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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/time-lords).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has one bit of swearing, so just a warning if you’re in the car with your kids.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 484 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re going to look at the many ways screenwriters compress, twist, and otherwise manipulate time in their scripts and strategies for doing it effectively. Then we’ll discuss dialogue, both in terms of subtext and continuity. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will discuss which moment in history or prehistory we’d most like to visit and why.

**Craig:** Exciting stuff.

**John:** It’s potentially a flashback episode.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** We could even weave in a Stuart Special.

**Craig:** We’ve actually had a little bit of a pre-discussion about this time thing with our D&D group, so it will be interesting to see how it plays out in our bonus episode for everyone else.

**John:** Yes. Little bits of news. So this sort of snuck in under the wire. This was a December 31st announcement that the DGA sent a letter to WME telling it to get rid of its conflicts. Basically the head of the DGA sent this letter to the head of WME, Ari Greenberg, and said “we believe now is the right time to communicate our strong support for DGA’s efforts to remedy the affiliated production company issue.” So, Craig, I feel torn about this in ways that, I don’t know–

**Craig:** [laughs] I’m not.

**John:** We always reach for ways, you know, of German should have a word for it. But it’s not really German. I feel like the Swedish might have the right word for this feeling of like, yes, it’s the right thing, but it’s not kind of the way you want it to happen.

**Craig:** I’m going to quote this – I don’t know if you saw this amazing interview with this Capitol Hill police officer who had been attacked by the mob.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. And the last bit of it was amazing.

**Craig:** The last bit of it was amazing. And I will go ahead and I guess this will earn us a language warning. But he said some of the people in that mob, realizing that he was in danger of being killed, finally sort of surrounded him and tried to protect him from further harm. And to those people he said, “Thank you but also fuck you for being there.” [laughs] And that’s how I feel about this. I mean, what an enormous expenditure of political capital for the DGA to just show up in the final seconds of the war to announce that they’re in support of the losing side losing. I mean, this is pointless. I don’t quite even – the only thing I think they get out of this is maybe once again earning some sort of respect from the companies for restraint?

And when I say companies I mean the agencies at this point. I don’t know what the point of this is exactly.

**John:** Yeah. And I don’t know where this message actually came from, whether it was directors in the guild saying, hey, we also want this resolved, or where this came from. I want to be an optimist. And so in being an optimist I want to say that one of my great frustrations for two decades has been how little the three guilds have been willing to work together on issues of obvious multiple guild concern. And this was one of them. And the WGA did it all by itself. OK, fine.

But as we head forward into this next decade the role of the streamers and residuals and what that all looks like, we all care about that. It all has to be figured out as sort of one thing. So, maybe this is a small opening, a small glimmer of hope that we can actually coordinate some of our efforts in trying to address the challenges ahead here.

**Craig:** Over here in the pessimist’s corner I think that the DGA has always been more than happy to strategically allow the Writers Guild to be the crazy ones and the aggressive ones and the militant ones. And then pick up the spoils after the battle is over. That’s kind of how it works. They let us go into the coal mine. They don’t have to do stuff. They didn’t like some of this packaging stuff or affiliated production any more than we did, but they also didn’t have to spend anything. Not one of their members had to fire an agent. They just waited for us to take all the body blows, to go through two years or whatever long, a year and a half, or however long this was. Or continues to be. And now, you know, when it’s basically over now they can come in and try and earn some sort of, I don’t know, labor solidarity chit. That’s C-H-I-T.

I don’t see them abandoning that strategy any time soon. Honestly, you know, tip of the hat to them. It’s worked for them for decades. I don’t see them changing.

**John:** Yeah. So basically Craig Mazin maintains his WGA militancy as always. He’s always the one banging that gong, that WGA gong, over all sort of reason and order.

**Craig:** Well, I would say relative to the DGA I am militant. But, yeah, I’m doomed to be caught between the Writers Guild and the DGA. And then there’s SAG. By the way, I’m a member of all three of these unions, so I’m sure someone is going to be yelling at me soon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I don’t know, SAG doesn’t seem to – they just seem to be so inwardly focused. That’s no comment on actors in any way, shape, or form. [laughs] But it just seems so navel-gazey about things. And they have their own issues.

The Writers Guild and the Directors Guild should be allied. Just naturally they should be. The fact that they’re not is…[sighs]

**John:** Yeah. At some point we should probably schedule an episode where we really talk through that because it’s got to be so confusing to anybody who has not been immersed in this for two decades to understand why things are the way they are and how we got to this place.

**Craig:** Well, let’s schedule three episodes to explain why there’s a Writers Guild East and West.

**John:** That’s an easier one, but yes, that same episode or a different episode can talk about the East and the West and how luckily there’s not conflict there.

**Craig:** Anymore.

**John:** They’re doing different things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Some housekeeping, sort of follow up stuff. So many of you are members of the Premium program which is awesome. Thank you for being Premium subscribers. We just added a $49 price point, so you can either go monthly, but some people asked, hey, what if there was an annual price and it would be cheaper. So, sure. So you can get 12 months for the price of 10. If you go to Scripnotes.net you can sign up for that. But thank you for all the folks who do that.

Some people are also confused about the back episodes. So the back episodes are available through Scriptnotes.net. That’s through the new Premium service, so it’s not Libsyn where stuff used to be. It’s all this new thing. So we used to have Premium episodes through Libsyn. Now they’re all through this new service called Supporting Cast. We’ve been on it for a year. It’s gone really well. So thank you for everyone who has joined us over there.

But if you’re writing in with concerns about like, oh, I was looking for this thing on Libsyn, that’s why it’s not there anymore because it’s all moved over to this new service.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** Yeah. And some follow up about bad IP, suggestions for – obviously we have the Rubik’s Cube Movie, the Slinky Movie. We’re always searching for a new thing. Dwayne from Edmonton, Canada wrote in to say, “Yes, I was listening in the shower, but the Showerhead Movie.” And then someone else had a suggestion for the Loofah Movie. I like Loofah Movie more than the Showerhead Movie because Showerhead actually has a function and a purpose. Loofah has some sense of like it’s tough but it’s soft. There’s a little texture to the Loofah.

**Craig:** I don’t love either one of them. Because they feel like–

**John:** I don’t love them either.

**Craig:** They have to live within the realm of possibility. That some thickheaded dingbat in the ancillary IP department of a large corporation might actually say, “You know what? We should make a movie out of this. It has to be something that is theoretically possible. Theoretically.

**John:** And really IP is intellectual property. And the thing about Lucky the Leprechaun is there is intellectual property there. There’s a copyright. There’s a protectable thing that no one else can make that movie. It’s a struggle we have, like you go in and talk to – I went in to talk to a studio a year ago and they’re like, “Oh, we really want to develop blank.” And it’s like, great, that is public IP. That’s not a protectable thing. So what is your plan for going in to do that?

Like Jack and the Beanstalk is public IP. And so anyone can make that, so would you make that? You don’t know.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it has to be something that is possess-able and ownable and exploitable. That’s the crux of the whole awful affair is that something is being exploited in the most cynical manner. So there has to be an exploitable object.

**John:** Speaking of exploitable objects, Beau Willimon, who is head of the WGA East.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** This week signed on to do the Risk movie which is based on a Hasbro property.

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

**John:** And would classically be the kind of thing that we make fun of on the show, because Risk has no characters. It has kind of a general scenario of world domination and archaic names for countries and strategies which are obvious but also crucial to understand of, you know, as a child you might start with an Australia strategy, but any adult who has played the game knows that the South American strategy is better.

**Craig:** Of course, the Venezuelan gambit. Always. Just, yeah. It is strange how the Risk board does sort of undermine what we understand to be where military and strategic value actually is located. The thing about Risk, it’s similar I guess to what they were doing with Battleship, not that it will turn out the same way. They’re just taking a game that was already based on something real and kind of echoing back to the thing it was based on. So Risk was just a board game version of a large WWI style battle for global dominance.

So my guess is that’s what the movie will – I don’t know. Actually I have no idea what the movie will be.

**John:** We’ll talk to Beau about it at some point. There was a vague plan on Twitter for us to be playing an online game of Risk to talk through it. So, who knows? Maybe that will actually happen and we’ll find some good charitable cause to play Risk online so we can celebrate this exploitation of an IP and hopefully do some good in the world.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly.

**John:** Exactly. All right. Let’s get to our marquee topic. So explaining sort of how the sausage is made. We are looking at a shared outline document. I put stuff on as I’m sort of helping to organize this episode. Megana put stuff on and we sort of try to group it together and have it make some sense.

Generally the topic for the week comes out of something either I was working on during the week or something I saw this week. Or Craig will suggest a topic and we’ll sort of flesh it out. In this case it was something I was writing and something I was watching. One scene that I was working on this week it was just too long. And it was clear that it needed to be cut into two scenes. Basically I needed to cut the middle out of it. And cutting the middle out of it is really common craft work that screenwriters need to do. And we haven’t talked very much about that. But basically we need to do a time compression in the middle of it.

There was also a sequence I was working on that I had scenes that were back to back A-B-C, but there was going to be a really significant time jump. So, you know, I was sort of changing the rules of the movie part way through where it had been sort of like scenes were very naturally flowing, like were all within one day, and then suddenly we’re jumping forward weeks. And that’s a thing we haven’t talked about.

So that’s part of why I want to talk about this, but also the movies I watched this week all dealt with time in interesting ways. So Nomadland, which was great, people should see it, has a kind of weird cyclical time thing to it. It uses time really strangely. Tenet has this weird time version. The Lego Movie seemed to take place in this continuous present. It’s just like hyperactively present. The Crown has these giant jumps forward in time between episodes. And we also watched Edge of Tomorrow which is an even better movie than I remember it being.

**Craig:** I love that movie.

**John:** Which is all about sort of looping time. So, time is just a thing that screenwriters do and it’s probably the resource that screenwriters have to control kind of most carefully. So I thought we’d just spend our main topic here just talking about time as screenwriters use it.

**Craig:** We have this craft over here, just been thinking about this because I was talking with somebody who works in plays, so she’s a playwright, and all of her work is on stage. And on stage even though there may be cheats of how time functions, it is all unfolding kind of in real time in front of you because you are actually in the room with these people. You are present in their reality, so you’re all experiencing the tick-tick of time together.

But onscreen we don’t. And in fact the entire exercise of telling a story cinematically is one that involves the manipulation of time. The very notion going all the way back to simple concept of editorial montage. I look at this, and then the camera looks over here, and we understand that there may have been time that passed. It just happens in the blink of an eye like that.

So, it’s not even something that we can sometimes choose to do or dwell on. We are always doing it in every movie no matter what. And that’s separate and apart from the theme of time. Because obviously some movies are about time itself and how it functions. And you have Looper and Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow and things like that. But in any movie, in any movie, I mean, how many times have you sat there and gone, OK, they’re in a space and this scene has concluded, but they must still be in this space again to start a new movement of the scene, meaning time has gone by. But how and why? What do I do to show that there’s been this lapse of time?

**John:** Yeah. And you think like, oh, well here’s ten tricks for doing it. Like sure, maybe there are a list of like you zoom out and you start in a close up of this thing and as you pull back out some more time has passed. Or you’re focused on this thing. There’s tricks, but it’s all hard work.

And before we even get into the jumping forward in time, we should call there are movies that try to take away that grammar. And they stick out because they are so unusual. There’s things like 12 Angry Men which is based on a play which is basically a filmed play which has sort of continuous time because it’s a play. But things like – do you remember the movie Timecode, the Mike Figgis movie that it’s quadrants and they’re all in real time.

1917 has the illusion of real time buried. Clue. Phone Booth. Dog Day Afternoon. United 93. Russian Arc. Where you’re sort of generally moving continuously through a space, and the whole gimmick, the conceit is that you’re not cutting. But those are the exceptions. And most times in cinematic storytelling you are cutting, you are jumping forward in time. And just learn as an audience to accept that as a thing that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. We know when we’re watching these things inherently that we’re going to get a compressed version of time because it’s dramatic. It’s exciting. If it weren’t we wouldn’t go. I mean, 12 Angry Men is a wonderful play and it’s a terrific film. And if it was actually presented in the way a jury deliberation would go it would be profoundly boring. Profoundly boring. With side discussions of irrelevance and people leaving to go to the bathroom and coming back. It just doesn’t work.

We are always twisting it and turning it. And so one of the things that you have to decide tonally is are you going to be naturalistic about it, meaning are you going to kind of hide the seams in between the time jumps, or are you going to have fun with it. Is it going to be something you wear on your sleeve? Like in Go, for instance, the way you move time around, you’re not hiding it, you’re making a virtue of it. But then that is a tone, right? So then the movie is sort of like an elevated heightened reality.

You have to make those decisions upfront about what you’re doing with this stuff. But what you can’t do is just ignore it. You need to be a craftswoman or man when it comes to presenting the disruptions of time to the audience.

**John:** Yeah. So what you’re saying is that you may not write down your plan for how time works in your movie. It’s very unlikely you are going to have a specific time plan. But you are establishing rules very early on in your script for how time works in your movie. Both how it works inside scenes and between scenes. And so let’s talk about some of those rules and assumptions that are going to be there and what you need to think through.

So, an obvious example is like is it continuous. Basically are we existing in real time or the illusion of real time? That you’re never jumping ahead. How big of jumps can you make? Can you jump to later that same day, or the next week? Or can you jump forward a few years. And that’s a very different kind of storytelling if you’re able to jump bigger jumps along the way.

How many clocks have you started ticking? And so I’m thinking back to your movie Identity Thief. And there is a timeline. You’re having characters say aloud that they need to get from here to there in a certain period of time. You’re setting expectations. Different kinds of movies are going to have different clocks ticking. But you’re generally going to set some kind of framework for what needs to happen by what point.

In Big Fish you don’t know when Edward Bloom is going to die, but you know he’s going to die. And so that is the ticking clock where you get the dramatic question of the movie answered before that alarm goes off.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is one of the reasons why I like outlining, to be honest with you. Because when you outline you are confronted by those disconnects of time. And you feel them and they literally help you outline. That’s how you suddenly go, OK, I think that this index card consists of these things that occur. And then it’s time for a new index card, or a new paragraph, or however you’re doing it. Because time is broken. There’s a snap. And I want to justify it. And I want to play around with it. And I also am aware that if I announce a certain kind of timeline that leads to a certain kind of pressure I need everything that follows to fall in line with it.

This is why Chernobyl is only five episodes and not six. Because as I was working on episode two it seemed that the timeline that the story had presented required a certain kind of speed. And even though the events that take place over the course of episode two went over the course of a week, into an hour, if they had gone into two hours of television it would have felt like two or three weeks, which would have felt wrong.

So you just have to have this weird internal fake chronometer that is aligned with what you think people’s experience of the time flow will be as they watch.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s drill into a little bit more on this, because we talked about Chernobyl in the sense of time to a limited degree. But each episode of Chernobyl changes its scale of time a little bit. So that first episode feels close to real time. You’re not slavishly real time. But it’s very, very present tense all the way through it.

The second episode, if everything took place in a matter of hours in the first episode, then you’re a matter of two days in the second episode, and then several weeks, and then months. It kaleidoscopes out. And that was a very deliberate choice really, I assume, from the conception?

**Craig:** Absolutely. And, you know, of note the first episode which does cover, I mean, the flow of events once you get out of the little prologue starts at 1:23 in the morning and it ends roughly at sunrise. That unfolds over about 50 minutes. It feels – so that’s the other thing – even though it feels like real time, it is absolutely not. And juggling some of that stuff and being really specific about it was important because I’m aware that there’s – it’s a funny thing. If you say to people, OK, this is happening at 1:30 in the morning, and then you show them something else happening at 4am, in their minds they’re like that’s really close together. It’s the middle of the night. Not a lot of stuff happening in the middle of the night, therefore it’s like those things are right after another.

If it’s in the middle of a day and it’s 10am and then it’s 2pm, that’s a different vibe. And suddenly you feel like a lot of time has passed. Things have happened. What went on in between those things? You just have to kind of have that weird sense of it.

**John:** Yeah. What you’re describing is time is relative. And not in any special relativity way, but in the sense of general relativity there’s an observer. And time flows according to what the observer sees, in this case what the audience sees. And it’s the audience that sees that two events that happened in the middle of the night are closer together than two events that happen in the middle of the day.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And often one of the things we encounter as screenwriters and as filmmakers is the big shift is like a day scene versus a night scene. A bunch happens between the two of those. And even if they’re back to back in the day scene and night scene that is a challenge.

A thing we often encounter with stories that are happening on multiple coasts is like it’s night in New York but it’s still maybe daytime in Los Angeles or in Australia. That’s confusing. That’s weird to see. And you try to avoid those situations because it just feels weird and wrong for the audience.

We know that they’re in different time zones, and yet if two characters are having a conversation they should both be in daylight or at nighttime they shouldn’t be split between the two of them.

**Craig:** Isn’t that funny? And there are times where people, it’s like spy movies and such where you have people in Washington, DC talking to an operative in Malaysia. Well, that’s about 12 hours apart. That’s like flip AM and PM. You will almost always see one of those people inside. Because you don’t want to see the light/dark thing. You don’t want to see somebody going night to – it is really confusing to us. Like the way our own circadian rhythms get biologically confused by jetlag. We just can’t handle it. It feels wrong and it takes us out of the moment, which is of course the thing we’re always trying to not do.

**John:** One of the other rules you’re establishing in whatever you’re creating is travel time. And so a show I loved deeply as I watched it is Alias. And as the series went along suddenly she could be kind of anywhere magically right away. They never showed her traveling someplace, so it’s like she’s in Los Angeles. She’s in Europe. She’s back. And somehow it’s still the same day. Travel time just sort of went away. And early seasons of Game of Thrones I felt like it just took forever to get from Winterfell down to King’s Landing. And then suddenly like, oh, you’re just there.

And, you know, in some ways that is just the collision of all the transitional scenes. Weeks could have been passing during that time. But it also just felt like they changed the rules in terms of how quickly you could move from place to place because they didn’t – it wasn’t serving them to show the travel time that would be involved.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think that there is a boredom factor to repeating the kind of expanded time. So, it is interesting to watch a slow journey if it’s new to you. If it’s not, I’m all in favor of just like skip ahead, skip ahead. Fast forward. So I don’t have to watch the same boring journey again. No question, in the early seasons of Game of Thrones getting to The Wall took forever, which felt right. And traveling, it seemed impossible to get from Essos to Westeros. It was like a massive amount of land and ocean to cover. And as you got deeper in and closer to the end then things started going faster because you had experienced the journeys already.

And, yeah, was there some time things where you’re like on paper you have broken your own time travel rules? Yes. And you just kind of have to sometimes take those hits because when you are as deep into that world as those guys were after whatever it was, 80 episodes, it’s really hard to stay consistent and keep the story moving. It’s just hard to keep that timeline consistent.

**John:** Now so a lot of what we’ve been talking about so far has been scene-by-scene, or sequence-by-sequence, and sort of the stuff that you can look at in an outline form and figure out, OK, this is how we’re handling time. But let’s zoom in and talk about time within a scene. Because even as we’re talking to a playwright, a playwright is optimizing dialogue and moments within a scene so that things that would normally take place over four hours are happening in ten minutes. There’s an optimization that’s natural to any kind of dramatic writing where you’re sort of getting the tightest, best version of these things.

What I find to be so different as a screenwriter than other forms of writing is that we have this expectation of just how long a scene can be and how much has to be accomplished, and so often we have to be doing really delicate surgery to cut out half a page, to jump over some natural moments that might happens so we can get to that next thing. We’re always just trying to take out the stitches and see if we can just sew a little bit tighter. And that is part of it.

One of the things I’ve learned to do much better over the course of 20 years of doing this is recognizing when I can’t actually just make this – when I can’t tighten it and when I need to just actually get rid of this scene or approach it from a completely different way because there’s no short version of this scene that’s going to handle what I needed to do.

**Craig:** This is why the classes that aspiring screenwriters should be taking are not, in my opinion, screenwriting classes. Are we going to talk by the way about the crazy QAnon screen guy? Maybe next week. Because that was something else.

**John:** Oh yeah. When we have a little bit more about that we’ll do some of that.

**Craig:** We’ll get around to him next week. But I think the classes that screenwriters or aspiring screenwriters should be taking are editing classes. Because editing is where the time compression and expansion rubber meets the road. And you begin to see exactly how flexible or inflexible something is. There is a point where the material will snap. And it will not feel correct in terms of the manipulation of time. And that tensile strength, that flexibility, is different depending on tone and pace. But you’ll see it in there.

And the more you can get a rhythm of how that functions in an edit the more you will be able to anticipate that as you’re writing ahead of the edit. You will know that you can get away with certain things and you will also know you can’t get away with certain things.

I’ve spent so much time in editing rooms. So much time in editing rooms. If there’s one thing I can point to that has made me a better writer than I used to be over the years it’s the amount of time editing scenes of things I wrote.

**John:** Mm-hmm. And recognizing like, oh, I thought I needed that or basically you have to acknowledge that like it made sense why you did that on the page. And then when you actually see it with physical people in the blocking that they have, that moment just can’t last. We don’t have space for that in the movie we actually made. So therefore we need to come into that scene later or leave earlier.

So let’s talk about some of the classic techniques we do use for trimming time, which is also trimming pages. Because how we sort of measure our time is pages. Come in as late as you can. Leave as early as you can. So basically what is the latest moment you could start this scene. Can you start the scene with the person answering the question rather than the question being asked? Can you get out on a look rather than on that last line? What is the moment you can jump out of this thing? How can you not ask the question that a person would naturally ask? How can you get from A to B as cleanly as possible and still have an interesting scene?

Some of the challenges we face though is you can optimize a scene so much that it’s just not interesting. It’s quick. The story has made forward progress but there’s nothing interesting in that scene itself.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think that, while the “get in as late as you can, leave as early as you can” advice is probably very good advice for early screenwriters who tend to overwrite, once you are getting better at things it’s dangerous. Because there are human moments in the beginnings and ends of things. Sometimes just the way somebody walks up to somebody else in and of itself is dramatic and sad or exciting. And it allows you to set a context for what comes next so that you don’t feel like you’re just kind of getting the choruses of the hit songs on the album, but that you’re getting something a little bit more rich.

Shoe leather is the term we use in production for people that are walking.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Traveling pointlessly from one spot to another is considered the cardinal sin. There’s a moment in Chernobyl that we looked at a billion times where Jared Harris has, they’ve taken a break in the trial and he sees Shcherbina is sitting a bit a ways away on a bench and he walks over to him. And the question was how much walking do we need. I think initially in Johan’s first cut he just sort of materialized next to him and I was like, well, no. We can’t do that.

But, on the other hand, do we actually want to show him doing the full freaking walk? No. So can we show some of the walk that feels meaningful and weighty and just trust that the kind of, I don’t know, human aspect of his little travel there will be enough to kind of cover the manipulation of time? And it seemed like it was.

But there is definitely a screenwriting class version of that scene that begins with those two guys just sitting next to each other already. Like they went out there. They’re sitting next to each other. There’s a pause. And then one of them starts talking. But, you know, I like a little windup. What can I say? I’m a windup kind of guy.

**John:** Yeah. But you have to really make that decision. Does seeing one character sit down next to the next character change the dynamics of the scene?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If it does, then yes, you should write it and you should aim to shoot it that way. If it doesn’t really matter then maybe you do just have him sitting there because you don’t think about sort of the editorial work that the reader is doing. But just that sentence of like “walks over and sits down next to the person,” we’re filming that in our minds and it’s changing our perception of what is the urgency, what’s actually happening. Getting to that moment more quickly may be the right choice.

Definitely I think you and I are both urging writers to write like it’s the edit. And write the version of the movie that you’re actually seeing in your head. And you may make different decisions working with a director. You may decide to make some different decisions. But as close as you can come to this best version you can make inside your head and get that on paper the more likely you’re going to have a successful version of that scene and hopefully you’re whole movie.

**Craig:** Yup. It is one of those places where you get to show off a little bit of creative freedom. A little bit of chaos. Even shows that you might think of as very well organized temporally like say Breaking Bad is full of time tricks. Full of them. There’s that one season where multiple show openings were of a pool and a teddy bear floating in it. And you didn’t know why. And none of it made sense until the end when it was revealed to be a function of something that hadn’t even yet occurred at the first episode of that season. Because they had no problem messing with time and being creatively chaotic with it.

But it’s got to pay off. It’s got to be worth it in the end.

**John:** Yeah. You have to have confidence and you have to – that confidence has to be built out of trust in your audience and your audience trusting you. We always talk about the social contract between the writer and the reader. It’s like give me your attention and I will make it worth your while. And time and use of time well is one of those aspects of trust.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** All right. Let’s go to some listener questions because some of our questions actually do tie into this topic. Here is where we bring on our producer, Megana Rao, who asks the questions that our listeners write in with. Megana, what have you got for us this week?

**Megana Rao:** All right. So first up, Don writes, “I know you’ve talked about continuous dialogue before, but I wanted to take a crack at changing your minds.”

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**Megana:** “Wouldn’t it just be easier for everyone to stop using continuous dialogue altogether? Does it really help that much? I can understand the argument that is useful at the start of a new page, but I can’t seem to find any usefulness outside of that. Even if the dialogue is broken up by action, I assume the average person doesn’t get totally lost without the use of CONT’D. Continued.”

**Craig:** I must admit, Don, I’m a little confused. Because you don’t have to change my mind at all. I don’t use CONT’D for dialogue, for continuous dialogue. I haven’t used it ten years.

**John:** Yeah. So CONT’D is a convention that I kind of feel is going away to a degree, but there’s two kinds of CONT’Ds to talk about. And it’s a thing that we encounter a lot with Highland because Highland does one kind and doesn’t do another kind. So let’s talk about what the difference is.

There’s CONT’D if a character is talking at the bottom of a page. Let’s say they have a long speech and it jumps to the next page. Software will automatically mark it CONT’D there to make it clear that it’s one block of dialogue that just got split between two different pages. That I have no problem with. I think Craig you don’t have a problem, too.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Because it’s referring to like it’s just the software doing a thing to make it clear that this really is all one block of dialogue.

**Craig:** If you didn’t put it there you would not know that the next bit of dialogue was meant to be part of a continuous speech.

**John:** Yeah. So that – no one really has big issues with that.

**Craig:** That’s all good.

**John:** What we’re talking about though is Craig starts talking and then there’s a scene description line and then Craig keeps talking after that. And Highland does not automatically put that CONT’D in there. Final Draft does want to put that CONT’D in there. That was just a philosophical point from my side, because software wise we could do that. It’s just so often I’ve had to manually delete those back when I was using Final Draft because it really wasn’t the same idea, it wasn’t the same thought. I didn’t mean for it to be one continuous thing.

So, if I meant it to be one continuous thing I could type the CONT’D there to show that it really was one thought. But sometimes three different things happen between those two, so it really is not the same line, the same thought. It shouldn’t be continuous.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t matter. Basically, Don, what I’m saying is you’re right. I don’t see the value in it. It feels very format-y to me. Something that just was sort of vaguely secretarial in the creation of the classic Warner Bros screenplay format or whatever, the [unintelligible] format was. To me it’s literally changing the character’s name. I hate it. Just let them talk. They’re saying something, then a thing happens, and then they say something. And it isn’t continuous. If it were continuous I would make the choice to not break the dialogue up. There is some sort of natural pause, break, or change that has occurred in between those two things.

So, I don’t use CONT’D myself. And so you don’t have to fight me on it.

**John:** Nope. I will say there have been times, because I don’t use it, there have times in table readings where I’ve noticed that an actor doesn’t get their next line because they’re expecting like, oh, if there’s another line of dialogue it wouldn’t be my line of dialogue. But they can get over that. Or they can highlight their own script. It’s fine. It’s not a big deal.

**Craig:** They can figure it out.

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

**Megana:** Danielle asks, “I would love any feedback on how much to include in therapy scenes. My protagonist seeks professional through a three-month rehab program in the third act which greatly moves them forward in their healing journey. I have plenty of dialogue that navigates what healed them, but not sure how much to include and when is too much.”

**John:** So this is, again, a question of time. How are you using your limited resources of pages to show this three months? And you’re going to make elisions and choices about sort of what we’re seeing. Are sessions individualized? Is dialogue being stretched out over the course of multiple sessions? Is the dialogue extending over other scenes that show passages of time? There’s a lot going on here. Craig, what tips would you offer for Danielle as she’s thinking about how to do this?

**Craig:** Well, I think first of all I would need to know what the nature is of the relationship between the patient and the therapist, or the rehab specialist. Because if it’s a very important relationship then I want to see more of it. There are movies where that relationship is central like Ordinary People or Good Will Hunting. Then there are situations where those relationships aren’t as important, but they are kind of backgrounded and they are used as these sort of subtle markers of progress. In Honey Boy, for instance, there are some therapy scenes. They’re very, very truncated and they’re really meant to just show where a character is in a given moment in his journey.

So, it depends on what you want us to focus on and listen to. The thing about therapy scenes is they’re always, of course, there are great examples, even better than a jury deliberating, which is usually very, very boring and then we just show the good parts, same with therapy. Therapy is circular. It can be boring. It can go backwards. It can be frustrating. And when a movie show – they show this kind of glamorized highlight reel of it all that often concludes with someone saying the one thing that makes everybody go, “Oh my god, I get it now. I’m healed.” Which is not what therapy actually is.

But there could be some key moments or some big reveals or things. So, I guess my only advice would be tailor the length to the significance of the relationship between the patient and the therapist. And try and avoid over-glamorize pitfalls if you can.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not technically therapy, but I go back to Marriage Story and the scene with Scarlett Johansson and Laura Dern which is a long scene and plays in continuous time. But the choice to have that be one scene rather than a bunch of little small scenes that add up to that scene was so smart and so well done because it allowed for a continuous emotional progression within a scene. It made it its own moment and would not have worked so successfully had it been broken into smaller bits.

And so I’m going to throw two contrasting bits of suggestions here. One is to look at sort of like if you sort of shatter it apart and just take the pieces and thread them through a period that covers time, where we can see progress of the character, where you’re not sort of in one scene for a lot of it, that’s a possibility. Or to do this Marriage Story approach where you really anchor it around one central scene that is really doing the work of this thing and not try to break it into three scenes of equal length which I suspect is going to be the least effective way to handle it.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** What’s next, Megana?

**Megana:** Great. So Ash from London asks, “My writing and directing partner and I are 99% in synch. But recently we have both noticed that we might read the same dialogue in a totally different way, inferring different subtext, tone, or intended performance in ways that are quite drastic and effect the interpretation of the scene. It’s a bit like the relationship between reading the lyrics to a song which seem mundane and flat on the page and then listening to the final piece of music. I feel like I’ve suddenly become aware of a massive limitation of the medium and I find myself panicking about people reading the dialogue I write in the worst possible way. What’s happening here? Am I OK? Am I having some kind of existential crisis? Or am I struggling with something that everyone struggles with?”

**Craig:** No, Ash, you’re not OK. This is all you. Of course, what are you discovering, you’re discovering that this is what we are. This is part of our humanity is that we will interpret things in different ways. And it’s actually good news. It means that this stuff is more extensible than you think it is. It’s more rich than you might have thought it was. Yes, it is possible and it happens all the time that people read a line and go, “Why would you – this is so dumb.” And you’re befuddled by that reaction and you say what do you mean. And they say, “Because of this.” And you go, oh, no, no, no, you don’t understand. My apologies. It means this. This is the intention. And then then go, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, OK.”

That will happen to you a thousand times. So, in a weird way kind of almost enjoy it when it happens. Like my whole thing is I let people just keep talking. I swear to god. I do. It’s mean, but I just let them keep going until they finally exhaust themselves with their complaining. And then I say, well, it actually meant this. You were just stressing the wrong word. I would stress this word. And then they go, “Oh, oh, OK. Oh god.” And then I can see that they’re embarrassed. And I like that. Because I’m bad.

**John:** Ash, one thing that will help you is at some point you will be in casting for a project and you will see 30 actors read the same scene. And you’ll recognize, oh wow, there are so many different ways to read those exact same lines of dialogue. And you can tell which ones match your expectations and which ones don’t match your expectations and which ones are even better and cooler than your expectations. That’s great. That’s actually performance.

The writing is a plan. It’s a guideline for things that actors are actually going to say. And their performance does really matter. And their intention really does matter. So, there’s nothing wrong with what’s happening. It is super common.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s good. I like it. When somebody something and it’s better than what you imagined, that’s a wonderful surprise. And it also jogs the material out of the expected. Because if it can surprise you, imagine what it’s going to do to the audience.

**John:** So I will tell you, my first experience with this was with Go. And we were having a very hard time casting the role of Gaines, the drug dealer, Todd Gaines the drug dealer. To the point where I was sitting through all these auditions like did I just write a bad scene? Is this a bad character? Can this not work? And then Timothy Olyphant came in and read it. It was like, oh, that’s what it’s supposed to be. That is actually – it does actually make sense as a character because this person in front of me was able to do this role and it does actually track and make sense.

So, don’t worry too much about it. That said, you and your writing partner who are theoretically writing the same thing disagree on sort of what these lines are supposed to be, there may be something that’s not happening right in your communication with each other, in how you’re establishing the voices of these characters to begin with. Because as you’re reading through a script if a character has an established voice it should be pretty unambiguous how a given line is going to sound or what the intention of a given line should be. So, watch for that. Maybe you’re not establishing voices especially clearly.

And then I’d say one technique to look at, and this is a thing I see a lot in J.J. Abrams scripts, is in the parenthetical there will be quotes with a line for what the line is meant to say. So if the line was, “You’re stupid,” but in the parenthetical it says, “I love you so much.” Just basically giving kind of like a line reading in the parenthetical. It’s a thing you see more in TV than you do in features, but it’s available as an option if there’s a specific line that is really not what it seems like it is just texturally on the page.

**Craig:** Word.

**John:** Word. Let’s do one more question, Megana.

**Megana:** All right. Great. So, Lawant from the Netherlands writes, “What makes a story more suitable to live action versus animation? I know the way the screenplay gets written is often a little dissimilar to the way a live action screenplay does. I also know that there are often logistics and economics at play. So do you feel that there are certain stories that inherently lend themselves better to one medium or the other?”

**John:** Yeah. So the obvious thing is if most of the characters in your story are human beings, live action is a really natural good choice. If most of them are not human beings, they are animals, they are other kinds of creatures, animation is a better choice.

Obviously we can do things in sort of hybrid ways that are between the two that are new, and exciting, and different. We can redo The Lion King in “live action.” But we all know what we’re talking about. If it can be filmed with human actors, then it should probably be live action.

But that said, the nature of certain kinds of stories that we tend to do more often in animation than in live action. So, mythic stories, simple fairy tale kind of things. Things that feel like they should have Disney songs in them are generally better off to be thought of as animation. But just this past year there was a project that we took out which was going to be live action, it was going to be sort of Mandalorian-y kind of shot, and ultimately the decision was, you know what, this is probably going to be animation instead just for the logistics of it all. And it was the kind of story where you could kind of go either way and we decided to go into animation.

So, I don’t have hard and fast rules, but the characters and the world are what’s going to dictate whether it’s live action or animation to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. The only other consideration may, Lawant, is that if your story is what I would call pure story, meaning it is so connected to a really sharply engineered super high concept plot, then it might be better suited for animation. Because in animation you can do anything. You can show anywhere and do anything. So if you have this pure story that really requires very specific plotting and structure, you might want to think about it as an animated tale because you’ll just have more latitude.

**John:** There are Pixar movies that you could do live action, but they really kind of wouldn’t work the same way. There’s certain formulas and there’s certain heroic journey stuff that it just feels better in animation than it feels in live action. And so really just be honest with yourself about the character goals and sort of what the story wants to be and you probably will feel if it’s animation or if it’s live action.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Cool. Megana, thank you for these questions.

**Megana:** Great. Thank you guys so much.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Before I get to my One Cool Thing I have to do follow up on Craig’s One Cool Thing from last week which was There is No Game which is a terrific – it’s a game, spoiler, it’s a game. But really, really well done. I haven’t finished it yet, but do check that out because Craig was actually right this time.

**Craig:** Actually.

**John:** I don’t play all of the games that he recommends, but this time I thought it really was terrific.

**Craig:** It’s a good one.

**John:** Two small things for me to recommend this week. First is Some Kind of Heaven, which is a new documentary that came out this past week. It’s about The Villages in Florida which is this retirement community. And it is a great documentary following several people who live at The Villages. Again, I don’t want to do spoilers. But we’ll put a link to the trailer. But if you went in cold I think it would honestly be the best exposure to it because it’s great. I want to have the filmmaker on at some point to talk through his use of characters and how you create detailed character moments and arcs when you only have these real people for limited periods of time. It’s just really well done. So, I’d urge you to check that out.

But my general One Cool Thing if you want to waste some time is Microsimulation of Traffic which is this German website. And it basically – it’s this animation where you have all these cars in this highway system and you can drag in little obstacles. You can sort of see how the traffic flow goes. I’ve always been really curious sort of how you optimize cars getting from point A to point B. And it’s just a really smartly done version of that. So it’s not Sim City. It’s very much more sort of mathematically-driven in terms of how you optimize traffic flow. And I wasted a good hour on it. And I think you will enjoy it.

**Craig:** There was an article years ago that someone did about traffic in Southern California and what causes traffic and what would alleviate traffic on the freeways. And one of the things that kind of blew my mind was he said one of the biggest impacts on traffic flow is sun.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So you’re kind of going down a hill or something and there’s sunlight in your eyes. You will slow down. And everybody that slows down a little bit causes this ripple effect in the back. The other one is how many cars can you see ahead of you. If you can see a lot of cars ahead of you a lot of times it seems like there’s more traffic, so you slow down. And if you can’t, it doesn’t, and you speed up. It was just like we suck is basically – it was just another one of those your brains are bad stories.

**John:** Yeah. I will say a thing I’ve always read about and never sort of seen until I tried this on the traffic simulator is ghost crashes. Basically there will be an accident or something and then there’s a bump in the rug and there’s this traffic jam that persists for hours after an accident has been cleared. And this simulator makes it really clear why that’s there and why running traffic breaks, which is where the police cars turn their lights and very slowly do these S shapes to sort of slow down all the traffic clears the break.

And so it was fun to see that like, oh, it is actually just jams are sometimes just the echoes of things that happened a long time before.

**Craig:** Exactly. I like that. Ghost crashes. A couple of One Cool Things this week. This one is sort of a cool thing. They’re related. The first one is definitely cool. We announced, The Hollywood Reporter announced, that The Last of Us has its pilot director. Originally we were going to be doing this with Johan Renck who I did Chernobyl with. Johan, like so many people who is working on things, had a movie that got delayed by Covid and so suddenly the schedules couldn’t line up. So some big shoes to fill in terms of where to go and who to talk to.

And there is a film, this is, by the way, again not to be like – I don’t want to sound like a butt-kisser here, but HBO is pretty cool. Like we’re making this big show. It costs a lot of money. And we come to them and say, “You know who we want? We want a guy named Kantemir Balagov who had made a small film called Beanpole in Russian, in Russia.” And they were like, “Yeah, let’s do it.”

It’s awesome. Beanpole is beautiful. I’m 99% certain that we are also going to be using the cinematographer that Kantemir partnered with. She is also remarkable. Her name is Kseniya Sereda. And it is stunning and heartbreaking and gorgeous. It showed up on a ton of Top 20 of 2020 lists. I’m not a huge list person as everybody knows, but the Top 20 of 2020 lists have been fascinating because so few movies came out that almost all of them are these really obscure and very cool little movies.

So, we’re very happy about that. Kantemir is a fantastic guy. Super talented guy. And he speaks English. But, he speaks Russian better than he speaks English. So, as we’ve been communicating I’ve been trying to find a translation solution, sort of an inline translation solution. I mean, ideally I would be writing an email and something would be mirroring in another window in Russian. That would be incredible. Not quite that simple. I mean, I can sort of go on Google and type it into that window and see what happens.

What I’m using now is something called Mate. M-A-T-E. Which is kind of like an integrated translation system. Its interface is a little funky at times. Sometimes the formatting goes away. And sometimes it comes back. So I’m just – it’s a pretty cool thing. It’s a pretty cool thing. But if somebody out there has an awesome translation solution, sort of a frictionless translation solution for me for English to Russian and Russian to English I’d love to hear about it.

**John:** Nice. Yeah. Send those suggestions in. And that’s our show for this week. So, as always, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Timothy Vajda. We could use some more outros. And so a reminder of what an outro is, because I was looking through the folder and there’s a bunch of pieces of music that are good that really have nothing to do with Scriptnotes at all. So, the only requirement we give is that they be cool and they somehow go Bum-bum-bum-bum-bump, or the minor version of that. But there’s pieces in there that like that’s a cool piece of music but it has nothing to do with Scriptnotes. It does not have our theme. So the only requirement is it has to use the theme in some way. And I want you to keep pursuing excellence and giving us great outros because we really appreciate it.

You can send us links to those outros at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts. You can get them at Cotton Bureau.

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

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on time travel.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** OK, Craig, this is very much a dorm room stoner question.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** But if you could travel back to any point in history, or pre-history, and go there as a tourist, so we’ll start with the tourist rules where you go and you know you can come back to the present time. What are some places you’d like to visit in history and why?

**Craig:** Yeah. So we put this to our D&D, or you put it to our D&D group as well, and immediately because it’s a D&D group, which is just obsessed with the details and potential loop holes and possible ways to gain the system, there were certain questions in there, but they were reasonable. So let’s also presume that I’m not going to be suffering. There’s not going to be a bad case of bubonic plague or something like that. I’m not going to be immediately burned as a witch because of my clothing and so on and so forth.

So then the question is where do you go back in time. What are you most interested in seeing? And, you know, I don’t know how much of this reflects on who I am or what my interests are, but I suppose – and again let’s also presume you can understand every language.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Maybe because my dad was an American history teacher and that was the bulk of the history that I was taught, I think I would want to go back to those very hot days in July, late June and early July, where Americans were debating whether or not they should be declaring independency from Great Britain in Philadelphia. Because in that discussion there was not only the momentous occasion of our independence, but there was also the first real consequential debate over slavery. It had begun already. And it wasn’t going to get any better or any less complicated or any less morally repugnant. And would ultimately fester and explode into the Civil War and then into Jim Crow and then of course we still are struggling with its legacy today.

So all of that’s there plus Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. It’s pretty – I think I would like it. That’s where I would go.

**John:** Absolutely. So both around the Declaration of Independence, but also figuring out the Constitution are just, are just such seminal moments and we have many accounts of it, but we have no one who can sort of tell us what it’s like to be there and sort of look at it with modern eyes in ways that, you know, just to actually physically be there would be great.

And I guess we’re sort of playing – we’re not playing Terminator rules, so you can’t go back and change a thing. You can just sort of go back and witness it and really see what it was like.

**Craig:** Fly on the wall.

**John:** Fly on the wall. And so fly on the wall, two points in history and prehistory that I’m really curious to see. Everything happening around Jesus’s time. And sort of like what Jesus was like in his time. What the sense of this small little group was like and did it feel like it was the start of something bigger because I guess I just always wondered to what degree civilization was primed and ready to have this explosion of a religion that would take over everything, or it just was lucky.

And to what degree, who he was individually and how charismatic. And sort of what it felt like in that time would be fascinating. So, that’s one thing, but I would also really be curious to come to North American continent in a time before European settlers arrive and just see what it was like because I think I was definitely raised on this myth that North America was just sort of this empty continent, that there really wasn’t anybody here. And that clearly was not the case. It was actually a pretty busy and full place. And the myth of it being empty was sort of foisted upon us.

So while there weren’t permanently built cities in the way that we saw in Europe, there were actually a lot of people here. And I was just really curious what that was like. And we sort of lost all of that because there wasn’t written language just in that sense of what it felt like here before the Europeans came.

**Craig:** Cleaner.

**John:** Yeah. Probably cleaner.

**Craig:** Much, much cleaner.

**John:** Yeah. We made a mess of things.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, changing the rules a little bit, if you could go back to one moment in your life, so we’ve always gone back pre-us, but is there a moment in your life where you’d like to look at yourself?

**Craig:** Oh, oh god. I mean, no. I don’t want to see any of that.

**John:** I don’t know that I want to see any of that either. Because I think I would just – it would just be very wincey to sort of see the dumb choices you make. One of the reasons why I like the show Pen15 so much is that you have these really talented actors going back to play themselves at 15 years old and just how unbearably awkward you are those early ages. And so if I couldn’t change stuff, if I couldn’t encourage the younger version of me to do the things that are so obvious to do in retrospect, I guess I wouldn’t go back and want to watch any of it.

**Craig:** No. I’m embarrassed by all of it. Everything. Everything up to this moment. It’s a tragedy.

**John:** I will say having lost my mom last month there are definitely moments in my mom’s life and in my dad’s life that they’ve given me some reporting on, but I just don’t really have a very good sense of who they were at different moments. So the sort of Back to the Future fantasy of like getting to see your parents when they were teenagers or early 20-somethings would be neat. It’s not Jesus in his time neat. But it would be illuminating.

**Craig:** Yeah. I always feel like if you could get a good look at your parents when they were young it would be a little bit like getting a peek into the cockpit of a plane and seeing how drunk the pilot was. It would give you a bad feeling. Like there but for the grace of god. Like this person should not have been in charge of me at all. At all. Who put this guy behind the seat of an airplane or the wheel of an airplane or whatever you call it, the helm? Who put this guy behind the helm of an airplane? And who put this guy in charge of a child?

And if my kids could look back and see how absolutely clueless I was at so many points they would probably feel exactly the same.

**John:** So a thing I noticed this last year is that as I look back at photos of my daughter there’s continuities and there’s also discontinuities. And I don’t perceive sort of one continuous evolution of a kid from point A to where she is right now. There’s stages. And of course there were small shifts – there were shifts between those stages and there were transition points, but it’s almost like she’s a whole different species than who she was as a younger child.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And sometimes I feel lost for – I look over these photos and I feel lost for who that kid was. And obviously she’s still right in front of you, but she’s not really right in front of me. That younger toddler who was so neat in her own specific way is gone.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is the tragedy of watching your kids grow up. There is a progression that you can see. And you can follow it with a line. And to tie back into our topic in the main show about time and how time can sometimes just break, there is an end of childhood and there’s the beginning of this other thing and there’s a break. And that break is traumatic for everybody. But what happens on the other side of it is a different person entirely emerges. Just a different human being. And it is a struggle sometimes for everyone to wrap their minds around the fact that your kid is gone.

I mean, memory and time claim all children. All of them. And what is left in their place you have to come to accept. And if you can, then there’s this whole other potentially wonderful relationship with them for the rest of your life. But sometimes you have this kid and everything is great and there’s the jump and then they come out on the other side a person and some children and parents don’t like each other anymore after that point and they go their separate ways. It happens.

**John:** And a huge source of tension between parents and kids is the parent not willing to acknowledge that it’s not their small child anymore.

**Craig:** That’s right. There’s been a change.

**John:** It’s reality. And tying this back to sense of time and screenwriters as being masters of time, if you haven’t seen Boyhood, the Richard Linklater movie, this is a great opportunity to see Boyhood because that is an experiment in which you follow a kid through this difficult time and you see both the continuities and discontinuities of a kid aging. And a great example of approaching a project with a plan, with an intention, and then having to adjust based on the actual realities of what happens.

So, I loved Boyhood. I thought it was just terrific.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Cool. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [DGA tells WME to get rid of its conflicts](https://deadline.com/2021/01/dga-sides-with-writers-guild-in-its-dispute-with-wme-over-endeavor-content-1234672501/)
* Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium at [Scriptnotes.net](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/), with a new annual pass for $49!
* [Some Kind of Heaven](https://www.somekindofheaven.com/)
* [Microsimulation of Traffic Flow](https://traffic-simulation.de/roundabout.html)
* [Beanpole](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10199640/) film
* [Mate](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/language-translator-by-mate/id1073473333) translation app integration
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* [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)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Timothy Vajda ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/484standard.mp3).

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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