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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)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by 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).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hi, folks. This upcoming episode does feature some naughty language, so if you are in the car with children, put the earmuffs on or wait to play this when you’re at home.

Hello, my name is Craig Mazin, and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This is 593rd episode of Scriptnotes, which is upsetting.

John is not with me today, also upsetting, but to counteract that, today on the show we have one of the best screenwriters simply of all time, and also one of the nicest people in Hollywood, which I agree is a low bar if that’s what you were thinking, but he would be a nice guy pretty much anywhere. We welcome Richard, AKA Richie as I call, Richard LaGravenese. Welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Richard LaGravenese:** Thank you, Craig. This is great. Good to see you.

**Craig:** It’s good to see you too. We are looking at each other over Zoom. Richie and I have known each other for many, many years. I have been a fan of his for many more years than I’ve known him. I’m going to run down a short list of some of the movies that he’s written, so that you can go ahead and drop your jaw like I do when I look at it all together like this.

The Fisher King, The Bridges of Madison County, The Mirror Has Two Faces, The Horse Whisperer, Beloved, Behind the Candelabra. These are all remarkable, highly acclaimed films, and yet we’re not going to be talking about any of those today, nor are we going to be talking about the seven other movies that Richie has directed.

What we are going to be talking about today is one of my favorite movies of all time. It is the 1994 film The Ref. The Ref was a criminally under-seen film. That’s why I want to dig into it, because I think from a screenwriting point of view, it’s remarkable.

Then in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, we’ll be talking about men without friends, how and why men should make friends, and how friendless men emotionally burden the women in their lives. That ought to be fun.

Normally, this is where John would do news and follow-up, but I simply have none. Instead, we’re just going to get right into The Ref. The Ref was released in 1994. It was, I believe, a Touchstone movie. Touchstone was one of the, I was about to say adult film arms of Disney, but that doesn’t sound right. Non-family movie wing of Disney. It was a Christmas movie, and that’s why of course they released it in March. Why would they have done that, Richie? Do you know?

**Richard:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** It certainly impacted the movie’s prospects. When it came out at the time, it was a bit of a box office bum. I think looking at how much money it made, if it came out today and made that amount of money, everybody would be dancing in the streets, but the business was different back then. The expectations were a little higher for theatrical releases. The fact that it didn’t necessarily make money right away didn’t mean that it wasn’t going to catch on as a cult hit and maybe even more than a cult hit.

The story is by Marie Weiss, screenplay by Richie LaGravenese and Marie Weiss, and directed by the late, great Ted Demme. I’ll do the quick summary, and then we’ll dive into the origin story of The Ref.

Quick summary. It’s Christmas Eve. Caroline and Lloyd, a middle-aged couple living in an affluent and very white and uptight Old Bay Bridge, Connecticut… Is that right, Old Bay Bridge? Is that the town?

**Richard:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Are having a marriage crisis. As they debate the past, present, and future of their relationship, they’re taken hostage by Gus, a thief on the run, but who has captured whom? Gus is forced to listen to their ceaseless bickering, as well as pretend to be a marriage counselor when Lloyd’s extended family arrives for the holiday, but his intervention, ultimately at the point of a gun, is what finally leads Lloyd and Caroline to be honest and open with each other.

This always struck me as a modern Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf take on Ransom of Red Chief, the old O. Henry story.

**Richard:** That’s right.

**Craig:** Is that where it began for you?

**Richard:** Absolutely. It started as a take on The Ransom of Red Chief. It was an idea by my then-sister-in-law, Marie Weiss, who was coming out of advertising and wanted to work in the movies, and her then-husband, Jeff Weiss, who is one of the producers on it.

I had a deal at Disney, because originally, Disney had bought Fisher King but didn’t make it but then put me under contract for three movies. You give them an idea. They give you an idea. They never take your ideas and usually do things off the shelf. That’s where Little Princess happened. The first thing was Widows, which just recently got made by McQueen. That was originally there.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Richard:** That was the longest development thing. That’s when Touchstone and Disney used to give you literally 16 pages of notes in development. At the time, we were making it a comedy for Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn, so it didn’t turn out that way. I was on that for months, like a year. It was terrible.

Anyway, the last deal was we brought to them this idea of The Ref. That’s how it began. She had this idea of a Ransom of Red Chief idea with an arguing couple and a family and stuff. With me guaranteeing it, she got to do a first draft, and then I came in.

**Craig:** Then you came in and you started doing what you do. The movie, I suspect, given the fact that it was 1994, which was thick in the middle of every movie makes money because it’s going to be out on VHS and DVD. I suspect that all it really needed was a star. Then along comes Denis Leary. Now, Denis Leary was a bit of a phenomenon at the time.

**Richard:** He and Teddy, they had a partnership, kind of.

**Craig:** I see. Denis Leary was, I think at that point, primarily a stand-up comic. Then he was doing some stuff for MTV.

**Richard:** Yes. Interstitials they call them.

**Craig:** Yeah, interstitials.

**Richard:** Teddy directed them. They were all Cindy Crawford-centric and really funny. When I hired Teddy, when we met on the movie, he brought in Denis.

**Craig:** One question to start with is, Denis Leary has a very specific comic persona. That comic persona is brought through here. As a character, he’s a quasi-chain-smoking, fast-talking, angry guy. That was his thing was he’s angry, he’s very verbal, he doesn’t have time. Every frustrates him. It is a perfect match, really.

The first question is, did he just pick that script up and go, “Oh yeah, if I just be me and say these lines, everything will be fine,” or did you say, “Ah, okay, now that it’s Denis Leary, I need to adjust the character of Gus to fit Denis Leary.”

**Richard:** I remember I always loved those fast-talking comedies of the ‘30s and ‘40s. He’s perfect for that, because he’s rapid fire. I now remember there were a few drafts that were going through, again, Disney development, Disney development. Then once we had a producer on it, it still wasn’t really clicking.

I remember it was me, Denis, Judy Davis, Kevin Spacey, and Bruckheimer. I rewrote the script in 4 days, bringing in 30 pages and 60 pages and reading with the actors the next day, the next day, the next day, and built it like that.

One of the greatest feelings you can ever have as a writer, it happened with Robin Williams too, is when you make someone like Denis laugh from reading the script. He was reading it cold, and he would start laughing.

Then we found the voice of it. In those four days, I think we really found the rhythm and the voice of it a lot. It’s easy to write for Denis, because he has a kind of 1940s delivery. You know what I mean?

**Craig:** “Here’s the thing. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that. Hey, ho.”

**Richard:** Breathy and fast and just quick. I know there was a couple of bits he improved, like biting the baby Jesus cooking and things like that. We stuck to the script pretty much. It was a free form on the script. On the floor, we needed to come up with something funnier. That was it. It was finding the rhythm and then his ear.

I had known Denis also earlier. We went to Emerson together. We were in different groups, because I was in the theater thing and he was in the comedy thing. He started the Comedy Workshop there. I remember his shows with his little troupe. They were always really, really funny.

**Craig:** I’m fascinated by the fact that so much came out of those four days. There is this interesting intensity that can happen when you almost have a theater setting. It’s crazy. You have to deliver.

You’re working with Judy Davis, Kevin Spacey, who we will discuss purely as an actor in this podcast and not deal with all the other stuff. Those two alone, what’s interesting about them is how verbal they are as actors and how they’ve maybe never been more verbal than this. I want to give a little example here.

Right in the beginning, there’s two things that happen. The first thing is you establish the town. As the credits are coming on screen, the camera moves to this town, and we learn that it is a picture-perfect place, although there’s maybe the undercurrent of an issue, like the fact that the baby Jesus is missing from the [inaudible 00:09:44] in town square.

We eventually get to a marriage counselor, played by BD Wong. He is dealing with the angriest couple in the world. As they go back and forth, I always feel like the first five minutes of a movie teaches you how to watch the movie, and it teaches you a few things here. One of them is, tonally, these people are so hyper-verbal and hyper-literate in the way they talk to each other. I’m going to give an example here, because I’m fascinated by the way dialog works like this.

**Caroline Chasseur:** You took out a loan. I mean, it was your decision, not mine. You took out a loan from Satan Mom.

**Lloyd Chasseur:** She blames my mother for everything that’s gone wrong in her life. In the meantime, she never finishes anything she starts. Photography courses, existential philosophy courses, Scandinavian cooking classes.

**Caroline:** At least I go after my dreams.

**Lloyd:** To be what, somebody who takes photographs of lutefisk to prove the nothingness of being? No wonder our son’s so confused.

**Craig:** That’s gorgeous, right? He listed three classes, and then without a pause to think or put it together, he can come up with this imaginary idiot who’s used all the knowledge of those three classes. It really teaches you how this movie’s going to function and how these characters work. They both speak like this.

Talk a little bit about dancing on the edge of… One of the classic notes is, “This line feels written.” When you have actors like this, they can do it. There’s something almost play-like about it. Talk to me a little about how you addressed the manner in which they would speak and how literate and how many words and how writerly it would be.

**Richard:** I keep thinking of those first 15 minutes of His Girl Friday, when it’s Cary Grant and Ros Russell in the room. I’ve watched that scene about a million times. The rapidity and how they cram things into their references and you know exactly what they’re saying, and they’re insulting each other, they’re undermining and they’re funny, that rhythm was in my head as much as possible.

I’ve always over-written. I like literate movies. I like movies that are a little theatrical, that are not all exactly like real life. They’re just a little heightened. I think for comedy, it works.

Comedy, like music, goes through different grooves and different rhythms and stuff like that. It doesn’t always work, but I really think the classics do still work today, because there’s an intelligence behind them.

The rhythm was always in my head. I wanted to maintain it as much as possible. I had these two great theater actors, Judy and Kevin, who knew exactly how to find those rhythms. It’s funny when there are certain actors who just don’t know how to do that, today’s actors who don’t know how to talk fast. I was lucky. I was lucky with that and Christine Baranski, of course, later on.

**Craig:** We’ll get to her. You’re bringing up an interesting thing, which is that over time… It is a little distressing to me how much time has gone by, because this movie is almost 30 years old now, which is, I know, horrifying. Over time, actors have notoriously become mumblers, kind of introverts. I think acting quality has been too associated with that kind of navel-gazing and muttering. Here is this, where it’s a little bit like… There are certain bands where the singer is… Freddie Mercury is a great example. You understood every word he’s saying.

**Richard:** Articulation.

**Craig:** Articulation. There’s something so articulated about everybody here. The articulation of everyone is remarkable. I love that.

There’s another thing that happens here. First, we briefly meet Gus as a burglar who goes a little too far in trying to empty out a safe completely, but not before he’s sprayed by cat piss, as a very strange booby trap.

When we get back to the therapy session, one of the things that you do brilliant here is, inside of this one scene, in what John and I often refer to as this precious real estate of the first 5 or 10 minutes of a movie, you deliver so much exposition through therapy and through argument.

When that one scene is over, without us really noticing that anything has happened other than terrific entertainment and quite a few laughs, I know that Caroline has had an affair, that they haven’t had sex in a really long time, that they are in debt to Lloyd’s mother, whom Caroline hates and Lloyd defends, instinctively. Their son Jesse is a budding criminal delinquent.

Shortly after, in a connected scene where they’re driving home, I also understand that Caroline wants a divorce, and Lloyd isn’t going to agree to it. That choice is really interesting to me, because after a lot of this interesting exposition, all of which we will see echoed back at us, I’m not going to lead the witness. Why was it important that Caroline wanted a divorce and Lloyd wouldn’t agree to that?

**Richard:** Because I wanted there to be somewhere to go, because him agreeing to the divorce ultimately would be like an act of love, really. Right now, it’s about who’s got power and who’s going to get their way. That kept it open, so that there was conflict, like an engine going forward. If they both agree to the divorce, they’ve been decided, nothing is moving forward on that. I guess it could’ve worked, but it was more interesting to me leaving it open.

**Craig:** I think you made the right choice. Yes, it could’ve worked. They could’ve both agreed that they were going to get a divorce, and then at the end of it, they decide to call it off.

What I loved about the choice was that it felt… She says, “We’re miserable.” It felt like, okay, they are suspended in misery. These two people are stuck in this permanent misery where one wants to leave, one won’t let her leave. They can’t stand each other, but they can’t go anywhere. If nothing happens to them, this is going to be the way they are for the rest of their lives. That’s what I felt, because that is exactly when Gus enters. He is confronted now. It’s immediate. You guys don’t hide the premise. It’s right away, boom, “What did I do?”

There’s this wonderful scene where he gets in the car with them. We have a little bit of plot logic. I want to talk a little bit about the plot logic, actually, because it’s the most annoying part of writing these kinds of movies, but it’s essential. Gus has stolen jewels from, I think he’s the amusement park king.

**Richard:** I don’t remember.

**Craig:** It’s an old Willard. I think his name’s Willard. He’s out of town. There’s something about Willard, I guess his connections or whatever, that basically the theft of his stuff leads to this state police manhunt for the guy who’s done it. Why the manhunt? Why escalating it to the state police? Talk me through that storyline.

**Richard:** I can barely remember. Obviously, these are the least interesting parts of these movies for me to write. I’d rather just have people in a car or in a room talking for two hours and Virginia Woolf-ing it the whole time.

Making up this had to do with the McGuffin of the whole thing, because what happens at the end? If people aren’t searching for him, and it isn’t that big a thing, then there’s no tension of him having to hide in the house and pretend to be a therapist until he can figure out how to escape. We had to create this outside pressure cooker for him to stay inside the house. That really was all it was.

Again, it probably could’ve been better. It could’ve been a lot more logical or I just didn’t care. That’s the problem with me. I don’t outline. I get bored with that stuff. I just, “All right, that’s fine.” [inaudible 00:18:06].

**Craig:** In its own way, it works beautifully, because it’s simple. I can’t say that I understood necessarily why the one theft here led the whole state police manhunt to happen, but also, I kind of didn’t care, because when logic is in place to help me have a good time, I don’t interrogate it too much.

**Richard:** I think if you want to take the ride, you take the ride and you accept those things-

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Richard:** … because they’re not that important.

**Craig:** The way you set up the rules, it’s really simple. I don’t have to think much about it, because you don’t want me thinking about it. He can’t leave. He’s waiting for Murray, his getaway car guy, to call back and say he’s gotten a boat for them to escape. That’s it. He’s stuck in the house until-

**Richard:** Which is Richard Bright from The Godfather.

**Craig:** It is?

**Richard:** Yeah, he was in The Godfather.

**Craig:** He was in The Godfather?

**Richard:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who was he in The Godfather?

**Richard:** He’s one of the younger… You’ll see him.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**Richard:** He’s one of the assassins. He was a great guy. It was Richard Bright, wasn’t it? Yeah, it was Richard Bright. He was Murray.

**Craig:** Was he the one that was in the police uniform and shoots Barzini on the steps?

**Richard:** Yes.

**Craig:** Wow. I had no idea.

**Richard:** He’s in it throughout if you see. He’s in it throughout.

**Craig:** I had no idea. Oh my god.

**Richard:** Yeah, that’s Richard. He’s in a lot of movies.

**Craig:** That’s a connection I didn’t realize. Here’s another interesting fact for those of you following along at home. This movie I think was JK Simmons’s debut on screen.

**Richard:** It might’ve been.

**Craig:** I think it was. He plays Siskel. He’s a teacher at this military academy where Jesse, the son, is. We’ll talk about him in a bit.

We’ve set up everything we need to set up. You’ve done this beautifully. In the first, I don’t know, whatever it is, 10 minutes, I know everything about this town, I know everything about their relationship, I know everything about the rules that Gus has to deal with. Now we begin this triangle of characters for a while.

I’m also fascinated by this structure, because what you do is, once he meets them, once he takes them hostage, the movie splits into two halves. The first half is the three of them, that triangle. Then the second half is the larger family coming over. Talk a little bit about why and how you did that and focused in on the three of them first for quite an extended bit before bringing the family in.

**Richard:** They’re the heart. They’re the core of it. Then it was about showing the shark that’s coming towards the house to create some suspense and anticipation for what that collision is going to look like.

It was like a three-character play almost up until… I had ideas about turning this into a play, because it’s a one-set thing. You could have the whole thing in the house, in the living room for the entire evening.

**Craig:** Would you please do that?

**Richard:** I thought of doing that. It’d be really fun to do that. It was also for cutaways, because we had to skip time for them to prepare for the house. Denis had come up with the idea, had the idea of being the therapist. The fun of seeing this family coming towards them, I thought the audience was like, “Oh god, this is going to make complications in a farce kind of way, even better.”

**Craig:** It was incredible escalation. I appreciated, in a way, the quiet time, even though it was anything but quiet, between the three of them, because there’s a really interesting thing that happens almost immediately. First, as they’re driving to Caroline and Lloyd’s house, Lloyd blows right through a stop sign, which he says he didn’t see. There is no stop sign. Then when Gus gets them into the house and he’s got them tied up, he wants a cigarette. Lloyd says, “I don’t smoke, and Caroline quit.” As a smoker… Were you a smoker?

**Richard:** Yeah. Not like Denis, but yeah, I was.

**Craig:** I was as well, and so there was something absolutely delicious about a smoker seeing right into another smoker’s brain and going, “Where are they?” He knows she has has them. He knows instantly that there’s a hidden pack of cigarettes somewhere, and sure enough-

**Richard:** There are.

**Craig:** Because he has a gun, she has to reveal if they’re there. He says something to both of them that I think is kind of magical. In the film, he’s pushed them both over. They were in their chairs tied up.

**Richard:** [Crosstalk 00:22:28].

**Craig:** He’s pushed them backwards because they were bickering and they wouldn’t shut up. He comes over them. They’re accusing each other of being a liar. Gus says to Caroline, “You said you quit, didn’t you?” because she was like, “I never said I quit.” “You said you quit.” She admits it. Then he says to Lloyd, “You saw the stop sign, didn’t you?” Lloyd admits it.

In a way, what I love about this is the brilliance of starting the two of them in a marital counseling session with a completely ineffective counselor who cannot control them, and now here a guy with a gun is starting to make it happen. Talk a little bit, if you could, about the idea, even before Gus has to pretend to be a marriage counselor, the actual marriage counseling that he’s doing right here.

**Richard:** The joy of this for me, the most fun to me, was getting inside a marriage, and having been there myself. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but we used to do this a lot, where you get so into bickering with each other, doesn’t matter if you’re in public, doesn’t matter who’s there, everything goes away, and it’s just about who’s winning and who’s going to win. It’s like a match. It’s the information you use and the information you hold back and what you admit to and what you don’t admit to. This is how this marriage works. I was in the midst of that myself, and it was driving me crazy.

Having a character who just puts a gun to your head and says, “Tell me. Say what it was,” it’s like ah, then you finally get the truth. That’s how the marriage can heal, because they’re not really telling the truth to each other. It’s a power thing going on. They’re trying to each save their own skin. You lose the sight of the relationship, of the marriage. I think we do that a lot inside relationships when we bicker.

That idea was so real to me, of getting so lost in the bickering that you don’t care who is there, who’s around, you just have to get your point across kind of a thing. That was the fun of writing all that stuff, and then having him just cut right through it.

**Craig:** Cutting right through it is fantastic. There’s another thing that you set up so smartly. I would say to everybody, one of the things to do here is read this screenplay. Watch the movie. Read the screenplay. What Richie does in that first scene with BD Wong, who’s the failing marital counselor, is set up a situation where the marriage counselor says, “I’m not here to take sides. Basically, I’m not a referee. I don’t blow the whistle and say who created the foul.”

**Richard:** That’s right.

**Craig:** Here’s a guy who’s absolutely doing that, whether he realizes it or not. He is a referee. He’s saying, “This is what’s true, and this is what’s true.” In doing so, you start to see what they need, which I thought was a fascinating thing.

You described the incoming family as a shark. Talk to me about this. We meet the incoming family. They’re at dinner at a restaurant. They’re eating there because they know that Caroline is going to serve them something horrible and inedible, so they’re getting food first. Talk a little bit about this family now, these other ones.

**Richard:** Again, pulling from personal experience, the idea of a rich, controlling in-law that was a matriarch that was crippling the marriage, I liked. It wasn’t exactly my situation, but it was close, in a way, about how money can infantilize adult people around them. I wanted to get back at my in-laws for doing that, so I put all of the venom that I… You know when you have to be quiet at family gatherings and you want to say [inaudible 00:26:17]. I would just put it in the movie, like nailing yourself to a cross kind of a thing.

Out of that came her never approving of Judy Davis’s character, of her over her son and being too maternal love for the son and controlling and crippling him. I saw adult people crippled by their parents because their parents had money. My parents never had money. They always had problems. My dad was a cab driver. They never had that power over me. It was the first time I had witnessed it in that family. I played with that idea.

Her other son also being a soft doughboy. No one could stand up to her. He’s married to Christine Baranski, who’s just full of resentment and is trying to get along, is trying to make it through, but then when she sees what happens with Judy and Kevin, it gives her the liberation to finally tell the truth as well. It was really just a revenge thing for me to just get back at people who were too controlling.

**Craig:** I have to ask, since so much of this has been pulled from your own marriage, your own family, your in-laws, when the movie came out, did you get any difficult phone calls or no?

**Richard:** Went right over their head. No.

**Craig:** Isn’t that amazing?

**Richard:** Yep.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. People just can’t see themselves.

**Richard:** It’s I guess a good thing.

**Craig:** Were you worried about it?

**Richard:** No.

**Craig:** You knew that it would go like that. Wow. That’s amazing. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie, because we’ve been with this very literate, bickering, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf trio, and then we go to this other group that is not that. They seem regular in one sense.

I think this was my first exposure to Christine Baranski. She is brilliant, because she’s so frustrated and angry about this entire situation and constantly takes it out on her kids. I think she says something like, “Be happy. It’s Christmas! It’s Christmas!” I do that all the time. Every time Christmas rolls around, I say it just like her, so angry.

We also, I think, meet the antagonist here in the purist dramatic sense, Glynis Johns, who is absolutely brilliant in this movie as Mother Rose. Appears to be the antagonist. Myself, when I’m writing, I don’t necessarily think about who’s the protagonist, who’s the antagonist.

**Richard:** I don’t either.

**Craig:** I’m wondering if in retrospect you would agree that she is the villain if there is a villain.

**Richard:** Yes.

**Craig:** That comes through pretty clearly. There’s something that happens prior to the family arriving, and that is a connection between Caroline and Gus that struck me as really interesting. They have a conversation as she’s leading him upstairs to find some band-aids for his dog bite that he got when he was escaping the crime. She tells him things. She tells him that she and Lloyd weren’t always like this and that they, in fact, had a restaurant, she worked, and they had a dream, and it fell apart.

I’m curious what you were thinking, because this feels so natural to me. What drew her to him? Why does she open up to him so easily? Why does she want to take care of him like that?

**Richard:** I don’t know that she’s taking care of him. I think she respects him. He’s about the truth. There’s no lying with him. I think that’s in the line too where he turns to her and says, “What are we, girl friends?” That was when Denis laughed at the script when he read that for the first time.

**Craig:** It’s so funny. “What are we, girl friends?”

**Richard:** She starts to warm up. She needs someone to talk to, and she doesn’t have anyone. He is this symbol of… He’s all about the truth. He’s all about no bullshit. It’s life or death. I think she feels the need.

I wanted to humanize. I had to start planting what was good about what they had and how do I bring that out, so that you understand there was something there. Otherwise, they’re just bickering. What are they fighting for? I had to bring up the past any way I could figure it out. Then later on, when it all explodes and then they start saying what happened in the past, then you understand. I had to give little seeds of that, so that there was something, a dream there.

I got too sentimental with it, so he undercuts it. He doesn’t want to hear it. I think she wants to open up and figure it out and thinks he can help.

**Craig:** There’s an interesting theme that’s going through, that exists separate from… I think the main takeaway of the movie really is, in a very simple way, that communication and honesty is really the only way to salvation when you’re dealing with a relationship that is not working.

There’s this other theme going on, which is the haves versus the have-nots. It’s throughout the whole thing. It comes out here when they’re walking up the stairs, specifically because he notes that they have a shagol [ph], an actual shagol. She’s like, “If you want it, you can have it.” She doesn’t care, be presumably, it’s something that Mother Rose paid for or bought. He finds that so offensive and points out that, “You people, you probably never even worked a day.” It did strike me that she wanted his approval as well, when she says that’s not true.

**Richard:** She wants his respect. She wants him on her side, which also happens in bickering couples, no matter who’s around. Whatever witnesses are there to the bickering, you want them on your side, so I think so. I think he’s pointing to the fact that, “You don’t even know what you have. You don’t value what you have.” She’s like, “No, you don’t understand. That’s not the point. It’s the cost. Is it worth it?”

**Craig:** That is an interesting idea that I hadn’t considered, that she’s buttering up the ref. She’s getting him on her side.

**Richard:** As a friend almost, yeah, like an odd liaison.

**Craig:** That leads to this big second movement of this story, and that is when the family arrives. There is something that happens here that I think is really educational for anybody that’s writing farce, because it definitely becomes farcical, at least for a while, in a fun way.

What you do here, and again, there’s just an elegance to it, is rules. The rules are simple. Jesse, the son, has come home. They’ve tied him up and put him upstairs. No one can go upstairs. Rule number one, no one can go upstairs. Rule number two, the three of us always have to be together. That is enough. That’s enough.

**Richard:** That’s hard enough.

**Craig:** That’s hard enough. The family arrives. A question about the family. You are Italian. You come from, I assume, a Catholic background, Catholic upbringing?

**Richard:** Yep.

**Craig:** I’m Jewish. I come from a Jewish upbringing. You’re a New York Catholic. I’m a New York Jew. It’s essentially the same thing. It’s basically the same, but this family is not. My wife is Episcopalian from New England. This reminds me more of that world. Talk a little bit about how you were able to present that kind of WASPiness so accurately and beautifully?

**Richard:** I remember, I think Marie came up with, which I thought was just funny, that they were Huguenots.

**Craig:** French Huguenots. We’re French Huguenots.

**Richard:** That cracked me up when she told me that.

**Craig:** Mid-18th century French Huguenot.

**Richard:** Yeah, which I thought was really funny at the time. I’m speaking at the time, because my situation is very different now. At the time, the in-laws were Scarsdale Jewish.

**Craig:** Got it. Let me translate for everybody else, Scarsdale Jewish. It’s in Westchester. It’s fancier, richer, but still Jewish. You’ve got one foot in the old ways, and you’ve got one foot in the golf club and all that, but you’re not old money rich.

**Richard:** There still were a lot of, I want to say there were affectations, but the way things are done, how things are done, the kind of dinner parties and what you say. The contrast was, when the shit hit the fan, all that went right out the window, and they were just like Italians, emotional and brutal and all that stuff, but all the upper crust stuff. Part of it was from that. I think it was just osmosis of watching a lot of films and reading things about how those families work and the Philip Barry world of Philadelphia Story and Holiday and those kind of things.

**Craig:** It’s interesting.

**Richard:** It’s a New York sensibility too, to a certain extent, an Upper East Side sensibility.

**Craig:** I think outsiders often do those things the best, because we have been watching them. Like you say, you’ve been watching those things.

**Richard:** You absorb it.

**Craig:** It’s funny. I was at a party a couple of weeks ago, and Maureen McCormick was there, Maureen McCormick who played Marcia on The Brady Bunch. I told her how my sister and I used to watch her and that show and yearn for that kind of… We thought of that as the best kind of life, this WASPy… Nobody yelled. Nobody was screaming. Nobody got hit.

**Richard:** Nobody got hit.

**Craig:** It was so wonderful.

**Richard:** No plates were thrown.

**Craig:** No plates were thrown. Your mother and father weren’t screaming at each other constantly. I love the notion of the outsider creating this but then also going, “There are worms in the dirt underneath this.”

**Richard:** Something underneath there. Absolutely. Absolutely.

**Craig:** There’s a fantastic moment in this dinner where as things devolve, and they devolve rather quickly, Mother Rose mentions, quite casually, Caroline’s infidelity, the fact that Caroline cheated on her precious son, whom she’s awful to anyway. The fact that-

**Richard:** That he told his mother.

**Craig:** That he told his mother, that fact just sends her into a rage.

**Richard:** As it would.

**Craig:** As it would. She storms off, which means that Gus and Lloyd both have to follow her. They go into the kitchen, and there’s the following exchange.

**Richard:** I love this scene.

**Craig:** This is one of my favorites. She says, “You won’t talk about it in therapy, but you’ll discuss it behind my back, with that bitch.” Lloyd says, “Hey, she’s my mother.” Gus says, “She’s a fucking bitch, Lloyd.”

**Richard:** He’s telling the truth.

**Craig:** That is the best referee moment in the entire movie, because somebody has to say it.

**Richard:** Somebody has to say it. Exactly.

**Craig:** Somebody has to say, “No, I just showed up here. I have no vested interest in this fight, but I’m telling you, she’s a fucking bitch, Lloyd,” which my wife and I have been saying just as a general phrase about anybody we think is a bitch. We’ll just say, whether it’s a man or a woman, “He’s a fucking bitch, Lloyd.” We always just put Lloyd at the end.

**Richard:** That means so much. I love that. That’s fantastic. That makes me really happy.

**Craig:** A fucking bitch, Lloyd. It’s the ultimate referee moment. It goes by very quickly. It’s not this big, dramatic… Nor does the conversation stop. It keeps rolling. That is almost like the match that lights the fuse that eventually inevitably leads to everybody saying everything they think.

Talk about how to do that scene, where you’ve brilliantly jammed all this gunpowder into a barrel. How do you blow these things up? How do you create a sequence in one room, where no one’s really moving around that much, and yet everything explodes?

**Richard:** The event is the act of opening presents at Christmas. That’s what you hang it on, like a tree. Then the heartbeat of it was the relationship between Kevin and Judy and them speaking again as if no one’s in the room and then getting everything out. Then you have all these people now who have somewhat of an interest invested in it, which is different than what we’ve had before, so they get to throw in their stuff and bring up their own stuff. The motor is the couple. Then all these other pieces come around when the timing and the moment feels right. Example is they’re talking the gifts, and Christine Baranski shouts, “Isotoners.”

**Craig:** Slipper socks.

**Richard:** The slipper socks. I think one version was Isotoner. “Slipper socks, medium.” All the resentments start to come out. The focus was on the relationship. That was the steady. That was the through line. Then everything else could jump off of it when it felt right.

**Craig:** There is this amazing moment where after watching an entire movie of these two tearing into each other and then watching this entire dinner with them tearing into each other and then this sequence here where they’re really tearing into each other, it finally comes out that Caroline wants a divorce, and they are. He’s fine. “We’re going to get divorced.” Gary, the stupid brother, says, “Why?”

**Richard:** He was so sweet.

**Craig:** It is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s so wonderfully innocent.

**Richard:** He’s very sweet.

**Craig:** So sweet. Oh my god, the look in his eyes where he looks like he was stunned by this thing. Everybody else is like, “What?” In this discussion, they finally get to the truth. What’s interesting is the ref, Denis Leary, in this sequence, says, “I don’t think anything.” He just-

**Richard:** Stands back.

**Craig:** Yes. You understood that the scam that he’s playing here, just for the purposes of the rest of the family, is that he’s posing as the marriage counselor. That’s to excuse his presence. He, as it turns out, is kind of the perfect marriage counselor. He knows exactly when to say, “You’re a liar. No, you’re a liar. She is a fucking bitch, Lloyd.” Here, it’s as if he actually gets invested. It feels like he’s invested.

**Richard:** This is the moment when it’s not about him hiding and it’s not about the robbery and it’s not about anything. He actually has been with these people all night, and he’s seeing what’s happening and is like, “No, this has to happen.” He just steps back.

He could’ve stopped it. He could’ve rerouted it, but he doesn’t, because he has heard her side of it, and he kind of is understanding Kevin’s side a little bit more. He knows this thing has to happen, and so he steps back and he just watches it. It’s an act of grace that he gives it. It’s not about him in that moment at all.

**Craig:** It’s a really interesting decision. It goes again to, I think there are a lot of movies when people are thinking about them or talking about them or when they try and write them and they’re wondering who the main character is, they will sometimes confuse main character and protagonist as the same thing.

What’s interesting is Gus maybe is the main… Denis Leary I suppose is the main character in a sense, but he’s certainly not the protagonist here. To the extent that it’s about people changing, it does feel like it’s about both Lloyd and Caroline, although I would argue ultimately, as is the case with almost every story, it comes down to one person making one choice that finally changes things.

I think for me, that moment is when in the middle of their arguing, Mother Rose says, “What does it even matter? They’re getting divorced,” and Lloyd turns to her and says, “Mother, is it possible for you to shut the fuck up for 10 seconds?” That to me is the moment where the protagonist there, I think-

**Richard:** Is Lloyd.

**Craig:** … is Lloyd.

**Richard:** That’s what the marriage needed all along.

**Craig:** All along.

**Richard:** To stand up to his mother.

**Craig:** There is this wonderful tradition in movies about psychological issues, relationship problems, and therapy, where it often comes down to one thing. I assume you go to therapy. You’re like me.

**Richard:** Been there 24 years now.

**Craig:** It would be great if therapy worked like this. In real life, it doesn’t, but in the movies, it often does come down to these little moments, like, “It’s not your fault,” or, “Mother, shut the fuck up. It’s almost like the walls come tumbling down.

**Richard:** One-word truths and then all the walls come tumbling down.

**Craig:** Everybody starts saying the truth. It is a wonderful conclusion of things. Before the family can be healed, there’s also the story of the son. What’s interesting about him, we’ve given him short shrift here, is that he is a criminal delinquent. It seems to be a reflection of the fact that his family home is broken. That’s what it feels like. He wants to go with Gus.

This is where there is this pathos to Gus’s sadness and a weight to him, even though he’s a funny character and he’s a burglar and he has the gun. We like him quite a bit, because he didn’t shoot anybody. He actually made things better. He expresses a sadness here. I just wanted you to talk a little bit about what is the story of Gus. Does it matter? Is he like one of the Greek gods that shows up in The Odyssey and then leaves?

**Richard:** It’s close to that, I guess. When I think about it, I don’t know that there was a lot of backstory. I think he had a lot of empathy for the kid. I have to be honest. This was the one part of the movie that I had… I wasn’t crazy about the casting. I like that kid, but I didn’t think he was right for the part. There wasn’t enough edge to him for me.

When I think about this storyline, I have to say, when Teddy and I hired Simpson and Bruckheimer to be our producers, because we had to pick from the Disney stable-

**Craig:** Got it.

**Richard:** We wouldn’t pick anyone that wouldn’t drink with us. Each one of the candidates we met at a bar. Teddy would lean [inaudible 00:46:08] go, “No, he’s a spy. We can’t hire him. No, he works for the studio.”

Simpson and Bruckheimer were a little bit insane. They had already had Top Gun and all this stuff. Then they made a deal. They saw this as, “Oh, Denis Leary, MTV. This is going to be a comedy for teenagers,” which was a big mistake. Don Simpson, who was a character in his own right, he detoured the script by making me do a rewrite that was all about the kid, because that was his thing. He wanted it to be about the kid.

We had the reading with the actors. The script had changed so much that Judy Davis got up and went, “This isn’t the part,” all of a sudden. I said, “I know. I agree with you. Please. I’m fast.” That’s when the four days happened, after that.

**Craig:** Oh, interesting.

**Richard:** The kid, that storyline was always, for me, a little… All I remember is we wanted to Gus to have this sort of humanity, hinting at a past, that he understood this kid in a way that his parents didn’t. I don’t know that we had any big past for him. We didn’t want to get too sentimental or too bogged down in that. He was going to help the kid in some way as well by his presence being there. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it was more like a Greek god that comes in and out.

**Craig:** Yeah, or like The Rainmaker. I always think of The Rainmaker, because I love that movie and just the idea of someone who shows up with bad intentions, a con artist, a thief, and yet is exactly what is required to un-suspend the misery, basically.

**Richard:** And get the truth out.

**Craig:** And get the truth out, exactly. Finally, at the end, the family is healed. Gus escapes. There is one of the greatest lines ever in history. Lloyd and Caroline are about to kiss, finally, when they are interrupted by Lloyd’s nephew, who says, “Sorry, but Grandma’s eating through her gag.” “Sorry, but Grandma’s eating through her gag.” It’s one of the greatest lines in history.

**Richard:** I love the way Denis did it. There’s an earlier line where he’s so upset with her, he wants to punch her. He goes, “Your husband isn’t dead. He’s hiding.”

**Craig:** “He’s hiding.” It’s so great.

**Richard:** Denis was great in that. The whole time he loses his shit.

**Craig:** [Crosstalk 00:48:34].

**Richard:** He’s like, “[inaudible 00:48:35]. Let me at her.”

**Craig:** They get it. They’re like, “We get it, but you can’t.”

**Richard:** They were holding him back.

**Craig:** They were holding him back.

**Richard:** I love that. Denis was so good in that.

**Craig:** “Mothers are supposed to be nice and sweet and patient and forgiving.” She really is horrible. With that wonderful mid-Atlantic accent, that not American, not British, kind of moneyed way of talking is absolutely wonderful.

Now, I read somewhere that the end here, which is a very happy ending, because Gus does escape with Murray on a boat, that that end was not originally the end.

**Richard:** It was re-shot.

**Craig:** Re-shot.

**Richard:** I believe we re-shot it, yeah. The original ending was Gus sacrifices himself for them in some way and gives himself up. Disney, they wanted it to be-

**Craig:** Happy.

**Richard:** Yeah. We had to re-shoot the ending.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting, because I remember those days.

**Richard:** They’re still here.

**Craig:** Studios still give notes and stuff, but there was something about the 90s. Maybe it was cocaine. I don’t know. There were so many notes. So many notes.

**Richard:** They’re still here. They’re still here. Streaming services are like that.

**Craig:** They’re still doing it. Through the crisis of writing drafts that you didn’t want to write, featuring storylines you didn’t want to feature, having Disney tell you to change the ending, all of that stuff, and then ultimately, all of it goes away in the crucible of those four days where you could just do the work.

**Richard:** Exactly, with the people that you’re doing it with, and not the executives, who are five steps removed and don’t really know how things work and don’t really know how things are made.

**Craig:** And also don’t know to release Christmas movies at Christmas. It’s the weirdest. Actually, March is the worst possible month, because Christmas happened, but it’s not a funny, ironic thing that it’s in the summer. It’s fucking March.

**Richard:** I also think we opened on the same day as Four Weddings and a Funeral, which was huge.

**Craig:** Oof.

**Richard:** Huge. I think it was the same weekend.

**Craig:** Lots of reasons why the movie initially didn’t do well, but it is something that I think adds character.

**Richard:** It was more, like I said, for a teenage MTV audience instead of an adult audience. I think that was part of the problem.

**Craig:** They must’ve been incredibly confused by that first scene, which I still think, if you understand what the movie is and who it’s meant for, is absolutely wonderful. Richie, we’re going to do a little segment now we call Drew Has A Question.

**Drew Marquardt:** I have a quick question on The Ref, because in the presents scene, I realized as I was watching it that we’re watching Lloyd do a monologue in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t feel that way. You’re hanging on every word. Very often, monologues aren’t done very well in movies. I was wondering if you could speak to how you set us up for that. Were you building to that the whole way through, or is that about following the logic of the moment?

**Richard:** I think it’s a few things. Like you said, it was building up all the way through. You want the audience to feel the way Judy Davis and Denis feel. They want this guy to blow up. They want this guy to tell the truth finally, especially when the mother enters the scene. You’re anticipating that, and you’re going, “Oh, here it comes. Now here it is.” You’re ready for it.

Another testament is that it’s just Kevin Spacey is a great actor, and he knew how to time it and he knew how to deliver it. The way Teddy directed it, with all the different characters there and their reactions and how to make it keep moving forward, keep moving forward. A lot of the energy of that is because of Kevin’s performance and everything that we set up along the way.

Finally, he’s blowing his top. In the first scene with the therapist, he’s snide, he’s sarcastic. They’re playing the game with each other of how they communicate, which isn’t the truth. It’s one-upmanship. This is finally taking the mask off. Okay, this is it.

It was revealing to me, and this happens in relationships, where everybody has their story, everybody has their side, but it’s not the whole story. Everything she said was true, but she forgot this. She forgot she wasn’t happy in that little apartment. She forgot this part of it. She didn’t understand the pressure he was under. To me, that was very honest.

It happens in all relationships, where you just get into the bickering, and you’re not really getting to how different people see things and their experiences and go, “Oh, I never thought of that. I never thought you were feeling that. I didn’t understand that. I thought it was power or something, and it wasn’t.” It was honest, and it was a lot of Kevin’s performance.

**Craig:** It’s also really interesting that you pull a little trick in that monologue, which is you don’t let him finish it. Everyone basically interrupts him, as if they’re too busy with their own crap. He has to pick up a fireplace poker and whack the Christmas tree over and over.

**Richard:** To get a symbol of why they’re there.

**Craig:** Exactly. “Shut up. I’m not done.” Then he gets-

**Richard:** The corpse has the floor.

**Craig:** The corpse has the floor. That reminds me so much of something that my dad used to say, which I won’t say on the air. It was the idea of feeling like you weren’t alive, the notion that you were being treated like a corpse that had been stuffed and stood up against the wall, not to be listened to and not to be considered.

**Richard:** Your father said that?

**Craig:** He would say something like that.

**Richard:** Wow.

**Craig:** I’ll save that for one of our confessional episodes. Richie, that was a fantastic discussion.

**Richard:** Thank you. This was great.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. I hope people do watch The Ref. I know for a fact it’s available to watch on Amazon Prime Video.

**Richard:** Is it on Disney Plus? I don’t know if they have it. Do they have it?

**Craig:** That’s a great question. I don’t know.

**Drew:** I don’t think it’s on Disney Plus, but we’ll put a link to it in the show.

**Craig:** Classic Disney.

**Richard:** [Crosstalk 00:54:43].

**Craig:** They’re still screwing this movie over. Guys, come on, put The Ref on. It’s so good. It is a fantastic Christmas, holiday tradition. We like to watch it every Christmas.

**Richard:** That makes me happy. Thank you.

**Craig:** We love it so much. Thank you for it. Now at the end of our regular show, we like to do something called One Cool Thing.

**Richard:** What’s yours?

**Craig:** I’ll tell you. I like to solve puzzles. I’m a big puzzle guy. For those of you out there who do enjoy, as I do, solving lots of puzzles, you will find oftentimes that you need to refer to the letters as number, so A as 1, B is 2, and so forth. Braille, binary, there’s something called a pigpen cipher, Morse code. You have to go around looking for all these things.

There’s an organization called Puzzled Pint. I think they’ve been my One Cool Thing before. They have, in one easy pdf, basically not all of, but a lot of the codes you would need to use, like NATO alphabet and semaphore and all the other ones I’ve mentioned, including binary, ternary, and hex. It’s incredibly useful, all in one sheet of puzzle solving, if you are, like me, a puzzle solver. We’ll include that link.

**Richard:** I love puzzles.

**Craig:** Oh, then listen.

**Richard:** I do the crossword on the subway every day.

**Craig:** Fantastic. You may find this interesting, especially if you expand into some of the stranger puzzles out there, which have begun to occupy me daily.

**Richard:** Did you Wordle?

**Craig:** Of course I do Wordle. Yes, I do Wordle.

**Richard:** I do Wordle.

**Craig:** We had Josh. What’s Josh Wordle’s actual name? Is it Wordle? It’s not Wordle. What’s his name?

**Drew:** It’s Josh Wardle.

**Craig:** Wardle. Wardle.

**Richard:** Wardle? Really?

**Drew:** Yeah.

**Richard:** Wow.

**Craig:** We had Josh Wardle on the show, who invented Wordle.

**Richard:** Wow.

**Craig:** Big Wordle fan, and also the Spelling Bee and the regular crossword as well. Do you have One Cool Thing for us, Richie?

**Richard:** Oh, man. I thought about this, and all I could think about was food.

**Craig:** Oh, we love food. Last week, my One Cool Thing was food. What’s yours?

**Richard:** There’s a place in New York, a couple of them, called Levain Bakery. Levain Bakery comes up with these cookies that are gigantic. One of them is a chocolate peanut butter. Literally, it’s a meal. You can only take little bites of it every day, because you eat the whole thing, you’re dead.

**Craig:** You’re dead.

**Richard:** It’s that big. They have a sour cream coffee cake. My mother and I always had this thing where we had to have cake, because she used to say it helps just to make the coffee go down. This is what she used to say. I had this thing in my head that I need cake to drink coffee or I can’t drink coffee.

**Craig:** It won’t go down.

**Richard:** It won’t go down. They have this sour cream coffee cake. I literally go to be at night thinking, “When I wake up, I can have the sour cream coffee cake.” I get so excited by it. It’s really good. It’s dense. It’s got all this sugar and maple stuff in the middle of it, and sour cream.

**Craig:** Oh, wow.

**Richard:** It’s a really great coffee cake. The other thing I can recommend is I discovered the benefits of celery juice. I buy this big bottle of Suji, I think it’s S-U-J-I or something, celery juice. It actually helps, because I have a terrible, terrible, acidic, nervous, ulceric kind of stomach, and it really helped. That kind of juice helps. There’s a couple things.

**Craig:** Those are both excellent recommendations. It’s Levain? Is that what it is, Levain Bakery?

**Richard:** L-E-V-A-I-N.

**Craig:** Levain.

**Richard:** Bakery. Great cookies. They deliver.

**Craig:** Do they ship?

**Richard:** Yeah, I think so. I use Try Caviar. They’re on that. I think they could ship to you. Their cookies are amazing. They have an oatmeal. All their cookies are gigantic.

**Craig:** Just like manhole covers.

**Richard:** They’re really good. They’re dense.

**Craig:** I love it. I’m going to unfortunately have to go and buy some of that stuff now. Thank you for that.

**Richard:** Thank you for this. This was really wonderful, because I don’t think anybody remembers the movie or thinks about it. Thank you. This meant a lot to me. Thank you very much.

**Craig:** I hope that we bring a whole new generation in.

**Richard:** And to Teddy.

**Craig:** Yes, and to Teddy, wherever he is, watching or listening.

**Richard:** And Denis too.

**Craig:** He’s wonderful.

**Richard:** That’s right.

**Craig:** That’s right. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro today is by Matt Davis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That is also where you will find transcripts and the signup for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts, and they’re great. Cotton Bureau. So soft. Highly recommend them, Richie. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you can get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we are about to record now. Richie, Drew, thank you so much for a terrific episode.

**Richard:** Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Drew.

**Drew:** Thank you, Richie.

[Bonus Segment]

**Craig:** Premium members, welcome back. Little, short treat for you here. Little bonus. I want to talk with Richie about… Because we’re both middle-aged guys. Apparently, middle-aged men have problems making and keeping friends.

There’s been some really interesting articles about this. There was one in the New York Times. This one was back in November of ’22, an article by Catherine Pearson titled Why is it So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends? “American men are stuck in a friendship recession. Here’s how to climb out.”

There’s also a slightly different view here back in May of 2019. This was in Harper’s Bazaar, written by Melanie Hamlett, Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden. “Toxic masculinity and the persistent idea that feelings are a female thing has left a generation of straight men stranded on emotionally stunted islands, unable to forge intimate relationships with other men. It’s women who are paying the price.”

First of all, I guess one question I have is, friends-wise… I have a lot of friends. Have you encountered the middle-age man not having friends issue?

**Richard:** First of all, I’m not a straight man. That’s one.

**Craig:** Boom.

**Richard:** That’s been a change since we saw each other last.

**Craig:** You were.

**Richard:** Not really.

**Craig:** I know.

**Richard:** I pretty much assumed everyone knew so I didn’t have to say anything. No, not really. My wife knew before we were married. It was a second coming out. Sorry, I came out-

**Craig:** Second coming is a much more [crosstalk 01:01:43].

**Richard:** I came out when I was 18, but only halfway, not with my family. I don’t know that it’s about toxic masculinity or anything like that. I do have friends. They’re mostly writers, like you, that I know. I used to have friends through the marriage. I don’t have them as much anymore.

It is hard to meet people. I also don’t like a lot of people now. The world is so fucked up. I really can’t stand people. I’m becoming a hermit. It’s hard to meet people when you’re a hermit. You meet them through work. I just directed this movie and made lovely new friends there. Again, it’s through work. I think something that women don’t understand, maybe not, this is probably wrong, but we’re defined by what we do.

**Craig:** Men, you mean?

**Richard:** Yeah. When we’re not doing what we do, we are invisible. We disappear. There’s a lot of pressure about that. I think we find friends through what we do. I don’t really have sport hobbies or stuff like that. I have a trainer, a gym guy that I love, that I talk to a lot and I’m with a lot. I don’t know. How about you? Are most of your friends in the business, or do you have outside friends?

**Craig:** Most of my friends are in the business. Most of my friends are writers. We do get an interesting built-in fraternity, I think, in a sense, because there are a lot of people that do what we do, and we’re all complainers. I find that complaining about things really can bring people together.

**Richard:** Absolutely. Absolutely. Also, writing is a solitary activity. Years and years ago, because we’re in New York and not LA, where you guys know each other and see each other more, Robert Kamen used to live here and he started this dinner thing. It was me, Robert Kamen, Tony Gilroy, and at the time Stephen Schiff, but now Scott Frank is here. We would have monthly dinners just to check in. That was really nice. We went out of our way and had a beautiful dinner, complained, drank. It was really a great thing that we did every month almost. Now that’s dissipated as well. I think especially for writers, male writers, it’s a good thing to do, to reach out and create those groups.

**Craig:** I talked about my father briefly before in the episode. It did strike me that in his later years, I never really thought about my dad and friends. It wasn’t like my dad had a group of guy friends.

**Richard:** No, my dad either. He was alone. It was all for my mother, all for my mom.

**Craig:** Exactly. It was that way until my dad died. His relationships came down to his wife, and that was it, and then family if you had to have those family holidays and things. It does strike me as sad. It is an interesting concept that men who can’t keep a friend group of men start to overburden their wife or their partner, because that’s the only person they deal with. That’s the only person who hears their problems.

**Richard:** Their only outlet.

**Craig:** There is no way to process.

**Richard:** I think that’s true.

**Craig:** Part of what they discuss here is how hard it is, like you said, for men to meet each other. You’re looking for a friend version of Grinder, basically. I don’t know what we would call it. Women do seem to just meet each other and become friends so easily.

**Richard:** Open up to each other more easily.

**Craig:** Exactly. I guess we don’t have the solution here. How old are you, Drew?

**Drew:** I’m 33. I’m getting married this fall. I’m doing the list for the bachelor party. There’s my brother.

**Richard:** Who do you want to spend time with? Who do you want to hang out with?

**Craig:** It’s happened to you.

**Drew:** It’s happening slowly, in little bits. It’s strange. I think honestly, I’m closer with women than I am with men, for the most part. It’s also interesting talking about burdening your wives too. I found a little book called Point Omega where one of the characters has a thing. He’s fresh off a divorce and doesn’t know why it fell apart. One of the characters says, “It’s because you told her everything, not because you told her anything.” I always think about that. If you burden your wife or anything with that oversharing and feeling like they have to be responsible for all your feelings-

**Richard:** That’s too much. No one person should be responsible for everything. That’s why friends are really good to have, to share other things with. We got to fix this. I don’t know how we do this.

**Craig:** I don’t know either, but I urge men to make an effort. I think part of it is just making an effort and not being afraid to say, “Hey look, I’m actually fucking lonely.” You have to show a little bit of vulnerability, because if you’re just like, “Hey, you want to get lunch?” guys are like, “No, not really.” If I hear a guy say, “Hey, listen, I’m actually having some problems and I need advice. Do you want to have lunch?” absolutely.

**Richard:** I’d be right there for them, yeah.

**Craig:** Then you start to create… You also get perspective. Richie, you were married for I don’t know how long, a long time.

**Richard:** 35, yeah.

**Craig:** 35 years. I’m getting close. I’m at 27, I think. When you can talk to other people who are in marriages that are that long, the complaining feels very good, because you realize this is normal.

**Richard:** You’re not alone. You’re not alone in it. That’s a really important thing. That’s really important.

**Craig:** Otherwise, it just feels like you’re stuck in something. You don’t realize that other people are like, “Oh, it’s fine. I feel that. It’s okay. It’s totally normal.” I don’t think we solved the problem necessarily, but at least we can urge you out there, if you are a man, particularly if you are heading into your middle ages, make an effort. It’s worth it to have some buds. Richie, thanks again.

**Richard:** Thank you very much. You’re a bud.

Links:

* The Ref on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKthobV2JU4), [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B006RXQ1EI/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r) and [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110955/)
* [Richard LaGravenese](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0481418/) on IMDb
* [The Ransom of Red Chief](https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Henry_Red_Chief.pdf) by O. Henry
* The Ref’s [Opening Scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAa3zP1ysqo)
* [Puzzled Pint’s Code Sheet](http://puzzledpint.com/files/2415/7835/9513/CodeSheet-201912.pdf)
* [Levain Bakery](https://levainbakery.com/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/) on Instagram
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matt Davis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Drew Marquardt](https://www.instagram.com/marquardtam/) 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/593standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/parentheses-would-help).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name’s Craig Mazin. How can I help?

**John:** This is Episode 552 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we talk narrative geography, professional development, and when it’s okay to take that pitch out somewhere else. Then it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at entries from our listeners and give our honest opinions on what’s working and what’s not. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll teach you the one secret to social media everyone is too afraid to show you.

**Craig:** Oh god, it’s not the top 10 secrets?

**John:** No, there’s just one secret, it turns out. It’s a secret you already know, Craig. The secret was in you the whole time.

**Craig:** I can’t wait.

**John:** It’s going to be good.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** I should say there’s not a general language warning for the whole episode, but I will probably swear when we get to that part. If you’re a Premium Member and your kids are in the car, John’s going to probably be saying some bad words.

**Craig:** Now you’ve unleashed me.

**John:** Craig, we’re going to start with some Follow-Up. This is so much in our pocket. It’s one of those questions that comes in that you and I are so well qualified to answer. Megana, start us off.

**Megana:** @ryanbeardmusic from Twitter asked about the credits for the upcoming Elvis movie. He said, “Hi all, can you explain Baz’s multiple writing credits for Elvis, please? I presume it’s a WGA thing, but I can’t wrap my head around it.”

**John:** This tweet shows the credit block for Elvis. This is what it reads. It reads, “Story by Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner. Screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell and Baz Lurhmann & Craig Pearce and Baz Lurhmann & Jeremy Doner.” Baz Luhrmann’s name appears four times in just the writing credits for this movie. That’s a lot, but it happens. Craig, talk to me about why this happens.

**Craig:** We do answer this pretty frequently, but this is a particularly good one. I really like this one. The way to understand all this stuff is to understand that every writing team that works on a movie is considered an individual writer for the purposes of credit. Let’s say there’s a writing team of Baz Luhrmann and Sam Bromell. We know they’re a writing team because of an A-N-D between them, there’s an ampersand. The ampersand tells you they’re a team. They count as one writer for the purposes of credit arbitration.

Now, when we do credit arbitration, and in this case there was an automatic arbitration, because Baz Luhrmann is also the director of the film, we don’t know who the writers are. We’re given scripts, and the scripts say Writer A, Writer B, Writer C, Writer D. I’ve done a couple that hit Writer H, which was exciting. What happens is we say, okay, we’ve gone through all the scripts, and here’s what I think it is. I think that the writing credit should be story by Writer A and Writer B.

**John:** With an A-N-D between those two.

**Craig:** That’s right. Writer A and Writer B, they’re two different writers. Then I think it should be screenplay by Writer C and Writer D and Writer B. Now, here’s where it gets fun. What if Screenwriter C is Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell? As it turns out in this case, that’s what happened. Baz Luhrmann wrote on this own for the purposes of story. Then he clearly did a draft in tandem as a team with a writer named Sam Bromell. He also did another draft as a team with a writer named Craig Pearce. This is an interesting one. Basically, the arbiters gave out as much credit as they could on this. They gave credit to the team of Baz Luhrmann and Sam Bromell. They gave credit to the team of Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce. They gave credit to Jeremy Doner. Then when it came to story, they gave it to Baz Lurhmann and they also gave it to Jeremy Doner. Wow.

**John:** It’s a lot. Here’s a thing that will help people understand this is, if you added some parentheses it would make a little bit more sense. If you put some parentheses around Baz Luhrmann and Sam Bromell, if you put parentheses around Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, parentheses around Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner, you’d understand those are three separate writing teams, and they were probably Writers B, C, and D, but they could’ve been writers B, F, and J. We don’t know how many writers were involved in this project.

**Craig:** Sure don’t.

**John:** That’s how it happened. By the distributive property, you want to be able to put Baz Luhrmann out and then put everyone else in parentheses, but you’re just not allowed to do these credits. As a person who’s been an arbiter on these things, I can tell you that Craig’s exactly right. We have no idea whether these people are writing teams or individual writers when we’re reading through these scripts. We’re giving credits to Writer A, Writer B, and then C, D, and E. We have no idea. That’s why you get credit blocks like this which look kind of strange. Same thing happened with Chloe Zhao on Eternals. It’s just a thing that happens.

**Craig:** It’s just a thing that happens. There is only one weird circumstance where we can collapse the credit down a bit. That is if there’s a writing team and then another writer, and the writer is one of the writing team, and there’s nobody else getting credit. If I worked on a script with John, it would be Craig & John. Then John goes off to do something else and I write another draft just by myself, and the arbiters say, oh, A and B both share credit. Written by Craig Mazin & John August and Craig Mazin looks bizarro. In that case they can smush it down to just written by Craig Mazin and John August. The apportionment of residuals would still be accurate to the technical credits.

**John:** All this was done by the books and is all good. I think a person could reasonably argue that there should be some way that these writers could agree to have the credits not have his name there so many different times, that there’d be some way the actual monies could be apportioned properly, but the credit block could look less screwy. Craig, under our existing rules, could these four writers decide that?

**Craig:** No. They can’t. There is an almost never used rule that says that writers can determine their own credits if they want to get together and do that, but not in the case of an automatic arbitration. Furthermore, the apportionment of screenplay credit among three writers can only be granted by arbitration.

**John:** Yes, in this case the screenplay is apportioned between three writers, in this case three writing teams, so only arbitration can do that. Megana, did that answer your questions?

**Megana:** I guess my question is can you talk about the development process of this, the process of Baz Luhrmann working with these three different writers? Are they hiring these people on to work as a part of a writing team to work with Baz Luhrmann?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Megana:** My question was whether the writing team is also under contention, like who did what to the draft?

**John:** We know people who’ve worked on… None of these writers. We don’t know these writers personally, but we know other folks who were involved at some point in this process. I think the call was, hey, do you want to go to Australia and work with Baz on this script. A writer would go and work with Baz for a couple weeks on this thing. It was a collaborative team writing thing where you were doing stuff together. There’s no real transparency into that process from the arbitration point of view. How much were they really a team? I don’t know. These writers were hired on to work on drafts with Baz Luhrmann.

**Megana:** Got it. That does clarify things.

**Craig:** That’s correct. There is really no… Other than a writer protesting to the guild and saying, “Listen, I was strong-armed into being part of the team. I didn’t want to be part of the team,” or somebody stuck their name on as if we were a team, but they really weren’t, unless that kind of protest happens, no, it’s just presumed that the writers who share the credit on the title page there for that draft are a bona fide team. It does seem like Baz Luhrmann probably wrote some kind of treatment at some point, some sort of story material by himself. Whether that came before or after Jeremy Doner, I do not know. Then it seems like he did indeed have at a minimum two writers that he did extensive work with as part of two different teams.

**John:** That’s my guess as well.

**Megana:** Got it. Thank you guys.

**John:** Megana, what else do we have?

**Megana:** Chris asks us, “What do you call the page before a script begins, where the writer puts either a quote or an explanatory message? I’m trying to figure out why writers do this, because my gut reaction is that it feels like cheating, but perhaps I’m missing a valuable tool I could use to better elucidate or thematically prep the reader for some of my writing. I don’t mean a character list like in The Nines script. I’m referring to something that is much more directly explanatory for the reader.”

**John:** Craig, what do you call that page between the title page and the first page of a script?

**Craig:** I don’t. It’s just the stupid page with the stupid quote on it.

**John:** It feels like a dedication page. I’ve also called it an intermediary page. If there were a standardized name for it, I think it would be helpful, because it’s weird we don’t have a good standardized name for it.

**Craig:** You could call it quote page. It’s not something that you need to worry about, Chris, honestly. I don’t think it’s cheating. If somebody wants to do it, God bless them. Is it a valuable tool? No. There has never been a single screenplay that went toward the path of success as opposed toward the path of failure, simply because of the strength of its quote. It’s not a thing. It doesn’t matter. You’ll be fine. You use it, you’re fine. If you don’t, you’re fine. It is not a valuable tool. It sounds like it’s not the kind of thing that you feel a great desire to do. The vast majority of screenplays do not do this.

**John:** The majority of the screenplays I’ve written do not have one of these pages. He mentions The Nines, which has a character explanatory page, which was really crucial for that, because otherwise you might not realize that the same actor’s playing these characters in different parts of the movie. Big Fish has one. It says, “This is a Southern story full of lies and fabrications, but truer for their inclusion,” just a single sentence on that page. It was helpful for Big Fish, because it just set up the right tone for what is the story you’re about to read. For that, I thought it was great. It ties in very nicely to the next question from Corey here. Megana, if you want to ask.

**Megana:** Corey asks, “In Episode 550 you discussed a screenwriter placing a trigger warning page between the cover and Page 1, whether it was warranted. I’ve written a screenplay that has several characters with disabilities. I don’t outwardly identify as a person with a physical disability, and I’m concerned that it could deter producers into thinking my writing is ableist. My question is, should I be putting a disability inclusion/information page at the top of my screenplay? Since my script is a comedy, it involves both abled to disabled bullying and disabled to disabled bullying. Can an information page alleviate potential producer concerns or scare them off more quickly?”

**Craig:** That was a really good question. Wow, it’s funny, we’ve been doing this so long, John, that now we actually can get new questions, because the world changed. That’s how long we’ve been doing this.

**John:** It did change.

**Craig:** The world changed.

**John:** Craig, before your answer, what would your answer have been 10 years ago?

**Craig:** My answer 10 years ago would’ve been nobody cares. That is not the answer that I would give today. This is a good question to ask. It’s relevant, because I think that a lot of producers, particularly in mainstream Hollywood, have become very concerned about this issue. Depending on what the story is, they may feel a burning desire to know if the writer is part of the class they are portraying. There’s lots of ways they can find out. The easiest way is your agent. Your agent says, “By the way, I represent this disabled writer, and he or she has written this script.” If you don’t have representation, nobody’s doing that for you, then I think it actually is helpful to put some kind of thing in there to let them know that you are coming at this from the inside as opposed to from the outside.

**John:** I agree with you in principle. I’m trying to imagine what would actually be said on that page that would both set the reader up for a good experience reading the script and not feel weirdly pre-defensive. I think it’s a really challenging thing to phrase there for that one page, that one sentence you’re going to put there, that’s going to set the person up right.

**Craig:** It’s not an easy… You could simply say something… Let’s say Corey’s last name is Jones. “Corey Jones is a disabled writer from Virginia.” You could do something as simple as that that is the most barebones biographical thing. Then I think the readers would say, “I understand why you were saying this.” I don’t think anybody would go, “Who cares about your bio, Corey?” They would get it, I think.

**John:** I think another alternative would be to find some quote, a thing a real person said out there, who is a disabled writer, a disability activist, who said the most important thing is that we push hard and then take it back. There might be some quote from a disabled person who says you also have to be able to have fun. You can’t put people up on a pedestal. There might be something like that that can actually help frame the comedy that you’re about to get into, because otherwise the person might be uncomfortable with some of the bullying that’s happening there.

**Craig:** Every comedy, you risk that, regardless. You could. You just don’t want to start your comedy by saying, “Lighten up. It’s a comedy.”

**John:** Don’t do that. Not a thing to do. I can imagine other kind of comedies that are talking about marginalized communities where a similar kind of advanced statement could be really helpful in framing who you are and why it’s appropriate for you to be telling this story or the kind of story that you’re hoping to tell.

**Craig:** Megana, what would you do in a situation like this? Should there be something? What do you think? Also, how would you phrase it?

**Megana:** I think it’s becoming a lot more common just in my experience. I feel like I’m seeing whatever we want to call that interstitial page a lot more. I think that people are more open to reading that. I think the quote is nice. I think what John was saying about finding a quote that frames it, without being too explicit, sounds nice and warming you up to the story.

**John:** I’m curious what our listeners think about this issue, but also what to call that page, because Megana just said interstitial page, which is the term I was reaching for rather than intermediary page. What do we want to call this page? I feel like if we just picked a title to this page, within five years we could actually name this page, and it would no longer be a question out there in the world. Write in to Megana or just tweet at us and let us know what we should call this page between the title page and the first page of the script. Those are follow-up-y questions, but Megana, we have some new things in the inbox. What do you got for us?

**Megana:** Great. Fred asks, “What do established screenwriters do for professional development? I’m in a field where there are continuing education requirements to keep up on the latest developments and hone my skills, but I’m curious what you do.”

**John:** Craig, are you caught up on all your classes or your coursework? Is your documentation up to date?

**Craig:** Yes, I have been proceeding up the ladder of professional development, and I should have access to the executive bathroom shortly.

**John:** That’s good, because you got to keep your credentials going there, because you never know when you’re going to be called up on it.

**Craig:** I’m so un-credentialed.

**John:** We tease, and yet there are some things I think we are doing consciously or subconsciously that are the equivalent of professional development. There’s certain things like WGA Showrunner Training Program, well-known, well-respected. Hey, you are going to be running a show. Here’s a boot camp in how you run a show. That is important. It’s been going on for a decade. It’s been really helpful in people figuring out how to do that job, the management function at that job. Things do change and evolve over the course of our careers. What Craig was just saying about 10 years ago, he would’ve had different advice for this writer, than now when we recognize that the world around us has changed to some degree, and we have to adapt what we’re doing. Yet there’s not a systematized way of doing that, because we’re not continually employed by the same employer. Just know we have to do HR training and sexual harassment training if we are staff on a show sometimes. For feature writers, that’s not really a thing.

**Craig:** I did have to do that when we started our production here. I don’t really consider that professional development, per se. It’s a creative job. We really don’t have professional development beyond watching TV, seeing movies, reading books, talking to people that are different than we are, the things that creative people and writers have always had to do. Professional development, I think in a lot of fields, is essential. Then in other fields it seems like it’s just a bunch of busy work designed to make people jump through hoops so they can get paid more, when they should have just been paid more already. It’s a way for some people to say, “Oh, I took these seven classes, so I should get paid more than that person, who is way better at this job than I am, but I took the seven classes.” We don’t have these problems. We don’t have the benefits or the drawbacks of professional development. We just try and stay plugged into culture and hold on to some relevance, I think is probably a good way of putting it.

**John:** I would say, just to be perfectly honest, most of my professional development has come through Scriptnotes, because you and I having a structured weekly conversation about the profession that we’re in, between each other, but also with all the guests that we bring in, I learn a lot, especially when we bring in folks who are doing something different than what I’ve ever done. We bring on showrunners or folks who are working in late-night or other fields I’m not directly involved in. That’s professional development, because I’m learning how they’re doing their jobs, the questions they are asking themselves, the struggles that they are facing. If I were to run a TV show, I’d be much better prepped, just because I’ve been doing all of the work and listening to these very smart people talk about their jobs.

**Craig:** There’s your answer. All you have to do, Fred, is start a podcast and do it for 10 years. Then you too will be professionally developed.

**John:** Love it. Megana, what else do you have for us?

**Megana:** Rachel asks, “I’m working on a spec script that’s based in a city I know well. I know where each of my characters live and work, and when I have them meet, I’m automatically thinking in terms of where they would genuinely meet if they were real, like which character would selfishly pick a place that’s close to their home but inconvenient for everyone else. At the same time, I’m aware that this isn’t generally how real-world locations are treated in actual movies. Any Before Sunset fan who’s visited Paris knows the disappointment of trying to trace Celine and Jesse’s walking route, only to discover that it dissipates after 10 paces because they teleported to some entirely different part of Paris mid-scene. Is my current approach misconceived? Am I sweating a set of considerations that don’t matter at all?”

**Craig:** A good question.

**John:** That’s a good question. I’m not saying you are totally misconceived, but I think you’re also, in your question, you’re answering your question. In the real world, people don’t think about that as much. In the actual making of films, we are going to cheat things to get from place to place. All that said, it does drive me crazy when people can do impossible things in LA in a movie. In movies that I’ve set in LA, things like Go, I am mindful of what part of town I’m sticking in and being sure it all tracks and makes sense within that part of town, both logistically but also just culturally and visually that it feels like you’re in the same part of the city that whole time. It’s not wrong for you to be thinking about where these people live, but you can get too anchored into some of your choices in the script that aren’t going to be relevant to the reader or to the viewer.

**Craig:** There was this note that used to get handed out a lot in the ’90s. Let’s say you were writing a movie that was set in Miami. The studio executives say, “I feel like you need to make Miami more of a character in the movie.” You would always think, oh, yes, yes, but what does that mean? Do you mean show places in Miami or have things that are… That’s what setting a movie in Miami is supposed to be. What do you mean? I think maybe all they meant is to provide some bits of authenticity and specificity. I think it’s probably a good thing that you’re thinking this way because it’s helping you think about your characters. If you think in terms of where they would genuinely meet if they were real, that gets you closer to where that scene is going to take place.

Now, if you’re doing a movie that is very much about a city, then sure, you’re going to want to make sure that Fenway Park is where it actually is in Boston, because people will just point at you and say that you’re terrible. It’s okay to lay everything out as truly as you can, and then when production happens, you figure it out. If they say, “We can’t shoot there. We’ll have to shoot here,” you can either rewrite it or you can cheat it. If it’s helping you write and it’s helping you achieve a certain amount of verisimilitude, specificity, and authenticity, then yeah, as long as it’s not holding you up, march on.

**John:** The other thing I would ask you to do is keep in mind what your reader needs to know versus what you want to know, because you as the writer/creator have this vision in your head for how people got from this point to this point and the shoe leather that would take them from this moment to this moment. That may not be important to your reader at all. Always just try to go back through your script and think, okay, do they actually need to know this detail? Do they need to know this connecting bit, or are they just looking like, “We’re in this location and we’re in this location. We don’t need to know how we got there or how realistic it is.” Is it not informing the characters and their dialog and the choices within those scenes, it probably doesn’t belong in your script.

**Craig:** I want to answer another question, desperately.

**Megana:** Do you want to answer this one from Jack from Sydney, Australia?

**Craig:** I haven’t read it, but yes. I don’t know what you’re going to say. I haven’t opened the thing. I’m committing to answering this question no matter what it is.

**Megana:** Jack says, “I recently completed a feature, and after receiving some extremely warm notes from a coverage service, I decided to share details and the log line of the project online. It’s very high concept, and judging by the responses and feedback, it’s clear the idea alone has a great deal of appeal. Off the back of this, I’ve been contacted directly by development executives asking to read it, which all sounds very positive but also has me a little nervous. I know ideas on their own are a dime a dozen, so I’m very keen to get the entire script into people’s hands to digest and enjoy. As this is my first time with any sort of industry attention, I’m just not sure how to navigate this and whether to share it freely with whomever asks. I’m unrepped and still very early in my writing journey, so any advice on what to expect and how to manage this would be appreciated. Before sending, should I watermark my script somehow? Will I be expected to sign release forms? Are these for my protection or theirs? Is this all just the ramblings of a paranoid newbie?”

**Craig:** I’ve committed to answering this question, Jack.

**John:** Craig, do it.

**Craig:** I’m going to answer this question. Don’t worry. You are from Australia, Jack. I do not know how copyright functions in Australia, but I can assure you it offers you more protection than copyright does in the United States, because copyright protection in the United States is the worst, unless you’re a business. You have Droit Moral. You have moral rights of authors and so on and so forth. The point is, when you write something, you have established authorship. There is likely a copyright office in Australia. You should contact them, register your screenplay with them so that there is a legal paper trail. Then you should go ahead and give it to people. You can absolutely watermark it. I think most of the major screenwriting programs do it. John has a separate program called Bronson Watermarker that does it.

**John:** Oh my gosh, this is Craig Mazin hyping one of my products. Please make a note of this in the transcript. This is the first time this has happened.

**Craig:** I don’t know if I hyped it, but I’ve acknowledged it.

**John:** Acknowledgement is hype from Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** If your sales spike, I want money. Yes, you may be expected to sign release forms, but they have requested this, so it is now, instead of an unsolicited screenplay, it is a solicited screenplay. If it’s an unsolicited screenplay, it’s fairly common for them to ask you to sign something, because they really didn’t want to read it at all, and they don’t want to get sued over something they didn’t want to read. If they’re soliciting it, then in general you should be able to send it to them, watermark it with their name. They won’t be offended. It is for everyone’s protection. Live and love, man. Go for it. That’s what you wrote this stuff for is to show it to these people, right? Show it to them.

**John:** The moment has come which you’ve been hoping for which is that people like your stuff and want to read it. This is very exciting. Yes, so you can watermark it. It doesn’t have to be a big, obnoxious watermark either. Just a little reminder like, hey, this is for you and only for you. You have a trail because they’ve asked for it, and then you were emailing the thing. Down the road, if you do need to sue somebody, you could prove that they had access to it, that they read the thing. It’s fine. Don’t catastrophize this yet. The best possibility is that you’re going to make some connections. You’re going to hopefully find somebody who makes this movie or at least wants to meet you as a writer. These are only good things. I’d say take the excitement, work with the excitement, and keep pressing on. Also, in stressing out over this script, don’t stop writing your next one, because that’s even more exciting than this current one.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Megana, give us one last question before we get to these Three Page Challenges.

**Megana:** JJ from Pasadena says, “A couple of months ago, I had a general meeting with an exec from a company that controls a lot of magazine IP. After the meeting, the exec sent me a couple of articles they thought I might be interested in. One of the articles clicked with me, and I came up with a pitch for a show. I didn’t use any characters from the article or any other material except for the idea for a setting. Even then, my setting became completely fictional. I pitched my idea, and they passed. My question is, am I free to take this pitch to other places, without the article attached, of course? The characters I created, their relationships and backstories are wholly original works and have nothing to do with the article. My managers are saying it’s tricky, but my take is what’s the difference between what I did here and me reading the article on my own and using it for inspiration to create something original, which happens every day?”

**Craig:** Managers. I swear to God.

**John:** I’ll take the first crack at this, because I may have a different approach than Craig. We just talked through Jack’s situation where people have solicited his script, and so he doesn’t have to worry about this. In this case, the reciprocal is true, because this magazine can show like, oh we came out to you for this thing, and we didn’t want it. We didn’t want it, but you took this article that we’ve used, and it became a basis for your project. Is that likely? Not likely at all. The way to make it even less likely or ever become a thing is to really change whatever other details were from that article and just make it your own thing. If this thing was set at a bowling alley, could it be set at a roller rink instead? Is there a different place you could set it, it just gets rid of all traces of that article? Yes, what you did, JJ, was create a whole new story that was vaguely inspired by that thing. You can get rid of that thing that was underlying it and use what you’ve got there as its own pitch. Craig, what’s your take?

**Craig:** The tricky part is only the diplomacy between yourself and these other people, but they passed.

**John:** They passed.

**Craig:** Which to me, that’s the end of diplomatic negotiations. The fact is, I’m presuming this article is nonfiction. It may not be. If it’s fiction, that’s a different story. To me, I don’t think of articles as fiction. If you had said essay, that might be different. Fiction is copyrighted, and it is a unique expression and fixed form. You can’t infringe upon somebody’s copyright on that any more than they could infringe on something you wrote.

If it’s a nonfiction article about facts, and the facts have been published in a magazine or newspaper, those facts are free to everybody in the world. You cannot own facts, particularly after you have reported them. You have gone even further than you would need to go, because you’re not using any of the characters from the article, or if it’s nonfiction I would call those people people. Then you said your setting became completely fictional. I think you’re perfectly fine if it’s nonfiction. If it’s fiction, no. That’s dangerous. You would have to make it very, very different so that when the executive from the IP magazine company hears about what you’re doing and reads it, that he or she can say, “Oh my god, I’m suing you.”

**John:** Let’s talk for a moment about fiction versus nonfiction, because we’re not lawyers obviously, but let’s talk about it just in a general sense of why they feel different and why they work differently in terms of what we consider literary material. If something is a work of fiction that has characters in it, something that has story developments, you can see, okay, this is the movie within this space. These are characters that were created to tell this one story. It’s hard to get rid of all those things and create a whole separate story. It’s unlikely you’re going to do this. As opposed to most nonfiction works, which are like, okay, this is about underwater mining, and there’s just a general sense of how this all works and the people involved in this, but there’s nothing there that you couldn’t go out and just do your own research and come up with the same details and facts. You’re going to be able to do that with nonfiction. You’re not going to be able to do that in fiction. That’s part of the reason why they feel different and why you don’t see the same kind of problems happening with the nonfiction articles.

**Craig:** The nonfiction work is research. You’ve read it. It counts as research. It’s facts. Certainly you can write about real people. You can’t defame people. The reason that we are so obsessed, we meaning Hollywood, with buying the rights to nonfiction articles, is because it helps the company stake a claim to an area, so everybody else knows they’re making a movie about let’s just say-

**John:** FIFA Soccer scandal.

**Craig:** The FIFA Soccer scandal. So-and-so has bought the rights to this big article in Rolling Stone about the FIFA Soccer scandal. They’re going for it. Also, now, when they buy that article, they have access to the journalists’ notes and all the stuff that was behind the article, including the contact information for all the people they talked to so that you can keep going further. You can also use things that they didn’t publish in the article. Beyond that, facts are facts. It’s just research.

**John:** Facts are facts.

**Craig:** That’s why anyone can write a movie about the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. You can take any fact you want from any nonfiction book or article, any of them.

**John:** Let’s discuss a practical matter though. Let’s do your Reagan assassination attempt thing. Let’s say there was a really good article and JJ was brought in to maybe pitch on this really good article about this Ronald Reagan assassination. It’s a very specific moment and beat. They say, no, actually, we’re not interested in that. If JJ then went out and started pitching this Ronald Reagan assassination movie to other places, those producers would be pissed. The ones who passed would be pissed. Would they legally have a claim to stop it? No, not really, they wouldn’t, because he could do his own research. That doesn’t mean it’d be a good idea for JJ to do, because it’s very clearly they brought him in, they passed, and he’s going off and doing that. Doesn’t mean he shouldn’t do it. It just means he should be aware of that. I can understand some hesitation there. It doesn’t sound like JJ’s situation is anywhere near that specific.

**Craig:** No. It’s a bad idea unless somebody buys it, in which case it was a great idea.

**John:** Then it’s a great idea.

**Craig:** This is an area where having great representation helps a lot, because representation can launder these kinds of interactions. No, you wouldn’t want to be known for going around town shopping an idea like this. If you had a general meeting and you mentioned your awesome take on the attempt on Reagan’s life, and they got excited, when the other people call to complain, your agent’s going to say, “They wanted to make one too. They mentioned it to him. What do you want? You don’t own the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life.” Then they just have to eat it. This is the danger of developing stuff that’s nonfiction. While I was developing Chernobyl, there was a competing Chernobyl project at Discovery, I think, which now amusingly is HBO, so that’s weird. You’re aware that it’s there. Let’s all see what happens. Nothing you can do.

**John:** Let’s get on to our Three Page Challenges. These are, as far as we know, not based on any fiction or nonfiction works. Instead, these are pages that our listeners have sent in. If you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, you can see the entry form, which you can send us a pdf of your three pages, generally the first three pages of a script. It can be a teleplay. It can be a screenplay. Every once in a while, Craig and I will read through these and give you our honest opinions. I say we read through these, but of course it’s really Megana Rao, and in this case Drew Marquardt, our intern, who is reading through all the entries in this last batch. If you want to read along with us, you can go to the show notes for this episode and click there. It will have the links to the pdfs of what was sent in to us, so you see. You could pause this episode and read through the pdf first, or just go back through it after you’ve listened to us describe them. We have three of them here. Megana, could you help us out with a summary of this first script?

**Megana:** The first one is Tag, You’re It by Suw Charman-Anderson. In the dead of night, World War One trench fighter William leads a small group of soldiers to silently plant barbed wire in No Man’s Land. Caught by a German patrol, William is riddled by machine gun fire and bleeds out. We cut to present day, where Nia Jenkins, 50s, goes to take a sip of water but notices a drowned spider in her cup and flings it across the room. At the same time, a man in filthy clothes mutters to himself as he walks through the town center. He lunges at a group of students who fight back, and in the scuffle, pull off his hoodie to reveal he’s William, and he hasn’t aged a day.

**John:** Craig, one thing I want to say about these pages before we get into anything else is a lot happens in them. There’s actually a fair amount of story beats that happen in just the course of these three pages, which I just want to commend, because so often we’ll get through three pages and it’s like, okay, that set up some scenery, but not a bunch happened here. A bunch happened here, so good job on that. Before we get to these three pages though, the title page here reads Tag, Season 1, Episode 1, You’re It, but doesn’t have Suw’s name or contact information on it, nothing else. A cover page doesn’t do any good unless you actually have the cover page stuff on it. Just make sure you’re always putting that stuff on for a Three Page Challenge or for any script you’re sending out there into the world.

**Craig:** Particularly if your script is entitled Tag, because there is a thing in television that is the tag, and so they may think, wait, is this just the end of Episode 1. You might want to put that in all caps or something, just because… It’s a little interesting. Often, you will see pilot episodes. Season 1, Episode 1 is a bit… It’s very optimistic.

**John:** Say pilot.

**Craig:** I think pilot seems a little bit more true to what it is, unless Suw knows something that we don’t.

**John:** Craig, when we got into… We’re opening up in these trenches of World War One. What did you think of this first page? Let’s go through the World War One sequence.

**Craig:** There was a lot of really good stuff here. World War One trenches are pretty evocative things. I think that Suw did a pretty good job of placing us in that world. I needed a little bit of effort, which I didn’t want to expend, I generally don’t want to expend any effort early on, to get through a little bit of lack of information. It begins with, “Exterior, World War One trenches, night,” although it is WWI. I think if it’s World War One, you can go ahead and write it out at that point.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** You can come back to the abbreviation later, but give us the first bit. Then it says “super: the Western front, 1916.” Other than my late father and men his age and history professors, a lot of people are not going to know what the Western front was. They’re not going to know where it was. I think we need to hear where we are, whether we’re in Germany or France. We need to know a town, an area, just so we can place ourselves.

I loved that William Fernsby, I liked he had “ferrety eyes and a shaven head.” He’s “up to his ankles in filthy water.” He’s got lice. He’s waiting for the soldier in front of him to move forward. It’s a nice way to move us into establishing that there are six men. It says “in the wiring party.” We don’t know what that is. Probably not a good idea to use that lingo when you just need to show me what you show me next, which is they’re gathering “supplies of six-foot pickets and rolls of barbed wire.” We proceeded through the No Man’s Land. Again, probably a good idea to give people a little bit of a concept of what No Man’s Land is, which was essentially this dead space in between opposing trenches.

This puzzled me. I’m curious, John, what you made of it. In the second scene, “William treads carefully, quietly, his nerves humming. The German trenches are only 150 meters away. There’s a noise.” Noise is in all caps. “The entire party freezes, nervously searching for its source. Communication is by hand signal and low whispers. Slowly, as they realize there’s no one there, they begin to move again.” Now, I know what happens next, but what-

**John:** Yeah, but at the time, what-

**Craig:** What is this noise? What is it? Do you know? I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t know what that noise is. You have to be more specific here, because a noise could be anything. What do they think they hear? Do they hear movements? Do they hear someone approaching? What do they think are hearing?

**Craig:** Describe the ruckus. We need to know what they think it might be. Now, it seems to me that what Suw’s going for here is in the next scene, “William has moved away from the others.” That’s pretty vague. Why? What’s he doing? Why is he away from the others? “Out of nowhere appears a German soldier,” which is ironic, because that is how a German would say that. It’s backwards. A German soldier appears out of nowhere is better syntax, I think. “Part of a patrol.” You wouldn’t know that, because we don’t see them, because he’s alone.

**John:** Scratch that.

**Craig:** Don’t need it. Also, how out of nowhere? Do you mean apparated? Do you mean from the shadows?

**John:** From the darkness?

**Craig:** Yeah, because there’s clearly something supernatural going on. We need a little bit more clarity there. Also, it says, “The German soldier is on him immediately, but neither fire their weapons. Instead, they grapple hand-to-hand, silent except for huffs and puffs,” until the German soldier puts his wrist against William’s and then, “William screams in pain.” Why were they quiet earlier? Maybe that gets answered later. I don’t know. I like what happened next. Everybody died.

**John:** Everybody died. I was assuming they were quiet just because everyone has to be so super, super quiet. I think that could’ve been a little better set up. I think my only real frustration with this trench sequence is that throughout this whole thing I have got no sense of who William is individually. I wanted just one line. Just give one piece of business to William that is his alone, because otherwise it’s just the camera is favoring this one guy. I don’t know that’s going to be enough, because it is important that it is him, that we’re really going to see his face.

**Craig:** I agree. I did like that on the top of Page 2, the German soldier, which is spelled solider, a word that any spell check would capture, so please, for the love of God… “The German soldier leaps almost gleefully into the line of fire, his body jerking grotesquely.”

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Whoa, okay, that’s interesting. Then we find out that William is dead by, “William lies amongst the mess of bodies, eyes barely open, blood flowing freely from bullet wounds in his chest. Dawn breaks on the dead.” That’s great.

**John:** Dawn doesn’t break on the dead though, Craig. The sun suddenly comes up?

**Craig:** I still don’t know the difference between dawn and sunrise, to be honest with you. Every cinematographer laughs at me. Meaning there’s light on the horizon and there’s a lot of dead people. It was evocative.

**John:** It was evocative.

**Craig:** Then we ran into some trouble.

**John:** Last thing I’ll say is we want to get William off by himself. I think the wringing of the wire could be a good reason for him to be off by himself. Either he’s pulling ahead or he has to stay back with the reel as the others are pulling it forward. Just show us how he gets to be put by himself.

**Craig:** Agreed. No question, we need to explain that, because otherwise what’s happened is your screenplay has moved him somewhere he shouldn’t be so that something can happen. Audiences just don’t like that.

**John:** They don’t like that. That’s not all of our scenes. Next, we’re moving into Nia’s house, the bedroom. The room is “stylishly decorated, tidy but sparse … curtains drawn, dawn light seeping in around the edges.” I don’t know what tidy but sparse means.

**Craig:** Tidy and sparse. Sparse does not contradict tidy. It says “super: present day.” I’m not sure we would need that if you could just give us some details in the room that would tell us we’re no longer in 1916.

**John:** Now, we see this spider crawling around. I don’t need the spider crawling around at all. I basically just need… I love that she’s hot in bed and she’s the sort of person who sleeps hot and she grabs for the water and there’s a spider in it. That’s great. I think we spent too much time on this spider business.

**Craig:** Unless it becomes really important later, which is possible.

**John:** It could be.

**Craig:** We have some reverse syntax again. “Alone in the double bed lies a sleeping woman.” I’m starting to wonder if maybe Suw is a German speaker.

**John:** Could be.

**Craig:** “The menopause has reached Nia at last.” The menopause?

**John:** The menopause.

**Craig:** The menopause.

**John:** You got it.

**Craig:** I think it’s just menopause.

**John:** Menopause has reached-

**Craig:** She’s menopausal. Here’s my biggest issue. She wakes up. There’s a spider. She freaks out about the spider. She calls up for somebody named Tomos. There’s no one there. She’s upset. She then picks up the spider with some barbecue tongs and flushes it down the toilet. It says finally she can breathe again, except it says, “She can breath again. She sags.” Then that’s it. Then we’re off to a different scene. I’m like, why did I watch any of that?

**John:** I don’t know why we watched it.

**Craig:** I learned nothing. It didn’t drive me forward. Why? Here’s the deal. Suw, you get this big, exciting first sequence. Then you go somewhere else. I need something at the end of that sequence, doesn’t have to be crazy, to make me go, “Oh, what’s going on here?” I don’t get anything. I just get a lady flushing a spider.

**John:** I like the details. I like her with the tongs and all that stuff. I see it. It’s all great. I didn’t get any new information that’s making me extra intrigued. It just feels like a different movie, like okay, that movie happened, now we’re in this movie, and now we’re going to this third sequence, which is the college students. This fortunately does tie back into our opening. We see that William is part of this world. He seems to be the stereotype of the insane person rambling around that everyone’s trying to not look at, but mostly this worked for me. Then he’s on top of a student there. I would say my frustration at the end of this was, “With surprising speed and agility, the man lunges at the nearest student. There’s a scuffle as the others pull him off. His hoodie falls backwards, and we see his face.” The other student, who is that student? Is it a man? Is it a woman? Give us some detail here. Even if this character’s not going to survive this moment, we’ve got to know something.

**Craig:** Also, again, describe the ruckus. “There’s a scuffle as the other pull him off.” What does that mean, scuffle? Are people throwing punches? Do they grab him? Unless you were different, John, I had zero doubt that this was going to be William.

**John:** No. Of course it was going to be William.

**Craig:** His face is covered by a hoodie. I wonder who it is? You might, Suw, get away with not doing this ornate reveal and just a simpler reveal. We see a man from behind, stumbling “through the pedestrian precinct.” That’s an interesting choice of words. A car almost hits him. He turns, and now we see his face. It’s William, and he’s muttering to himself or whatever. This feels pretty involved. Generally speaking, “One notices the man but studiously ignores him,” I don’t know. The students, they’re nothing. They’re like props. Then we end with a reference to a character. We learn their name. We learn how the name is pronounced. We learn what their skin color is, what their eye color is, what their hair color is. We really probably don’t need all of that there. We’re going to learn it later. I would rather learn it when other people would learn it, because the audience isn’t going to learn it here. They’re not going to know his name here. I would probably dose that out a little bit later perhaps, because he’s supposed to be mysterious.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s give a little more detail on William at the start. Let’s consider whether we need to have this scene with the spider and Nia where it is, because I think it’s meant to be just a filler scene so that we don’t have these two things back-to-back. It’s not doing a job here. Let’s get to our William quicker. Even though I started this conversation by saying I was happy with how much happened in these three pages, and I still am, I think we could spend our time better in these three pages still.

**Craig:** If you do have what I think is a pretty interesting narrative conceit, which is Highlander but World War One, there’s other, more imaginative ways to show somebody being launched through time and still being alive and being as disturbed as the man who put this curse on him. I think this feels familiar. The executive feels familiar. I would really take a look at Page 3, and I would just ask myself… Let’s presume people get it, that there is actually… It’s not the most earth-shattering concept. Maybe put a little less pressure on the concept and think a little bit more about a more contemporary or challenging execution of it.

**John:** A thing we started doing recently with Three Page Challenges is that we asked them to submit a log line as well. Craig and I don’t know the log line until this very moment. I’m going to open up the triangle here. Here’s the log line for this thing which Suw sent through. “A curse transforms a single mum into an immortal heroine who must protect Earth from aliens, but is her 1,000-year-old champion really on her side or should she be protecting her enemies from him?” I did not see aliens coming.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** An involuntary immortal quality there, I get that.

**Craig:** You knew that Nia Jenkins was important because we saw the scene, so yes, but aliens, that’s the part I was like… That caught me by surprise.

**John:** I’m excited to see what Suw does with the rest of this script. I thought there was some promising stuff here.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Now let’s move on to our next thing. Megana, can you give us a summary of Halloween Party?

**Megana:** Great. Halloween Party by Lucas Abreu and Zachary Arthur and Kyle Copier. In a local newscast, a reporter delivers breaking news that three people have died and hundreds more were injured at a Halloween Party at Arizona State. They showed the mugshots of the two students identified as suspects, Carmichael and Allie. We then go back to two days earlier as Carmichael and Allie walk to class. Allie bemoans that they’ve yet to attend a single college party, but Carmichael defends this decision, saying he needs a spotless record in order to sit on the Supreme Court one day. Allie pushes back, insisting one party won’t destroy his life, but Carmichael asks her to wait until after his longtime crush, Maddie, leaves.

**John:** That’s where we’re at after three pages. Craig, first impressions of Halloween Party?

**Craig:** Lucas and Zachary and Kyle, this is going to sting just a touch. There’s a lot going wrong here. There’s a lot going wrong in a way that is very typical for screenplays. In that regard, this is, I think, useful and fixable. I want to go through them, because there are just a lot of screenwriting sins that pile up really fast and really consistently.

**John:** Agreed. There’s also some good things we can point out as well, but the sins are very obvious.

**Craig:** The sins are pretty obvious. Let’s start with sin number one. The reporter is not reporting the way any reporter reports. This is what the reporter tells us: Breaking news. Three people died and hundreds of people were injured “in a Halloween party gone wrong” near a college campus. Two people were taken into custody. They are the key suspects. What? How did the people die? It said investigation “into last night’s horrific events are ongoing.” What events? No one ever gets on the news and said, “Three people died.” How? Were they shot, chopped up, melted?

**John:** Poisoned?

**Craig:** We need something. Right off the bat, there’s just a clumsiness here. Reporter dialog is just something you need to get right.

**John:** Let’s talk about reporter dialog. This whole setup essentially is a Stuart Special, where it’s just like we’re seeing the aftereffects of this and the news footage of this thing, and then it jumps forward to three days earlier, which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with a Stuart Special. This could be a good setup because it is surprising that these two people did this horrible thing, apparently. They want to see them in the time before. That can absolutely work, but we’re relying on this newscast to do a little too much. I also wonder about starting over black. There’s a limited amount of time which an audience is willing to just stare at a black screen and have someone talking. I think this was pushing beyond that. Think about what are you actually showing on screen. Are there multiple reports happening simultaneously in an I Am Legend kind of way? That could be a way to get into it. This is not going to work here. All that said, I love the character descriptions of both Carmichael and Allie. “Carmichael, 21, short Black chubby kid with a smile wide enough that it probably hurts his face, has a cul-de-sac haircut and lipstick all over his face.” I don’t know what a cul-de-sac haircut is, but I love that his smile “probably hurts his face.” I love it. Craig, Megana, what is a cul-de-sac haircut?

**Craig:** In the shape of a horseshoe?

**Megana:** I took it to mean just suburban and nerdy.

**Craig:** We’ll have to look that one up. While we’re doing research on this, I didn’t mind this description, but I did not like the description of Allie. The description of Allie was, “Allie, 22, tall skinny woman who’s far cooler than she has idea about.” To me, that’s just cool but doesn’t know it.

**John:** I like “glossy eyed and faded, she’s still on top of the world and doesn’t give a fuck about her black eye.” Great.

**Craig:** Hard to get across in a still photo. Also, who’s watching this? It’s on TV. We won’t know she’s a tall skinny woman because you’re showing us mugshots. How do we know she’s tall and skinny? Is there a specific height on the mugshot? They don’t really do that. That’s from the bad movies from the ’50s. There’s so many issues here. I thought, okay, let’s see where we end up two days earlier. We’re at campus. By the way, there’s nothing wrong with the Stuart Special. We’ve seen this particular kind of Stuart Special a lot.

**John:** I do not believe that two days before Halloween, people are already wearing their Halloween costumes around campus. I just don’t believe it.

**Craig:** They’re not.

**John:** I did not believe the campus at that moment. They’re not. Here’s my frustration is, there’s no such place as “exterior, Arizona State University campus.”

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** That’s not a place.

**Craig:** Not a place.

**John:** It’s not actually a location. You can be like, the main quad moving between the dorms and this place, but describe, give us a place, because I don’t know what the ASU campus looks like. I need to know something, and especially because you’re going to do a walk and talk, attempt to do a walk and talk for a very long time between two characters in a space. I have no idea where we are. By picking a more specific place, you could break it up. Give us some things to do and see and change up the scene. Right now, we are just trapped in this conversation that just keeps going. Aaron Sorkin could not make a good walk and talk that could carry us through these two pages of some void that we’re in.

**Craig:** Well-observed that we are in a place that doesn’t exist. Many, many years ago, all the way back when I had my blog, I wrote an article called You Can’t Just Walk into a Building. I think that’s what it was called. It’s common for screenwriters to say walks into a building and looks around. It’s like, what building? Building isn’t a thing. Someone has to go find the building. What is inside of the building? Is it just a building? Campus is not a place. Absolutely true that nowhere on the planet Earth are people in costumes two days before Halloween. There is no reason for Carmichael to be dressed in a Harry Potter outfit. Why?

**John:** I think it’s trying to ironically comment on JK Rowling’s trans controversy. I have no idea why he’s in a Harry Potter outfit. No idea.

**Craig:** It’s a brave attempt, but no. Then what proceeds is two pages of what I called ticker tape writing, just dialog, no interruption, no action lines, no one else shows up. I simply have these two people having a conversation that doesn’t appear to have a moment before. The conversation begins like this, “This weekend we’re doing it. I think we should try drugs.” Okay, but what were they saying before that?

**John:** They were together. They were already walking.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** This could be a first line if she runs up behind him and grabs him, startles him, and pins him down and says this is what we’re going to do. That is the beginning of a scene, that that moment started. It can’t start with them already walking and she says this.

**Craig:** If you just added the word no, then I would understand that she was responding to something, and so that we were inside of a…

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** You can’t just start as if these people were walking silently and then suddenly, scene. Then what happens is two people that know each other very well start telling each other things that they should already know. They just start announcing things that they should know. “We’re seniors at the number one party school in the nation and have literally never been to a single party.” Yeah, they know that. “I want to be on the Supreme Court.” Yes, I know. Then, “You act weird around Halloween,” which is bizarre, but also something that you would know. Then, “Imagine how many more copies of my book I’d sell.” Okay, so you’re a writer. You need to tell him that, even though he already knows. Then he has to tell her that there is a woman that he is in love with, that she already knows about. None of this would happen.

**John:** It would not happen.

**Craig:** None of it.

**John:** We often talk about how late could you come into a scene and still get the purpose of the scene. It’s a fun exercise with this, because you would come in so much later to this and actually get the information out that you want to get out, and give yourself space to do more interesting things in here. We won’t keep beating on this, but it’s like a jokoid. It has the quality of dialog, and dialog that people say in movies, but it’s just there’s too much, and it’s not actually moving us anywhere, not going to any place. There’s one sentence I actually have to talk about, because I think it would be actually an impossible sentence to diagram. I’m going to read Carmichael’s sentence from the top of Page 3. This is what Carmichael says. I’ll try to give a fair performance of it. Here it is. “I’m simply saying I have to go in there with a resume solid enough for Lindsey Graham to be comfortable nominating somebody with a skin color that’s darker than his mother’s.” Wow.

**Craig:** What I wrote next to that was awkward and written. By written, I mean instead of somebody talking, which is what dialog in a screenplay is for, it appears that somebody has taken some time to write some prose out. He does it again. Then his next dialog brick is, “This just kind of feels like one of those moments I bring up in my bestselling autobiography 50 years from now where I talk about how your decision to try drugs in this moment led you to a life hunting for Sasquatch and multiple felony-level prostitution charges.” No.

**John:** How many words was that?

**Craig:** So many words. The sentences are coming out in absurdly complete packages. I have a challenge for Lucas and Zachary and Kyle. The challenge is I want you to rewrite this scene. I want you to not worry about being funny. I don’t want you to write a single joke. I want you to write it in the most realistic way possible, as if these were actual human beings walking across an actual campus, going somewhere, coming from somewhere, and having a discussion that two people that have known each other for years would actually have, in the way that they would have it. Just go as low concept as you can. Go mumblecore on this. You can always then pull it up. I think you guys need to get down to the really realistic ground on the ground before you can start getting into the comedic stuff, because it’s just not connected to reality right now.

**John:** I very much want to see that. I was going to propose the same thing. I want to see a cleaned-up version of this. I think it’s also challenging to have a team of three writing scenes. It can happen, but you don’t see it very much. It’s not common.

**Craig:** That’s true. Maybe that’s part of it is that it becomes committee-ized or something. All I can say, guys, is I think that I’m sure that you have a movie that all three of you love, that is in this genre. See if you can get that screenplay and just really dig into how it’s constructed. I think you will move forward by leaps and bounds. I really do believe so.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** I am rooting for you guys.

**John:** Here’s the log line that they sent through. “When two best friends decide to impress their friend group from out of state, they mistakenly throw the greatest Halloween party of all time.”

**Craig:** That’s what I think probably you thought it would be about, certainly what I thought it would be about. There are lots of great movies about young adult parties going bad but good. Time-tested genre often works. I think you guys, just give yourself this little exercise, and then I think write back into it. It’s okay. Like I said, you didn’t invent any new mistakes, so don’t worry about that. I made these mistakes. John, you made these. Maybe you didn’t, but I did.

**John:** A hundred percent, I did. Also, I do wonder if some aspect of what happened to dialog at a certain point, and what we took to be as good dialog, like of the Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it’s very convoluted, and yet it all fits together, people heard that and internalized that and think that’s what dialog should sound like. It’s just not working in some of these situations.

**Craig:** Also, there’s a certain kind of person that can do it. If your characters are highly educated, articulate press secretaries for the president or future Mark Zuckerbergs who are on the spectrum and at Harvard, yeah, then they can talk like that, because some of those people talk like that. This is not to insult anybody at Arizona State University, but this is not the typical cadence of anybody. Neither Carmichael nor Allie are talking like actually people there. All of their lines are too formed. When Allie said, “Never fucked a woman,” she knows he hasn’t. What is that even about? Then you fuck him then. It was just so weirdly mean, and then he just kept going through it. That’s an example, guys, where I think you’re going for a laugh but you’re actually hurting the characters. That’s the other thing is never, never sacrifice character on the pyre of the laugh, because you probably won’t get the laugh, because people will be upset at the character, and you’ll hurt the character.

**John:** For sure.

**Megana:** Wait, also, do you want to know what a cul-de-sac haircut is?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to know. Please.

**Megana:** I think that what they are saying here is it’s a fade. There’s a little bit of hair on top, and then you have the cul-de-sac effect because it’s really trimmed down on the sides.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Megana:** The thing that comes up when you first search for this on Google is just male balding patterns. That makes more sense to me as a cul-de-sac.

**John:** A horseshoe, yeah. I doubt he has shaved his head to resemble male pattern baldness, although I’d want to know that character. I’d really want to know that character who would choose to do that.

**Craig:** I would respect that.

**John:** A hundred percent.

**Craig:** I would respect that.

**John:** Megana, can you talk us through our final Three Page Challenge?

**Megana:** Ronnie, an American at college in Scotland, comes home from a one-night stand to a voice mail from her dad, Ed. As she listens to the voice mail on speakerphone, she notices her pet goldfish floating in its tank. As she tries to resuscitate the fish, Ed informs her that her mother has died. Back home in Santa Barbara, Ronnie and her siblings stand on the beach as Ed pushes their mother’s urn out to sea, which the tide quickly brings back to shore. Her sister Elle swims the urn out and submerges it. When she returns to shore, their sister Sophia accuses Elle of stealing her earrings.

**John:** That’s where we’re at at the end of three pages.

**Craig:** What’d you think, John?

**John:** I liked quite a lot about these. I really liked quite a lot about these pages. There’s some interesting stuff here. Again, we’re on a college campus, and yet it feels a more specific college campus. I wasn’t trapped in nowhere for this as much. I have specific things about getting to voice mail. This is essentially the convention of someone listening to their voice mail when they get home or the answering machine that we used to have in the ’90s. I want to propose that maybe her phone is dead and she’s plugging it in when she gets into a room and that’s why she’s now getting this message from her father about her mother being dead. Yet I dug the tone. We were in a dramedy space. I was curious to see what was going to happen on Page 4, which is always my question for these kinds of samples is do I want to keep reading. What did you think?

**Craig:** I loved it. Do you think it’s Emme or is it Emme?

**John:** I think it’s Emme. That’s my guess.

**Craig:** If it’s E-M-M-E?

**John:** We’ll say Emme for this podcast. We’ll apologize if that’s not quite right.

**Craig:** Miss Harris. The start, here’s a description that does work for me, “Ronnie Thomas, 20, American, the kind of girl you ask to watch your laptop at a café, ties her sex-wrecked hair back and throws on sneakers.” Now I must admit, I’m not sure what the kind of girl you ask to watch your laptop at a café is, but sex-wrecked hair gets a check mark for me. I can see her. This was a very efficient way to show me something that I’ve seen a million times. Here’s the thing. It’s okay to do things that people have done a million times. Just don’t dwell on it like you’re the first person to do it. What I liked here about Miss Harris is that she writes this very efficiently, like you get it, you know the deal. As you point out, she’s running across the university campus. I would like to know where, but at least at the end, it’s super short and she’s heading for another dormitory building. At least I get a sense roughly of where she is. I like the stone spiral staircase.

I thought this was such an interesting way to convey information. We’ve talked about exposition a lot and how you get across ideas and how exposition is sometimes a wonderful opportunity to be creative. This is creative. He’s just yammering on her voiceover. She’s very upset about a goldfish. She starts doing little… I saw her doing little finger compressions, which I thought was really hysterical. Then her dad says, “Oh, and your mum is dead.” Then she starts screaming. Then her roommate says, “Well, that seems a bit dramatic, doesn’t it?” It was very good. It was a good way to… I’m so leaning forward and excited. I kept feeling that way when we got to the beach in Santa Barbara. How did you feel about that scene?

**John:** I think the beach mostly worked. We are there. The idea is that we’re going to put these ashes. We’ve seen the ashes at the beach thing a hundred times. Again, you weren’t scared of the stock scene. You’re doing the thing. You’re putting the urn in, and it just won’t sink. That comedy, it just keeps washing back up, feels great that the sister swims out with it and finally submerges it and dunks it. It feels right. Do I know quite what’s happening on the page after that? Nope, but in these three pages we’ve met our hero, we’ve taken her from Edinburgh where she’s going to school to Santa Barbara. It feels like that’s where we’re mostly going to stay. We don’t know. We’re curious. We want to know more about her. We basically like her so far. These are promising things.

**Craig:** They’re smart. This is a very funny bit. I thought this was really funny. I liked the idea that Ed is like, “This is ridiculous. This urn full of her ashes, it’s biodegradable, it’s supposed to just sink and release the ashes into the water.” Everyone starts laughing. Then Elle takes it and brings it out into the water and she dumps it in, and then there’s this bit about earrings. It had that kind of intelligence that you see in Fleabag, for instance, to me. You know in Fleabag, in the second season, when they’re at the funeral, and everyone’s just like, “Oh my god, you look really great.” It’s this incredibly awkward thing that happened. Her hair just was perfect that day. It’s so weird and specific. I could see her sister. I could see her other sister. I like that Elle was wearing a slightly too extravagant gown. It’s all just really well done. I loved how much white space there was on the page. I salute you, Emme or Emme or Emme Harris. Well done.

**John:** Here’s a suggestion for Page 1. As Ronnie’s speeding across campus, her friend in upper case “carrying books, stops as she passes.” Friend asks, “Are you coming to Lit?” Ronnie says, “Yes, just going to my room to grab my stuff. I’ll see you in a sec.” “They part ways. Ronnie heads for another dormitory building.” Who’s that friend? That friend male, female? That friend could be somebody specific. Just give us a gender. Give us something about that. Also, it’s a wasted opportunity. It’s like a nothing conversation. There’s a moment to either acknowledge that this was a walk of shame coming back from this thing. I wanted something funny there and for them to just tell us that, okay, we’re in a comedy and get us primed for the next scene, which could land even better if we had some joke before that.

**Craig:** I agree with that.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** That’s an excellent point.

**John:** As we wrap up here, let’s talk about the log line. “After the death of her estranged mother, a college student returns home to her sisters and dad in California for a memorial service that reveals more than one complicated relationship.” It’s a half-hour pilot, apparently.

**Craig:** Great. Great. I want to read it. Send it. I’ll read it. I’m excited. This is good. It was funny. I enjoyed it.

**John:** I want to thank all the people who sent in Three Page Challenges, especially these three that we talked about today. If you want to send in a Three Page Challenge, go to johnaugust.com/threepage and fill out the form there and attach your pdf. We do this probably every two or three months. If you’re a Premium Member, we’ll send out an email in the week before we’re going to do one so we can get that last call of entries for this. I want to thank Megana and Drew for going through all of these entries…

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** …and remind people that this is a voluntary thing, so we really applaud you for sending in scripts that we can all talk about. All right, Craig, it has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing comes from, on Saturday night, we did a thing we had not done for a long time since the pandemic, which was having a game night. We were over at a friend’s house. We all played games together and gathered around a table. It was tremendously fun. I played a new game I never played before, which was the Blockbuster Party Game. I’ll link in the show notes to it.

This game comes in a case that looks like a Blockbuster tape, which is just such a wonderful bit of nostalgia. The game itself, you have movie titles on your cards. You’re trying to get your team to guess them. It has a Charades-y kind of quality, but it actually has some really smart game mechanics in terms of things you can do to compete against the other teams. There’s timers. It’s all smart, and just the right version of this kind of game. If you’re a person who loves movies, which you probably are, if you listen to this podcast, and want a party game for six people or more, I recommend you check out the Blockbuster home game. It was like eight bucks on Amazon, so not a big commitment, but a really surprisingly fun game.

**Craig:** This was a game from the ’90s, right?

**John:** No, this is a brand new game.

**Craig:** No, it’s not.

**John:** This is a brand new game that just-

**Craig:** You’re kidding.

**John:** It’s a brand new game that just happens to have the packaging and the feel of Blockbuster. They must’ve just found out whoever has the logo for Blockbuster. They got the rights to have the logo for Blockbuster. It’s a brand new game.

**Craig:** Oh my god, so this isn’t when Blockbuster’s at the height of their power. They had a little associated game. Maybe they’re like, “Who’s going to sue us? There’s no Blockbuster.”

**John:** I think Blockbuster’s one of those brands, it’s like Ataris. You don’t need the real company. You want the nostalgia for the thing.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** I quite enjoyed it. When you’re back in town, Craig, I’m going to have you and Melissa over for game night with a bunch of folks, and we’ll play this, and I think you’ll enjoy it as well. It’s a smart choice they made in deciding this.

**Craig:** Deal.

**John:** I also insist that at some point you host Mafia again, because Craig may be a good screenwriter, he’s one of the best Mafia hosts you could possibly ever imagine.

**Craig:** I’m thinking about just doing that professionally from now on.

**John:** I think it’s a good choice. Craig, it’s less stressful. People would pay you good money. You could have billionaires pay you to be a host for Mafia parties.

**Craig:** I worry that for billionaires, when people die, they actually die, because they can murder, because laws don’t matter. My One Cool Thing this week is something that wandered my way via Twitter but I guess from TikTok. This is not a new thing, although it’s new to TikTok. It’s called the hanger reflex. Have you been following along with this one, John?

**John:** I have. We tested the hanger reflex around in our house after watching an episode of TV. We tried it. Craig, does it work for you? Does it work if you do it to yourself, or only if someone else does it to you?

**Craig:** I only tried it putting it on my… Let me tell you what it is. If you haven’t heard of the hanger reflex, you take a wire coat hanger and you spread it slightly and put it on your head and then let it go so it squeezes on your head. For many, many people, including myself, your head will naturally turn to either the right or the left. What I found was if I rotated it, it would turn one way or the other. It always turned towards the way the coat hanger was hooked.

**John:** The hook.

**Craig:** This is not one of these mass suggestion things. This in fact is an established reflex discussed in journals, medical journals, research journals. No one really knows why, although they think it has to do with shearing force, which is basically when one force is pushing one way and the other one is pushing the other way, but not directly at each other. It creates a natural desire to twist along with the shearing force. It’s really weird. I was not expecting it to work. It absolutely worked on me. Have you tried it, Megana? Have you hangered yourself?

**Megana:** I have not yet, because you have to have a wire hanger, right?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah. Apparently, it will work with a thicker plastic hanger, as long as there’s actually space, as long as it will squeeze properly, but wire is the preferred one.

**Craig:** I think I’ll find a wire hanger and I’ll put it on your head. We’ll get this done. Don’t you worry. Don’t you worry. Anyway, check it out. If you just Google the hanger reflex, very easy to try at home. Fun for the whole family. You start to feel very, very stupid as you’re doing it. Some people are like, “Wait, this is a setup, right? You all just agreed to say that this does something, and then I’m going to be the idiot that puts this on my head, and you’re going to laugh at me.” No, it’s a thing. It’s actually real.

**Megana:** Have you tried to resist it when you’re doing it?

**Craig:** Yeah. You can.

**John:** It’s not overwhelming. It’s not like some ghost is turning your head.

**Craig:** No, it’s really more that if you don’t try and resist, you don’t try and help it, your head will just naturally want to turn. It’s really weird. You’ll see when I put it on your head.

**Megana:** Cool, I can’t wait.

**John:** That is our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with help this week from Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Our outro’s by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. 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 secrets of social media. Craig and Megana, thanks so much for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The secret to social media was actually revealed this past week by Sara Schaefer, a writer and comedian who has actually been a guest on this podcast before. Let’s take a listen to Sara Schaefer’s secret to social media.

**Sara Schaefer:** I used to always share my opinion online. No matter the topic, I was ready to dive into the discourse, even when it had nothing to do with me. The result, me posting a lot of dumb shit. Before I knew it, I was posting dumb shit online every single day, until all that changed. Now I don’t post dumb shit at all. What’s my secret? Silence. Surprised? I was too. Turns out you don’t have to post anything at all. It’s not required. Sometimes you can just be quiet. My girl friends ask me, “But Cheryl, wouldn’t that be censoring yourself? Is this the end of a free society as we know it?” No, it’s actually something else. It’s called maturity. I wondered what would happen when I stopped blasting out every half-formed thought from my head like a diarrhea cannon, but now, thanks to silence, I’m posting half the amount I used to, and guess what, I still exist. Silence, I never knew. Did you?

**John:** Craig, do you think Sara has hit upon the formula for social media success?

**Craig:** She has, although I have to give credit to fellow screenwriter Katie Dippold for saying this exact thing a number of years ago. Somebody had tweeted something, and she showed it to me and then just wrote, “You don’t have to say anything.” It’s just an interesting thing. Sometimes you get fooled by social media into thinking that it must be used. It doesn’t have to be used at all.

You know what? The other day I was thinking about this very issue. We’ve been living with alcohol for thousands of years. They find residue of beer in prehistoric bowls. What if we hadn’t? What if no one had ever had alcohol until 10 years ago? Then the first alcohol was very rudimentary. It was pretty watered down. Now after 10 years, there’s beer, there’s wine, there’s vodka, there’s gin. Someone just invented tequila. People are going crazy. No one knows what to do. They’re puking. They’re arguing if it’s a disease, is it not a disease, is this a good thing, is it a bad thing. We’re so ill equipped to handle something as powerful as alcohol, because it’s only been around for 10 years. That’s social media. We don’t know what we’re doing. It’s alcohol. Sara Schaefer, what you’re really saying is you don’t have to drink it. You don’t have to drink it. You can watch other people drinking, and it’s fun.

**John:** One thing I think Sara hits on which is really important is that, “I didn’t say anything, and yet I still continued to exist,” because one of the things about social media, if you’re not posting it’s like you’re not really there. No one’s retweeting you. No one’s acknowledging you. If you don’t put out your opinion, do you even exist? You do continue to exist. You actually are a person who has opinions, even if you’re not sharing those opinions. More importantly, you don’t have to have an opinion on everything. You can just stay out of whole conversations. That’s a crucial skill which I wish people could pick up earlier.

**Craig:** I love staying out of conversations. It’s like crack cocaine for me now. I read something. In my mind I’m like, “I’ve got something to say.” Then I don’t say it, and I feel great. It’s such a joy.

**John:** What put us on the bonus topic today was the Amber Heard, Johnny Depp trial, which I’ve never commented on. Obviously, I know Johnny Depp from work projects before. I don’t know Amber Heard at all. It angers me so much that this is a public trial that’s being shown to the world and also discussed by the world, when it’s none of our fucking business whatsoever. I just get so incredibly frustrated by that it’s just a moment of entertainment and enjoyment for the world to participate in and comment upon, when who the fuck cares? We shouldn’t be allowed to watch this thing.

**Craig:** I haven’t been following along with the trial of the century. You’re right. It’s none of my business. I can’t possibly learn anything or grow as a human being by following the Johnny Depp, Amber Heard trial. There was this other thing that happened to me over the last couple of months. That was, and I think I shared this with you, getting a number of interview requests by real places like TV news outlets here and abroad to comment on the war in Ukraine, because I had written a television series about a nuclear disaster in Ukraine. They’re always very flattering when they come for you. I politely declined. The reason I politely declined is because I am not qualified to discuss the war in Ukraine. That’s not what I do. It seems like nobody out there cares. They’re just trying to throw more people at microphones. Everybody can shout their unearned opinion at each other. That’s why I like that we do this, because we actually have earned our opinions about screenwriting, so it’s nice. You see what I mean? Why would anyone ask a screenwriter to talk about a war in Ukraine? That’s crazy.

**John:** On the podcast we are sharing our expertise and our opinions on a topic that we know very well because it’s actually the thing that we do every day. Had they gone to an expert in Ukrainian military history or the tactical issues involved with Russian military or nuclear safety, fantastic. Those are great places to go to. The guy who wrote Chernobyl is not a valid news source for this thing.

**Craig:** No. I think everybody has been trained to believe that everyone is an expert on everything, and God knows they’ll tell you about it. The problem is, what do we do? I don’t know how to get out of this.

**John:** A choice is silence, as Sara Schaefer lays out. We don’t have to weigh in on things. We don’t have to weigh in on things that we are experts on or not experts on, that we do know of some information. We can stay out of it. There have been times where I’ve jumped in on something because it’s a funny moment. Great, but I’m trying to stay out of things that are just like, this is an enraging thing that’s happening in the world. If I’m not showing my rage, it sounds like I’m sitting on my hands. No, it’s just that I’m better off donating to abortion rights charities than screaming about it on Twitter, or I’ll go to a protest where actually my physical presence is important for me to be there, than just putting it out on the timeline, where everyone else is also venting. Megana, you are not as big of a social media user as I am. What is your decision process about what to amplify, what to keep back from? What’s your metric for doing that?

**Megana:** Sorry, this is something that I could talk about forever. I think I prefer to hold most of my opinions to myself and reserve the right to feel differently about things.

**John:** Wait, I want to stop you there. Reserve the right to feel differently, reserve the right to change your mind?

**Megana:** Yes, I reserve the right to change my mind, which social media and the internet does not respect or it’s not a thing that is really possible on the internet.

**Craig:** You monster.

**John:** You monstrous hypocrite. How could you possibly change your mind?

**Craig:** How dare you?

**Megana:** I agree. I also grew up with social media. Me and my friends all got MySpaces and Xangas when we were 12 years old. No 12-year-old has anything interesting to say. I think that around 2014 I was grossed out by the way it felt like everyone around me was behaving in a way that they could then curate to social media instead of just living. After that, I just stopped posting stuff. I’m still on social media. I’m still on Facebook because there are certain groups that I get information from and message boards. I wish that I didn’t have to be on Facebook, but I am, because of that. I’m on Twitter because of writing and work stuff. Then I’m on Instagram. I’m actually not really on Instagram that much. I wish that I didn’t have to be on any of these things, because I think that there is some value in them, but for me in my life it’s mostly a negative.

**John:** You’re distinguishing between you’re a consumer of these things but you’re not a producer of content for these things. That’s an absolutely valid choice. Basically, it is helpful for you sometimes to get this stuff coming in. There obviously can be toxic effects of that too. I guess back to Sara Schaefer’s point, you don’t feel the need to comment on everything that’s happening, passing by. You’re very judicious about what you put out there in the world. You got to go up and see Craig in Calgary, and Bo, and hang out with them. I got to see pictures of beautiful stuff up in Calgary, which is great. I was so happy to see you posting that kind of stuff. You could share that with people who would be interested in seeing those things, but you didn’t have to weigh in on bigger issues.

**Megana:** I think another thing with social media is that especially with the new Facebook algorithm and the metaverse overhaul or whatever, it favors extreme opinions. Most people don’t have extreme opinions. Most people think pretty similarly about things. When I’m on social media, I’m like, “Oh my god, this world is so polarized.” When you go outside and talk to people, you realize that’s not actually the case at all.

**John:** I will stand up for the fact that Oreo Thin cookies are the best version of Oreos, and the dark chocolate Oreo Thins are the best version of Oreo Thins. That’s the hot take that I will stand by.

**Craig:** Guess what? You’re a garbage person.

**John:** Tell me why I’m wrong. Tell me what is the actual correct answer for what is the best store-bought cookie.

**Craig:** You may absolutely be right, but I feel that my job is to express outrage. Where is the outrage? I love when people on Twitter are like, “Where is the outrage?” I’m like, are you kidding me? What else is there here? “Where is the salt?” says man drowning in ocean. It just doesn’t make any sense.

**Megana:** One thing that was nice is John and I went to the Bans Off Our Body March in LA, what was it, two weeks ago?

**John:** Yeah.

**Megana:** The Supreme Court leak and the stuff about Roe v Wade is something that is incredibly frustrating and painful. I see so many hot takes on social media. First of all, found out about the march through social media. Being able to be in a physical space with people was so affirming. That’s all I wanted to say.

**John:** You just don’t know how many people there are on Twitter. You can see all these things scroll by in your timeline, but when you’re actually physically in a space with a bunch of people, you’re like, oh, these are all as upset and angry and scared as I am, and they’re all coming together to stand up for something, is meaningful. Shouting there was meaningful because we were all shouting together. Shouting at each other on Twitter is not doing any good.

**Megana:** There’s no room for anyone to “well, actually” you at that march.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Exactly, because you were experiencing real community. These places call themselves virtual communities, but that’s an oxymoron. You need to see people. You need to be with people. It’s why sporting events are still popular. Everyone has the best seat in the house to see any baseball game they want, any football game they want, and still, tens of thousands of people go every day in each individual city to see a team play because it’s community. It’s physical community. Fuck you, Meta. It’s not going to work. It’s just not.

**John:** Craig, what I hear you saying is that while you love Scriptnotes as this podcast, we need to go back to doing our live shows and we need to get all 40,000 of our listeners together in a stadium to listen together to a Scriptnotes recording.

**Craig:** That would be good if they would all agree to show up on the same day. It’s true, the pandemic, we worked around the lack of physical communion, but it’s just not the same. We were designed to live in space, in reality and space, and not in this disconnected fucking void. It is of course a system that is built on shouting, will encourage shouting. Sometimes people say, “Twitter just makes everybody mean.” I don’t think it’s Twitter that’s making people mean. I think it’s people being assholes make people mean. It’s the “well, actually” people. They have no control over themselves. They don’t know how to use this. They don’t know how to drink the alcohol, and so they’re ruining the party for everybody. All my metaphors collided, smashed together. I don’t care. It’s awful. Talk about a really hot, hot, hot take. Is there anything more Twitter than complaining about Twitter?

**John:** Nope. The circle is now complete.

**Craig:** The circle is complete.

**John:** Thank you guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Ryan’s Elvis Question on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ryanbeardmusic/status/1527078914304053249?s=20&t=mxVqjmJlJB_h7npBbI0w8Q)
* Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: [Tag – You’re It](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F05%2FTag-3-pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=8f19a8a60a86d95ebd750d8d808c7e0f41086178fa494e7a66c4dbe1303ca6d8) by Suw Charman-Anderson, [Halloween Party](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F05%2FHalloween-Party-first-three.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=1e53d05e5ac4750e18d1cce9b4ec22f64a7ed94e761e27be5ad312169555a61e) by Lucas Abreu & Zachary Arthur & Kyle Copier, [Belly Up](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F05%2FBELLY-UP-three-page-challenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=196cabefbb46451a9202a4b18c5fa5693fe28c48046c0a556434856eceb54b11) by Emme Harris
* [Blockbuster, the Party Game](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WMWNYNN?ref_=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_dp_FAJ764ZAMGTXGQZ1V9AB)
* [The Hanger Reflex](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7788272/#:~:text=The%20hanger%20reflex%20is%20a,the%20cause%20of%20this%20phenomenon)
* [Sara Schaefer Silence Video](https://twitter.com/saraschaefer1/status/1527385667583365133?s=20&t=Xs601W2CeWgx8WrXLbPCXQ)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nico Mansy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/552standard.mp3).

The original transcript for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/what-youre-looking-at).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 576 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do screenwriters place things in front of the reader’s virtual camera? That’s right, it’s a crafty episode, where we’re going to take a look at some really nitpicky word choices and how those make movies you can watch on the page. We’ll also tackle a bunch of listener questions on everything from outlining to maligning small villages, Craig.

**Craig:** Maligning small villages, finally. I have been waiting since Episode 1 for somebody to write in about that.

**John:** Absolutely. Those little, tiny villages that you drive past, what if you could just slander them, slander them to death?

**Craig:** Malign them.

**John:** Oh, but Craig, you’re going to really enjoy our Bonus Segment for Premium Members. Sixteen will enter. One will win. Which dessert will come out on top of our first ever dessert bracket?

**Craig:** I don’t know if people know this, but I do love making desserts. I like baking, cooking, mixing, whipping, folding. I love to make a dessert.

**John:** We’re recording this pre-Thanksgiving. Mike and I are planning on making three different pies. Pies are definitely in the entries here.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course.

**John:** Overall, in the general categories of desserts, we need to figure out which are the ultimate desserts and which are not the ultimate desserts.

**Craig:** Let’s rush through this shitty podcast so we can get to that.

**John:** I’m looking forward to it.

**Craig:** That’s what matters.

**John:** Let’s start with some news though, because Craig, Megana Slacked me this new on Sunday afternoon. I could not believe it. Bob Iger is back running Disney.

**Craig:** I could not believe it either. As somebody that owns a small amount of Disney stock, I was thrilled. Bob Chapek was an interesting choice to succeed Bob Iger. That was always going to be a tough gig to succeed Bob Iger. He was in a class of his own in terms of these uber-CEOs that ride over the whole corporation. Bob Chapek came in there and was like, “Watch what I do.” Then he did a bunch of stuff, and nobody seemed to like it. I think Bog Iger must have somewhere along the line thought, “I probably picked the wrong guy.”

**John:** Chapek was a handpicked successor. There was a whole plan for transition. There was a year of overlap. It was all going to be a very smooth transition in theory. Iger left, and then Chapek had a series of missteps and stumbles. The recent reporting we’re reading seems to be that it was really an investor call, that Chapek messed up on an investor call, was the inciting incident that got him out the door over the weekend. Friday afternoon, the call went to Iger. Then by Sunday-

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** … evening, Chapek was out and Iger was back in.

**Craig:** What did he do on that phone call?

**John:** The New York Times story, we’ll put a link in the show notes to that. The sourcing seems to indicate that he was too sanguine about the really dismal numbers and seemed out of touch.

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**John:** His own lieutenants were basically going to the board and saying, “If you don’t get rid of Chapek, we’re going to leave.”

**Craig:** Bob Iger is back. One of the things that was really interesting was he came back on Friday and it’s currently Tuesday, he’s already changed 4,000 things. Look, from my point of view, obviously, you and I, we don’t swim in those waters. Different people do that stuff. We don’t really care about that stuff, only to the extent that it infects us. Bob Iger was always about the content and about making sure that you protected the creative output and made sure that the content was great and that the content would drive everything else. Don’t worry about it. Everything else will just flow from it. It appears that he is hard at work to reinstate that culture. I hope it accrues to the benefit of writers.

**John:** Another thing I’m thinking about this week is just how much CEO quality matters, because so often it seems like these corporations, they just are their own corporations. Many of the times, a well-run corporation is the one where you don’t have any idea who the CEO is. You look at Disney right now versus Twitter, and oh, wow, the person in charge of things can really have a huge impact on how stuff is happening, how stuff’s working. A good CEO can fix things. A bad CEO can break things very quickly, much more quickly than I would’ve ever guessed was possible.

**Craig:** The good news for CEOs is they’ll still make $400 million as they absolutely screw their company into the ground. Twitter, boy, wow. I quit. I’m out. I’m gone.

**John:** He’s out. He’s gone.

**Craig:** I’m gone. Pedro Pascal quit over the weekend. I saw that. Even internally, as we’ve been talking about gearing up for lots of marketing and stuff for The Last of Us, just incorporating the Twitter exodus into the planning. It’s now received wisdom that Twitter is a damaged product if you are not a MAGA troll.

**John:** It is fascinating, because if you’d told me a year ago someone’s going to build a rival to Twitter, it’s like, that’s a stupid idea, because there’s already Twitter. Now it seems like, you know what, you could probably find a bunch of engineers who are available to build you an alternative to Twitter. I don’t know that one thing will ever take off. I don’t know that we’ll ever replace it. I don’t know that Twitter necessarily will go away in a complete sense. It is just fascinating that something we assume, it’s Twitter, it’s always going to be there, can just disappear so quickly.

**Craig:** As a company, I think they always struggle to figure out exactly how to make money. When Elon Musk came along and offered them some stupid amount of money as a dumb, pot-inspired joke, I think, they were like, “Holy shit. Yeah, we’ll take that. Thank you. Thank you for overpaying for this thing that just doesn’t make money.” Now he has it, and he’s just flailing around and smashing it into bits. It’s very strange. I have to say, for something that I used every day for years and considered my main method of communicating things to the world, not only do I not miss it, I feel better. Not a little bit better, a lot better. I feel a lot better. Let’s put it this way. You and I, John, lived most of our lives without Twitter. Everything was fine.

**John:** Everything was fine.

**Craig:** It was fine.

**John:** I was on Twitter before I was doing this podcast, but the boundaries are blurry. I had my website before I had Twitter. I had some other place of truth of John August’s opinion. Twitter did become that, and I don’t know what’s necessarily going to replace that. I guess just the blog. Wrapping up the CEO talk, we have Bob Iger back there in charge. He’s not going to be there forever. He needs to find someone else to take over for him. That’s going to be even probably more difficult, because finding the person who can now do this job, it’s going to be challenging.

**Craig:** John, I have a real question for you.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** What if they said, “Hey, John August, we want you to do it.”

**John:** I’ve been thinking about that, because Craig, I do consider a lot of alternative [inaudible 00:07:07].

**Craig:** That is the craziest answer ever. Ever. That was insane.

**John:** Craig, I have been thinking about it.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I don’t think I would do a good job. Here’s the reasons why I don’t think I would do a good job. I know a fair amount about making movies. I know a fair amount about making TV shows, less but a fair amount. I do not know how to manage all the other parts of that company, including the theme parks and the streaming services and all this other stuff. That’s why when I look at who the people are who could potentially take over for Iger, it’s really challenging. Dana Walden is on that short list. Dana Walden is fantastic. I’ve met with her. I think she’s great. She’s really good at making TV shows and entertainment, and that’s not the whole job. Maybe it’s just too big a job for any one person to do.

**Craig:** It’s not. Somebody has to do it.

**John:** It’s not too big for Iger.

**Craig:** Nobody can know everything. You have your lieutenants and people that report to you, and hopefully you do a good job. I think the thing that would get you… I remember the very first time I directed, I was talking to my first AD. First ADs have seen a billion directors come and go in their lives. I said, “What’s the one rookie mistake you can advise me, that perhaps I could then avoid making?” He said, “Honestly, it’s never about any of the technicals.” He said, “The thing that no first-time director ever sees coming is the politics.” I suspect that would be the biggest problem, because you take over, and suddenly, there’s all these people trying to figure out how to assassinate you and take your job. If they could promise me that none of that would happen, I feel like I could probably make a few things up.

**John:** I could make a few things up.

**Craig:** I couldn’t have done worse than Bob Chapek. No offense, Bob Chapek.

**John:** Honestly, it seemed like the politics were a big part of why he didn’t succeed, because he didn’t have the trust of the people that were working for him.

**Craig:** When the Florida thing happened, I could feel myself sweating. I’m like, “What would I do? This is really tricky.” That’s tricky. You’re like, “On the one hand, I have my principles and I have my morals. On the other hand, part of my principles and morals is taking care of the 12,000 people that I employ in the state of Florida. What do I do?” That’s a tough one. I’m glad I don’t run a company.

**John:** I’m glad I’m not taking over for Nancy Pelosi, because I’ve also been thinking about that.

**Craig:** That’s a hard one.

**John:** That’s a hard job. That’s a lot of [crosstalk 00:09:37]

**Craig:** Thank god you’ve been thinking about that. Who do you not thinking about taking over from?

**John:** I’m involved in a project right now, which Megana knows has just an incredibly high degree of cat wrangling. I can do it. You got to think from each person’s perspective, what are they looking for, what do they need to hear. That’s a challenging job. That’s why whoever takes over for Bob Iger or the ruins of Twitter whenever Elon Musk gets bored is going to have a lot to do. Let’s get to some questions. We have two follow-up questions about your outlining process, Craig.

**Craig:** Fair enough.

**Megana:** Neil asked, “I just listened to the episode on writing difficult scenes, and Craig mentioned his go-to on preparation via an outline. I’ve heard his testament to outlines a bunch, but I’ve never been able to track down an actual sample of Craig’s. Are there any available in the archives? I’m an engineer, so less of a pantser and more of a plotter, or maybe a plantser.”

**Craig:** A plantster.

**John:** A plantster.

**Craig:** I don’t have any out there, but it’s possible that maybe after The Last of Us runs through, I might put that show bible out there, because it’s quite extensive. I generally avoid doing it, because as much as I enjoy informing and educating to whatever extent I can, I’m also… I don’t just teach cooking. I also am a chef. I don’t necessarily want to show people how my magic tricks are fully done. A little bit of the process I think should remain opaque.

**John:** Maybe if we can’t see the actual visual, can you describe for an episode of Last of Us or an episode of Chernobyl, how many pages was an outline? Was it paragraphs? How closely were you matching? Were there scene headers? What do your outlines look like?

**Craig:** I don’t do scene headers. It’s basically prose. For each episode, my guess is, I would say probably five to eight pages, single-spaced paragraphs describing what happens, and more importantly, why. That’s the thing, because I don’t write these for myself. I write them for myself and others, so that everybody can feel what we’re doing before we do it. That’s important to me.

**John:** Your paragraphs are largely matching up to what scenes look like. No paragraph is going to cover multiple scenes or it will [inaudible 00:12:05].

**Craig:** No, a paragraph could cover multiple scenes, because I know there are certain scenes that flow together. Two people have left one place. They’re on their way to another. Then the next day they’re there, and a thing happens. Then they move on. Those things could probably be a paragraph where we describe what happens and what’s discussed or why it’s important. I will combine.

**John:** For Neil’s edification, what Craig is describing is actually a pretty common length and size and scale and scope of an outline in television. A lot of one-hour dramas that you’re going to see are going to have a document like that at some point that goes to the producers, to the studio, to other people, to let them know this is what’s going to happen in the episode, and sometimes they’ll get notes off that outline, depending what the process is.

**Craig:** Just as important as those episode outlines, there’s also character breakdowns, and there’s general discussion of theme. I will also sometimes take a moment to talk about, for instance… There are no spoilers here for The Last of Us. I apologize to those of you who are looking for them. In the outline, in the show bible, one of the little sections was a section on violence and what our philosophy about violence was, how we wanted to portray it, and what we thought was important philosophically for everybody to know as we went ahead and writing and then producing the show. It’s your chance to basically get anything off your chest you want, that you want other people to know.

**John:** In some ways, that’s doing what a tone meeting might do, but way in advance. People are looking at documents. Everyone knows going into the project, this is what our goals are here. Then you’ll have very specific notes on individual scripts, individual scenes.

**Craig:** In fact, the outline, the show bible we did, it was very extensive. I think it was about 180 pages. It was also the document that our production team used initially to budget. It was thorough enough that they could essentially get within, it was really close, within actually 5% of what we ultimately ended up spending, because they had a sense of locations and set pieces and all that.

**John:** A follow-up question from Tommy here. He asked, “In the last episode, Craig talked about needing roughly 20 days to write a one-hour TV script. How much of that time is spent before that in the outlining phase?” Is it 20 days after this episode is outlined?

**Craig:** The 20 days is the length of time I need to write the script. The amount of time it takes to outline things ahead of that is considerable. None of that is really divisible by episode, per se. You have to figure everything out together. That process could be two, three months, where you’re really trying to figure out how you’re breaking this all apart and what the episodes are going to be. Then you can spend about a week just writing it all up in one massive document.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Then after that, yeah, it’s about 20 days. For me at least, it’s about 20 days.

**John:** Great. Before we get on to our big marquee topic, we have a bit of follow-up here. Way back when, Craig and I each did episodes with Megana, just Megana, where we answered listener questions and tried to get some good advice to people. One of those people is Ben. He wrote in about some advice that Megana and I gave him. Craig, would you talk us through Ben’s follow-up here?

**Craig:** I will play the role of Ben. He says, “I wanted to give you all some follow-up on my question that John and Megana answered on Episode 543 about my boss’s boss’s boss inviting me to send my script in to the head of the studio that I work at as an office coordinator, and I wondered whether or not I could take a year to do so. I took John’s advice and sent my script to six friends to make sure what I was writing would be worth sending. All my friends loved it, and so I sent it to a couple of other people I made connections with at work, and they loved it too. I was a little skeptical, because I’ve never gotten this type of universal positive response before. I was wondering if telling them I had this opportunity made them forgive certain shortcomings in the script.” I like Ben. I like that he’s nervous about good news.

**John:** Thoughtful.

**Craig:** That’s the way to be. He goes on, “I then checked it over a couple more times and finally end it to my friends who are a little more harsh. They loved it too. Just a few easily correctable notes. I emailed my boss. As John predicted, my boss’s boss’s boss said she couldn’t send it in to the head, but she connected me with a few creative executives, and after signing a release form, I submitted my script for them to review. It took them a month to read, but they got back to me, and they loved it also. It was great timing, as I wrote a family spooky movie,” for spooky season, “and they read it three days before Halloween. The creative executive said my script was a really fun read and very well executed and invited me to the lot to, quote, talk generally. He made it clear that the script wasn’t quite right for their current slate, but he did invite me to have coffee with him. I just got back from the meeting. It couldn’t have gone better. We really hit it off. He invited me to send him another script when I have one ready. He’s a really nice dude.

“All of this to say thank you, John and Megana, for your advice and all the great tips. Also, I want to thank Craig as well,” thank you, “even though he didn’t answer my question directly,” and has done nothing for my life, “but has given me like 600 episodes of advice as well.” That worked out phenomenally for Ben.

**John:** It worked out so well for Ben. That’s great. Craig, you stopped where he said take a year to send in the script, which felt like too long for us as well. I think what Ben did, which is really smart, is really just double check, like, “Wait, is what I’m writing any good at all?” and actually get that feedback to say oh yeah, this is actually pretty good. He went through then proper channels, and people liked it. It sounded like he was doing the right things there. My question for you, and for us to discuss, is what should Ben be doing next, because he’s had this good meeting with a creative executive. That’s lovely, but that doesn’t do anything. What should Ben be doing next?

**Craig:** I think the very first thing Ben should be doing is dropping an email back to his new creative executive friend and saying, “Hey, would love to get myself an agent. Any chance you could slip this script and your general approval and good feelings to an agent that you think might be well suited for me?” That’s the very first thing I would do.

**John:** I think that’s the right choice, so agent and/or manager. “I’m looking for a rep,” is the general thing, and who does this creative executive think might be the right person. The way to think about this from Ben’s point of view is like, “Okay, I know what I get out of this, but what could this creative executive get out of this?” In some ways, there are reciprocal relationships between your agents, certain managers and execs. If this exec really does think you’re a pretty good writer, then sending you to this representative could be a good, sympathetic kind of thing. It could actually help both of them. Don’t feel weird about asking for that ask is what I’m saying.

**Craig:** No, not at all. This is how it all starts. I imagine that the creative executive is probably roughly in the same age bracket you are, Ben. As we all grow up together in the business, we meet each other’s friends and connect each other with people that we like to work with. By this point, I know a whole lot of people in this business that I’ve never actually worked with, but you never know. We like each other, and then they mention something to somebody else. Crazy things happen all the time.

**John:** That’s how I got my first agent was a friend sent my script to a producer, who read it and liked it and said, “Hey, could I take this in to the studio?” I said, “That would be great. Also, I need an agent.” He’s like, “Oh, I think I know the perfect person for you.” That became my first agent.

**Craig:** There you go. There you go.

**John:** Ben, keep us posted a year from now and let us know what’s happened next. Great. Marquee topic here. Julian wrote in with a link to this thread by David Wappel, a writer I don’t know. Wappel’s thread was showing how nouns and sentence structures, when used well, can feel like they’re directing on the page, in the good sense of directing on the page. They really give you a sense of what you’re seeing. In this thread, he’s pointing out the difference between, “Sally reaches into her back pocket,” and, “Her hand slips into her back pocket,” and the idea that the second one, we’re clearly focusing on her hand. We feel like we’re in a closeup there on that.

Another example from this thread is on apples. If I say the stem of an apple, you’re thinking very closely about that stem of the apple. If I say an apple, you’re probably picturing the whole thing. If I say five apples, we move wider. A bushel of apples, a row of apple bushels, you get the sense that we’re pulling out wider and wider with those shots.

Useful there, but in some ways I was like, “Obviously.” I think it’s a thing that I do subconsciously, that I’ve never actually put words to. You and I are doing this all the time. Every sentence, every scene, we’re really thinking about what is the visual idea and how I’m using that visual idea to direct the reader’s attention, but I don’t know if we talked about it so explicitly on the podcast. We probably talked about it in Three Page Challenges. I want to spend a little segment talking about how we emphasize and convey the visual information we need not just scene by scene, but sentence by sentence, word by word.

**Craig:** Which is why, when people say, “Don’t direct on the page,” I just want to slap the world, because what else can we do? If you are visualizing the scene appropriately, visualizing it in terms of, as you said, close, far, up, down, movement, still, then the language ought to flow naturally from that. If you were imagining a closeup of Sally’s hand reaching into her back pocket, slipping into her back pocket, so now it feels a bit furtive, you would never write, “Sally reaches into her back pocket.” Those words wouldn’t happen as a result of the thought you just had. [Crosstalk 00:21:57]

**John:** Craig, sometimes I think people do stop at the very most basic sentence that gets the idea across. I worry that sometimes as we look at Three Page Challenges, we are getting a little bit like, “Sally reaches into her back pocket.”

**Craig:** Then people, stop doing that.

**John:** I want to shine a bit of a spotlight on it, because I think it’s an automatic process for you and for me. I don’t think it’s necessarily an automatic process for other writers, especially because screenwriting is a little bit different. All writing is about word choices and sentence structure, but screenwriting is a little different. As an example, here is a paragraph from Pride and Prejudice, one of the great novels. Jane Austen, really, really talented writer. Let me read this to you, and you can see why it’s not screenwriting.

“Mr. Bennett was so odd, a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserved caprice, that the experience of 3 and 20 years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married. Its solace was visiting and news.”

A terrific paragraph. The word choice, every little thing, every comma was deliberate, so smart, and that is not at all how you write screenplays.

**Craig:** No, because this is somebody that is relaying information to you about things that are not happening in front of your eyes-

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** … whereas in screenwriting, everything is happening in front of your eyes, unless you’re dealing with a voiceover or something like that. In a voiceover, you could do something like this. However, while the voiceover was doing all this, I need to know what I’m seeing.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** This would actually be wonderful if I heard this in voiceover and then I-

**John:** Oh my god, a dream.

**Craig:** … witnessed Mrs. Bennett showing “little information and uncertain temper.” Because we are a visual medium and because we do not relay descriptions of things that have already happened, we are always in the business of thinking about what we’re seeing and hearing.

**John:** I think the challenge I want to put to our listeners is, as you’re doing the screenwriting, really be thinking about what is the visual idea of the sentence. Oftentimes, there’ll be a single visual idea in the sentence or a series of visuals that imply motion that gets you from place to place. If you have a sentence that has no visual idea in it, it has to have another really good reason why you need to put it there, because otherwise it’s not doing the job of screenwriting. Not every sentence in your screenplay is going to have visual information, but most of them should. That visual information should probably be at the start of the sentence rather than touch back in at the end of the sentence.

**Craig:** Let’s say that the word screen also encompasses sound.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** We are screen sound writers. That means we are visual sound writers. That’s what we do. That’s the description of the job. When you are putting these little moments together, there is no moment too small to be considering how to guide the mind’s eye of the reader to align with your mind’s eye as the writer.

**John:** I pulled some examples from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This is from the very start. “Chocolate pours into a mold, one of hundreds inching along a conveyor belt. Complicated gears tug on oiled canvas ropes, slipping through swinging pulleys.” “With giant scissors, Wonka slices a fat red ribbon. One of the ribbon ends flutters up, obscuring Wonka’s face yet again.” “Wonka’s hand smooths out the blueprint for a massive structure, complete with curvy onion domes and twisted columns.”

Just four sentences picked at random from the script. It’s clear what the visuals are in the sentence. Also, if there’s multiple visuals, it’s clear how we’re moving between those multiple visuals. It’s not just the nouns. The nouns are very specific. The verbs used to convey action and convey meaning are also very specific. They’re tugging. They are pouring. They are fluttering. You could write more basic versions of each of those sentences, but they would not convey the visual information you’re trying to convey.

**Craig:** I particularly like that first one, because if I were handed that as a director, there’s an implication that I’m going to be shooting a closeup of chocolate pouring into a mold, and then I’m going to shoot a much wider shot to reveal that mold is one of a hundred. Perhaps I watch the chocolate pouring into the mold, and then I angle the camera slightly [inaudible 00:26:28] to reveal there’s this line of a hundred that are moving along, and that was just one of a hundred that are exactly the same. There’s all sorts of implications from the way that was written that you would not get if you weren’t considering what you wanted people to look at and see.

**John:** If I say, “A conveyor belt shows hundreds of chocolate bars being produced,” that doesn’t give you the same information, doesn’t tell you what you need to see.

**Craig:** It doesn’t. “One of hundreds inching along” is giving me a sense of speed. I can kind of hear it. There’s a vibe to it. There’s a lot of information there that is producible. As much as you can, if you think about… This is really what the job is. If you imagine a moment in your mind, what is the best way to describe that with the fewest words? That’s the game.

**John:** Its other general rules, I would say, general principles, is have characters doing things rather than things just existing. If you can have a character make a change within the scene, make a change within the sentence, the character is doing something rather than a thing just is, that is helpful. That’s not a condition on avoiding the verb to be. It’s just saying if a character can take an action that is part of the visual, that’s more helpful, and getting back to, again, showing us rather than telling us. Rather than just describing a thing, make it really feel like we are giving you a visual to really show what the thing is, rather than just being narrated to about what the activity is that’s going on.

**Craig:** Those are great rules. I would throw this one on the pile also. Watch out for certain words that mean lots of different things to you but may not mean lots of different things to the reader. For instance, let’s say it’s as simple as somebody smiles. We smile for a thousand different reasons. We smile because we are excited. We smile because we pity. We smile because we’re giving up. There’s so many reasons we smile. If you find yourself using one of those words that have a billion purposes, consider what you could do to relay the more specific aspect of it.

You could say, “John says, dialog, ‘Unfortunately, it turns out we’re not going to be able to offer you the job after all,'” and then in action, “Craig smiles, stands up, shrugs, shakes John’s hand,” or you could say in parentheses, in action, “Yes, as I figured.” You can try as best you can to not rely too much on people reading your mind, because they’re not always going to be able to, especially if there’s ambiguous action.

**John:** Here’s an example from Station Eleven I thought was really useful. “Jeevan faux-waves, straightens up, knows no one at this macabre gathering. He pats his jacket, looking for his phone, not left, not right, not back, not chest, remembers where his jacket is.” Very specific actions that Jeevan is doing, and it lets us know something about Jeevan. Clear visuals. We know what we’re actually seeing on screen. We also know why Jeevan is doing it. We know what he’s looking for. We can connect his thought process there. We’ve been that person, and we understand what he’s looking for. Another example from Station Eleven, “Kirsten’s attention has been drawn to the big windows, so huge they’re like the deck of a space station. She approaches the glass and puts her fingers on them, looking down at the lights of the pier.”

**Craig:** I could direct that. I know what to do. I even get a sense of alienation. All the things that they would want me to feel here, I understand. They’re just pouring off of these words. Note that you don’t have to say, “She approaches the glass and puts her fingers on them, a tiny person lost in the world,” blah da da, “separated by glass,” blah, whatever the hell it is. You get it. Any time somebody puts their hand on glass, I know what it means. I also know what to do. I know to shoot the hand. I also know to shoot back through the window at her, which would be great. “Looking down at the lights of the pier” implies I need to see what she’s seeing. I also need to see her seeing what she’s seeing.

**John:** The camera’s going to probably raise up a little bit so we can get the look down at the-

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Then the reverse is a low angle back up. Distance would be great there, to get a sense of scope, because the windows are “so huge they’re like the deck of a space station,” so I need to be really wide behind her. There are all these things clearly implied by the writing there. Weirdly, for a craft where everyone is constantly admonished to not direct on the page, the one thing that will get your script bought, sold, produced, directing on the page.

**John:** This whole conversation I wanted to avoid, the “we see,” “we hears,” the wes of it all, because none of these examples involve the wes.

**Craig:** These don’t need them.

**John:** These are just good visuals, clearly communicated, giving us a sense of what it would feel like to be in the audience, seeing that produced on the screen.

**Craig:** As much as I love writing “we see” and “we hear,” I only do it when I need it.

**John:** In this case, we don’t need it.

**Craig:** We don’t need it.

**John:** Let’s get to some listener questions. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Yes. Adam asks, “How many montages can my 118-page screenplay have?”

**Craig:** 118.

**John:** Three.

**Craig:** I really do love the idea of a 118-page screenplay with 118 montages.

**John:** It’s all montages the whole time through.

**Craig:** Every page is a montage.

**John:** Everything Everywhere All At Once is honestly probably 118 montages.

**Craig:** It’s close. It is.

**John:** The answer is there’s no answer, but here’s what I’ll say. If you’re using the word montage more than three times in a script, something is probably weird about your script. It feels different. If you’re doing bullet-pointy montages a lot in your script, something is really strange about your script, and that’s worth noticing. Did you write a strange script?

**Craig:** Yeah, particularly if the montage is doing the most tropey of montage purposes, which is some sort of training/growth.

**John:** (singing)

**Craig:** (singing) I include makeovers as part of training and growth. There are certain kinds of montages that we almost don’t even notice are montages. For instance, very common when you’re watching a movie or television show and people are driving quite a distance from one place to another, there’s nothing happening along the way other than the driving, that’ll get montaged. We don’t feel like it’s a montage. It’s not the same thing as someone decides they’re going to start lifting weights and here we go, or the worst of them all, the novelist finally figures out what to write and 40 seconds later, there’s a book.

**Megana:** No, there’s papers flying first.

**Craig:** Of course. First, you have to throw… The wastepaper basket has to get filled up.

**John:** It has to overfill.

**Craig:** It overfills, and then suddenly you’re like, “I’ve got it.” Now, you’re just pulling the paper out, slapping it on that pile right to the right of you, and then threading in the next page, because everybody exists in 1963 when they’re writing a novel, and then clack clack clack clack clack. I hate that so much.

**John:** Getting back to the point of when you use the word montage and when you don’t use the word montage, I feel like I’ve probably used the word montage in my scripts maybe five times in a career. There are a lot of montages in there. Spring comes to the castle. A couple sentences describing what has changed and what we’re seeing. You don’t necessarily need to use the word montage to make that clear.

**Craig:** Agreed. How many montages? Not too many.

**John:** Not too many.

**Craig:** Adam is regretting asking us this question. He’s like, “These guys don’t know what they’re talking about?” What’s the next question, Megana? I feel like we’re going to crush the next one.

**Megana:** David asks, “My story takes place in a real town with a small population. After a recent draft, the townspeople have become way more complicit in the evil doings of the antagonist. Is this poor taste, since real people live in this town and are being represented negatively? Should I change it to a fictional town, or is this just part of the storytelling game and I shouldn’t worry about it?”

**John:** Interesting. It’s a real small town. David is writing some terrible deeds happening in this small town that people are complicit in. I don’t know. He’s not saying whether it’s a true story or not. If it’s a true story, then yes, you have to be much more mindful of the fact that people can be mashed together to be in your thing. I really wouldn’t worry about it. You cannot libel a town. You can libel people.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Unless you are making it clear that these are the specific people who are doing this terrible thing, I think you’re in the clear.

**Craig:** I would refer you to obscure author Stephen King, David, who has forced real small towns in Maine to go through all sorts of horrible things, and Massachusetts. As long as the actual people aren’t reading this and going, “Wait a second, that’s me,” then you’re fine. That thing at the end of episodes or movies that say, “Any resemblance to people alive or dead is,” what is it, coincidence? That’s the key. I would not worry about this too much.

**John:** Agree. Megana, it looks like we have a question about shooting scripts.

**Megana:** Yes. CH asks, “I keep being told by a fellow writer that I shouldn’t put things like establishing shots into a script. He tells me that this is something that is done when you write the shooting script.”

**Craig:** What?

**Megana:** “Can you tell me about the process that happens to a script when it goes into production and a director gets his hands on it? What is the difference between a script and a shooting script? Who writes the shooting script?”

**John:** Wow, some fundamental questions here. I also want to point out “gets his hands on it.” Their hands on it? It could be a woman. It could be a person who identifies as a he.

**Craig:** It could be a person without hands.

**John:** By the way, it could be a person without hands.

**Craig:** Just saying.

**John:** I want to start by saying we could probably put a link in the show notes to a previous episode where we talked about some of the things that do change when you move into production. You don’t see numbered scripts until you get pretty close to production, until someone tells you, “We need scene numbers.” Then you put scene numbers in. You don’t put them in scripts up until that point. There’s not a big difference between a shooting script and the script that you’re writing. It’s a mistake to think that they are completely different things or that some other person does them.

**Craig:** CH, here’s what I would like you to tell your fellow writer. You’re wrong, fellow writer. Apologies, but you’re wrong. The shooting script is not a thing. The shooting script is just like, “Okay, we’re shooting now, so I guess this draft is the one we’re working with for now,” but you can revise that one. There’s no special skill to writing a shooting script. There is absolutely nothing other than, as John says, scene numbers, that belong in that script but not in earlier script. If you want to say establishing shot so-and-so, of course you write that into your script. You don’t need to wait for some theoretical day where they tap a magic wand on your document and call it the shooting script. There’s no such thing really. For the legal purposes of figuring out credit, the Writers Guild essentially describes the shooting script as the last one. That’s the last one they got published. That’s it. I guess that’s the shooting script.

I have a feeling that your fellow writer either is not particularly experienced or is just deeply confused. In anything, just for all of you, any time anybody gives you advice that smells like, “Hey writers, know your place,” reject it.

**John:** Here’s where I think the friend maybe got confused is that online you will find screenplays and you will find screenplays that look just like the screenplays you and I would write normally, or you’ll find what are called shooting scripts, which all have half pages and A and B pages and stars in the margins, and they look crazy. They’ll be in different colors if they were originally in different colors. There’ll be weird headers on things. That kind of shooting script is the production drafts that go through multiple series of revisions and stuff. Things can look really strange in those. You don’t want your script to start that way. It’s just a way that we’ve decided to handle additions and deletions to shooting scripts while we’re in production. We don’t have to re-shoot the whole script. We can just re-shoot pages. That is the difference between a shooting script and the original script.

Sometimes it’s harder to read shooting scripts, because they are just messy, and there’s weird one-eighth pages, and things get broken, strangely. You’re not writing that. You’re writing a draft, and you’re writing the script that is meant to be read and goes into production. Don’t worry about the differences here.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. I think it’s come time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Oh, exciting.

**John:** I have a big One Cool Thing and a very small, little, adorable One Cool Thing. My big One Cool Thing is, previously on the show we’ve talked about the Inevitable Foundation, which is a great group here in Los Angeles that helps match writers with disabilities and people who should be hiring those writers with disabilities. They’ve had a great track record of getting people staffed on shows and getting projects set up. This last week I went to an event that they were doing that was really focusing on their new class but also their concierge service. I want to hype up the concierge service. If you are person who is looking to hire on a writer with a disability for a specific project or if you have a show, and it’s like, “Man, it really would be fantastic to find a deaf writer from a Latin background for my show,” you call them, you [inaudible 00:40:10] them an email, and right away, they will give you a list of some really great writers and samples for you to be reading through.

Shoshannah Stern, who was a previous Scriptnotes guest, was one of the hosts of this event. She’s a great example of somebody who is working today in part because people recognized, “Wow, it would be really great to have a deaf writer to help us figure out how to do this show about deaf characters.”

Just hyping up the Inevitable Foundation. If you are a person who is looking to staff, you’re an executive who is curious about trying to find disabled writers for your project, they are the place you should go to first.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to them. My small, adorable One Cool Thing is, you can see it in the show notes here, I fell for an Instagram ad which was about these little crochet animals you can make. I bought the little kit. It was kind of difficult but actually really fun and rewarding. I made Pierre the Penguin that you see there, this adorable, little, plush thing that I crocheted just from a bunch of yarn.

**Craig:** This was not something I could have foreseen.

**John:** I’m a crafty person, Craig.

**Craig:** You are.

**John:** You’ve seen me-

**Craig:** You’re amazingly crafty. It’s just the crocheting was something-

**John:** Crocheting?

**Craig:** … that I did not foresee. I love it. It’s adorable. I will tell you… John already knows this. I watched John expertly duct tape the handles of picket signs for our last strike, not to be confused with the one we’re about to have. He watched me absolutely screw up. All I needed to do was just duct tape a wooden stick, and I really struggled.

**John:** It’s all about the angle.

**Craig:** His, it was diagonal, and it was layered perfectly. I have a feeling Megana would also be just amazing at that.

**John:** Megana has great craft.

**Craig:** She looks crafty as hell. I still do not know how to wrap a present. That’s me. This is wild. I love the way this thing looks. You’re a very good crocheter. Speaking of crocheting and crocheters and pronouncing French words, John, you mentioned that the Inevitable Foundation has a concierge service. Have you heard, and I have heard this so many times, people say concierge [said like concier]?

**John:** Yeah, they’re over-applying the language. They’re over-applying the rule. They think a French word, you have to not say the last bit of it.

**Craig:** They don’t understand that if the word were C-O-N-C-I-E-R-T, yes, concierge [said like concier], but concierge, G-E, the word’s concierge. I never know what to say when they say concierge [said like concier]. I don’t want to be that guy, but I am that guy. I am that guy.

**John:** While we’re in a digression about pronouncing things, where is the World Cup being held right now?

**Craig:** Qatar [said like cutter].

**John:** We decided it was Qatar [said like cutter] and not Qatar [said like ka-tar]. I’m fine with it. I’m fine with it, by the way. It’s just interesting that we’ve now all come to agree that we’re going to say Qatar [said like cutter] rather than Qatar [said like ka-tar].

**Craig:** I think we agree because the people from Qatar [said like cutter] were like, “It’s called Qatar [said like cutter].”

**John:** It’s interesting in what cases we decide to use the local pronunciation and not, because we call it Paris, we don’t call it Paris [said like Pari], but some people insist on calling it Barcelona [said like Barselona], which drives me crazy.

**Craig:** It’s too much. Part of it is when we learn these terms. Qatar as a nation is not… As a people, it’s been around forever, but as a nation, it’s relatively new compared to say China. The word for China in Chinese is not China any more than the word for Japan is Nippon. Why don’t we call it Nippon? I don’t know. It’s because just somewhere along the line they said Japan. Then we do change things. We don’t say Bombay. We say Mumbai. What are some of the other ones? Beijing is the best example. It used to be Peking.

**John:** Peking.

**Craig:** Now it’s Beijing.

**John:** Those were cases where it was like our colonialism had forced a word on there and we were like, “Oh, that’s not the real name for things, so let’s not call it that.”

**Craig:** Then other places, we have no problem forcing our colonialism on. It’s like, “Fine. You’ll just be called this or you’ll be called that.” Korea’s not Korea. That’s not the name for Korea in Korea. I don’t think it is.

**John:** No, it’s Hanguk.

**Craig:** Yeah. Anyway.

**John:** Anyway.

**Craig:** Any who.

**John:** That’s a digression. Anyway, the Woobles are adorable little things. I think they’re largely sold out. I can’t believe I’m hyping something I found on an Instagram ad, but I enjoyed it.

**Craig:** You’re hyping it. My One Cool Thing, this one’s expensive, folks. This will be more expensive than the Woobles. I use a Yeti mic for this podcast. I can’t remember what my headphones are, but they’re nice. I enjoy them. They’re nice. I had them brought to my house, because I was at home sick with COVID, and I’d left them there, of course, because that’s me. Here I am in the office, and I need to plug headphones into my mic so I can do this podcast.

As luck would have it, our amazing editor, Tim Goode, had gotten our amazing producer, Jack Lesko, a pair of new headphones, because she didn’t have really good reference headphones. I’ve immediately stolen them for this podcast. I will give them back. I promise I will give her her headphones back, but they’re awesome. These are AKG headphones. The model is K702. They are reference studio headphones, open back, around ear. What I love about these is they are incredibly comfortable and I can hear my own voice not solely through the microphone, if that makes sense. I’m hearing my own voice much more naturally, which is really nice. My ears don’t feel quite so stifled. In terms of actual sound reproduction, these I think are state of the art. I don’t even know what they cost. Should we dare to look it up and see?

**John:** Let’s dare. We’ll take a moment here.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**Megana:** They’re not crazy.

**Craig:** What are they?

**Megana:** It looks like they’re on sale for 289.

**Craig:** That’s not horrible. We are heading into the holiday season. They are a joy. I’m getting myself a pair of these for sure.

**John:** Craig, I’m guessing that the headphones you’ve been using have been the Sony MDR ones.

**Craig:** I think they are.

**John:** They’re the classic-

**Craig:** I think that’s right.

**John:** That’s what Megana and I both use. They’re great. They’re the standard. Obviously, if you have something that you like better, go for it.

**Craig:** These feel better. I’d say they feel better and they sound better, to me. If you are looking for some reference studio headphones that feel comfortable and reproduce sound nicely, and you’ve got a little dough to spend, or perhaps you want to shower somebody with luxury this holiday season, AKG by Harman, K702.

**John:** K702. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yay yay, woo woo!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Matthew Jordan. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, Craig’s not on Twitter anymore, I’m @johnaugust for the moment. We’ll see. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. I think you can still probably get them in time for Christmas if you order today. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. 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 the dessert bracket. Which is the ultimate dessert-

**Craig:** Ultimate.

**John:** … that will beat all others? Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** This is inspired by several things. First off, it’s the Great British Baking Show just resolved, or Great British Bake-Off if you’re British, which was always a delightful show to watch. They were always making great, delicious, tasty desserts and some other tacos [said like tack-os] that they should not be trying to make.

**Craig:** Tacos. Taco [said like tack-o].

**John:** Tacos [said like tack-os].

**Craig:** Their pasta [said like pass-ta] and their tacos [said like tack-os].

**John:** Oh my gosh, don’t get me started on the pico de gallo [said like gall-o] and pico [said like pike-o] de gallo [said like gal-o].

**Craig:** I know. Come on, British people.

**John:** It’s also the holidays, which means there’s lots of good desserts out there. I thought we would actually just take a moment and really figure out which is the best dessert possible.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** In this bracket, we’re going to have 16 different desserts competing. I want you to imagine the best possible version of a thing. It can be a thing you make yourself or a thing you got from that one fantastic place. It’s the ultimate version of it. Don’t worry about the mediocre ones.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** We will start with the fruit pies. Which is the winner, apple pie or cherry pie?

**Craig:** Apple.

**John:** Megana?

**Megana:** Apple.

**Craig:** It’s apple. It’s apple, for sure.

**John:** I don’t think there’s really a [inaudible 00:49:15] question. Cherry pie is delicious. Again, vanilla ice cream elevates both of them. Apple pie is the one you want to go for.

**Craig:** The only way to really make cherry pie is to over-sugar and glop the cherries. The cherries themselves become kind of gross and not really cherry-like, so yeah, it’s apple pie.

**Megana:** It’s just not as versatile.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Apple pie also you could have for breakfast the next morning. It’s delicious.

**Craig:** It’s wonderful.

**John:** So good. So good. Next the battle of the breads. We’ve got banana bread versus bread pudding.

**Craig:** That’s actually tricky, because you’re asking me to imagine the best possible version. If you were going for just average probability of happiness, you’d go with banana bread, I think, but the best possible version of bread pudding destroys banana bread.

**John:** That’s where I’m coming too as well. Megana, what’s your feeling on the breads?\

**Megana:** I am bread pudding all day every day.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** I’ll pick a bread pudding at a restaurant almost any day, so let’s go for it.

**Megana:** I’m just going to say it. I think banana bread is over-hyped.

**Craig:** It’s fine. You know what it is? It’s a dessert that anyone can make, and so it gets over-made. That said, somebody did recently give me, as a gift, a wonderful banana bread.

**John:** Did it have walnuts in it? Should banana bread have walnuts?

**Craig:** It should not, and it didn’t.

**Megana:** I just think it’s a place that we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s good so we don’t feel guilty about our brown bananas and doing something with them. Let’s just end this charade.

**Craig:** It’s one of the most annoying things. Melissa’s like, “I’m making banana bread.” I’m like, “You’re rotting food on my counter. That’s what I’m seeing.” Next, we have cake.

**John:** We have cakes.

**Craig:** That’s a big one.

**John:** Which do we prefer? Do you want a chocolate birthday cake or a poundcake?

**Craig:** I’m going to be the unpopular one here. I don’t love chocolate cake. I find it to be cloying. It’s too much for my palette. I’m not a huge chocolate person. Actually, I think a good poundcake, a really well done poundcake can be fantastic. I’m actually going to go with poundcake.

**John:** Is the poundcake frosted in any way? Is there a glaze to it?

**Craig:** No, I would not do frosting or glaze. I’m a purist.

**John:** Megana, what are you thinking in this cake battle here?

**Megana:** I knew that Craig and I felt the same way about chocolate birthday cake, so I am also going to go with pound cake.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** I would generally go for chocolate birthday cake, but I will go with the majority here, so poundcake is the winner.

**Craig:** Poundcake.

**John:** Now we’re going to worldwide here, international. Crepes Suzette versus baklava.

**Craig:** Can I throw one other one on there?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Tiramisu.

**John:** Tiramisu’s also really good.

**Craig:** With that, my answer is tiramisu.

**John:** Again, we’re trying to only picture the ultimate versions of tiramisu. I’ve had some really shit tiramisus. I think I’m still leaning towards baklava.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Megana, help us out.

**Megana:** I know I’m taking this way too seriously, but this is incredibly difficult for me.

**Craig:** I know. You’re stressing out. I love it.

**Megana:** I’m going to go with crepes, just to mix things up.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Now what do we do?

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:52:27].

**Craig:** I think what we have to do is maybe rank choice this, even though Sarah Palin does not like that system.

**John:** Absolutely, rank choice voting. Craig, rank them. Crepes, tiramisu, baklava.

**Craig:** I’m going to go tiramisu one, crepes Suzette two, baklava three.

**John:** I would go baklava one, tiramisu two, crepes Suzette three.

**Megana:** I’m going crepes one, baklava two, tiramisu three.

**Craig:** Oh god, did we just [crosstalk 00:52:54]?

**John:** Good Lord, I think we completely broke it.

**Craig:** Oh, no. Did we break our whole system?

**John:** We’re going to circle back to that. We’re going to cleanse our palette with other ones and circle back to the worldwide.

**Craig:** I’m happy to defer to crepes Suzette. It’s not that I don’t like baklava.

**John:** It is one note. It is one very sugary and honey sweet-

**Craig:** Very sugary. I don’t tend to like Middle Eastern dessert profiles, whether it’s Israeli or-

**Megana:** It’s so syrupy.

**Craig:** It’s so syrupy. Exactly.

**John:** It is syrupy. We’ll go for crepes Suzette. It has fire. Fire is exciting.

**Craig:** Fire is exciting, and it’s French.

**John:** Alternative pies. We have pumpkin pie versus key lime pie.

**Craig:** Wow. Oof. Man. You’re kind of catching us at a weird time in the calendar here.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Going for the best possible version, the ceiling on pumpkin pie is higher than the ceiling on key lime pie.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** I would go pumpkin pie.

**John:** I’m going to go pumpkin pie too. Megana?

**Megana:** Yeah. That was a great analysis.

**Craig:** We think we’re on CNN.

**Megana:** Or ESPN.

**John:** The only ting I’ll say is, two bites of key lime pie, and wow, this is really great, but my 10th bite of key lime pie, I’m like, “I don’t want anymore,” whereas pumpkin pie, I can keep eating it.

**Craig:** I’ve made them both from scratch. They’re both excellent. By the way, tip on key lime pie, never use key limes to make key lime pie. They’re disgusting.

**John:** Just use normal limes.

**Craig:** They’re tiny and bitter. Mediterranean limes, which are the ones you would imagine in your mind, those make a much better key lime pie. This has been confirmed by the excellent people in the test kitchens at Cooks Illustrated.

**John:** Love it. The cold round, cheesecake versus ice cream, any flavor, including hot fudge sundaes.

**Craig:** This is an easy one.

**John:** Are we going for ice cream or cheesecake?

**Craig:** Best version for me, cheesecake all day long.

**John:** I’m also going to go with cheesecake. Megana, what are you thinking?

**Megana:** I imagine this is what it would be like if you asked me to pick between me children.

**Craig:** It’s Sophie’s Choice. This is your Sophie’s Choice. One of them has to die.

**John:** One of them will come with you. The other one will just melt out on the sidewalk.

**Craig:** You’re actually crying.

**Megana:** God, my first love is ice cream, but I’m going to go cheesecake.

**John:** Something about it. I love a hot fudge sundae, but cheesecake, the best.

**Craig:** A great cheesecake is a great thing.

**John:** Pure Americana here, chocolate chip cookies versus s’mores.

**Craig:** I would go chocolate chip cookies myself. Megana?

**Megana:** To Craig’s earlier point, the ceiling on chocolate chip cookies is just higher.

**Craig:** S’mores are required to be one thing basically.

**Megana:** Unless you’re Paul Hollywood.

**John:** S’mores are exciting in a camping situation, like oh, this is pretty good for around a campfire, but I’m never reaching for a s’more.

**Craig:** No. It’s actually very annoying to eat. God help you if you have a beard like I do. You can’t.

**John:** Crumbly?

**Craig:** The marshmallow just begins to embed itself in your face.

**John:** Lastly, some summer fun. Peach cobbler versus rice crispy bars.

**Craig:** Megana, I want to hear from you first on this one.

**Megana:** Rice crispy bars.

**Craig:** That’s where I was going, and here’s why. Peach cobbler can be excellent, but rice crispy bars are not only one thing. You can kick them up. You can mess around with them. You can do some interesting things. They have a unique texture. No other dessert can have what rice crispy bars have. I’m going to go with rice crispy bars.

**John:** Rice crispy bars are rice cakes with syrup on them.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** I do not enjoy rice crispy treats. I will eat them. I will eat them, but I won’t enjoy them the way that I will enjoy a great peach crisp. God, summer fruits, stone fruits are incredible.

**Megana:** I knew it. I knew it.

**Craig:** Unfortunately, the rice crispy bar people have spoken.

**John:** Fine. Now, we get to the next bracket here. Lead a battle between apple pie and bread pudding.

**Craig:** Bread pudding for me.

**John:** That’s bread pudding for me too. Megana, how are you feeling?

**Megana:** I’m going to go apple pie, but I guess I lose.

**Craig:** You have lost.

**John:** Bread pudding made it through the round, although now we have no fruits left in the competition.

**Craig:** Great. Good. Fruits are garbage. Let’s get to the real stuff.

**John:** Poundcake versus crepes Suzette.

**Megana:** Can I switch over to tiramisu?

**John:** You can switch to tiramisu.

**Craig:** If you switch to tiramisu, then I’m going with tiramisu for sure.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** In that case, this is hands down tiramisu for me.

**John:** I think tiramisu deserves it. It’s a weird stacked dessert. It’s a trifle. It’s got come coffee in it potentially.

**Craig:** Definitely.

**John:** Perfectly made [crosstalk 00:57:36].

**Craig:** Required. Mascarpone cheese, delicious.

**John:** Pumpkin pie versus cheesecake.

**Craig:** I would probably go cheesecake. It’s just more versatile.

**Megana:** You could have a pumpkin pie cheesecake.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. You can have a pumpkin cheesecake. Bingo.

**John:** You can have a cheesecake pumpkin pie, but you would still call it cheesecake.

**Craig:** You would call it cheesecake.

**John:** I think cheesecake’s going to win this one. Chocolate chip cookies versus rice crispy bars. No competition.

**Craig:** It’s chocolate chip cookies there.

**Megana:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s an easy one.

**John:** Final four. Bread pudding versus tiramisu.

**Craig:** Tiramisu.

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m pretty much a bread pudding. Let me see if I can sway you to bread pudding. Bread pudding, it’s coming out hot. It’s coming out with little bits of chocolate melted into it, maybe some caramel melted into it as well. It’s like French toast. It’s a little bit eggy. You got to eat it with a spoon. Maybe it’s in the middle of the table and you’re sharing it.

**Megana:** Yeah, and some caramel.

**John:** Or maybe it’s in a little cast iron pan.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. Now let me try and sway you to tiramisu, because I recently made it.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Delicious espresso coffee. Ladyfingers have soaked it all up, this delicious, spongy yumminess. Then you’ve got a mixture of cream and Mascarpone cheese adding a little bit of tang, lots of sweetness from sugar. Then the whole thing is dusted on top with a little bit of cocoa powder. It all just blends together. Each bite has five things going on.

**John:** Megana, it’s coming down to you. You have to decide between tiramisu and bread pudding. Your vote decides everything.

**Megana:** I’m going bread pudding.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Megana:** He got me at it’s hot.

**Craig:** I hope the nation of Italy visits its vengeance upon both of you.

**Megana:** Don’t put them on me.

**Craig:** You’re a racist.

**Megana:** Where does bread pudding originate from?

**Craig:** It feels Englishy to me.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** Any time the word pudding is in there and it isn’t a glop, I think it’s English.

**John:** Cheesecake versus chocolate chip cookies.

**Craig:** Cheesecake.

**John:** I’m debating. I’m thinking of the ultimate versions of things. Maybe it’s because chocolate chip cookies, while they can be dessert, they’re not really an end-of-meal dessert. They’re a treat to be eaten other times.

**Craig:** You can eat them after lunch.

**John:** The same reason we haven’t [inaudible 00:59:55] blueberry muffins, which are delicious.

**Craig:** Yeah, because they’re not really dessert.

**John:** Megana, you agree with us?

**Megana:** I don’t, but you guys win.

**Craig:** We win.

**John:** Make your case. Are chocolate chip cookies as dessert as the dessert winner here?

**Megana:** I don’t know. They’re just my best friend.

**Craig:** That’s not what we’re talking about though. We’re not talking about what listens to you talk.

**Megana:** They’re all the time. They are just a universal, delightful treat for any time of day, year, season, whereas a cheesecake is an undertaking.

**John:** What I was saying is it comes down to the definition of dessert. If it’s something that’s uniquely a dessert versus also a snack, is that a difference?

**Megana:** Yeah, because a chocolate chip cookie is like a treat.

**John:** It is a treat.

**Craig:** It’s a treat. I made a cheesecake recently for the first time. It came out beautifully. It’s fun to make. A cheesecake, when you bring it out at the end of dinner, people are like, “Oho.” You bring out a plate of chocolate chip cookies, they’re like, “Oh, you don’t care about us.”

**Megana:** Yeah, “He phoned it in.”

**Craig:** “He phoned it in.”

**John:** That’s fair.

**Megana:** I guess we’re going cheesecake.

**John:** Cheesecake. Final round. This is actually a surprise. Not what I would’ve predicted.

**Craig:** Startling.

**John:** Bread pudding versus cheesecake. I’m astonished apple pie didn’t make it through to here.

**Craig:** We’re not that American, I guess.

**John:** We’re not. Bread pudding versus cheesecake. What’s going to win?

**Megana:** Cheesecake.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s cheesecake. I know. I know. I know. I know.

**John:** I think it’s the effectiveness of presentation. Would I have a stronger impression of cheesecake, would I enjoy cheesecake more if it weren’t for the Cheesecake Factory? That is what definitely has soured me.

**Craig:** The fact that they put the word factory next to it is pretty brutal. The whole concept and experience of Cheesecake Factory is upsetting from the very moment you walk in. The faux Italianate design.

**John:** Yeah, oh my gosh.

**Craig:** The menu that appears to be a phone book. They are terrible at night but good at nothing. Then the cheesecakes themselves, they’re stupid. They’ve gotten so far afield from just the simplicity and elegance of a New York style cheesecake.

**John:** We’ve not even discussed the Basque cheesecake and the rise of the Basque cheesecake.

**Craig:** The Basque cheesecake is-

**John:** Burnt.

**Craig:** … fantastic.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** It’s glorious. That’s another great vote in favor of cheesecake is that there are different families.

**John:** I think a thing that’s also been pushing it over is because there’s been recent innovation, at least within America, the popularity of Basque cheesecakes.

**Craig:** Discovery.

**Megana:** Watch the cheesecake space.

**Craig:** Watch this cheesecake space. I’ve always loved the combination of sugar and cheese in a dessert. Even a cheese Danish is delicious to me. Cheesecakes are not easy to make. Bread pudding is easy. It just is.

**John:** Yeah, true. Anyone could do a bread pudding. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun dessert bracket.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Megana:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye, guys.

Links:

* [Bob Iger Back As Disney CEO, Bob Chapek Out](https://deadline.com/2022/11/disney-bob-iger-returns-ceo-bob-chapek-out-1235178223/) on Deadline
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 543: 20 Questions with John](https://johnaugust.com/2022/20-questions-with-john)
* [David Wappel’s Twitter Thread on Anchoring Nouns](https://twitter.com/davidwappel/status/1202287786998390785?s=20&t=xSSMDkDRYaft-MmoMKhE5w)
* Learn more and support the [Inevitable Foundation here](https://www.inevitable.foundation/)
* [Woobles Crochet Kit](https://thewoobles.com/products/penguin-crochet-kit), check out John’s craft [here](https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ck6ShCeApLU/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link)
* [AKG K702 Headphones](https://www.akg.com/Headphones/Professional%20Headphones/K702.html)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Jordan ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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