so nice. It was so nice. I remember like being like I would come home after like an audition or like a casting director being like– Oh, whatever. I’m not going to say anything. The rejection actually like fueled the writing. It was like you can do something, you can actively do something about it when you are inspired to write.

Brian: I support this. My only question is do you want to make things? Are you more like, “I should do that because people say I’ve got to break in that way.” I don’t know that I have an answer either way. I do think there’s a lot of pressure when you are an actor to figure out how to make something. I was always making things and so were you. We were making movies as kids, like on our handy cam. It’s also like an old muscle.

I don’t know. I would say you can you can also just be an actor and stay on the grind and you will get a part that will get you another part that will get you another. I many times was pursuing that trajectory and had some success that way, and also had more success also making things, so I don’t know. Do you have a natural instinct to write something and film something, or it’s more you’re doing it because people are telling you that that’s the only way to break in?

Christy: I have made things. I feel the same as you where it’s like I did it, it was so hard and I got it made and it got some recognition and people said it was good. Then it’s like, “I guess I’ll make another one.”

Craig: Welcome to writing. Yes, it never ends. “I guess I got to go make another one.” Here we go. That’s what it is. That’s the gig. It never ends. That’s how you know you’re a writer. When you go look– When you hit the end, you’re so proud of yourself for whatever. Give yourself a week… Fade in. Here we go again.

Christy: God damn it.

Craig: I know. I know.

John: Thanks so much.

Brian: Good question.

John: Hello. Can you tell us your name?

Katie: Hi, I’m Katie. In a previous episode, you guys mentioned that it can be helpful to let your representatives pigeonhole you in a genre as a writer so that they know where to put you. You guys have a myriad of different genres that you’ve written for. I’m curious how you navigate transitioning out of that once you have solidified your foundation.

John: Great. That’s a great question. I think what we said on the podcast before is like sometimes it’s useful for people to know what box to put you in just so they have some sense of how to send you out into the world. Yet it can be really frustrating. For a while before Go, I was only getting sent family movies. Things about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. With Go, I was able to say like, “No, I can really write a lot of other things.” Jac, I’m curious for you, as a feature writer, were you pigeonholed originally? Was there a thing that like, “Oh, we’d think about Jac for this, but not for other things.”?

Jac: Yes. I made a feature called Timer. Referring to the previous question.

Brian: I made a one called Oppenheimer so, people watched that too.

Jac: I wrote because I wanted to be a director. I’m not a good actor, so that really resonated with me, the like do you have the creator piece? Because I think that’s really what it is. I made it, this feature called Timer that’s about a device that counts down to the moment that you meet your soulmate. I was going for like an eternal sunshine, kind of a vibe. When people looked at it, all they saw was the rom-com. For a long time, I was the rom-com girl.

John: You’re also a woman. Could that be a part of it?

Jac: Yes.

John: Maybe.

Jac: It was a little bit of a part of it. It was really frustrating. Then I wrote– I was very angry. That’s another thing you said that I feel like when you write out of frustration, it can be really fantastic, like when you’re sick of something. I wrote the spec out of frustration and it was to sort of break out of the box. It got on the Black List. It’s called The Shower. It’s about a baby shower that gets interrupted by an apocalyptic alien invasion.

I was like I can do action. I had no idea how to do action, but I was like– so I sort of burst out of the box with a spec script. In fact, my agents didn’t get it. My manager, bless her, was like, “It’s time for you to leave,” so I left with like no career and a spec script that nobody got that was totally just all about vagina panic. It was me being like every horror movie is just a big, scary vagina and I need to address that in the script.

The script, then it got on the Black List, then I got representation. For my journey, I had to be like I’m going to write the thing. I didn’t feel like it was helpful at all to be in the rom-com box. I do think it is about what a kind of a creator you want to be. Do you want to be a writer for hire who can do any genre, any thing, like whatever? Then you need material that demonstrates that. If you want to have a singular voice, you got to write that singular voice. I think the real answer is what do you envision for yourself and write that.

John: We can stop there. That’s great.

Craig: Terrific.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

John: All right. Our last two questions of the night.

Thomas: Hi, I’m Thomas. This one’s aimed at Brian and Stephanie, but open to whoever.

Craig: I’ll take this.

Thomas: When you’re making your own stuff and you’re excited about it, how do you strike that balance of wanting to show your friends and your contacts and stuff, but also not wanting to seem annoying or needy?

Brian: Wanting to show your friends and your–?

Thomas: When you make something and you’re really excited about it and you want to send it to everyone, but you don’t want to annoy them.

Brian: Oh. That’s a great question.

Craig: Early on when you’re like, “Look, I made another short,” and everyone’s like, “We really don’t care.”

Brian: I have a gift where I’m not afraid to be annoying. My mom, when I was like five, she was like, “When you go to school, don’t care what people think of you.” Obviously, I care what people think of me. It’s also not just that I’m not afraid to be annoying. It’s that just being annoying– I had an older sister, so I just am kind of annoying. Then that’s like– it’s just not all the time, but it’s just a part of my personality where I’m like, even, I don’t know, it’s like part of something I’m comfortable within my relationships. I’m like, “Oh, I’m being a little annoying right now.” I can’t believe I’m saying this publicly. This is crazy.

Stephanie: It’s very endearing.

Craig: You brought your publicist. We will strike it from the record. “I’m annoying.”

Brian: Anyway, hopefully it’s endearing or something.

Stephanie: You’re saying don’t worry about it.

Brian: I’m just saying, yes, I would make something that I thought was funny. I would post it on YouTube, but I would also like send it around to people and be like, whatever. J. Crew is spamming me every day. I can spam my friends.

Craig: He’s got a point there.

Brian: You’re a business. You got to get your stuff out there. What I do say a bit more earnestly is, at first, if the stuff you’re making is good, which I’m sure it is. At first, maybe you’re sort of spamming people or you’re being annoying about sharing it. Eventually, people are sort of thanking you. “Oh my God. I love your stuff.” It’s almost like the same people that were ignoring it at first are like just complimenting it later. I don’t know. It’s like the– and the world will thank you for being willing to give it something that’s cool, that it didn’t have before. Then eventually you won’t be annoyingly spamming people on Facebook. You’ll be here talking about your TV show. That’s cool.

Craig: Yes. If it’s good, it’s not annoying.

Brian: Yes. Yes.

Stephanie: That’s great. That’s amazing.

Brian: It’s okay to be annoying, basically. I think.

Stephanie: Yes. What’s the point? You might–

Brian: Any business is annoying. It’s trying to–

Stephanie: Yes. No, but there’s also just no loss in spamming people your stuff that you made, and you made it. It’s like, “Watch it, damn it.”

Brian: Yes. Exactly.

Stephanie: Send it away.

Craig: I like this.

John: I will tell you that I feel your insecurity there because I’ll post one thing. I posted the one thing that’s all [unintelligible 01:20:16] and then I do it, but then I have friends who are 15 stories in a row for the next two weeks that are proposing another thing. It’s like, “I clicked through and it’s fine.” I’m not angry with them. I would say err on the side of showing too much because you don’t know who’s going to see it, and then when they’re going to see it. People are not going to get annoyed by you. They’re not going to unfollow you, it’s fine.

Craig: I wish that all our emails had the thing that the texts have that says, “Reply ‘stop’ to end,” so that I could respond to a friend with just the word stop.

Brian: But if you think about it, what you are trying to do is make something that the whole world sees. It’s like why would you be afraid of trying to get a bunch of people to see your thing. Isn’t that why you made it? Maybe it’s not why you made it, maybe it’s also you make it because it comes of you and is art and needs to exist, but it’s both, you want people to see it. Don’t be afraid of showing it to people.

Thomas: Thank you so much.

Brian: Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Our final question, and I don’t want to jinx you, but these have been the best questions we’ve had on a live show.

Craig: Oh, that is such a jinx. Oh my God. I would be drenched in sweat if I were you right now.

[laughter]

John: Let’s see if you can hold up to the standard here.

Ben: Oh, no.

John: Oh no. First off, what’s your name?

Ben: Hello, my name is Ben.

John: Hi, Ben.

Ben: I have a question about how writers’ rooms are scheduled and structured. I’m wondering-

Jac: I love this topic, so I’m already in on this question.

Ben: -Is it like a 9:00 to 5:00, a 10:00 to 6:00? Is it every Saturday and Sunday? I just have this irrational fear that if I get staffed, I’ll never see my wife again. I’m just curious how that works.

John: What a good question. Well done, Ben.

Jac: Such a good question. Such a good question.

Ben: Thank you.

John: What an audience. What an incredible audience.

[cheers]

Craig: I think we made it. I think we made it. This is a great audience.

John: Maybe the best audience we’ve ever had.

Craig: I think it might be.

John: It is a Christmas miracle. Jac Schaeffer, we’ve talked about writers rooms a lot.

Jac: We have. I love this question. I stumbled into TV with WandaVision because I was writing features at Marvel. When I got the job, I won the job, they were like, “How do you want to do this?” I was like, “How do I want to do this?” I asked all the smart people I knew who had TV experience and Micah Fitzerman-Blue said to me, “It is possible to have a civilized writers room that is 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, and that you get your work done. You have to be focused. You give them 15 minutes to shoot the shit in the morning. You are clear about what time your lunches are.” He broke it out for me.

My children were two and four. I was like, “This is going to blow up everything.” Also, I was doing TM at the time. I was like, “When does the TM happen?” Transcendental meditation, it’s 20 minutes, twice a day. I don’t do it anymore, which is maybe why WandaVision is probably the best thing I’ll ever make, because I was tapped into something. I’m a kind person and I’m a warm maternal person.

So I was warm, but I was real clear. I was like, “Go to the bathroom when you need to go to the bathroom.” Another thing I was told is let everyone know what the expectations are, and how they can reach you, when they can reach you, when you’re on the clock, when you’re not. I was told to give homework because I was like, “I don’t want to sit here,” like, “We’re not going to stare at each other until it gets funny or cool.” We end, everybody leaves.

I also had an hour-long commute. I was on the West side. We were at Marvel. It was, like, I’m still married and good job me. It’s because of what I did in this room. That’s not every showrunner, that’s not every show, but there are rooms out there that function in a way that support a life outside of the room and also support your creative mind outside the room.

Not everybody is fast in the room. Some of the greatest ideas on both my shows were born of homework, were born of people reflecting. Sometimes they would do it in pairs. They were allowed to stay as long as they wanted to stay. The childless people were there all the time. I promised them we wouldn’t have any overnight work sessions. We ended up doing that on WandaVision, and everyone loved it because it felt like we were kids in a candy store. This is the longest answer forever.

Brian: This is so good. Amazing. I’m learning.

Jac: I believe that we are currently in a moment where people can advocate for their personal lives and for their mental health, and I hope that we stay there. I think it’s about people in charge modelling that, and I think everyone has a right to that. You just have to do your job well. That’s the end of it.

Ben: That’s a big relief, thank you.

[applause]

Stephanie: Are there writers rooms Saturday, Sunday that you guys– Other than Saturday Night Live? That’s not even Saturday.

Jac: No.

Stephanie: I think Saturday and Sunday, you got-

Brian: I think the other thing is they vary wildly.

Jac: Production is totally different.

John: Production’s crazy.

Craig: You need to get a job on one of her shows. [crosstalk]

John: I was going to say.

Craig: You’ve got to get a job first.

Brian: We all want to work for Jac.

Craig: Step one, get a job.

Ben: It’s funny, you mentioned mental health. My wife is a therapist, which is why I’m asking this question for my own mental health. Thank you.

Craig: That’s great.

John: Great question.

Jac: Bless her.

Ben: Thank you.

Links:

• Hollywood HEART
• Jac Schaeffer
• Brian Jordan Alvarez and Stephanie Koenig
• Agatha All Along
• Fleetwood Mac – Silver Springs (Live)
• English Teacher
• A Spy Movie on YouTube
• Sitting
• My Old Ass
• The Downeaster “Alexa”
• The Later Daters on Netflix
• Sun lamps
• Thin Mint bites
• A Man on the Inside on Netflix
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/what-if-hollywood-edition).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 634 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

What if Alexander the Great had died at the Battle of Granicus River? What if Robert E. Lee hadn’t lost Special Order 191? Historians consider these questions as counterfactuals, exploring how major world outcomes sometimes hinge on relatively small moments that could’ve gone either way. Today on the show, we’ll explore a range of Hollywood counterfactuals, looking at some moments, people, and events that could’ve gone very differently. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, capitalism. Craig, is it good or bad?

**Craig:** Uh-oh.

**John:** We will definitively answer the question once and for all.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Oh, boy. Craig, it’s so nice to have you back!

**Craig:** It’s so good to be back. I’m sorry that I was gone for so long. The small matter of directing the first episode of the second season of The Last of Us, which I’m almost done with – we have a few days still outstanding that we need to do in a different location. I’ve been monitoring things on the internet a little bit. People are very clever. They like to see where we’re shooting, and then they have all these brilliant theories about what it means.

**John:** Yeah, and they’re all right. 100 percent of them are correct, right?

**Craig:** I wish I could put my arm around each one of them and say, “No.”

**John:** No. No.

**Craig:** No, most of the theories are incorrect. Some of them are halfways correct. Some of the conjecture is like 28 percent correct. But I do enjoy it all. I like the interest. It’s fun. But I’m mostly done with my directing stuff and very happily enjoying watching the second episode being done from the more traditional showrunner point of view, which is nice. I do like directing, but also, it’s the most exhausting thing ever. I miss it when it’s over, and then while it’s happening, I just keep asking myself why, why, why am I doing – why did I do-

**John:** Hey, Craig. Hey, Craig. I have friends who direct sitcoms, and let me tell you, one week they’re in and they’re out. If you could go back, why not make it a sitcom? Then you could direct as much as you wanted to direct, because it’s just a week of your time. James Burrows is not exhausted the way that you’re exhausted.

**Craig:** No. It sounds like you’re talking about a good old-fashioned three-camera.

**John:** Three-camera, oh yeah.

**Craig:** So you’re really just working on a stage play that three cameras are capturing. You don’t have to figure out angles and coverage and turning around. That sounds wonderful. Plus just a week. Yeah, so if there is some sort of box I failed to check to have James Burrows’s career and money… That sounds like a plan.

**John:** Did I tell you I finally met James Burrows? After all these years, I met him backstage at a play. And of course, as you could expect, the most lovely man.

**Craig:** I would hope so. If he were just unpleasant-

**John:** Yeah, a monster.

**Craig:** … what a weird choice to keep going back and back and back. Those days are kind of over though, aren’t they? The three-camera sitcom is sort of-

**John:** There are more this development season than in previous years.

**Craig:** Oh, interesting.

**John:** Yeah, I think there’s still some hope for it. There tend to be more of the half-hour single-camera things, which again though, are pretty short schedules. Modern Family apparently did a light shoot. They’d show up to the location, they’d shoot every scene a couple ways, and they were done.

**Craig:** Yeah, the classic network model of doing something like that, the standard is shoot a master and then hose it down, as they say, just simple coverage. If you’re shooting a couple cameras at the same time, the thing about a show like Modern Family is the coverage really doesn’t have to be particularly specific. It’s people talking, and what they’re saying and their faces are the most important things, whereas when you get into these big dramas – and the big dramas are like, each episode is kind of a movie.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Eesh. Oof.

**John:** Eesh. Yeah. I will say, the shows that are like The Office or like Modern Family, they do rely sometimes on the camera finding a joke, because the conceit, of course, is that it’s a documentary crew, so the camera’s finding the joke at times. Abbott Elementary has the same thing. But it is much more straightforward. It’s a very survivable life.

**Craig:** I don’t think it requires less skill. It simply is easier from a kind of how much stuff you have to do perspective. But the specific talent required to know where the camera ought to be – and also, editing those shows is very tricky. Editing comedy is incredibly specific.

**John:** Yeah, it is. Let’s get into some follow-up. This is mostly follow-up on things I think you were maybe not here for, but you could still weigh in. Drew, help us out with some follow-up here. Let’s start with the table reads bit.

**Drew Marquardt:** A few episodes ago, Jacob wrote in asking a question on whether you should send a script for a table read ahead of time or have everyone read it cold.

**John:** Craig, what’s your instinct on that? Let’s say you’re doing a table read with some friends. Do you think you should send the script ahead to those folks or have them come in cold to read it? What’s your instinct?

**Craig:** I’m not a huge table read fan. I think I’ve said that as much. But if I were to do one, I would do it cold.

**John:** That was Celine Song’s recommendation as well. Jacob wrote in with some follow-up here.

**Drew:** Jacob wrote, “Our table read was already scheduled for five days after the episode’s release date, so we ended up going with the dual method. Half of the attendees had the script ahead of time, and the other half read cold. And guess what? Celine was right. Our actor friends who had the script ahead of time put way too much energy in coming up with ways to play their characters, and bizarrely, even some had accents. We definitely preferred the read from those who did not have the script ahead of time, but it was still helpful to receive feedback from people who were able to discover the under-the-radar jokes that might’ve required a reread to enjoy.”

**John:** We talked about this with Celine Song. Mike Birbiglia does this thing where in his development process, he’ll have an interim draft. He’ll have a bunch of his friends, and they’ll have pizza and read through his script. That’s an important part of his process. But he really makes sure that they’re not auditioning for roles in that, that they’re there to read the script aloud. That feels like the right instinct here.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s especially the right instinct when you’re dealing with maybe actors who aren’t as experienced or at a particularly high level. So I don’t know where Jacob is in his life and I don’t know if his actor friends are well experienced or highly professional or quasi professional or aspiring. The more aspiring they are, the more important it is to not give them the script ahead of time, because they’re just going to do the thing. They’re just going to do it. They’re going to do the thing where they care way too much. That’s not the purpose. The purpose is, I assume in this case, for the writer to hear the words out loud, note the things that do seem to be working, note where it gets slow, note where it gets too fast, etc.

**John:** We’ve got differing opinion here from a guy who’s done it the opposite way. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Tom Harp says, “I’ve done reads both ways, with writers and with actors. But I wanted to offer my experience as a counter to what John and Celine said. In my own process, my trusted writer friends read early drafts and gave notes. But before I give it to my agents, I always do a read-through with actors.

“During the read, I’m listening to the pace and flow of the dialogue, but maybe the most important part is the Q and A I do afterwards. Actors have a different set of antenna than writers do, and their instincts have saved me several times. I’ve been told, ‘This feels false,’ or, ‘I don’t think my character would do or say this,’ when none of my writer friends noticed it, nor did I, because writers get why the story needs it. But down the line, an actor is going to call emotional bullshit on set, and then you’ve got your production’s boot on your neck as you try and solve it.”

**John:** Not quite on the same focus here. He’s saying that actors do bring something different to a read, because they’re bringing experience of how to sell a line, and they don’t know how to actually do a line.

**Craig:** I’m not going to disagree with Tom, because he’s obviously getting some use out of that. The only flag I would wave here is that casting is a thing. One of the reasons casting is important is because you’re trying to match an actor whose instincts match the instincts of the character you have created. When you have somebody show up because they’re available or they are your friend, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the right casting for that part.

And they may indeed think, “This feels false,” or, “I don’t think my character would say this.” A, it’s not their character yet. And B, they might not be right for the part, for that very reason. That’s not to say that there aren’t going to be things that almost every actor in that spot would go, “Oh, I don’t quite understand why I would say or do this here.” So that matters. That logic is important.

But if you don’t pick up on it until the actor comes up to you after, so you listen to the whole thing, sounds good to you, and then they call, come over, and say, “I don’t think that this… ” Maybe it’s just that the actor is not the right actor for that part. That’s the only thing I would flag there. But if it works for Tom, it works for Tom.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s get to the meat of this episode, which is counterfactuals. Some setup here. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading this book called What If?, which is a series of essays edited by Robert Cowley, about military history. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this book. The important part is that it’s really talking through counterfactuals versus alternative history.

I want to spend a moment to describe the difference between counterfactuals and alternative history. A counterfactual is basically the outcome of this battle or event could’ve turned out different in a way that’s very possible. There’s a distinct moment that could’ve gone either way, a kind of a coin toss. And if it’d have gone the opposite direction, outcomes would’ve been very different.

Alternative history I’ll define as something happened in a very different way or in a different timeline, like what if Africa had industrialized first, or we discovered nuclear power in the 1800s? You’d still get to a place where the outcomes are very different, but it’s not hinging on one moment, one thing where it could’ve gone either way.

So we put out this call to our listeners, saying hey, what counterfactuals do you want us to talk through? Some of them were incredibly useful, but a lot of them were actually just alternative histories, where, like, oh, what if this had happened, or what if this had happened, but it wasn’t hinging on a specific event. It was just like, there’s a different version that came out of here.

Some of the alt histories that people proposed, like what if Zoetrope Studios had succeeded, sure, but it’s not based on one movie succeeding. What if Jacksonville, Florida had become the filmmaking capital of the world? It could’ve happened, because it was an alternative way things could’ve gone, but it wasn’t based on one moment that could’ve happened. Or the wars in Europe, like what if the wars in Europe hadn’t happened or had happened differently, and European film industry became the dominant one rather than American? Again, it’s not based on one event. I just wanted to make it clear that thank you for sending those through, but those are really alternative histories and not the counterfactuals I was looking for.

**Craig:** You were really looking for those fork in the road moments, where there’s definitely-

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** … two ways you can go. Things went left instead of right, but what if they had gone right instead of left?

**John:** Exactly. The first I want to talk through is Edison. Back in 1915, he’d already invented many incredible devices that we use today, electricity. How he was getting electricity and light bulbs and things out into the world were incredibly important. But he also had patents on the original motion picture camera and projection technology. Because he had this patent and was trying to enforce it very vigorously, a lot of people who were trying to avoid his sort of patent thugs were heading out to the West Coast. It’s one of the reasons why the Hollywood industry developed out in California was just to get away from this guy and his very ambitious enforcement of his trademark over things.

He lost a 1915 court case, which was crucial in his ability to constrain how people could use his devices and whether these things he was creating, these projectors, could only show his own creations. This feels like an important moment in terms of the evolution of the early film industry, so 1915.

**Craig:** 1915. You have this court case that basically allows an industry to exist. Prior to that court case, everybody had to go through Edison and his company, the Motion Picture Patents Company. I did not know this until – I’m looking at the article that you linked to in the Saturday Evening Post.

When you say “patent thugs,” you mean it. Edison famously occupied a space in New Jersey. There is an Edison Township, New Jersey. I believe that is named for him. But in West Orange, New Jersey, that’s where his base was. He would hire mobsters – and there sure were a lot of them up there on the East Coast – to literally beat up people, filmmakers that were using cameras and film. Edison’s argument basically was, I control the entire chain of creation of motion pictures, from film stock to projection. And anybody that tried to get around him and do whatever they wanted without getting his approval could even theoretically get physically assaulted.

The court case said no. Basically, the court said you can sue somebody for infringing, but you can’t use your patent as, quote, “a weapon to disable a rival contestant or to drive him from the field.”

This’ll tie into our capitalism versus anti-capitalism discussion later on. We used to be quite invested in busting trusts, monopolies in this country, particularly around then. Teddy Roosevelt was quite the pioneer in that effort to create a healthy form of capitalism. We seem to have lost our way. There are a number of companies, I look around now, who I think Teddy Roosevelt would be thrilled to break apart. But yes, if that goes the other way, then John, you and I are probably working in New Jersey.

**John:** Yeah, I think we’re working for the Edison company or some offshoot of the Edison company. It’s hard to find a perfect analogy for what this system would’ve been like, because it’s not quite like the app store, where everything has to be done through the app store. It’s not quite that. But it is like there’s just basically one funnel, and everything has to either license or be done by this one company. All motion pictures have to go through this one channel, which would be vastly different than what we’re expecting.

Do I think this would’ve lasted forever? No. I think there would’ve been other ways around this, other alternative technologies that didn’t infringe on the patent. There would’ve been ways to do it. But clearly, our early film industry would’ve been very different. What we do goes back to 100 years ago when this was all being figured out.

**Craig:** It’s almost certain that in order to get around this, a healthy motion picture industry would’ve sprouted outside of the bounds of the United States.

**John:** That’s a good point.

**Craig:** Where would that have taken place?

**John:** France?

**Craig:** Europe, certainly. But in terms of what we do, the Hollywood style, the very American style of creating things and making a huge business out of it, as opposed to thinking about it specifically in terms of art and cinema, which is a very European and certainly French way of approaching things.

I think about where I’m sitting right now in Vancouver. Canada would’ve been a wonderful place. The immigrants who founded Hollywood way, way back when, Warner Bros and so on, may have just headed up to Montreal or Toronto.

**John:** Mexico would’ve been another great choice. There’s other venues.

**Craig:** Lots of sunshine.

**John:** Again, we are not legal experts in here. This is really our first glimpse of the history here. But it looks like it’s the projection technology is the issue. Basically, if any projector sold in the U.S. could only project things that Edison had approved, that still would’ve been a challenge for American audiences. It’s not just where you film the things. It’s also how you’re showing the things. It would’ve gotten sorted out. There would be some way to do it, but it would’ve really limited the spread of Hollywood movies.

**Craig:** When you have something that people want, it will find a way to exist. It’s a little bit like Prohibition, which also fell apart a few years after this happened.

**John:** Rather than the manufacture of distribution of alcohol, manufacture and distribution of film.

**Craig:** People want it.

**John:** People want it.

**Craig:** If you really want to go down that other fork in the road, the movie business is run by cartels, and it is an entirely criminal enterprise.

**John:** That would’ve been great. That’s a How Would This Be a Movie, because you can envision that. In some ways, the Man in the High Castle and the hidden films, the stolen films of the alternative history, how this all ties back together, is an example of that. There’s a currency for these films that show what happens in the other timeline.

**Craig:** Yeah, I would see that.

**John:** Our next one is actually similar. This is the Paramount consent decree, which we’ve talked about on the podcast several times. Again, this is a question of manufacture and distribution of film materials.

Prior to going into this, the very thumbnail version of this, the studios were allowed to also own movie theaters, and they could control the entire channel of, we’re making the movies, we’re showing them in our theaters, we’re constraining all of our product. The Paramount consent decree held that the studios cannot own exhibitors, and therefore films from other companies can be shown in theaters.

**Craig:** Had that not fallen apart, I think you would’ve seen a creative paralysis in the business. What happened immediately following the collapse of that was the breakdown of this incredibly formalized manner of presenting art to people.

Even though there are incredible movies that were made in the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s, there were also very clearly rigid constrictions. Because it seems like a long time ago, it’s hard for us to see how fast things changed and how dramatically they changed, because it was before our time. But let’s say you were born in the ’30s. You’re used to watching movies of a certain sort. By the time you get into the ’60s, you now have nudity and graphic sexuality being shown on screen. You couldn’t even show people kissing with tongue, and now there’s sex. It’s kind of incredible how fast it changed, because if the studios don’t control the screens, other people can make movies to put on the screens. That’s the big difference. The other people didn’t have to follow along this rigid formality.

**John:** It’s important to understand this both from a producer and a supplier point of view, because this allowed theaters that were not affiliated with studios to compete for titles they wanted. So it allowed for more independent theaters, but also allowed for filmmaking that took place outside of the studio system. Those are the ones that you first see nudity and moving past the Hays Code and really pushing what cinema could be.

Obviously, this had a huge business transformation on Hollywood, but also had a huge creative impact. If the Paramount consent decree hadn’t happened, we would be in a different place. The irony, of course, is that the Paramount consent decree was overturned in the past 5 years, 10 years. How long have we been doing this podcast? In theory, now studios can own movie theaters. We haven’t seen a huge change in that. They haven’t come in and bought out the AMCs in the world.

**Craig:** Probably because it’s not a great business to be in.

**John:** It’s not an amazing business.

**Craig:** It’s funny, the Paramount decree fell apart right around the time it was no longer necessary, because studios found a new bunch of screens they could control via streaming. However, because of that window from the 1950s through let’s say up to 10 years ago, where the screens were so important, the proliferation of different kinds of content occurred. That toothpaste cannot go back in the tube. We’ve all grown up with and have become used to a certain kind of entertainment.

Ironically, when you look at the movies Paramount itself was making in the ’70s, starting with The Godfather, and onward and the kind of filmmakers they were supporting, they themselves benefited more almost than anyone from this, because they were allowed to make new kinds of things.

The companies do now control their own screens via streaming, but people want what they want. It’s one thing to say, “I want some things that I haven’t seen, but I would imagine I’d like them,” and it’s another to say, “I have seen the things I like. You can’t take them away.”

**John:** Before we move on, I think it’s worth looking at; both the Edison case and the Paramount consent decree, at the time these things were being decided, the justices and everyone else involved couldn’t have anticipated what the long-term effects are. They could only really look at what is this date right now, because they really couldn’t know what was going to come 10 years, 20 years down the road. I guarantee you that there was not an awareness of like, this will change the type of movies that get made if this gets overturned. They were just looking at it in terms of, this is a law, this is restrain of trade, this is anti-competitive, and therefore-

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** … we’re going to knock these things down.

**Craig:** If they had taken the other path, I think we would still to this day have a much more restrained kind of content. People look at the ’70s, the freewheeling ’70s, and the rise of the auteurist and all the rest of it as some sort of product of the cultural revolution in this country. And I would argue that no, that is not the case, that in fact, those things happened because of this court case.

I would point directly at network television as proof, because network television is the control of screens. And when you look at what was allowed on network television and is to this day allowed on network television, it is so much more constrained than what is allowed in movies. It’s not even close. Language, nudity, content. There’s just limits. People lost their minds when, in the ’90s, NYPD Blue showed a butt. A butt. They’re still not allowed to drop F-bombs and so on and so forth. I would just say that’s what movies would be like. Movies would be like network television. You’d be constrained.

**John:** And of course, European cinema, Asian cinema could’ve made different choices. But the problem is, if there’s no way to exhibit those films here, it’s moot.

**Craig:** That’s right. Absolutely. That was always the case. In the ’40s or the ’30s, people referred to – my grandfather referred to French films. Those were sort of early Blue Movies with nudity. Sure. But mostly, it would have operated the way network television still operates, under those constraints, which some people argue are positive on some levels. Creative restraint does force certain kinds of creative creativity. But you would not have the things that we have in movies if this had not gone that way.

**John:** Yeah. Simpler what ifs. What if George Lucas had died in his car accident?

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** This is June 12th, 1962.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** “As Lucas made a left turn, a Chevy Impala came flying from the opposite direction and broadsided him. The racing belt snapped, and Lucas was flung onto the pavement just before the car slammed into a giant walnut tree. Unconscious, Lucas turned blue and began vomiting blood as he was rushed off to the hospital.”

This is George Lucas, who at this time is a promising young film student. I guess he’s made some stuff at this point, but he had not made Star Wars. He had not made Raiders of the Lost Ark. How different would it be if we did not have George Lucas as a filmmaker? What are the knock-on effects of this?

**Craig:** For starters, I just want to say as an unlicensed doctor, if you turn blue and start vomiting, it’s not good. That’s really bad. There’s two ways of looking at this. One way is – let’s go the obvious way – George Lucas doesn’t create Star Wars. He doesn’t bring about the era of the blockbuster. Movies stay a bit smaller. Special effects and visual effects do not advance as far as they did and as fast as they did. The hyper-merchandization of films and the creation of so-called franchises does not occur.

However, a couple of counter-arguments to that. One is that somebody else probably would have done something of the size that would’ve created that anyway. George Lucas was really important, as we’ve discussed, in the creation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I do feel like there’s going to be a – Steven Spielberg was making his own blockbusters, Jaws.

**John:** He’s making Jaws. He’s still making blockbusters.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think there’s going to be blockbusters. But just as importantly, it seems like George Lucas’s brush with fate here was actually quite informative to him as a filmmaker. He sits there in the hospital and starts thinking about what saved his life in that car, and eventually, I think that sort of turns into American Graffiti. There’s this world where it’s like, if he doesn’t get into the – he needs to get into the car accident, I think.

What happens? If he dies in his car accident, we don’t get these movies. If he doesn’t die in the car accident, we do get these movies. We definitely wouldn’t have Star Wars. There would be no Star Wars. That’s for sure.

**John:** A world without Star Wars is different. Beyond the business things you’ve laid out, how it popularized a kind of space opera, children’s stories but for all ages, it did a very specific thing. We already had Star Trek. Star Trek would still exist without Star Wars, but I feel like we kind of need both of those things for in order for us to have-

**Craig:** Sort of. Star Trek is a network television show that gets canceled after, I think it was three seasons. Then Star Wars happens, and shortly after that, Star Trek the movie happens. Star Trek the movie does not happen if Star Wars doesn’t happen. There’s just no chance.

**John:** Very good point. Very good point.

**Craig:** Similarly, all the movies that were inspired by Star Wars sort of happen. The movie that’s coming to mind actually is Dune, because Dune was really the only thing that could’ve been Star Wars, because it preexisted Star Wars as a novel. Maybe the Dune that gets made doesn’t get made. I don’t think the Lynch Dune gets made without Star Wars.

**John:** And the Jodorowsky Dune doesn’t get made either.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s not going to get made either. But at some point, somebody, let’s say it’s Spielberg, in the absence of a huge-

**John:** Or Coppola or somebody.

**Craig:** Or Coppola or somebody. Somebody figures out how to make Dune and gives us the Denis Villeneuve standard type Dune earlier, and that leads – because there’s obviously great interest in those large-scale science fiction fantasies.

**John:** Because it’s crucial to understand there was a huge science fiction community before Star Wars. It popularized it in a way that was important. I think you don’t have the volume of science fiction fandom until you have Star Wars.

**Craig:** Star Wars, it was like giving a very loud and passionate fan base the world’s biggest megaphone, because everybody sort of flooded into the tent. It’s a really interesting thing, a world without Star Wars.

A fun thing I do like to think about when we’re talking about these counterfactuals is that we are currently living in counterfactuals, meaning in our world, Melissa Suzanne – the worst fake name ever – Melissa Suzanne does die in a car accident, doesn’t make blah da bloo, which is the biggest fricking thing of all time in that, and we’re living in the counterfactual where it didn’t happen. We don’t know what we don’t have.

**John:** Exactly. Yeah, we don’t. Let’s talk about another movie that it would be different if it hadn’t existed, which is Titanic. You and I were both in Hollywood as Titanic was happening. Some backstory for folks who don’t know. Filming was supposed to last six months. It stretched to eight months. The budget doubled from a reported $110 million, making it even costlier than Water World’s $200 million price tag. Another counterfactual would be like, what if Water World were a hit? But it was not a hit.

Titanic was incredibly expensive. Craig and I will both testify to the fact that there was real discussion about, “Oh my god, this movie could be a disaster. It could completely tank.”

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** And sink both Fox and Paramount, who were both putting up the money for it. That didn’t happen. It became a giant hit and changed exhibition. It just kept running and running forever, despite its long running time. What happens, Craig, if Titanic had tanked, sunk?

**Craig:** The thing is, we do live in the world where these enormous movies tanked and sunk. That one might’ve killed Paramount. Paramount I believe was the initial production company. And it got so bad that they had to go to their competitor, Fox, and say, would you basically put in all the money we put in, on top of the money we put in, and we’ll give you all of the international, I think is how it worked out. That’s unheard of. I don’t even think it’s happened since on that scale. I think in part it hasn’t happened since on that scale because Titanic did become a huge hit. And the only thing that scares these companies more than a massive bomb is missing out on all of the money of a massive hit.

**John:** Of a hit, yeah.

**Craig:** But I think we would still unfortunately be in a world where some massive films just tank because people take these big swings. The weird thing about Titanic succeeding is that it probably has created more flops in its wake, because everyone goes, “What if it’s Titanic?” Then someone’s like, “We’ve done research, and it’s projected to only make… ” I think Titanic its opening weekend made – $28.6 million is what it made, which is really good for 1997.

**John:** Really good.

**Craig:** Very good opening weekend.

**John:** For a four-hour movie, yes.

**Craig:** Yes, but if it followed what normally happens, which is then the following weekend would be, let’s say-

**John:** Drops 50 percent, 40 percent.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s say the following weekend’s like 15 million, and then it goes to 7 and 3 and 2.

**John:** Disaster.

**Craig:** Oh my god. But in fact, it made more. It went up. I just remember how it just kept making somewhere in the 20s every single weekend forever. There’s never been anything quite like it, box office wise.

**John:** My husband, Mike, was running the AMC Theatres in Burbank at that point. He had 30 screens. And Titanic nearly killed him, because they’d add screenings and those would sell out. So they’d add 9:00 in the morning screenings and not even advertise them, and they would sell out. It was crazy. Yes, it’s really good money for the exhibitors, because they’re getting a cut of that, but it was just so hard on everybody, just staffing those endless screenings.

**Craig:** The creation of that movie was incredibly difficult to do. It is certainly no fun to be making something that massive while the people that are paying for it are freaking out and basically telling you, “We’re screwed.” Making things is hard enough. When you are confidence shaken, it’s really hard, because you already want to curl up and die just from the exhaustion of doing it. And Titanic was an incredibly exhausting thing to make. To think, while you’re making it, that also everyone’s miserable and it’s going to fail, oh my god, how do you even wake up in the morning?

**John:** But you do.

**Craig:** They did, and so people just keep pointing back at this and saying, “Look.” The one thing I think that would be different is maybe there would be fewer flops.

**John:** There’d be fewer big swings. I think there would’ve been someone going like, “No, we absolutely cannot do this thing.” One thing that is different about our current moment is we have some places that have so much money, and they don’t actually need the box office, but they can just spend a ton. Apple, on Killers of the Flower Moon. In any normal situation, that would be a disaster. But it’s not a disaster for them, because they kind of don’t really care about the money. And so they can make a very long, very expensive movie that doesn’t perform at the box office, because that’s not really what they care about.

**Craig:** Yeah, and similarly, Netflix doesn’t – I don’t know what their metrics – I don’t know how any of it works. I work for a company that is oddly old-fashioned in the sense that even though there’s a big streaming service for Max, a lot of people still watch HBO through cable or satellite, and those are subscriber fees that get paid in, and there’s ratings for that stuff. But yeah, Netflix makes these enormous things and go, it kind of doesn’t matter. I don’t understand any of it.

But certainly in the case of Amazon and Apple, those companies are so enormous. Their production wings are such a small piece of what they do, that they can easily absorb any of these things. No problem. The world of Titanic, it was back – I don’t know, who owned Paramount back then? Was it Gulf Western?

**John:** It could’ve still been Gulf Western.

**Craig:** That was a big oil company. If you read about the history of The Godfather, for instance, they were all freaking out when they were making The Godfather, because they were going to lose – they couldn’t stand the notion of losing money.

**John:** There was a history of disastrous films costing studios so much they had to change, like Cleopatra and Fox. We have Century City in part because Fox had to sell off some of that lot to actually earn money, and that became Century City.

**Craig:** Exactly. There’s Heaven’s Gate, which basically destroyed a studio. There’s been movies that were so big and so massive and so horrifying in terms of their costs that just entire companies fell apart.

**John:** A movie that did not cost the company but was a big swing and a big miss was John Carter. John Carter of Mars was a film that Disney made. We’ll link to an article by Richard Newby for The Hollywood Reporter, called John Carter Changed Hollywood, but Not in the Way Disney Hoped. Based on the numbers, John Carter earned $284 million on a $306 million budget. That sounds like, oh, it was close, but of course, there’s hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing on top of that.

Newby argues that Disney realized, like, “Okay, we were trying to create Star Wars. Maybe we should just buy Star Wars.” They might not have reached for Lucasfilm at that moment if John Carter had worked. Possibly. They also were coming off other challenges, like The Lone Ranger, which was another expensive flop. And Newby argues that because of back-to-back misses, Disney got very conservative and were just banking on sure bets.

**Craig:** I’ll push back a little bit on this one.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** It seems like Mr. Newby’s hanging a little too much around the neck of John Carter. Yes, it was a flop, but it wasn’t a studio-destroying flop. $284 million against $306 is not good, obviously, because that doesn’t include the, let’s say, $100 million of marketing. And then, of course, they don’t actually get all the money from the ticket sales, but there was video and all the rest. I’m not sure that that’s why they said, “We need Star Wars.” I think anybody who has the chance to get Star Wars and has the capital to do it and also the brand that would convince Lucas to allow it-

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** … which in this case was Disney and no one else, unless there wasn’t an old existing Paramount that wasn’t there anymore, of the way that he was familiar, yeah, I think anybody would buy Star Wars. I don’t think that you can put too much around the neck of John Carter. The fact is he cites Lone Ranger as an example of how it didn’t help matters. But that’s proof that John Carter wasn’t enough of a cage rattler, because they did make Lone Ranger, so I don’t know.

**John:** Let’s rephrase this though. Let’s refrain it. Rather than saying what if John Carter hadn’t bombed, what if John Carter was a huge, huge, huge hit? What if it were kind of Star Wars level? That I think would’ve been a bit of a game changer, because then it would be validating, like, yes, let’s spend a lot of money, take really big swings on pieces of IP that are kind of known but not hugely known. I would say John Carter of Mars is more in the level of a Narnia book, in the sense of people kind of know what it is, but they’re not necessarily directly familiar with it. That could’ve changed some things. If it were a giant hit, would they still have bought Lucasfilm? Probably, because they would just have so much money.

**Craig:** I think it’s still probably presuming too much logic on the part of the folks that make these things, because there’s always been this strange gravitation towards, quote unquote, IP that I think most people would look at and go, “Okay. If you think that that matters.” When they made – what was the one with Billy Zane? Was it The Phantom?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The Phantom, that was something-

**John:** In Europe, yeah.

**Craig:** My dad was into that, barely, as a child. It was not relevant anymore. But it seemed like, oh, that thing. Now, in the age of algorithm-driven companies, I think the computers, as much as we hate them, probably would’ve said, “Please do not make The Phantom.” But you still see what I would call attempts to recreate other people’s large successes. And they sort of work, or sometimes they don’t work.

Amazon and Netflix, without naming names, have certainly tried to reproduce their – “We want our Game of Thrones. Where’s our Game of Thrones?” Then they go looking for IP that people are sort of interested in or maybe not that interested in. Some of it works great; some of it doesn’t. It’s hard to predict sometimes. There are book series that people love but just don’t want to watch adapted. There are other things that people don’t really care that much about, but when they get adapted, catch on. It’s not as logical as all that.

I think if John Carter had been a hit, I don’t even think it would’ve stopped Disney from buying Star Wars. The only thing that would change: a lot more John Carter movies and then a whole lot more movies that are sort of John Carter-ish that don’t work.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** When I was a kid, my dad said, “You’re going to love these books. When I was a kid, I read them. Doc Savage.” You know the Doc Savage books?

**John:** I recognize the title. I don’t know anything about them.

**Craig:** I think they were, I want to say 1930s era.

**John:** They were pulp fiction.

**Craig:** Pulp fiction, adventure stories, largely for boys, about a group of courageous people that go on to the far-flung reaches. Doc Savage was definitely an inspiration for Indiana Jones and even James Bond to some extent. Every now and then, somebody would bring it up in Hollywood as I was coming up. Now I’m like, that’s so old. Maybe there’d be a bunch of Doc Savage – or a Doc Savage movie would’ve been at a large scale and failed. But I don’t know if the world would’ve changed that much if John Carter had succeeded.

**John:** But Craig, what if Iron Man had bombed?

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** I think we’ve talked on this podcast before – I carried a football on Iron Man for just a couple weeks. I love everybody involved. I got to go to the premier. I remember going to the premier and the after-party at the Roosevelt Hotel across the street and saying, “Wow, that was really effing good. That’s going to be a giant hit.” But I will tell you that there was no guarantee that movie was going to be a giant hit.

You look at the folks involved, like Favreau, so smart, so great, had done some movies, but there was no guarantee that he could direct this movie. There was no guarantee that Robert Downey Jr was a good choice or even a rational choice for this, because he was not in the best place in his career. There were a lot of things that could’ve really derailed this movie, and yet it was a giant hit and started a franchise, which has made billions of dollars for the companies involved.

**Craig:** Billions and billions and billions and changed the shape of multinational mega-corporations.

**John:** It’s important to acknowledge that there were multiple movies before that that had not worked, and we’ve still got the Marvel Universe. But I would argue that if Iron Man had flopped, you doing have the Kevin Feige Marvel Cinematic Universe.

**Craig:** Without question. Without question. You could even go further back and say what if the X-Men movies flopped? Because superhero movies – other than Batman always seemed to work, Superman worked for-

**John:** Sometimes.

**Craig:** … two movies. But the other movies that they tried to do, the other things they tried, it all just, eh. Spider-Man also is another one where if that had not worked right…

There were preexisting superhero films that had done well, but those were not controlled by Marvel per se. X-Men was controlled by Fox. Spider-Man was controlled by Sony. Batman was controlled by Warner Bros. Here’s Marvel as a company suddenly finding a partner to make Iron Man with and do it well, and that directly leads into the entire Avengers thing. It also created all the feeder ones, Thor. Obviously, you never get to Guardians of the Galaxy or any of that stuff.

**John:** No, none of that stuff.

**Craig:** Ever, ever, ever.

**John:** I will acknowledge that if you had Iron Man but didn’t have a good follow-up with that first Captain America movie, it would’ve been much more difficult. But you have to have Iron Man first. But the whole choice to center this whole thread on Iron Man was a weird one too, because he wasn’t the biggest available hero there.

**Craig:** No. I loved Iron Man comics when I was a kid, because the suit’s awesome. But the actual Iron Man stories got kind of morose. He was an alcoholic. The comics went into a whole story about alcoholism.

Also, you would not have the superhero saturation and the way that superhero films… There’s going to be some amazing books written 10 years from now about it. The transformation of our culture by that movie and everything that came beyond it is remarkable. What it did to our business, for better or worse – and in a lot of cases worse – is remarkable. What it did to the visual effects industry but also technology is remarkable.

And then here’s this question: does any of this work without Iron Man? Does any of this work without Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr, or does it just begin to fall apart? Obviously, Marvel has created this incredible system with phases.

**John:** We’re in a struggling phase right now. I think it’s not hard to see. We don’t know what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** I think on our next episode, we’ll talk a little about when you hire stars, how careful you have to be, because they are going to be the face of your entity. In the case of Jonathan Majors, that did not work out well. In the case of Robert Downey Jr, it worked out great. But if you were to look at those two people at the start, I would’ve bet on Jonathan Majors.

**Craig:** I don’t know what was known, but here’s what was definitely known about Robert Downey Jr prior to Iron Man. He had gone through a very long period of substance abuse problems. He had gone through a very long period where he was highly unreliable. He was considered to be mercurial and brilliant but uncontrollable. He had had issues with the law. There was an infamous story where he just woke up in somebody’s bed in a house, because he broke in, because he was completely out of his mind on whatever he was – I don’t know what substances he was abusing. There was this sense that the last person in the world you put an enormous thing on top of would be Robert Downey Jr, and they just went for it.

**John:** They did.

**Craig:** This is the weird thing about trying to game or predict. You want the real hero here. If I can point to one person that is the reason why our culture is full of superhero movies and why Marvel is worth as much as it is and has had as much success, Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr’s wife and producing partner, who is the stabilizing force in his life, who clearly got him back on track and got him sober and focused. If Hollywood could give a Nobel Prize, it should go to Susan Downey. She’s remarkable. As far as I’m concerned, Marvel should write her a check for a billion dollars.

**John:** Let’s do a very short version on this. We’ve talked about fin-syn before. Fin-syn limited the degree to which networks could own the production entities. It’s like Paramount consent decrees in the sense of it’s about how much vertical integration you could have over the course of production. It was abolished in 1993 by a decision. It counts as a counterfactual, because the decision could’ve gone the other way. In a short version, if in 1993 fin-syn hadn’t been eradicated, how would Hollywood look different today?

**Craig:** Oh, boy. You can argue in a lot of different directions here. The deal with fin-syn is it created a system where the only people who could afford to produce television good enough to be on networks were companies that could afford to operate under a system called deficit financing. The only way you could make money making a television show, because the networks couldn’t make them – therefore the networks made money off of licensing, so the networks pay you money to license the show you produced. They run it on the air, and then they sell ads. The amount of ads that they sell hopefully is way more than the licensing fee they’re paying you. But how do you make money? You don’t, because the licensing fee doesn’t even come close to paying you back.

**John:** To covering your costs.

**Craig:** Doesn’t even come close. The only you make money-

**John:** You’re relying on syndication.

**Craig:** Exactly. Basically, you need a hit. If the show makes it to, 100 episodes was considered the classic number to hit, then it could be syndicated, meaning it could then go into reruns. At that point, it just starts to spin off insane amounts of money through licensing fees forever. The game was, right, we’re going to lose a whole lot of money to make a whole lot of money. The only people that can afford to do that are very large companies; in this case, movie studios, basically. Those were the ones doing it.

**John:** If fin-syn hadn’t gotten shut down, you can imagine somehow more capital would’ve flown in to create more things that were like the Carsey-Werners and that stuff. The experienced producers would somehow be able to raise enough money to be able to make the shows they’re going to be able to make. But it would still be dicier. Those people would be very wealthy in hits, but these companies would also go bankrupt more often. Generally, you want to strike down vertical integration where you see it, because it is anti-competitive. It can drive down wages for people, because there’s fewer places you can sell your thing.

But it would’ve greatly changed how we’re doing stuff. It’s hard to know what would this look like in today’s streaming world, because there are companies that bring their own money to do stuff today. Those things still exist. It’s just different. You have the Legendaries. You have the Fifth Seasons. You have the companies that actually are coming in with their own money to do stuff. It would look a lot different. I can’t even suss out what the real changes would’ve been.

**Craig:** I think that you would probably have had much larger productions. We can look at companies that are not impacted by fin-syn. Fin-syn fell apart. But when you look at Netflix, for example, Netflix produces and distributes their own material. They are not beholden to these rules. The reason that fin-syn was a thing is because it applied to broadcast television. Broadcast television used the public airwaves to send their signals out, so the government therefore had the ability to get in the way and create regulations. There’s no regulations on an end-to-end agreement like Netflix, where they’re not using public airwaves whatsoever.

**John:** The FTC or the Justice Department could still come in there, but without the broadcast aspect of it, it’s much harder to enforce anything like that. It’d be much harder for them to win the judgment they would have to win.

**Craig:** Yes. The government has a clear, established interest in the rules regarding the use of public airwaves, going all the way back to the age of radio and so forth. But with internet carriers, it’s different. Netflix and companies, Amazon, etc., they’ve never operated under anything like this. They’ve always been able to make their own stuff and exhibit their own stuff. And what you see are massive productions, because there is no arrangement where you deficit finance in the hopes for syndication, and meanwhile the exhibitor is making money off of the sale of ads. In fact, Netflix and Amazon don’t have ads, although now they’re starting to. But even then, they’re starting to just put more money in their pockets.

I don’t know how the finances of these companies work, but you could argue that for Amazon, for instance, it’s possible that their production wing is really a loss leader, and it is a deficit financing, just to drive customers to their other aspect, which is buying toilet paper and pencils. I don’t know. But it does seem like if there had not been fin-syn and the networks could’ve reaped the benefits of their own syndication, that probably you would’ve seen some larger productions happening.

**John:** Last bit of counterfactual. Remember when Netflix was red envelopes you got in the mail?

**Craig:** Yeah, I actually do.

**John:** What if Netflix had stuck with their DVD model, that they were a company that sends you DVDs?

**Craig:** This is a great one.

**John:** They never started a whole streaming business. How would the world be different if Netflix hadn’t started the streaming revolution?

**Craig:** I’m going to contradict myself a little bit here. Most of what I’ve been saying is when the world wants something, it finds a way to get it. In this case, I suspect that if Netflix hadn’t done what they did, nobody would’ve done it. The reason why nobody would’ve done it is because I’m not sure it, meaning the streaming model, actually makes sense. We watched this happen. Netflix did this. They churned through an enormous amount of money to build the business out of nothing, a little bit the way Amazon did with their larger business.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Then everybody else said, oh my god, we have to do it too. Then they all looked at each other and went, “How do you make money doing this exactly?” That makes me suspect nobody would’ve done it, because it doesn’t make sense. A lot of what we all went through with our convulsions in the labor movement in Hollywood was trying to make Hollywood confront the fact that they had blown up a system that worked fairly well for them and fairly well for us. They had blown it up chasing something that wasn’t like them and something that they could never be like. I think the world would be enormously different if Netflix had just stuck to the red envelopes.

**John:** Counterfactual to your counterfactual. I would say that internet video is going to want to happen. The fact that YouTube exists, there was a market for – people wanted to watch things through video. Even before we had Netflix, we did have webisodes of your favorite shows. The idea that we were going to be getting our TV or TV-like things over the internet I think is kind of inevitable.

The business model behind that could’ve gone many, many different ways. But I do think you would’ve ultimately seen things that looked like Netflix that were using money they got from investors to create shows and put them on the internet. And some of those would’ve grown into things that are maybe not the size or scale of what Netflix became, but it would’ve been big enough that even the other studios would’ve developed their own wings that were doing that kind of stuff. We would’ve gotten to something that looked like what we’re doing now, but just not with the full scale.

**Craig:** I think you’re right that in terms of a distribution platform, places like YouTube would’ve absolutely worked, and they kind of were. If you think back to what we were arguing about in our penultimate strike, the big concern was that the companies were going to use the internet to run our content and have ads run in it, just like it would on any syndicated channel, but because it was the internet as opposed to Channel 5 in New York, that somehow residuals wouldn’t apply.

I think YouTube did and continues to have a very robust system where they run ads. Yes, I think they would’ve struck deals with the companies to rebroadcast stuff. I think the whole thing of like, “YouTube is going to make its own stuff,” they sure tried. It didn’t work. What was it, YouTube Red? That was sort of a thing. Is it still a thing? I don’t even know if it’s a thing.

**John:** They got rid of YouTube Red.

**Craig:** They got rid of it. They got rid of it. Quibi. Good lord.

**John:** If it weren’t for Netflix, then we would’ve never had Quibi.

**Craig:** We would’ve never had the 4 million easy jokes about Quibi. The idea that these independent internet companies would… Remember Amazon Studios? Remember us discussing that whole baloney nonsense?

**John:** Yeah. They were always looking to do a thing. But again, Amazon still, with all their money, they probably would’ve tried to develop something that – again, it’s not Netflix, but they would’ve developed their own-

**Craig:** Maybe.

**John:** … video streaming service.

**Craig:** Maybe, or maybe they would have just said, “We are happy to be in the business where we pay you a licensing fee to rebroadcast your stuff on our platform,” just like Walmart pays for the DVDs that they then resell. And then Amazon, just like anything, will collect the ad money, and that’ll be that.

**John:** They probably would’ve looked at YouTube and said, “We want to be in the YouTube business,” and the revolution of that.

**Craig:** Where the internet was before Netflix decided to go bananas was this… You and I got yelled at a lot, as I recall, for decrying the concept of the democratization of entertainment creation. There are certainly a lot of people making money as influencers and all the rest of that, but that’s its own category.

There was this moment, and we were podcasting through it, where these companies were like, “The only reason that everybody doesn’t have great television to make is because of the gatekeepers, and if we just allow everybody to … ” No. The answer to that is no. None of that would’ve happened. None of that ever will happen. That’s not a thing. It doesn’t happen. It’s hard to do what we do. There are not a lot of people who do it.

It’s sort of like saying, “We’re going to democratize Major League Baseball. Everybody can show up and play.” Nope, actually, we still just want Juan Soto, which as you know, Juan is going to take the Yankees to the World Series this year. I know that you’ve been thinking it.

**John:** I basically stay awake at night really thinking about all the scenarios that gets him to the World Series.

**Craig:** Soto and then Judge, that number 3, number 4 lineup punch. We’ve talked about it a lot. It’s a big deal.

**John:** There are so many scenarios that it’s why I can’t sleep.

**Craig:** There’s really only the one scenario.

**John:** But you never know. The counterfactual is that, what if he gets hit by a bus, and therefore-

**Craig:** I’ll tell you, if Juan Soto gets hit by a bus, the Yankees will have another season like they did last year, which is really bad. David Benioff, John Gatins, and I have a little three-person group chat that is just nothing but us complaining about the Yankees. That’s all we do. It is just a constant ruing. This season hopefully will be different.

But in any case, I really think that what Netflix did was so improbable and so risky and so crazy. I’m still waiting for gravity to kick in.

**John:** It has basically worked for Netflix. It has not worked for everybody else. Netflix now actually makes a profit. But it was a wild, wild gamble. And they were able to use cheat money to do it. The circumstances worked out the way they worked out.

**Craig:** The circumstances worked out the way they worked out. I think the proof is in the pudding. Even as Netflix started to be successful, the legacy companies still weren’t like, “Oh god, we gotta … ” No, they were like, “Great. Keep licensing our stuff. Here. Friends. Give us money. You can run Friends.” It really wasn’t until they felt that there was an existential threat to their existence, and I think that was a miscalculation, by the way.

**John:** Here’s a question for you. Let’s say streaming never happens. Netflix doesn’t happen, and streaming never happens. Do the cable companies get even more powerful? Because they were the people not making the shows, but controlling access to people’s TVs.

**Craig:** Cable and satellite become more powerful. It is possible that a company like YouTube, which has successfully replaced a lot of cables and satellite dishes, would have become the other new dominant delivery system, but they would’ve been a delivery system. They wouldn’t have been a creation/delivery system. That’s the difference.

**John:** I agree. Let’s wrap up our big counterfactuals segment here talking through why I think it’s useful. It’s because when you look at the coin tosses, the ways things could’ve gone one way or the other way, you recognize that, as you said before, Craig, we are in a counterfactual. We’re in somebody else’s counterfactual. Things worked out the way they worked out, but they were not inevitable. We have to be mindful that the choices we make now will have repercussions down the road that we can’t always anticipate. I think it’s always nice looking at this ecosystem we find ourselves in was not the only possible version of this.

**Craig:** No. It is an either distressing or comforting notion to think that we are in the alternate reality, and in our version of the sim that we all live in, yeah, we’re missing some awesome things or we dodged massive bullets.

**John:** For sure. Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** We haven’t done a One Cool Thing together for a while.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Mine is on post-quantum cryptography, which is a mouthful but actually makes a lot of sense. I’ll link to an Apple Security blog post they did about it. The idea of post-quantum cryptography is – obviously, cryptography is so important for securing our communications. It’s making sure that the things we want to say private stay private, and messaging, all that stuff. Right now, we are using cryptography which is so strong that computers could spend 1,000 years trying to break the codes behind stuff, and they wouldn’t be able to open these messages. The problem is, at some point we’re going to get to quantum computers that are so powerful and so fast that this cryptography will fall apart. It will not be useful.

And so a thing that is happening is very well-resourced companies or nations can just say, “Okay, we’re going to suck up all this data. We can’t actually process it now. We can’t actually break the codes. But we know that in a couple years, we will be able to.” This becomes like, then how do you prevent that?

This paper goes through these plans for and these actual new algorithms to figure it out, for living in a post-quantum cryptography world, so basically, how do you encode things now so that as quantum computers come online, you still can’t open those messages.

The good news is there’s math that can get you there, so that it’s still going to be incredibly difficult for these super-super-super-computers to open those messages. There are things you can turn on now or soon in these messaging platforms that will keep stuff locked down whenever these quantum computers come online. Interesting. I like that it’s both dealing with problems now and problems 10, 20 years from now.

**Craig:** That’s smart. Phew. There is a problem I hadn’t thought of. Thanks. Now I’ll be awake at night. My One Cool Thing is a bit sweeter, pun intended, but also a bit sad, and somehow one of the most gripping articles I’ve ever read about marshmallows.

**John:** I love marshmallows.

**Craig:** John, have you ever had a Smashmallow?

**John:** I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Neither did I. Drew, Smashmallow?

**Drew:** I’ve never had a Smashmallow.

**Craig:** Apparently, these were a bit popular a bit ago. There’s this guy, Jon Sebastiani. This is an article in Business Insider. Jon Sebastiani is a scion of a big wine company in Sonoma. He created the company Krave, with a K, which makes fancy beef jerky and so forth. He got into this new area of creating fancy marshmallows, fancy handmade marshmallows that were delicious and had lots of different flavors, and they were hand-cut. And people really dug them.

Then he decided, “It’s time to upscale this business. Let’s go big.” What ensued was an incredible collision of desire and reality, on an engineering level, because as it turns out, making marshmallows to scale is enormously hard. The marshmallows that we all know, Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, Kraft marshmallow type marshmallows, the reason they are the way they are and they just all vaguely suck is because that’s as good as they can do. Even the shape is necessary. Those are cylinders. Smashmallows were handmade. They would make these big slabs and cut them in squares, and people really liked the squares. Making squares at scale, making cubes, really, really hard.

What happens and how this whole thing falls apart is actually fascinating from a chemical, physical, and business level. And of course, it all comes tumbling down. There are lawsuits. And Smashmallow is no more.

**John:** It’s great. As I’m skimming through this article, it’s the Theranos of marshmallows.

**Craig:** Isn’t that great? It really is. When you read it, you’re like… People were lying. He’s looking for this company that can build new machines to make the Smashmallows at scale. This company, I think it’s in the Netherlands, says, “We can do it. We can do it. We’re going to send you a sample of what we made to show you.” He was like, “Oh my god, you did it.” The big secret was they didn’t make that sample with a machine at all.

**John:** It was handcut.

**Craig:** They just lied.

**John:** They lied.

**Craig:** They just lied.

**John:** They lied.

**Craig:** Just lied.

**John:** This past week, I had to go in for a blood test, and I remember coming back and telling Mike, “Man, I was there, and it just seems really inefficient. I felt like there’s a way you could have a machine that could just do this for you.” I’m like, “Oh shoot, I’m pitching Theranos, aren’t I? I’m going to stop right now. I am pitching Theranos.”

**Craig:** Just to tie back to our counterfactual, was her machine called the Edison?

**John:** Maybe so. A counterfactual is, what if she’d actually been able to make that machine? In theory, it’s a really good idea. But apparently, it’s like the Smashmallow. Yes, you think you should be able to make that thing, when it turns out you can’t.

**Craig:** I think if she had been able to make that machine, somebody would’ve made that machine already. When she was like, “We’re going to take a drop of blood and do all of your blood tests from a drop of blood,” I remember her mentor at Stanford, this wonderful professor, just said to her, “No. That is literally physically impossible on a molecular level.” But there was maybe slightly more of a chance that the marshmallow thing could’ve worked.

**John:** I’m sure that professor would’ve told Thomas Edison that he couldn’t make a motion picture projector, and look at him, he did.

**Craig:** Definitely a better chance of that than the-

**Drew:** Theranos machine ever working.

**John:** Theranos machines. Craig, a pleasure talking with you again.

**Craig:** Great to be back.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Hooray!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Zach Lo. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We love when good outros come through. Reminder that outros involve some version of (sings). You can hide it in there, but I’m always listening for it. Sometimes we’ll get these outros that are like, that is musically beautiful, but it’s not a Scriptnotes outro. You gotta get that in there. We gotta hear that.

Ask@johnaugust.com is also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That is also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The one this past week was really good. It’s about oases and the moments in a story where characters find a bit of respite and escape from the plot and how important those are in stories. Inneresting.

We have T-shirts and hoodies. 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 record on capitalism.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Yay.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Craig, it’s so nice to have you back.

**Craig:** Great to be back, John.

**John:** Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, capitalism.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** It is the water we are swimming in. It is the system of finance and economics that we’ve grown up in. At the same time, when I see people complain about things in the world or about technology or about AI or other things, I’m like, yeah, but that is actually just capitalism you’re concerned about. That’s just how things are. Craig, I’m curious, when were you aware of capitalism?

**Craig:** Early age. Social studies class. You learn about different forms of economy. Certainly, we learned about the alternatives. In the ’80s, there wasn’t a lot of discussion of capitalism as a problem.

**John:** Yeah, because we had capitalism versus Communists. It was us versus the Russians.

**Craig:** There was the middle ground of socialism. But I think there was also a less angry discussion over it. Deregulation began in earnest under Ronald Reagan in the ’80s. But prior to that, we had and still have things like Social Security, which has the world “social” in it, which people that hate socialism are really angry about if you say that you would take it away. We have Medicare, and we have Medicaid, and we have Workman’s Comp, and we have Disability, and we have taxes. The thing is, we do live in a socialist system. I don’t know how you can’t, other than some sort of Ayn Rand fantasy-ville.

Capitalism was never seen as some sort of pure thing, but rather it was a negotiating thing. Tying back to what we were talking about earlier with Edison, one of the things we learned about quite a bit was how capitalism unchecked became a real problem around the turn of the century in the United States, the turn of the 20th century, and Sinclair Lewis and child labor, the meatpacking industry, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, labor movement, and all that leading into the busting of monopolies, robber barons, etc. There was a time when in our country, capitalism got out of hand, and the government stepped in and put it in check, and it hasn’t done so again effectively since.

Where I’m sitting here, I agree with you. When people are complaining, what they are complaining about is capitalism. But from my point of view, I would say what they’re really, really, really complaining about is the dysregulated capitalism.

**John:** We were alive during the time of Reagan and, “We’re going to take away all these rules about stuff that are holding us back.” And it’s hard to remember that there was a time before then, when there were more controls over what people could do, what companies could do and the size and scale of what they’re able to do.

I remember my dad worked for AT&T, or Bell Labs, and when the phone monopoly got broken up, I was like, “Oh my god, what are they doing? That’s crazy.” But it was the right choice, in retrospect. It was a dumb system we were living in. The innovation that was possible afterwards was important.

Let’s talk for a moment about definitions of what capitalism is, because there’s things that are in capitalism that are also common in other systems too. But important distinctions: the idea of a competitive market, that you want to have multiple companies competing for buyers, and buyers can choose between places they want to buy from; the sense of price finding, that there’s not a set price, but the price will find its right balance based on supply and demand; the idea of private property, property rights recognition, which includes patents and trademarks and copyright; the idea of wage labor, which seems so basic, but obviously in a lot of other economic systems, you don’t get paid wages for things.

You could argue, was America set up under a capitalism system? Kind of. The term wasn’t really used. But we also had slavery, so you can’t say that we were under any true wage system.

**Craig:** We certainly were not.

**John:** No. It’s complicated, but I think we have this fundamental belief and understanding that America has always been this capitalist nation. It’s like, not really.

**Craig:** No, we were more akin to a feudal nation. I think our economy was somewhat feudal. Obviously, there were two economies in the early United States. But one economy was victorious in the end, and that was industry. The growth of industry and the Industrial Revolution created what we consider capitalism today, I do believe. That was also what Marx was reacting to, and Hegel and the rest of them.

What industry did was create a both tremendous energy of creation and freedom and wealth, and also terrible exploitation and destruction. On one hand, industry – which we have in our brains converted into technology, but if we lived in China, we would understand is also industry, where everything is manufactured still – has led to longer lives, has led to tremendous advances in technology that liberates and connects. The creation of simple things like washing machines was essential to the liberation of women, who were traditionally stuck washing clothes literally all day.

But without regulation, almost every single time, what ends up happening is terrible pollution, the abuse of children, the underpayment of labor, extremist slavery, and then monopolization, which undoes what you call price seeking and freedom and actually begins to destroy creativity, and it kills itself. Capitalism is like bacteria that works well in our body until it runs rampant and then it can kill us.

**John:** A term I hear used a lot is late-stage capitalism. I wasn’t even quite clear what people are trying to refer to with it. It’s basically this moment that we’re in right now that has not just giant corporations, but multinational corporations, where you can’t even point to a center of them. They’re harder to control and regulate because they exist beyond national boundaries.

A thing that we’re both agreeing on here is that capitalism relies on a government system to enforce contracts and do certain things, and yet as individuals, we rely on the government to protect us from the worst abuses that these companies are going to enforce upon us. That is a real challenge when companies exist beyond all conceivable boundaries. It requires multinational government agreement on how to deal with these corporations. That’s not a thing that we really have a good structure for at this moment.

**Craig:** No. The closest we have is the United States government, which is being held hostage by one political party that at this point seems to only have, “We don’t like government,” as a purpose. And then there is the European economic community, which does represent itself fairly well as a large corporation of companies. It is in fact Europe that seems to be doing the only holding companies to accountability action. Now, they are not a particularly efficient group. Government is notorious for being inefficient. It’s why capitalism is also necessary. If government is in charge of creation, production, and payment, in general, you end up with a bureaucratic sludge.

Capitalism, to me, is really just the expression of human nature in economic form. But just like human nature, we need law. What we do see is Europe, representing a very large market, can say to, for instance, Google or Amazon, “No, you can’t do that anymore. We don’t like that anymore. Stop it.” The United States used to do that. It’s been quite some time, and these companies seem to be just flouting all of the rules. But the United States still represents an enormous marketplace. If the United States, for instance, said to Amazon or Netflix, “You can’t do these things anymore,” then it would have to stop.

That said, some of the things that Europe has done, particularly vis a vis technology to try and curb late-stage capitalistic companies, just is ineffectual nuisance. For instance, the constant asking me if I want to accept the cookies. Okay. Sure.

**John:** Yeah, or like, you must use USB-C. Sure, great. There’s the concern that they will tend to favor European companies over American companies. Yeah, we get all that. I think what it comes down to is – I say people’s complaints are really about capitalism. The second part of that answer is, and the solutions to these things are demanding of your government to address these concerns, because you’re not going to be able to address these concerns. You can’t yell at the corporation to do better. You actually have to – it requires action to make any of these changes.

**Craig:** Yes. Corporations, by charter, are designed to maximize profits for their shareholders. That is their sole purpose. What that means is that if they could get away with paying their workers five cents an hour, including hiring children, they would, because that satisfies their charter, to maximize profits. That’s where we need regulation.

The people that are angry about capitalism probably, almost certainly, are reasonably angry, because they’re probably being underpaid. Most people are. Wages have not progressed as they should. And if the United States government were functional and mandated a healthy minimum wage, I think people would be complaining less, because that’s a huge problem. They don’t get paid enough.

Also, companies – particularly, the financial industry has become so complicated and so disconnected from creation that this concept of too big to fail is real. We’re now on the system where capitalism – some companies simply cannot lose. If they lose, society falls apart, because they’re too integrated into our backbone. That’s a huge problem.

**John:** I think a previous One Cool Thing on an earlier episode was a book I was reading on the history of corporations. Corporations have existed before capitalism. They were originally designed to do sailing expeditions to different places, basically how you’d raise enough money to do a thing. Importantly, corporations had to get a charter that was literally from the royals. The imperial state had to give them the charter.

The argument is basically that government should basically have that same kind of charter thing, saying you actually have to serve the public in what your corporation does. There has to be a purpose beyond just making money. That’s an idea that we’ve completely lost. That seems insane, but that was the idea.

**Craig:** That was the idea. Just as certain concepts like copyright have become abused or weaponized, so too has the notion of corporatism and the idea that corporation now begins to shield all human beings from accountability. The creation of corporations is something that, at least in the state of Delaware, appears to be a hand wave. You and I both made corporations for ourselves, loan-out corporations.

**John:** Scriptnotes is an LLC.

**Craig:** There you go. Those corporations required a whole lot of one page of paperwork.

**John:** Yes, indeed.

**Craig:** They exist to take advantage of certain business things and certain tax things, so the tax code, all of it. Think about that, that the tax code – that’s the oxygen that government breathes to live – is in and of itself interwoven into corporate creation and corporate function. The economists argue with each other constantly over how this all works. I suppose if we step back really, really far and boil it down to its simplest, simplest version, it’s that there needs to be a balance, and we are out of balance.

**John:** We’re out of balance. We’re simplifying, yet it’s actually accurate, because we recognize that all the good things about capitalism and corporations, in terms of price finding and all that stuff, there is an efficiency there that you cannot replace. But without the acknowledgement of the individual value of people and societies and the environment, you’re going to end up in a terrible, dark place.

**Craig:** If you only value profit, you will die. You have to also value things that will diminish profit, like the health and welfare of human beings, because in the end, that’s what the economy is for. What our economy has turned into is an economy that exists to hyper-enrich an incredibly small amount of people. It’s just not going to work. We’ve been here before. I think the richest person ever in terms of dollars out of the amount of dollars that existed on the planet was Rockefeller perhaps or maybe Getty.

**John:** Perhaps, yeah.

**Craig:** The original oil barons, the robber barons. That’s why it changed. There was that period in the earlier part of the 20th century where America corrected what had been an out-of-control corporatization in our country. We are so clearly in need of that now.

Part of what we struggle with is that all of the messaging and discussion and the politics and the way politics functions as – these campaigns are corporations – the corporations themselves are sitting there, including the ones you and I work for, guiding the discussion. The people who want to not return balance to the system are the ones that have their finger on the play button.

**John:** At least we’ve solved it. That’s the good news. We talked it through. We figured it out. So problems resolved.

**Craig:** Problem solved. There’s something counterfactual where Rupert Murdoch isn’t born or decides to learn guitar and be in a band, a lovely band in Australia.

**John:** Or he has some sort of Christmas Carol kind of visiting by three ghosts, and things turn out very differently.

**Craig:** Where are the ghosts when you need them?

**John:** That’s the question. Never the ghosts when you want one. Craig, Drew, thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [What If?](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/406281) by Robert Cowley
* [Thomas Edison: The Unintentional Founder of Hollywood](https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/03/thomas-edison-the-unintentional-founder-of-hollywood/) by Garrett O’Brien for the Saturday Evening Post
* [United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc.) on Wikipedia
* [George Lucas: The Car Wreck That Changed His Life and Led Him to ‘Star Wars’](https://www.biography.com/movies-tv/george-lucas-car-crash-star-wars) by Tim Ott for Biography
* [When ‘Titanic’ Was Expected to Be a Huge Flop](https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/titanic-movie-flop-history-facts) by Jake Rossen for Mental Floss
* [‘John Carter’ Changed Hollywood, but Not in the Way Disney Hoped](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/john-carter-bombed-1235109193/) by Richard Newby for THR
* [Financial Interest and Syndication Rules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Interest_and_Syndication_Rules)
* [Post-Quantum Cryptography](https://security.apple.com/blog/imessage-pq3/)
* [S’more! S’more! His artisanal marshmallows were the greatest. Then he tried to scale them.](https://www.businessinsider.com/smashmallow-lawsuit-marshmallow-failure-silicon-valley-business-growth-2024-1) by Adam Rogers
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Zach Lo ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/634standard.mp3).