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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 538 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode is something new for us. One of our listeners, Jake Kelley, he wrote in to say that, “Many of my favorite episodes are the ones focused on craft, yet I find myself drawn to those discussions on being a screenwriter, which offer so much insight.” I put this show together to be somewhat the antithesis of a craft compendium. It won’t help you on your script right now, but offers a way to becoming a rounded and mature creative thinker. Jake provided the episodes and time codes for his vision of what this episode could be. Megana and Matthew took those suggestions and a few other bits to come up with this compendium of our conversations, not about screenwriting per se, but being a screenwriter.

If you’re Premium member, you of course have access to the backup episodes, all 537 of them. Today, Premium members should stick around for my conversation with Jake about why he picked these clips and how Scriptnotes has influenced his work as a visual artist, so enjoy. This first clip comes from Episode 6: How kids becoming screenwriters.

What we might talk about today is how people become screenwriters. I don’t mean how to become a screenwriter, because there’s countless books you can buy on any shelf in a Borders to tell you how to be–

Craig Mazin: I would take my microphone off and leave this podcast.

John: Another podcast we’ll talk about the so-called experts and our fury about some of the screenwriting books out there. Rather than talking about how to become a screenwriter, I want to talk about how a person becomes a screenwriter and the paths to that, because if you talk to a professional tennis player and say like, “Hey, how did you become a professional tennis player?” they’ll say something like, “Oh, when I was eight I started playing tennis, and I just played tennis for forever, and now I’m a professional tennis player.” It’s not that they were 21 and they picked up a racket for the first time and became a professional tennis player. That just doesn’t happen. Or if you talk to a doctor and you say like, “Hey, how did you become a doctor?” maybe they were interested in medicine growing up or maybe thought, “I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up,” but they didn’t really do anything serious about becoming a doctor until they went to college, and really until they went to medical school. They might’ve studied the sciences they needed, they got prerequisites they needed, but they didn’t do anything serious to become a doctor until quite late in the game.

Screenwriting is not really either one of those paths. There’s not a thing you could point to where you say, “I’m an eight-year-old who wants to become a screenwriter.” Not only does that not really happen, there’s not even a meaningful way to think about that.

Craig: True, true. It’s the difference between the word “career” and the word “vocation.” “Vocation,” the “voc” root is designed to imply a calling, that you’re called to this somehow by–

John: An evocation.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. Screenwriting falls into that area. You have this innate desire to tell stories, but when does that come, where does that come from, and how do you know you have it, and all that?

John: Malcolm Gladwell famously has been trumpeting this idea of 10,000 hours, that if you look at people who are very successful in any field, you can track back and they’ve put in 10,000 hours of practice to get up to that point. It applies particularly well to sports figures, but even other professions, like musicians and other artists. You can really see that they’ve put in the 10,000 hours of time to get up to their mastery of something. No screenwriter I know, at least no screenwriter I know that’s ever getting started, has put in 10,000 hours of writing screenplays. That just doesn’t happen. You don’t start writing screenplays when you’re six.

Craig: That’s right. If you’ve put in 10,000 hours of screenwriting and you’re still not a professional screenwriter, you suck.

John: That is true. You’re sad, and you probably suck.

Craig: You’re sad and you suck.

John: It’s just a tragedy that’s happened there, because 10,000 hours is a lot of time.

Craig: That’s a huge chunk of your life.

John: I’m not gonna open my little Solver program and tell you exactly how many days and weeks and moments of Seasons of Love that is, but it’s a lot of Seasons of Love to get to 10,000 hours. As I’ve thought more about how did I become a screenwriter, where did I get that experience… The first thing I wrote wasn’t great, but it wasn’t, like I said, I put 10,000 hours in between my first screenplay and Go. Go was a pretty good screenplay. It’s that I think I can make a good argument that I actually had my 10,000 words of experience and exposure in there. It wasn’t all writing, and it certainly didn’t look like screenwriting.

My first memory of this storytelling kind of stuff that I do now is, as a boy I would often… First off, I always woke up really early, and my parents wouldn’t let me come out of my room, so I had to stay in my room and play with all my toys. I would always line up my little toys. There’d be two rival faction armies. Actually, not really armies. They were sort of like Battle of the Network Stars. They’d be on the other side of the river and they’d have to come some competitions and things. I’d always have my favorites, but my favorites wouldn’t always win, because that’s the way the narrative should play.

I’d always have this ongoing narrative of the battle of the network toys, that later progressed once I was allowed to stay up to watch the James Bond movies on Monday nights right before school started in the fall. Again, James Bond and new fall TV shows coinciding in the fall, it was an important season for me. Once I was allowed to watch the James Bond movies on ABC, a lot of my imagination play became James Bond. I was on the speedboat. It was really my bed. I would build myself a graveling hook out of a hanger and some string and do James Bondy kind of things. I think that my early narrative development in the sense of figuring out how this action sequence worked was really as a six or seven-year-old playing James Bond in my room.

Craig: I know exactly what you mean. There’s a way to practice the art of storytelling without actually writing. My experience was around the same time as you, six, seven years old. First of all, I saw Star Wars, which blew my brain open. Then I had a clear memory that almost every night when I would go to bed, I would stay up for about 30, 40 minutes, with the lights out, in my bed, just I guess you’d call it daydreaming, although it was evening, just imagining scenarios. Just imagining. Just envisioning little movies in my head. I would make little sound effects to go along with things. My dad would come in and say, “Stop making rocket noises.” I remember that was the phrase, “rocket noises,” because everything was blowing up all the time. I would do that every night. I don’t know what it was. I was just compelled to tell stories in my head.

John: There’s an assumption that it’s all about how much you read as a kid. I was certainly a big reader, but I wasn’t a bigger reader than many of my peers, most of whom aren’t involved in any sort of narrative writing capability. I read a lot. I read the same kinds of things. I read a lot of the Encyclopedia Browns and the Three Investigators and the things that people read, but it was the imagining my own stories constantly that was more important. I did write. I did some creative writing. I probably wrote stories earlier than other kids might have done that. I was rewarded with teacher praise for doing a good job with it. I can’t chart that writing, my ability to put some words together, with my interest in telling movie style stories later on.

Craig: I’m with you. I remember always having a sense of narrative structure. I read a lot when I was a kid. I would say movies certainly inspired more of my visual sense. In my mind I would tell stories in a very visual way. The books that I did love would inspire those things. The Three Investigators, I remember the thing about them I loved the most was that Jupiter Jones had his headquarters underneath the dump.

John: Uncle Titus’s dump, which is –

Craig: There you go. Thank you. That was awesome to me. I desperately wanted my own headquarters under a dump, because it was so visual and it was so cool.

John: I tried to put on weight in 3rd grade so I could be more like Jupiter Jones.

Craig: I was always more of a Pete guy. Pete seemed like the cool one. I think he broke his arm at one point though.

John: Yeah, and therefore was slightly handicapped, and therefore–

Craig: Yeah, and thus an object of pity.

John: Pity/lust, I get it.

Craig: You feel me on that one. I love those. I remember in 5th grade I had a facility for language. I found reading and writing just came easily to me. Words came easily to me. In 5th grade they asked me to deliver the graduation speech. I remember that I wrote a speech that was rather mockish and infantile, in the way that a 5th grader would. It was a lot of bad metaphors about going through doors, opening doors and closing doors behind you and nonsense like that. It had a structure. I remember that I just innately understood that there should be an introduction where you establish this metaphor of doors opening and closing in your life and then three examples and then a final conclusion where the door closes behind you and you step out and you begin again.

John: That sounds very Toastmasters.

Craig: It was as paint by numbers as you can be, but the interesting thing was there were no numbers. I just had that. I was born with formula. I don’t know, maybe you need to start there. It’s a weird thing. Instead of having to learn it, it’s already in your DNA or something.

John: I think what I can also chart as probably the biggest influence on my development that way, and where I logged a lot of my 10,000 hours, was in Dungeons and Dragons, because D and D is one of those things where on the surface of it, it just seems like you’re pretending to play with swords, and it’s a bunch of people rolling dice and sitting around and table and drinking too much Coke.

Ultimately, when you’re playing a lot of D and D, especially when you’re playing at that age, you recognize that there’s two distinct phases to Dungeons and Dragons. There’s the social aspect where you and your friends are sitting around with your parents at a card table, and you’re playing a game, and one of you is the dungeon master. The other two or three of you are playing. He’s the fighter, he’s the thief, and that’s the wizard over there, the magic user over there. You’re trying to get through this dungeon. It’s very graph papery. You’re looking at a bunch of charts. That’s the part that feels baseball statistics-y, where there’s math involved and you’re trying to win a game. As you play more of it, you get a little bit more sophisticated, you start to really focus on the story and the role-playing aspect of it where you’re pretending to be… You’re this character. You’re this character in this situation. What does this character want? You start to think about your characters independent of this dungeon that you’re going through.

My friend Jason and I had, he had his character Garrett Darkhorse, who was a ranger. We started to build out these elaborate mythologies for the Darkhorse clan and who all the people were in the different generations. Suddenly it was about your character who would have a kid, and that kid would marry the other girl from over there. You started to look at the death of your character being part of the overall arc of the thing. It’s this sophistication that came only as you got to be more sophisticated, thinking about the narrative beyond this one specific game, this one specific dungeon that you were playing.

Craig: I didn’t quite get that massively nerdy, although I did play the… Marvel had a role-playing game.

John: I remember that.

Craig: A few of my friends and I played that. I remember not caring so much for the game, which I thought was just a little odd. I never quite got into the actual game part of it, but I loved making the characters. Everybody had a character and they had a name, and then I typed up backstories for all them, sort of like what you were describing, and actually tried to make sense of their… What happens is you roll dice, and they’re like, he’s really strong and he’s really fast, but he’s stupid. That’s interesting. Now, how can I create a narrative that explains that? I remember doing that and typing it up and printing it out on my daisy wheel printer.

John: You would print out these character backstories for the people who were playing your Marvel role-playing game.

Craig: It was interesting, because what they had were like, he’s got a power and he’s this old and he’s blond. Then I would try and explain where he was from and is he a human and how did he get this way and is he related to anybody and what does he fear, and come up with… The idea I guess was that there was a narrative puzzle presented. I always thinking of screenwriting as just endless puzzle solving. The puzzle is how do you make logical sense of this, some sort of dramatic, compelling theory that makes sense of the character you just created with dice. That was fun. I don’t know so much that I spent a lot of time practicing that is why I do what I do today. It’s that I felt the need to do it in the first place that explains why I do what I do today.

John: You felt a compelling need to create narrative meaning out of this thing that actually didn’t have a lot of meaning because it was rolled by dice. You wanted it to make sense and to exist in a way. It was probably one of the earliest occasions for you to see that the decisions you were making about who the characters were would influence the kind of stories you’d want to tell with those characters. Were you being the equivalent of the dungeon master for this, where you were leading the games?

Craig: No, my friend Dave Rogers was usually the dungeon master. Interestingly, he is a Emmy award-winning director now. He’s a very, very well-regarded director in television, directs a lot of episodes of The Office.

John: I’ve noticed several people who are involved with big TV shows right now come from D and D background. John Rogers, who does Leverage, who’s done a lot of other great shows, still writes for… I guess it’s not TSR now, it’s Wizards of the Coast, who bought out the D and D franchise. I first noticed, oh, there’s this… I was looking through one of the new manuals. I noticed his name. I was like, “I wonder if that’s the same person.” I Googled, like, oh, that’s just so strange that he still is doing that. In fact, he’s doing the new Dungeons and Dragons comic book, which is great. It’s like Firefly, but with swords. If we were to have him on the show, I suspect he had a similar experience where that experience of developing characters and developing a world for characters to run around in is really similar to developing the world of a movie, or even more so, developing the world of a TV show, is that you have a sustainable world that goes beyond the adventures of this one week’s play but has an overall narrative, an overall arc. I haven’t talked to David Benioff to see whether he played much D and D, but I’ve got the feeling that it’s probably true.

Craig: Knowing David, I would guess that he did. Knowing Dan Weiss, I would guess that he did as well.

John: It’s a pretty safe bet. I’ll also stump for the new D and D manuals. I don’t actually play D and D anymore. I wouldn’t have time to. I feel like so much of what I do and get paid to do is so similar that I would be burning out that part of my brain to try to DM a session. I’d still buy the new manuals. The new manuals are fantastic. Anybody who’s listening to this who played in the past and has seen those manuals, and like, “Eh, I wouldn’t go into them,” they’re remarkably well done. It’s Gary Gygax’s sort of legacy but sort of brought through to make a lot more sense. They made very smart choices in the new books. I have a ton of them that are all sitting on shelves and I read them as leisure time books.

Craig: That’s where I would fall apart. That’s why I can’t do that sort of part of the game because I don’t understand all the rules and my mind could not wrap around on that stuff.

John: One of the things I think is interesting about where we are right now is the online games, Diablo and World of Warcraft, that seem to be very similar, where they’re doing a lot… You’re running around and you’re killing things. They don’t develop that same instinct, really, because in those games you are optimizing, because ou are trying to figure out the best kind of character to make, but the character is really just a collection of statistics. The character has no backstory. The character has no motivations beyond the quests that are assigned through the game. You have goals as a person, but that character, individually, has no goals.

Craig: I like the Bethesda games. The main quests, at least, give you some sense of identity and sense of purpose.

John: In terms of choices you make?

Craig: Even in terms of your goal. In Oblivion you are tasked with a job by the dying king. In Fallout 3 you’re actually murdered in the beginning of the… Isn’t that right, in Fallout 3? No, no. That’s not Fallout 3. That was the other one.

John: Fallout 3 is an example of a tremendous–

Craig: Oh, it was in New Vegas you’re murdered.

John: New Vegas, yeah.

Craig: In Fallout 3 you’re actually born and you’re raised by a father and then he disappears and you have to go find him. There’s some sense of character.

John: There’s a sense of character, but you’re not generating that sense of character.

Craig: No. You’re right.

John: You are essentially an audience to that character development. While you might learn a lot by observing it, you’re not responsible for the making of it. You’re not making choices about how that narrative is going to be shaped.

Craig: That’s correct. That is the difference between the passive act of playing a video game that’s presented to you and scripted for you, and the idea that you’re going to make your own story as you go along. No question. No question.

John: Our next clip is from Episode 119: Positive Moviegoing.
Craig wanted to talk about positive moviegoing, which I’m not even sure what it means, so Craig start us out. What is positive moviegoing?

Craig: It’s this thing I’ve been thinking about lately because this is the time of year when all the so-called good movies come out. A lot of them are actually good movies. I think it’s just we live in a time of snarkiness and suspicion and nobody seems to want to like anything. People a lot of times go into theaters with their arms crossed, especially in Los Angeles. We’re all in the business. I think people go to movies and they’re demanding to hate them and they’re prejudging them. You name any movie and I could just sort of come up with some pretext for hating it.

What I really have been trying to do is when I go to movie to go wanting to love it and accepting everything about it for at least 20 minutes. I don’t care what happens in the first 20 minutes, I am on board. I will accept it and I will attempt to enjoy it as best I can. I will give myself to the movie. Then at some point, okay, listen, sometimes you just don’t like movies. Sometimes they disappoint. Sometimes they anger you because you hate them so much, and that’s okay. I’m not denying that that can happen. I’ve really been trying to just give myself over to movies.

I went and I saw The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I went in, just gave myself to the movie, and I loved it. I think I would have loved it anyway, but I think it helped that I wasn’t judging. I just decided nobody else goes to movies to judge. Why do we go to movies to judge? Can’t we just enjoy them? Anyway, that’s my thing, positive moviegoing.

John: What you’re describing is almost like… I can picture the body language of it. It’s like you’re sitting down in your seat. You’re not crossing your arms in front of you saying like, “Okay, impress me.” You’re saying, “I’m here. I’m eager to be entertained. I will follow you wherever you go. Take me on a journey.” That’s the message you’re trying to send to this movie.

Craig: That’s right, sort of like meeting somebody at a party and they start to tell you a story. You’re standing there, so be nice. Listen to it. Give it a shot. I get so depressed when I see people ripping movies apart before they even see them.

Aline Brosh McKenna: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s easy to hate things and to bag on things. I think it’s just, it makes people feel fashionable and intellectual. It’s harder. It takes more effort to go out there and say, “You know what? Even if it wasn’t perfect, even if things aren’t prefect, sometimes things that you love are the imperfect perfect thing.” Going in there with an attitude of like, “I’m going to enjoy this. I paid my money to enjoy this, not to find something that I can sit down with my friends later and pick to shreds.”

Craig: Yeah. It will happen that we will encounter movies that infuriate us. And we will pick them to shreds and we will pick them to shreds. If you’ve earned that experience, so you’ve earned it, but there is something to be said for letting yourself be entertained and not attempt to make yourself feel better by pushing a movie away. Frankly even the feeling that, okay, it’s not perfect. How often does that happen? Movies win Oscars and people go, “Oh my god, that piece of crap won an Oscar.” Perfection is irrelevant. I almost think, okay, mistakes aren’t really mistakes. It’s just no more than I got from here to there on a road and it was a really enjoyable journey and there was a pothole. It’s just part of it.

Aline: I like it. I also think it’s very Christmas-y.

John: It’s very Christmas-y. Now, on some level are we talking about expectation? I find that a lot of times the movies that I enjoy most were the ones where my expectations were not set too high going into them. That’s why I love to see a movie during its opening weekend before everyone has sort of told me what I’m supposed to think and feel about it, because when I come into a theater with a set of expectations, nothing can surprise me. I’m sort of preconditioned to think this is how I’m supposed to feel about this particular entertainment.

Aline: Yeah. I miss the days of just going to see a movie and knowing nothing about it. My parents would drive us to the Paramus Park. We used to call it the Millionplex. It had 14 theaters. They would just drop us off there and we would see the 7:30, whatever it was, and just be happy. That’s how I saw Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, which pleasantly surprised us. We laughed, fell out of our chairs laughing. We also saw Yor, The Hunter From the Future that way.

Craig: Good one.

Aline: You don’t have that surprise anymore. You’ve been so inundated with media before you go to see a movie now, that I miss the days of just thinking like, “I just want to see a movie. Let’s see what’s out there.” I miss that.

John: Yeah, I remember seeing 9 to 5 that way. I was a kid dropped off at the theater, and the theater we were supposed to go to… They just dropped us off at the wrong movie, essentially, so we saw 9 to 5. I was far too young to see 9 to 5, which is the best way to see 9 to 5, because they’re smoking pot and having sex and all these things.

Aline: Stringing people up.

John: I also remember in college going to see… We ended up seeing The Handmaid’s Tale because the other movie that we wanted to see was completely sold out. We had no idea what the movie was. That’s so incredibly rewarding when you sit in, the only information you have is what the filmmakers are giving you frame-by-frame as the story unfolds. You had that experience of positive moviegoing because you weren’t preconceived with what we were supposed to feel. There was no expectation about what to —

Aline: You haven’t checked a review aggregator that’s given you 60 opinions before you even set foot there.

Craig: Yeah, or your Twitter feed, or comedians teeing up, or whatever, anything, or even articles that are insisting that it’s the most important thing of all time. It’s funny. 9 to 5 was the first movie I think I was dropped off to see on my own. I remember it was like a weird triple date, like a weird triple fifth-grade date. What were our parents thinking? I really make an effort now when I sit in the movie theater before the movie starts to blank my mind completely. I just say, go ahead movie, write all over me and let’s see where this goes.

John: Some of my favorite experiences are actually like when you see the three trailers, or the four trailers, and then the real movie starts and you’ve forgotten what the movie was that you [unclear 00:25:40] what movie is this. Oh right, it’s the Muppets. It is very exciting.

Now, let’s talk for a second as filmmakers, as screenwriters. Is there anything we can do in those opening pages or in the opening minutes of a movie to get people in the positive moviegoing experienced? What is that like from our side as writers to hopefully foster that good spirit?

Craig: I do have one thing that lately I’ve been tending to do, and that is write a credit sequence. It became out of fashion. Originally movies used to have these opening credit sequences that includes even the credits that we now call end credits, where there are logos and rosters of people. Then there were the standard opening credit sequences. That became out of fashion. For a long time, all the credits went in the back of the movie, so you just started the movie. I really like credit sequences. I like opening credit sequences. The opening credits for Mitty are beautiful. I think that that helps kind of get everybody situated and in the mood, so I’ve been doing that lately.

John: I will also write credit sequences in movies where I feel it’s appropriate. More than anything I try to make sure that the reader and therefore the viewer feels confident, like, trust me, this is going to be a ride that you will enjoy taking with me. You’re going to feel rewarded and smart on this journey. We know what we’re doing. Everything is going to be okay. That shows up in your word selection on those first pages, but also just making sure no one is confused in a bad way in those first pages. If it’s a funny movie, you need to have something funny happen really quickly, so everyone sort of gets what the world of your movie is.

Aline: My husband has a thing where we’ll go to see a movie, and sometimes movies take forever just to get going, and he’ll turn to me at some point and say, “When does the movie start?” 20 minutes into the movie, because sometimes it just seems like, especially because we do know what movies we’re going to see, it does seem like if you’re taking 15 minutes to get us acquainted with what we’ve seen on the poster, that makes me a little itchy. I think our attention span for that has probably changed a bunch, too. I think it’s great to see if you can get to the heart of the matter so the audience knows what movie they are seeing.

John: Let’s segue to our next topic, which you brought up also, which is why it’s important to be friends with writers. My recollection, and my early days in Hollywood, I was friends with a bunch of people who were starting out in Hollywood, but they weren’t necessarily writers. I went through a graduate film program, so everyone was trying to become a producer, a film executive. Some people became writers. I didn’t necessarily seek out other writers. What was your history going to–

Aline: I feel really strongly about that. I think that people sometimes misunderstand what the idea is. The idea is not to be friends with writers who are going to network for you, or who are cool, or who are writing, or who are employed. That’s not really the critical thing. The critical thing is to have friends who do what you do and are engaged in the same kind of work that you are.

A couple of my writer friends are from the very, very, very beginning of our career before we had any success or barely any work. We don’t have workplaces in the way that… My husband works at a mutual fund. He has a workplace. He has coworkers. We don’t have that. Even when we do for a specific project, they’re just for that specific project. My ongoing workplace, my Cheers, my group of people that I check in with, are my other writer friends that I talk to on the phone periodically, or have lunch with.

John: Aline, you talk on the phone?

Aline: I talk on the phone.

John: Wow.

Craig: Who talks on the phone?

Aline: I do.

John: Wow.

Aline: We can check in on what we’re doing and say, “Hey, I was working on that. What do you think of this? Is this a good idea? What do you think of this person?” That network is invaluable. You will grow with these people. It’s less important to seek out people who you think are going to connect you with a job and more important to seek out people whose process you find productive. Gatins refers to it as lab partners. Finding a lab partner who does their homework and has a neat notebook is important.

John: I don’t think Gatins has a neat notebook. I think Gatins’s notebook is one of those PT folders that he’s like sort of half colored in as he fell asleep.

Craig: Gatins’s notebook, it’s like a folder that you open up and it looks like it’s full of stuff, and you open it up and there’s nothing in there.

Aline: It’s so brilliant.

Craig: It’s all in his head.

Aline: It’s like a workbook where he didn’t do any of the math, but around the margins are those amazing drawings and thoughts. He’s a good example. He’s a great lab partner. Also, something another friend of mine said, which is easier said than done, we were talking about having your friends read stuff. I said, “Who do you go to for that?” He said, “It’s very simple. Send it to someone who roots for you.”

Craig: Perfect. He’s exactly right.

Aline: I don’t know, it was something I hadn’t really thought of in quite that way, because I think we all have friends that we love, but maybe we have other friends who we think root a little harder.

Craig: You mean to say, “Maybe some of them are rooting against us.” That’s what you mean to say, which I think is real, by the way. Listen, it’s human. It bums me out, but I sometimes sense it.

Aline: It’s funny, I have the opposite.

Craig: Same thing about the positive moviegoing.

Aline: I have the opposite of that, which is I really like everyone around me to be really successful because I think it makes me look better.

Craig: Exactly.

Aline: It gives me more names to drop. Sometimes it’s even on a specific project. Sometimes you can have a friend who is really supportive but they don’t like an idea that you have. There was just a friend that I had that I pitched him a few things I was working on, and one of them he just thought was a terrible idea. That’s not somebody who I would ever go to and say, “Do you want to read this?” It’s just find somebody who really wants to see you do well, or find someone who really roots for that specific project, because that’s positive moviegoing. You want to share your work and share your career with people who are going in with the best possible intentions.

We generate enough of our own schadenfreude towards ourselves in this process. You don’t really need it from other people. I have lots of friends who are producers and executives and agents, and actors too, but your writer friends understand your struggles and your travails and they can really be there for you. I think if you look around, you can find people to link arms with, and you will all come up together.

John: My friend, Andrew Lippa, who did the music for Big Fish, he has this group of composers, lyricist composers, and they get together once a month and they have to show the work that they’ve been working on. As a group they have to perform the thing and they talk about it, which just seems amazing. There are obviously screenwriter groups that can do the same kind of thing, but it’s different to show your written pages versus actually performing something. It’s that trust element that kicks in.

You were talking about how you might have directors or producers or other people who can read your stuff, agents, but all of them have some vested interest in maybe how they’re going to associate with this project. The great thing about another writer is the writer is just the writer. They’re not trying to take your project. They’re not trying to do anything.

While there’s still sometimes that, it’s not even schadenfreude, but that realization of there’s only so many musical chairs, and that sometimes you’re competing for the same spots, in general we can be very supportive of each other because we’re not trying to do the same thing. We’re all working on our own projects.

Aline: Yeah, and it’s interesting, because I know you guys have talked about this too, but the three of us all met at different phases in our careers.

John: We should talk about how you and I met, because that’s a strange version of how you and I met. Let me tell my recollection of it, because I’m really curious to hear your version of it. Aline and I met on the phone because I was coming in to rewrite a project that she had written as a spec, correct?

Aline: No, I wrote it on assignment for New Line. Then John rewrote it and he cold called me and said, “I want to make sure it’s okay with you that I’m rewriting this.” I said, “Sure.” Then John did a draft of it, and never to be heard from again, that thing.

Craig: John, you killed her movie.

John: I probably killed her movie.

Aline: They were bringing in the big guns, and I got pushed down the stairs. John was the first person, I think might have been the first person ever to call me and do the gracious thing. I was outside on my deck and I remember he said, “Is it okay with you if I do this?”

John: I remember you also saying like, “Somebody is going to do it, and I’d rather you do it than somebody else,” which is honestly the reality of most of these situations. The answer is not going to be they’re going to go back to you, the original writer. If they’re looking for another writer, they’re going to hire another writer, so you want the writer who actually has the ability to make the movie be good and not ruin the movie. Those are the situations you want to have. That was a strange project, because the reason why I was able to get a hold of you is because we both had John Gatins as a friend. I called Gatins to get your number and said like, “Is it going to be cool if I call?”

Aline: Oh, that’s nice.

John: It was this movie that you wrote that I really liked. It was just a really good idea. Suddenly Dustin Hoffman was attached, and so I went to this lunch, this crazy lunch with Dustin Hoffman. Suddenly, this is a movie, and then it just disappeared.

Aline: Yeah, it got complicated in that way those things do. We already knew each other, and I knew Craig already when the strike happened. The strike was really the thing where writers really connected in a different way. I think it was sort of the convergence of the strike plus the internet. All of a sudden people really got to know each other in a way that I had not experienced previously in my career where people really know each other now in a different way than they ever had before. I really think it’s for the good. I always find it funny when you’re talking to an agent or an executive or a producer and you say, “Oh yeah, I talked to so-and-so about that project. Oh, yeah, she did a draft on that. So-and-so is directing it.” They’re like, “How do you know that?” It’s because, I think, we know each other more now than we did.

Craig: We know more than they know sometimes. We know so much more than they think we know. We talk to each other. I have a lot of writer friends. I like writers. It’s been a wonderful thing for me for the last, I don’t know, six or seven years to get this coterie of writers around me that I admire and that I trust and that I can learn from. We share and talk about everything. I think we do so in a way that is informed by our experience of being safe with each other, that over time we haven’t screwed each other over, that the narrative that we just feed off of each other and compete with each other and undercut each other is essentially bullshit, and that, in fact, we are supportive of each other because the pain that we feel is the most salient thing about the job we do. When we see somebody else feeling it, naturally we just want to help them. There have been a couple people here and there, but for the most part I have found screenwriters to be incredibly generous and incredibly empathetic, and sweet and encouraging, to me at least.

Aline: I’ll tell you a good story. On this spec that I was working on, I wanted to give it to somebody who didn’t know me and didn’t know the situation and didn’t know anything about it that I could give to cold, who I really respected. I gave it to a writer who I really, really respect but don’t know super well. I maybe hung out with him a dozen, no, half a dozen times. I sent him the script, and then I didn’t hear from him for a while which is always the thing where you’re like, “Oh god, he hates it and he can’t figure out how to tell me.” Then I get an email from him that says, “Look, my dad was sick, he was in the hospital. I’m just about to read the script,” whatever. I was like, oh no. Then a couple days go by and I get a set of notes, seven pages of notes–

John: Wow.

Aline: That are the most amazing thoughtful, heartfelt–

Craig: You’re welcome. You’re welcome.

Aline: Well thought out. Including like, “Page 26, you could be doing this. Page 43, you could be doing this.” Sometimes you get notes from people and it’s like they’re fighting what the movie is. This was just a writer understanding like, oh, this is what she’s trying to do. You are trying to do this. Let me help you. You’re trying to get to such and such a place in five hours. Let me give you the best directions on how to get there.
I was so moved when I got that notes document that I was in my office and tears sprang to my eyes. I know how hard it is as a writer to turn your attention from your own imagination and delve into another person’s script. That he would do seven pages of these incredible notes really blew me away. It’s professional camaraderie. Man, the more of that you can find the better. It doesn’t have to be somebody famous. If you’re 23 years old, it can be somebody else that you know who wants to do this, who will read your stuff and put their heart into it.

John: It’s also back to the issue of as writers we want movies to be better. When I’m advising on projects at Sundance or other places, everyone’s like, “Oh, that’s a tremendous amount of your time that you’re spending.” It’s like, yes, but it’s a chance to make movies better. It’s a way to sort of see what a person is attempting to try to do and help them get to that place that they’re trying to get to.
Seven pages of notes is above and beyond the call. That’s terrific. Really only a writer could do that, because only a writer could understand what you were trying to do and provide specific ways that you could get to that place.

Craig: I would also say that only a writer can convince you that you’re any good.

Aline: That’s interesting.

Craig: I had a very nice experience. I started writing a novel a couple of years ago. Honestly, I wrote two chapters and then stopped, mostly just out of fear that it wasn’t going to be any good and that I wasn’t any good and I’m no good and blah, blah, blah, rotten tomatoes.

John: Dennis Palumbo?

Craig: No, it’s not Dennis Palumbo. I gave it to Kelly Marcel because she asked to see it. She’s a really good writer. She loved it. I have to believe that. When we give screenplays, or we give our work to people that are employing us, they’re just as overly optimistic as we are. Everybody is rooting, rooting, rooting, but you always wonder. Or you give it to somebody, some producer or agents or coverage. Who’s doing coverage? I don’t know who they are. If a writer reads something of yours and says, “This is good,” then you need to believe it. We can’t get that from anybody else.

John: Yeah. You want that response of, “I’m so happy for you and also a little bit jealous.” That’s the best feeling you can get as a writer is when another writer says, “This is great and I wish I had written it.”

Craig: You know what’s so funny? That’s exactly what she said. She said, I actually think she used the words, “I’m a bit jealous.” Now, I have this other task master that’s making me write this book, which is terrific, terrific, because we also need that. We need somebody. We need a lab partner. We need a lab partner.

John: As we wrap up this segment on the importance of writers being friends, we also need to credit Aline, because during the strike – I agree that the 2008 strike was a big game-changer in terms of especially feature writers knowing who each other are – you organized these events that would happen during the strike, these drink events where we would all get together and mingle. It was my first chance of actually getting to know faces with names of some of these people.

During the strike you were assigned to different studios where you were supposed to be doing picketing. Because I am the palest person on earth, I would picket at Paramount Studios from 5:30 in the morning until 8:30 in the morning, so it would be dark and so I wouldn’t get sunburned. I loved that group of people I was hanging out with. Everyone else was at different studios.

The events that you organized, and there were three or four of them, were terrifically helpful,
because just suddenly all these names that I’d seen in the trades are suddenly in front of you
and you’re talking about the things you’re talking about. A lot of what we were talking about was the strike, but you’re also talking about the work, and you’re talking about how to make things better.

Aline: It came at a critical point. If you try to do those mixers sometimes, it’s hard to get people to go, but people were really wanting to be with other writers then and talk about what’s going on and what are we going to do, and nobody was working.

You were able to organize them over the internet really quickly, send out an e-vite to hundreds of people. There were a lot of people who I knew their names but had never met them. We all really got to know each other during that experience. People had really varying opinions was the other thing. A thing that always amazed me was people were really all over the map about what they believed about this, but by and large people were able to… The camaraderie of being screenwriters overcame people’s different point of views on the strike.

John: I would say there were different point of views on the strike and what we should be doing on the strike and how long it should go and what we should be fighting for. It made a common point of focus in terms of what our profession is and what it is our job is and what our craft is. By focusing on the feature writers who are usually completely in isolation, bringing thing together, it was a way for us to identify ourselves as a group, because usually we’re not a group the way that TV writers are often in rooms together and know each other. It was a way for us to actually know who these people were.

Craig: There’s a certain kind of way that screenwriters interact with each other that is unique. I love it. It is a very talky, chatty, low-tech, low-fancy environment, almost always. We don’t do it the way other people do it. There are few screenwriters I know that love to glam it up and throw parties at nightclubs and stuff like that, but for the most part it seems to me we’re at our happiest when we’re talking somewhere where we can hear each other. That’s fun. It’s a nice, real way to be in Los Angeles, a town where just around the corner there’s some place that has convinced you is important and you have to go inside, and if you can’t get inside, and who do you know inside, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There we are with our jeans and our sweaters and our cigars and our wine. We’re able to be real with each other.

Aline: I will tackle people. It’s funny, because I won’t do this with actors or directors really, but if I see a writer whose work I admire… I did a panel with Peter Morgan in 2006, and I was so excited he was going to be there. The video of me is like a running back approaching, of me literally taking guys and grabbing them by the nape of the neck and chucking them out of the way to get to Pete. I was so excited to meet him. I got to him and I was like, “Oh my god, I just came to this thing so I could meet you.” That moment someone said, “Let me take your picture.” There’s a picture like 30 seconds after Pete and I meet, and I look like I’m standing next to Santa Claus. I’m so excited to be meeting Peter.

Craig: John, who was my Peter Morgan in Austin?

John: Oh, it was Breaking Bad. It was Vince Gilligan.

Aline: Vince.

Craig: Vince Gilligan.

Aline: That thing, when you meet somebody whose work you so admire.

Craig: It’s everything. It’s everything.

Aline: It’s so amazing. I will tackle people. Kelly Marcel just moved to town.

Craig: Did you tackle Kelly Marcel?

Aline: I tackled her at the Mr. Banks thing. She’s new to town so she doesn’t know a lot of writers. I was like, oh, there’s people for you to meet.

John: There’s a mixer in your future.

Aline: She went to Austin, which is a really good way. One thing I would say is go to an event like Austin if you’re somebody who is starting out. Again, we just did not have stuff like this when we were starting out. I would have been there tackling people. Go to these events where there is going to be other aspiring people and you will find people that you connect to, that you can pitch your movies to, that you can talk about what they’re working on. You don’t have to be connecting to the fancy people. You can be connecting to people who are exactly in the same stage that you’re in.

John: Everyone grows up together, so there’s lateral things where you’re reading their script, and if you love their script, keep reading their scripts, and keep helping them out, and they will reciprocate. You will find your people, but you have to look for your people because it’s not you’re a professional football player where you’re just going to be around professional football players.

Aline: That’s right.

John: You are always going to be isolation unless you choose to make yourself not in isolation.

Craig: Don’t be judgey. Don’t be judgey. Don’t think that your friends have to be the fanciest writers in the world, or the most successful writers in the world. Don’t let that get in the way. When you fall in love with another writer, you’re falling in love with a kindred spirit and a fellow mind who understands you, who can help you and you can help them. There is no better feeling. The only better feeling than being helped is helping. How is that for Christmas?

John: This clip is from Episode 425: Tough Love versus Self-Care.

This is inspired by a Chuck Wendig blog post over this past week where he talks through the dueling notions of do you buckle down and sit in that chair and get all those words written when you’re hurting, or do you take a step back and practice some self-care. He’s really looking at the trap you can fall into where you’re just self-caring all the time and you’re not actually doing the hard work. As we head into NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which is where I started Arlo Finch, I thought it was a good time to look at the dueling instincts to you’ve got tough it out versus relax and be easy on yourself.

Craig: Yeah. I loved this. I thought it was really smart. The reason I really appreciated it is because there are two positive ways of thinking about things, and one positive way is I need to take care of myself and be gentle with myself and not beat myself up, because that’s going to be counterproductive. There’s another positive thing that says I need to apply myself and motivate myself and push through difficult things and be resilient in order to get things done.
The problem with both of those things is that bad sentiments can easily masquerade as those things.

That’s the part that I thought he really put his finger on brilliantly is that the two things I just said are correct and good, but here’s something that can masquerade as tough love: a kind of brutal self-loathing and self-denial. Here’s something that can masquerade as self-care: just fear and withdrawal and a sense that engaging isn’t worth it. I thought it was really important that especially now because we do concentrate so heavily on self-care ,that somebody said, just watch out, there are these two imposters that will wear the clothing of these two things and neither one is going to help you.

John: Yeah. Let’s go back to that tough love, because someone who is advocating tough love will say, “Yeah, so what? Writing is often hard. You’re not digging a ditch.” To some degree, writing is exercise and it’s just like working out. You get stronger sometimes by pushing through the pain. You’ve got to rip those muscles a little bit so that they can get stronger. I don’t know if physical science would hold that up to be true.

Craig: You did it.

John: I get that. Writing, for all of us, actually sitting down in the button chair and getting to that 1,000 words or those 3 pages can be really tough sometimes. It’s hard to string the words together. We’ve talked about this a lot on the show. What Craig describes as that imposter is a real thing where sometimes it’s your romantic notion that art must be suffering. That writing must be hard and so therefore if writing is hard then I’m doing the right thing because that’s what writing is supposed to be like, that it’s supposed to hurt and it’s supposed to be torture every time you do it. That’s probably not true. That’s not a healthy way to be approaching the craft that you’ve chosen for yourself.

Craig: You can easily get into a trap where you think of yourself as stupid or lazy because it just didn’t happen that day. You can try and try and try. There are days where it’s not going to happen. The healthy thing is to say that that is normal. I am not perfect. Not every day is going to be optimum. That imposter dressed in the clothing of tough love will say, “You suck. You’re weak and lazy and dumb, and a real writer would have gotten it done. You just failed.” That’s not helpful at all.

John: Let’s look at self-care, because you and I are both dealing with shoulder pain. Part of the recommendation for that is, take it easy on your shoulder. Don’t do things that are going to hurt your shoulder. That really is a form of self-care. If you are encountering a lot of mental anguish and other things in your life that makes it hard for you to write, possibly pushing through and forcing yourself to write is going to make that mental anguish worse. Be mindful that there could be a good reason why you should step off the accelerator and give yourself a little bit of a break and not be pushing yourself so hard.

Chuck was writing from the perspective of he’s a guy in a shack who is writing books. I’m reading his book right now. His book is really good. He wrote a big giant tome called Wanderers. It’s sort of like The Stand. It’s as long as The Stand. It’s a big tome that drops down. Chuck is a guy writing by himself out in the woods. He is not in a writing room. I’m going to keep using that word as much as I can.

Craig: Good for you.

John: He’s not in a writing room in a social environment with other people, and so therefore he only has himself to turn to. Some of his advice can be a little bit different about self-care when you are surrounded by a group who can be pushing you or also be supporting you.

Craig: The self-care thing is interesting because we didn’t really have it until a few years ago. Of course, it existed and people would come up with different names, but the notion of self-care and the popularity of it is a relatively modern phenomenon. What happens is there’s this backlash where people say, “Problem is all these snowflakes with their self-care, ergo self-care is stupid.” By the way, the people that say that never use the term ergo, but whatever. That’s not correct. Self-care is actually crucial.

What is correct is that self-care can be used as a name for something that isn’t self-care at all, but a different kind of self-abuse, which is hiding. We can, when we are afraid, sometimes put on the clothing of somebody that is trying to take care of themselves, when really we’re just scared. People might think, how exactly is writing scary? When you don’t know what to say, it’s terrifying. It really is. It’s as scary as a dream where you have to go on stage and give a speech but you haven’t prepared one. That’s what it kind of feels like.

John: Yeah. There’s a natural anxiety that happens, like, am I going to be able to do it? If I can’t do it, then it’s going to suck and I’m going to be embarrassed. Even if I’m the only person who is going to see that I can’t do it, it’ll going to be embarrassing. Yes, there’s a whole cycle that can start about should I sit down and actually start writing today?

Craig: Correct. You can wear the clothing of modern parlance and say, no, today is a self-care day. It is worth taking a real clear moment when you say today is a self-care day to say, “Or is it?” It doesn’t mean you’re lying to yourself. It just means let’s really ask and evaluate first. Then if everything checks out, then yes, it’s a self-care day.

John: I put together a list of five questions that I thought would be a starting place for looking at is this a time for self-care or is this a time for some tough love with myself. et me read through here. Craig, I suspect you’ll have other things to add to this checklist.

First I would say is check the facts. Basically that’s a chance to sort of step outside yourself and just look at the situation you’re in. Is this a situation where you’re dealing with some big stuff that anyone in your situation would say like, okay, given what you’re going through, like the loss of a family member, a big breakup, you’re moving, there are some real reasons why you are not equipped at this moment to be doing this stuff. Just check the facts. Independent of your emotions, what are the actual facts about this situation?

I would ask, are you taking care of the basics? Are you actually eating properly? Are you sleeping enough? Is there some basic survival function that you’re not doing a good enough job at, and is that the thing you really need to fix rather than worrying about how much you’re writing on a day? I would ask, can you take smaller bites? By that I mean rather than committing to 3 hours of sitting writing, can you just write for 20 minutes, or an hour? Can you do a little sprint to get you through some stuff? Can you write 100 words rather than forcing yourself to write 1,000 words at a sitting?

Can you lower the stakes? And this is where I come back to Aline Brosh McKenna’s method of getting in the ocean. I don’t know if you remember her describing this at some point. This is how Aline describes starting to swim in the ocean, is that you sort of step on the sand and you get your toes wet, and then you get your ankles wet, then you splash a little water up on your shins, and then your knees. Eventually you’re in the ocean and you’re swimming and you don’t even realize that you started swimming. I always loved Aline’s visual for how she gets into the ocean, because it’s true. It’s scary to jump into the ocean, but if you just wander in there, you’re like, oh hey, I’m in the ocean and I’m swimming.

Craig: It’s literally how every Jewish woman I’ve ever seen gets into a pool. It’s like every Jewish woman slowly wets the arms, wets the legs. It’s so careful. Maybe it’s just my family. Maybe it’s just the women in my family. I don’t know. It’s such a weird stereotypical thing, and I guess as far as stereotypes go, fairly harmless, because it is a smart way of acclimating to a new environment. I think lowering the stakes is a brilliant point of view on this, because there are times where you may say, “Listen, I think today is a self-care day. You know what? Today is a self-care day. That said, what if I did some writing on a self-care day? It doesn’t even count. It’s like free calories. Because it’s a self-care day. If it happens it happens. If it doesn’t it doesn’t. I’ll just try it now with zero stakes attached because it’s a self-care day. I don’t have to sit there grinding my teeth because it’s not happening.” I think that’s really smart.

John: Katie Silberman when she was on the show recently, she talked about how when she starts a project she’ll write scenes and scenes and scenes that aren’t going to be in the movie that are just the characters talking. Perfect. Those are throwaway scenes. It doesn’t matter. You’re just getting a sense of the voices. There’s no demand that those actually have to be the real scenes in the movie. Try writing those. You’ll be surprised. Some of those will end up in the movie. It’s lowering the stakes. The world isn’t going to come crashing down if those scenes are not perfect.

Craig: There you go. Yeah.

John: Last I would say, can you define what you’ll need to be able to do in order to get back to work as normal? If you say, okay, this is a self-care day, I can’t do it, great. What are the criteria you need to meet for you to be able to get back to work? If you can be just a little bit more concrete about that, like, “Okay, I need to be able to sit for 10 minutes without bursting into tears,” great. That’s a thing, if you can do that, then you’re on your way to being able to do the next thing. “I need to be able to focus on one thing for 20 minutes.” Give yourself some real criteria, benchmarks that you need to hit, so that you can actually say, okay, I’m in this state or I’m not in this state. There’s a sense that there’s an end date to it, that it’s not going to be a permanent condition for you.

Craig: Those are five great questions to ask yourself. I really only have one other one to suggest. It is simply, is the biggest problem on this particular day your writing? Because if the biggest problem, the thing that is taking the most wind out of your sails, the thing that is making you the sickest in your gut is the work itself, it may not be a self-care day. It may be a day where you just have to kind of re-approach your writing and think about what’s not working, because otherwise you could hide forever from that.

John: Yeah. When I was writing the Arlo Finch books, so the third book is in and done, so I’m essentially done with them, it was a lot more regular writing than I’d ever had to do. It’s been four years of really regular writing to get those books done. The word counts were just so much higher and the workload was so much higher than before. I did have to be little tougher on myself in terms of like, yeah, I don’t necessarily really want to do it today but I kind of need to do it today and I’m going to do it today. Even family vacations, I would say, okay, I need an hour this morning to write. I’m not being selfish. It’s what needs to happen. We would plan for I’m writing during this time. then once I got that writing done, I was just free in a way that was great. It wasn’t looming over me because I knew I’d gotten that work done.

I bring this up because sometimes writing actually is what you need to do. Sometimes writing is a really important way to get healthy again because it lets you step outside of yourself, outside of your own internal narrative into a different narrative and really focus on that for a time. It can get you out of your head with the right project.

Craig: That’s such a great point. I’ve got to tell you, that’s me. There are times where I needed a day off or even a week off because of extant circumstances, things that are going on in my family. My son has surgery. You got to deal with life as it comes and there are days where you just can’t do your work. In all honesty, 90% of the time when I am feeling miserable it’s because something is wrong with what I’m writing. The only way to fix that is to solve that problem. It doesn’t mean I have to write the solution. Sometimes I just have to take a long walk or a long shower. Sometimes I just don’t know the answer and I have to sit in that discomfort. That is still a work day to me. My fingers may not be moving on the keys, but I am thinking. I’m trying. I know exactly what you said is correct. When I do solve it and when I write that solution, the pain that I’m feeling will go away. Therefore I can’t self-care that. That can’t be self-cared away. That has to just be worked away. It’s a really smart distinction that you’ve made there.

John: Cool. We will link to Chuck Wendig’s original blog post which we thought was terrific. Chuck Wendig also writes a lot about writing and the writing process, so if you’ve not read any of his books on writing you should do that as well, because he’s a very smart, clever guy and talks really honestly about the frustration of writing but also what’s cool about writing, and has a very good voice. I would encourage you to check out his books as well.

This clip is from Episode 539: How to Grow Old as a Writer.

We have two big topics this week. This one you proposed, so I’m going to let you take leadership on this topic of growing old as a writer.

Craig: I was just thinking about because we’ve been doing this for a while, you and I, and when we started, there was actually quite a lot of concern about ageism in our business. The general idea was that somewhere after 50 the business started kicking people out. In fact, when you look at what the Writers Guild considers a protected class, writers over the age of 40 are considered a protected class. The world has changed drastically since the mid-’90s. I was talking to some people the other day who were pointing out that the writers who are being employed as showrunners, and we’ll call them sort of major feature film writers, generally are older than they’ve ever been before.

I thought, this is interesting. There must be some sort of lessons that we can learn, since you and I are among the people that are still here, about how to keep yourself fresh and motivated and relevant as the years go on, because we are not kids no more.

John: No. Craig, do we want to talk about how to have a long career, or how to be comfortable with aging in your career? Are we talking both? What are the edges of this conversation?

Craig: I feel like they’re intertwined. So, rather than talk in a very practical way about something that is applicable to about 80 people, I want to talk about something that’s applicable to everybody. Everybody who pursues any kind of creative concern, whether you are a visual artist or an actor or a writer or a producer-director, whatever it is that you do, as you get older your relationship to your own art and your own creative process does need to change, or you’re going to suffer. A reflection of that may be in terms of the industry around you and people’s interest in you, or an audience’s response to you. Rather than view it through the lens of industry, I just want to talk about how to keep ourselves in a kind of good place with our own creative minds.

John: Great. The artistic side of growing older and how that relates to the craft and the thing that you’re trying to make on a daily basis.

Craig: Ideally that would be reflected back at you with some sort of industrial success, if that’s what you’re looking for as the years go on. First let’s just consider it all in terms of strategies, because I do think like anything else there’s just practical things that you can apply to yourself as time goes on. These are good thoughts and questions to just, even every birthday, take a 10-minute walk and think about it.

First, you have to think about what your task actually is. Because it changes over time. You may start as someone who for instance in the mid-’90s, you are, “I want to write sitcoms. I’m going to be a sitcom guy that works on network sitcoms.” There are hundreds of them. Over time, that changes. The tasks that are available that match what you think you do can change. Also, formats can change. We think of television as a certain thing now. It’s all over the place. When we started, it was something else. Chernobyl, for instance, couldn’t have been really done until a certain format change occurred. That meant paying attention to what was going on with formats.

There are two kinds of challenges that you can make to yourself. The first is, is the thing that I’m doing the only thing I can be doing, or could I be writing a different kind of thing, like a short story, or like you did, a novel, or like we’ve both done, some songs, or nonfiction work? Also, are we working within a format that is maybe dying out or just getting boring to us? What other formats might expand our own personal expression? If we don’t rotate the crops, as it were, then we will end up with a field that isn’t doing too well.

John: Let’s talk about rotating the crops, because I think that ties into a thing that happens with age, which is this burnout, which is that you’ve done one thing for so long that it’s boring to you. It’s just not interesting to you. It’s hard to work up the enthusiasm to do it again.

I was talking with a writer recently. She was just starting on a new script. She’s like, oh wow, wait, I’m back doing this again. I’m having to start a whole new script again. She was ready to. She knew how to write a script. It was also she didn’t have the same enthusiasm for it that she would have had 5 years, 10 years earlier in her career.

I think that’s one of the reasons why I was attracted to writing the Arlo Finch books or to writing the Big Fish musical is it gave me a chance to be a beginner again, to be someone who is brand new to things and be curious and eager to explore and willing to make mistakes as I’m figuring out this new art form. When you have mastery over something, it’s nice, it’s helpful, things are easier for you, but they’re also less exciting. Picking a new thing to try to do… Just challenge yourself on a regular basis to try something that you haven’t done before as a writer, so that you get that experience of being new at things.

Craig: Yeah. Getting yourself in that rut is the function of a good thing, I think. We know that you need to focus and you need to practice and perfect. That’s part of how you get good at any creative pursuit. There is a point where, and a little bit like when you get in a video game you’ve maxed out your level, you’re now just walking around all the areas of Skyrim and beating everyone’s brains in with ease.

John: Yeah. You’re just doing a little side quest.

Craig: There’s no challenge because you are perfection, and it gets boring. You’re absolutely right. Being a beginner again is a wonderful thing. It’s a little scary, so it’s also a function of fear. Trying new things is scary. The thing that I’m scared of the most is actually, at this point now in my life, being bored. Challenge yourself to reconsider the nature of the formats you do work in, that you’re willing to work in, that you’re willing to try. Take a look at some formats that you didn’t maybe know even existed before, because there are new ones all the time. Challenge yourself to even break out of a genre and into another genre.

John: You’re really saying just stay curious and really look at the world around you and see, what is out there, what is a thing I could make out there that is interesting to me? It doesn’t mean you have to pursue everything. You don’t have to become a social media influencer. You don’t have to master TikTok. It’s okay to leave some stuff by the side, but also recognize that if these things are coming online, they’re serving some need. What is it you can bring to this need, and what can you do that could fit into this bigger universe of new content that’s being made?

Craig: You’ve mentioned the key to all of this, which is stay curious and be connected with the world. The biggest complaint people will make about, we’ll call them aging artists, is that they’re out of touch. How do we get out of touch? We get out of touch by essentially ignoring the world around us because we feel like we figured it out in a moment, and then we stay there. The world will move past that moment. If you don’t, you will be out of touch.

Sometimes people engage with the world simply in opposition. “Kids these days.” Let me just boil it down to that. “I don’t understand the world today. Everyone is on their phones.” Anybody who ever says, “You know what the problem is with the world today? Look around you man. Everyone is staring at their phones. They’re not looking at each other,” you go ahead and tell that person they’re an idiot, because the world changes. They are interacting in fact with more people faster than you could have ever done in your life. Is it true that sometimes uninterrupted eye-to-eye contact is wonderful? Absolutely. Is it a cliché, out-of-touch thing to say, “They’re all looking at their phones?” Absolutely out of touch.

Rather than instinctively saying, “In my day everything was perfect and now it stinks,” listen. Just listen to the world. Even if you disagree with it, listen to it, because perhaps in your experience of the world around you and your differences of opinions with it, you may find grist for the creative mill. Defensiveness isn’t going to get you anywhere.

John: Yeah. Being defensive is never a good look. When you say no to something, people stop engaging with you. I would say over this last 20 years, one of the most helpful ways I’ve been able to stay caught up with how things are for screenwriters and just for general people making creative things, I’ve always had an assistant. My assistants have always been younger than me. They’ve always been at the start of their careers and doing stuff that people at the start of their careers do. It’s been fascinating to see how the starts of careers have changed over the last 20 years because just the industry has changed around them.

Also, just engaging with the people who originally were writing into the website who are now Scriptnotes listeners. You see what they’re doing and what the challenges they’re facing, but also what is exciting to them. I may not be excited about the same things, but what they’re into is valid. Listening to what it is that they are going after is great. I always try to remember that the people I’m interacting with are the people who are going to be running this town in 10, 20, 30 years. It’s worth hearing what’s sparking for them because those are the kinds of movies and TV shows that we will be making the next couple decades.

Craig: Inherently, you are not jealous of the young, nor am I. I think a lot of older people get quietly, subconsciously jealous of young people. My feeling is that when we judge them, remember what it was like when we were judged by older people, because in my memory my feelings were not hurt at all. I just kind of rolled my eyes and made fun of them, because soon they were going to be dead and I was not. They were old and out of it and not vital. My feeling is, judging people who are younger and thinking that all they do, they’re obsessed with their influencers and their TikTok and blah blah blah, you’re not having any impact on them. They’re laughing at you. Maybe just listen to them and observe them. What’s wrong with that?

John: You can also ask advice, which I think a lot of times older people have a hard time asking advice of younger people because it reveals something that they don’t know. The fact is you just don’t know some things, so again, be curious. Ask the questions. Don’t ask the questions in a way that feels judgmental like, “Why are you doing it this crazy, stupid way?” What is it that’s interesting to you about this thing, or why did you decide to make that choice? Again, when you get to move into new fields, that’s very natural because you just actually just don’t know. You’re in a much better position to ask naïve questions because you don’t know what that thing is, versus us as screenwriters we have a good sense of how all the stuff fits together.

That said, when I talked with a writer, Liz Hannah, who just did a movie for Netflix, I am genuinely curious about what the experience is like making a movie for Netflix. What are the deliverables like on that movie? Are they expecting the same things that we’d expect in a theatrical feature delivery system where they want… Are they cutting negative? Are they doing all the stuff that we used to do for normal, traditional features, or is it more like a TV delivery system? Ask those questions and realize that the different kinds of things people are making these days are more likely the future than what we knew.

Craig: The things around us that happen that we can lose touch with in a dangerous way are not just I guess the different experiences that younger people are having, but also the general viewpoint of the world. Attitudes change. It’s very hard for us to keep up with it. It really is. I understand that.

I remember a friend once told me, he was like, “I’m going to keep listening to whatever the pop music station is, the current hits station, because I never want to be one of the old people that doesn’t know current music.” Inevitably, you will be. It’s not possible. There are some things that are going to leave you behind.

General attitudes and vibes and feelings are things you need to be in touch with, because what was once funny may not be anymore. Things like funny and dramatic and scary and shocking are not absolute values. They are relative to the time in which you live. If you’re not paying attention to the kinds of things that are shocking people or making them laugh, you’re going to flop, because you’re out of touch and out of time.

John: Let’s talk about authenticity, because one of the things I see which can be kind of embarrassing is when an older person is trying to seem younger than they are and is not acknowledging the fact that they are in a different generation than people they’re talking to.

Craig: Hello, fellow kids.

John: Language is one where they’re trying to use slang and they’re using it improperly. That’s sort of a tell. It’s not just that it’s embarrassing that they’re using it wrong. It’s that it’s clear that they’re not being authentic to who they are. I think one of the reasons why young people spark so clearly to Bernie Sanders is he feels very much himself. That is true of any generation. When we were in our 20s, we didn’t want the old person who was trying to be like us. We wanted the old person who felt like themselves. Don’t reach too far in terms of your own voice trying to sound young.

In terms of your writing voice, though, you are going to be writing characters of all different ages, all different backgrounds. You have to be listening for how those things sound so that your character’s voices don’t drift away.

Our example in last week’s episode, where we were listening to how people speak, that’s I think even more important as you age into your career, because your assumptions, your memory of what 20-somethings sounded like is not going to match how 20-somethings sound right now.

Craig: Yeah. Then we come to our last point, which is just language, just the realities of language, because you’re right. There is something terribly inauthentic about someone that is chasing language. They will always be five steps behind anyway. They will always be your dad walking in saying, “Oh, chill out. Oh wow, this is fresh.” Shut up, dad. That’s so old and lame. It’s faster now. Whatever is cool five seconds will not be cool five seconds from now, because that’s what youth is. It’s a churn.

Don’t chase it, but do let yourself be carried along by it. Be aware of it. Let yourself be old authentically without either chasing something, which is inauthentic, or denying the reality of it, which is just as terrible. Just be aware of the way that the world is changing and be aware of the way you’re changing. If you are those things and you are willing and open to evolving, then it doesn’t really matter how old you get. You’ll just be cool. Dr. Ruth Westheimer is 4,000 years old.

John: Good lord, yes.

Craig: She’s cool.

John: Yeah, she’s a lich, but she’s really cool.

Craig: She is a lich.

John: There’s a [unclear 01:17:21] hidden away someplace.

Craig: Yeah, she’s a lawful good lich. Very rare. Very rare.

John: Special when you find them.

Craig: She’s a lich.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with segments produced by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, and Megan McDonnell. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Chris John Mince [ph]. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin and I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. You should get them. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record with Jake, who wrote in with the suggestion for this episode. Thanks, and we’ll see you next week.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, I’m here with Jake Kelley, who is the listener who wrote in with the suggestion for this episode. Jake, welcome to Scriptnotes.

Jake Kelley: Hello. Thank you for having me.

John: Tell me about the inspiration for this episode. What got you thinking about, “Oh, I should put together a compendium episode.”

Jake: It started because I think as listeners what we appreciate about you and Craig is your expertise on the craft of screenwriting. If you listen to enough episodes, it becomes evident that you’re both very wise and experienced guys in other manners. I wanted to put this episode together to showcase some of that wisdom that’s not necessarily craft-specific, but that can still help screenwriters.

John: Stuff that’s not about the words on the page, but the actual experience of being a screenwriter. Are you a screenwriter? Do you write yourself?

Jake: I do write. I am not a professional screenwriter.

John: I see by the little bit of Googling that you’re actually a visual artist. That’s your background?

Jake: That is correct.

John: How do you find the relationship between the creative process, writing, trying to write a script, versus the work you’re doing, painting or doing other visual arts?

Jake: I find the process to be pretty similar. I would say the biggest difference, and it’s a very surface-level difference, but I can only write for about two or three hours a day max, and usually not even that, whereas if I’m doing visual art, it’s pretty easy for me to do five, six, or seven hours straight.

John: They’re similar disciplines, but different in the way that doing physical art, you’re physically doing stuff, you’re in a space, you’re moving around, versus writing, you’re at a desk and you’re making a thousand decisions about this word or that word, this moment or that moment. Even Craig and I, we’re writing two or three hours maximum a day also. It’s not realistic to assume that you’re going to be able to crank out that number of hours.

Jake: There still is a lot of those decisions in creative art. Every time I mix a color, it’s like, is this the right color or the wrong color? Every line, I’m questioning it. It really is a process of thousands of micro decisions you’re making through the course of that working session.

John: Craig, of course, if he were on this podcast, he would say [unclear 01:20:48] drop out of film school. Did you go to art school? Did you learn how to do this in an academic setting?

Jake: Yes. I did go to the University of Wisconsin, where I studied fine art.

John: What are those classes like? I know a writing class, because I went through a journalism program. Those metrics were like, are you able to do the job or not do the job, versus it would seem to be harder to figure out, is this student in my visual arts class actually progressing? Are they doing the work that deserves an A or a B or a pass or a fail?

Jake: I think that was the trouble for some of my educators, some of them being grad students. I would say overall it is measured by progress. These classes were open to non-artists a lot of times. We did try to foster a healthy atmosphere if somebody wanted to come in from a science field and just try to do a life drawing. It was based on progress and effort and attempt. You’d just blow it off, but that was the starting place.

John: Now, coming from a visual background, were you always also writing? Did you write even back in those days or was it a later thing that you got into?

Jake: We can say I was doing some writing, but where they really came together was I was doing comics and comic strips, which is really both writing and drawing at the same time.

John: Talk to me about the comic strips, because that’s absolutely true that you were both having to figure out what the stories, what the words are, what the actual point is, yet you have to have a strong visual representation of how that works. As you were doing comics, were you scripting them out first and then figuring out the panels? What was your process?

Jake: For that, if it was a simple four-panel comic, generally I would just have a vague idea of one I wanted to do. I would fill in the visual information, and then do the text last. Other people did it the other way. If it’s longer form, then I would probably start with some sort of words on a page to help guide me, break up the storytelling information that way.

John: I’m writing a graphic novel right now. I’m loving it. It’s a great process, but I’m finding it is actually exhausting to really have to visualize the page and think, okay, how is this going to be presented on the page, what’s actually happening panel by panel to get me through it, what is the top-of-page to bottom-of-page experience? I love it, but it’s just, even after 20 years doing this as a job, it is still different than the normal screenwriting I’m doing.

Jake: When you’re screenwriting and you’re using only words, what is the engagement of the visual process there for you?

John: Screenwriting with just words, I am envisioning the space, envisioning who the people are and where they are in the space and basically what they’re doing. I just create the loop of this is the moment, this is the scene, this is happening. I don’t think shot by shot. I don’t think what the coverage is going to be. I don’t think necessarily who’s big in frame, who’s small in frame, usually. I just have to put the people there and get them in motion, as opposed to doing this writing now for this graphic novel, I really have to think about who’s in that frame and who am I focused on in that moment. It feels a lot more like the directing from the page has always been okay, but it feels like calling out those closeups, calling out what it is moment by moment I’m going to be seeing. That is a little exhausting for me.

Jake: Of course.

John: I want to talk to you about, you pulled for this episode way back to Episode 6. When did you start listening to this show? When did you find all these little moments? Were you always listening from the beginning or did you go back through the archives? How did you find all these moments?

Jake: I believe I discovered your podcast, I want to say around Episode 390 or so. I’m not actually sure what date that lines up with, maybe three years ago or so. At first I was just listening to the new episode every week it came out. Then I did start to become more interested in the past episodes, because there is a wealth of information there. What I did was I would go reverse chronological by… You break it up into 50-episode chunks. I would go backwards a chunk, but then within that chunk, go forward. I’d jump to Episode 250, then go 251, 252. Then when I reached 300, I would jump backwards to 200 and then 201.

John: I’ve never listened to the back-catalogs. I have a memory of recording them, but I can’t remember who I was at that time or what the show was like.

Jake: Of course.

John: How much has the show changed when you listen back to those early episodes versus what’s happening now on the show?

Jake: I don’t think it actually changed all that much. I know that some people say that the earlier episodes are a little bit rough around the edges. I think that’s only true maybe in terms of microphone quality. Very, very early on, I think you and Craig maybe don’t have quite the same rapport. Honestly, it’s not that noticeable. It really is you could jump to those back-episodes that far back and really truly have the same experience. You guys are as wise and smart as always.

John: Aw. Jake, thank you so much for this. Thank you very much again for writing with this suggestion, because it really was a great pitch for putting together the kind of episodes that we’ve been doing more of as Megana’s come online, to really pick stuff up from this big catalog and make episodes that make sense. We some rerun old episodes, and that can be great, but so much of that information gets weirdly out of date, and our wonderful things don’t match up to anything. A suggestion like this for a special compendium episode is great. Jake, thank you so much again for this.

Jake: Of course. Thanks for having me.

John: Absolutely.

Links:

• Episode 6: How Kids Become Screenwriters
• Episode 119: Positive Moviegoing
• Episode 425: Tough Love vs. Self Care
• Episode 439: How to Grow Old as a Writer
• Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium to listen to all the episodes in our back catalogue, including the ones sampled here.
• Thanks to Jake Kelley for the episode suggestion!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Aline Brosh McKenna on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Christiaan Mentz (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao (with segments by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, and Megan Mcdonnell!) and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/you-cant-even-imagine).

**John August:** Hey, so on today’s show Craig says the F-word a couple times because he gets angry about a writer who is taking advantage of people. So that’s a warning if you’re in the car with your kids or someplace where you could just put in headphones, do that.

**Craig Mazin:** The kids need to know, too.

**John:** The kids need to be warned about Svengalis.

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 520 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show the screenplay is often described as the blueprint for a movie, but how do the artists and craftspeople who actually make movies use these blueprints. We’ll look at some of the most important people to read a script and how they do their jobs. We’ll also talk about predatory writers, getting in over your head, and what it’s like to have no visual imagination.

And in our bonus segment for premium members, fine, let’s get into that whole bad art friend situation. The thing that was all over my Twitter that Craig sent to me as an – ugh, now I had to read this.

**Craig:** I mean, kinda.

**John:** Kinda. You sort of kinda had to read it. You missed out on the episode where I think Liz Hannah was on the show and she and I talked through the Cat Person discourse. And so it’s another round of that. And Cat Person is actually referenced in it, so it’s all nesting dolls of appropriation.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s pretty screwed up. Yeah. I enjoyed reading about. And I enjoyed not being a part of it more than anything.

**John:** Yes. I really enjoyed not being involved in any of those text chains.

**Craig:** My new sort of joy is not being involved in things.

**John:** Yes. Love it. I love that for you. It’s a good look. But first some follow up. Last week we discussed the upcoming IATSE strike authorization vote. Craig, what was the result of the strike authorization vote?

**Craig:** A resounding yes. Not only did 98% of the vote come back in as a yes, which is not uncommon for these things, but the really fascinating number was that 90% of IATSE actually showed up to vote. If 90% of the Writers Guild shows up to vote that’s a pretty great number, but it represents a few thousand people. If 90% of IATSE shows up to vote we’re talking tens of thousands of people.

**John:** Yeah. Good sized towns of people.

**Craig:** Yes. So there is no question about IATSE’s willingness to go on strike. And this was not kind of even a show vote. They weren’t even doing the thing that the Writers Guild annoyingly does where it’s like you have to vote yes. They were like, no, no, no, everyone was like, please, give me the ballot. I insist on voting yes right now because there is a pent up demand for action. And it is justified.

So, what happens is they go back and they sit down with the AMPTP who at this point would be beyond foolish if they didn’t arrive at a place that thwarted a strike in my opinion.

**John:** Absolutely. Because we recorded this show on a Saturday and it comes out on a Tuesday maybe it will all be resolved by then and we’ll again be living in the past. So, for our listeners who are living in the future, hey, tell us what happened because we don’t know yet.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, my gut tells me there will not be a strike. I still keep thinking that because I feel like the impact of an IATSE strike is so dramatic. And because it would open that can of worms permanently. I just feel, I feel like the companies are going to have to give on a number of issues. If they don’t it is almost tantamount to them declaring that the era of unionization of labor in the entertainment business is over and that the Amazonian era has begun. And we don’t want that.

**John:** No, we don’t.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** In last week’s episode we wondered aloud why Netflix was choosing two minutes as the threshold for viewing a program. Craig was mocking them and asking, hey, why are you doing that. Several writers wrote in with possible answers. So, the first one really comes down to intentionality. Doug writes, “Viewing something for two minutes is long enough to say ‘that person was interested in this’ and that is a valuable metric for Netflix because the constant release of curiosity-worthy material is enough to keep people subscribing, even if they don’t finish everything they start.”

So if you clicked that and you’re watching it for two minutes you meant to click it and it wasn’t accidental. This was something that you thought was going to be interesting to you. And so that’s really kind of what they’re most concerned about. Because remember they kind of don’t care whether you watch the whole thing. They’d be delighted if you did watch the whole thing. They basically don’t want you to stop subscribing to Netflix. That’s really their goal.

**Craig:** Yeah. I get that completely. But I think Doug is stating something as fact in which I don’t really know if it is. If everybody constantly watched just two minutes of stuff on Netflix and went “garbage, moving on,” and then never found stuff that they really, really loved at some point people would turn it off. The two minutes is not a threshold – I mean, we’re acknowledging there is a threshold that implies interested in. But at that point why is it two minutes? Why isn’t it one minute? Why isn’t it 40 seconds?

It seems to me that there has to be a number that implies interested in and appreciated to some small amount. And two minutes ain’t it. At all. So I would suggest that Netflix has picked two minutes because more than anything it makes their numbers look amazing. That’s why.

**John:** That’s very, very possible. I would also be certain that if people are actually watching two minutes, if there’s that kind of churn from program to program to program to program Netflix has a whole team that’s studying that, too, to make sure that that’s not going to be a person that we’re going to lose. So, they certainly have their data scientists there. Another listener wrote in to point out that when you buy a ticket to see a movie in a theater no one kind of cares whether you actually sat through the whole movie. So it’s like buying the ticket is sort of the intentionality. That’s the money coming into the thing so that’s kind of all you care about. And so it’s not about did this person watch the whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s also a weird point.

**John:** It’s a weird point.

**Craig:** Because we don’t pay per view on Netflix, we pay for months. It’s really more akin to you got a MoviePass, remember those John?

**John:** Oh, I remember MoviePass. Yeah. Why didn’t that work? I was rooting for MoviePass.

**Craig:** It seemed like a great idea. The fundamentals were sound.

So if you got a MoviePass and then you hopped into a movie and then walked out after two minutes should Universal declare a victory? I don’t think so.

**John:** Well, I think Universal got paid, though. They got the money from MoviePass for it, so.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** MoviePass was not happy.

**Craig:** In general I don’t think they can suggest that this is a victory for them or a hit. I mean, the whole point is you want more, don’t you want another, you want a second one, you want a third movie. I don’t know. Anyway, at some point this is what happens. The Internet tries to gaslight you into believing that people watching something for two minutes and then turning it off is a good thing. It is not. Stop it.

**John:** It’s not an artistic triumph.

**Craig:** No. You’re writing into a podcast for writers. And you’re suggesting that we should be happy that people watched our thing for two minutes and then went, “Nope.” I don’t think so. It’s just not great. It’s not great for them either. They don’t – by the way you know they adjusted it. It used to be a much longer number. And then they adjusted it. Because now they can say four billion people watched a show.

**John:** Yeah. I think I probably referenced this obliquely in the past, saying like there’s a Broadway producer who is notorious for showing up for like ten minutes of a show and then walking out. And I probably didn’t give his name because I didn’t want to anger him, but now it’s Scott Rudin, because we can just say his name. Scott Rudin was notorious for just first-acting, second-acting things, or having people buy a ticket and just watch ten minutes of it and then walk out. And so frustrating as a person who is making theater, but that’s what you got with Scott Rudin.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s a bad person. There was a wonderful little story out last week. Elijah Wood, who is an excellent person. We ought to have him on the show. He’s a lovely guy. Have you met Elijah Wood by the way?

**John:** I’ve never met him.

**Craig:** He’s fantastic. He was saying that originally Bob and Harvey Weinstein – so Miramax had the rights to Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson wanted to make three movies. And Harvey said he only wanted to make two. And eventually New Line got the rights. And Peter Jackson really did not like Harvey. No one did. And so there’s an orc. Somewhere in those movies there’s an orc that is modeled after Harvey. And I’m like I’ve seen those movies so many times and I’m like I’ve got to watch again just to find the Harvey orc now.

**John:** Yeah. I’m sure Elijah could point you to him, maybe.

**Craig:** I’m going to ask him to do that. That’s fair.

**John:** Wrapping up our Netflix talk here, Quinn my friend pointed me to this Twitter thread by Trung Phan who looks at how the thumbnail artwork for a show on Netflix is generated and how it is tested. And I know they were procedurally done. I knew there was some A/B Testing. But it’s actually much more complicated than you would ever think or believe. And there’s a reason why those things are designed in the rule of thirds. They know based on what you’ve done before, what you’ve looked at before, this is what’s going to appeal to you about this particular show. So even though this actress is only in like two out of ten episodes, she might be the marquee face that they’re going to show you for that program because they know that you like her face.

So it’s a fascinating sort of dystopian look at how they make their decisions.

**Craig:** Yeah. Market research is a barren wasteland where no soul can thrive. It’s effective. There’s no question about it. We’ve always known that. It’s nothing you. You see a trailer for a movie and it makes a big deal about an actor being in it and they’re in it for two seconds. This is pretty standard stuff. But it’s a bummer.

**John:** Yeah. Normal real marketing, like when you have a movie coming out, it’s not like it’s some artistic we’re making this poster for all the right reasons. It is such a workplace of committees and random opinions and that executive hates the color blue. It’s a mess that way, too.

**Craig:** It’s a mess. And they do test everything and eventually I think if you’ve been around enough testing you start to come to the inevitable conclusion that you can use the testing to justify any answer you want.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yeah.

**Craig:** And that pretty much is what happens.

**John:** Yup. All right, so this past week I was listening to the Slate Working podcast which I highly recommend and they had a guest on, she was a costume designer named Dana Covarrubias. And she was talking about how they came up with the wardrobe for Only Murders in the Building. And Craig you don’t watch a lot of TV, so you probably have not seen Only Murders in the Building.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think you would genuinely love it. It is a Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez. It is like a Serial true crime thing, but also a comedy. It’s all in this upscale Upper West Side apartment building. It’s really, really well done. And the costumes are fantastic and they’re so smart and so specific. What I loved about the conversation on the podcast though is they were really talking about what is the process of getting started to think about costumes. You would think that, oh, she must talk to the director or the showrunner or the actors. And it really starts with she reads the script. And she talked about her process of sitting down, reading the script. Reading it once just for pleasure. And really just getting a sense of the tone before she then approaches like, OK, now let me think about days and nights and where is this character coming from, where they’re going to, and building out full threads on who this person really is and why they’re making the choices they are doing.

And you and I have talked so much about hair and makeup and looks and all the other things that a writer may be thinking about for characters and for their scripts. But I don’t think we’ve talked about all the other people who are getting handed that script and having to make choices based on what they’re reading there even independently of the other folks they’re talking with. So I really want to take a look at the script as a blueprint and then look at all these incredibly talented people who have to take this blueprint and figure out how to build the thing.

**Craig:** I’ve always struggled with the word blueprints because blueprints are rather bloodless and they’re incredibly thorough in that they tell you exactly what to do. This goes here. This goes here. This goes here. And it is absolutely true that every head of every department working on a television show or a movie if they’re good, and one would hope that they are, they do read to understand. They are trying to get inside of the heart of it and they’re trying to see how it functions from a character point of view. At some point they’re going to have to put other hats on.

It is remarkable to see how essential it is to everybody that works in our business creatively to also be organized. Because each department has to feel it with their soul and understand why and how they should be dressing people a certain way, putting hair on a certain way, stunts in a certain tone, but also they need to figure out how to actually pull it off with the money they have, the time they have. And people who can do both at the same time are worth their weight in gold and that’s what makes the good ones great.

**John:** Yeah. So as you approach doing your TV shows, or as you’ve been involved in movies too, it always is striking to me that in order to get these people signed on they’re generally reading the script. And so they have known who else was involved, but they have to read the script and they have to really respond to the script. And they have to say, OK, this is a project I want to work on because I think the project will be good on the whole. I think it will turn out well. I think I will be proud of the work I can do here. And I think it will present interesting challenges to me. These people may not be taking the easiest jobs, or the jobs that they’re used to, but OK this offers some cool challenges for me. Because I know sometimes the projects I want to take as a writer are also the ones that are like, wow, I’ve never gotten a chance to do this before and this is exciting to me.

And so whether it’s a costume designer who has never gotten to do this period before, or a cinematographer who has never gotten to shoot in these environments, that’s really compelling. And the first experience about what that’s going to look like, feel like, be like is going to be in that script. And that’s why it’s all so important. It’s not just these are the scenes, these are the characters, this is what’s happening. It’s what the script feels like because that’s their first vision of what the final movie hopefully is going to be.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know one of the things they’ve been saying in terms of the IATSE action right now is that for those of us who are below the line we tend to think of production as something that comes along every now and again, for people who do these kinds of jobs they’re in production all the time. They’re either in prep or they’re in production. And so you’re absolutely right, the notion of being able to show off a different muscle, a different kind of vibe, that would be incredibly attractive to them. But that means they need to understand what makes it special. So, there are situations also where just the size may be attractive to them.

But size and novelty will wear off. And also size and novelty only maybe inspires you to say yes to the gig. It’s not going to help you design it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Ultimately you do need to get inside the tone and that means you need to also have a relationship with the one or two people that holds that knowledge inside. And you need to get in their heads and you need to share it.

**John:** Realistically on most features the person who is going to be making a lot of those decisions is going to be the director. But on something like a television pilot that showrunner/creator and the pilot director will have a lot of very direct connection about this is what the vision for how we’re going to shoot this is going to look like. This is what we’re going for. This is tonally what we’re going for. And that will radiate from all the departments. And so ideally early on in the process you’ll hire on a production designer who is responsible for like, OK, here is the very big swatches of color kind of look for things. This is the time. This is the general look. And then those decisions will then radiate through to the other costume departments and art departments and props and everybody else.

But if that vision doesn’t actually match what’s on the page in the script it’s going to be a real challenge to sort of be going back and forth between like this is what we’re seeing on the art boards versus this is what’s on the page. How do we actually marry that? If there’s a grand vision for sort of these giant 1930s cityscapes but it’s all taking place on interior sound stages that’s not going to actually work.

**Craig:** Does sound like the person who wrote the script should be involved, doesn’t it?

**John:** Doesn’t it sound like it?

**Craig:** Yeah, which is why I do find working in television now so satisfying, because that’s what I do now. And it is nice to be able to say, ah, here’s what I think. And here’s why I think it. And wonderful early discussions that bore a lot of fruit while we were in prep on The Last of Us, we’re going through the choices we could make. I mean, there have been a lot of shows that occurred after the apocalypse. So, you know, in talking with our costume designer, Cynthia Summers, about how we wanted to do this. Neil and I, we obviously had things from the game that informed us, but we also had general philosophical notions and ideas that are a bit different. It’s a very similar thing that we did with [Unintelligible] and Johan Renck and I. And it’s a wonderful thing to talk about that stuff. I love talking about that. Entirely within the framework of tone.

Costumes will blow up or preserve or reinforce tone. So will hair. All of it. It’s all essential. And the more you dig into the details the more you appreciate the people who do read the script and care about the script. And it’s the ones who don’t who can be tricky sometimes. Sometimes they’re brilliant, too, but they need more attention.

**John:** Yeah. And we should say that there’s a certain point in sort of the hierarchy on the set where like maybe it’s not essential that this person knows the overall vision for the movie or for the series because they are there to sort of get this day’s work done. And literally moving the lights and getting this lit they may not need to know the grander scheme of things.

But I also had the experience of on movies, big movies, where I really kind of felt like, oh, they only looked at the scene in a vacuum and didn’t really notice what was happening before and after and so they lit it as sort of the wrong kind of dawn. And like, oh, that actually doesn’t track with the shot that’s going to come directly beforehand. And that’s something that an editor in reading through the script would have noticed like, oh, it’s going to be really important–

**Craig:** Sorry, I have to interrupt you. An editor read through the script? [laughs] Where is this magical editor? I would like to meet this person.

**John:** So I want to have a whole discussion on postproduction because editors are notorious for not reading through scripts. And just like, oh, I found the movie as it came in. It was like documentary footage that sort of came across the transom and I decided to cut something together.

**Craig:** They do exist. I’m joking. They exist. But a lot of them really are sort of infamous for not reading the script.

**John:** But I would say that editor would notice like, oh shit, this could have been an amazing transition if you’d actually lit it the way it was sort of written on the page and you didn’t notice that. And so that can be a problem because it can become very atomic when it gets down to production where they’re just looking this scene, this scene, this scene, this scene, and not seeing the overall flow. And one of the things I so appreciate this costume designer Dana talking about her plan for things is they really are looking – costume designers are really good at this – looking for like where was this person earlier in the day. How did they get to this place? Because they are always worried about continuity and making sure that they had a scarf there. They would still have that scarf.

**Craig:** Ah, yes.

**John:** That stuff is remarkable. And they are building out these boards and notebooks that actually detail all of this.

**Craig:** I’m just laughing because Cynthia Summers is our costume designer, but on the day-to-day work on the set we have two gentlemen, the two Steves, and the two Steves are in charge of both handling the application of wardrobe to our actors on the day, but also preserving and maintaining continuity. Considering continuity and the attention to detail there is startling. And they will occasionally walk up to me and say, “Quick question for you. Seven months from now we’re going to be somewhere,” and then I’m like oh my god, oh my god you guys. But it’s essential. And it doesn’t matter what you do. If somebody is wearing the wrong shirt from one cut to the next it’s over. It’s done.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s funny actually. I looked over the shoulder. They watch the video feed. And they don’t have contacts, our little portable, they don’t care what anyone is watching at all. They’re watching moving clothes. And I said to you this shows just clothing moving around and they’re like, “Yeah.” And it’s awesome. And they’re really great at it. It’s remarkable to watch.

**John:** Now back in the day they would all be taking Polaroids. Now I’m sure they’re using their iPhones or they’re screenshotting what they’re seeing there so they can have references for this. But another reason why this is so important, like you can have a plan going in, but then a pandemic can stop production for a year and then you have to pick up scenes that you started shooting before you shut down. And they can just do it because they can. Because they’re remarkably organized and talented. It’s that creative brain which you absolutely need to do these jobs, and also this meticulous detail brain which is so essential. And I think many screenwriters don’t appreciate the importance.

**Craig:** I mean, nothing gets shot in chronological order. Inside of an episode things are being shot out of order. And then even episodes themselves may not be shot in order. We had to shoot slightly out of order episodically because of weather. Just accounting for how the weather would impact the episodes we were shooting. So, sometimes you’re shooting things and then you realize, ah, stuff happened in between. What needs to happen to the clothing, the hair, the makeup?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** The scars? The bruises? Whatever it is. All of that math has to be done and it’s constantly being figured out and thank god these brilliant people that we have are so dedicated and committed to getting it right. And they really are. And we would be utterly lost without them.

But I will say this machine that processes details – that’s what it is, a detail machine, and it’s like details is its fuel and it’s just churning and churning. It needs detail fuel. If you don’t write the detail people are just going to fill it in for you. And this is my constant refrain. If I taught a class at the University of [Gibberish] it would just be called Details. That’s what it is. It’s how to write details. Because if you don’t then you’ve failed before you started.

**John:** Yeah. And again one of the biggest challenges of screenwriting is kind of knowing all these details and recognizing how many details you can put in before you sort of choke the life out of scenes. Where like those details get in the way and people stop reading. And that’s challenging. And that’s the craft.

**Craig:** It is. And there is a certain amount of detail that the viewer can’t take in. So there’s an amount and then there’s a kind of way to inform detail without spelling it all out. You know, if you say this room is full of blank-blank era stuff, most of which was heavily used but has been brought back to life, that guides everyone. Props. Art direction. All of it.

**John:** Just like a fight sequence does not label every punch. You’re not labeling everything on the shelf. You’re just making sure that you’re creating a space where there would be shelves full of things.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Now, before we get to editors, because we should talk a little bit about editors and scripts, the person who is staring at the script the entire time is the script supervisor who I know we’ve talked about scripties before on the show, but I do want to sort of call them out again because the same way that hair and makeup and wardrobe is keeping track of all these continuity things, the scripty is keeping track of every line that is said, every take, making sure that as you cut from angle to angle it’s actually making sense, that things aren’t drifting.

They can be an absolute godsend. So I just want to speak up for the script supervisors on set.

**Craig:** Have we talked about how crazy that job is, even that it exists. It should not be one job. I just want to run down the things the script supervisor has to do. First, they need to make sure that the actors are saying the lines as written, or that somebody signs off on a change. Second, they need to record what lines are being said on camera and what lines are being said off-camera while it’s happening. Third, they need to handle all continuity. That means what things have moved, drinks and glasses, did you pick it up with your right hand or your left hand. All of it. When did you turn? On what line did you open the door? All of it needs to be recorded. Every single take.

Then they also need to record what time the first shot of the day was. They need to record what the lens. They need to record what camera roll you’re on. They need to tell the camera assistants if we’re going up a letter in takes or if we’re staying on take six. They have to do all of that, plus they have to time the whole script out ahead of time to see what the timing would be. It’s crazy. And eye lines. And that’s the other thing. They need to know on a scene where you’re shooting 12 people sitting around a table, when you get to a particular line should they be looking to the left of the camera or the right of camera. This should be 12 different jobs and it’s a job for one person. They are essential.

**John:** And they’re heroic. And we should say when we say recording all this is happening they’re literally taking notes in pencil on a script page. And so there’s a whole coding system they use and squiggly lines for like this take, this take, this take. This is where we moved to 6A and this is 6B. They can do all this stuff. And so a script supervisor can look back at those notes and say like, OK, this is how we did this thing and the reason why you’re keeping track of lens sizes and such is so like OK we need to go back and reshoot something or fix something you know exactly how you did it.

**Craig:** Even later in the day when you’re like, OK, we’ve turned around. It was hours ago. What lens we’re we on because we have to match it on this side? It is I would say probably rare to find a script supervisor that is still doing it with pencil and paper. There are some excellent programs that people have been using for a long time. And now I think a lot of it is done on iPad. Our script supervisor works on an iPad and sometimes I just sort of peek over and watch what he’s doing and it’s crazy. I was talking to him, I’m like how does anybody survive doing this job for the first year as you’re learning? And you know he said, “You kind of just make it up.” He said early on there’s no way, there’s no way you can do it. So you’re sort of like, yeah, they were holding it in their left. And then you’re like, oh boy, I hope they were holding it in the left hand. Because it just takes time for your brain to expand, to firehose that much information constantly all the time.

But, yeah, I mean, look, there’s a reason why it’s practically in my contract that our script supervisor on Chernobyl is the same one on The Last of Us. And I intend to have him by my side always. Because he is too good. He’s just too good.

**John:** Absolutely. And of course in modern productions it is theoretically possible to sort of go back and say, OK, we can actually check the tape and see – when I say pencil notes, I’m thinking back to like Go and it’s literally shot on film. So there’s no record, there’s no way to actually look at sort of what hand someone was holding it in. So we would just have to look to our script supervisor and ask her what was it. And she knows. Because she’s always right by the camera lens, even if you’re on a dolly truck going down a street in Downtown LA. She’s there because she has to see everything with her own two eyes. So, it’s a remarkable job.

**Craig:** It’s pretty amazing.

**John:** Now in theory all of those notes go to the editors who obviously they have to take the footage and then break it into the proper bins and start assembling the movie. And in theory you’d think like, oh, they can just look at the script pages and see what the scene is supposed to be. In practice a lot of times they sort of look at all the footage and then start cutting scenes their own way.

**Craig:** Yeah. Which is understandable to an extent. You don’t necessarily want to deprive yourself of their instincts. And when they look at footage they may feel something and they may drift toward it and that makes total sense. However, I do always appreciate and ask of my editors that they do read the scene carefully before they start cutting it because there are as I like to call it clues buried all over this thing. It’s like a little clue book.

**John:** It’s almost like someone wanted you to find your way out of this [unintelligible] box.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Sometimes you’ll sit there and they’re like “I just didn’t quite know what to do in this moment.” And I’m like did you check the clue book? And then they look and they’re like, “Oh, that’s what that is.” Yes. It’s in the clue book.

The other big clue book is in fact the notes generated by the script supervisor. So a lot of times what will happen is I’ll be sitting there and I’ll go why don’t we have that shot where he turns and looks at her in the wide? And they’re like we didn’t do it. And I’m like we did. No, it’s not there. Yes it is, I know it. And then we look in the script – oh, there it is. We found it.

**John:** There it is. It’s right there. One of the things we also notice that the script supervisor is doing is marking which of the takes are, we used to say “print the takes,” because now everything is basically printed. But circling the takes is like these are the ones we think have the performance that we’re actually going after. So if you shot five takes, takes two and take five may be the ones that have the stuff that you want.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that was something we used to do when it actually cost money to print takes. So you would say, OK, well that obviously was a garbage take. But now what I’ve discovered along the way, and I’m thinking probably everybody sort of figured out early on, too, is even the takes, you sometimes have to go into that bin of the castoffs because what you needed was somebody just looking up and then looking to the left.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the best bits of directorial advice I can give anybody is wait longer than you think you have to before you say cut. Because stuff happens back there that could just be gold.

**John:** All right. So some takeaways from thinking about how other people are using the script is just to remember that I think so often as writers like, OK, I’m going to write this script and then I’ll hand it into the studio and the producer will read it and we’ll get a director on board. And then I guess the actors will learn their lines. But that’s not even the beginning of the process really.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Everyone else has to take this thing and actually make it a thing. And blueprint may be the wrong term for it, but I guess you can have a blueprint for how you’re actually going to physically build the building, but that’s not furnishing the building. That’s not doing all the other stuff that sort of makes a place you can actually live inside. And that’s what all these other amazing artisans and craftspeople are doing is really making this thing be a place you can live inside.

**Craig:** Yeah. A long time ago when I used to have a blog, do you remember back then?

**John:** I do remember that.

**Craig:** I wrote a thing called You Can’t Just Walk Into a Building. Because if you say somebody walks into a building, which I think a lot of writers do, somebody has to figure out what building. Where? What does it look like? How does it function? And if you haven’t designed it, meaning you haven’t described what the function and nature and feeling of the building is then as I said other people are going to do it for you. And so the more you can participate in the direction, and when I say direction I don’t mean film direction. I mean creative direction.

**John:** The design.

**Craig:** The overall direction of the film or television show the better off that film and television show is going to be. They need the benefit of all the things you know and you will always know more than you can fit on the page.

**John:** Now Craig you are making my segue way too easily here. Because back in Episode 519 Craig said, “I am a huge believer in the visual imagination of the space. I need to know what it looks like, how close they are together, whether the lights are on or off, if there’s a fire in the fireplace, if it’s warm or hot.” And we got a couple of responses back on this and a whole new branch of things to talk through. Megana, could you read us what Dave wrote for us?

**Megana Rao:** So Dave wrote in, “A year or so ago at age 51 I discovered I have aphantasia. This means I’m unable to visualize, or put another way I have no mind’s eye. It was a surprise to me as I have a strong sense of imagination, work in creative fields, and write screenplays for pleasure. The latter being the reason I discovered Scriptnotes. For me imagination is narrative and conceptual, but not visual. When I read a book and the character description says she was tall and had blonde hair I know what this means but don’t form a picture in my head. It’s the same when my yoga instructor asks me to imagine a balloon inflating and deflating as I breathe.

“This revelation has led me to realize many things about my life. For example I now know it takes me longer to learn new things, especially physical ones because I’m reading through a set of instructions rather than playing back a video clip or looking at pictures of the activity. And when it comes to my writing I see now that I tend to over-describe because I want to make sure people see the character or place as I see, or in fact don’t see them. It’s suggested that perhaps 3 to 5% of people are aphantasiac. So perhaps as many as 2,000 listeners to Scriptnotes could be. I wonder how this affects their personal and professional lives. For me it’s not at all.

“There are some notable examples of aphantasiacs working in Hollywood, such as Ed Catmull, formerly at Pixar, which might suggest this to be true for others. Anyhow, keep up the good work. I’m always inspired by your weekly discussions, even if I can’t picture any of the things you touch upon, which in the case of Sexy Craig might not be a bad thing.”

**Craig:** Oh, you don’t have to see anything. You just have to listen. That’s all. Dave, you just got to listen.

**John:** Let Sexy Craig wash all over you. I really thank Dave for writing in with this because I’ve seen this term a little bit popping up on Twitter and I didn’t really know what it meant. And it’s not a disorder, it’s the range of how people imagine information and how the visual system works for people. But it is really interesting because I think I just have bias to assume well everyone’s brain works the way my brain works. And my brain, I can absolutely picture things in my head. I can imagine smells and textures, and tastes. I can sort of completely put myself in a place pretty easily and I set myself there and I write what I see. And that’s writing for me. And that’s not going to be the same experience Dave is having.

**Craig:** No. And I want to call out the most important word I suppose in the quote that Dave brings up here, and that’s the word “eye.” I believe in it. It certainly works for me. It’s important part of my process. But here’s another thing I know. Dave, I cannot draw at all. I can’t illustrate. I mean, my hands work. But a cube is barely within my reach. And only because I practiced it. So I can imagine things very vividly and very accurately, but I cannot reproduce them through drawing at all. And then there are people I think who may be able to produce things by drawing perfectly but perhaps don’t see them in the mind’s eye.

So, this is not a prison sentence by any stretch as you yourself have noted. However, I will say because it is a visual medium, and we know we’re telling a visual story, you need to have some method to create specificity and completion of visual work. Whether it is happening in your mind or whether you are sketching it out in a series of storyboards, your illustrations, or whether you have a really specific connection to words and the words connect to images as you write them. Whatever it is you need something because ultimately it’s film.

**John:** Yeah. I do wonder if someone who is writing strictly a stage play, with characters on a stage talking, it would impact their process less if they didn’t have to see the whole thing, but it was literally just about the words and the talking and sort of how this all goes. But there’s also, and we can look up what the actual term is, but the same way that some people don’t have a mind’s eye, there’s people who don’t have a mind’s voice, or they don’t have a voice in their head. They don’t have the ability to imagine conversations. And that would probably be a greater hindrance to doing the kinds of things that we’re doing because so much of what we do as screenwriters is think, OK, if they say this then that’s the answer – it’s putting yourself in the middle of imaginary conversations. And that’s a sort of crucial skill. And I think it’s also a source of anxiety and sort of negative repetition.

I do find that so often I will have arguments in my head with people and it’s like well that’s just really stupid because they’re actually not here to hear the other side of this argument.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s crazy. You should stop doing that.

**John:** Because Craig you never do that. You never actually–

**Craig:** I don’t really.

**John:** Have imaginary arguments?

**Craig:** I don’t. No. You’ve said this before. In fact I believe, because I remember it making quite an impression on me, it was one of your New Year’s resolutions to stop having arguments with people who weren’t there. I mean, I’ve definitely had the thing, there’s a German word for it, where you walk away from a conversation and then you think, oh, I should have said this or this.

**John:** The staircase thing, yeah.

**Craig:** The staircase logic. But it’s rare that I will sit and have a debate with somebody who is not there because they’re not there. It seems like a total waste of good fighting.

**John:** Yeah. But again it’s a range of experiences. And so I think, you know, there’s people who are going to be, I think there’s a term hyperphantasia, people who have extremely visual internal lives and that can be great, but it can also be challenging because apparently it ties into PTSD and other things. They kind of keep re-seeing these things. And it’s not just a reported phenomenon. Like one of the things I liked in this New York Times piece that we’ll link to, they actually can do scientific studies where they say, OK, we want you to visualize a bright white triangle and while they’re doing this they’re measuring your pupil dilation and people who have a situation where they don’t have a mind’s eye, their pupils will not contract where other people’s pupils will contract. And so it really is a thing – it’s a deeper brain thing and not just how people report the experience.

**Craig:** It’s a good reminder that what we do is brain work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And everybody’s brain is different and I don’t necessarily think, unless we’re talking about specific injury, or clear malfunction, or dysfunction, some of these things are just a question of how the imperfect system is balanced.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, you can only say that you are hyperphantasic if we have a number that is a normal amount of phantasic.

**John:** And we don’t.

**Craig:** We don’t. It’s a spectrum, like you say. There’s a range of brain function and, you know.

**John:** Here’s I think what might be useful for listeners though is if you feel – if you listen to our conversation and say like, OK, they describe as seeing yourself in a place and imagining all these things around you and that doesn’t even make sense to me. I don’t even know how a person does that. That could be a sign like, oh, maybe you actually are on this edge of this experience. Maybe it’s good to know, because if it is your situation then look for ways to address that. You may not be doing something wrong. It may just be how your brain works.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I don’t understand why anyone believes in god. My brain doesn’t work that way. And wouldn’t it be amazing if I got to judgment day and stood before god and went, oh, whoa.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re real. And he said, or she said, “Yes.” And I said but I just – even now I really don’t quite believe. And then he or she said, “Yeah, that’s because you had a brain problem.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then I would say, OK, so does that get me out of burning in a lake of fire for eternity? And I suspect that’s where they would say, “No.” [laughs]

**John:** But then again the question is well then who designed your bad, broken brain? It all sort of snaps back. As you were describing that were you visualizing?

**Craig:** Of course I was.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Of course I was. I can see everything. I could see all of it. I think I might be hyperphantasic.

**John:** I think I might be as well. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a common trait among screenwriters and writers in general.

**Craig:** Makes sense.

**John:** When I was doing the Arlo Finch books because as a screenwriter we’re only looking at what we can see and what we can hear, like texture, and taste, and smell, like those are not things that we’re actively describing in our scene description, but suddenly in a book I was doing all of those things and I did feel like my world had gotten a little bit more full. It was nice to be able to look at those senses that I normally can’t describe on the page and everything did just feel a little bit brighter for it.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Nice. Let’s get to some more listener questions. Megana, what have you got for us?

**Megana:** Great. So Stupid Luck asks, “I found myself in the most wonderful but terrifying situation. A pilot that I helped to develop and write was sold earlier this year and despite my having zero experience working on a TV show beyond assistant gigs nearly 20 years ago I have been given a higher title than I surely deserve, leapfrogging several low and midlevel positions. Am I doomed to fail? Will my complete and total ignorance of how this all works make me seem irrelevant? I’ve already been included on a ton of conference calls but besides weighing in on the development and my take on writer’s samples I pretty much stay silent. I’m trying to learn and absorb as much as I can, as quickly as I can, but the learning curve is steep. Any advice on how to approach this situation? How to balance my inexperience with the desire to contribute in a meaningful way? How to show appropriate deference to those who have been doing this a lot longer than I have while still taking my shot?”

**Craig:** Wow. Stupid Luck, you are kind of a dream. You seem to have missed the memo that in order to succeed in Hollywood you have to be a total psychopath with no shame and who has no problem talking when you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You know, I think this is actually really good news, the fact that you’re even thinking this way is really good news. No, you’re not doomed to fail at all. Don’t be fooled by the militarization and rankifization of the television business. There are people whose value, experience level has nothing to do with their title, both for good and for bad. You are where you are, now forget about it. It doesn’t matter.

In any meeting the best idea is the best idea. And the person who is the most impressive is the person who impresses the most. So it makes total sense to listen and to learn, but you shouldn’t be afraid to weigh in. You should not worry that people are going to judge you. And if you make a mistake you make a mistake. You have a natural humility about you. As long as you don’t take things personally and you keep moving forward and you show other people respect and you don’t trample on them in an effort to get somewhere they will be OK with that. They will be perfectly fine. It’s the only way you can learn. So I think you’re doing great.

**John:** Well let’s imagine another scenario in which Stupid Luck developed and wrote this thing, it was sold, and then comes in as a staff writer on it. That also would not make sense because you are the person who co-created this project. You are naturally going to be up a few ranks there because you are going to have some decision-making capability. You helped create this world. You know things about this world that no one else does. So you’re not going to enter in at the bottom.

When I sold my first TV show I was brought in and my first title was Co-EP, but I was really the showrunner but I really didn’t know what I was doing. I had the disaster that I think you’re fearing that you may have. But it sounds like you have people around you who really do know what they’re doing and can actually support you and sort of make all the stuff happen. I wouldn’t worry so much about it.

Or my first movie, Craig you probably had a similar experience, the first time being on set for a movie, you kind of don’t know a lot.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And you’re scared like am I allowed to eat at crafts service. It’s all kind of new. But you do have a place there. You do belong there. It’s finding out how you can be useful and how to get out of the way when literally they just need to turn the set around.

**Craig:** And people actually want to help. They want to teach. Nobody walks onto a production and knows what’s going on just naturally. No one. It’s very weird. A lot of it is strange and there are things still to this day I get confused by. I’ve been doing this forever. I run my own show. And I repeatedly confuse who is in charge of beards.

**John:** Oh yes.

**Craig:** It’s hair or makeup depending whether it’s this kind of beard or that kind of beard. All the time these things happen and then you just go, OK, right, sorry, let me…

And it’s perfectly fine as long as you don’t bluster about and take it out on people when they gently correct you. And you’re going to be fine. And, by the way, don’t say Stupid Luck. I would say there is no such thing.

**John:** Good Fortune, sure. But you also worked hard to get there.

**Craig:** You worked hard. And you did something. And it is something that is now employing lots of people. So, I wouldn’t say Stupid Luck. I wouldn’t say it was inevitability either. I would say you achieved something. You should be proud of it, while staying humble, and move forward.

**John:** Agreed. Megana, can you give us another question here?

**Megana:** Casey writes in, “I’m a screenwriter based in LA who has yet to break in but I have had a pilot in development for the past couple of years. I wrote it on spec for producers and we have an older, more established writer attached to showrunner who has guided me through the development process. I wrote the pilot but we worked together to create the pitch. It’s been years now and I’m beginning to feel emotionally detached from and frustrated with the project. In working with the producers I have less and less confidence in their ability to get this thing across the finish line. And I have also come to discover that the showrunner and I have very different world views with regards to race, social justice, and gender.

“I also keep being asked to do free work on a project that hasn’t gone anywhere in two years. My question is am I shackled to this project until it’s officially dead or until it gets bought? How do I navigate this strange situation?”

**Craig:** Hmmm.

**John:** Casey, I wish I could tell you this was a strange situation. There are sort of like zombie projects that aren’t really alive and aren’t really dead that are just kind of always out there and you have to decide, you know what, I’m done. I don’t believe this thing is going to move forward. I don’t believe it’s going to move forward with these people on board.

You wrote this script, this other showrunner person helped you, or helped guide you through the pitch. Maybe contractually they’re involved. You can see. My hunch is that you have a good writing sample that you should be using to get you other jobs. But this project is dead is my guess.

**Craig:** Dead or alive, it’s your decision. That’s the good news. You’re not shackled to it. It’s yours. You own the copyright. You haven’t sold it. You’ve written it on spec. No one has bought it. So, you could just do whatever you want with it. And, you know, as far as the showrunner, the showrunner is not the showrunner because there’s no show. That’s just a person. And if you don’t like the person and you don’t feel connected with them then you make a change. Because it’s your material. They can’t go on without you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because they haven’t sold it yet. And when you say being asked to do free work, you’re not being asked to do free work. There is no work, meaning employment. You are choosing – this is what it comes down to, and this is a hard one to hear Casey, but you’re choosing to continue to work on something that you own. It is your property. The day you sell it is the day everything changes and the work is about employment and then it is a question of being taken advantage of by people who should be paying you because you’re not a copyright owner but you’re an employee. Until that day you have to act like the person you are in this situation, which is believe it or not, the boss.

**John:** Yeah. I will say that emotionally you may have moved on from this project as well. And so I want to give you permission to say like I learned some things from that and now I’m going to step aside and Craig and I both have things that we’ve wrote that’s just like I like this script, there’s things I like about this script, but it is not going to be worth my time to pay any more attention to it. It’s on the shelf now and I’m moving forward with new things. Just give yourself permission to say this is not what I’m interested in working on right now. And that’s great. Don’t feel like you have to finish everything.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just make sure that your lack of interest is not a lack of interest in people as opposed to material. If you’re still interested in the material but the people are wrong it’s time to find different people. And, of course, the other ones may say, well, if you sell it then we get a title and we get money. OK, well we’ll figure that out down the road. But in the meantime it sounds like this marriage has come to an end.

**John:** I think so. I have a thing that’s actually not a question, but I want to point to this Twitter thread by Ariel Rutherford about this white male writer with credits who puts out a call for a diverse female writer to help him on a project and then he tries to swing this kind of Svengali mentor situation where he’s like I’m creating a writer’s room and stuff. I’m not going to go in depth on the Twitter thread, but there’s a link in the show notes, so click through this link. Be warned that this kind of behavior exists out there. Especially because it turns out another writer @awkwardgirlla had the exact same situation with the exact same writer. So it’s a guy who is just doing this repeatedly.

This is just shitty behavior. And I don’t know who this writer is, but this writer should not be doing this. And it was just a new spin on sort of like a person with some credits taking advantage of writers with no credits. And so it drove me crazy. I just wanted to shine a little spotlight on it here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Anybody that suggests that you should join their mentor group you should view as a cult leader. There are no mentor groups. That’s not a thing. The mentor groups that exist are not generated by individuals like that. There may be something like the kind of thing that you and I have done where there have been organizations that have put together established writers with up and coming writers. And they have a discussion and it’s formalized and then they move on. There is not sort of you join my little mini church and then you also do all of my work for me and you clean my clothes and then eventually I have 12 babies with four of you. This is not good. You don’t want this. You don’t want to go down that road.

You don’t need it. That’s the other thing. Anybody that’s offering you that, it ain’t real. Real mentors are desperate to not mentor people. That’s the god’s honest truth. You or I, we’re not looking for extra people to do this stuff with. We have to be asked. We have to forced and shamed into it.

**John:** And so here I think is this guy’s clever trick, it’s almost like it’s a negging kind of thing he’s doing, those pickup artist books. Basically he’s saying like, “Hey, I need help. Would someone out there want to help me?” It’s almost like a white guy in a van saying hey would you help me find my lost dog. He’s asking for help and so then someone will say, “I can help you.” And he’s like, “Oh, you’re actually not good enough, but I think you could get better if you just come join my writers group.” That’s what drives me crazy. Because it’s not even the normal scam which is that like, oh, we’re going to help you polish up your script. It has that first level of I need help because I’m a white male writer who needs a diverse female voice on this thing.

**Craig:** Also, if you’re a white male writer and you’re on the Internet asking randos to help you be less white, fuck off. Go do your own work. Do your work. Research. Figure it out. Study. Interview people. Don’t make them do your work for you. Don’t ask that. What is that? That is something you pay people for. It’s called writing or producing or consulting. It’s a job. It’s not free.

Geez, fucking guy.

**John:** I should say also that he was offering pay at the start. So basically the hook was like oh I will pay you to be a consultant on this thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, but like what? When I say pay I mean like you work for Fox or Disney and you get paid, like a real salary. Not like some guy is like, “Here you go. I guarantee you $100.”

**John:** All right. Now it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a thing I did last year which I highly recommend for people in LA. It’s called the LA County Adopt a Family for the Holidays program. It’s done through the county and you go to a really boring website, a poorly designed form, but you put in your information and they match you up with a family in LA County who receives Medicaid or basically needs some help because they would not be otherwise able to buy Christmas presents for their kids. And so you get matched up with a family. You exchange text messages to find out who they are and what their kids are like and what their situation is. You buy some presents. You wrap presents. Everyone knows I love wrapping presents.

**Craig:** Oh my god. You’re so good at it.

**John:** I love wrapping presents. And then you drop off the presents and then you go and it’s lovely and it’s nice and it’s such a good thing. A friend tipped me off to it and I’m sending out the word to other friends. It’s just a really good, smart program. So if you are a person in Los Angeles who feels like you know what I’d love to buy some Christmas presents for people who could really stand have a better holiday, really recommend the LA County Adopt a Family for the Holidays program. And we’ll put a link in the show notes to it.

**Craig:** That does sound pretty good.

**John:** It’s pretty good.

**Craig:** I can probably steal that. You know, I don’t know how to wrap gifts. Did you know that?

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** I don’t even know how to do it. Melissa does it.

**John:** I love, I genuinely love doing it. I didn’t realize people didn’t know how to do it until Rawson Thurber, who was my assistant at one point, just literally could not do it and so I would wrap all of his presents.

**Craig:** So basically I start to wrap something and then everything goes wrong. It’s sort of like me and drawing. I can wrap it in a square and then there’s the extra part sticking out and I know there’s some folding involved, but the folds don’t work right. And inevitably it ends up looking like a large Tootsie Roll inevitably. I just start twisting the ends. Megana, do you know how to wrap gifts.

**Megana:** I’m really bad at it. And it’s so embarrassing to bring something that I’ve tried to wrap in front of John because I can just feel his judgment so heavily.

**Craig:** He’s pretty judgy.

**John:** But Craig I don’t know if you know that Megana actually draws really well. She’s actually, give her a pen and some time and she can draw you up something lovely.

**Megana:** I do like to doodle.

**Craig:** I know that because Megana got me one of the nicest things ever. She made a painting of my dog.

**John:** She made a painting of my dog, too. That’s your thing.

**Megana:** It actually really wasn’t. You guys are the only two that – I’m like what do these guys care about? And the answer is consistently your dogs.

**Craig:** I have another dog now, Megana. I’m just saying.

My One Cool Thing is Megana’s ability to draw my dog.

**John:** That’s a very cool thing indeed. And that’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Layn Pieratt. Really good outro. Thank you, Layn.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter Craig is sometimes @clmazin. And I am always @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing. This last week’s was about naming characters and I just went through this big project where I had to name, I can’t even tell you how many characters, but so many characters and it was just fun to go back through this newsletter and look at how other people name their characters.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. And 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 a Bad Art Friend, or maybe two bad art friends. We’ll discuss. But only for our premium members. Thank you Craig. Thank you Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Oh, Craig. Oh Craig. All right, so welcome all our premium members. You are true friends. You are true art friends. And we would never turn on you in our text channel, our text thread about you. Craig, can you give us the briefest recap of the situation between these two women and this writer community?

**Craig:** Yeah. So this has been zinging around and there’s a big article in the New York Times Magazine. Long and short of it is there was a woman who was more of an up and coming writer. And she decided to donate a kidney to a person that she didn’t know. A little bit like the way you just adopted a family. But this was a rather extreme thing. She was like I decided just to be a really good person. I’m going to offer my kidney to somebody in need of a kidney. And just somebody. And in fact there was somebody in need and she did in fact have the surgery. She donated her kidney. And she talked a lot about it. She talked a lot about it on a Facebook group. Facebook, of course, root of all evil.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And while she was talking about it she had an acquaintance, or she thought was a friend, was another writer who is a little bit more of an established writer who wrote a story that included something about a woman who donates a kidney to somebody. And the kidney donor was a bit irked because initially she just didn’t feel like this other woman was paying enough attention to her kidney donation.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is where I got stuck. Cause I think it’s sort of like that’s not why you donate a kidney. Anyway, and that writer, Sonya Larson, said, “Yeah, no, no, I saw that you donated a kidney. Good for you.” And then later she released this story and Dawn Dorland, the woman who donated a kidney, was aghast and believed and accused Sonya Larson of essentially lifting her story because she included this element of a person donating a kidney. But what was really weird and where this story actually got kind of confusing and muddled is indeed Sonya Larson did lift a sentence or two from an email that Dawn Dorland had written, or a Facebook post, one of those two. I can’t remember.

So actually there was sort of like a little bit of technical plagiarism there. But not much. And this story has lit up everyone. I guess you either are Team Dawn or you’re Team Sonya, or as somebody on Facebook [unintelligible] what this story really shows more than anything is that writers are annoying. [laughs] And that is absolutely true. So, OK, John, Megana, what do we make of this?

**John:** So I’ve only read the Robert Kolker New York Times story, so my only point into it. I know there’s a discourse that goes well beyond the edged the edges of this because it’s 2021 and the discourse has to spill everywhere. And like these people themselves are probably also involved in the conversation.

God, it made me – as you start to read the story and you start to see Dawn saying like why aren’t people commending me enough for donating a kidney. That is a great character. That is a great moment.

**Craig:** Nuts.

**John:** And at the same time I think oh my god you want to use that character in a story. And then it seems like Sonya Larson did that and then also – which was probably defensible as using that idea of that character. But then to actually use those words seems so dumb. And that’s a thing I couldn’t get past.

**Craig:** Yeah. So everybody fucked up to some extent. Although my sympathies will always be with the person who does the work. And in this case the person who did the work was Sonya Larson. The fact that she was inspired by someone’s story of donating a kidney is normal. People are inspired by real life stuff all the time. Nobody owns that. If you donate a kidney to somebody you don’t own everybody’s short story from now until the end of time about somebody donating a kidney.

Yes, she clearly screwed up by cribbing that line from an email and that was wrong. Also, it didn’t really cause any damage because as far as I could tell Sonya Larson’s short story has not led to any kind of real financial success. It was just out there, but it wasn’t some huge thing. Now it’s a huge thing.

And also Sonya Larson appears to be a legitimate writer who is doing work. And so I feel like if you do the work you do the work. So she made a mistake and she has owned that mistake. The other thing that was going on in a very kind of typical Internet way there are a bunch of people who are on this Facebook page–

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** –where they see Dawn Dorland going on about her kidney donation ad nauseam and wondering why people aren’t telling her more about how wonderful she is for her donation. And they start back-channeling and gossiping about how much they hate her. And I totally understand that because I think I probably would have done the same thing. Totally. I’m like Megana I have to at this point – you seem like the nicest person in the world. Every interaction I’ve ever had with you you seem quite pure. Like you were delivered on angel wings to the world to save us all.

But, have you never just sort of seen somebody acting like this super thirsty annoying person and then kind of back-channeled some catty commentary?

**Megana:** Yeah. I mean, I so sympathize for Dawn because I think we’ve all had that experience of thinking that people are our friends, or that people are saying – you know, just that infuriating feeling of not getting the joke or not being in on the thing is so devastating. Nobody is talking about the violation of privacy here and I would never want my personal private group chats with my girlfriends to be public.

**John:** That is absolutely crucial. So we should say those became public because of discovery. Because there were lawsuits going back and forth between the two of them. And so once it got to that point I’m just like oh my god everything has gone off the rails because there are so many conversations I’ve had with people that I would not want to show up on discovery. And I’ve been through discovery. Discovery sucks. So I don’t want that done. Yes.

**Megana:** But also the context, because sometimes my friends are like really in the wrong, but when you have your friend’s back and you know. I don’t need everyone reading the New York Times how I’m trying to support my friend in that way. I don’t know, it’s just so–

**Craig:** Totally.

**Megana:** Ugh.

**Craig:** It’s a real mess. I do love just how this all started. And the way it started was that she was posting on Facebook celebrating herself and what she did. And then what’s so great is she just looked to see that some of the people she invited into her self-congratulatory look-at-what-I-did group hadn’t reacted to any of her posts. Now, at that point it’s getting stalky. What does she do? She writes an email to Sonya Larson and the email basically is why haven’t you said anything? Mother-fucker, nobody owes you a comment. We’re reading it. And what was kind of shocking was the message to her was, “I think you’re aware I donated my kidney this summer, right?” [laughs] Like what the hell is that? What kind of crazy world is that?

**John:** I want that printed on a t-shirt, please.

**Craig:** I think you’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer. Yeah? Mm-hmm. Like I would have been like, “Mm-hmm.” But Sonya Larson said, “Ah, yes, I did see on Facebook that you donated your kidney. What a tremendous thing,” which is pretty much the polite thing to say to somebody when what you really want to say is, “Yeah, what do you want? What do you want? You want a cookie?”

And then in response to that Dawn Dorland wondered if Sonya really thought it was great why did she need reminding that it happened. Which reminded me of that thing in Airplane. Hmm, he never has more than one cup of coffee at home. So stupid. Like what narcissism. Anyway, it’s kind of like I guess the person who has her kidney is like I don’t care about any of that. I’m alive. So, good on you, Dawn Dorland. But this got crazy. And, look, underneath all of it the reason I suggested it, John, is because I think there is this – as we were talking about parasocial relationships last time, this thing happening with the Internet now where people overshare their lives and then are shocked to find that other humans who hoover up information about humans for their vocation and then recreate them into art are doing so. They can’t believe it. And they feel as though they’ve been violated. And to the extent that a story like this leads some people to think that writers shouldn’t be doing things like this, other than ripping that one line off from the email which shouldn’t have happened, writers should be doing things like this.

I’m very pro-writer in this regard.

**John:** One thing I did want to actually discuss is that idea of iteration. I thought it was interesting point of the Sonya Larson side of it all is that like they were going back to earlier versions of the story. Basically she kept working on the story and revising the story. And earlier versions of the stories might have been closer to this, but when is that story finished? Because it was going to be published this one time, and then she changed it more, and it got changed again. What is the draft that is actually the problem? And at what point in the process can you really say like that was infringement or she just hadn’t done the necessary editing to not make it infringe-y. And that’s an interesting ethical question as well.

**Craig:** What do you think, Megana?

**Megana:** The thing that I was going to say is that in our Cat Person discussion we talked about how easy it would have been for the person to change key details about where this worked, just completely lifting those directly. I think in the same way here, John I think said in Episode 500 like I like to use characters from real life because it proves that those people can exist in reality and that’s a believable thing. But I think you can take the spirit of that without taking the exact details. Like what I also find really troubling is that whether or not Sonya Larson liked Dawn Dorland, like they were a part of the same community. And Dawn was very vocal about this kidney donation. So presumably everyone in Dawn’s life who reads this short story is going to know that. And I just don’t understand why you couldn’t take the extra effort to obscure some of those details. I don’t think it would have changed the feeling of the story, but it would have protected this person whether or not you like them.

**Craig:** It sounds to me like that aspect of the story was fairly minor. That the story was not about kidney donation. It included somebody who had done so. But that the value of the story was in the writing and in the execution as is so often the case. That the concept – didn’t matter what the concept was. So, yes, she could have certainly done that, but I think it’s also reasonable to expect that if Sonya Larson doesn’t know Dawn Dorland and reads somebody’s repost of that and writes a story about it that she doesn’t owe Dawn anything. So what’s the difference?

I mean, basically it sounds like Dawn thought that they were a lot closer than they were and Sonya’s point of view was, yeah, I don’t know you. You know? I don’t know you like that as the memes say.

**John:** Now, Megana, you’re actually in writers groups and Craig and I are not. So has there been a discussion in your writers group about this situation and like what is your feeling about this kind of appropriation or even just we’re writing about the same area or space? Is that a thing that comes up in your group?

**Megana:** I don’t know that I have a great response. Because it is an icky situation and I think that sometimes you see people using similar plot devices or things creep up in multiple people’s works because they’re inspired or they’ve just been talking about it in the group. So, I don’t know. It’s really tricky and I wish that I had a better way of figuring that out. But so far we haven’t really had any conversations about that.

I think we’re also aware that in the process of iterating, yeah, maybe you are using something similar to someone else’s project to figure out a solution, but maybe in your next draft that’s going to be different, so it’s not worth litigating as a group.

**Craig:** Years and years ago I had a drum kit. It wasn’t a very good drum kit but I was learning on it. It didn’t sound great. And I knew a drummer, like a proper professional drummer who came by and I showed it to him and I was like it doesn’t sound that great, but it’s good enough to learn on. And he sat down and he played some and it sounded amazing. It was like the best drum kit ever because it’s not the drum kit. And it’s not the idea. It’s not the concept. It’s not the premise. None of that is what it’s about. That stuff is just the drum kit. It’s the drumming that matters. And in this case it’s the execution that matters. It’s the writing that matters. Anybody in any writing group, everybody could get the exact same prompt and 12 of those same details and you’ll get eight different stories, and you might even get eight stories that are really similar, but only one of them is good.

**John:** Yeah. Like the four gospels in the Bible. Only one of them is good?

**Craig:** Which one is that?

**John:** I’ll tell you off-mic.

**Craig:** Oh, is it John? Because your name is John? Is it John?

**John:** That’s what it is.

**Craig:** Oh, is John the crazy one that talked about the beast and the mark of the devil?

**John:** That’s Book of Revelation. Wow. No. That’s not a gospel.

**Craig:** OK, that’s a different god.

**Megana:** Can I say one other thing about the writing group though? I’m so shocked that no one in this group was like you should definitely change that text. You can’t just lift.

**John:** For all we know someone did. We’re not seeing the whole thread. Or maybe you have gone through all of the documents. Megana has been doing nothing else for the last three weeks. Just going through all this. She found the Zodiac Killer and now she’s figuring out who was the real bad friend in the bad friend group.

People throw this at us like How Would This Be a Movie. I’m going to say that I don’t think this is a movie because so much of what it really comes down to is appropriation of words on a page and plagiarism is not great movie material. If you look at the Melissa McCarthy movie, Can You Ever Forgive Me, was fantastic, but it’s not really plagiarism. It ends up being a very physical, visual thing she’s doing. She’s faking letters. Versus this I feel is just not going to work, to me.

**Craig:** John, question for you.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** You’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer, right?

**John:** You know, I think it’s such a remarkable, selfless act. I have not been talking to any of my other friends about how much you bring that up.

**Craig:** If you really thought it was that great of an act I’m wondering why you needed reminding that it happened. Curious.

**John:** All right, well thanks. It’s been fun.

**Craig:** See you guys.

**John:** You can log off the Zoom now. Bye.

**Craig:** See you next week.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Netflix 2-minute Viewership](https://screenrant.com/netflix-2-minutes-veiwership-numbers-why/) on ScreenRant
* [Twitter Thread on Netflix Thumbnails](https://twitter.com/trungtphan/status/1445768087832182796?s=21)
* [Harvey Weinstein Orc in Lord of the Rings](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/oct/05/elijah-wood-lord-of-the-rings-orc-modeled-harvey-weinstein)
* [Dana Covarrubias explains “What the Clothes in Only Murders in the Building Say About the Show’s Characters”](https://slate.com/podcasts/working/2021/10/only-murders-building-costume-designer-dana-covarrubias-creative-process) in Slate Working Podcast
* [Aphantasia](https://aphantasia.com/what-is-aphantasia/)
* [Many People Have a Vivid Mind’s Eye While Others Have None at All](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/science/minds-eye-mental-pictures-psychology.html?smid=url-share) on the NYT
* [LA County Adopt A Family](https://dpss.lacounty.gov/en/community/volunteer.html)
* [Bad Art Friend](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/magazine/dorland-v-larson.html) by Robert Kolker
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Layn Pieratt ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/adapting-with-justin-simien).

**John August:** Hey, it’s John. Craig uses the F-word a couple of times in this episode, so just a warning in case you’re in the car with your kids.

**Craig Mazin:** Sorry about that. It just happened. It slipped out.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 460 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we look at adapting features into TV series and adapting to changing norms of portraying people of color and historical figures. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we’ll talk about Hamilton on Disney+ and what it means for musicals on screen. To help us with all of this we will be welcoming writer-director Justin Simien.

But first we have some industry news. Craig, what happened this last week?

**Craig:** So on July 1st the Writers Guild announced, that’s the Writers Guild West, in conjunction with the Writers Guild East, announced that conjointly they had reached a tentative agreement with the studios on a new three-year contract. You were on the negotiating committee. This was kind of a strange one because of the pandemic and all the rest. And I think this may have been the first in my memory, this may have been the first deal that we negotiated after both of the other two major creative unions.

**John:** That’s right. So in our backstory here, so as we’ve talked through the lead up to this, generally the three big guilds, the Directors Guild, Screen Actors Guild, and the Writers Guild, each of them is negotiating a three-year contract. I forget exact expiration dates but generally the DGA goes first, SAG generally follows after the WGA. Sometimes it goes before the WGA. But our contract had actually run out and we’d extended two months because of the pandemic basically.

We started all the process of gearing up for this negotiation. So we did the survey to members. We did the pattern of demands. There was a vote on the pattern of demands. We had member meetings. And then suddenly we could not have member meetings anymore because there was a pandemic. We could not gather together.

**Craig:** Yeah. And a lot of people had asked me at the time when we were running up against the expiration what would happen if there wasn’t some sort of official extension. And the truth is there kind of is an implied official extension. If your collective bargaining agreement expires and there is no strike and there is no lockout, essentially the contract remains in place and is largely enforceable. There are a few things that go away like grievances and things, but mostly it extends itself.

So people were a little concerned, like wait, do residuals stop on that day? No. Everything just keeps on sort of motoring along. But what you don’t get are, for instance, increases, or any of the things that you’re hoping to get, or probably know you can get. So it’s a little bit of a game of chicken. You don’t want to extend forever. You want to get a new deal done. So, I was not particularly freaked out by that.

**John:** No, I wasn’t either. Things to keep in mind though is that so the pandemic, of course, meant that we could not meet in person, but also meant that all production had shutdown. So suddenly the entire town was not working, except for weirdly the writers. We were still employed. And we were still employable. And we had virtual rooms. So it was a weird situation that we were going through. And then in the middle of these negotiations, which were all happening on Zoom, we had the George Floyd protests, Black Lives Matter. We had a lot of other stuff sort of happening in society. And that was impossible to ignore that these other things were happening while we were trying to negotiate a three-year contract with the studio.

So there was a lot going on is basically what I meant to say.

**Craig:** There was. Look, you and I know that for, I don’t know, a while now there had been a lot of talk that the writers would be going on strike. I would hear it all the time. And I just didn’t ever think we would. It just didn’t seem – this was before COVID, before the world started to turn upside a little bit. It just didn’t seem likely to me. I didn’t quite understand why everyone was freaking out. Maybe I’m just naïve. But it didn’t seem like it was going to be a strike situation. It really didn’t seem like it was going to be a strike situation once the DGA and SAG had already cemented the pattern in place.

So, I was not surprised by this. I think some people were. Nor was I surprised particularly by how it all worked out. It kind of seemed to me like it worked out the way I expected it would.

**John:** I would say it didn’t work out quite the way I expected it would. So, and again, perspectives in terms of like who we’ve been talking with and sort of which rooms we’ve been in, but let’s go back and talk about sort of the strike idea, or the strike threat. Because in our last negotiation, the 2017 negotiations, there was a strike authorization vote that happened. And that’s one of the things that unions do when they are in a negotiation to show like, hey, we actually will – we would step out. We would stop working if this were to happen. Much harder I think to play that card when the entire town is shut down.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s true. Although I’m happy that we couldn’t play that card because I don’t really think we should be playing that card the way we do. First of all, I don’t think it comports with our constitution. But also I’m just – we had gone through this last time and I was like on record I am not doing this whole – even if I don’t want to strike I have to vote yes for a strike. I’m not doing it anymore. It’s just crazy. We shouldn’t be in that business of just constantly asking our members to vote for something they don’t want just so that it won’t happen, and then it happens. I’m glad.

We do have to figure out how to have a reasonable strike threat without taking that vote. I think we did in 2001. We did a really good job of pushing it right up to the brink. We didn’t have a strike authorization vote, but it sure seemed like it was inevitable. And then at the last minute a deal was worked out.

**John:** So let’s recap what the issues were going into this, pre-pandemic, sort of what was on the table. So, for a change it wasn’t about the health plan. The health plan is actually funded and fine. We knew that the DGA had taken a rollback on residuals for TV syndication, so that was a thing that was going to be pushed at us. We talked a lot about pension and keeping our pension funded, so that we actually can pay what’s being owed to writers.

We talked a lot about streaming and SVOD, specifically residuals for streaming and SVOD. The idea that if your show is a massive hit for Netflix or for Amazon your residuals should reflect that. And right now they don’t. We talked about getting rid of the reduced rates that studios can pay for writers, newer writers, so there’s a new writer discount. There are trainee rates, which mostly go to underrepresented class of writers, minority writers, Black writers.

We talked about teams and the way that – writers are the only group in this industry where two people are sharing one salary and in sharing one salary there’s some real inequities that happen there, in their rates and also how things are calculated for pension and for health.

Comedy and variety, so when we had Ashley Nicole Black on the show talking about how if you’re writing on one of these talk shows, like late night talk show that’s for a steamer, there aren’t even minimums. There’s not residuals. It’s all sort of a wild free for all.

In feature land, because Craig and I focus on this, there was a proposal for a theatrical residual for foreign distribution. So essentially the same way that when an American TV show is shown overseas we get residuals for that. Shouldn’t we get residuals for an American movie that is showing overseas?

We talked about a second step for screenwriters. This has been a thing that Craig and I have been hammering on for years and years. The idea that especially writers who are being paid less than a certain percentage of minimum, or certain double of minimums, that you need to guarantee them a second step. They are the most vulnerable feature writers and they are being exploited in one-step deals.

**Craig:** Yeah. Generally speaking I think all these things are important. The guild has to figure out what their priorities are and what is more getable than others. I just want to mention that pension was a real issue. I mean, you all saw that. Somebody should be apologizing to Nick Kazan who went out on a limb and made a very strong statement during the last election that our pension was in trouble. And I believe he got just a ton of anger about that and denial. There was just like official Writers Guild denial that the pension was in trouble. And he was right. The pension was in trouble. And somebody should apologize to him for that.

And I’m glad that we were able to address it because the guild essentially has two major moral obligations as far as I can tell. One is to the emerging writers and one is to writers who are in the sunset of their life, because that’s when we need the care the most – when we’re coming up and when we’re on our way out, not to be too grim about what it means to be a retiree. I’ll be there soon enough.

The feature thing is obviously – it just hurts. And we are either going to be in a situation where we keep kicking that football down the field and punting forever, or we make it a point of saying that that is now the priority and it’s more important than other things like the every three years improving the payments and rates and terms for television writers. We’re just going to have to do it or not. Right? But right now we are on a pretty much a 25-year streak of nothing for screenwriters specifically.

And so I don’t know what to say. Certainly I’m going to be voting yes on this contract. I think most reasonable people would. But I just don’t know what else we can do internally, other than to continue to encourage screenwriters to run for the board. I know Michele Mulroney is a big advocate for screenwriters. I’m glad she’s there in the room.

**John:** She was co-chair of the negotiating committee.

**Craig:** And I hope she keeps pushing this. I know she wants it. I know that.

**John:** So you were saying the guild has a specific focus on writers at the beginnings of their careers, emerging writers, writers at the end of their careers. Another area which was on our pattern of demands was paid parental leave which is a real crux point there because for many writers it’s the moment at which they have to decide am I going to continue a writing career or am I going to have a family.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so one of the sort of real breakthroughs I think of this negotiation was for the first time, for the first guild ever, we have a paid parental leave which is entirely funded by studio contributions. It’s 0.5% of writer’s earnings go into a fund that pays for paid parental leave. It’s worth $30 million over three years. No one else has it. I genuinely believe DGA and SAG have to get it for their next round. I think it could be groundbreaking for writers, especially women, who feel like they have to choose between a family and a writing career.

**Craig:** Yeah. No question. This is definitely of greatest value to us because it supports women continuing in the workplace. We know that just because of the nature of the way birth works that parental leave accrues to the benefit of women in the more immediate and important way. And because – I’m not sure if it ever will carry over quite the way it has for us to the DGA and SAG, because the nature particularly in television is that it is a Monday through Friday gig. You show up, if you’re in a room and you work and you go home. Directing, there is no ability to take leave in the middle of a movie as a director. It just doesn’t work financially. And the same goes for actors. It’s going to be much more difficult for them.

I’m not saying that they deserve it any less. It will just be much more difficult for them to get.

**John:** Craig, I think you’re misunderstanding it though. This is actually – it’s fully portable. So I think a feature writer is in much the same situation as a director. And a feature writer will be able to use this because the money that has been socked aside from this is going to go to them. So, you know, while you may not be leaving your exact job the way that someone who is working as an executive at Disney would leave to go on parental leave, when the time comes and you are not taking work because your job is now to raise a newborn you will be able to use it.

So the fact that it applies not just to TV writers but to all writers, to comedy/variety writers, is crucial.

**Craig:** Of course. Absolutely. I think, no question. I wasn’t questioning whether or not it applied to all writers. And I’m glad it does. I’m just suggesting that it’s going to be harder for the DGA and SAG to get it. But I hope they do.

But, no, I’m thrilled that we got this. I think it’s incredibly important. And it is going to make it easier for us to improve our parity, well, we don’t have parity statistics, but will improve our statistics and help push them toward parity, particularly in gender. So this was a big win for us and I’m thrilled that we have it.

**John:** Cool. Let’s wrap this up by saying the things we did not get, which I think are still really important. That sense of tiered residuals or some way of recognizing that if something is a giant hit for Disney+, like Hamilton, it should be paying out more in residuals than something that is not a hit. And there needs to be some way to recognize that and to pay that.

**Craig:** You’re talking about like elevations of the formula itself?

**John:** I’m saying elevations of formula or an actual true formula. How often something is streamed impacts how much a writer gets in residuals?

**Craig:** Well, there’s not connection whatsoever to the amount of showings? It’s just a flat number?

**John:** It’s essentially a flat number?

**Craig:** Isn’t there a formula with [imputions] and [unintelligible].

**John:** No. So right now the way in which you figure out how valuable something is is kind of an internal calculation based on the market value of the thing. But it doesn’t actually make sense when Netflix is making something for Netflix. They’re not selling it to anybody else.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** And so there’s no transparency.

**Craig:** They’re self-made stuff. And there is no transparency. We know that. And this is – this is a really tough nut to crack. Because even if you come up with a tiered plan you have to rely on their numbers. Because there is no Nielsen. There’s no ticket sales. There’s no box office. I mean, Netflix repeatedly says that people watch their shows. It’s some number that’s absurd. It’s just like, “Yeah, 400 billion watched our latest—“

No they didn’t. No they didn’t. They have their whole like, oh, they watched it for two seconds. But then in reality they’ll come back to you and say, “Oh yeah, no one is watching it.” I don’t know how they – how do you get that without transparency from them?

**John:** But the reason why this is so crucial just to wrap this up is that as more and more stuff goes streaming first, as what we consider theatrical features are made streaming first, this matters. Because the future of residuals is going to be on streaming. And so we need to make sure that residuals actually make sense on streaming.

**Craig:** Look, this battle is hugely important. And this is a battle that will cover both feature writers and television writers.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Because right now I’m looking around, I’m not seeing theaters even open. And when this ends I don’t know what that looks like. And I also don’t know – I don’t think any of us really truly understand the economics that the studios are currently contemplating. The cost of putting Hamilton on Disney+ is vastly lower than the cost of putting it in theaters. Vastly lower.

Now, are they losing out on ticket sales? No question. Do they make it up in subscriptions and subscription retention?

**John:** Maybe?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t know. But what I do know is if things continue to go the way they are, I mean, even prior to COVID Netflix had no problem making movies for Netflix that just stream. So, yes, we need to figure out that formula. And that will be a strike issue. And that’s something that we’re going to have to – I would love if we could somehow talk to DGA and SAG about that, too.

Foreign theatrical is probably not as big of a deal. I don’t that that’s – for me, personally is much of a – that feels a little bit like arguing over a somewhat sun-setting thing.

**John:** Just to help the Deadline Hollywood headline writers who are going to say, “Craig Mazin: We must strike.” All right.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, I’ve always said [Wannsee] and we have to strike over something. They really need to look carefully at that. But I also do think at some point we are going to have to as a union collectively, and I’m talking to television writers now, do for feature writers what feature writers have done over and over for television writers.

**John:** I would also want to include comedy and variety folks in there as well. We think we get the short end of the stick. They get no stick at all.

**Craig:** They get no stick at all. So I think we should concentrate on the no sticks and short sticks people in our next go around. But for this go around I think that you, your committee, the guild pretty much did the best they could. I don’t see, I mean, just because I’m disappointed that certain things aren’t there, well, duh. I mean, I guess if we’re not disappointed then we really under-asked, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But this seems like a pretty solid deal. And pretty much what I imagined it would be. And we should all vote yes and get back to – well, keep working I guess.

**John:** We’ll keep working. All right. Now for the marquee attraction of this podcast. Justin Simien is a writer-director whose credits include Dear White People, which won the US Dramatic Special Jury Award for breakthrough talent at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. In 2017 his television series based on the film debuted on Netflix. Now two seasons in it’s received a notable spike in attention given the protests and national conversation about race and racism in America.

His follow up feature, Bad Hair, debuted at Sundance in January, which feels like a century ago. Justin, welcome to the show.

**Justin Simien:** Hey, thanks. Good to be here.

**Craig:** Great to have you on, man.

**John:** It is a pleasure. So, where do we find you today? Describe your surroundings as we’re recording this.

**Justin:** I am Skyping from lovely Los Angeles where coronavirus is everywhere. And, yeah, where I’ve been just sort of working out of my house, you know, since February like everybody else.

**Craig:** You’re nesting. You’re nesting. We’re all nesting.

**Justin:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Which I like. Yeah.

**John:** It’s a good instinct. So, let’s talk a little bit about your background. So you are a film school person, is that correct? We get so many questions on the show about like, “Hey, should I go to film school?” People who are in high school or people who finished college and thinking like, oh, should I go to film school. You are a film school person. I am a film school person. Tell me about your film school experience.

**Justin:** Wow, I’m a film school person, guys. You know, it was interesting. I have to say I figured out what kind of storyteller I needed to be/wanted to be in high school because I had the fortune of going to a performing arts high school. I studied theater. What was I called? I was a theater major with a musical theater emphasis. And truly if it wasn’t for that experience I don’t know what I would be, where I would be, how I would be. And so for me college was actually a little bit more like a high school in that there was certainly a film school component to Chapman University, but there were also other schools there. And there were other kinds of folks there. And there were quite a few people who had grown up and spent their whole lives in Orange County and had never met Black people before.

So it was a little more I would cliqued than my actual high school experience. But, the thing that I really loved about the Chapman film school is that, you know, there’s really this emphasis on making things from day one. You’re not sort of learning theory. I was making short films right away. And they were probably really terrible and I haven’t watched them in a long time. But it felt so great to be able to, you know, apply what I was learning kind of immediately.

And I think there’s a lot of stuff that I learned. There’s a lot of stuff that I’m realizing I didn’t learn in film school that has become essential to me.

**Craig:** Oh, well, let me stop you there. Because I’m not a film school guy like you two fancy lads. So I’m kind of curious what are the things, and I would imagine people who run film schools should be curious about this – what are the things you didn’t learn that you maybe think you should have, or at least film schools could do better?

**Justin:** Well I think film schools, well, I don’t know if this is true for all film schools, but it feels like it’s all about preparing folks for a certain kind of job. You know, you’re taught single protagonist storytelling. The things that I learned were very focused on like how to fit within Hollywood’s existing framework, which I think is valuable and interesting and helpful, but is incredibly limiting, too.

Specifically when we talk about cinema history, specifically Black people and African-American sort of contributions to not just Hollywood but cinema history in general are almost completely ignored. You maybe get like a conversation about Blaxploitation but like, you know, when everyone learns about Birth of a Nation we all watch the movie or we all watch clips on that. We discussed in great detail how D.W. Griffith invented cinema language and editing and cross-cutting and all of these things. And everyone is very careful to parse out the egregious racism in that film from its cinema techniques.

But then no discussion is ever given to the fact that that actually begins the independent film movement in America because, you know, Black Americans were so outraged by that film that you have the rise of someone like Oscar Micheaux who actually creates an entire Black Hollywood system, with its own stars and its own theater chains and all this stuff.

And this is stuff you just kind of have to find out in life if ever. And it’s actually like essential knowledge. This is actually the framework, the groundwork, for independent cinema as we know it. And of course independent cinema is what I’ve been operating in since I got my break.

**Craig:** It’s fascinating I think the general perception in let’s just call it the hegemonic culture in the United States is that universities and higher education is a hotbed of Marxist hyper-progressive thinking. And in fact the more I talk to people the more it seems that at least in a lot of these institutions things are fairly regressive. I don’t really understand. I mean, I’ve got to be honest with you, just as a side note about film school. A lot of people bring up Birth of a Nation. It’s been brought up a lot lately. John, have you ever seen Birth of a Nation?

**John:** I’ve never seen Birth of a Nation. So it only adds a thing that people talk about rather than an actual thing to watch.

**Craig:** Let me go on record here for a second. Birth of a Nation sucks. And I understand that people, like why they study it, because it was the first one. But it sucks. It’s sort of like let’s all study the first sandwich that was ever made. It was one stale piece of break that was folded over a shitty piece of meat, but look, a sandwich was born. Well who gives a shit?

Yes, OK, so he created these things. But it doesn’t matter. We all know what those things are. It seems like such a pointless exercise. And it’s a boring, overlong film. And the heroes are the Klan. It’s just stupid. I don’t know why anyone is bothering with it. Here, you want to summarize the value of Birth of a Nation? Let me teach you what cross-cutting is. There, that’s what it looks like, in 4,000 other movies since Birth of a Nation. Who gives a damn?

So, anyway, that’s just my rant on Birth of a Nation. I don’t understand why film schools are so obsessed with this boring, crappy thing. It just sucks. Come at me Birth of a Nation stans.

**Justin:** I know.

**John:** Send your emails to ask@johnaugust.com

**Justin:** A very controversial statement.

**Craig:** Yup. I’m out there.

**John:** But before you got into that rant I think you were asking why film schools and the Hollywood studio system are so regressive or so traditional and they are institutions. It’s basically they have a gatekeeper function. They classically have had that. And for people who were excluded from that system you have alternative systems that rise up. Just like we have alternative press and alternative newspapers, you had alternative films and independent films. And that’s what I think Justin is signaling that we have not been paying nearly enough attention to the history of independent film. We’ve only been paying attention to the history, the line that goes from Birth of a Nation through Casablanca up through, you know, Jaws.

**Craig:** Or when we do look at independent film we’re looking at our single, typically white male hero directors. That’s kind of the ‘70s worship of the guys that came in from USC and all that.

**Justin:** And those guys are great, you know. But the truth is that that kind of – these pockets of filmmakers exist all over the place and exist all over the globe. They exist in every race and every gender. But it’s only a certain grouping of them that we talk about.

And this is something that I deal with in the show Dear White People because the Ivy League that the kids attend in Dear White People is meant to sort of be an analogy for America or for imperialism or whatever. But the thing is all colleges are kind of based around this Ivy League system, at least in America. And the Ivy League system really came out of specifically preparing white, I believe Protestant men to be a part of the American workforce.

And so even though we’re moved from those days, college is really just about preparing a person to become a product. You are–

**Craig:** This is so good.

**Justin:** You are preparing to establish your market value. This is what I deserve to earn as a filmmaker. And so things that college is particularly concerned with is what the market is already looking for, what it already demands. You’re looking really to figure out how to fit yourself in a can of soup so that it can appear on the proper shelf. And I think that that knowledge is important and is interesting, but it isn’t like sort of the same as like, you know, knowledge in general. It isn’t the same as art and conversation and dialogue. These are things that happen in a culture and a society actually all over the place and in ways that might surprise people and are unexpected and don’t sort of fit neatly into a curriculum.

So, I really enjoyed film school. It was kind of like an escape. It was a way for me to get out of Texas and just sort of make movies every day and have that be normalized. But, a lot of what I needed to learn to sort of become the filmmaker that I am I had to figure that out on my own. I had to go find that stuff.

**Craig:** I fell into your discussion of higher education like a cold man going into a nice warm bath. That is so – I cannot tell you what a breath of fresh air it is to hear somebody talk about the higher education industry the way you just did, because it’s so spot on. I mean, the Ivy League tradition was originally meant to educate the wealthy sons of wealthy captains of industry so that when they took over the business they had some, I don’t know, general understanding of just well-rounded liberal arts and weren’t just kind of narrow dumb-dumbs.

And what we’ve ended up with, you’re exactly right, is a system where we actually before you get to college you are already a product that is being analyzed and tested and tested and tested. And the purpose of the testing is to get into a school. The school does nothing more than prepare you ultimately, I mean, what do Ivy League schools really prepare you for? I went to one. So I can tell you. To go work on Wall Street. That’s what they prepare you for.

I had no interest in that. So, I don’t know why I went there. This is a great – we should have a whole other discussion, like a very radical discussion about higher education on another time, because I’d love to dig into that. But obviously we have many other things to talk to you about.

**Justin:** We do. But just really quickly I have to insert like a really—

**Craig:** Go for it. I love it.

**Justin:** Something that just came up, because we research a lot every single for Dear White People and I was researching the admission standards and how that works. And not only was the goal of the initial Ivies to prepare white Protestant men to lead what they felt was going to be a new empire, the American empire. But specifically it was designed to weed out in this country at that time Italians, Jews, Black people, women, you know, everyone else so that they couldn’t sort of take the reins of this new empire. It was a way to make sure that only a certain sect of people would get to lead it.

**Craig:** It’s a weird thing. It is a weird thing. When you start to look back at how recent this was not just like an implied bias or a secret bias but just an open policy. Open.

**Justin:** In fact, it was created to enforce the bias.

**Craig:** Correct. I mean, we have a world where Einstein is teaching at Princeton and is generally considered the smartest man in the world and the father of the nuclear bomb that helped us win WWII, blah-blah-blah. And there is still a strict quota on Jewish students at that time at Princeton. Anyway. And by the way, no women. And Black people…what?

**Justin:** Oh please. No, Black people – you know, this idea of systemically taking Black people out of the history of various things, that really begins in WWII because they felt like the general public couldn’t take the idea that there were Black people fighting in the war, but what we were fighting was white supremacy. Like wasn’t that what we were fighting? Weren’t we trying to end fascism?

**John:** Who is the white supremacist actually?

**Craig:** Their white supremacy has a crazy costume, so that’s bad. But ours…

**Justin:** And so instead of going into it let’s just remove them from it. So that’s why you don’t see any Black people in WWII. That’s why you don’t see any Black people in the history of cinema ever talked about before the ‘70s.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** All right. Let’s get back to your university setting. So can you talk us through the decision to do Dear White People as a feature, the original feature you made, and then the decision, let’s transition into making it into a TV series? So the initial idea for Dear White People as a feature. Where did that come from?

**Justin:** I was sitting in college after one of many very funny conversations between the few Black people that went to Chapman. I was in the Black Student Union. And I was just having a conversation with a friend about how funny is it that like for certain Black folks, you know, we will tolerate all kinds of personalities because we like need each other in a way that’s different. And we just had this conversation about friendship and race that was like why isn’t this kind of conversation in a movie. I of course adored Spike Lee and Robert Townsend and John Singleton and Charles Burnett and sort of the Black filmmakers that came out of the late ‘80s/early ‘90s. And I loved that, it’s probably problematic to say it now, but I guess it was then so I can say it. I was super into Woody Allen. Dun-dun-dun.

And like–

**Craig:** That’s all right. That’s OK. They’re movies.

**Justin:** Sort of like dialogue-laden, talky, articulate comedic satires. And I felt like I wanted to do that, but I wanted it to be new and fresh and speak to something that wasn’t being talked about. And what I felt at the time was that there really wasn’t anything in popular culture that was reflecting specifically my Black experience of being a Black person among mostly, vastly white people. Yes, I had my sort of community of Black people and Black friends, but most of time was navigating a very white world and having to cross in between those two things. I felt like that was an experience that I was having that all of my Black friends are having but yet none of us had a movie or a TV show that reflected that.

And so that’s really where it came out of. And at that time I just really knew that I loved multi-protagonist movies. It was like the one thing that no one at film school seemed interested in teaching me how to write or make. But I knew that I loved them and I loved Altman and I loved Do the Right Thing. And I loved Election. And Fame. These movies that nobody is right. And it’s not about consolidating around one particular point of view. It was about challenging the status quo from a bunch of different points of views.

And even though I didn’t really have language for all of that at that time I knew that my first movie had to be in that kind of world. And so ever since I had the idea to do that I really, you know, I spent years and years just sort of really self-educating myself how to write something like that. And in doing that it just became obvious to me that like within an hour and 40 minutes I could tell this story. But if this were ongoing somehow, if this were a series, and again in 2005 when I first started the idea of something like Dear White People being on television was laughable.

**Craig:** Right.

**Justin:** I mean literally it was unheard of. Nobody thought that that would ever happen. But in my imagination I thought, boy, this would really make for a great show. And I was inspired specifically by the M*A*S*H becomes a show. You know, Altman who is sort of a master of multi-protagonist cinema. It was already in my head. So by the time it started to come up it really wasn’t a decision. It was like do I want to pay rent and follow this opportunity to make Dear White People a show, or do I want to spend another eight years trying to get another movie made. So I picked the one that paid my rent and allowed me to keep going.

**John:** Justin, I want to stop you there on your decision to write the script while you were in film school. The idea that like, OK, this is a movie that I want to see that doesn’t exist but I want to see. And I think a message we keep trying to get out is that, you know, people ask us what you should write and we always say like write the movie you wish you could see. And it sounds like it’s exactly, Dear White People was exactly the movie you wish you could see because it did not exist out there. And you would have bought tickets for the very first showing, the very first day if it did exist. And so you had to make that movie. Is that fair?

**Justin:** I think that’s fair. And I think that’s a really important thing to stress because I think what we’re all taught, not only in film school but in film books and just by popular culture in general that like the most important question to ask is who is your audience. Who are the strangers that you’re sort of pouring your guts out for? And let’s make all of our creative decisions based on that hypothetical.

Whereas I always bought that, because I was like well I actually want to make things for me because I fucking love cinema. Like I will drink cinema’s dirty bathwater. I love it so much. And so what I want to see is a valid thing to bring into the equation because I’m not getting, you know, me as a gay, Black lover of cinema I’m getting hardly anything that’s geared specifically to me. It’s always an adventure from the outside in, you know, when I watch movies. And specifically when I watched the movies that people say are the great ones and the ones to watch. Like I’m having to look from outside a window into usually a very white life that Black people hardly ever show up in.

**Craig:** Well it’s described as this empathy gap where people who are in marginalized communities, in your case Black, gay, you are forced by culture to witness straight and white over and over and over to the point where if you’re going to appreciate what are an enormous amount of brilliant cultural works, you have to find a way to empathize with that culture. That culture doesn’t necessarily have to find a way to empathize with you. Right? Because they don’t have it. And, in fact, when you ask them to empathize with the other they really seem to struggle.

And what I find so interesting about the way you’re describing your relationship to the audience is that you have combined what you have taken in and who you are and then you say I want to make something that I’m passionate about that has a purpose. There’s sort of a purposeful self-expression. And I will argue over and over again until I expire that if you have a personal expression that is unique to you, meaning you’re not copying other people, right, so you’re not cynical, and you are not concerned with hitting a target. You’re simply expressing a concept that you believe hasn’t been expressed in this way and could not be expressed by anybody else like you can do it. If you have that, plus talent, then the audience will show up. Right?

So that’s like the old joke of like how do you avoid paying taxes on a million dollars. Step one. Get a million dollars. Right? So you definitely need talent. But there are a lot of talented people who don’t really get – look, for whether or not, people can argue about what my talent level is, but coming out of this very middle class kind of workday ethic background that I did my attitude was you work the jobs they give you. And that was where I was. And that’s where I was for a long time.

You were clearly and are clearly a braver person than I was. And it’s for the better. If you have talent – I mean, that’s obviously the key, then you trust it. You will essentially create the audience for the work that you do.

**Justin:** Yeah. I mean, I think that that that’s true. But I also think that for somebody like me, specifically Black, gay, it isn’t a given that an audience will show up. You know, there are so many brilliant storytellers who are braver than I am frankly and who are really out there, you know, doing something that popular culture is not ready for. But because they are a woman or because they’re gay or because they’re something other than straight white men audiences don’t find it. And people don’t champion it.

And I think my bravery, if you could call it that, really comes from a sense of urgency. A sense that like if I don’t do this and if I don’t take this chance and if I don’t sort of make the loudest version of this thing I will be completely ignored. You know? It’s sort of like there’s a pressure there.

You know, Dear White People is not the only thing I came up with. Dear White People is not the only thing I was thinking of in 2005 when I started writing it. But I knew that it was the one that had to come first because it was loudest. It doesn’t feel courageous in the moment. It actually feels quite terrifying. But I appreciate that it reads as brave. [laughs]

**Craig:** Well, you know, you can’t be brave if you’re not scared. Right?

**Justin:** That’s very true.

**Craig:** Bravery is action in the face of fear, I think.

**Justin:** That’s absolutely true.

**John:** Well, Justin let’s talk about the actions you took in that face of fear. What were the steps from I have this idea, I’ve written this script, to actually we’re rolling cameras and we’re finishing a film? What was the process of getting from idea to there’s a movie that can debut at Sundance?

**Justin:** Well, for me the process was really about motivating myself to do the work. There was a tremendous amount of work to do for Dear White People. One, I had to learn how to write it. I had to learn how a multi-protagonist film works. Because they don’t work in the same way that a single protagonist film works. And the kind of obvious thing of like, oh, it’s just like a single protagonist film but with many protagonists. It actually doesn’t answer a lot of questions. And it’s a really easy thing to get lost in.

And so part of my process was to watch everything that was multi-protagonist first and foremost. And then watch everything that felt like issue-driven. And whether or not it felt like Dear White People tonally, whether or not it was a comedy, I needed to get into my DNA the way these movies operate because, you know, something like Do the Right Thing for instance, you know, Mookie is technically the protagonist but he actually isn’t the one that breaks us into act two. It’s actually Buggin Out that breaks us into act two by bringing up the brothers on the wall.

But then it’s Mookie who breaks us into act three, but [unintelligible]. So just like little things like that, having to sort of – you know, what are the rules here? And so that was actually a really wonderful process. And then the other part I’ll be honest is I watched the Star Wars documentary Empire Dreams countless times because what George Lucas was trying to do with that film was also to make something he wanted to see but that did not yet exist and in fact really nobody, even the studio up until the day before release, nobody believed in that project.

**Craig:** They let him have the rights to the merchandise. [laughs]

**Justin:** Oh yeah. And I think they put it in two theaters or something. It’s like no wonder it’s a blockbuster because it’s only playing on two blocks. I needed those stories and I read a lot of biographies just to know that I belonged in the room. Because the self-doubt is crippling, I think for anybody trying to break into this industry or be an artist.

But especially for me because I was trying to say and do things that frankly I had no indications that I would be allowed to do.

**Craig:** Love it.

**Justin:** So there was a lot of that. And there was a lot of table reads. There was a lot of self-prodding. Self-given deadlines. Forcing myself to, OK, I’m going to figure out this plot problem this week. I’m going to table read with this group of friends by this month. You know, that kind of thing just went on for years and years.

**John:** But at what point did you have – there’s a budget, there’s a schedule, we’re actually going to make the movie? What was the transition point from this is a script that I’ve written to this is a movie I’m making?

**Justin:** So around 2011 we had a table read and I felt like people got it. I felt like people were picking up what I was putting down. And there was a conversation after that table read that was exactly – that’s how I knew that the script was in a place where I felt it was ready to be produced because people were having the exact conversation that I wanted people to have in the lobby after seeing the movie.

And so I made a concept trailer, because I mean there was just absolutely no – there was no market for what I was doing at that time.

**John:** Let me push back against that. It wasn’t that there wasn’t a market, because we actually know there was a market because the movie did really well. But there wasn’t an obvious prior to say like, oh, an audience will show up for this movie. You had no evidence of that.

**Justin:** The movie did OK. But it was, you know, I remember sitting with my agents and these people who were very passionate about me and my career and the movie were like, “So just so you know, 90% of all independent financiers we actually won’t even be able to go out to because they won’t even look at the package because it’s a Black ensemble”

So, yeah, it was like really I didn’t have any clue how to get the movie made. So, I just took whatever next step was available. And I felt like, wow, we should make a concept trailer so that people can get what this is. Because on the page it’s multi-protagonist. It doesn’t read like a script that a reader would expect to receive. You know, some readers, particularly white male readers were incredibly offended by aspects of the script. And so I made this concept trailer so that people could see it and get a feel for it. And that went viral online. And instead of at the end of that trailer “coming soon” it would say, you know, “Don’t you wish there were movies like this? Me too. Give us some money and maybe we can make that happen.”

And we raised about $45,000 and we were able to hire a casting director. And essentially we made YouTube videos about the making of this movie until a bigger financier eventually maybe a year and a half later came onboard to properly finance the film at about a million dollars. And, you know, because of the virality of that original clip we were, you know, there was a studio that was interested for a while and then they dropped us. And then spread a story that I had dropped them. It was all of this BS like political stuff going on.

But the net result was the movie wasn’t getting made. And then a year and a half in, because we had built this fan base online, and then we were continuing to water it and foster it, you know, this financier, Julie Lebedev, who also financed my second film, Bad Hair, I mean, she was just like, “You guys have an audience before there’s even a movie. Like let’s do it. And can you do it for $1 million?” And I said I don’t know, but I know that I’d rather try than not. And that’s exactly what happened.

We went to Minneapolis because they had a rebate program called Snow Bate that had just come back. We landed and looked at the University of Minnesota and we were told, well, you know, if you want to shoot here, and at that point in time it was the only college in the nation that we conceivably had a timeframe that we could shoot at. They said, “Well then you need to start in two weeks.” And that’s what we did. We hunkered down. I started casting. And all of a sudden we were making a movie.

**Craig:** I just love this so much. I love stories like this because it just shows a certain kind of indomitability and an impossible persistence is required.

**Justin:** Yes.

**Craig:** It also – I think it also goes to the heart of this very strange paradox. I think people think that studio productions are all about minimizing risk and independent film financing is the riskiest proposal of all. It’s actually backwards. Most independent film financing is the most cowardly kind of financing. They only way they’ll give you that financing is if they can do foreign pre-sales which make them make money before you even start shooting.

**Justin:** Absolutely. Absolutely. And foreign pre-sales work on specifically white star talent.

**Craig:** Yes. White and generally male star talent. And that system is, I mean, we have a certain kind of wonderful racism here in America. There’s a very old classic racism overseas. It’s a different kind. It’s a different vintage.

**Justin:** Nostalgic racism.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. And it is very much their theory is that “Black movies do not travel.” I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this. And we know for a fact that it’s not true. We know that.

**Justin:** We know it – it is proven untrue constantly.

**Craig:** Constantly.

**Justin:** And yet it’s still the paradigm. And so when people talk about how does racism persist, it’s like it’s not necessarily even an attitude. It’s not like – there maybe, but I don’t envision this hidden meeting of all the independent financiers and they’re like, “How do we keep the Blacks out?” Like it’s not like that. But when there’s these informal rules in place that’s essentially what we’re doing.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a received wisdom. And then every time a movie with a – let’s just say a significantly Black cast or a predominantly Black cast, or a movie about issues pertaining to Black people or race does well overseas they just say, “That’s the—“

**Justin:** “The exception.” Yeah.

**John:** The exception that proves the rule.

**Craig:** The exception. It’s an exception that proves the rule. Well, if every single exception is an exception then they’re not exceptions. It just happens so often.

**Justin:** It does.

**Craig:** First of all, hat’s off to the financier who was bold enough to say, “You have an audience. That’s all I need. I don’t need to be repaid by Spain, France, Germany, Italy before you can roll film.” I mean, to me that’s what independent film financing should be. So that’s good for her.

**Justin:** Well I think that’s great about Julie is that she would like that, but she recognizes that it’s wrong that that isn’t happening for certain kinds of stories and I think Julie is in the business of making – of proving markets that haven’t been proven by other people. And certainly with Dear White People and then again with Bad Hair, I think we’ve been able to do that.

**John:** Now, so you made this feature. It gets a great reception. The decision to go and make this as a TV series, in some ways it seems kind of obvious because when you have a multi-protagonist story, well, TV is multi-protagonist. You’re always going to be following multiple characters. So it seems like a pretty straightforward transition. And yet it’s so much more time and space and storytelling and a crew that is not just to make one feature but to make a whole series. You have potentially other writers. What was your process like figuring out how to move from I’ve made a feature to now I’m making a TV series?

**Justin:** Well, at that time I was certainly inspired by what was happening in streaming. I was inspired by things like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black because I felt like there was this new paradigm. There was this new space for cinema on TV. We were sort of moving beyond the idea that a show had to be very tightly formatted so that a kind of rotating set of creatives would come in and essentially make the same thing each time.

We were moving past that. And we were now moving into this world where you could stream an entire season of something as if it were just a really long movie. And that was really exciting to me. And I remember one of the early screenings of Dear White People there was an executive, her name was Tara Duncan, she’s president of Freeform now, but at the time was a creative exec at Netflix. And she said, “Have you thought about making this as a show?” And I said I absolutely have. And she said, “OK, well when you guys sell this,” at the time Netflix wasn’t really buying movies at that time, “so when you guys finally sell this I want you to think about it.”

And as I toured with the movie doing Q&As across the country a lot of which were at colleges, mostly white colleges where the BSU was throwing an event to show the film, or even in other countries like in Paris in particular, in London, Scandinavia, I was having these moments where I was realizing like, wow, the Black experience is actually a global one. And there’s so many things that we didn’t even begin to get into with this movie. So I started preparing just in my mind what would a TV show be like for this. And I started thinking about what could we do that would be new and fresh and exciting. And I came up with this idea of why don’t we give each character at least at the beginning their own episodes. So it’s a multi-protagonist show but it’s not a multi-protagonist show about this one light-skinned girl Sam and her friends. It literally is like when we’re in a Lionel episode we’re meeting everyone else from his point of view.

Wouldn’t that be interesting if we did something like I’ve seen Robert Altman do and I’ve seen other directors do with feature films, but we did that on TV? And that’s really where it grew out of. And there was a lot of material that didn’t get to be filmed that eventually became episodes. One thing that I recognized is that there were a lot of different kind of people showing up for the movie, but reliably Black women, young Black women were showing up. And were identifying with Sam and Coco. And I felt it was a priority to get Black women both in the writer’s room but also behind the lens to direct these episodes.

I never felt like this should just be coming from my point of view. I felt like my point of view should maybe set the parameters, but then I want a bunch of artists that are like me and I want to give them what I never get, which is room to do them and to say something that is specific to them. And that’s really the technique that I went into that with and I was able to do that. I was able to build a writer’s room where people felt empowered. Where people felt like they could bring their real stuff to the table.

We did the same thing with our creative departments, and particularly with the directors. And it’s been like going to graduate film school. I get to sit there and learn and mold and shape these world class directors.

**John:** Now, you have two seasons that are done and they’re out on Netflix.

**Justin:** Three.

**John:** I’m sorry, three seasons. But are there plans for – like what would you do next essentially? If there’s another season how does this current cultural moment we’re living in, how do you see that shaping the future of this show? What does it feel like to you?

**Justin:** We were actually writing season four when the lockdown happened earlier this year. And so we finished writing season four over Zoom. And then about the time that we were done writing it, and it was very emotional and of course it was like nobody knows that this is even happening, but we’re like oh my god this is the end of the show. Because it’s also our fourth and final season, I forgot to add.

And so the lockdown happens. And then the scripts are just sort of in a vault somewhere for a while. And then, you know, all of the protests around George Floyd begin to happen. And when the video of George Floyd went out, you know, as a Black person you don’t know if this is going to start a movement because frankly videos like this have become just part of the everyday fabric of life. And especially as a Black person it’s like every other week there’s something like this that happens. And when it starts to become a movement, you know, that was really mind-boggling and inspiring.

But then you realize that all of the same complications and all of the ways in which racism persists even among really well-intentioned people, well-intentioned white liberal people especially, all that stuff is still there. It actually felt like we had written a season especially crafted for this moment, but we of course had no idea that that’s what we were doing. The sort of method of attacking each season always involves deep, deep research. And a constant trying to tune in to what is in the Zeitgeist. Like what is just below the pop culture that’s happening.

And we end up making these wild predictions. And I can’t say much without spoiling it, but we end making these predictions that tend to come true. And you’re going to see the season and think that we wrote it in response to what’s happening, but we didn’t.

**Craig:** I have had my own weird dance with that very thing. And it turns out if you just look at the world and talk about it honestly that things that happen after are going to see like you predict them. You’re not predicting anything. You’re just accurately reporting what other people may not have been looking at.

**Justin:** I think that’s absolutely right. I think that’s absolutely right.

**John:** Cool. We have one listener question that I felt was especially relevant for this. Craig, would you mind reading us what Ryan in Brooklyn wrote?

**Craig:** Yeah. Ryan in Brooklyn, where I was born, writes, “My writing partner and I spent the first half of 2020 researching and writing a script based on a very well-known character from 18th Century American history. He is by no means the most heinous of culprits as far as racism, sexism, colonialism and the like go. But, he owned slaves and benefited from systems of white supremacy none the less.

“As our current culture reevaluates how we see these figures who in our case have for the most part been known as heroes and pioneers, we have taken a pause to ask ourselves for reasons both moral and creative if the project is worth even continuing with. How does one strike a balance between giving history its due but also taking into consideration modern sentiments?

“For instance the only people of color in the script are either servants or slaves who would have been paid very little mind within the limited scope of our narrative. But I feel like leaving them out altogether is white-washing. Artificially propping them is white-savior-ing. And leaving them as they are is lazy.”

Well, that is I suspect a dilemma that a lot of people are wrestling with right now.

**John:** Absolutely. And Justin it feels like the kind of dilemma that your characters on your show might be arguing. So talk us through what you’re thinking as you hear Ryan’s question.

**Justin:** Well, one, I applaud Ryan for having the dilemma, because there are examples of many people in this particular situation who don’t see a dilemma at all and just sort of well we’re just going to not talk about the slave people. Or that’s a very easy decision. Or we’re going to hang a hat on it. So kudos to you for recognizing the difficulty of the moment. I think for me and this is not really going to sound like advice, but for me it’s not just about how I’m telling a story or why I’m telling a story, but timing is a very important factor in storytelling in my opinion.

There are certain – there’s a time for certain stories. Because we’re trying to speak to a certain moment. There’s a reason why out of all the things people could be thinking about or talking about or experiencing we want them to experience this little slice of life right now. And for me – for instance I got a script the other day, it’s a wonderful script. Wonderful story. But it’s about a white boy sort of among a bunch of Black and Brown people where he is the outcast. And we’re sort of getting something of the experience of prejudice from his point of view. And I was like this is a good story, but I can’t tell this right now because this isn’t – this is a point of view that everyone is already pretty saturated in. And actually the story about the Black and Brown people who sort of just kind of accompany his world, those are the stories that have been left out. So actually I would like to tell those stories right now.

So, it doesn’t mean like abandon your story, but I would say, you know, I think you’re right to maybe give it a think and give it a pause. And if the Black people, the sort of subjugated people in that story are not the focus of it, you know, maybe they could be. Maybe we don’t really need a historical heroic example of a white person from a backwards time right now. Or maybe there’s something else to say about that person that is pertinent to the moment.

I think stories do exist in the times that they’re born out of and they should speak to those times. At least that’s how I feel as an artist. And everyone can do and make what they want. I may not go see it. [laughs]

**Craig:** I love that answer. I think that’s great.

**John:** Our friend Aline tipped me off to a podcast that charts all the presidents in order going up through modern day. And just because I know so little about the presidents, and my daughter is starting AP US History. And so I’m listening to the first episode and they talk about young George Washington who I only have the one image of George Washington which is sort of what’s on the dollar bill. But if you actually go back and look at he was pretty hot when he was a teenager. He had a reputation. He would have been a social media star essentially. He was known around the community and he was sort of heroic and dashing and sort of a wild adventurer. And there’s a story to be told about young George Washington, and yet I have exactly Ryan’s qualms about it because I don’t know that I need to see a young George Washington story and try to fit it into a context that is at all meaningful in 2020. It doesn’t feel like, what you said, it doesn’t feel like the time to tell a young George Washington story.

**Justin:** Especially because don’t we all have – I mean, you can’t live your life as an American without being confronted with George Washington’s story.

**Craig:** Thank you. We know it.

**Justin:** The one story that I just learned about is that it wasn’t wooden teeth, it was slave teeth. Did you guys know that? That he had slave teeth towards the end of his life.

**Craig:** Ew.

**Justin:** And it became wooden teeth over the course of the centuries of that story spreading, but it was actually the teeth of his slaves. It’s things like that that to me would be much more interesting to see a perspective or a movie about.

A movie I fucking love and I talk about this all the time that did not – I feel like this is another topic – but I feel like film criticism failed this movie. And it is Lemon by Janicza Bravo. And what I think is so brilliant about that movie is that essentially she’s telling a tried and true story that we accept all over the place about an actual sociopathic white man but nobody can see it because he’s a white man. And so the movie is very uncomfortable. And if you don’t quite know what she’s doing maybe you feel a little left out.

But what she’s doing is she’s telling the story that we always go to the movies to see, especially in independent cinema. It’s the thing that we always fall for, but she’s doing it without the white male gaze. She’s doing it from a Black female gaze. And that makes people very uncomfortable. But I was like that is so brilliant. That’s the movie about George Washington I could see right now.

**Craig:** It does seem, Ryan, like one of the things you’re hearing here is not only, OK, well done you’re considering this and timing matters, but also there have been a lot of books and movies and television shows that have examined very well-known characters from 18th Century American history. Do you know why they’re very well-known? Because they’re very well-known.

So if they’re very well-known, I don’t know, do we need another one?

**John:** Well, but Craig it is an opportunity to look at one of these people and fill out the context. So I guess the question is is it worth spending the time to take a look at one of these characters and paint out the context when you know that painting out that context is going to be really not just challenging but may not be the right time to be doing that.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. It just feels like – also, I feel we’re about to get – you know, I am always on the lookout for the trend. Because the trend is what, so people are behind things always. That’s what they want, the people that are paying for things. And the trend is going to be, well, let’s keep telling stories about famous white people but now let’s also focus on the Black people around them. Or, or, crazy idea, tell stories about not those white people. Because we’ve already had those stories. I actually don’t need another story about Thomas Jefferson as it relates to Sally Hemings or his slave-owning or the south. Because I’ve gotten my fill of Thomas Jefferson in Paris. I had 1776. I have John Adams. There’s a lot of Thomas – there’s Hamilton which we’ll be talking about. There’s a lot of Jefferson. Jefferson, Jefferson, Jefferson. I’m good. Let’s move on. Let’s find other people to talk about.

That’s my general feeling.

**Justin:** But I will bring this up, too. The dilemma that’s being described to me feels like – I always feel that way as a writer. And it’s not about racism. Like I always get to a point in the story where I’m like, oh, I don’t know if this works anymore. I don’t know if this fits. And so it might be a necessary machination of the process. Maybe this movie, you know, this is going to say woo-woo, but I do feel like stories kind of have their own souls sometimes. And they tell you when they’re not ready. They tell you when they need something else. They tell you when they’re not working.

And this might be your journey to making a more interesting project. You know, this pause that you’re being given by this moment might actually be an opportunity to explore a different area of this very same person or this very same moment in time or, you know, or something deeper, more challenging, more interesting perhaps.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. Craig, kick us off.

**Craig:** Well, I didn’t have one myself so I turned to my intrepid assistant Bo. And I said, Bo, do you have a One Cool Thing? And that is why I’m going to talk about long hair, which I don’t have.

**John:** Nor do I.

**Craig:** I don’t really hair. I mean, I have a little bit. So, Bo does have very long, straight hair. And apparently when you have long straight hair, so I’ve been told, it does get very dry at the ends. And, you know, you hear about split ends.

**John:** Yeah. I kind of know that as a theory, but I don’t really know what it is.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I guess the ends of your hair just start to split because they’re dry. So she is recommending something called Olaplex. And we’ll put a link in the show notes. If you have long hair that is getting dry at the end do what Bo does. Check out Olaplex. I cannot vouch for it myself because I don’t really have much hair.

**John:** The amount of money I save on hair care products is staggering.

**Craig:** I use like this much shampoo. Boink.

**John:** No shampoo for me. My One Cool Thing is a website I’ve gone to for years, and years, and years. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken about it on the show. It’s called Electoral Vote. If you go to this website, it’s electoral-vote.com, it looks like it’s from 1995. It’s like a really basic website. But every day they just update it and it’s these two smart guys who sort of summarize the political news and sort of what’s happening in the world for you.

And if you just read this every morning you feel like, oh, I kind of get what’s happening.

**Craig:** This is an encouraging map I’m looking at.

**John:** Yeah. So it was originally set up about sort of literally the Electoral College and that. But it’s morphed over the years into just a general political discussion of what’s going on in the world. Good summaries. Really good Q&As over the weekends. So, I’d recommend you take a look at this.

What I had to do during the 2016 election was really deliberately limit myself to how much news I would take in, because my anxiety just went off the charts. And so this would be the kind of thing which I would allow myself to look at in the mornings and then look at nothing else for the rest of the day.

So, if you were to go on that kind of diet this might be the thing you would leave in so you can get some information.

**Justin:** What is it again?

**John:** Electoral-vote.com.

**Justin:** Oh, OK, Cool. I missed the dash. Cool.

**Craig:** John, your description is perfect. This website does look like it was made back in the Angel Cities area.

**Justin:** Absolutely. Yeah.

**Craig:** But it’s a nice map to look at. I mean, I’m kind of grooving on the map. Because I don’t – I’m one of those people when everyone is like, well, we’ve put out a new poll. Biden leads Trump by this many points in the general election, I’m like, oh, you mean the national poll that I don’t care about at all?

**Justin:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Give me the states. Give me the states.

**Justin:** This is giving me so much agita.

**Craig:** It’s coming.

**Justin:** Louisiana, why? OK, go. Sorry.

**Craig:** I think you know why.

**John:** Know yourself. Know yourself. And if this is not the right thing you’ll know it and you’ll clip it away and you won’t put it in your bookmarks.

**Craig:** I like this.

**John:** Hey, Justin, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Justin:** You know, this one made me feel so old. Have you guys heard of Animal Crossing? But I’m just going to say the thing that I think is fucking cool. I am so enjoying I May Destroy You. I know this is not a hot take. But Michaela Coel’s show on HBO or the BBC depending on where you are is just a cool – if you’re a writing nerd, you’re seeing the things that they’re doing on that show and the things that they’re getting away with in a TV show is so inspiring and liberating.

So, I don’t know if that’s cool enough or edgy enough.

**John:** Oh, it’s absolutely cool enough. We’ve been trying to get Michaela Coel on the show and Megana has been working really hard on it. So, people in Michaela Coel’s universe, if you are hearing this now we really are trying to get you on the show. So, we would love to have her.

**Justin:** I also just want to meet you and worship at your feet. So, if you can just reach out to Justin Simien. That would be great. If you just need some worship.

**Craig:** I feel like, yeah, she’s the new Phoebe, right? I mean, I’m not taking anything away from Phoebe. Phoebe remains Phoebe. But there’s this meteor that has arrived and everyone is like, oh my god, how do I get to talk to Michaela.

**John:** But you know what? We got to speak to Phoebe.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So hopefully we’ll be able to get to speak to Michaela as well.

**Craig:** And just to reiterate, Phoebe, still a meteor. Still a Phoebe-like meteor.

**Justin:** Well I want the Zoom code or the Skype code. I just want to listen in. Because, you know, I think she’s incredible.

**Craig:** Honestly, after your discussion of higher education, Justin, I’m considering having you be a permanent third host on this show.

**Justin:** [laughs] I’m down. I’m down.

**Craig:** When you meet a kindred spirit you’re like don’t leave me. Stay.

**Justin:** I love nerding out about this stuff.

**Craig:** So great.

**Justin:** It’s my pleasure.

**Craig:** Well, you know what, we’ll nerd out about Hamilton in our bonus segment.

**Justin:** All right.

**John:** Absolutely. So until then Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. Justin, what are you on Twitter?

**Justin:** Oh god, I’m barely on Twitter. But @jsim07. I may not @ you back just because it’s not on my phone right now.

**John:** Which is so smart. We have t-shirts. They’re great. You can get them at Cotton Bureau. There’s a link in the show notes.

You can find those show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com or on the podcast that you are playing this from. 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 just about to record on Hamilton.

Justin, thank you so much for joining us on the show today.

**Craig:** Thanks Justin.

**Justin:** My pleasure. Thanks guys.

**Craig:** That was great.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, you are a big Hamilton fan. Did you see Hamilton on Disney+?

**Craig:** Yeah, of course I saw it on Disney+. Are you crazy?

**John:** Justin Simien, did you see it on Disney+?

**Justin:** I did.

**John:** And had you also seen it in the theater?

**Justin:** I had.

**Craig:** And I have twice.

**John:** I have twice. And I’ve seen it with this original cast in the theater.

**Justin:** Oh wow.

**Craig:** Yup. I saw it with the original cast and then I saw it out here at The Pantages with another spectacular cast with I think – Renee Elise Goldsberry was the one kind of carryover, but everybody else was knew I think.

**Justin:** You guys are hardcore fans.

**John:** We’re pretty hardcore fans. I loved the staged production. I will say I loved the film production as well. But I need to provide some context. I was staying at an Airbnb when this debuted and so we hooked up our AppleTV, watched it, and it was only after I watched it that I realized that motion smoothing had been turned on.

**Craig:** Oh no.

**John:** And you know what? It was good.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** My theory is, and I can’t of course reengineer it to know, but I think the weirdness of live theater and motion smoothing which makes things look too present, kind of worked for it.

**Justin:** I could see that.

**Craig:** Outraged.

**John:** It was weird. So I think it made the one case, other than professional sports, in which motion smoothing is not an absolute horrible–

**Craig:** I hate it on sports. I hate it.

**John:** But let us not talk about the motion smoothing. Let us talk about Hamilton on Disney+ and our reactions to it. Justin as the guest you get to start. What was your reaction to it on Disney+?

**Justin:** Oh god. This is very putting me on the spot.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**Justin:** I’m not, OK, I am probably not the biggest Hamilton fan in the world. I wasn’t before I saw it on Disney+ and I’m still not. But, I thought, you know, one, seeing theater on TV in this form is something that like deserved this quality of production for a really long time. Like when I went to performing arts high school like – every theater geek knows about that one tape of Into the Woods with Bernadette Peters in it, or Pippin with Ben Vereen.

**Craig:** Yup.

**Justin:** And I love that stuff. So to see it normalized on TV is great without the gimmick of like doing it live in front of an audience that I think some Broadway shows are being adapted for TV in that way. So to see it just like in its native Broadway environment, well-filmed, with beautiful lighting, clear audio, I think was kind of a revelation for me that like, god, I wish I could see more shows like this.

**John:** Craig, what was your take?

**Craig:** The same. Look, I do love the show. And I appreciate the – it’s five years old now. And because we’re older five years seems like the blink of an eye to us. My daughter who is a huge Hamilton fan, she’s grown up, like she’s changed dramatically from a 10-year-old to a 15-year-old as Hamilton has aged one-third of her life with her.

So, it is interesting to see how the world changes and we do start to look back and reexamine. I still think that Hamilton is an incredibly important show. I think it has opened a ton of doors. I think it has changed Broadway permanently. I think Lin-Manuel Miranda is a genius.

I think that if you now want to look at the show and start asking questions about – he does sort of wave his hand kind of these aren’t the droids you’re looking for in that kind of manner over slavery. He’s very smart about how he – there’s a line right up front, “While slaves were being carted away across the waves.” He is smart to mention it. And it comes in various points. Does the show address slavery the way I think he would if he were doing it right now? No. Is that kind of the curse and blessing of art? Yes.

The art stays the same. The world changes. We do go back and look at it, but it is so good that it is – you can still dig into it and chew on it. From a musical point of view and from a storytelling point of view it is mind-blowingly good to me. And I really appreciated the fact that I could just see the show.

There are a ton of shows where they just don’t do it. I think they don’t do it because they’re scared that you won’t show up to see the show maybe. Hamilton obviously does not have that concern. They have sold out every performance they’ve ever had. But I would love to see other shows done this way because it is wonderful to watch. And it is a very different experience than a film adaption, like say Chicago, or the live versions which are live versions and not the show.

I thought Tommy Kail did a really great job of somehow being there and inside of things, but not in a way that made me feel like I wasn’t watching the show. More than anything what I really appreciated was the one thing that I couldn’t get in a theater and that was the faces. To see faces like that. Leslie Odom, Jr. in particular, who is just like, yeah. So that’s the MVP of the show, right? All respect to Lin who is, again, a genius, and who created the whole thing, wrote every one of those insane words, and managed to wrestle the whole thing. For a performance point of view, Daveed Diggs is a scene-stealer. But Leslie Odom is a show-maker.

And being able to see his face and the way he moves his mouth is very specific was fascinating to me. I got more of his inner turmoil and the terror of a man that’s constantly pretending all came out in the close, which I loved.

So I thought it was wonderful and I will absolutely watch it again. I remain a huge Hamilton fan. A huge Lin-Manuel Miranda fan. And just as much – more of a Leslie Odom fan. More of a Daveed Diggs fan. All of them. Christopher Jackson. All of them. Just remarkable.

**John:** So, I had a Broadway show, Big Fish, that you do a filming of it. So, pretty much every show that’s on Broadway there is at least one performance that is sort of properly filmed. There are multiple cameras in the audience filming it. But it wasn’t anywhere near this level of sophistication where – and it’s not edited in a meaningful way. So there’s not that kind of sophisticated approach to when we’re going to be in a close-up, when we’re going to be over here, when we’re going to be actually on stage and following a character as they’re making their exit. We have none of that.

And so there’s not a filmed version of the show I can look at and say, oh, here is the show. This is the thing that I made. And some of that is what theater is supposed to be. You have to actually be there to see it live and in person. And Craig you were asking sort of why more of them aren’t done it’s because – large part of it – is because the union contracts that govern how the performances are made basically bar the filming or make it impossible to have that be out there any other place.

And you’re always worried about cannibalizing future sales of the show by people just watching the video of it, which makes sense.

**Craig:** I get that.

**John:** But watching Hamilton, I think the thing that was most surprising to me is when it was done I did not have any desire for a typical adaptation of Hamilton. I didn’t want to see the movie version of Hamilton.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**Justin:** I agree with that so much because I think that Hamilton works in a very theatrical way. And I actually – this is going to sound like shade but it’s not – it is sort of, you see it with the adaptation of Cats into a film, is that some things they aren’t – it’s not a direct translation. I think a fantastic movie could be made of Hamilton. Don’t get me wrong. But you can’t just film it in real life and have it just be what it is. It just wouldn’t work. Like it works because it’s a concert experience almost. You are overwhelmed by these amazing performances and you feel like you’re there and there’s an audience participating. And you need all of that, I think, for Hamilton as it is conceived right now to work.

I felt the same way about The Lion King actually. And that I really enjoyed because I think too few people really appreciate the power of theater and musical theater in particular to be both musical and whimsical but also profound. And Hamilton is both dramatic, profound, and a musical. And that’s something that like only a few people understand because only a few people will have access. For that I think it’s very meaningful to have it out.

And I could not agree more. This to me is the version of Hamilton to see.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, there are certain shows that are easier to adapt than others. I mean, I’m in the middle of adapting one right now and I consider it to be one of the easier ones in the sense that the show is trying to be cinematic and so you can now be totally cinematic as you do the film adaptation.

Whereas Hamilton is not trying to be cinematic. Hamilton is interpretive and it is stylized. For instance, it does remind me of Pippin in a little way.

**Justin:** Absolutely.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So when Pippin sings about war they’re dancing. It’s Fosse. It’s not war. And here when they’re fighting the Battle of Yorktown it’s dancing. And take the bullets out your gun, take the bullets out your gun. How the hell would you shoot that with real soldiers and bullets? It just would be ridiculous.

**Justin:** They would try. [laughs]

**John:** They would.

**Justin:** Which to me is so depressing.

**Craig:** They would, yeah.

**Justin:** In Broadway stuff in particular that gets translated to movies I’m just always – not always – but I’m mostly very disappointed because no one has taken the time to figure out how to adapt the theatricality of the show to cinema. They just sort of film it. And that’s not the same as adapting it. And some of these shows, and Hamilton is one of them, like I don’t think anyone should have a first blush idea as to how to do that. It should be recognized as an incredibly difficult problem to figure out how to adapt something like Hamilton to the screen.

**Craig:** Lin, I think, could. I suppose if there’s anyone who could do it Lin could. I still remain very impressed by the adaptation of Chicago. I think that was—

**Justin:** Oh, I think it’s great.

**Craig:** Incredibly successful. In part because Rob Marshall understood that he was making both a movie and also shooting the show. So he kind of runs in two lines. There’s reality, which feels cinematic, and feels real, and in the world with cars and outside. Because theater is inside. Movies are outside. But then also there are these moments where, you know, He Had it Coming is – it’s not the official name of the song, but–

**John:** Staged.

**Craig:** It’s staged. It’s a dream. Even when Latifah is doing When You’re Good to Mama there’s two versions. There’s the real one where she’s just in her regular – and it’s a regular prison – and then there’s the one where she’s in a burlesque on stage. So, he manages to do the theater and the real at the same time, which is brilliant.

I think Chicago is an excellent sort of map.

**Justin:** I love Chicago. And I love that Chicago consolidates really for popular culture some things that Fosse was doing in his films that I don’t think quite made it to the mainstream yet. Like if you look at Cabaret you’re starting to understand – Cabaret to me really is one of the first American musicals that begins to sort of have a dialogue between the real world and sort of like stage reality. And then with All that Jazz when the character starts hallucinating on his deathbed and he starts seeing in his mind what it would be like if this were made as a musical number you’re starting to see the language for that form. But it really isn’t until Chicago that it’s sort of like put into a kind of thesis that I felt like my mom could understand, or a general movie-going public could understand. And I don’t know, I do not include Chicago in the list of Broadway adaptations that I’m disappointed at. I quite like Chicago.

**Craig:** And interesting that you point out Cabaret because now we’re talking – there’s something about Kander and Ebb, I’m just going to say. Those guys are – when I think of the shows that they’ve done and written they do seem somehow slightly more adaptable. I don’t know how. There’s just something about them where I can see it working. I think part of it also is just the nature of the songs. They feel like I want to watch them being sung on screen. Or do I need them to be in a theater or else they’re boring? You know?

Like Sondheim to me, you got to be there. I don’t know. I just believe that. You got to be there. It just doesn’t work the same way if you’re not there. That’s my feeling.

**Justin:** Well I’m going to say it. I would have made a great Into the Woods. [laughs]

**Craig:** I love it.

**Justin:** And by the way I think it is possible to make a great Hamilton film. It’s just a lot harder than I feel like–

**Craig:** People might think.

**Justin:** People might realize, yeah.

**John:** So let’s also acknowledge that the Hamilton that we saw on Disney+ was not the version – well, it was a version – but we weren’t supposed to see it on Disney+. We were supposed to see it on the big screen. This was going to be a theatrical release. And I think it would have been a giant theatrical release. I think it would have been a big event.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And that would have been a very different experience to see it on a big screen with a big audience to be able to cheer together. I can imagine people singing along in a theater.

**Craig:** That’s the part I hate. [laughs] I’m so angry at that part, in my head.

**John:** Maybe some screenings they would allow singing, some screenings they wouldn’t.

**Justin:** Eliza!

**Craig:** Shut up!

**John:** I remember seeing Evita at a singalong Evita and it was great that everyone could sing along to the songs. But, it’s important to remember that Broadway Theater is incredibly expensive so very few people get to see it. And so people have much better experience, or their experience of Hamilton is probably largely through the cast album rather than seeing the show because so few people could afford to see the show.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** Movie tickets are much, much cheaper, so it’s how most people would have seen it. But now that it’s debuting on Disney+, which is an inexpensive subscription service, just the amount of people who saw Hamilton in one night when it debuted on Disney+ has got to exceed probably everyone who saw it, at least the original cast, in the theater.

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

**John:** And so it’s important to remember sort of how transformative a cultural thing can be when everyone can see it is the thing, when it’s taken away.

**Craig:** This would have been – I mean, years ago if they had had to do this it would have been on ABC and they would have had commercial breaks. A lot of them. That’s how we watched stuff when we were kids, right? Commercial breaks. Oh my god, can you imagine? Oh my god.

**John:** Yeah. I may be working on one of those things with commercial breaks.

**Craig:** “Forgiveness.” And then, “We’ll be back after these messages.” Ah, yeah, commercial breaks.

**John:** All right. Thank you gentlemen very much for talking about Hamilton with me.

**Craig:** A joy.

**Justin:** My pleasure.

**Craig:** A joy. One more reason that I want to spend all my time with Justin.

**John:** Thanks.

 

Links:

* [WGA AMPTP](https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/wga-amptp-negotiations-deal-contract-1234695529/)
* [Dear White People](https://www.netflix.com/title/80095698)
* [Lemon Movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5973364/)
* [Olaplex](https://olaplex.com/)
* [Electoral Vote](https://www.electoral-vote.com/)
* [I May Destroy You](https://www.hbo.com/i-may-destroy-you)
* [Hamilton on Disney+](https://disneyplusoriginals.disney.com/movie/hamilton)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Justin Simien](https://twitter.com/jsim07?lang=en) on Twitter
* [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 Matthew Chilelli ([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/460standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 413 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to try to answer the question how do you know when you’re ready to write that script. Then we’re going to answer listener questions about rewrites and polishes and whether writing a bad script could put you on a do not hire list.

**Craig:** Do not hire.

**John:** Do not hire!

**Craig:** Do not!

**John:** But Craig, most crucially in follow up, a question a lot of people have been asking – Craig, what’s up? Are you OK?

**Craig:** I’m OK. So the last podcast was the one that you did with – and I was supposed to be there but I couldn’t, essentially connected to this same thing – you did the mental health podcast which we’ll get to in a bit. But prior to that I had to drop out of the race, the Vice Presidential race, the sexiest of all political races, vice president, because of a medical issue in my family.

So, a little context. First of all, no one is dying. I think that’s important for people to know. But I do have a kid who has multiple chronic health issues and there was – I think maybe, ugh, I want to say literally the day after I said, OK, I’ll go ahead and run for vice president we got a call that he had to go into emergency surgery for the second time in a year. And it’s a complicated surgery. It’s not the kind where they poke three holes in you. It’s more like the kind where they make a big line and go Wee. So, good news is he’s recuperating quite nicely, but he does have medical issues that we have to be attentive to. And it seemed to me not only that I was not going to be able to have the time or attention to give to the race, but even worse my ability to serve effectively for two years should I win was fairly compromised because, you know, if this happens again, or if one of his other conditions sort of acts up and that requires attention, then I just won’t be present or able to do the gig.

So, for that reason I had to drop out. But, you know, good news – to be clear – no one is dying. But, you know, it hasn’t been a great month.

**John:** Yeah. Life is challenging at times. And you and I both had some challenges as things happen. So, we’re glad to hear that he’s doing better and that you’re doing OK.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes I am. And I really appreciate. There was a wonderful outpouring of support and people were very lovely, which was nice to see. And we should. We should try and be lovely to each there is a medical crisis going on in a family, but nonetheless it was nice to see and encouraging that, you know, we all know ultimately what matters in life. There’s layers of importance and rankings of importance. And this is one of those things that’s more important.

So, we’re in a pretty decent place, but I think it was the right call to make.

**John:** I agree. Now, you also had a very bright moment of news over these last two weeks. You won a TCA, a Television Critics Association award for Chernobyl.

**Craig:** I won. I keep wanting to give it a name, like the Taco or something like that. The Taca? And I wasn’t able to go to the event and here’s why: because I had to then go to – I’ve been doing a lot of back and forth traveling – my son is at school in Utah, so we were going back and forth over the last few weeks from here to Salt Lake City. And then we had to go from here to Upstate New York to get my daughter from camp. She goes to a performing arts camp. And part of that final weekend when you collect your kid is that’s the big show. And if there’s one thing that movies have taught us, John, is that not seeing your kid in a production makes you a bad parent.

**John:** Oh absolutely. I mean, if there’s a third act lesson there, actually it’s often a first act indication that this is a terrible parent. But then by showing up at the third act moment you’ve redeemed yourself as a parent. So in the magical father wish comedy that is our life you showed up.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, the problem was I knew that there wasn’t going to be a show soon after that one, so I could have just first-acted that one and then arrived for the next one. Like, look, daddy gets it. But, no, I chose to do the right thing and go to see my child perform and it was great. So Jared Harris was able to accept on our behalf.

**John:** Oh nice.

**Craig:** And so it was great. I mean, I’ve never won an award before, I mean, in Hollywood. I’ve won things like in grade school.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Won some Mathlete challenges and such. But, no, it’s lovely. It’s a nice crystal slab and I’m very appreciative. So thank you Television Critics Association. That was super nice. And, you know, either I’m getting killed by critics or they’re giving me lovely crystal slabs. I’m confused. But it was great and very honored to receive something like that. And, you know, hooray.

**John:** Hooray. One of the things you did miss out on was this mental health and addiction panel. So that was last week’s episode we aired it. It really was just a terrific night and I’m so happy that people who have been writing in – it seems like it was meaningful for them as well. So, we talked about what it’s like to write characters with mental health problems or addiction issues, but also what writers should look for in their own lives when it comes to those two topics.

People wrote in with some really great personal stories, which we won’t share here, but it was clear that it touched a nerve for a lot of people. So if you haven’t listened to the episode yet I would recommend you go back and listen to that. Also listen to Episode 99. We will keep talking about these things in the future seasons of Scriptnotes because it’s not a problem that gets solved once.

**Craig:** It’s not. And it’s also not something that shouldn’t be talked about. We just naturally avoid it as people and we shouldn’t. We should be leaning into it. We should not feel any sense of shame. I feel no shame about my emotional issues and my mental difficulties and the medicine I take. And we do need to talk about it because our business, and particularly for writers I think the process of doing what we do as writers and then as writers for screen in particular is emotionally difficult and at times it can be extremely stressful.

And it is no surprise that a lot of writers end up with substance abuse problems. A lot of writers end up deeply depressed. A lot of writers end up with a kind of chronic anxiety that they find difficult to manage. And these are the things we want to avoid desperately, right. You can’t avoid them necessarily, but at least you can manage them and we can help each other by talking about them.

**John:** Yeah. The screenwriter classically is stressed out and isolated which is not a great combination for mental health.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And so we need to look at ourselves and as an industry how do we do better for everyone who is facing those situations.

**Craig:** Precisely. And so, yes, we should keep talking about this and – and – John, I have an idea.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** You know so we do nice things for charities. Maybe there’s something we could do for a charity that is involved in this area.

**John:** That would be great. So, a charity that is focused on mental health. If there is a charity that is focused on writer mental health, even better. But we will find ways to do some sort of event that could be benefiting this. I will also say Hollywood Health and Society who organized this event, they’re great. They do a bunch of stuff. And so I hope this is the first of many of these kind of panels we do on different topics.

**Craig:** Yes. And I do hope that I’ll be able to be at the next one. I mean, weirdly enough part of why I wasn’t there was because of these chronic issues, one of which is a mental health issue. So it’s something that’s part of my family and it’s something that we deal with. And we are those people that aren’t embarrassed to talk about it.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I guess that makes us special.

**John:** Aw. Another very special institution in Hollywood is Deadline. Deadline is the website that we all feel a little bit of shame every time we open because we know it’s bad for us and yet still sometimes we open it up.

**Craig:** I mean, sometimes it’s fine. You know, it’s not all bad. Although I still have like Nikki Finke like PTSD. Because it used to be like just her going bananas. And now, well, now they do things like what they just did to you.

**John:** So, we have complained on previous episodes where they’ll take stuff out of our transcripts and call it an exclusive. Like, oh wow, it’s an exclusive of a podcast that we just recorded and put out for free in the world. I put up a blog post this past week about the myth that the WGA is not negotiating. It was a 1,088 word post that really talked through pretty clearly my thoughts. Deadline thought it did a good job as well and so they took the entire post and wrapped it around in some double quotes at times with like, “August said.” Basically excerpting the whole thing but kind of making it seem like an article.

**Craig:** I mean, you can’t really excerpt it if you take all of it.

**John:** No. So I bitched on Twitter about that and I wrote to the writer, David Robb, saying I don’t think that was appropriate at all. I didn’t say copyright infringement, even though it’s clearly labeled as copyright. Because there’s such a thing as fair use and I want to make sure that fair use is protected and it’s such a crucial institution for dissemination of ideas and culture, especially in a journalistic context.

But to take an entire blog post written by another person and just put it on your site is not really journalism. And as a journalism major back in college if I had done this for a news story–

**Craig:** Oh good lord.

**John:** My professor would not have given me credit for that. It would have been a lecture.

**Craig:** They’re screwing with you now. I really feel like they’re kind of doing it on purpose. I actually had a conversation about this with Nellie Andreeva who works at Deadline. I was talking with her at one of these HBO media events. And she admitted that exclusive was not appropriate. And she said they actually had removed that when they saw it.

But I think that you’re making a really good point about the nature of reproduction. So fair use does say, listen, if there’s newsworthy value to it you can take some of it – some of it. Not all of it. Right? So if you’re taking all of it then I think you would need to do, for instance, so the New York Times or the Washington Post if they’re going to republish say a court document, which is not copyrighted by the way, they still put it kind of in its own little box. And they say, look, here’s the document. We’re not just going to quote the whole damn thing as if we dug it up ourselves and made editorial choices about what to include and what to not include.

I just think it is a violation of some basic principles of journalism and they shouldn’t do it. Also, how about this? Just put the link on there, quote a few things like a normal person would, and put the link on and say if you want to read the whole thing to.

**John:** Like Variety did. That’s what Variety did.

**Craig:** Yes. Like a normal – correct, because that’s normal.

**John:** They made a little summary and they linked out to the article. And so that’s kind of the minimum you could ask them to do. But here’s my probably bigger frustration is that the headline for it is something like John August Sees Long Slog Ahead for Agency Deal Negotiations. And “long slog” was in quotes. And I’m like I really don’t think I said that. So I took a look at my original post, I took a look at the actual post that they had put, and they added the word long and put it inside quotes as if I’d said long slog.

So when I complained specifically about that they took long outside of the quotes, so it was clearly just editorializing that it was going to be long.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s not right either.

**John:** That’s so wrong.

**Craig:** If you don’t call something a long slog they can’t quote you as saying long slog, nor can they describe it as a long “slog.”

**John:** Because you and I have both been through short slogs. That is a real thing where like, god, you’re grinding and you’re grinding and you’re grinding. It doesn’t mean it takes weeks. It means it’s just a really arduous process.

**Craig:** It’s tough. You can go through a slog of a negotiation for a project that they want to hire you for at a studio and it can be two miserable weeks of slogging. Where it’s back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. A long slog that’s months. That has a specific meaning. That’s not – I think they have failed twice in this regard.

**John:** So, and my frustration with this is that I got people who read – I tweeted out my link to my actual article on my blog and I got feedback from that. And then I got a whole different set of feedback for people who had seen the Deadline piece, not realizing there was a blog post, not realizing I had not said “long slog.” And I could tell they’d read the Deadline piece because it’s like you say it’s going to be a “long slog.” And I’m like, no I didn’t. I didn’t say that. Deadline did. And that’s the frustration, the degree to which it warps the conversation we’re trying to have.

**Craig:** Well, speaking of conversation, let’s have a conversation about what you wrote and your point of view, because I had a little bit of a different point of view on it, as I thought expressed by one of the great GIFs of all time. I thought I picked a great GIF.

**John:** I don’t know the source of that GIF. What is the source of that GIF?

**Craig:** I have no idea either. Nor can I even remember what words I typed into the search to get it. But it was so perfect because it was like – it wasn’t like bad it was just more like, hmm, I don’t know. It actually perfectly encapsulated my response. So, I wanted to kind of walk through it.

**John:** And I should say that my response GIF was Joey giving Chandler a hug from Friends.

**Craig:** So adorable. Nothing can keep us apart. I think it’s really important people understand this. Nothing.

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Although that one person on Deadline does want you to fire me. Oh no, they were on Twitter. Sorry. They wanted you to fire me.

**John:** I don’t think you can really be fired Craig. I just don’t think it’s going to happen.

**Craig:** You can’t fire me. I quit!

**John:** I’m going to stop paying you, Craig!

**Craig:** Oh man. [laughs] So let’s talk through. So do you want to sort of encapsulate your position, or you want me to ask some questions basically?

**John:** Absolutely. Let me give the very short version. We’ll put a link to the actual blog post, not the Deadline post here. I started by saying that I think it’s incredibly important that we have robust discussion of ideas and issues but as a union it’s important to have a common set of facts. And I didn’t feel like we were having a common set of facts on this idea of no negotiation. And that this idea that we weren’t negotiating had become something of a straw man, where it was just presumed at the start and then you could argue against this idea. You know, the WGA says we shouldn’t negotiate. Well, we should negotiate. And so I cited three candidates who are saying we are refusing to negotiate and then I walked through what was actually said at the time that we said we were no longer going to be negotiating directly with the ATA but negotiating with individual agencies, and what had changed in the meantime. What actually happened in the meantime.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that’s a very short summary of what I wrote.

**Craig:** Yeah. And your suggestion is essentially that the argument of the WGA refusing to negotiate is a bit of a straw man. And it is and it isn’t. So there is imprecise language there, no question. I guess we want to – my point of view is let’s talk about what is sort of the significant core of this complaint, even if the language is imprecise that the WGA refuses to negotiate.

The complaint is that the WGA refuses to negotiate in any effective way with the big four agencies that essentially, A, control the ATA, and B, represent the great majority of our membership. I don’t think there’s much of an argument there, is there?

**John:** I think there is an argument there. Here’s what I think is fair to say. That the WGA has said that instead of negotiating with the ATA that we wanted to negotiate with the agencies individually. Specifically in Goodman’s point he says, “The top nine agencies,” so the big four and the next five agencies. We want to focus on them. And so have individual discussions with those agencies.

So it is fair to say that we are choosing not to negotiate with the ATA, refusing – not negotiate with the ATA. And to the degree that you’re not negotiating with the big four because they are only agreeing to negotiate through the ATA. That’s not as well established. But it seems like their preference is to negotiate through the ATA.

**Craig:** Well, that’s where I’m not sure I agree on that. Part of the issue is you can say, listen, we don’t want to negotiate with the ATA anymore. We just want to negotiate with the individual agencies and that includes CAA and WME and UTA and ICM. But the problem is that when David Goodman makes that statement he is well aware – I think we’re all well aware – that because of the nature of the proceedings prior to that moment which is kind of nothing happening, they make a proposal, we do not respond in any way to that proposal. Then they come back. They unilaterally raise their proposal. And we say after some time we’re not negotiating with you anymore. That that was in effect a secession of negotiations. And that it was incredibly improbable that without some sort of significant change in something that the individual agencies would not then take David Goodman up on this invitation.

**John:** Can you wind back that last sentence? So you’re saying that it was improbable that any agency would agree to individually negotiate?

**Craig:** I’m talking about the big four.

**John:** OK.

**Craig:** And the reason I keep talking about the big four is while we have signed some other agencies, I think it’s important to say that – unless I’m wrong about this – I don’t think we’ve signed any agencies that actually were engaging in packaging fees and affiliate production in any significant manner. Meaning we haven’t done anything to change anything yet. In fact, after about a half a year what we’ve done is essentially bring back a few agencies to the state that they were in prior to the action we took. I don’t really think we’ve changed much there.

**John:** I don’t think that is accurate or fair in terms of the agencies that we’ve signed and also just the packaging deals that have not happened as a result of this action.

**Craig:** So they were packaging?

**John:** Some of these smaller agencies were packaging. Verve was packaging. As I believe Kaplan-Stahler had a package on a significant property as well. So these are agencies who I think given their druthers would love to continue packaging.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** They’ve decided to not package in order to sign this deal.

**Craig:** I will acknowledge that. But I think in turn you would probably agree that none of those agencies were packaging in any significant way, or at least in terms of the percentage of shows that are packaged. They were responsible for maybe a cumulative total of 1%.

**John:** A much smaller percent than the big four. Absolutely. No argument there.

**Craig:** And so when we began this fight – look, when Chris Keyser came on our show and the three of us were in violent agreement that we needed to do something about packaging fees and affiliate production, the three of us were talking about four agencies effectively, because those four agencies account for the greatest majority, I mean, a vast majority of all of the packaging fees and packages that are implemented and all of the affiliate production that is implemented.

So, yes, we can absolutely say we have signed Kaplan-Stahler. Or Verve. But I don’t think we can say that we have effectively engaged in negotiations with the four agencies that are responsible for the problem that we are all really angry about. I think sometimes people think like maybe I’m on the agencies’ side because I criticize the way we’re handling things, but I’m actually – it’s because I hate the stuff that the agencies are doing that I criticize the guild because I want the guild to do better.

And now we have a difference of opinion of how to accomplish that, but I think I would push back on you in the sense of, listen, yes, there was some sloppy language there, but there is a decent point to be made that because of the way we have handled things we have yet to negotiate effectively, nor have we shown a great willingness through behavior to negotiate effectively with those individual four agencies.

**John:** I would say that folks who attend the WGA public meetings will get a sense of sort of where the strategy is currently and where it’s headed to. And that the big four – negotiating with the big four agencies remains a priority.

**Craig:** Well that’s good to hear. I mean, because I’ve been pretty consistent about this all along. That is where our victory is. Some people I think – I’ve seen some things where some members of our union seem to feel that we’d be better off without them and I will just continue to maintain that down that path lies peril for us. It’s not that we’re being deprived of their wondrousness. It’s that we may be subject to some anti-wondrousness. I mean, just this week I got a call about something and I was like, ugh, and it involved an agency – not CAA – which was my agency. One of the other big four agencies. That lit me on fire. I mean, I was so angry. I was just like pouring gasoline into bottles and shoving rags and I was ready man.

And then I’m like, OK, let’s just figure out how to deal with this and stop this. But it is infuriating. Some of the behavior that they engage in is infuriating. And I want to win. And the way I at least think about winning is that we figure out how to get them back from what they’re doing into a place where they’re actually advocating for us as clients.

So, I think you brought up good points. I thought that some of the people pushing back on you brought up good points. I think that as long as we keep our eye on this – what you’re saying is a priority – I don’t know how we get to this priority because there’s a lot of now anger between these parties and a lot of mistrust. But whatever can happen, hopefully it happens sooner rather than later.

**John:** All right. So let’s take a meta moment here to look back at the discussion we just had. And so you and I did not convince each other of anything, but we expressed our ideas and our opinions on sort of where things have been, where they’re going, and what the best course of action is. The degree to which we can model that behavior for other folks I think would be terrific. One of the functions I sort of see myself as a person who is not running for reelection is to remind people both in big rooms and online that we are remarkably lucky. That we are remarkably lucky that we are some of the most talented writers out there. We’re some of the most highly-paid writers out there. We’re the only writers in the world who get to have a union that gets to represent them this way.

So, we are starting from a position of just tremendous luck and luxury. And the fact that we have so many people who care so passionately about what the future is for all of us writers is great. And so let’s all approach this from a perspective of we may disagree on ideas and tactics and strategies, but the degree to which we can compassionately disagree and not question people’s motives but question people’s ideas, that’s how we come out of this in strength.

**Craig:** 100%. We should be able to stress test each other’s ideas on these things. And we should be able to do it publicly. I don’t think that asking why we are doing this or that in some way is going to damage our solidarity. Our solidarity at least to me is not a function of our allegiance to any given leadership. Because if it were our solidarity would have to kind of whipsaw back and forth depending on who just got elected.

Our solidarity is based on our willingness as members, even when we disagree, to follow our working rules and send in our dues. And what that means is when there’s an action like this one and we have a working rule that says you can’t go back to your agent until this is solved, you don’t go back to your agent. That’s where solidarity is. It’s not in agreeing with every single thing either Phyllis Nagy or David Goodman says. That would be – down that path essentially is just sort of a, I don’t know, a kind of a poverty of imagination and thought.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I do think you’ve put your finger on it that as we go through these things to the extent that we can avoid deciding that some people are just bad because they think a certain thing about a strategy we should – it’s a shame. Because I do feel like every single person that is running in this race, every single one of them, legitimately wants to do something that they believe is best for writers. Nobody is getting a payoff or a kickback or anything. I mean, there’s been some crazy allegations made. So, yeah, let’s just reduce the temperature a bit. And I think maybe give ourselves credit for being strong enough to withstand an election which we’re supposed to have anyway.

**John:** Yep. And honestly I would rather have some disharmony than apathy. And so many years we’ve had apathy where we’ve had to basically twist people’s arms just to get enough people to actually run for the board or to run for office. So, it’s a good problem to have that we have many people who want to do this unpaid job for two years.

**Craig:** I completely agree. And one of the downsides to the – you know, we never really had uncontested elections and then suddenly we did just because we couldn’t find people to run. And one of the downsides is you start to create a generation of members who are not used to contested elections. And we can be frightened by them, even. And we don’t want that for the very reason you’re saying. We want a good competition of ideas and as long as our members are following our working rules and going by the kind of action that we’re taking then we do have meaningful solidarity. We don’t need solidarity of opinion. We need solidarity of behavior. And that’s important. And I don’t think that we should ever put something like an election in the context of hurting our leverage or anything like that.

If an election hurts our leverage than our leverage is terrible. That’s how I guess I would put it. So, you know, hopefully yeah, people can kind of just be nice to each other because they’re writers. And we deserve that from each other.

**John:** Absolutely. All right, let’s do a final bit of follow up. Back in Episode 399 we sat down with a bunch of studio executives to talk about how they give notes and how they could give better notes. Steph Cowan wrote in, Craig would you read what Steph wrote for us?

**Craig:** Sure. Steph writes, “I was right in the middle of a what-am-I-doing-with-my-life-I’m-not-cut-out-for-this moment when I heard your episode Talking Austin in Austin with Lindsay Doran. At the time I’d been working in the theater industry developing new musicals for about eight years. I’d been told that I’m too nice and cared too much to be a commercial producer and that I’m better suited for the lit department of a non-profit instead.

“Then Lindsay Doran said something like as a producer I consider myself the guardian of the storytelling. And I teared up. This was exactly how I felt. It’s still how I feel. And to hear a successful, admirable producer say it was deeply reassuring. I felt that reassurance again when Craig said I think you’re told not to be vulnerable, addressing studio executives in Episode 399. He’s right. We are, in the Broadway world anyway.

“Knowing that showing our love for the story and the team is strength gives me hope that maybe I am cut out for this. It’s also very exciting for me to hear how to give more effective notes. I can’t wait to share this episode with my colleagues.”

John, this is great. Especially because Steph comes from Broadway and we love Broadway.

**John:** We love Broadway. I’m headed to Broadway soon to see four shows in a very short period of time. But my experience making a Broadway show is that there is that function of a producer in terms of being a cheerleader, in terms of being a person who is putting a giant hug around an idea which is still forming. It is really crucial. And so you look for those ones who can do what Lindsay Doran says and sort of be a champion and a challenger and a person pushing you to make the very best thing. So, it sounds like that’s what Steph was taking out of these two episodes.

**Craig:** You know what? I’m starting to think this podcast is a good idea.

**John:** Maybe so. Maybe you should keep doing just a few more.

**Craig:** Why not?

**John:** Unless it turns out that we are wrong about the words of English.

**Craig:** Let’s find out.

**John:** “Hi Craig. I’m one of those Johnny Came Lately show listeners who have washed up because of Chernobyl. Sorry. I’m sure a bunch of people have already pointed this out but I just listened to a second podcast where you poured scorn on “heigth” specifically, characterizing it as a construction of illiterate youth. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is old school. It was good enough for Milton and it’s good enough for us, right?”

And then there’s a link, line 324 if you’re following the link in the show notes. “Cheers and thanks for a really well put together podcast.”

**Craig:** Well thank you anonymous writer. I’m glad you washed ashore as a result of Chernobyl. So, of course, I felt a little bit red-cheeked here. I mean, am I wrong? Is heigth a word? Maybe it is. If it’s good enough for Milton – that sounded like a pretty smart phrase.

So I went ahead and looked at the reference here which is, of course, to Paradise Lost, book two, line 324. And in line 324 it says, “In heigth or depth, still first and last will reign.” OK, that’s embarrassing. But I’d like to point out that five lines later it says, “War hath determined us and foiled with loss.” War is spelled with two Rs and foiled has no E. We don’t do that anymore. This is archaic. It is not applicable.

I mean, if we’re going to say that heigth is acceptable because it’s in Milton I guess we can start spelling war W-A-R-R. No. I reject this. I reject this.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. And you know what? For arbitrary reasons. Language can change. Language can grow, evolve. Absolutely. But if Craig says no, Craig can say no. And he’s just not going to use that word. He’s not going to use the heigth. He’s not going to accept it.

**Craig:** And I’m also going to continue to say that people are wrong. Unless, here’s the exception: if somebody randomly says heigth and I’m like did you just say heigth, and they said, “Well yeah, I know, but Milton,” I’ll say stop, you can do it. Just you.

**John:** So the Milton clause is what gets you out of it.

**Craig:** Milton clause.

**John:** The Milton clause. All right. Let’s do our marquee topic. This was inspired by a conversation with Katie Silberman two episodes back. Also I just saw Andrea Berloff’s movie The Kitchen and I had a Twitter conversation with Alison Luhrs who is a designer at Wizards of the Coast and she’s going to be coming on the show in a future episode. But they were all talking about the process of writing. Katie Silberman did all these pages in advance before she started actually writing. She would dialogue pages endlessly to do stuff.

Andrea Berloff was talking about the research she did for The Kitchen. Alison Luhrs was talking about these giant encyclopedias they built for these fantasy worlds that they’re doing for Match of the Gathering and for Dungeons and Dragons.

And so I want to talk just a bit about how do you know when you’ve done enough of that prep stuff and that you’re really ready to write. And Craig and I have different perspectives on this. We do different kind of advanced work. But I want to talk about how each of us feels like, OK, I’m ready to actually start writing scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this may be one of those things where we talk through it and ultimately what it boils down to is we each have our own finger print about this. And what it comes down to is when are you comfortable. When do you feel like you actually can do the good stuff? Which is finding yourself in that moment and writing out a scene and feeling really good about it.

And for me, and this has been this way for so long, I mean, it’s almost getting more this way: I really love to prepare. I love to know exactly what every scene is going to be and what happens in it, even though of course I can deviate. I’m one of those people that goes all the way basically to I need to know what the script is before I start writing the script. And I guess maybe in that regard I’m probably closer to Katie Silberman than I am to you I’m thinking.

**John:** Yeah. And I’m very much not that. But I think the kinds of things that I want to know are probably similar to things you want to know, it’s just that you’re actually doing a written down version of it and I’m just carrying a bunch of stuff in my head and not writing it down.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And why it’s relevant really for this season and this moment is I think you’re just about to start writing something new, or you have already started writing something new?

**Craig:** I’m about to start writing something new. Correct.

**John:** As am I. So this is top of mind for me. Also this is development season. So this is when new TV shows are getting pitched and people are starting to write them. So a lot of people are at this moment right now in town.

**Craig:** There’s still a season to these things?

**John:** There’s still a season certainly for broadcast. We’ve been through staffing and now the folks who are generally not in a room on a show are developing for stuff and they’re going out and pitching things to networks and studios. So that still exists.

**Craig:** All right. Well, good.

**John:** So let’s talk about the idea. And so for me before I start actually writing any scenes I want to know what is this movie or show, what does it look like/feel like if you sort of squint your mind a little bit. What is the shape of it? What category is it? What does it feel like? What does the music feel like? This is the time where I might start putting together a playlist of the music that feels like the show or the movie to me. I think about the trailer. I think about the one sheet. I just feel like pulling back far out, even not looking at specific story, what kind of movie is that. And I need to know that really early on and certainly before I start writing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Obviously I’ve just sort of given my thing away, but speaking specifically of that, that’s the big one. You can – I think anyone can start whenever they want, but after that. Because I think a lot of people think that what they need to start writing is an idea. And an idea, if it’s just the plot, if it’s just the log line, that’s actually not enough.

**John:** Oh not at all.

**Craig:** Not enough. If what you have is, ooh, what if a guy woke up and every day was the same day. That’s not enough. You need to know about why that idea matters.

**John:** Yeah. A thing we talk about on the show a lot is that many ways screenwriting is making a movie in your head and then writing the description of like that movie that you see in your head. And so if you don’t have the basis for sort of like what does this look like in my head, what does this sound like, what does it feel like, then you’re not anywhere close to really starting to write. So I suspect for Chernobyl you had done the research and you had a sense of like visually what does this feel like. What is going to feel like to be watching this show? And you have to have that early on.

And to me that comes before the characters. The characters are the next really crucial step here, but I need to know sort of what kind of thing am I trying to do and who are the characters who are populating this world. Not just my hero. I need to know what are the relationships between the central characters. Where would we find them at the start? Where would they get to by the end? What is the trajectory that they’re going through?

So even though unlike Craig I’m not going to do a full outline that’s sort of going scene by scene, I definitely need to know who are these people and what is the journey that they’re going to be going on through this block of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can see your guide posts along the way. So you understand no matter what’s happening, even if you’re not necessarily writing from a description of what the scene should be, you understand where you’ve come from and you understand where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re coming from and you don’t know where you’re going, that’s when screenplays start getting very purpley and self-indulgent and talky and flabby. I mean, I’ve seen this so many times where I just think they didn’t know.

**John:** They didn’t know.

**Craig:** They were just writing their way through a forest hoping that they would stumble across something. And eventually they do, but that’s their problem. I’m not here to go on your fact-finding mission. I’m here to go on a carefully curated tour of your deep dark forest. So, I mean, you can obviously find your way through those things, but you can’t show it to anybody until you’ve–

**John:** Yeah. And the thing is you can have your general idea, you can have your characters, but unless you sort of knew what is specifically the story of this movie, which comes down to a thing we’ve talked a lot about recently which is what is that central dramatic question, what is that central argument, what is the thing the movie or the episode of television is really about. And if you don’t know that going in – sometimes you can succeed honestly. There’s been stuff I’ve started writing where I didn’t really quite know what is that thematic thing that’s pulling it all together, but I had – even if I couldn’t say it aloud I had a sense of what it felt like. I had a sense of what I was going for. What space this occupied. And it’s the scripts that you read where I just don’t think you actually know where you’re going are the ones where they didn’t have a sense of that right when they started writing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, listening to you, what you’re not talking about is plot.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I mean, I think this is where people go wrong. They think they’re ready to write when they know what the plot is. The plot – first of all, I don’t even know how you know what the plot is unless you know the things that you’re talking about. Because at that point then you’re probably just creating something episodic and plotty with no purpose or meaning or anything greater than that.

You do need to do all this kind of internal psychological examination of why this story should exist. I mean, when you write a screenplay you are writing a proposal for some entity to invest tens of millions of dollars into its creation. Why? Why? Why would anyone do that to your thing? Well that’s the question you’re asking yourself now and that’s the question you need to answer before you start.

**John:** Yeah. At a certain point you are going to start thinking about plot. You’re going to be thinking about what are the moments. What are the set pieces? What are the moments in the story where things take a big turn? If this were a broadcast episode or pilot you’d be thinking what are the act breaks? Where are the moments where things really take a big turn, where are the cliffhangers in the story?

Before I would start writing I would have to have a sense of what are those big really visual things that are going to show what has happened in the story. So that’s where I need a sense of what is the world like. What is the world like at the start of the movie? What are the different sort of sets or places I’m going to be seeing over the course of this story?

I say this on the podcast a lot, but Susan Stroman, director of Big Fish, said she never wanted to see the same set twice. I don’t hold myself to that, but I definitely like her sense that we should not be coming back to the same place without there having been a change. Without something fundamental having been changed about the character or that place or the situation if we’re coming back to this thing. So what is the geographic journey of this story and what is the color journey through the story. What is changing about how this looks on screen as I’m going through this story?

I’ll have that sense pretty early on, generally before I’ve started writing any scenes.

**Craig:** This goes a little bit to that notion of the dialectic. You’re creating something and then it must change. There must be a constant change happening in storytelling. If you end up in that flat space or that circular space people will start to feel bored and for good reason. You’re treading water. You’re almost wasting time. I don’t know how else to put it. You’re literally wasting people’s time.

Good stories are narratives in which people’s relationships with each other, themselves, and the world around them are constantly changing. Every single scene exists in order to create a change. So you’re absolutely right. Coming back around to some place you’ve been before is only interesting if you’re different or that place is different. And the contrast is the whole purpose, right? So, these things need to be determined. If you end up just sort of noodling your way I think you probably will find yourself in that same diner having a similar conversation again.

**John:** Yep. Let’s talk about the dangers of starting too early. And starting the process of actually writing scenes too early before you have that stuff figured out. To me it’s that in the times where I’ve done it myself I outline my supply lines, like I get too far ahead of myself and I just haven’t built the infrastructure behind me to get myself forward, to get myself to this next thing. And so, man, I wrote a great first ten pages. Man, that’s a good first 30 pages. Wow, I have no idea how to get through the next 90. I didn’t have enough story figured out or I didn’t have enough figured out about how I was going to get from this point to a point I know I’m going to head towards later on. So outrunning myself is a real problem if I haven’t really thought through where stuff is.

I’ve often found myself where I have the right hero in the wrong story. I have the right story with the wrong hero. If I haven’t done that real thinking I might have smooshed these two things together but they’re not well suited for each other. And I would have been able to figure that out if I really thought through all those other things before I started writing scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I also think one of the dangers of starting too early is inefficiency of storytelling. As you go through you will be incapable of writing tightly, meaning everything has been really carefully considered so that the audience has experienced a pure storytelling unfold in front of them, a kind of a pure storytelling unfold in front of them, rather than a meandering or a wandering about or any kind of circular motion. But rather everything has been carefully machined so that there is – we understand that scenes have transitions and that this scene is a reflection of a scene earlier. And that this moment recontextualizes that moment.

There is essentially craft going on. And part of craft is efficiency of craft. It’s no wasted space. No wasted cloth. No wasted movement. But rather an elegance as if this thing had landed whole and already told in your lap. And it’s hard to do that when you’re kind of making it up as you go.

**John:** Yep. Let’s also talk about the dangers of starting too late. And I don’t know if you’ve encountered this much in your career, but there have been projects where I kind of did all the prep work and I maybe overdid the prep work a little bit and by the time I started writing I kind of gotten past it. Where the thing that attracted me to it was no longer attractive to me and I was looking at this as a chore rather than a thing I was excited to write.

And so I think part of the reason why sometimes I don’t do the laborious preparation is that I’m afraid of falling out of love with something, or being distracted by something else that’s newer and shinier. I want to start writing when I’m still really attracted and excited by this property. There’s a passion to it. And sometimes if I’ve burned off that passion in outlines and other things, especially if I had to show them with other people, then the actual starting to write is no longer thrilling for me.

**Craig:** Interesting. Yeah, I can totally see that being a problem. Certainly I think one of the hallmarks of starting too late is you’re dealing from fear. Something is holding you – you’re afraid to write. I think a lot of times people abuse the pre-writing process, whether it’s outlining or research not to set themselves up for writing success but rather to avoid writing failure. They’re only valuable to set yourself up for success. They are only useful tools. They can’t forestall any trouble. So at some point you’re going to have to dive in.

For me, I do feel a little bit of a sense of exhaustion and completion once I’m done with a 50-page scriptment. But then take a week or two and then when you start writing what you find is – at least I find – that the act of now full creation of a scene is invigorating again. That rather than thinking about an entire movie and a whole series of movements and character changes and resolutions and reversals, all I have to think about is this one little short film. And that is – that kind of makes me fall in love with it all over again. And I get to do that without worrying that I don’t know what to do next, because I do know what to do next.

**John:** Yeah. That is definitely an advantage to that is – what’s ironic is that I’m a person who tends to write out of sequence. You’re more likely to write in sequence. You could write out of sequence probably more easily–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because any of those moments – you could take a moment from page 30 of your script and just write it because you know it’s going to fit back in. I will write something because it’s what appeals to me to write that day. So even within I think all of our suggestions about figuring out adequate preparation and that everyone is different, it really does come down to people ultimately recognize what they need to have done before they start writing. And you should try some different things to figure out what works for you so you actually get scripts written and finished that you are happy with.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, maybe a general rule of thumb is if you find yourself frightened while you’re writing, and scared of the dark, then maybe you should be putting more time in ahead of time. If you find yourself feeling a bit dry and a bit like a horse on a lead, then maybe you need to do less to start with so that you have a little bit more of a sense of play while you’re going. You just have to dial into yourself.

But listen to what your mind is telling you as you go. Because none of this is orthodoxy. It’s all really about what makes your unique brain put out its best work.

**John:** Agreed. All right, let’s take two questions. First we have Leslie from Australia. She writes, “I’m questioning my sanity because I’m currently in a disagreement with a producer over what constitutes a polish versus a draft and I’m hoping you can help shed some light on this. I was hired and paid to write a feature for this producer. He and his backer loved what I did. I gave them a couple free polishes afterwards to address some feedback we got from a mucky-muck in the industry and they were delighted with that, too.

“A second producer has come onboard and given his notes on what he thinks needs changing. The first producer and his backer now agree with him and they’ve asked me how much I’d charge for a polish, or as they put it, ‘A strong polish.’ I told them the changes they’re asking for amounted to a draft, not a polish, or even a ‘strong polish,’ whatever that is, but they disagreed. So, when I gave them a reasonable quote for a draft they rejected it. I would love to get your take on what a polish is versus a draft. I may be way off base – I don’t think I am – but I’m willing to be schooled.

“Also, I’ve never heard of the term ‘strong polish’ before. Is that even a thing?”

Craig?

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

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No. No, no, no, Leslie. That’s not a thing. That is a term invented by con artists to get you to do more for less. I mean, that’s all that’s going on here. They want more for less.

Here’s a rough rule, because there is not a ton of super specificity about this. And when you say a draft, for those of us here we would probably call that a rewrite. In my mind a polish is something that happens in about three weeks, or less. And if it’s more than that, it’s a rewrite. That’s kind of roughly how it goes. So, that’s sort of what I would say. And then the question is how much can you do in three weeks? Whatever you’re comfortable with doing.

So generally speaking a polish would not be re-rigging the plot. It would be fixing some characters. It would be maybe one or two characters need some work on their dialogue. There’s two scenes that need kind of reinventing or reimagining. That feels like a polish.

If they’ve got systematic issues that they need you to address or want you to address, that’s a rewrite. And if they don’t want to pay for it they can gaslight you all they want. They can tell you it’s a polish all they want. They can invent new phrases like strong polish. But that’s gas-lighting. They’re just trying to get more for less.

**John:** So, Leslie, even if you were working here, even if you were working in this town with schedules of minimums and things like this, you would still be dealing with this question of calling this a rewrite, calling this a polish. Them trying to get you to do more for a little bit less.

WGA has specific terms for what polish means and for what a rewrite means. Polish involves character work and dialogue. Things that change story in a major way tend to be rewrites. But functionally Craig is correct when he says it’s really more about time. That’s what we think about when we think about a polish. A polish is a matter of just a week or two, three weeks. If it’s multiple weeks and a lot of work that tends to be a rewrite.

And so Leslie I think you were right to be suspicious and I’m sorry that this didn’t work out on this draft. But whether they called that a polish or a rewrite, they didn’t want to pay you money for it and that’s where I think it comes down to it.

**Craig:** Well they wanted to pay her something, just not what she deserves. And I’ll point out you’ve already done a couple of free polishes.

**John:** Yes!

**Craig:** So this is what happens. We are not rewarded for “good behavior.” We’re punished for it. They don’t look at you as somebody who has done them a solid favor and therefore they now owe you something. What they do is look at you as somebody that they exploited successfully and so they will continue to exploit you. That’s what bullies do.

Now, when it comes to capitalism that’s essentially what capitalism is. It’s economic bullying. And they’re going to do what you’re going to do. And so you’re going to have to stand up for yourself and say no. And based on the way you’re describing this I’m just wondering where the copyright for this rests. You’re in Australia. I don’t think they have work-for-hire there. You may have more leverage than you think. I think it’s time for you to get somebody else involved to help represent you with them.

You’ve probably seen a lot of cop shows where the job of the police is to convince their suspect to not bring a lawyer in because if they bring a lawyer in it’s going to be much harder to get them to spill their guts and confess. Well, this is sort of like that. These guys don’t want you to bring a lawyer in. So, bring a lawyer in.

**John:** Agreed. Do you want to take Justin’s question?

**Craig:** Justin from Hawthorne asks, “Hello Screen Wizards.” I like Justin. “I’m writing today to see if the tales of the Do Not List from Hell exist in present times. I’ve heard rumors of this list but I can’t imagine it to be true. I’m worried I might be on it and I’m praying that the years of hard work attempts to crack open a career as a screenwriter won’t be thwarted by earnest and possibly haphazard times when maybe I was too eager or submitted my material too early? If it’s real, can somebody who is on this list ever get off of it?”

**John:** So I provided some off-mic context for Craig because this Do Not List is apparently an idea that producers or studios or other folks in town have a list of like never hire this person, or like there’s a do not list. This person is a hack and don’t hire them.

I think individual people will have their lists of writers they don’t want to hire, but it’s generally because they worked with the writers and the writers were bad for them. You writing something that wasn’t good, it doesn’t help you, but it doesn’t hurt you for a long time. It doesn’t stick around. People’s memories are kind of short when it comes to stuff they didn’t like. If they read a script that they really like of yours, they’ll hire you on to do more things.

So, I would say don’t be worried about your early work. Always be mindful if you’re sending stuff out make sure it’s good and it’s professional and that it’s showing your best light. But if you didn’t, stop worrying about it. Instead worry about writing good new stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. When people read something that someone has submitted, an original or something like that, and they don’t like it, they throw it out. They don’t run to a special list called Oh My God This Person Wrote a Terrible Script. Because they know as well as anybody that somebody can write a terrible script and then four weeks write something wonderful. That does happen, right? Sometimes we’re working in the wrong genre. Sometimes for whatever reason it just doesn’t work.

John is correct. There are lists. First of all, there are lists. It’s important for people to know that. I’ve seen them. They exist. There are lists. And those lists are people that either a studio or a producer believes are well worth hiring and working with and they can make levels of them. I mean, the whole phrase A-list came from original list had A, B, C. And there are lists of, nope, we’re not hiring that person here. They usually don’t write that down because they don’t want to deal with any legal issues, but they are always on that list because there’s been a bad employment experience.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Not because they wrote a bad script. If the studio hasn’t paid for it, they’re not going to blame you for it, dude. Most scripts are bad. How about that? You’re going to be fine.

**John:** Yep. He’s going to be fine.

**Craig:** He’s going to be fine.

**John:** Let’s do our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things this week. The first is a delicious cookie. It is the Oreo Thin.

**Craig:** I love those.

**John:** If you’ve not tried the Oreo Thins, they’re good and they’re so much better. And they’re crispier. So you owe it to yourself to try an Oreo Thin. Even if you don’t really love Oreos you’ll probably love Oreo Thins. They are terrific.

The second is a thin book. It is Monsters and Creatures: A Young Adventurer’s Guide. It’s by the D&D people. And what I like about it is it’s designed for young middle grade readers and they’re smaller books. They’re hardcover, but they just have all the cool illustrations of dragons and owlbears and all this stuff. Basically art work that Wizards probably had sitting around and they found a good way to repackage it and write some new text. It’s written by Jim Zub.

**Craig:** Hold on.

**John:** What a great name, right?

**Craig:** I think Jim Zub is in the monster manual. I think I’ve faced off a crimson Jim Zub.

**John:** They’re nicely done and to me it feels like if I were a six-year-old kid who was obsessed with dinosaurs I would also be obsessed with these books because it’s dragons and cool stuff. There’s other books – Warriors and Weapons, Dungeons and Tombs. So if you have somebody who you want to give this kind of gift to who is not really ready for actual D&D it feels like a good starter thing.

**Craig:** You round the corner and see in the room a giant Zub. What do you do? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. So is a Zub one of the things where you stab with your sword and then your sword rusts away?

**Craig:** Probably. That seems Zub-like.

**John:** Zub-like.

**Craig:** It’s definitely Zub-like. Well, listen, you had two One Cool Things. I’m going to give our listeners a break and just say they deserve two One Cool Things. And also I didn’t have one.

**John:** That sounds good. So, Craig, I’ll give you half credit on the Oreo Thins because you also agree they’re good, right?

**Craig:** I have eaten them, so yeah.

**John:** All right. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael Karman. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. But for short questions, on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

People do recaps on Reddit so you can check the recap for this episode and a couple episodes back if you’d like. You can find the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, it’s good to be back with you doing a normal Skype show.

**Craig:** Very good to be back with you and we’ve got some really interesting shows coming up, so–

**John:** We do. I’m excited. And off-mic we’re going to talk about some big special guests.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Have a good week.

**Craig:** You too.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Myth of No Negotiation](https://johnaugust.com/2019/the-myth-of-no-negotiation)
* Deadline’s “Exclusive” on [John’s Blogpost](https://deadline.com/2019/08/john-august-wga-long-slog-agency-deal-negotiations-1202662054/)
* [John Milton, Paradise Lost](https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_2/text.shtml)
* [Monsters Creatures: A Young Adventurer’s Guide](https://amzn.to/31xMkk7) by Jim Zub
* [Oreo Thins](https://www.oreo.com/Thins)
* [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 Michael Karman ([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_413_ready_to_write.mp3)