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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/big-numbers).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hi, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 396 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig and I are both maybe just a little bit jetlagged. Craig, you just flew back from England, correct?

**Craig:** Yeah. This was my last run over to London. We finished basically.

**John:** Hooray!

**Craig:** We mixed our final episode of Chernobyl and we just got some straggling VFX shots left, but basically I guess it’s probably good that we’re done because it’s coming out in a few weeks.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. You should be done. It’s good. And I just flew back from Maine. I was there doing a one-week book tour of the northeast. It was great but I had to wake up at 1am LA time to catch my flight back here. So, if I nod off in the middle of this podcast that will be the explanation of why, not because I’m not fascinated by the things we’re talking about.

But now we are both back in town and it’s a really good thing because, well, nothing interesting happened this past week. It was a very quiet week in Los Angeles while we were gone.

**Craig:** Sleepy. Yeah, one of those rare weeks where everything goes as planned. [laughs] He-he. Yikes.

**John:** Today on the podcast we’re going to be talking about a lot of big numbers from the latest developments in the WGA/agency situation, to the announcement of Disney+, and the final installment of Star Wars non-ology. I guess is that nine movies? Non-ology?

**Craig:** Sure. Why not?

**John:** Sure. Then of course we’ll answer some listener questions. But I wanted to sort of frame this as big numbers because we had a very big exciting thing happen this week because we got our first image of an actual black hole.

**Craig:** That’s right. It was gorgeous.

**John:** Yeah. It’s named Powehi, which is a Hawaiian phrase referring to “an embellished dark source of unending creation.”

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** I’m a little skeptical of that long name, because a culture that would have a term for an embellished dark source of unending creation – that feels a little specific for a three-syllable word.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well Po means embellished dark source.

**John:** Oh, that’s right.

**Craig:** We is unending. And Hi is creation. You’re right. Actually many Polynesian languages are sort of famous for having these very long words.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So this is an odd one. But the photo really isn’t of the black hole. The photo, of course, is of the light being sucked into the black hole. You can’t really take a picture of a black hole, because it’s a black hole.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s actually a composite image of the radio telescope’s data that they were able to pull from this thing, but still it’s impressive. It’s an accomplishment because it is a demonstration that the physics that we assumed were real, are real and so we can now see it. This 55 million light years from Earth. This super-massive black hole has a mass that is 6.5 billion times that of our sun. That’s not even a number I can fathom, because I can’t really even fathom how big the sun is.

I love going to planetariums where they show you relative sizes of things. And I kind of remember that for a while, but then I can never remember whether the Earth is a speck of dust or a golf ball. And really it doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** It really doesn’t matter. And also I should point out that the super-massive black hole either has or had a mass. Because what we’re seeing is a picture from 55 million years ago. Correct? I think that’s right.

**John:** It is. Yeah. So, it took that long for the light that we’re capturing or the radio waves that we’re capturing to get to us. So, that was a long time ago. But you know what? Black holes, they last a really long time. And I know this because the same week that this news came out I watched a really good video, I’ll put a link in the show notes, it’s by John Boswell. It is a Timelapse of the Entire Universe. And it starts now and goes to the end of the universe, but it keeps accelerating as it goes. And you realize that the period of the universe that we’re in right now is actually just a brief little blip in the time in which we could actually have planets and solar systems. Because most of the universe will be giant black holes crashing into each other and eventually decaying until there’s nothingness.

**Craig:** Well, that’s certainly what the simulation would have you believe. In the meantime I’m just wondering, in the time-lapse of the entire universe where did the part where we fire our agents land? Was that recent? How long does it last?

**John:** That was Friday at midnight.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** Yeah. So that was another sort of change in the overall physics of the Hollywood universe is that – so this past week we were having negotiations with the Association of Talent Agencies. Last week we sort of assumed that it was going to have already happened, but then there was a last minute extension, so this last week there was more conversation. A deal was not reached and you and I and every other member of the WGA got an email saying there’s been no deal reached, it has now come time for us to send a notice to our agencies that they need to either sign the agreement or they are no longer representing us.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this is a, you know, I don’t know how else to phrase it except a failure of negotiation. Normally when we are looking at failures of negotiation between the Writers Guild and the companies the outcome is a strike. In this case, you know, and I’ve been saying this all along, when we had Chris Keyser on, we’re kind of management here. And the closest analogy I could come up with was that this is sort of a lockout. We’ve locked them out.

It is a failure of negotiation, but I place it at the feet of the agencies. I really do. I think that it took them – either it took them a very long time to take this seriously, or their strategy was to not take it seriously. But suddenly there were five hours left and at that point they wanted to begin. When you’re down by 14 points that’s not the time to run the clock out. You run the clock out when you’re up by 14 and there’s 40 seconds left. Why they’re running the clock down, I don’t know. And why they chose to do what they did I don’t know. Why their first volley with eight hours to go was so far afield of the fairway I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. You and I talked a lot about this sort of off-mic this whole week, sort of anticipating what could be happening, what might be happening. You and I both had our theories of sort of, you know, theories of mind for sort of what was going on on the other side and I don’t think either of us were particularly correct. It’s hard to sort of, you know, understand quite why we got to this place. But here’s what we do know is that there are 43 agencies who have signed this agreement. They’re not the big agencies that you would know. But they represent about 300 or a little bit more of our members. So that’s something. If you’re at one of those agencies that’s awesome.

What’s going to happen this next week, the next few weeks, is there’s going to hopefully be more discussions, hopefully building on sort of the small things that were decided in the room. There’s going to be a lot of speculation about whether more agencies will break off from the ATA to make a deal. I think there’s probably some betting pools about who that would be. But it’s uncharted territory. We are past the event horizon and so we don’t know what the future holds for our relationship with our agencies.

**Craig:** We don’t. The reasonable prediction would be that after a brief cooling off period everybody comes back to the table and starts talking again. There will be increasing pressure as time goes on. Time always delivers pressure. There are people whose job is to determine for the agencies how much money they are not making per month for every month this goes on.

And this is kind of an interesting difference between a typical labor action like the kind where we go on strike, when we go on strike we don’t make money and they can’t get new writing. In this case, we can keep getting hired. We can keep making money. In fact, there is a real argument to be made that whatever pain is and whatever the distribution of pain is it is wildly in favor of the writers and wildly in disfavor of the agencies.

You are going to have a lot of people, a lot of agents at those agencies, saying, “Hey, you’ve kind of eliminated my career here.” And I have to say that in that there is some hope for this all because when you run a business and you have employees, sure, some people are awful about it and the larger the corporation I suppose the easier it is to be awful, but these are not massive corporations. They all work in a building. And I think seeing people in pain and seeing people scared and seeing people suffering is going to make a difference to the men and women who run these agencies.

They don’t want this to go on forever. And people will get hurt. So, the question is where’s that sweet spot between what they can live with and what they can’t? The truth is the longer this goes on the more danger they are in.

**John:** Yeah. On this flight back I had wifi and so I was emailing with a bunch of writers, just sort of checking in with them on sort of where they were at. These are largely folks who are on that big list of 700 people who signed up.

And one of the things I stressed in conversations was this is weird and uncomfortable and that’s probably good. It kind of needs to be weird and uncomfortable because if this felt normal we wouldn’t actually solve it. And so you have to sort of be comfortable with being uncomfortable for a bit while we sort of sort through these situations.

But in two of the conversations I had with writers today I realized folks who I knew well, like big screenwriters who you and I talk to quite a bit, don’t have agents. I was surprised like one of them hadn’t had an agent for eight years and he works all the time.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So, it seems like, oh, it would be so weird and impossible not to have an agent, but there’s folks for whom it’s fine.

**Craig:** Well, there’s the creeping danger for the agencies. So, the longer this goes on the greater the chance that – not everybody – but a number of writers will say, “I don’t notice a difference here.” And that’s obviously an existential threat for the agencies and their relationship with writers.

The other issue is the actors are waiting out there. So SAG does not have a signed agreement with the ATA and hasn’t for a while. So they’ve just kind of punted this the way I think in a sense the writers punted this, too. But the longer this goes on the longer the odds are that SAG will do the same thing. And at that point it’s untenable.

So one of the tricky parts for the agencies is they can’t simply make a deal and imagine it is only with us. Whatever they do here is going to be extendable I would imagine to the actors and then of course to the directors. All of their clients really. The simple solution of course is to simply revert to 10%. Whether or not that happens, I don’t know. But I absolutely agree with you that it is uncomfortable. That is a sign that probably it’s moving in the direction it should be moving in since the entire point of this exercise was that the status quo and the comfort of stability was not worth the price we were paying.

But on a personal note it’s distressing. It’s distressing to me because I am close with my agents. My main agent has been my agent for well over a decade. And this is, I think the two of us feel a little bit like two brothers on different sides of the Civil War. It’s one of those things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s sad. We don’t like this.

**John:** No. I tweeted as this was all happening that my agent of 20 plus years, you know, I would give him a kidney tomorrow if he needed a kidney. I’m on my way to Cedars. He’s genuinely a good guy. And so what we’ve tried to stress from the very beginning is this isn’t about an individual agent. This is about a system that’s broken that needs to get fixed. And so hopefully we can get this system fixed.

But speaking of broken systems, I want to give you an opportunity because I know you are not happy with some of what the WGA was saying in the FAQ about this. Do you want to talk us through that?

**Craig:** Yeah. And I’ve never been shy about criticizing the union at any point in time. In fact, I tend to do it when people are most annoyed with the idea that I’m criticizing the union. Because I think in part the Writers Guild has a kind of institutional paranoia that in times of strife any dissent represents potential fatal wound to the body politic which is nonsense. I think dissent is essential, particularly to keep any kind of structure of power and authority honest to the people that it purports to represent.

And I think by and large the Writers Guild has actually done a very good job through here. But they always go one step too far. And here’s my problem. They released a frequently asked questions for writers which was very thorough and people do have a lot of questions about how this all works. But there was one thing that stuck in my craw.

So, the letter that we all signed and sent to our agents – I did it, you did it, most of us are doing it I presume – says essentially you can no longer represent me for employment in regard to any new deal covered by the WGA.

**John:** Yeah. My writing services.

**Craig:** Correct. What the frequently asked question says is – question: What if I’m a TV writer/producer? Answer: Some unsigned agencies, meaning agencies that haven’t signed the code of conduct, meaning most of them, have been telling clients they can still represent them as producers. This isn’t true. Because your writer and producer functions are inextricably linked and are deemed covered writing services under the MBA you cannot continue to be represented as a producer by an agency not signed to the code of conduct.

Well, I don’t think that’s true at all. I think that’s just patently false. I think that, well, it is true in practice that writer-producers in television, those two activities are mushed up and linked together. But producing is not covered by the MBA. The MBA has passages that say, look, if you are claiming to be producing and you’re doing more than this small limited number of exceptions then you’re actually writing and it needs to be covered here, but otherwise producing income is dues-able. That’s how we know it’s not covered by the MBA and that’s how we know that in fact the Writers Guild cannot stop people from producing in television. There’s an entire category of television producing called non-writing producer.

So, why did they do this? I think again because they’re paranoid. But they don’t have to be here. That was unnecessary. Because if you are a proper writer-producer in television and your agent cannot represent you in the writing portion of the deal then they won’t. And you can’t produce and not write if you’re meant to be a writer-producer. So, the point is you can’t – they can’t get away with saying that they represent more than they do. And I think it’s also unnecessary. I think the fact is saying to the agencies you cannot represent my new writing work is as far as we ought to go and it’s as far I believe as we can go.

And until such time as somebody makes a decent argument to me that the MBA says otherwise that’s what I’m going to believe. And they tried to make an argument but I thought it was terrible and it didn’t hold water. So, this is where I think sometimes they go too far. That was unnecessary and I just don’t think it’s enforceable.

**John:** Yeah. So talking with some showrunners today or emailing back and forth with showrunners on my endless flight back from Maine I was talking to them about sort of these issues and I was really heartened to see that the showrunners I was talking to really did see their writing and producing functions as being so inextricably linked that they couldn’t imagine having conversations with their agents about the producing function of their job which was really they couldn’t separate it. So as a practical matter they felt those two functions were so linked that they couldn’t imagine separating them out. And that’s the kind of thing that also happened during the strike. There were showrunners who felt like they couldn’t go through and be doing post-production on episodes because it was still kind of writing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so I totally get that. And as a practical matter these showrunners I was talking to said, listen, I think the best way through this is for me to sort of stop talking to the agencies and to direct my folks to stop talking to the agencies so that we get this done more quickly and more fairly and sort of resolve this thing.

**Craig:** Well, I wish that you had written this, because that’s the answer. In other words, during the strike we said – we organized ahead of time. We talked to showrunners and said, listen, if we go on strike the companies are going to demand that you continue to fulfill your producing responsibilities which are not covered by the WGA, for instance supervising editorial. That’s not writing. Well, a lot of the showrunners sort of ahead of time said, “Yeah, we’re not going to do that. We’re not going to cross the picket line. And so you’ll have to sue us.”

Meaning the guild can’t compel us to do this. There is no legal reason we’re doing this. But since we’re all doing it you’d have to sue all of us and that won’t work. That’s how you do this. You don’t say you’re not allowed to.

And by the way, because this isn’t a labor action what we’re talking about really is representation. So the question is if you’re making a deal can you have an agent negotiate the producing part of it and have somebody else negotiate the writing part, practically speaking the answer is no. that doesn’t really make sense.

**John:** Not really, no.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so what I wish we were saying is you shouldn’t because it’s going to diminish our ability to do these things. What we’re saying to you is don’t. Right? But we’re not telling you you can’t. And we’re not lying to you about what the MBA covers. That’s where the guild just drives me nuts. They’ve got to go one step too far. And my problem is they’ve done this so well with the exception of that that I think it just diminishes a little bit of their – it diminishes the legitimacy and the honesty of the other arguments which are all excellent.

**John:** Yeah. Well, Craig, thank you for keeping us honest on that. The one last sort of macro question I got a lot today was about, but wait, couldn’t the agencies just package shows without writers? They could use actors and directors? The first response to that is always, well, but they don’t. The writers are always sort of deemed essential to these shows. So I would be surprised if any studio was going to be willing to pay a packaging fee that doesn’t include a writer.

But the other thing that I thought about today which had never really struck me before is we see these mega deals for writers, these $100 million deals for streamers with these writers, you don’t see those for directors. You don’t see those actors. There’s something obviously very special about writers is that we make the things that they’re able to show. And that is why we are so valuable. And I think that’s also why we’re so indispensable for these packaging fees.

**Craig:** And it’s why the feature business is so bizarre. Because it’s always been the case that the richest creative talent in Hollywood, the most handsomely-rewarded creative talent in Hollywood were television writers. Always. And continues to be the case. And then you have this bizarre world in features where, I don’t know, it’s like they pretend that television doesn’t exist and that that entire system isn’t working really, really well. And I’m kind of fascinated by what’s going to happen.

Because what you’re seeing now – is this just aside from the agency thing – but you are seeing people like Spielberg grouching at the Academy about whether or not Netflix movies should be eligible. And I understand the arguments on both sides, but there is underneath it a certain kind of fear I would imagine among directors that if their protected and exalted status in features disappears because everything is television then they will have lost an enormous amount of status and authority and that’s kind of an interesting side effect to all of this.

As the television-ification of Hollywood continues writers and their leverage only I think increase in stature. And another reason why it’s really important that we take this time now I think to reset things with agencies because we can. We are in fact the people that are the lynchpin behind these massive deals.

**John:** Yeah. Craig we got two questions that were specifically about WGA stuff. I thought maybe we’d take them first.

**Craig:** Great. All right, well Sam asks, “I just signed with one of the big four agencies off my break-in spec.” Great timing, Sam. “It made the Black List. It has some A-level talent circling. I’m meeting on assignments. All the good stuff. The thing is this is my very first go-round. I’m not in the WGA. What happens to a guy like me if WGA writers walk from the big four? Do I sit tight until I accumulate enough points to make it into the union and then jump ship? Could my agent even negotiate a WGA deal for me?

“I have a manager, so I’m not going to be floating out in space all alone, and despite not being in the union I want to back my fellow writers.”

John, we’ve got answers for this. Go for it.

**John:** We do have answers for Sam. First off, Sam, it’s awesome that you’re thinking about your fellow writers. That is a good start on your career. You are not a WGA member. You are not bound by sort of what’s happening with this. You can stay repped by this big four agency. They can send you out on stuff. Book something. Get a great job. Get a great job at a studio. That is going to be covered work. And with that covered work you are ultimately going to be joining the guild anyway and at which point let’s hope this is not still happening. But at which point you would have to be leaving your agency because then you’re bound to the restrictions of what’s going on right now.

So, you’re fine Sam. But it’s awesome that you’re thinking about this. This is the kind of guy who if this were the strike he would show up on the picket line even though he didn’t have to be on the picket line because he was there to support. That’s good.

**Craig:** Great. Thanks for that. John, you want to take Tamara’s question?

**John:** Sure. Tamara writes, “In the negotiation with the agencies about packaging fees why doesn’t the WGA team up with the DGA and SAG/AFTRA to demand that all their client members receive 50% of packaging fees so at the end of the year all packaging fees collected by the agencies would be split 50% for the agency, 50% for client members? Wouldn’t this be better than trying to eliminate the fees altogether?”

**Craig:** Well, Tamara, I agree with you. It would be better. I would be all for that, personally. That’s my personal feeling. I think the Mazin plan as I put it is once the agency recoups what it would have made from a 10% commission then everything after that they would split with everybody that was covered by the package. So that would mean everybody that wasn’t paying commission essentially would then get half. And it would be prorated among how much you contributed to that imputed 10%.

The issue though is that I don’t think, and I mean, John, maybe you know differently, I don’t think we can just team up with two other unions like that in something like this. I think we have to sort of negotiate on our own first. The DGA may have a deal in place. SAG does not, if I’m correct.

**John:** Yeah. I would say as you try to rope in other unions it gets more complicated and one thing I’ll just say in defense of the Mazin plan, Mazin idea, is that what Craig is trying to do is incentivize agencies to get more for their clients. That’s really ultimately what it comes down to. So that the 10% is really meaningful. And so that they are not only thinking about that packaging fee. They’re thinking about how do I get my clients paid more so that I make 10% more.

**Craig:** Exactly. My basic theory is if you tell them that the higher their clients’ salaries, the more packaging money they get to keep for themselves. They will be incentivized to maximize our salaries. And that’s all I want. I just want – there was a thread between agents and clients and that thread was the more you make the more we make. And that thread was severed by packaging fees. I want to restore that thread. However it works out. I want it to be that the agents realize that the more money we make upfront, all of us, the more money they will get to keep later on.

**John:** Yep. And as we wrap up this conversation we should never forget producing because producing is the thing which I feel like we don’t address now, five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road we will be kicking ourselves because it’s so clearly a conflict between what’s best for us and what’s best for them. And the nature of an agent versus an employer.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I would say that this is another area where – because I don’t represent the union. You’re a board member. I was many years ago. But I’m just a member at large. I have no problem saying to my fellow writers just as a person don’t work for those companies. Just don’t. You know? Because I don’t think it’s good. I don’t think it helps us. I don’t think it’s a healthy relationship to have. I don’t think making life better for those companies is going to make life better for writers in general. So I would say don’t work for them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just don’t.

**John:** That’s a choice. Nice. All right, moving on, also this week we found out the details about Disney+. That is the new Disney streaming service. It launches November 12. It includes content from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, and of course since they got Fox there’s also a bunch of Fox stuff on there including The Simpsons. Every episode of The Simpsons will be there.

So, that was a lot and it doesn’t actually cost a lot. It costs $7.99 per month.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yes it does.

**John:** At least at the start here. In addition to the stuff that already exists there’s going to be original shows, Marvel shows based on Hawkeye, Falcon and Winter Soldier, Scarlet Witch and the Vision, which we talked to Megan our former producer about because she’s working on that show.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** There’s new Star Wars shows. And probably the single show I was most excited about when I heard about it almost a year ago is called Encore. It’s a reality show. It stars Kristen Bell. And she is the producer who brings together former cast-mates of a high school musical and they have to recreate it within one week.

**Craig:** Oh wow. Well, you know what? I was Curly in our senior year production of Oklahoma. So, Kristen Bell if you’re listening, Freehold High School, class of 1988. Oklahoma. I have no hair left. I would need a wig.

**John:** You would need a wig. It’s a great idea for a show.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** I mean, it’s just going to be a ton of stuff and we’re just clearly now into the age of streamers. Between this and Apple+, you’ve got the Hulu. You’ve got the Netflix. You’ve got the HBO. This is our universe now.

**Craig:** It is. And this was clearly designed to be a kick in the ribs of Netflix. No question. That pricing alone was – well it was just a massive underpricing. And they can do that because Disney, I think they claim that they will be profitable by 2024 or something like that. And I believe them. I believe them completely.

Netflix, you know, continues to burn through cash and they charge quite a bit more a month. So now it gets interesting because they’re going to pull all this stuff off of Netflix obviously. And unlike Netflix which has no other streams of revenue except for their subscription service and doesn’t have a kind of endless library just yet, even as they make a thousand shows, what they don’t have is 30 years of The Simpsons right?

And Disney obviously has the ability to buffer everything with their theatrical and their parks and their cruise ships and their merchandising, and ABC. It’s going to get interesting. I think, if I had to predict, I would say that Disney+ is going to be an enormous success.

**John:** I think it will be an enormous success, too. The only thing I would say don’t discount about Netflix is we think of Netflix through our US bias, but when I travel overseas Netflix is giant. And they have a lot of local content that is made for the countries that they’re in. And they continue to do more and more and more of that. So, Disney even with all the stuff they have, I think a lot of folks are going to stick with Netflix because there’s things they want on Netflix.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** It’s not going to be an either/or situation.

**Craig:** I agree. I think it’s really more about the future and how it impacts Netflix in the future because if they’re holding all this content like Star Wars and Pixar and Disney, I mean Disney is a huge selling point for Netflix content. And it’s going to go away. So it impacts what their curve looks like ahead. But, look, as a writer, as a content creator, I want there to be 20 of these things.

**John:** Oh my god, yes.

**Craig:** As long as they pay us well.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, I’m very sad to lose Fox and I will never stop bitching about how I don’t think Disney should have been allowed to buy Fox. But places that want to make things is good for us.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so we should make things for those places.

**Craig:** Correct. Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. One of those giant properties that will be showing up on Disney+ is the new Star Wars. So, this week we learned the title. It’s The Rise of Skywalker. We saw a teaser. It got 16 million views. I want to talk about big numbers. But I would like to do right now on this podcast is just play one minute of the music from the trailer. So this is a John Williams clip. Because I truly believe you could have just played this music over a black screen and we would have all had goosebumps and been so excited to see this movie. So, if you’re listening to this on a podcast player that’s speeded up can you just slow it back down to normal speed now? Because I think it’s worth just listening to just music to sort of feel what they’ve done here.

And as you’re listening to this I want you to notice how when the choir kicks in they just simply go up the scale and, man, that is so effective. At some point, Craig, you just got back from your sound mix, I do want to have a whole episode or most of an episode about the mix and score and how that works and how a writer can approach that. But listen to this and just see the remarkable job they’ve done with the music for this clip.

[Clip plays]

**John:** It’s so good.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, look, that’s storytelling. You can actually see. It’s writing. Like regular writing. It’s got a narrative to it. I mean, there’s the recall of an old theme. Well, first of all there’s the weird sort of dissonant thing that builds up and then it resolves into sonance. And then like you say there’s that climbing chorus going on, rising above the repeating theme. And then just as it’s about to resolve they cut it off.

**John:** Yeah. Anticipation. That cliffhanger.

**Craig:** Cliffhanger. Then you have the introduction of some evil terrifying thing. Then the resolve but underneath the resolve you have the evil kind of hanging out in there. It’s storytelling. It’s just wonderful. And people have made this argument before. I think there’s merit to it. That Star Wars would have been one and done without John Williams.

**John:** I think that’s a very good argument to be made because visuals in the original movie are fantastic. Visuals in this trailer are fantastic. But without that score it just doesn’t work the same way. It doesn’t, I mean, they often say the score is that piece of the movie you get to take home with you. It sticks in your head and you sort of hum it to yourself. And he was just a master at doing that.

**Craig:** He is. He continues to be.

**John:** I’m not putting him in the past, but what he did for Star Wars is just so iconic.

**Craig:** And E.T.

**John:** And E.T.

**Craig:** And Superman. And Jaws.

**John:** And Raiders of the Lost Ark.

**Craig:** Raiders of the Lost Ark.

**John:** So he’s had a few hits.

**Craig:** Harry Potter.

**John:** He’s a few instances of success.

**Craig:** He’s had all of the things.

**John:** He’s had all the things.

**Craig:** He really is – when you look at like everybody in Hollywood and you ask who is the greatest of all time, meaning who made the biggest difference and was the biggest kind of positive impact in our entire history of film and television, there’s an argument to be made it’s John Williams.

**John:** I think a very good case can be made for John Williams.

**Craig:** And I love your idea, too. We must do, look, I’ve just been mixing for a while. I’m obsessed with mixing in a way that I really do kind of get a bit sleepy during color-grading, color-timing. But the mixing, it’s everything to me. And so I would love to talk about how much writing happens in our ears. That’s a great topic.

**John:** Cool. Let’s take one of our questions. We have a bunch here, but we’ll save the rest for other days. Question from Scott. He asks, “As a screenwriter working to get into the business, if you write say two to three hours a day what does the rest of your day look like? Are you done-done, or do you have more work that you do that’s not words on a page?”

So, Craig, talk me through a writing day on your side and I’ll describe my day. How many hours a day when you’re really writing are you really writing?

**Craig:** Well, yeah, about two to three are actually what I would call composition time. Then there is thinking time. And there’s ordering time. And there’s imagining time. And daydreaming time to imagine the scene. I don’t like really writing anything until I’ve watched it a bit in my head and thought it through.

Of course, I am in the business. When I was working to get into the business, after the two or three hours of writing a day I went to my job.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** You know? I made money so I could live.

**John:** Yep. I would say I’m like Craig in that there’s probably two to three hours a day where I’m at the keyboard or pen in hand writing the stuff that is the actual screenplay or book in this case. But there’s a lot of time that’s thinking through other stuff.

Now, back when I had a day job my day job was answering phones and doing all that stuff. My other day job is sort of this podcast, it’s the software company I run. It is a thousand WGA stuff. So there’s a lot of other things that fill up the rest of the day. But it’s good that there are those things because I don’t know anybody who can write eight hours a day. A person who can actually just sit down and physically do that. It’s really taxing on the brain.

You’re making all these choices of how to get through a sentence. And that decision-making process just exhausts you. At a certain point you just can’t write more.

**Craig:** Yeah. It requires an enormous amount of attention to detail. Like attention not only to the kind of detail of words, order of words, sentences, how do you break them up, word choice. But also just attention to detail of all the things you’re responsible for. All the plates you’re spinning to keep a scene real and alive. The relationships. And the themes. And the description of places. All those things. It requires massive amounts of attention.

There’s only so much you can – you have about three hours of that hyper focus before it starts to break down.

**John:** Yeah. And if you try to force it and go longer–

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** You end up writing crap.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** You just do. And you would think that you would write shorter, but you end up writing much, much longer. The days where I’ve had to really muscle through, those scenes are sloppy and long and you can feel it. They’re flabby. And you end up having to strip them down and redo them from start.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re sort of shapeless. I mean, again, we talk about intention all the time. The more tired you get, the more overworked you get, the less ability you have to craft and to create intention. You just start typing.

**John:** Let’s get to our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. The first is on the topic of big numbers. It’s this article by Sarah McVeigh in The Cut where she talks to Abigail Disney – Disney – about the fortune that she inherited and why she gives most of it away and sort of like what it’s like to be absurdly wealthy and the toxic effects of being super wealthy. I just thought it was a really great interview and it made me really like Abigail Disney a lot. So, take a look at that.

And second off this past week the Anita May Rosenstein campus of the Los Angeles LGBT Center opened in Hollywood. It is fantastic. It has 100 beds for homeless youth. A new senior center. An academy. So it’s the new flagship. But what I think is so smart about this building is that it’s both homeless youth and senior housing and senior programs. And it just lets those two generations kind of work with each other and help each other.

And so some of the training that they have in there is for culinary arts. So like if you are a gay homeless kid who has shown up in Hollywood without a place to stay not only can you get a bed but you can get through your GED, learn how to work in a kitchen. You get a whole apprentice training and there’s other stuff – you can basically find a way to make a life in Los Angeles.

And so the Center was incredibly important to me and I posted on Instagram the caption about sort of when I was in Hollywood this was probably ’97, ‘96/’97, I met this young woman who was really freaked out and she needed to get back to this place. And she was sort of sketchy about where she was going. But it turned out that she was staying at the Center in one of their emergency beds. And I was so grateful that she had a place to stay. And I’ve been supporting the Center ever since, so check that out.

**Craig:** That is One Cool Thing indeed. And it’s particularly important that Los Angeles has something like this and to expand something like this is wonderful because the reputation of Los Angeles as exhibited by the Guns N’ Roses song Welcome to the Jungle is well-deserved. This is a place where people come from all over the country and they are incredibly vulnerable. And they’re really vulnerable when they’re LGBT, when they’re underage, when they have mental illness. There’s a whole host of reasons why you can become easy prey on the streets. And to have a place like this is tremendous. To give kids a second chance is tremendous.

And then also to return some dignity to the lives of older people I think is beautiful, too. So, on one hand kind of a bummer that we can’t get our crap together enough as a nation to do this collectively through our governing systems, but a wonderful thing when private organizations step in to fill that gap. So that is terrific.

Well, OK, so you’re making sure that people find a place to stay, and I’m going to talk about a place that you want to get out of. You know I love escape rooms.

**John:** I love escape rooms, too.

**Craig:** Oh, such a fan. And last week I did an escape room called Lab Rat run by Hatch Escapes. It is the escape room I’ve ever done.

**John:** Holy cow, that’s high praise.

**Craig:** It is indeed. I have done escape rooms in Los Angeles. I have done escape rooms in London. I have done escape rooms in Lithuania. I have done escape rooms in Latvia. And I just loved it. It was fantastic. It’s just wonderfully done. It’s one of the most elaborate rooms I’ve ever been in. But the elaboration of its presentation did not detract from the actual fun of doing the puzzles as well. There is a moment that is unique which is when you’ve done a lot of escape rooms you’re really appreciative of that.

And the nice thing is that when we finished, this is no spoiler here, there’s a fairly large audio-visual component to it. It starts with a little bit of a presentation. And at the end if you manage to escape, and they really do want you to, there’s some credits. And in the credits suddenly were all the names of the people that I was with and me. And I’m like, wait, how did they do that? And so when the door opens in comes Tommy Wallach who is one of the owners, cofounders, and designers of Lab Rat. Turns out he is a fan of the podcast.

**John:** Oh, amazing.

**Craig:** It was amazing. And you know what was really nice was that he just moved right past Chris Miller, Oscar-award winner. See, it never ends. You’re Chris Miller. You’re top of your game. You’ve got an Oscar for Spider Man. You’re Chris Miller. And some nerd with a podcast outshines you. But only in escape rooms. Only in escape rooms.

Anyway, Tommy Wallach, fan of the podcast. And he gave us a tour backstage behind the whole facility. It was remarkable.

So, anyway, my point is One Cool Thing, if you like escape rooms–

**John:** Everyone should go.

**Craig:** Lab Rat is not to be missed. It’s really, really good.

**John:** I’m going to book this before the episode goes up so that I can actually get a reservation.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Awesome. That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megana Rao. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Lou Stone Borenstein. If you have an outro, send it to us. You can send it to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions like the ones we answered today.

On Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We love to answer short things there.

You can find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher, or pretty much wherever you find podcasts. If you leave us a review that helps people find the show.

You can find the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. It goes all the way back to Year One, Episode One. And it’s two bucks a month to listen to all those back episodes. You can also buy seasons of 50 episodes at store.johnaugust.com.

There are transcripts. You can read the transcripts for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. And you can find the show notes for this episode at johnaugust.com.

Craig, thanks for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next week.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

Links:

* [Timelapse of the Entire Universe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=14&v=TBikbn5XJhg) by John Boswell
* [Disney+ News](https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/disney-plus-streaming-service-news/)
* The Rise of Skywalker [teaser]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLZQfnFyelTBOQ15kmHSgEbdjzLMWzZpL7&time_continue=4&v=adzYW5DZoWs)
* [What It’s Like to Grow Up With More Money Than You’ll Ever Spend](https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/abigail-disney-has-more-money-than-shell-ever-spend.html)
* [Anita May Rosenstein Campus of Los Angeles LGBT Center](https://lalgbtcenter.org/)
* [The Lab Rat Escape Room](https://www.hatchescapes.com/lab-rat)
* Accepting recommendations for updating the [Listener’s Guide](johnaugust.com/guide)
* Submit to the Pitch Session [here](https://johnaugust.com/pitch)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Lou Stone Borenstein ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_396_big_numbers.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/austin-live-show-2017-aka-too-many-scotts).

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

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

**John:** And this is the live show of Scriptnotes at Austin, 2017.

**Craig:** 2017. And I don’t know if any of you were at the show last year.

**John:** I was not.

**Craig:** And so you remember that. We’re also drunk again.

**John:** I’m not drunk.

**Craig:** I assume a number of you are also somewhat drunk again. Somewhat is the key. Now last year when we did the show, because John wasn’t here last year–

**John:** I was in Paris.

**Craig:** We had the benefit of my organizational skills. Which essentially amounted to nothing. We winged it. And it was great. John’s not a winger. So we have an actual agenda tonight.

**John:** There’s an agenda. This will be the largest Scriptnotes show. If you notice the chairs up here you might think, wow, are there going to be like seven guests?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. There will be a total of 13 writers on stage. We topped ourselves again.

**Craig:** I mean, look, you guys showed up. We’re going to deliver. That’s what we do.

**John:** So Craig, we’re in Austin, Texas, and one of the things I enjoy most about visiting Austin is I could be sweaty after a run and someone will be in the elevator and say like, “Hey, you’re John August.” I’m like, yeah, I’m a gross, sweaty John August. Thank you for saying hi. But I also love seeing so many Scriptnotes t-shirts.

**Craig:** So many.

**John:** In the wild. And some people have some deep cuts of Scriptnotes t-shirts. They’re back to like–

**Craig:** Old school.

**John:** The Camp Scriptnotes shirts, which didn’t sell a lot, but someone here has a Camp Scriptnotes shirt.

**Craig:** The originals. But we have some new ones coming out which, as you know, will accrue to my financial benefit not at all.

**John:** No, not at all.

**Craig:** But they will line John’s pockets. So you should definitely buy those.

**John:** So there’s one week left to buy Scriptnotes t-shirts. You can find the link either at johnaugust.com or just go to CottonBureau.com and we’re selling a bunch of shirts there. So there’s three different models. They’re great. There’s classic ones. There’s a Star Wars-ish one.

**Craig:** What’s the good one?

**John:** Is the Umbrage and Reason one. It’s really good. It sort of looks like Craig’s–

**Craig:** Kind of sort of obligatory, isn’t it?

**John:** So hopefully we’ll see some people wearing those next year. But we actually have something extra special for you tonight. Something that you cannot get anywhere else.

**Craig:** I don’t know what this is. I’m so excited.

**John:** Ha, see. Some organization. We’re going to be doing sort of a game show thing in our final segment tonight, and it’s always hard to pick how you’re going to find that special candidate. Do you remember at our 100th episode we picked a person? Do you remember how that person was chosen?

**Craig:** Maybe something under their seat?

**John:** Yeah, so I mean people could check under their seats. But that would be a mistake because it’s not underneath your seats.

**Craig:** But go ahead and do it. Just do it just to see, just to make sure. Nothing there.

**John:** At the homecoming show, remember how we picked the winner for that?

**Craig:** We had a homecoming show?

**John:** Yeah, two months ago. At the WGA Theater.

**Craig:** Oh, was that what that was called?

**John:** Yeah, that was called the Homecoming Show. He doesn’t listen to the show, so he doesn’t know.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** How did we pick the winner for that one? Do you remember?

**Craig:** There was a raffle ticket?

**John:** There was a raffle ticket, yeah.

**Craig:** OK, great.

**John:** So check your raffle ticket. No, there’s no raffle tickets. Instead, Craig, at the end of every episode we say for longer questions write in to ask@johnaugust.com, or for short things we’re on Twitter.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you’re @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. So if you would like to participate in our final segment thing, you need to tweet “Pick me” to @johnaugust. And the first person who tweets “Pick me” @johnaugust gets picked for this live show.

**Craig:** You mean right now?

**John:** Right now. Pull out your phones. Do this right now.

**Craig:** Do not tweet @clmazin. I will not look at it.

**John:** So in the third segment we’ll figure out who is first in my timeline and that person will be coming up to win something that no one else could possibly win. Now that everyone has tweeted, it’s time to get to the serious business of this podcast and bring up a writer who we’ve wanted to have on the show from maybe the first moment we recorded.

**Craig:** And who was it?

**John:** It was–

**Craig:** Scott Frank.

**John:** Walter Hill or somebody. No, it was Scott Frank.

**Craig:** Scott Frank.

**John:** Scott Frank, his credits – I could read them off the list, but you kind of all know them.

**Craig:** Let’s just say some of them, because they’re fun. There’s Dead Again.

**John:** Great movie.

**Craig:** You’ve seen Dead Again, right? Do you like Out of Sight? Do you like Minority Report?

**John:** Yeah, that’s good.

**Craig:** Do you hate dogs, so you like Marley & Me? All right.

**John:** I think I saw the name on a movie called Logan this last year. But you know he’s also directed. He directed a movie called The Lookout.

**Craig:** Loved Lookout.

**John:** He directed a movie called A Walk Among the Tombstones. But he also has a brand new show called Godless and we’re going to talk to him about all these things. Scott Frank, please come up here.

**Craig:** Come on up, Scott Frank.

**John:** How did you first get to know Craig Mazin? Oh you need a microphone, that helps.

****Scott Frank:**** I met Craig in a gay bar.

**Craig:** I don’t know if it was a bar.

[laughs]

It was a club.

**Scott Frank:** It was a club.

**John:** Any place with dim lights and alcohol can be a bar.

**Scott Frank:** Craig, I lived in Pasadena for a very long time. And Craig lived in La Cañada, very close by.

**Craig:** Pasadena-adjacent.

**Scott Frank:** Pasadena-adjacent. Our offices were a block apart. And I think Craig invited me to a Writers Guild something. A meeting. And I remember thinking there were several representatives from the Writers Guild and a lot of writers from the San Gabriel Valley. And I remember thinking that guy is really smart.

**Craig:** Who was that guy?

**Scott Frank:** And then there was Craig.

**John:** The guy next to him was Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Was that John Lee Hancock?

**Scott Frank:** That was John Lee Hancock. And we became instant friends ever since. Well, Craig became a friend with me. And then started stalking.

**Craig:** Years before that happened I, like all of you, went to go see Out of Sight, which was 1996?

**Scott Frank:** 1998.

**Craig:** ’98. Thank you. And so I was a screenwriter at the time in the sense that I was working as a screenwriter, but I really was just learning. And so when I went to go see Out of Sight I had the experience that I think a lot of screenwriters have when they watch Scott’s work on film which was just shame. General shame. But also a liberation because you can say, oh, well you know what, I don’t have to worry about fighting my way to the top of any heap, because there’s this guy at the top who will always just beat me back. So that’s actually quite freeing.

And I also remember thinking, because I saw it with Melissa, and I remember I said to her after, “There’s a movie where I really want to know the writer.” I mean, I appreciate what Steven Soderbergh did, it’s very, very cool, and I like the acting, but I want to know the writer. But, you know, how are you supposed to meet a writer? And this is in the nineties. There’s no real Internet connection. There’s no kind of this is going on.

And I just got lucky. I got lucky.

**Scott Frank:** You staged a fake WGA meeting. And I showed up at it.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was lucky, but it was also psychotic. I mean, it was a combination. Sometimes, maybe even more often than not, when you do meet your heroes you are devastated by how awful they are. And this was certainly no exception. But, over time, I came to see that there was great value in this man. Truly, he is a mentor. He is an angry dad to me. But he’s also a great dad to me. And a friend. And it’s just been the greatest thing. The greatest thing to know you.

**Scott Frank:** Aw.

**John:** Aw. So nice. So, Scott, I got to know your work as a screenwriter, and I think I first met you up at the Sundance Filmmakers Lab. And so you were one of the gracious hosts of the Sundance Filmmakers Lab. And you brought me up there and I was terrified and you were very nice and very generous. But I always basically thought of you as you’re the guy who can sort of write any movie. Like basically you’re the guy who they come to when they need a big thing done, whether it’s an original movie or to fix a lot of movies.

And so when you went off to do, now you’ve directed movies, which is awesome, but now you’re off doing a television program. Why? What’s changed? And what was the decision to like now is the time to go off and do Godless?

**Scott Frank:** Well Godless began life as a movie. In 2004 I’d written it. And for some reason most of the things I write seem to take quite a while to get made, and this one was no exception. And I’d written it in 2004 and my agent said to me before I wrote it, she said, “You know, no one anywhere is buying a Western.” And she said, “I’m worried you’re going to spend a lot of time writing the script and no one is going to be interested. Westerns don’t do well in the United States. They don’t travel well overseas. You know, Westerns are now Tom Selleck on TNT. It’s not movies.”

And so I said I have to write this script. I love this script. I’m going to do it. And I spent two years writing it, and she was right. No one wanted to buy it.

**John:** So even though it was you, even though you had a terrific reputation, because it wasn’t based on anything else, because there wasn’t another filmmaker, because it was a Western. Because essentially the genre you think there was no appetite for making—

**Scott Frank:** There’s no appetite.

**Craig:** I mean, wasn’t it briefly at Sony? Am I crazy?

**Scott Frank:** It almost got made several times. And I didn’t write it initially for me to direct. And I’d written it for Steven to direct. And Steven said, “Wow, I think this is the best script you’ve ever written. I fucking hate horses.” And I said, “But besides that, maybe you could do this.” And he said, “I really – I don’t know how to shoot them. I hear they’re really difficult. And I don’t want to do it.”

And I said, “You know, Clint Eastwood was allergic to horses. And he still – he did it.” And for some reason that didn’t help. And so then Sam Mendes was going to direct it. And we had a whole cast. And it was very expensive. Sam–

**John:** I’ve been there.

**Scott Frank:** Sam cut his fee to $10 million.

**Craig:** Oh. That’s super generous.

**Scott Frank:** Yes. And his then wife, Kate Winslet, who was going to be in it, cut her fee to $10 million.

**Craig:** Well these people are almost saint-like.

**Scott Frank:** Yes. Isn’t it awesome? And for some reason he didn’t understand why we couldn’t get the budget down to what it needed to be in order to get made. And various people flirted with it and were in and out of it after that. And then I made The Lookout. And then I said, “Hey, I’m going to direct it,” which made it even harder to get made.

**Craig:** Yes. So you said, “I’m going to direct it,” and Hollywood responded with a—

**Scott Frank:** Collective nothing.

**Craig:** Nothing. They just simply did not hear you say that.

**Scott Frank:** They said, “Who?” Yes. Nothing. So because The Lookout was such a giant hit.

**Craig:** Huge.

**Scott Frank:** Huge.

**Craig:** Massive.

**Scott Frank:** I think the people in this row, including the empty chairs, were the total people who saw it in the theater.

**Craig:** It made tens of dollars.

**Scott Frank:** It made tens of dollars. Thank you very much. So I went out and we tried to get it set up that way. And it was almost made. To be honest, we almost made it at Warner Bros. We almost made it a few places. But it couldn’t happen.

And then one day Steven Soderbergh said to me, because I kept him on as a producer, and he said to me, “Why don’t you do it yourself as a mini-series?” Because he had just done a couple of seasons on The Knick. And he said, “You should do this.” And he said, “Television is telling far more serious stories than movies are. And I think you should give it a try. And you should bring it to HBO. I’m very close with them at HBO.” He had done Liberace and The Knick and so on. Was doing his project Mosaic there at the time.

And so I had a meeting with HBO in NYC where I live now. And the meeting went – it was interesting because the head of HBO miniseries says to me, “Well what have you directed?” And I said–

**Craig:** We have the Internet. You just have to Wiki it.

**Scott Frank:** And so I told him what I had directed, and then he proceeded to tell me a long story about how they had just shut down a Western they were making, Lewis and Clark. And how–

**Craig:** So far so good.

**Scott Frank:** And how they had to fire the director. And so I took that as a not so subtle message as you’re concerned about me directing this movie, aren’t you, this miniseries? And for some reason, I’m helping, I’m consulting on a TV show at Netflix called A Series of Unfortunate Events. And two things happened while I was there. One, out of nowhere, HBO says we’d like to meet with you about Godless. And I said, “With me directing it, right?”

And they said “Yes.” And I met with somebody else, with the then head of HBO, who said we want to make this. We don’t care who is in it. We’d like to do a Western. We think there’s a big appetite for Westerns on television. And we’d really like to do this as a miniseries. And I said, “Great.”

And at the same time, the people at Netflix I’m working for, the head of their dramatic programming says to me, “I hear you wrote a Western.” All in the same day.

**Craig:** This is how it happens.

**Scott Frank:** This is after 14 fucking years.

**Craig:** You guys are wondering like how to succeed in Hollywood. You just have to have that day.

**Scott Frank:** That day. All you need was that Wednesday. And so I said, “Yes, I wrote a Western,” and she said, “Well, will you send it to me?” And I said, “Sure, I’ll send it to you.”

And less than 12 hours later I get two things. I get an offer from HBO that reneges on every single promise that they made. Basically, we’ll develop the six scripts with you and then we’ll see what casting we can get. And then we’ll decide and we’ll see if you as a director can attract anybody. And this is what we’ll pay you, and so on and so forth.

Netflix, also known as the de Medici family, sends me – they say – Cindy Holland, who is head of their dramatic, just sends me an email saying, “We’re going to make this next year at this time.” I hadn’t even expanded it into a miniseries. “We’re going to just do it. It’s going to be our first in-house miniseries.”

I then got an offer that was 12 times what the other offer was, promising everything, and we don’t care who is in it. Cast it with the best people you want. And so on and so forth.

**Craig:** So now you’ve got a dilemma.

**Scott Frank:** It’s tough.

**Craig:** What do you do?

**John:** It is tough. Your thought process is like, “Do I take the terrible deal for the people who are mean to me?”

**Craig:** Right. Don’t like me.

**Scott Frank:** It was a long, long, long, long minute.

**Craig:** Meanwhile, I’m the idiot that is writing a miniseries for HBO.

**John:** How is the HBO series going?

**Scott Frank:** How’s that going, Craig?

**Craig:** I thought it was going really well.

**Scott Frank:** All the people, or a couple of the people are no longer there. So it’s different for you, Craig. Anyway, we made the show at Netflix and they were tremendous. And it was the right thing to do as a miniseries, because in expanding it I realized that it was already too long as a movie, anyway. In fact, the screenplay makes up 3.5 of the episodes.

**Craig:** Well, you know, tomorrow if you have a chance in the afternoon, I’m going to be doing a little one-on-one with Scott where we’re going to walk through his process and you’re going to learn if you show up – and you’re smart to show up – to learn from him.

One thing that’s always been very freeing to me is knowing that every first draft you’ve ever written in, in this case with Godless the final draft that you’ve written of a feature, you said like – I think you said I’ve never submitted a first draft that was under 150 pages? Something like that? Right.

**Scott Frank:** He had to look at Lindsay, but yes.

**Craig:** Yes, Lindsay is like, yes, that was my problem that I had all the time.

**Scott Frank:** The shooting script for Get Shorty, which is a 97-minute movie, was 135 pages long.

**John:** Yikes.

**Craig:** I forgot about Get Shorty.

**Scott Frank:** The shooting script for Minority Report was 180 pages long. Cheated into 165 pages.

**Craig:** By the way, don’t bother cheating 180 into 165.

**Scott Frank:** Once you’re above 160. Out of Sight was 130. Most of them are around 135 pages.

**Craig:** Do you see what we mean when we talk about the stupidity of the rules all the time. And the conventional wisdom that gets put on you guys all the time. And here is arguably the most successful screenwriter working today and he never follows that rule ever. And never, ever did.

**Scott Frank:** Well, first of all you have to tell me. Is there a rule?

**Craig:** There is. There is. “Never write anything more than 120. Really it should be 107.”

**John:** Yeah, it should be 107. We are going to get into some feature rules right now. And I want to bring up some other feature folks to talk about features. Because like you had a great experience in television it sounds like, but you’ve done a couple features.

**Scott Frank:** One or two.

**John:** So let’s talk about that. I want to bring up some more amazing folks. I want to bring up Guinevere Turner. She’s the writer of American Psycho, The Notorious Bettie Page, and Go Fish. Scott Alexander wrote Ed Wood, The People vs. OJ Simpson, The People vs. Larry Flint. People vs. Everything. Man on the Moon. And Big Eyes. Scott Alexander.

Tess Morris wrote Man Up, but she also hosts a podcast you should listen to called “You Had Us At Hello.” The legend, Lindsay Doran, producer of Stranger than Fiction, Sense and Sensibility, Nanny McPhee, Dead Again, The Firm. Lindsay Doran.

Why I sort of wanted you guys all up here on the stage with us is to talk through a thing I’ve noticed, and you talking about doing Godless and sort of moving from doing a feature to doing a television show, I see so much amazing stuff happening in the one-hour space. And we just make these amazing shows. Have any of the lessons or the opportunities we’ve seen in one-hours and you’ve done some amazing television stuff, too. Are those translating back to features? Can we make better features based on how good we’ve gotten in our one-hours?

And I also wonder whether there’s any things we can learn structurally about what we’re able to do now in television that could help us make better dramatic features? Scott, talk to us about—

**Craig:** He looks super optimistic.

**John:** Because he seems so confused, I’m going to start with you. When you went on to do People vs. OJ Simpson did you have to learn a fundamentally different aspect of telling a story over multiple episodes?

**Scott Alexander:** Yeah. But that wasn’t your first question.

**John:** I know. But we’re going to get back to my first question.

**Craig:** Don’t question John August. Just answer his questions.

**Scott Alexander:** We went into OJ thinking we were writing a ten-hour movie. And we were thinking of it as episodes one, two, three are kind of the first act, and four, fix, six, seven are kind of the middle, second act. And then the rest is the third act. And then someone had to explain to us, it’s like, “Guys, no, you’re making ten one-hour movies. And each one needs to have a beginning, middle, and end, and needs to carry you into the next episode.”

And we said, “Oh.” And then we came up with this idea which was that every hour would have a high concept theme to it, which I don’t know if that’s how other TV writers work, but it was this thing we sort of stumbled onto, which was, “OK, this week is the Bronco. This week is Marcia and gender politics. This week is the jury.”

And so sort of like gave a talking point to every week’s episode. OJ was a – it was a great writing experience. I mean, we spent three years sort of being in charge of ten hours, which was a long time. It honestly broke us when we went back to features because after doing OJ our next job was to do the Patty Hearst kidnapping, also based on a Jeff Toobin book. And we just had no idea how to fit a story into a two-hour format anymore, or 2.5 hour, or even a three-hour format. And we left out half the book. And we still brought in a first draft at 207 pages.

**Craig:** That’s even long for Scott Frank.

**Scott Frank:** I’ve never broken 200. 199.

**Scott Alexander:** Oh, I once wrote a script that was 291 pages. A feature.

**Craig:** Why would you?

**John:** But why?

**Craig:** What failure of planning occurred there?

**Scott Alexander:** It was a biopic of the Marx Brothers who I love dearly, and we worked so hard on it. And what a waste. Years of my life.

**Guinevere Turner:** I love this page count shaming that’s happening.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, you’re asking people to see a movie about the Marx Brothers. It’s the length of the Shoah or whatever.

**Scott Alexander:** Brilliant Alexander plan.

**Craig:** Sorrow and pity. I mean, it’s insane.

**Scott Frank:** He’s got the biggest page count.

**Lindsay Doran:** I worked on something like that once. And the writer – and I said, “I can’t hand this in.” And she said, “Just tell them that all they have to do is read 120 pages, and if they don’t like it, they don’t have to read the rest.”

**Scott Alexander:** I don’t want to come off as obnoxious. But that’s an internal draft. Our sort of rule of thumb has been once it goes into the buyer, meaning the studio, it has to be under 150. So that’s a rule we’ve always tried to live by.

**Craig:** 150 is not admirable. That’s not a thing.

**John:** OK, Lindsay Doran, you ran a studio. You ran United Artists. And so—

**Lindsay:** You’re going to tell all these people that?

**John:** Well, you don’t have to do it right now.

**Craig:** It’s her fault.

**Scott Frank:** She made West Side Story.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s say, no, so let’s say you had a new studio. Do you think that the changes that have happened in one hours would be informing some of the choices you’re making as a studio head? Either the projects you’re doing or how you think the storytelling can happen on the page. Do you think there’s a change in what screenwriters can do based on what TV writers have been able to do in the last ten years?

**Lindsay:** Rightly or wrongly, I feel as though there’s been a shift from “never be boring” to “always be exciting.” Somebody I know who made a movie for Netflix said that he got one note the whole time which was, “Make sure something amazing happens in the first five minutes. That’s all we ask of you.” Does anything amazing happen in your first five minutes, Scott?

**Tess Morris:** First 150 pages.

**Scott Frank:** Yes.

**Lindsay:** So, I think there is a sense, whether it’s true or not—

**Scott Frank:** But wait, isn’t that just good writing?

**Lindsay:** Well, yeah, I would think so. But that idea of the slow build, you know, I wonder if you could write a fantastically elaborate, interesting first scene and it would be enough. Even if it was great. I wonder if people are going to say, “But wait, I want something really exciting to happen.” And you go, well how about this really exciting writing. And it’s like, “Well, yeah, but nobody gets killed and nobody gets betrayed and nobody gets pushed under a bus…”

**Guinevere:** But in and around this conversation is actually as writers how we now think, because we know that we may say, “Here’s my idea,” and someone will say, “Is that a back door pilot? Is that a series? Is that a feature?” That’s just a feature. And how features may or may not be devalued/haloed as this new rarified form. And/or how does that have legs in season five? And so it’s actually changed our brains and the way that we think about our own narratives. And this whole idea of legs and seasons—

**Craig:** It’s flipped things around, right?

**Guinevere:** I mean, is it good? Is it bad? It’s definitely stretched our muscles and made us think in different ways.

**Tess:** But if you think – I had a show that was a film idea originally, that then we turned into a six-part thing. But actually weirdly the structure of it still made sense because it was a romantic comedy, so we still had a very clear end point to everything that was happening. Like Catastrophe does it really well. I mean, really you could watch each series of Catastrophe as a very long romantic comedy movie. So it’s just our brains that have to change. I don’t think the audiences have to, maybe not.

**Scott Frank:** You’re not from around here, are you?

**Tess:** I’m not, Scott. No. I’m new in town.

**Scott Frank:** Yes you are.

**Lindsay:** From East Texas.

**Scott Frank:** Houston.

**Scott Alexander:** John, I think you’re asking a hopeful question with a bad answer.

**John:** The best kind, yeah.

**Scott Alexander:** Because as we all know, the mid-budget film, the mid-budget drama/dramedy that we all grew up on and love has been in trouble for years. I would think that the success of all the long form television has just made it harder because it sort of taught people that audiences will invest in that long term storytelling. They want to hang out with those characters for a period of time. And why would you want to invest $40 million to only hang out with them for an hour and fifty minutes.

**Guinevere:** But I would have watched The Breakfast Club for five seasons when I was a teenager.

**Tess:** Oh my god, yeah. Imagine Pretty in Pink every week. That would be amazing.

**Craig:** Well, but the point is you actually wouldn’t have to. If it happened now, that’s what it would be. Because they would not make The Breakfast Club as a feature. It wouldn’t make economic sense. They would simply say this could be so much better if we made six of these, or we made a season of different people in detention every season, because that’s—

**Guinevere:** Oh my god. I already love it. I totally want to make that.

**John:** I would argue that we actually are already doing sort of the giant version of this, is the Marvel movies, which are essentially a giant TV show—

**Tess:** They’re not like The Breakfast Club.

**John:** They’re not like The Breakfast Club. No they’re not.

**Craig:** But he’s not wrong. Because they are soap operas.

**Tess:** No, I know. They are.

**Craig:** And, look, the problem is that what’s happened now is in movie theaters we now have created the space for spectacle. So Marvel movies get away with soap opera because they’re spectacle soap opera. Soap opera soap opera really now is just for TV. But the viewing audience, one thing that we know because we are – even though we write, we are also viewing constantly – we know that watching things at home is so much more comfortable. We only watch what we want to. We don’t feel trapped. We certainly haven’t paid for the experience per that moment.

**Tess:** I do like the idea of Emilio Estevez like ripping his shirt off and it being Captain America underneath it, you know, that scene in Breakfast Club. You know, and actually it would be like a Marvel character underneath it.

**Craig:** You should go pitch that.

**Tess:** I’m not going to do that, Craig, but OK.

**John:** Well, Tess, I want to get back – your podcast is essentially about romantic comedies.

**Tess:** It’s very niche.

**John:** It’s very niche. So if you enjoy romantic comedies, or even if you’re just confused by romantic comedies, listen to her podcast. They really do break it down and talk about that as a form.

**Tess:** Very niche.

**John:** As a genre. But essentially romantic comedies have been usurped by series television, like we’re not making very many of them. Like you were able to make one, but very few of them are getting made. Is there anything that you see happening in television, from like Catastrophe, from anything else, that could get us back to a feature place of romantic comedies?

**Tess:** Netflix and chill is our last hope, I feel.

**Craig:** That means sex, right?

**Tess:** Yeah. But why is not like Hulu and hang?

**Craig:** Hulu is not sexy.

**Tess:** Hulu is sexy.

**Craig:** Oh, it is?

**Tess:** There’s sexy things, maybe not as—

**Craig:** I don’t know what sexy is. Everybody knows that.

**John:** I think I know why she thinks Hulu is sexy suddenly, but I’m not allowed to say.

**Tess:** All I know is that all the carbs I ate have kicked in suddenly and I feel quite slow.

**Craig:** You mean alcohol.

**Tess:** I think when we made the film that I wrote, Man Up, we released it in the cinemas and knowing what we know now we would not release it in the cinema again. We had a very small release here and we had a bigger one in the UK. But we would definitely now, like the next film that I’ve written for the same company we will probably take it straight to somewhere like Netflix.

Because you’re all fucking idiots, but people don’t go to the movies to see romantic comedies anymore.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**Tess:** And I don’t either.

**Scott Frank:** Thanks for coming to our country.

**Tess:** You’re welcome.

**Craig:** Still this lingering resentment about the Revolution.

**Tess:** I’ll stop when I swear first. Someone had to swear. But, no, I think that – I do actually believe that there is the event, like The Big Sick did incredibly well and it’s a great little movie – big movie. But that was packaged brilliantly and sold perfectly. And also was a really modern take on the genre. And was about something that is important right now. So, I think that is the way, if you’re going to get people in the cinema, you have to try and think bigger now.

Yes, Scott Frank, what would you like to ask me?

**Scott Frank:** Well, you can’t make a slate out of The Big Sick, which was a great movie, but—

**Tess:** No, but you could make a nice six-part recurring series about it. They could get divorced in the second one.

**Scott Frank:** But speaking about movies for a second, even if you make a movie – a drama – for $25 million at a movie studio, they’re still going to spend $30 million to sell it. So it’s still a $50 million proposition. And everybody was talking about Logan Lucky only making $10 million because he did this experimental thing and, you know, that was a failure. It actually is about what it would have made if it were at a studio. It was a $25 million movie. If they were at a studio they were all going to spend $35 million to market it with that cast. And they would have, you know, maybe they would have gotten more people in the movie theater, maybe not, but ultimately after you take away all the profits for the studio, they $10 million or $12 million that everybody who made the movie has to split, it wouldn’t be there anymore.

And if you think about who is going to movies right now, which is – thinking about – which is everything. It’s kids who are 13, 14, experiencing their first independence. That’s who supports most of the movies. You go to any mall on a weekend night and look who is there. Or it’s families taking their kids to see family movies. It’s not a lot of other adult or serious movies.

There’s certainly anomalous things we can all point to, but it doesn’t make economic sense if you’re a studio not to take the big swings.

**Craig:** Right. But we do have this – I mean, there’s some good news here, believe it or not.

**Tess:** Well, tell me the good news.

**Craig:** The good news is—

**Lindsay:** Craig Mazin, bearer of good news.

**Craig:** It doesn’t happen frequently, so listen up.

**Lindsay:** I know. I’m all agog.

**Craig:** You guys have a freedom that we did not have. So, I certainly didn’t, and I know Scott you couldn’t have had, and John you didn’t. When we started it was you write a movie, this is what a movie is. Or, you write a show which is on this network and that’s what that is. And it has the commercial breaks in it, see.

That’s it. You guys can write anything. It can be any amount of time. It can be any amount of episodes. It can be one long thing. Five little short things. Even amongst themselves, like so Dan and Dave who do Game of Thrones, the first season of Game of Thrones which is now, what, eight or nine years ago at this point I think, the first season they did all their shows, they shot them all, they edited the whole season together and then HBO came back and said, “You’re short. These episodes are too short. They need to be 55 minutes and blah-blah-blah seconds. And you’re short.”

So they had to go back and shoot some extra stuff to pad them out. Now, no one cares. They have episodes that are 48 minutes long. They have episodes that are 79 minutes long. You guys have a freedom we did not have. And that’s exceptional.

**Tess:** But just to finish my rom-com rant, though, is that the only issue, if anyone writes romantic comedy here, is that you really know the ending to most rom-coms and that is the fundamental issue with turning it into – with making it doable for TV. Is that you have to find ways to make people break up and make up many more times than you do in a film sort of structure. So that’s the only sort of problem with the rom-com.

**Craig:** So good news for everybody except the rom-com writers.

**John:** Guinevere, I want to ask about, so you’re doing a movie with Mary right now, Mary Harron, based on the Manson girls. And it feels – you’re doing it as a feature, but it feels like it could very easily be Netflix, it could be HBO, it could be some sort of television thing. Why a feature and why not a television thing?

**Guinevere:** So it’s a story about the women who killed for Charles Manson. Three of them went to prison. And to me it’s about this very specific point in their history, which is after the orgies and the sex and the cameras and the trial. And this real moment of time, five years where they spent – the three of them – in isolation in prison. And that, to me, only – that story needs to be told in that way.

**John:** So it’s sort of a one-time journey. It doesn’t want to sort of stretch out over longer things.

**Guinevere:** I mean, you could go second season, they get into the general population which is where my movie ends, but to me it’s a little bit corrupt, because I’m really talking about the mindset of these people and it has more to do with the moment in history and where women were and where prison was and where the media was with this story than the far-reaching things. So, I mean, if somebody came to me right now and said “We want to make six seasons of post-Manson, the ladies, how the ladies lived,” I don’t know. That’s the wheelhouse I lived in.

**Scott Frank:** That’s a romantic comedy.

**John:** That’s a good one.

**Craig:** I have a squeaky [unintelligible] romantic comedy would be something to behold.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Scott Alexander:** I’m so in.

**John:** Let me get a roundtable room going. So that’s one of the last things I want to talk about is there has been this move in features to sort of bring together rooms to sort of break features. And that’s a thing that we’re also taking from television where like, well, we have this piece of intellectual property. We have – we always say Slinky – but what does the Slinky movie want to be. They’ve done this with other big videogames. And they’ll put together a room-

**Tess:** Sorry, a Slinky?

**John:** A Slinky. A toy.

**Craig:** It’s a large coil that—

**John:** Yeah, that walks down stairs.

**Craig:** In Britain I believe it’s called the Coily or the—

**Scott Frank:** There really is a Slinky movie?

**Craig:** Stair Walker.

**Scott Frank:** I got to catch up. 120 pages.

**John:** A general take on feature writing rooms. Because I’ve never done one. I’ve done roundtables, and I think a lot of us have done roundtables, but this idea where we’re breaking the whole – we’re figuring out from the genesis of what this movie is as a team, as a group.

**Craig:** I wonder, what do you think about this phenomenon? You’ve been watching this happening, right?

**Lindsay:** Well, I actually just went to my first roundtable. I’d never been to one before this month, I think it was. So it is this odd thing. In family movies I do see it a lot, because I work on those a lot.

**Guinevere:** I’m sorry, because I’ve never been to a roundtable. Can anyone and all of you just tell us what does it look like?

**Craig:** Well, there’s two different things we’re talking about here. One is a roundtable which Lindsay is mentioning where a movie is about to go into production, or a movie has been shot and they’re contemplating reshoots, and they will have six or seven writers sit around and just discuss.

**Tess:** And eat.

**Craig:** And eat.

**Lindsay:** That had nothing to do with the roundtable that I went to, but that’s OK.

**Craig:** OK, so you had a different roundtable. So then there’s this other thing which is “We are contemplating making a movie. Let’s get a bunch of writers together to talk about what this movie should be.” That is the thing that is horrifying to me.

**John:** Yeah, so it’s more like breaking a season of television, but you’re breaking a feature out of it. Or sometimes you’re breaking three features and a TV series. So sometimes they’re month-long rooms. It’s such a very different way of working that we’re just not used to.

**Scott Alexander:** I mean, I’ll say I’ve never done either, ever. I think it’s the end of the world.

**Guinevere:** Anyway, back to Lindsay, please, because I’m so curious what you have to say.

**Lindsay:** No, I think it was very confusing. Really, I found it – it was like where is the person in this room with conviction. Because the whole point was to not have conviction.

**Tess:** I think it’s different in a comedy.

**Scott Frank:** The roundtable to me is so distressing conceptually because somebody – whoever that poor writer was – wrote a script and put thought into it. And then a bunch of people are just going to sit around for eight hours and get paid a daily rate and just block out lines—

**Craig:** Well, to be fair, most of the times when I do it—

**Scott Frank:** I wasn’t looking at you.

**Craig:** I know. I’m just telling you because you don’t do them.

**Scott Frank:** I was looking at Lindsay.

**Craig:** Don’t you dare. Usually the writer is there. So, you know, I did one for the Pirates of the Caribbean, what are they up to?

**John:** 19?

**Tess:** 40?

**Craig:** 70. All right. Pirates of the Caribbean, 70.

**Scott Frank:** That was the good one.

**Craig:** But Jeff Nathanson was there. He is the writer and he was there. And we just sort of – really what it came down to was, in some of these cases, the roundtables that are post-facto roundtables are kind of like writers are doing what maybe the development executives used to be able to do but don’t. So we’re just sort of saying, “Well what about – here’s some questions of things that maybe you can think about or help.”

But this other thing that’s happening which is develop a movie together. Dana and I – why isn’t Dana up here? I don’t understand.

**John:** She’s up in the next segment.

**Craig:** OK. So, anyway, the person that I will not mention is up in the next segment, were asked to do a roundtable at Disney to create a new story for a new movie. And the two of us freaked the F out. Because that to me is what you’re talking about. There’s no authority. There’s no voice. There’s no author. There’s no vision. There’s just a bunch of people now cobbling together a movie. Forget the economics of it, which are disastrous for writers. I just think creatively it’s – that I agree with you. End of times.

**Scott Alexander:** How does that get arbitrated?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** Horribly. Horribly.

**Tess:** That’s a whole other podcast.

**Scott Alexander:** How do they even? What do they even do?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**Tess:** Don’t even ask that question.

**John:** It’s a genuine mess.

**Craig:** I legitimately don’t know.

**John:** So, as we wrap it up, I’ll say that in television where they have writer’s rooms, everyone is also a producer, so you have a credit because you’re a producer. There’s some other way that you’re acknowledged. And so when you’re running your shows, there’s a system, there’s a structure for that.

**Craig:** For multiple episodes. So somebody is going to get a credit sooner or later.

**John:** That doesn’t exist in features. And if this trend continues we’re going to have to figure out something, because it’s going to be weird. And all you guys will be in there, because we’ll all be retired by then.

We need to get to our next segment. This was an amazing discussion. Guys, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** You can head down. We’ll bring up the next folks.

**Craig:** Fresh writers. More grist for the mill. Never stops.

**John:** A new thing to try.

**Craig:** Oh, we got a new thing. Oh, here we go. You guys know this was John’s idea, because I don’t have any.

**John:** It should be good. We’ll see. To do this, we need some new writers up here. We’re going to start with Dana Fox.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Dana Fox. Dana Fox is the writer of What Happens in Vegas, Couples Retreat, How to Be Single. She was the creator and showrunner of Ben and Kate. She’s directed New Girl. She’s awesome.

**Craig:** Stop apologizing. Just own your genius.

**John:** And a bunch of other movies.

**Dana Fox:** I’m not up here with Scott Frank.

**Craig:** None of us are.

**John:** And she’s a repeat Scriptnotes guest.

**Dana:** I love it.

**Craig:** One of our favorite Scriptnotes people.

**Dana:** Anytime you ask me I say yes.

**John:** Another repeat Scriptnotes guest, Megan Amram.

**Craig:** Megan Amram. Literally just noticed your shirt by the way. That’s the greatest shirt ever.

**Dana:** We’re wearing message shirts.

**Craig:** So Dana’s shirt says “Ask Me About My Feminist Agenda.” I did.

**John:** Yeah, we did.

**Craig:** Megan’s says “Zero million followers.”

**Megan Amram:** MY friend, Mo Welch, makes these shirts. They’re great. If you have less than a million followers, I highly recommend it.

**Craig:** Nobody here, that doesn’t apply to anybody.

**John:** So when we introduced you on the last live show, you were the writer-producer The Good Place, Transparent, Silicon Valley, Parks and Recreation. You’re the author of Science for Her. But now you’re also a writer on The Simpsons.

**Megan:** Yeah, it’s a pretty weird coincidence that I appeared with our friend Matt Selman on the show last time, who happens to show-run The Simpsons. And then I got a job really soon after that.

**John:** So I think the key here is if you want to get staffed on a show, be on an episode of Scriptnotes with the showrunner. That’s how you do it.

**Megan:** I owe John and – what’s your name?

**Craig:** I’m your cousin.

**Megan:** Oh, that’s, OK, Craig. I owe you both my life. So, I don’t know what you want to do with this segment.

**Craig:** I don’t think you need to go that far, but you owe us quite a bit. Quite a bit.

**John:** Our next writer, I’ve never pronounced your last name, so I’m going to try. Oren Uziel. Yes? Oren Uziel, writer of 22 Jump Street, Freaks of Nature, The God Particle. Oren, who I know mostly through roundtables. That’s how I’ve actually gotten to know you.

**Oren Uziel:** Yeah, I’m sorry.

**John:** No, it’s awesome. Jason Fuchs is here, though.

**Craig:** Fuchsy.

**John:** A writer whose credits include Wonder Woman, Ice Age: Continental Drift, and Pan.

**Craig:** And also…if you saw La La Land and you remember that douchebag screenwriter who talked about being really good at building worlds: Jason Fuchs.

**Jason Fuchs:** Sorry.

**John:** So this is the part of the show where we need to bring up the Twitter person who tweeted first. So, this could be you. This is somebody in the room. And so I’m going to go to my Twitter here.

**Craig:** Hey, Scott Rosenberg!

**John:** Scott Rosenberg is here. Come on up here.

**Craig:** What a weird attention grabbing—

**Scott Rosenberg:** Someone needed a beer. Apologize. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

**John:** Scott, don’t read this yet, but you’ll read it eventually.

**Craig:** Super attention-grabby. Super like look at me, I’m Scott Rosenberg.

**Dana:** He’s going to get a haircut during this podcast.

**Craig:** Some people have it. Some people don’t. He’s got it. He’s got it.

**John:** So the first person to tweet at me was John the Wizard. Where is John the Wizard?

**Craig:** John the Wizard.

**John:** Oh, holy shit. All right.

**Dana:** John the Wizard. John the Wizard.

**John:** Will you take that microphone there? This is the game show we are going to be playing here. So, all of us up on this stage have received at certain times notes from the studio. And five of these things we’re going to read aloud are actual notes that I received from the studio on my projects. The only, I promise to God, the only things I’ve changed are sometimes identifying character names. But everything you’re about to hear, except for one of them, is true.

Your job is going to be to identify which of these was not the true thing. What is so crazy is you are the person who came up to me and asked if I could sign your Writer Emergency Pack, is that correct?

**John the Wizard:** Yes. That’s correct.

**John:** The gift you’re going to get out of this, which is nuts—

**Craig:** Oh no.

**John:** Is the dark mode deck of the Writer Emergency Pack. The exclusive black edition of the Writer Emergency Pack, which no one has, and that was never sold.

**Craig:** You should be good at this, because you are a wizard, so let’s see.

**John the Wizard:** I mean, that’s referencing my D&D.

**John:** Craig, start us off.

**Craig:** Here’s the first one. I assume he’s going to listen to them all and then make your judgment.

**John:** And we may discuss a bit.

**Craig:** We may discuss a bit.

**Scott Rosenberg:** Can we just go back to the pros and cons of writers’ rooms? Because I’m totally confused.

**Craig:** This is not about you.

**Scott Rosenberg:** I keep staring at this thing over and over again. I don’t know what the fuck it means. I don’t know who Madden is.

**Dana:** No, don’t give it away.

**Scott Rosenberg:** Where’s Scott Frank?

**Craig:** Scott Rosenberg, you can’t just Scott Rosenberg all over this.

**Scott Rosenberg:** All right. Carry on.

**John:** Craig Mazin, read a note.

**Craig:** Can you believe this guy?

**John:** No, I can’t. I honestly can’t.

**Jason:** Do you want to switch with me?

**Craig:** God. Wasn’t enough that like—?

**Scott Rosenberg:** You’re not going to like that one more.

**Craig:** God, Scott Rosenberg. Not handsome enough. Not tall enough. Jesus Christ. OK, here we go. “The inherent fantasy fulfillment, especially for kids, makes this something we believe audiences will embrace and thoroughly enjoy. That said, the tone of the picture needs to be much edgier.” Possibly real. Possibly not.

**John:** Dana, go for it.

**Dana:** OK. “We like the pivot away from the misdirect and towards embracing Johnson’s role as a villain from the outset. But, as we move forward we’d like to make sure that we don’t lose his complexity and shift too far into his evil persona that it feels cartoonish.”

**Craig:** Ooh, so many clauses in that.

**Megan:** Word salad. Word salad.

**Dana:** It was really hard to read.

**Craig:** Multiple clause note.

**John:** Megan Amram, perform for us.

**Jason:** This is not good. This is not good at all.

**Megan:** “Can we discuss whether Mark and Kristen need to die? We don’t feel like the characters have earned the terrible things that befall them.”

**Scott Rosenberg:** That’s totally real.

**Dana:** The terrible things including death.

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**Megan:** One of the worst.

**Craig:** Things with an S. Right.

**John:** Oren?

**Oren:** All right, “We appreciate the early look and understand and respect that the creative process is still in motion and that there are outstanding notes the producers want to make before the draft we read is considered official.”

**Craig:** Wow, that’s just fucking sinister.

**Dana:** That’s too real.

**Scott Rosenberg:** That’s just they don’t want to pay for delivery yet. Right?

**Dana:** I’m just so surprised they actually put that on paper. That seems illegal.

**Craig:** That’s like fraud, right? It’s amazing.

**John:** All right, Jason.

**Jason:** “We would like to clarify and simplify the rules of time travel.” Sure. Sure. By the way, we’re halfway in, so far not a bad note. “Could Madden explain that only certain actions disrupt the time stream?”

**Scott Rosenberg:** See, that’s the one that I kept looking at over and he switched with me. I couldn’t understand it. What’s the time stream?

**Megan:** Yeah, that’s why you have to clarify the rules.

**Dana:** That’s why they have to clarify the rules.

**Jason:** According to the note. That’s what we’re doing.

**Craig:** I know this is crazy, when you walk in the middle of something to not understand it.

**Jason:** This is why you don’t get the bit.

**Scott Rosenberg:** I’m sorry, I’m a screenwriter. I thought we were talking about screenwriting stuff. This is why they’ve never invited me on whatever that thing is they have. That podcast. Never ever, by the way. 42 movies I’ve made. Never. Never once. Never had a dinner.

**Craig:** You’re that guy now? You’re the 42 movies made?

**Scott Rosenberg:** Not once. Never. Never.

**Craig:** 42 movies I made.

**Scott Rosenberg:** Koppelman, he knew me a minute, put me right on. “What are the aliens waiting for? Is it simply that it’s taken this long for them to amass a big enough force to try to take over Earth again? Or, is there a more specific “why now” reason that the alien invasion is finally happening again?”

**John:** Wow, that’s a lot.

**Scott Rosenberg:** I mean, duh.

**John:** I think we may need to read through them again. But general themes. Do they seem familiar? Have you encountered these notes before? I saw some nodding.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, my note I could summarize as make it nice but make it not nice. It’s just like these inherent contradictions, right? And yours seemed—

**Dana:** I truly had no idea what was happening with mine.

**Craig:** Basically yours was the same thing, like make him a villain but don’t make him too villainy.

**Megan:** Yeah. I had summarized this as do Mark and Kristen have to die. A pretty, you know, universal question you should ask yourself. I mean, everyone’s got a Mark, everyone’s got a Kristen. And you just have to think to yourself, did they earn the terrible things that befall them? So.

**Oren:** Mine is basically we enjoyed reading your script. Do we still have to pay you for it?

**Dana:** That one was the most familiar for me.

**Craig:** Familiar note.

**John:** Jason, back to yours.

**Jason:** Yeah. Mine is we paid you to write a script about time travel. Can you figure that out? No. Doesn’t make any sense.

**Scott Rosenberg:** I’m going to be super controversial. I’ve gotten the stupidest fucking notes in the world my entire career, and I’ve never once been less than grateful to be a person getting stupid fucking notes.

**Dana:** Shut up.

**Scott Rosenberg:** It’s just a fact. Honestly. And I’m the last guy to have any gravitas in this whole room. But honestly, like you take them, and they’re ridiculous, and they’re absurd.

**Dana:** Are you from Canada?

**Scott Rosenberg:** And I am from Canada.

**Dana:** Honestly.

**Scott Rosenberg:** By way of Boston. But, no, seriously, I remember the stupidest note I’ve ever gotten in my whole life was I wrote this crazy psychotic character and they were like, “We just found he was so irrational.” And I was like “Because he’s psychotic.” And they were like, “Well couldn’t his irrational psychosis just be a little bit more rational?” And I was like, “Wow, you are insane.” By the way, she is not in the business anymore that executive. But I just remember thinking like as I drove home thinking like how am I going to tackle this.

I was like, goddamn, god bless me that she’s actually paying me to do this and I actually – I’m sorry to like rain on the fun of the gag.

**Craig:** You should be.

**Scott Rosenberg:** But seriously, that’s my thing. Madden, where’s Madden?

**Jason:** You want Madden back?

**Scott Rosenberg:** But seriously, we’re all getting stupid notes. That’s the nature of the gig. But you know what, God bless us all for getting them.

**Craig:** That surely was helpful for you.

**John:** That was helpful. Scott, would you remind recapping what your actual note was so this gentleman can try to win? What was your actual note you got? What was the actual note that you read aloud?

**Scott Rosenberg:** I read it. I actually read it. You want me to read it again?

**Craig:** Just summarize it.

**Scott Rosenberg:** I actually didn’t understand it.

**Craig:** OK.

**Jason:** That’s the point of the game.

**John:** John the Wizard. Tell us where your head is at.

**Craig:** Do you have a sense?

**John:** Which one is the fake note?

**John the Wizard:** I’m seriously confused if it’s the last one or the third to last one. Both seem very confusing.

**Craig:** You think maybe it’s the Oren right here.

**John:** Do you want to hear them aloud again.

**Craig:** Again? Really? Just those two. Just those two.

**John the Wizard:** And I’ll take the audience, what they think.

**Oren:** “We appreciate the early look and understand and respect that the creative process is still in motion and that there are outstanding notes the producers want to make before the draft we read is considered official.”

**John the Wizard:** This is so confusing.

**Oren:** There’s so many words.

**John:** I can’t believe that’s real.

**Oren:** No commas.

**John:** Do you want Jason or Scott’s?

**Jason:** I also have no commas. “What are the aliens waiting for? Is it simply that it’s taken this long for them to amass a big enough force to try to take over earth again? Or is there a more specific “why now” reason that the alien invasion is finally happening again?” I think I’ve gotten that note on every single script I’ve written.

**John the Wizard:** I guess my problem at the end is the aliens, I would assume is referenced to a real–

**Craig:** Don’t dig in too deep here.

**John the Wizard:** No? Is it too much?

**Craig:** Just go with your gut.

**John:** Go with your gut.

**John the Wizard:** You sir.

**John:** Oren’s?

**Craig:** He has chosen Oren’s as the fake note.

**John the Wizard:** I’m going to choose Oren.

**John:** But up here, what do you guys think?

**Dana:** I think that’s definitely real.

**Craig:** I think it’s Jason’s.

**Megan:** I think mine might be fake.

**Craig:** I think Megan is fake.

**Megan:** Thank you so much.

**John:** Oren’s is completely real. Oren’s is 100% real. That was in a memo and it basically was what you describe. Like “Thank you for showing this producer pass early so we don’t have to pay you and we can still give notes.” So that’s a lovely thing. So your second choice is Scott?

**John the Wizard:** Yes.

**John:** You’re still wrong. Sorry.

**John the Wizard:** It’s not the first time so.

**Jason:** Does he get another guess?

**John:** It’s Jason’s.

**Craig:** It’s Jason’s.

**John:** Time travel.

**Craig:** Jason’s time travel thing seems so real.

**Jason:** Yeah, well, I sold it.

**John:** Why did it seem real to you?

**Craig:** Well, it seemed real because it was so stupid. I mean, you know, like every time you see a movie, or any time you’re writing any movie that involves anything slightly magic or slightly science fiction, the first thing they talk about – because they love to – is rules. They’re obsessed with the rules. What are the rules? No one actually cares about the rules.

I don’t know what the rules are in Lord of the Rings. People literally show up and fucking turn into ghosts and back again to regular people. And I don’t give a shit, because I don’t care. It’s awesome to watch. But they love talking about the rules.

**Megan:** I hate to be a Scott Rosenberg here, but I love the rules. I love like a scene where they just talk about the rules. There’s a scene in Arrival where he just narrates the rules and I loved it. You know, diverse. It’s a diverse panel.

**Jason:** I have to say these are all obviously dumb notes, and they’re better than any notes I’ve ever gotten on any project I’ve worked.

**Oren:** These are high level John August notes.

**Jason:** I mean, these are terrific notes. I was working on a project, I’m currently working on a project where a producer said to me, “What’s the tone of the movie?” We’re like two months in. And I said, well, you know, it’s kind of like a darker grounded Star Wars. And the gentleman I’m working with is Italian and he said, “I don’t like the Star Wars.”

**Craig:** Is he Italian or is he a cartoon Italian?

**Jason:** He is, in fact, both. And I said, you know, “Why don’t you like Star Wars?” And he said, “Where’s Earth?”

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**Jason:** I swear to god. This is a week ago.

**Craig:** That’s an amazing critique of Star Wars.

**Jason:** Yeah, he said, “They never talk about Earth. They never go to Earth. Why is no Earth?” And I said, “Well, you know, it’s Star Wars. It’s in the stars.” And he said, “No, no, I get it. But you know…” he had an idea. He didn’t just have a problem. He had a solution. He said, “You know what’s a good film? You see the Battleship?” And I said, “Peter Berg’s Battleship?” And he said, “Yeah, si, si. They’re on Earth. And the soldiers on Earth and marines. Watch the film Battleship.”

And I said, “You want me to write this film – you’re going to pay me, you want me to make it more like Battleship than Star Wars?” And he said, “Watch Battleship again. You’ll see what I’m talking about.” And I literally called the studio. I said, “I can never speak to that human again.”

**Craig:** No. And then I assume he was like, “Now I got to go make the meatballs.”

**Jason:** These are terrific notes. I wish I had rule notes.

**Scott Rosenberg:** To me, the greatest notes story of all time is–

**Jason:** That was not the greatest notes story of all time?

**Scott Rosenberg:** No. No. No.

**Megan:** I’m going to let you finish.

**Scott Rosenberg:** That was the best rendered notes story of all time.

**Jason:** Fair.

**Scott Rosenberg:** The best performed notes story of all time.

**Jason:** I’ll take it.

**Scott Rosenberg:** But the great William Goldman story was, you know, William Goldman notoriously only lived in New York City and hated Los Angeles, like a sickness. And he would come out for five seconds and he did his version of Maverick. He wrote his draft of Maverick, and he flew out and they took him to Warner Bros. And he had the meetings with the guys at the time, there was probably Lorenzo and Robinov. And they came in and they gave him his notes and they said, “So we really like it. Everything you’ve done is wonderful. We just wish it was smarter and funnier.”

And Bill Goldman said, “So do I.” Which is like we never turn in what we don’t think is the best, right?

**Dana:** It also dovetails with things that have happened to you in test screenings, or notes you’ve gotten in test screenings.

**Craig:** Those are the best.

**Dana:** Yeah. I had one – they give you the little forms afterwards. You fill them out. And it said, “Was there anything about the movie you didn’t like?” And this person wrote, “The movie.”

**Oren:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Somebody, I can’t remember who, has one of those cards framed and under the what would you change and somebody had scrawled, “More boobs,” but they had spelled it B-E-E-W-B-B-S. The most tortured spelling of boobs possible, so you knew it was real. They really wanted to–

**John:** Nice. John the Wizard, thank you very much for playing. You get the deck anyway.

**Craig:** Thank you, John the Wizard.

**John:** We weren’t going to let you go away without the deck. Thank you to our amazing panel. You guys were great. Thank you for playing the game with us.

**Craig:** These people want to drink. I get the sense they want to drink. Let’s wrap this up.

**John:** Let’s wrap this up. Guys, thank you for an amazing show. We need to thank some of the special people here first.

**Craig:** Thank you folks.

**John:** A little talking here. We need to thank Megan McDonnell, our producer.

**Craig:** Megan McDonnell.

**John:** We need to thank all of our amazing panelists for coming up here. Thank you guys very much for playing. And we need to thank Colin and the amazing Austin Film Festival for having us here once again. Guys, thank you very much for having us back each year.

**Craig:** Thank you, Austin.

**John:** It’s so much fun to do the show. Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/david-mamet-and-the-producer-pass).

**John August:** Hello and welcome, my name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 240 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be answering a bunch of listener questions about the craft, about the profession of screenwriting, and about Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Lots of Craig questions.

**Craig:** I won’t know how to answer any of them.

**John:** It’s one of our easiest types of episodes because we had to do almost no work. We basically pasted a bunch of questions in here and we’ll just answer them one at a time.

**Craig:** Or, it’s exactly as easy as it is for me, always, because you do everything.

**John:** This is the Craig special we’re talking today.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Last week on the podcast, we were talking about an article on acting by Marcus Geduld, and so we were looking at his article, and we were comparing what would the similar advice be for talking about good writing. And so Marcus listened to that episode and wrote in and said, “Hey, a friend alerted me to the Episode 239 of your podcast in which you discussed my Quora post about acting. I’ve been feeling some qualms about it. But I was very pleased that it sparked such intelligent conversation on your show. You have a new listener and a fan. Forgive me for bringing up stuff you may already know about. It will take me some time to listen to your whole back catalogue, but I wonder if you’ve discussed David Mamet’s memo to his writing staff on The Unit. It was dashed off and contained a lot of typos, but it’s great fodder for discussion.” So he sends a link to this memo that David Mamet wrote in 2005 for the writing staff of this — I think it was a CBS show called, The Unit.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I remember seeing it when it came out, but I don’t think we’ve ever discussed it on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. Before we started recording, I asked you to go check it because I thought for sure we would have discussed it because I remember reading it and thinking about it and then talking about it, but I guess it wasn’t on this podcast about things that are interesting to screenwriters. So we should talk about it.

**John:** We’ll have a link to this in the show notes, so you can just click through and see what we’re talking about, but it’s about a four-page, just memo, like a single sentences about advice and frustrations and guidance to his staff about what he’s looking for in an episode in their writing. And you know, one of the sort of central tenets behind it is like don’t be lazy, like you know, the stuff I’m asking you to do is really hard, but that’s sort of your job to do the really hard work. And what he’s really looking for is not plot, it’s not story, it’s drama. And he’s sort of railing against those scenes that are so common, especially in procedural dramas that are not dramatic at all, they’re just information dumps.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the things that I found remarkable about this when I read it was that it needed to be written at all, but I understand particularly when you’re doing a procedural, and there is an enormous amount of plot, because every episode has to be centered around some new bit of narrative, it’s tempting to fall into the trap of letting narrative and plot drive everything else. But what he’s reminding them here is very, very true, and it’s something that I think is a little easier for us to keep an eye on in a movie because it’s just our one story — character drives plot, and character relationships drive plot. Even when it seems like the plot isn’t driven by those things, the plot must ultimately be in relationship to those things. It has to either come out of them or exist to change them. So he’s really refocusing their eyes on that.

**John:** He’s arguing that every scene needs to be about the conflict and discovery of characters within that moment and the scene itself has to have drama, it has to have a spark to it. And it can’t really be the thing that’s connecting you to the next thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’ll read a little bit from it here. “Everyone in creation is screaming at us to make the show clear. We are tasked with it, it seems, cramming a shit load of information into a little bit of time. Our friends, the penguins, which is what he calls the studio execs, think that we, therefore, are employed to communicate information, and so at times, it seems to us. But note, the audience will not tune in to watch information. They wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned in to watch drama.

“Question, what is drama? Drama again is the quest of the hero to overcome things which prevent him from achieving a specific acute goal. So we, the writers, must ask ourselves of every scene these three questions. Who wants what, what happens if they don’t get it, and why now?” Those are three great questions.

**Craig:** They are, and they are questions that I ask of myself constantly and I try and ask them before I write the scene. I don’t like going into a scene without knowing the answers to those questions. The scene must be first and foremost an immediate answer to why now because if the scene could happen later, it probably should happen later, or earlier, or not at all, right? It needs to feel like it must be now, must be. And then the who wants what, this comes up so often, and it’s articulated in so many different ways, but it is the bedrock question of following characters and believing that their people. What do you want? And it changes at times. At times it doesn’t. And it’s static. But when actors say, well, what’s my motivation? That means what do I want? It’s the only way to perform. I think it’s the only way to write a scene. It’s the only way to write a movie.

I think it might have been frustrating for his staff to read this because I don’t know, I suspect that they might have known a lot of this, and they were like, hey, you know, we have to do 26 of these? And it’s not like writing a play, but if you don’t know the answers to these, you are going to end up with that feeling of treading water.

**John:** Yeah, I definitely would feel some sympathy being on his writing staff because like, hey, you hired us to write on your show because we are writers who’ve written on other things, like, we should in theory know what we’re doing. I think where I sympathize again with Mamet though is that sense of when you’re actually in the process of trying to make these things, you’ll reach those scenes where it’s like, there’s nothing — the scene just needs to be here so I can get this piece of information out. And he’s saying, I know you feel that way, but that’s not a good enough answer. You have to find a way to make that scene dramatic. Otherwise, it’s just not a scene, and it’s not worth anything.

Circling back to his question of like what do the characters want, we’ve talked a lot about, you know, wants and goals and wishes and dreams and motivation on the show, and there’s a whole scale, there’s a whole like sort of mountain of want that a character experiences. There’s that overarching, that wish, that dream, that someday want, which is informing a character for like one day I hope to get this thing. And a character on a TV show will kind of never get that thing they hope to get. A character in a movie probably should get that thing they’re hoping to get.

And then there’s sort of more immediate goals, like what are the things we’re trying to do in this section, like what is a thing I can see in the distance I’m trying to get to, that mountain that I’m trying to get to. But there’s also a very immediate goal, and this is I think what Mamet is getting frustrated about is that it is literally like in this moment where I’m standing here talking to you, what am I trying to achieve?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And sometimes you don’t see those things happen. And it’s those questions — what I’m trying to achieve right now — that’s informing each line of dialogue, it’s informing why the characters are interacting with each other the way they’re interacting. And I think his frustration is, you encounter these scenes where it’s, “Well, Tom, as you know, blah, blah, blah.” And then it’s just an information dump.

**Craig:** Precisely. The essence of conflict is each character in conflict, and in one of our episodes we went through all different kinds of conflict, but for all of them, each character in the conflict wants something that is different than what the other person wants. There is no conflict, and thus, no drama in a scene where one character is explaining something to another. That’s a meeting. People go to meetings all day long at work, even if they don’t work at places where you think they have meetings, they do. If you work at Burger King, at some point, the manager is going to be like, hey, guys, we just go these new kinds of fries, and here’s the order that they have to go in. That’s a meeting. That’s boring. It’s just boring. And that’s not why people come to see shows.

So your job, he says, is, you know, information is necessary to make the whole thing work, figure out how to encode that into scenes that are dramatic. Otherwise, why are we watching it, you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like he says, look at your log lines, a log line reading Bob and Sue discuss is not describing a dramatic scene, and he’s right because if they’re just discussing it, there’s no conflict.

**John:** I think it’s really interesting that he’s going back to the log line because as you’re doing sort of like quick and dirty outlines of like sort of what’s going to happen in the show, you’ll see these things which are basically, these two characters discuss this thing and decide to do this thing. And discuss is never going to be a dramatic scene. And so if all they’re doing is discussing, that scene is not going to meet his standards. If they decide, well, then, what is the nature of the conversation that led to a decision? And so if it’s an argument, then that probably could work. If it is a, you know, Tom convinces Mary to do this thing, that is conflict. You can see what the different character’s goals are. But if it’s just discussing, if it’s just like you know they’re passing the ball back and forth while they’re talking about it, that’s not going to work.

**Craig:** There are so many ways to bury conflict in there while this information is happening. For instance, one character can be explaining something, let’s say, I think The Unit was a law enforcement show, correct?

**John:** Yeah, I think so.

**Craig:** So one character is explaining to another what they found and what he thinks they should do next. And she is listening to this, and then her response is going to be okay, let’s go do it. No conflict, right? But if while they’re talking she needs to be somewhere else, or she wants to be on the phone with someone else, or she sees someone through the window, or she just walked out of something that’s pissed her off, or she has a secret. Anything that makes her want to not be there, suddenly the scene is interesting. He can stop and say, I’m sorry, are you not paying attention to me at all? Of course I am. Now, it’s interesting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s about people.

**John:** Yes. So he’s stressing that the scene has to have drama in it. The scene has to be dramatic and again, his words, “It’s not the actor’s job. The actor’s job is to be truthful. It’s not the director’s job. His or her job is to film it straightforwardly, and remind the actors to talk fast. It is your job.” Although Mamet is, you know, weaving in that talking fast, but that’s Mamet, and that’s absolutely true. And I can’t think of any TV shows that are not non-fiction cooking or sort of building thing shows that don’t have that central conflict woven into every scene.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And frankly it’s why there are certain kinds of shows that I never really got into like Law & Order has been on forever and a lot of people are big Law & Order fans, but I always found my problem with Law & Order was that there were scenes where people that just generally were agreeable coworkers would discuss facts. And I found that like I was in a meeting. I just did not like that so much.

**John:** I have never liked that show. And that show is sometimes a nice intricate crossword puzzle, but in general, characters would have scowls while they gave each other information, but that wasn’t actually conflict.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Every once in a while, Sam Waterston would like throw some papers around and he’d get really upset, and there were moments where there generally was disagreement, but those things were rare.

**Craig:** Yeah. So then what you really end up with is living or dying on what I call the prurient interest of the plot. Will they be found guilty or not, which is fine, but kind of not enough for me to watch your show.

**John:** Yeah. He talks about clarity and curiosity. He says, “The job of the dramatist is to make the audience wonder what happens next. It’s not to explain to them what just happened, or suggest to them what happens next. It’s to create that question mark.” And, you know, to the degree that Law & Order succeeds, I think there is a question mark about how are the pieces going to fit together.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s like they’ve shaken up the box of the big puzzle and now you have to figure out, oh, are they going to be able to put the pieces together in time? The answer is yes, but maybe there’ll be some detours along the way.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a really good outline of how to approach scene work, I think, and a great way to — it’s a nice enumeration of pitfalls.

**John:** I agree. So why don’t you hit our next question?

**Craig:** So Robert writes, “When you’re writing for a first step for a studio, do you give the draft to the producer for their notes, that is to say, do a producer pass before you submit to the studio? And if you do, is there a limit to the quantity or scope of adjustments that you will do for the producer, or will you do as much additional work as the producer desires?” And then he clarifies, “As a young writer, you want to do what’s best for the project and be known as a team player, but also don’t want to be taken advantage of, or undermine the guild in any way.”

**John:** Yes. So Robert is going to be so happy to hear that once you have had a few projects made, this never comes up again. And it’s free and clear to answer your question. So the answer, Robert, is that there’s no great answer for how much leeway you should give to the producer before it goes into the studio, to what degree you should bend to their wishes, to what degree you should be a good team player versus stick to your guns, it’s a really tough thing that you’re going to be wrestling with your entire career.

**Craig:** Yeah, boy, it’s rough for us when we can’t give you a good answer. And look, for me, I’m actually dealing with this right now. And I’m kind of a hard case about this. Frankly, I don’t have the time to do these passes just for the producer because I have other things I have to do. But in addition, my entire outlook on things is I want everyone to tell me what they think, not just the producer. The producer oftentimes is wonderful and has great insight into the movie they want to make. They will convince you that they have the greatest insight to the movie the studio wants to make. But as you go on in your career, you’ll find out they don’t, any more than anyone does, seemingly. And so sometimes you end up in this trap where you’ve done all these work and then work, and then work, and then work, then you turn it into the studio, and they’re like, what? This isn’t what we wanted.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So here’s the uncomfortable fact for every screenwriter whether you’re new, it’s particularly brutal when you’re new, or whether you’ve been around forever: there will always be pain and friction here in this relationship. You will find yourself in positions where you are going to make people upset. You will find yourself in positions where you’re making yourself upset. And all I can say is that if you are involved in a producer that you believe is starting to behave in a way that is abusive or counter productive to the project, you’re not going to want to work with them again.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you might as well hunker down with your agent and say, “I’m drawing the line here, we’re turning it in here. And that’s it. And if they flip out, they flip out.” But I’ll say this much, if the studio likes it, they’ll be your best friend.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s talk about the difference between realistically in daily practice and contractually. Contractually, you owe the script to the studio, you don’t owe it to the producer. And so when you turn it into the studio, you are saying, you’re delivering your script, and they’re going to pay you your money, the other half of the money that they owe you for the script. And so there’s one person listed on your contract, you turn it in to him or her, and they should cut you a check.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In practice, what tends to happen is you show it to the producer first, kind of as a courtesy, but also to get their feedback. And sometimes you will do additional work based on their notes, and then you will turn it into the studio, and they will pay you. The pitfalls that happen: sometimes the producers will come to you with a tremendous number of notes or just like really crazy things, like wow, that’s going to take so much time to do.

Sometimes you’ll agree with them, sometimes like, well that’s just a better idea, I’m going to go through and fix that. Oftentimes, you’ll be questioning whether it’s a good choice to be doing those notes, and then you’re kind of stuck so do you say like, “Yeah, I don’t think so,” and you go into the studio? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. You also are always wondering where is that note really coming from. Is that note because they think it’s what’s best for the project or because they’re just playing from fear? If they’re playing from fear, that’s not going to be a helpful situation for you.

The real danger is that they actually have shown it to the studio, and they’re actually sneakily trying to get you to do the studio’s notes as their notes, and that’s just the kind of BS that you encounter and you want to throw somebody through a wall.

**Craig:** That happens all the time and is literally fraud that they are perpetrating upon you. The thing that bothers me maybe the most about this is that, you said something that I think would be great if both sides saw it this way. But you do this as a courtesy to the producer. But so many producers don’t see it as a courtesy. They see it as something that they’re entitled to.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I don’t feel that way. I just had a very difficult discussion with a producer the other day. And I just said, look, I’m turning in the script, and I’m just kind of curious what you’re intending to do forward, how do you want to deal with this because it’s a one-step deal like they always make. And I said, are you the kind of place that does the whole, oh, let’s do another draft now just for the producer, and he’s like, yeah. I said, well, I’m not that guy.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** And it was a difficult conversation. And I will remain not that guy. And here’s the deal, yeah, if there’s something terrific and wonderful and interesting, and it’s a couple of weeks, or a week, yeah, I’ll do it. Sure. If it’s what I consider to be a re-write or a draft, no, I won’t. And they’ll say things like, well, the studio will never go forward with this. Okay, that’s right. You know what, they had a choice of how to structure my contract, this is how they structured it, so you know, I’ll take my chances there.

**John:** Yes. I ran into this situation on a project and the frustrating thing when I sat down with the producers, and things were going great, I sat down with the producers and their notes were just crazy pants like, wait, that’s a fundamental rethinking of the entire thing. That’s actually not the movie I pitched to the studio. And you’re wondering, just like, yeah, as an experiment, maybe I could try that, like the answer is no. And so I just flatly said no, and I left the meeting. And it really messed up my relationship with those producers, but there was just no way I was going to do it. And so we turned in the draft that I had done, and the studio loved it, so great, but it made it for an awkward situation with those producers because I frankly said, “You are insane. I’m in no way doing that thing.” And I thought they were abusing — in the context of trying to like, oh, let’s just like open up all the doors and like really explore things, they were trying to get me to write a completely different movie. And that was not going to fly.

**Craig:** No. And see? So Robert, note what John said. It screwed up his relationship with these people. That got broken. But I would hazard to guess, John, that you wouldn’t be running back to those producers with something else.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So sometimes you got to break things. You can’t be everyone’s friend. If you want to be everyone’s friend, you’re walking around with a mark on your forehead that says, take advantage of me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you are going to have to judge these things unfortunately on an incident by incident basis and you’re going to have to understand that the people who are telling you that it has to go this way or else are saying that to con you. And they are sometimes also incidentally correct. But their primary concern is to con you.

**John:** Yeah. A mutual friend of ours is very, very hardcore about like, oh, I’m done. Here’s the script, bye. And so if you made a one-step deal with him, he’s done. He’s not going to like fix a comma in the script and he’s incredibly hardcore and I think he’s perceived as being incredibly difficult for that reason. And he’s had a lot of success, but I think he also has a reputation for being really difficult. And it’s the kind of behavior that makes you seem really difficult. I’ve never been that hardcore, and I’ve always been like happy to have the conversation with the producer or even the studio saying like, hey, we have this issue, can we talk about this issue specifically because of this problem because we’re trying to go after this actor, or whatever else, I’m fine and happy to do that.

It’s when they’re asking me to essentially just come back in and do more free work that I do go back to what Craig said, is like, well then maybe you should’ve have made a different deal for me. Or in fact, we have optional steps in the deal that you did make for me, let’s visit those.

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s do them, exactly. Look, I would never recommend to anybody to be the not one period or comma because I think that’s just dumb, you know. And I think that there is great value in doing what I’ll call tweaks to make everybody feel good and invested and whole as they go into the studio with this. But my whole thing is, look, if you want to do more than those tweaks in advance of the studio seeing it, it means this isn’t working for you. If this isn’t working for you, I’m not your guy. So I got to go because I got other things I want to do with my life and what I don’t want to do it just now chase you. I don’t want to chase you and what you want to do. This should be enough for people to go, well, everybody, studio and producer alike, after a week or two of tweaking, we see enough value here that we want you to continue, or we do not see enough value for you to continue. But I think a lot of writers end up chasing somebody who is just running ahead of them flinging fear glitter into the air and they’re just chasing them down this terrible path designed to assuage anxiety to no end.

**John:** I thought experiment it just occurred to me. So somebody says like, oh, can you just do a couple of days at work and my instinct is usually sort of yes, but what if I rephrase it as like, oh, we just want to reshoot a couple of days. That would be free, right? Of course that wouldn’t be free. Like to reshoot a couple of days would be tremendously expensive. So it seems really weird that you expect my labor to be free whereas everybody else’s labor would be incredibly expensive.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, it’s a funny thing actually for me, I brought this up in the conversation with this producer. When I’m in a development phase, I have to be careful about my time, and careful about being paid for the work I do and protecting what I feel is my earned status as a professional writer, to not just do stuff cause. When we’re making a movie, I don’t ask for anything. And what I find a lot of times is, then they’ll call me and they’ll say, you’ve done quite a bit here, we should pay you something for it. And I’ll say, great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when we’re making a movie, there’s no teamier team player than me because I love it, but I hate development and I certainly hate wasting my time writing screenplays that aren’t being read by the people that decide to make a movie. Ugh. But anyway, Robert, long answer, difficult answer. You’re asking a good question and I’m sorry we don’t have a great answer for you, we just shared our pain with you instead.

**John:** Right, let’s do a simpler question. Najeeb writes, why does Craig feed the trolls so hard?

**Craig:** So I assume Najeeb is talking about Twitter and the people that occasionally go after me because I’m not a fan of Ted Cruz. And they seem to be breaking down into three categories, there were two, now there’s three. Category number one, people whose Twitter avatar is a flag with an eagle. Category two, people whose Twitter avatar is a flag with a cross. And the new one is, flag with don’t tread on my snake.

**John:** Yeah, very, very important.

**Craig:** Eagle flaggers, snake flaggers, cross flaggers. Why do I feed the trolls so hard? Because it’ s fun for me. I don’t feed them, they’re feeding me. I’m having fun. Now when I don’t like what they say, or if it’s just like a boring thing and most of them are, I’ll just ignore it. Or if it’s really disgusting, I’ll block them, or it’s just like enough already from you, I’ll block them. Like, oh, now you’re having fun, I don’t want you to have any fun.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there’s this great line from the Watchmen, Alan Moore wrote for the character Rorschach. He’s been sent to prison, and all the prisoners hate him so much and they’re like, now you’re in here with us, we’re going to kill you. And he says, “No, you don’t get it. I’m not locked up in here with you. You’re locked up in here with me.” [laughs] And that’s me on Twitter. They’re locked in there with me. So that’s why, Najeeb.

**John:** I do notice sometimes people put those little hashtags at the end of things and they’ll sort of make up their hashtags but like there’s one just yesterday, it was #MazinBaby. And so I was like, oh, I hope other people are using #MazinBaby but they’re not. It was a one-time occurrence of #MazinBaby.

**Craig:** MazinBaby was pretty good. I like MazinBaby.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, nice.

**John:** Talking about Twitter best practices, I used to block people. I don’t block people anymore. I just mute them. And so if you’re not using block or mute, I would encourage you to explore the wonderful world of mute because mute, they just disappear. You just don’t hear them again. It’s like you just ignore them and they never show up in your feed again. And it’s really useful because they don’t know that you’ve done anything and that’s a lovely —

**Craig:** That’s a great point. It’s funny. Like without naming names, I’ve used mute many times for people I follow.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Who I don’t want to upset but who are just boring me. They’re tweeting a lot and it’s all boring.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So I mute them. It’s the little white lie but then you got to be careful because then they’re like, hey —

**John:** Why don’t you ever write me back?

**Craig:** Yeah. Didn’t you see what I wrote?

**John:** Yeah. I’m thinking of some people you might have on mute. Here’s a question for you. If somebody is muted, and I can look this up. By the time you’re listening to this podcast, I will have already looked it up, but if I have muted you and somebody writes to both you and me, do I still see the tweet or does it go away completely? I’m not even sure.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think you see anything that’s got an @ to you. The muting is just basically for stuff that isn’t adding you and it’s just them talking.

**John:** Oh no. Muting does block people. It does keep people from adding you.

**Craig:** Oh, it does?

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** Oh. Oh, well in that case.

**John:** It’s useful for that too.

**Craig:** Then I’m going to stick with blocking for certain people. [laughs]

**John:** John Lambert writes, “A hypothetical, of course, but if your second script is an original one-hour spec, and it’s genius, what would your next three steps be?”

So here’s the numbers here. It’s the second script. It’s a one-hour drama. He wants to know what three steps you should take next.

**Craig:** No idea. What? [laughs] What kind of?

**John:** Yeah, Craig’s not a good person for a one-hour specs but — so you’ve written a spec script and by this I believe you are — I think you’re meaning that it is an original, so that’s not just an episode of you know Law & Order 16, or Chicago Social Services. You’ve written a great episode of television, original episode of TV, a pilot. And people like it. So, I would say — you say it’s great. Well, I think you need some objective measurements about whether it’s great. So, I would say enter it into Austin, enter it into Black List, get people to read it and see whether other people think it’s fantastic.

While you are doing that, you need to write more. Because one or I guess this is your second script, you’re going to need a trunkful of things under your belt before you try to make the move out here. You can make the move out here but before you’re seriously in consideration for a job writing television.

**Craig:** Yeah. That makes sense to me. I get thrown up by the next three steps. I can’t see three steps ahead. That’s like chess.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I got one step, show it to people and see if you’re right. How about this, get it out of the world of hypothetical, and into the world of actual. And then that should be your next step.

**John:** So I actually witnessed Craig thinking a few steps ahead though because last night we were playing Pandemic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It was your second session, my first session playing Pandemic, which was a former One Cool Thing. This is the legacy version where the board actually physically changes once you’ve gotten through a gaming session. It was terrific. And you were very smart about sort of, you know, as we discussed sort of planning to keep cities from going rogue and falling and outbreaks from spreading.

**Craig:** Well, that’s where my mind is really suited to useless strategic things like playing Pandemic and sometimes not at all suited to what would my next three steps be if I had a genius script in my hand. We all have our strengths. That game by the way, a lot of our One Cool Things just aren’t that cool. That game is so good. I had so much fun. So much fun. I can’t wait. So we — the game is laid out in months. So you play it 12 times assuming that you win each time but if you lose, you get to play it a month over again if you lose. So we’ve only played January and February but we won both times. We’re very proud of ourselves.

**John:** And our funding has been cut to nothing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I know. We were extremely — can’t wait to play it again. So, next question. John Sweeny writes, “Subject, idea.” John Sweeny, I’m intrigued. “You guys should sponsor a screenplay contest.” John Sweeny, intrigue, lost. “The prize, the winner gets his screenplay purchased WGA minimum and produced.” What? [Laughs]

**John:** Because Craig, it’s so easy to make a movie. It’s just ridiculously easy, because you and I, any movie we write, it automatically just gets made.

**Craig:** Well first of all, let’s back up for a second. I don’t really believe in screenplay contests. I’m still waiting for the waves of incredibly successful screenwriters that are pouring out of these contests.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just — even the Nicholls which is like the big one, there’s been a few people over the years. A few. Most, no.

So screenplay contests, to me, are a little bit of like an accomplishment trap for people that are trying to achieve something in a business where the actual achievement is an on-off switch and it’s almost always off, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the on-off switch is basically get hired, make movie, movie hopefully appeals to people, right? This is a very hard switch to flip to on, so instead, they’re like, you know, you see then people when they write their, “Well, I’m a semi-finalist in this and I was a quarter-finalist in this” and it’s like, what, there’s an Appalachian screen festival where you got fourth round in that? It’s bananas. The last thing in the world I’d want to do is sponsor a screenplay contest.

The prize, the winner gets his screenplay produced. So ladies, you’re out. WGA minimum for an original screenplay I think is $98,000. So that’s a hundred grand for us to split, no problem, and then produce. We have to make it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s like, just because we do a podcast, we should probably spend a few million bucks.

**John:** Well, yes. Probably so. So, Project Green Light was essentially what he’s describing, which is basically it was a competition and they’d read a bunch of screenplays and they pick a screenplay. And they would make it. And so, that was a show. It’s been shown several times on HBO and other places. So you can watch Project Green Light. I don’t think we’re going to ever be Project Green Light.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** The thing which I think, they’re not — you know — John is really not keeping in mind is how much work it is to read through screenplays in a competition setting. So I have friends who read for Nicholls, and it’s sort of their job for like months of the year. All they’re doing is reading scripts. Same with Sundance Labs, like all they’re doing is reading scripts. And that’s just no fun at all.

**Craig:** No, it’s no bueno.

**John:** Circling back to the idea of screenplay competitions because in the previous thing, I said like, “Oh, you should submit to Austin or one of the other things,” I’m saying you should submit to those things because they will get your script noticed, and purchased and produced. I’m saying because they will tell you like, “Oh, you’re a really good writer.” And objectively, other people telling you like, “Oh, you’re a really good writer.” Then that’s a clue that like, “Oh, you know, I should probably go where the really good writers are and just get started in this business.” If they’re not telling you’re a really good writer, maybe you need to work on your craft a bit more.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that’s pretty much the most you can hope for from those things. And even then, you have to take them with a grain of salt. Sometimes, they say things are bad and they’re not bad. It’s just that they were wrong. And sometimes —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Frankly, more often than not, they’re too easy on you. I mean, I judged — I was a judge, a finalist judge for the Austin Screenwriting Competition one year, a number of years ago. So, it was — I think there were three judges or four of us. And we were judging the five scripts that made it all the way to the finals.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And I hated all of them. All of them. Hated.

**John:** So right now someone is doing the research to figure out like which year that was and feeling really bad.

**Craig:** I hated them and I was shocked. I’m sorry to say if you were in there and you remember me being involved. But I hated them. And I didn’t think that they were of the quality that, if it had been me running it, I would have — no one wins. This is why I shouldn’t run.

**John:** So one of the things I love most about Sundance Labs is they’re kind of upfront about the fact that like they’re not picking the best scripts they’ve ever read. They’re picking the fast hitting stories that can be great movies that no one else is making. And like that’s such a great mandate. Like they’re trying to get stories and voices on screen that are not usually onscreen.

And so when they’re reading things from that perspective, they can overlook some clumsy writing and things that aren’t as good as they could be because they know they’re going to go through these labs process, they’re going to get these things in their best fighting shape to make a really great movie. That’s such a different thing than having to say like, objectively compare like, “Well this is a really good script or that’s a really good script.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I just don’t like it. I don’t like it and I would never ever in a million years would I be involved in a Project Green Light thing. And I’m not — it’s not a moral thing. I get it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I mean they’re making entertainment. And Matt and Ben are terrific guys, great screenwriters also. And they’re entertainers. And that’s an entertaining show. But for me, I don’t want to entertain people that way. That’s not how I entertain people. I would never do it. Like, the Sundance Labs, you know, it’s a shame because I was supposed to go one year and then I had to cancel because we were shooting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I’d love to go one year. I got to call Michelle and talk to her about that because it sounds like it’s exactly the kind of thing I do like to do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is sit in a very real way with another human being and help them be the best them.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Kevin writes, “As an Englishman, it’s easy to tell when non-English actors fail to summon a realistic British accent. So, do American audiences and filmmakers care as much about an accurate non-American accent? Is it an area that’s advanced or gone backwards during your careers? And how important do you think it is for maintaining the audiences’ focus on a story?”

**Craig:** That’s a good question. I think we do. I think we care very much when we hear bad accents. I think we know bad accents. Remember that we consume a lot of English language entertainment including entertainment from the UK. And even when it’s not UK entertainment but American entertainment, we employ a lot of English actors.

**John:** A tremendous amount of English actors.

**Craig:** We love English actors, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So anytime you meet an English actor, they kind of giggle about the fact that they get this extra boost for being classy and smart just because of their accent but it’s true, right? So we’re very familiar with that.

So, when Kevin Costner attempts to do a British accent in Robin Hood, the world kind of goes bananas because it’s terrible.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s really bad and we absolutely notice it and it gets called out. Similarly, we also notice bad regional American accents.

**John:** But I will say that most British actors who are doing sort of a down-the-road kind of Middle American accent, they tend to do a pretty good job and like rarely do I hear somebody who is like, “Oh, you’re not concealing your British accent very well.”

It’s a weird thing. I don’t perceive it as being like, “Oh, they didn’t hit like Kansas City accent.” It’s just that I can tell they’re not actually American. I could tell they’re concealing something. We definitely notice when we see people trying to do a very specific regional accent where we actually have the ear for like what that’s supposed to sound like. And when they don’t hit it, it’s really painful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it’s more noticeable to me when American actors are doing a bad British accent because I think British actors are just better trained in doing an American accent because if they want to be in films, they know that there’s this enormous other opportunity for them. There’s an enormous market. I’m with you. It’s very rare that you hear an actor from the UK doing a bad, like a bad American accent, or like come on man, I’m not buying that.

**John:** It’s fun when you watch on shows where they’ll ask like normal British people to try to fake an American accent. And they tend to go either for like this crazy Californian thing or sort of a John Wayne. They’ll slow down a lot. They’ll try to do things. And it’s the American bias that it’s just sort of always assumed that like, “Oh, if you get rid of your accent, then it’s American.” And of course, it’s just different vowel and letter sounds for everything. And different phrasing and different everything else. But my incorrect perception is that everyone else’s accent is just a hat they’re wearing on top of a normal American accent.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, like ultimately Kevin, I guess the answer to your question is, yeah, we all know when somebody’s not doing it right. Everybody knows and nobody likes it.

**John:** But I think it doesn’t bug us as much as I think it bugs British people when American actors try and fail.

**Craig:** Well, because they have a pride in their language. It is the English language. It’s not the American language. We don’t. Like if somebody mangles an American accent I don’t think, from another country, I don’t think, oh you — you violated the great, what, it’s not the Queen’s English but Washington’s English? It’s not. So we don’t have that pride in our own. The only — we do have a regional pride, so you have some guy from California trying to do a Boston accent and everybody just goes “Ugh.” Everybody in Massachusetts loses their mind because they have pride in that regionalism.

All right. So we have a question here from Avishai, Avishai from Brooklyn. He writes, “In the screenplay I’m currently writing, there is a news montage. It depicts clips of videos sourced from different TV news reports spanning the course of a month. And beneath that, I want there to be truncated snippets of different reporter VOs that overlap and bleed into each other. For each bit of voice over, how do I label the speaker? Do I write Reporter 1, Reporter 2, Reporter 3? Do I write Reporter, another reporter, yet another reporter?” How about just Reporter each time and specify in the description that it’s always someone new?”

**John:** So this is the kind of thing which people freak out too much about. Like what is proper screenplay format and that belief that like every person who speaks onscreen has to be individually credited to get their own block of dialogue. How I would do this, and Craig, I’m curious what you would do, I would say, various reporters, and then just have dialogue in there, the little snippets of things. A little slash and then like the next person keeps talking because ultimately you’re going to do this as just like a crazy montage. So breaking this out as individual people talking is not going to be helpful or your friend.

**Craig:** Sometimes though, you have to, if in between the different reporters talking, new visuals are emerging.

**John:** Absolutely true.

**Craig:** So in those cases, I still would do it essentially the way you’re describing and Avishai, you picked on it, it’s your last thing. How about just reporter each time and specify in the description it’s always someone new. That works.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Reporter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 starts to feel like a spoof almost. It’s goofy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You definitely don’t want to get into over describing them like reporter, another reporter, yet another reporter because that sounds like a joke. You don’t want to do black reporter, tall reporter, skinny reporter, small, because then it’s like is that important or do we have to go find a short reporter now? So yeah, I just think various reporters, then just do reporter VO, reporter VO, reporter VO.

**John:** Sounds good. Blake Wrights, “I just finished a feature script and I wrote post credits scene for it. If it was you, how would you let the reader know that this scene takes place after the credits?”

**Craig:** Oh, okay. Great. So for me, I’ve done a couple of things like this. What I’ll do is, instead of writing “The end,” I’ll just put in bold and sort of to the left where, you know, scene header would go, I’ll say, “Roll credits,” and then I’ll just do like a return, return, return and then I’ll say, “Then:,” and then do a little scene.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve done similar things. Usually, I’ll do a page break and make it on a new page and then I’ll say like, “Post credits,” and maybe underline that and then there’s that scene that’s post credits. And a lot of my things recently have had post credit sequences and it’s great. That’s what you have to do. So I have sometimes used “The end” or I’ve done “Roll credits” or I’ll say, “After credits” when the next thing happens.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah. Whatever essentially is clear, there’s no — this is another one of those things where just go for what’s clear and what feels — you can use whatever language feels appropriate for your tone and all the rest of it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. We’ve got here, we’ll do one more.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Two more. We have two.

**John:** They’re short.

**Craig:** They’re short. Okay. Mohammed from Iran. So this is great. I love that we have listeners in Iran. Mohammed from Iran writes, “Big fan. Really helpful site. Really funny podcast.” Hey, Mohammed, guess what, you’re right and thank you.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** “But you know what would be a cool idea, if you guys did the book version of the show. The material is there, you just need to come up with a logical order to classify stuff into, maybe sexy Craig — ” Oh, yeah, Mohammed, yeah, “can do a bit of illustrating for it. I’d pay for that. Just kidding.” Wait.

“But please don’t forget the chapter about female reproductive health. That’s what 99% of your fan base wants.”

Mohammed from Iran basically is the coolest dude ever.

**John:** He really is.

**Craig:** Thank you, Mohammed. We will get to work on that right away.

**John:** So I thought about doing the book. So our podcast unlike most podcasts, we have transcripts for every single episode. This is episode 240, later on this week, we’ll have the transcript for this episode that you’re listening to. So we go back and do all of those transcripts partly so I can search for things, like did we ever talk about David Mamet before? But also because have people who are deaf who can’t listen to the show, and so they love to read the transcripts. My friend Steve Healy only reads the transcripts. So that’s great.

So we have all this material and we have thought about, or in the office we’ve talked about like, “Do we do this as a book somehow?” The idea of a book gives me a bit of a shudder just because I hate how-to screenwriting books.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** But if it was just a book that was like, you know, John and Craig talk about screenwriting, I guess I’d be all right with it. I mean, how do you feel about it, Craig, because I really don’t have strong opinions.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I mean, the transcripts are on the internet, it’s like they’re there. I know the book sort of curates it all for people which is nice.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, but like —

**John:** You can read the book in the bathroom or —

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. My problem is the same as yours. I’m so angry about these books and what they do. So I feel like, if we’re going to do a book, it has to be proper and well thought out and done in a way that’s not just throw in the transcripts but that we actually say, “At last, here’s a book that you can buy and don’t — not — you don’t have to buy any other book. Don’t buy any other book ever.” Literally, every store should only have this book. It is definitive. Everything else is crap. Only this book.

**John:** Well, I think that’s — if the book is about how to be a screenwriter, but I think this is probably — our podcast really isn’t about how to be a screenwriter. It’s basically sort of like, “What is it like being a screenwriter?” And so, that’s the kind of thing which —

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** There are multiple versions of it. That’s something that might be better — you know, could be taken from the transcripts in a more meaningful way. Like it’s our conversations, maybe sort of, you know, annotated and highly edited because lord know we ramble a lot.

So as I thought about doing it, it’s just the matter of who’s going to do that. And so, it’s not going to be Stuart. Stuart is already way too busy. So that’s probably another new person and just becomes this other big project — and let’s be realistic — in my life, to have to be on top of it.

**Craig:** Definitely not in mine. Yeah, plus you’d have to learn a new person’s name which is really —

**John:** It’s the worst.

**Craig:** Hard to do.

**John:** Something about this last year, I’m having the hardest time remembering new people’s names. It’s just — like the buffer is completely filled. And so, I have a new agent I’m working with on one project and for the life of me, I keep forgetting her name and it’s been so awkward because they’ll be phone conversations where I need to talk about her and I’m like, “Yes. Yes, I was talking with her about — ” Oh, it’s so embarrassing.

**Craig:** You really need to learn that name.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I like that you’re saying it’s just this random thing and not say the fact that you’re getting old.

**John:** Oh, no. It couldn’t be that at all.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think it’s just some bad circuit kind of thing. So once I get the memory upgrade, I’ll be set.

**Craig:** We’ll take care of that. Don’t you worry.

**John:** Maxwell writes, “Who do you think would win in an all-out brawl to the death, John or Craig?”

**Craig:** Huh? Normally, I’m not one to toot my own horn, but I feel like I could kill you.

**John:** I think Craig probably could. Craig has weight on me. He’s also just —

**Craig:** Angry.

**John:** He’s determined. He’s angry. He’s determined.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I think I would have — here’s what it is: I would have that moment of qualm. I was like, “Am I really going to kill him?” And Craig wouldn’t have that moment. He wouldn’t have that pause.

**Craig:** No, it’s the pause is the problem.

**John:** As he’s chocking me out, he would finish it.

**Craig:** No, no. For sure like they would have to — they’d have to do that thing where we’re like, “He’s dead, man, he’s dead. Stop. He’s already dead.” [Laughs]

**John:** They’re pulling you off —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you’re going back to hit him some more.

**Craig:** Exactly. “No, no. I don’t believe it.” I won’t stop ever until he’s dead.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I’m going to go with Craig.

**John:** Yeah. We got 100% agreement on this podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a blog post by Brent Underwood and he has a post called, “What does it take to become a bestselling author?” And he’s a guy who does book consulting and he was very frustrated that on Amazon it is so easy to become the number one bestselling author in any given category because they update their lists continuously.

So unlike The New York Times which has like this methodology how they are like polling all these bookstores across the country and figuring out like what the bestsellers are, Amazon is just looking at their own numbers, like, “Oh, we sold three copies of this book in this one-hour period. It’s the bestseller in this tiny little subcategory.”

And so, this guy’s frustration is that people will, you know, legitimately to some degree claim like, “Oh, I wrote a bestselling book on Amazon.”

**Craig:** Oh, my god. [laughs]

**John:** And it’s because you picked this incredibly narrow category that you sold three copies. And so he does this little exercise where he actually does become the bestselling book about free masonry on Amazon.

So an amusing post that I think our readers will enjoy. And it’s also interesting because as screenwriters we’re never really concerned about rankings in a meaningful way. Like when our movies come out, we want our movies to be number one at the Box Office, but there’s no sort of power rankings. But for print authors, getting on that list is incredibly important and this guy is saying those lists are much more suspect than you’d believe.

**Craig:** There’s an internet meme, one of my favorites, I don’t know if you’re ever seen Identifying Wood.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So it’s a real book and the book is called Identifying Wood and it’s a picture of a man curiously in like a business shirt with a tie and he’s staring at a block of wood through like a jewelers loop.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then, what they’ve added to the bottom is, “Yup, its wood.” [laughs] And I just — like I’m sure that is the bestselling book in the category of wood identification —

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Publications. It’s Identifying Wood. Unbelievable. Well, my One Cool Thing is a sad thing but he was so, so cool. I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about Father Ted on the show, I might have. It’s a great Irish sitcom from the ’90s and it ended so — just ended too soon because the star who played Father Ted died very young. It was a brilliant, brilliant show. It was about this kind of morally challenged priest who was always involved in self-aggrandizing schemes, a little bit like Basil Fawlty kind of. Working in this god forsaken parish on some miserable island called Craggy Island off the coast of Ireland.

So it was like he’d be sent to, you know, the ends of the earth and he shared his home with two other priests. One was named Father Dougal who was a complete idiot and the other one was Father Jack. And Father Jack was played by an actor named Frank Kelly who unfortunately passed away this week or this past week. And Father Jack appeared to be a 70-year-old incredibly alcoholic sexually obsessed degenerate who only said four words, one of which was arse, and he’s disgusting, truly just like you take the bad stereotype of the lecherous priest and just put it on roids and it was — that was Father Jack.

Frank Kelly, by all accounts, an incredibly gentle, beautiful nice man and a wonderful actor, played this loathsome character and he was so good at it. So my One Cool Thing this week is Father Jack from Father Ted and we’ll throw a link in the show notes. You can watch episodes of Father Ted on Hulu.com.

**John:** Fantastic. So while you were talking, I was Googling and because we have transcripts, I was able to pull up that in episode 14 that was your One Cool Thing, was Father Ted.

**Craig:** Oh, fantastic. There you go.

**John:** And so you talked about it there. So if you would like to listen to the Father Ted episode, it is available on the Scriptnotes app, you can download that in either of the App stores.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Segue Man. The premium episodes and all those back episodes are available through Scriptnotes.net as well. So that’s where you get an account. It is $2 a month for all of those back episodes. We also have a few of the 200-episode USB drives that have all of the back episodes, or at least the first 200 back episodes. If you would like a copy that could survive post-apocalypse probably, you could get one of those USB drives.

**Craig:** It has to survive the post-apocalypse as well?

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. So it’s one thing to survive the initial blast, but once the reavers come through and sort of —

**Craig:** So it’s really designed not for the blast at all [laughs] —

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

**Craig:** But for the reavers.

**John:** Yeah, because honestly the initial blast could probably melt the thing. So —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You want to put it in like a fireproof safe. You want to go to 10 Cloverfield Lane and like — and slide it underneath the bed there and then you’re fine.

**Craig:** See that poster by the way, great poster.

**John:** Great poster. Very exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the director of that film is I think a listener of our show and I had coffee with him about a year ago when he was going off to direct some movie and it turned out that was 10 Cloverfield Lane.

**Craig:** How about that? Excellent.

**John:** Very nice. If you would like to harass Craig on Twitter, he is @clmazin. I’m at @johnaugust. I won’t mute you unless you say something terrible to me.

**Craig:** You won’t know.

**John:** We are on iTunes. So please go subscribe to the show in iTunes. It’s great if you want to listen to it at johnaugust.com where we host all this stuff, but it’s even better if you subscribe because that way people know that you are subscribing. Give us a nice little review there. That’s always lovely. We have a Facebook page, too, which we occasionally check. So like us on Facebook and tell your friends that we are a show that you listen to.

Our show, as always, is produced by Stuart Friedel. Our outro this week is by Adam Lastname who’s done several of our best outros. If you have an outro for us, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com with a link to it. That’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. And that’s our show.

Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** I have one last question.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Who edits this show?

**John:** I forgot to mention Matthew Chilelli. Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel, as always, and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yeah. Okay. Now, I feel good.

**John:** That’s very good. Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [David Mamet’s memo to writers of The Unit](http://movieline.com/2010/03/23/david-mamets-memo-to-the-writers-of-the-unit/)
* [Craig’s Twitter feed](https://twitter.com/clmazin)
* [Muting users on Twitter](https://support.twitter.com/articles/20171399)
* Brent Underwood looks at [what it takes to become a “best-selling author”](http://observer.com/2016/02/behind-the-scam-what-does-it-takes-to-be-a-bestselling-author-3-and-5-minutes/)
* [Identifying Wood](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0942391047/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* Father Ted [on Hulu](http://www.hulu.com/father-ted) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Ted), and [Frank Kelly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Kelly)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 14](http://johnaugust.com/2011/how-residuals-work) and other back episodes are available at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) and [on the 200 episode USB flash drive](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-200-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* The poster for [10 Cloverfield Lane](http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTzD7J7Y1hiY1rgen9sd__hgFWkRz0wOr1xamo7pZr7PUKLhfEj)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Lastname ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))