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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/conflict-of-interest).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 347 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be discussing conflict of interest, both as a legal theory and as a reality in the world of film and television. Then we’ll be answering listener questions on TV comedy, establishing time periods, and not writing.

But Craig I’m so excited because you are all the way on the other side of the world. It’s the first time where we’re doing one of these long distance podcasts where you are in Europe and I am in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yeah. Not just in Europe but Eastern Europe, so I’m a bit far flungerer than you were last time when you were in Paris. I am in Vilnius, the capital city of the great country of Lithuania. I am 10 hours ahead of you. This is very exciting. We just finished our second week of shooting on Chernobyl and all is going well.

**John:** I’m so excited for you, Craig. I was actually with Craig Mazin as the first shot of his show went off. We were playing D&D and he got the text message with the first still image from the first scene being shot. And this has been a very long journey so I’m so, so happy that you are making your show.

**Craig:** Well, thank you very much. And all, I think, all television and film production should begin with the writer-producer playing Dungeons & Dragons while the first shot goes off. I think that’s fair.

**John:** That is only fair. It’s the way things should be. In a perfect world it would all be Dungeons & Dragons and television programs.

**Craig:** I’ve got here in my hotel room, it’s Rise of Tiamat, the module that I’ll be preparing so that when I return I will be DMing that for you and the boys. So D&D never too far away from me. But we’re making it work, you and I, as we do no matter what time zone we’re in.

**John:** All right. Let’s start our episode. First off I have some news. So, along with John Gatins, a friend of the show, I’m going to be hosting a special Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Q&A with Aline Brosh McKenna and Rachel Bloom on Wednesday May 9, 2018, 7pm, at UTA. So, this is actually at an industry thing, so it’s not like a thing that I can sell tickets for. I can’t send you to a website to come to this screening. But what I can do is Aline says we can put two people on the list to come to this. And I feel like we have a big bunch of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend fans among our audience. But I’m trying to think of the best way to give out these two tickets. And, Craig, this is the first you’re hearing of this. What I think we might want to do is the first listener who can send in an email to ask@johnaugust.com with the lyrics to a song, like just write the lyrics to a song, that expresses why they want to be at this event. That might be the thing.

But, Craig, if you could offer some sort of theme for the song, or maybe even a title for the song that would convey what it should be.

**Craig:** Yeah. The theme is I want to be on the inside at an exclusive event because I’m on the outside normally and I want to be on the inside where not anyone can just go, because you said it’s a special industry fancy people event. And so I think let’s call the title of the song “The Other Side of the Velvet Rope.”

**John:** Ooh, I like that very, very much. So, if you are a person who wants to come to this, we are going to give away two tickets – well, they’re not tickets. We’ll put two names on the list and we’ll put those two names based on the person who writes the lyrics to that song. So, write those lyrics about The Other Side of the Velvet Rope. Send them through to ask@johnaugust.com and we will put those two names on the list.

To be clear here, I think whoever writes that and their plus one will be our guests for this special little thing.

**Craig:** Great. I think that’s a great idea. And it’s not a lyric contest. It’s really just like who can put the effort in, you know?

**John:** Exactly. We want you to jump over a bar. And that bar is write some lyrics.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But we have an actual real Scriptnotes show to hype as well. So on May 22 we are going to be doing a show at the ArcLight. Tickets are not yet available but I want you to clear your calendars on May 22. There will be a live show in Los Angeles. We are going to have very cool guests. It’s going to be a good, fun time. So, if you have anything scheduled for May 22, now is the time to cancel it because there’s going to be a Scriptnotes live show there. And this is the equivalent live show as when we had Rian Johnson on and Dana Fox and Rob McElhenney. It’s the equivalent of that show. And we’re excited to announce our guests pretty soon. You can’t come if you’ve – don’t schedule surgery for that day.

**Craig:** No, no. Well, listen, don’t schedule surgery if you don’t have to, obviously. We’re not big fans of the elective stuff. But also, folks, this is the event that we do to support Hollywood Heart, which is a wonderful charity that our friend John Gatins supports. And the past two times we’ve done this have been, well, we like to save some of the heavy firepower for those shows. So, the first time we did it we had Dan Weiss and Dave Benioff from Game of Thrones and we had Jason Bateman from Jason Bateman. And then, yeah, last year we had Rian Johnson on the eve of The Last Jedi coming out. We had Larry Kasdan, I believe. Oh no, Larry wasn’t on – he had his own show. He had his own live show.

But we had Rian Johnson and we had Dana Fox. I mean, we’ve had great guests for these. I don’t want to say yet who we’re getting, but we’re going to be getting some great people. So, no elective surgery on that night.

**John:** No. No. All right, so enough hype of future events. Let’s go to the past. Let’s do some follow up. So, a regular feature on the show is How Would This Be a Movie. One of those recent stories was the Worst Roommate Ever, the story by William Brennan. And that story was acquired by our friend Chris Morgan and Blumhouse. They are going to be trying to develop this for both TV and for features.

**Craig:** Yeah. So where did we land on that one? I can’t quite remember.

**John:** I think we landed that it was a very interesting premise and character. I think we may have differed on whether we needed to actually acquire the rights to this specific story or that as a general story space, like the idea of the roommate from hell genre might be a thing worth pursuing. But they decided, you know what, the actual rights to this story were worth it and they locked down those rights.

**Craig:** Well, I think if you are an individual writer and you get inspired by something like this it’s perfectly fine to write your own story as long as you feel you’re basically drawing on public facts as listed in this article. But when you’re a big company, and Chris Morgan has a big company, then you almost always just go and get the rights because you have a certain amount of money to spend and it generally plants a little bit of a flag in the space. You’re saying to other people, “Hey, we’re doing this, so maybe you don’t want to waste money doing it.” It’s a bit of business gamesmanship I should say.

**John:** I would say so. So I’ll be curious to see what project or projects come out of this idea. Almost all of us have had roommates at times. Most of them have not been deranged. But almost everyone has had a bad roommate experience.

**Craig:** I’ve had–

**John:** Actually, some of us have had deranged roommates. I guess you trump most of these other stories.

**Craig:** Yeah. I kind of have a problem with anything called Worst Roommate Ever, because I’m pretty sure I had the worst roommate ever.

**John:** Oh, always good. More recent news. We got an email from Nate. Craig, would you read what Nate wrote to us?

**Craig:** Sure. Nate writes, “I was listening to Episode 345 today and hearing about how Isaac and Elizabeth moved to LA right after college and that hit me harder than it should have. After I graduated I had plans to move to LA from Philadelphia with one of my best friends from college, but I was fortunate enough to be pitching a couple of shows here that picked up some momentum and decided to ride them until they were shelved.

“Once they plateaued I made plans again to move out. Just before putting down a deposit on an apartment I was hospitalized with Lyme disease.” Oh, that’s not good. “At that point my focus was health and put everything on hold again. And that urge was suppressed until today. I currently have a great job at 27 as a post-production supervisor at a large e-commerce company, a comfortable position that a lot of people would kill for in the area. A girlfriend of more than two years who has always supported me and my crazy ambitions but doesn’t want to move to LA and it has come to the point where it physically hurts to not be in LA.

“I guess I have more of an ask of you and Craig than a question. I would appreciate it if you and Craig could just tell me to quit being a coward and tell my girlfriend what I just told you.” Huh.

**John:** All right, well Nate, I can’t speak directly to your girlfriend but I can only tell you what I would tell her which is that if you are 27 and you want to be working in the film and television industry that is centered in Los Angeles, you don’t want to be in Philadelphia anymore, this is the time to do it. And you’re going to want to move here. And hopefully there’s a way you can move here and that she comes along with you. But I will say it’s not unprecedented for a person to leave a two-year relationship at 27 and move to the city they want to be living in. So, I think it’s time. Craig, do you have any more advice for Nate?

**Craig:** Well, look, it’s the girlfriend part that’s kind of stopping me. Because, yeah, all of the details seem about right. I mean, you’re 27. You’re still fairly young. You’re a post-production supervisor. That’s a gig that actually could get you a fairly decent day job working in a similar capacity in LA. So, theoretically there’d be a fairly nice glide path in for you.

I’m a little concerned when you say it’s come to the point where it physically hurts to not be in LA. Obviously it’s a slight amount of hyperbole there, but you seem to have put a lot of hopes and dreams on the location of Los Angeles. You haven’t exactly said why. I mean, you said you were pitching a couple of shows, but you know nothing was stopping you from writing shows while you were in Philadelphia and you weren’t. So, a couple of concerns. A couple of things to think about, Nate.

First, why is it super-duper important that you be in LA, and, if you have an answer to that, can you answer why you haven’t been at least working towards those goals while you’ve been in Philadelphia? And secondly, and more importantly, this girlfriend of yours of 2.5 years, you say she’s always supported you and your crazy ambitions. Well, that’s real. That’s a thing. And if you love her and she loves you, I don’t know, like it just seems – sometimes there’s things that are more important than living in Los Angeles, which is just a place, Nate. It’s a place.

So, I just want you to think really carefully here. I just want to make sure that you aren’t imagining that it is location that’s going to make and break you and location is going to solve your problems and make all of your dreams come true. Because generally speaking while it’s easier in LA, it’s not the be-all, end-all. And I don’t know, breaking up with your girlfriend, I hate to advise anyone to do that, especially because it sounds like you and she have a good thing going.

**John:** Yeah. This last week I spoke at USC. I was part of their Talent Week in which they bring in alums to talk to other alums and current students. And the thing I ended up talking about was the nature of sort of how characters express their wants and how to think of yourself as a character in the story of your life. And so I would urge Nate to think of himself as the protagonist in the story of his life. And if he sees himself that way he’d recognize that heroes of stories have triumphs and setbacks. They go on journeys. They come back from places. He perceives himself as the person who meant to leave Philadelphia but like weird stuff got in the way and he was never able to leave. And the nature of his true quest, where he really should be, is to be in Los Angeles.

He’s never going to be sort of the same person he was at 21. But I also don’t want him to think that like, “Oh well, now his movie is over.” That the thing he wanted is unrealistic or impossible at this point. I think the reason why I’m pushing him to maybe go to Los Angeles or really have the hard conversation with his girlfriend and figure out whether this is a thing that can work or not work is because he maybe really unhappy five years, ten years, 15 years from now if he hasn’t done this thing he always meant to do.

I don’t want him to be with the same woman, married with kids, and still be frustrated that he never tried in Los Angeles. So, that’s where I’m pushing Nate this direction.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, those are the two competing movies, right? So you have the movie of the person who never quite follows their dream and suffers in silence and then finally gets a chance and goes for it and wins. Then there’s this other movie, it’s more of the romance. A person who doesn’t realize what they have, leaves to go get something better, and eventually comes back home realizing, “Oh, you know, it was right here in front of me the whole time.”

There’s these two movies. I don’t know which one is Nate’s movie. I do know that when he says, “I would appreciate it if you and Craig could just tell me to quit being a coward and tell my girlfriend what I just told you,” um, you know, I would say to you that’s, generally speaking, good advice always. You should be able to tell your girlfriend everything you’re thinking and feeling in that regard.

I don’t think you’re being a coward, Nate. I think you’re trying to have your cake and eat it too here. And you need to decide what you want and what matters more and make your choice. Real simple. We can’t do it for you, buddy.

**John:** Yeah. Nate, a year from now please write us back and let us know what you have done or decided to do and how it all went, OK?

**Craig:** Good idea.

**John:** Last bit of news is way back follow up. In Episode 32 of this podcast we discussed Amazon Studios, in particular discussed their plans for inviting anyone in the world to send in their movie ideas, their pitches, their treatments and things, and there was a whole service. There was a whole website you could go to to put in your stuff and we both thought it was a terrible idea. And there was news on that front this week.

**Craig:** Yeah. So apparently Amazon finally admitted that it was, in fact, a terrible idea. I think they knew it was a terrible idea almost immediately. And they just sort of kept it lingering there because it didn’t really cost them anything per se. Just sort of hard drive space on servers which is kind of their bread and butter. They’ve got more of that than anyone. They’ve shut it down. They finally said no mas. This thing is over.

And, John, I’m pretty sure that they should have just listened to us.

**John:** Yeah. It would have probably saved some time and some effort. I don’t know to what degree they were actively doing any of this script outreach stuff. I don’t know whether this was a factor for years, honestly. And I didn’t hear anybody talking about it. But I will say if you look at what Amazon Studios is doing right now, they are investing heavily in high-priced IP and expensive talent to try to make big things like a Game of Thrones. That’s why they’re spending a gazillion dollars on the Tolkien rights. They’re making big, big swings because that’s how you make big hits in general.

So, it’s 180 degrees from this sort of crowd-sourcing thing that they started with.

**Craig:** Yeah. And look, I remember when we talked about this, some people got their feathers a little ruffled. You and I occasionally will get hit with the whole, “You guys are elitist, and you’re just trying to keep the little guy out. And that there are all these men and women out there who, if only they could get past the gatekeepers, would be successful. And that crowd-sourcing is the future. And you’re old. And you’re done.” And I believe our thesis at the time was, no, this is not something you crowd source. This is about personal creative vision and intelligence. And, no, we’re not trying to keep anyone out. We’re just being realistic. People generally are fussy about what they watch and it’s really expensive to produce things. So, this isn’t going to go well.

And we were 100% right on this one. And there was no doubt. Sometimes you and I make guesses about things. I don’t think either one of us were guessing back then. We knew. It’s not enough that Amazon does this whole thing – by the way, I also remember that they pushed a very bad contract out initially and then they fixed it. But it’s not enough that they put this out there and then just face plant, but they are now, as you said, all the way in the opposite direction. They’re now chasing all the A-list “elitist” writers because as it turns out writing is hard. Writing for screen and television is hard. It is not a common talent. It takes time to cultivate and to perfect, or at least to progress in. And so, yeah, there’s actually something called a professional screenwriter. Sorry. I don’t know what to say.

The entire exercise I thought was kind of a weirdly cynical bit of false egalitarianism that was never going to work.

**John:** Yeah. It’s interesting. There’s the choices of going wide versus going deep. And so wide is the sort of crowd-sourced model where you get a bunch of different brains working on things, and it’s really good for some stuff. It’s really good when there’s things that could be kind of figured out algorithmically.

But screenwriting, at least screenwriting so far, is not a good candidate for that sort of algorithmic wisdom-of-the-crowd kind of thing. It’s such a specific thing that requires one person’s intense focus for long periods of time. And that’s why both writing a movie or showrunning a TV show requires just this person’s brain to be so intensely focused and have a vision for what things are. And crowds are really good for like vision in a lot of different directions, but when you need an intense, focused vision that ends up being one person or a very small group of people.

And I think this is another example of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Silicon Valley at times gets a little too up its own butt about these notions of things like, for instance, crowd sourcing and the wisdom of the crowd. But even in the case of groups of people writing in Hollywood, for instance television shows, there’s a hierarchy. And there is a person in charge. And things are decided on that level. The notion that there’d be some kind of group pushing something towards brilliance is so bizarre because, you know, what’s everybody’s complaint? I mean, the most watered down Hollywood stuff is movies by committee. And here Amazon attempted to expand the committee to the world. It was dead in the water from the start. It was never, ever, ever, ever going to work. And honestly I do think people should listen to us.

When you and I 100% agree on something it’s not possible that we’re wrong. If we both agree to 100%, everyone just needs to just trust us.

**John:** Absolutely. So, having said that, please don’t go back through the archives and figure out all the cases where we were completely wrong, because I’m sure there are some of those.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, but not when we’re 100%–

**John:** 100%, yeah. That will be the thing. No, no, we were only 99% sure.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I will say even like recent things like MoviePass, we’re like well that can never work. And right now it seems to be quite successful. But we’ll see sort of how it all goes.

**Craig:** Yeah. And we were a little wishy. I wasn’t at 100.

**John:** We were a little wishy. We were like confused.

**Craig:** Yeah. Whereas I remember with this–

**John:** We were never confused about Amazon Studios.

**Craig:** No. I lost my freaking mind over this one. This was early umbrage. This may have been the first umbrage. I don’t know.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our feature topic of today. This is conflict of interest. And so I put this on the outline because this came up a couple times the last few weeks and I want to talk about it as a concept. So first thing that sort of came up was the discussions about the agency deal and the deal with writers and the WGA, particularly in terms of packaging and producing. I heard the terms conflict of interest used a lot around that.

And also more recently we have Sean Hannity who is talking about Michael Cohen, but he’s in fact a client of Michael Cohen. And as a journalist or whatever you want to call him, that is troubling. And so the word conflict of interest was also coming up there.

So, I want to dig into conflict of interest.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a tricky little area. I mean, I have often discussed this fact with lawyers. This is one of those areas where sometimes the things that we think of as conflict of interest aren’t necessarily conflict of interest. It seems rather situational. And certain professions are more susceptible to it than others.

So, yeah, let’s talk about how this applies to our lives as writers.

**John:** Absolutely. So we’ll try to define terms a little bit as we start. I think the crucial thing to understand is that conflict of interest is not a crime in itself. It’s not even necessarily a big wrongdoing in and of itself. It’s just a situation. It’s a set of circumstances. It’s wherever you have a person/organization that has multiple competing interests. They can be financial. They can be other kinds of interest. But in trying to service one of those they may end up acting in the detriment to one of the other interests. So each of these interests thinks that they are the primary interest and they can’t be. And so it’s those conflicting things that become a conflict of interest.

So, any situation where your loyalties are divided, that’s the way of thinking about a conflict of interest. And so it can go beyond the strict legal definition to just these murky places we find ourselves where even if there isn’t an actual wrongdoing, there’s a perception that something could be unfair towards the parties involved because you have these multiple competing interests.

Classic examples, if you are buying a house and the real estate agent is representing both the buyer and the seller, that is a conflict of interest. That happens sometimes, but it has to be publicly acknowledged that there is a conflict of interest here because the seller is trying to get the highest price. The buyer is trying to get the lowest price. The agent is also kind of trying to get a higher price because they get a percentage. So, that’s a thing that has to be discussed.

If you are given a bonus based on how many life insurance policies you sell to the clients of this organization, that can be a real conflict of interest because those people you are selling these to, they may not need life insurance policies. But if your salary is based on how many of those you sell, that can be a conflict of interest.

So, it happens in lots of situations. But, particularly for our podcast I want to talk about the situations where it happens for writers.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, to me conflict of interest typically revolves around questions of trust. There is a sense of a violation of trust. If you believe that somebody is working on your collective behalf. That is to say on behalf of them and you. Or, if that person is working for you. You’ve paid them and they are advancing your interests. And very specifically what they’re doing is providing you a service in which you can trust. For instance, a doctor. I trust my doctor. My doctor says, “You know what? I’ve done a blood exam and I really think you need this medicine Flamydol.” OK, great.

Now, if he doesn’t tell me that he’s a shareholder in the company that makes Flamydol, that is a conflict of interest and he’s violated my trust. This is something that’s very clear in certain areas like, for instance, doctors, lawyers. Journalists are constantly having to disclose things. They seemingly are the most fastidious about it. So, very typically you’ll read a news article and somebody will be talking about a product or a movie. And then they will say, “By the way, that movie or product is manufactured by such-and-such, the parent company of this paper.” So at the very least by disclosing it you don’t have to worry that we’re trying to put a fast one by you. You can judge that for yourself, but we have not violated your trust.

**John:** Or an organization like a newspaper might have firewalls between the advertising department and the editorial department so that the people who are selling the ads to those companies are not influencing the editorial decisions of stories written about that company. And that’s a reasonable way of trying to avoid conflicts of interest because even if there wasn’t impropriety, the perception of impropriety is sometimes just as damaging.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in our business I think that’s – well, look, there are some areas where there is clearly a question of financial conflict of interest. But maybe more than half of the time what we’re talking about is the appearance of a conflict. The appearance or sense that trust has been violated because what happens is one party or the other discovers something that someone didn’t disclose to them and that’s where we can get ourselves into trouble or people can get into trouble with us.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s talk through some examples that writers are going to face. First off is just with their agencies, with their agents, because agents represent you but they don’t only represent you. They represent multiple clients. And so if you are going in for a job pitching on the Slinky movie, well your agency – your agent – might have other writers who are pitching on that same job. And that is going to happen in your life. And sometimes you’ll know about that. Sometimes you won’t know about that. You should know about that. And so we’re going to talk through strategies for like how you have those difficult conversations.

But it’s not just writers. They also represent directors. So, you know, that director who signed on to that movie who wants to fire you, that is a weird conflict of interest that happens all the time where they are trying to keep their director client happy, but also their writer client happy. Same thing happens with actors. They may really want to have their actor from their agency in your TV show. Are they doing what’s best for the show, what’s best for you as the writer? Or are they doing what’s best for them as the agency because they have this big high profile actor client that they want to get into a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, there is a certain aspect of this where it’s a bit caveat-scriptor. The agency is absolutely going to represent other people. You know they represent other people. You know that a bunch of them either do the same thing you do, going up for the same jobs you go up for. Or are people that could theoretically fire your, or employ you. Or people who make more money than you do, therefore it would enrich the agency more. They also represent producers.

So, you kind of have to just assume, I think, as a writer no matter where you are represented that unless you, the client, are literally the highest paid client at that agency that at some point or another your agents will be in a position where they have to choose between your interests and the interests of a client that earns more money for themselves and therefore earns more money for the agency. It’s just priced into the situation. It’s kind of hard to, I don’t know, pretend that you didn’t know. It’s sort of out there, isn’t it?

**John:** It is. And so a thing that’s come up recently in discussions about sort of the agency deal is we all know sort of the challenge of the multiple clients situation, but when the agency has their own financial interest in a project that changes the equation. So if an agency has a packaging fee on a TV show, they no longer have the interest in trying to make sure that you’re getting paid – your being paid more salary isn’t helping them because they are not commissioning that salary. They are not taking their 10% on that salary. So they no longer have an interest in trying to make sure your price goes up.

In fact, they may have an interest in making sure the show is sustainable. They want that show just to keep running because they’re getting a fee for every episode produced. If the show is incredibly successful and syndicates they are getting a percentage of the overall profits of the show. So, their interest is in the success of the show and not necessarily interest of the client. And that is, very classically, a conflict of interest.

Similar kinds of things are happening on the feature side where some agencies and other companies are really truly acting as producers. They’re financing projects. And therefore they have an interest in the final product that is not the same as their interest in the client who put the project together. That’s a challenging situation and the kind of thing we’re trying to figure out a way to address.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, look, technically speaking there is a law that governs talent agents, at least in the state of California which is where all the talent agents we’re describing live and work, and it basically says you get to procure employment on behalf of artists and in exchange for that exclusive right no one else can do it without a license you are not allowed to charge more than 10% commission. And you are not allowed to have a financial stake in the employers or the companies that are employing your clients. That’s simple straight up non, you know, conflict of interest avoidance let’s call it.

And what the agencies have done is put a little end run on that. They have created essentially side companies. So there’s the illusion I think of a separate company because they do these things.

So, OK, the talent agency is actually a Talent Agency Incorporated. But the production company is Productions Limited. Well, the finances are comingled and the shareholders are the same. But they’re two different companies therefore this one is not violating the talent agency act and this one is – it’s bull sugar.

And, also, this packaging thing I hate. I hate it. And here’s the – so packaging basically as far as I can tell, the scam is that the agencies have basically performed a shakedown maneuver on studios. They say, look, a number of our clients are in this show. You have to pay us money per episode or we’re going to, I guess, tell all of our clients to not be in the show. Or we’re going to not have our clients show up for your next show. It’s a little bit of a, “Oh, it’s a shame if anything should happen to your network.” And they get this money. There’s no value added, at all, whatsoever. This money is theoretically money that could be spent instead on the show itself. Or, god forbid, on the clients.

Yes, the clients don’t have to pay commission on that. But as you point out the whole point of commission is I want to pay it because that means you’re motivated to get me more money. The problem as far as I see it in that case is a flat-out conflict of interest as far as I’m concerned. The issue is I don’t know if there’s anything we can do about that one, because it seems like the big agencies – UTA, William Morris Endeavor, CAA, ICM – all package. And we are mostly represented by them. And so it’s not like you can leave and go to the other one. It’s going to happen to you again. And it is apparently not illegal.

**John:** Yeah. So these are things that are going to be figured out over the course of the next year. And so if you’ve been to some of the WGA meetings you’ve heard some of the plans on that front. We won’t sort of rehash them here.

I think it’s important to talk about them because it is an inherent conflict of interest and there always are going to be conflicts of interest. Because I’ve heard people talking about like, “Oh, this WGA is to eliminate all the conflicts of interest.” And I want to stress that that’s impossible. That will never happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because conflicts of interest are inherent in any situation where people are representing multiple parties. That’s going to happen. I think what you want to do is get to a place where one of the parties they’re representing isn’t themselves. And that’s not the biggest party that they’re representing. And we’ll see if we can make progress on that front.

But I also don’t want to leave it all on the agency’s doorstep here because studios have conflicts of interest as well. Look at pilot season. Pilot season is conflict of interest season. It’s basically “We are going to create a bunch of TV pilots and some of them we’re going to pick up to series and some of them we aren’t. But we don’t know which ones yet and so we’re going to pretend that each one of them is the most important thing and that we’re going to stick the best actors in each one of them. But really we know we’re not going to actually make it all – they’re not all going to work. And we’re going to be pulling people out of things. And we know it’s going to be a train wreck. But we’re going into it just thinking like, OK, this is our process. This is how we’re going to do it.”

There are inherent conflicts of interest in there. And if you go through like casting in the pilot season process, it’s all conflicts. It’s all people trying to negotiate these things and you don’t know all the information. It’s really crazy. But that’s just the way it is. And no magic wand will ever be waved that can make that all go away.

So as a writer you’re going to be entering into a system where that’s just part of the game.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, there’s conflict always. And then there are these times when you have – a very common situation that we encounter where the studio is engaging in conflict of interest. A studio head is fired. A new studio head is brought in or a new network head. They have an inherent conflict of interest when they’re evaluating the shows that are there. They may quietly think this show that this former head was developing is brilliant. But that just makes me look terrible. If I go ahead and greenlight that show and it becomes a big hit everyone is going to say, “Oh, look, see, they fired the wrong person. They hired him. They should have just kept her.” So, I think I’ll just kill that thing.

That’s just a classic conflict of interest. And also internally what a lot of people don’t know is that the – let’s call them the sub-level of executives. You’ve got the boss, and then you’ve got the two underbosses. And then you’ve got the layer of the five under-under bosses. Each one of those executives has shows for which they are responsible and accountable. They are being evaluated by the success of those. It is in their personal interest to see those shows get on the air. And it is in their personal interest to see their colleague’s shows not get on the air because there is an endless churn of competition and survival of the fittest in the ranks of these executives. That, of course, is also conflict of interest if we define the ultimate interest as good show, which John it often is not.

**John:** It is not. I want to quickly go through some of the other flavors of conflict of interest you’re going to find. So, self-dealing. Self-dealing is when you are basically buying something at a reduced price because you’re essentially selling it to yourself. And so that happens in television where a studio will sell its TV show into syndication to the network it itself owns. So that’s become a subject of several lawsuits where they’ve negotiated a lower price than it’s believed they could have gotten on the open market.

That can hurt show creators who are counting on that price to be what’s affecting their profits on the show.

Another situation we all face is outside employment which is basically you’re working on two things at once. A lot of writers are going to be working on two things at once. You kind of on the phone call sort of pretend it’s the only thing that you’re working on. But realistically you are going to be working on multiple projects at once. The buyer thinks that you are only working on their thing when in fact you’re working on multiple things. Usually that doesn’t become a problem. And usually it’s just understood that this is a thing that happens. But it is a conflict of interest.

Am I giving all of my best thoughts and words towards project A or towards project B. Sometimes you are making choices like that.

**Craig:** I think writers do face these situations of potential conflict of interest all the time and it’s fair, if we’re going to whack agents and studio executives for it, we also have to give ourselves a pretty good spanking because it comes up a lot. Writers are constantly playing this game of managing multiple children. Each one of those children is a project of theirs that they love or care about. Someone comes along and says, “Oh, would you be interested in helping us fix this movie?” And you know that you just worked on that movie’s competition at another studio. It would be proper to disclose that. But if you do not, you are engaging in blatant conflict of interest.

If either one of those parties find out that you worked on this movie and its direct competition, you’re violating everyone’s trust. You’re taking money and violating trust. And it would be fair for both of them to question whether or not you did your best on either one and even worse if you did then that meant you took money to hurt the other one. That’s a real thing that comes up all the time, especially because there’s – as we’ve often said – rarely a movie that doesn’t have some kind of direct concept competition at another studio.

**John:** So the most direct competition thing I can think of that’s happened in my career is I signed on to write an Alice in Wonderland movie and Sam Mendes was going to direct it and it was produced by Dick Zanuck. Separately, Tim Burton signed on to do Alice in Wonderland at Disney and Dick Zanuck was his producer so Dick Zanuck joined him in that. So, Dick Zanuck was attempting to produce two competing Alice in Wonderland movies at the same time.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Dick Zanuck was amazing. And I am so sad he has passed away, because he was remarkable. And he was one of the best producers I ever met in terms of just really being honest with me. So, I remember sitting at lunch. It’s like, “Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s crazy that this is the situation. I’m going to do my best to support both things at the same time. I don’t know what’s going to happen. And at some point I’ll have to choose.”

Ultimately the universe chose and the Disney movie went and the Sam Mendes one went away. And I never ended up writing the Sam Mendes one. But those things do happen. And Dick Zanuck himself was – the role of a producer like that is always conflict of interest because he’s trying to protect the movie, and his relationships with everyone involved with the movie. You know, it’s complicated. So, I have nothing but sympathy for the kinds of situations we find ourselves in as we’re trying to make these nebulous, impossible things come to life.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would advise writers, I mean, because in a situation like that – the good news for Dick Zanuck was everybody knew. Right? So, the second studio that says–

**John:** Exactly. He was transparent.

**Craig:** Yeah. So they say, “OK, listen, we know you’re doing this. It’s crazy. We’re pricing it in. Everybody knows everything. We still choose this. Fine.” Conflict of interest has been avoided. Voila.

For writers who are working – professional writers – if something like this should come up, I think in general it is good to err on the side of disclosure. More disclosure than less.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** About most things. Because I believe – and I could be just Pollyannaish about this – but in the long run people appreciate honesty, particularly in our business where it is in short supply. And you will be probably rewarded. You will probably end up if you were to say lose a potential job because of disclosed conflict of interest, the karma would come back around to boost you up later. I just sort of believe that.

I try my best to not get into a situation where if somebody were to find out that I were doing something they would feel betrayed. I think that’s the most important thing. I never want to walk around worrying that if somebody should know something that I’m doing that is true they would feel betrayed.

**John:** Absolutely. I think it’s always good advice to imagine the phone call you’d get if that person found out. And, all right, that phone call would be horrible. I should tell this in advance.

There was a situation where I was working on a movie for Spielberg and I was also working on the first Charlie’s Angels. And both things had to happen at the same time. I had days where I was going between those two meetings back to back. And so I told Steven I’m doing this thing for Drew. He knew Drew because of E.T. And it was all fine and it was all good.

But, if he had found out separately that I was still actively working on Charlie’s Angels, or if Charlie’s Angels had found out I was doing this other thing that could have been a real conflict. And so being upfront about it, just being transparent, is helpful. And just phrase it in a positive way. I want you to know that this is what I’m doing. It’s going to be these three days and then I’m back on yours fulltime. That it will all work out.

That’s much better than the betrayed call that you get from that person. Because it poisons things after that moment. Even when you give them that great draft they’re going into thinking that they’re upset with you. That you are a bad person who didn’t do their very best work because of this other reason. So, disclose.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, you know, it’s not like they necessarily always follow these rules. You will find yourself in situations where you are doing the right thing for someone and then they turn around and do the wrong thing to you. And you may feel that you have firmly discovered the whole nice guys finish last rule. And that you’re a sucker. And you’re a doormat. And you should check your morals at the door. It’s the only way to get ahead. And all I can say to you is no. It is not worth it.

Yes, there are unscrupulous, bad, evil people that work in our business. I think it’s become more evident than ever. And they do succeed. And it is nauseating. The levels of injustice at times can be nauseating. However, that doesn’t mean you have to be a bad person. Nor does it mean you have to embrace any kind of betrayal. You can absolutely succeed by being a decent person.

I’m not suggesting you have to be a saint. This is a tough business. Sometimes you sugar coat. Sometimes you have to kind of bend the truth a bit just to avoid – you know, it’s the whole white lie syndrome. Right? These are things that have to happen.

But, you can be a decent person and succeed in this business. Will you end up with $500 million? Probably not. Do you want that? Eh, you’re in the wrong business anyway.

**John:** Yeah, I think so. So let’s talk about what can be done, or at least what steps an industry can take and individual people can take. So I’d say industry-wide what works for lawyers, what works for doctors, what works for newspapers when they’re run properly are standards. Codes of conduct. Basically public statements about this is what our policies are. And so when you have standards and practices, if you have a fiduciary standard where a client’s needs have to be the primary thing you’re working for, that helps.

So even like the NBA players, they have a code of conduct with their agents which sort of dictates these are the things that are allowed and that are not allowed. And so the degree to which you can figure out ways to codify what the expectations are, that helps. Because it’s when there are no clear cut expectations that these conflicts of interest become so pervasive.

Individually I would say that as a writer you have to acknowledge that those conflicts are going to be there. And that some of them are completely unavoidable. Like your agent represents multiple people. That’s just the nature of it. And so unless you are the only client, that’s going to happen.

And in a weird way the bigger your agency, the more of those conflicts are going to be a factor. That’s just the nature of it. You may have more access to some things at a bigger agency. But you also are going to have more conflicts just because there’s more people and more relationships there.

Some of the things that I think are useful to ask on the phone call is “What’s been your experience with this person?” Just get them talking about like who this person is, who this executive is, who this producer is to see if they have some preexisting thing. I’ve always been surprised where studio execs when they are renegotiating their contracts at the studio, it’s the agents who do that negotiation for them. So, agents have ongoing relationships with these people at studios that go much beyond just their clients working with them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, ask about that stuff.

It’s fair to ask, “Hey, do you have anybody else going up for this job?” I think that’s a fair question. If your agent won’t answer that question, they’re not really your agent.

**Craig:** And also the answer is, “Yeah.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think that Hollywood and DC are very similar in this regard. The lobbyists and the politicians and the people who run businesses that the laws govern are all way too involved with each other’s lives and there’s simply not enough separation there. That said, like John said, be aware of the stuff that’s obviously there. Just as, by the way, the studios are aware that every time they talk to us about an idea there’s a decent chance that we either have been working on a similar idea on our own, or could love that idea but want to do it on our own and not tell them. Everybody’s kind of dealing with that sort of thing.

So, by and large you can only essentially govern your own honesty and your own sense of decorum and good behavior. And you can only really govern your own representatives in as much as you have a sort of choice. But that sort of choice isn’t great. I got to be honest when it comes to these issues I don’t know of any particular agency where I would look at it and go, “Oh well, they are more, I don’t know, above the board and clean-handed than any of the other ones.”

**John:** Yeah. I would say you can find out reputations of people who are – you can avoid some shady people by asking questions. And that’s why when other writer friends ask us about agents or that they’re moving around we will tell them quite candidly what we think and sort of what’s happened. But in terms of the inherent systemic conflicts that are going to be there, they’re going to be there regardless. Even the best agents are going to have those conflicts. And I would say the agents I would choose to work with are the ones who are going to be most transparent and are going to put my interests as far forward as they can. That’s all you can sort of ask for.

**Craig:** I agree. I agree.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get to some other questions.

Jay writes in, “In regards to sitcoms, what factors are used in deciding if it should be a single camera or a multicam? Should the teleplay’s formatting differ based on the camera setup?”

**Craig:** Well, generally speaking multicam shows are fixed in a couple, two or three, key locations. So you’re thinking about your Seinfelds and your Cheers and a number of the Disney and Nickelodeon sitcoms where you’ve got the living room, the bedroom, and the office. You’ve got the movie theater, the kitchen, and the schoolroom. It’s that kind of thing. Or in the case of Seinfeld, it’s Jerry’s apartment and it’s the diner, right?

So, the reason why is if you’re camping down with the multi-camera setup you kind of are living in a space. You don’t want to yank all of your multi-cameras around. The whole point of multi-camera is we’re on a stage. We have a base. So we can set up our cameras and go from there. We’re probably going to have an audience. There’s a fair chance of that as well.

Single camera you have quite a bit more freedom. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have certain sets or locations that you use over and over. In terms of formatting, I don’t know necessarily if the formatting is hugely different as much as the style of the writing itself is necessarily going to be different. You can have lots of shorter scenes when you’re single cam. And obviously you can go outside and you’re going to want to find some different locations to move around and justify your single cameraness.

If you’re a multi-camera format and you’re in the living room, you’re probably not going to do the three or four line scene. You’re going to camp down for a while. You can kind of get this just from watching these shows. It’s sort of intuitive I think.

**John:** So, right now a couple of listeners are screaming at their podcast player right now because multicam is formatted differently. So, if it’s a multicam show it looks really different on the page. It’s double-spaced.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s crazy.

**John:** It does. It’s double spaced.

**Craig:** Why?

**John:** Scene headers are underlined. I’m going to send you a link. It will drive you mad. I don’t know the actual origin of the multicam format, but it is a very different looking thing. So, it’s double-spaced. Action lines are all uppercase. So you’ve got to really look at the shows that are multicam and study that format because if you were to sort of halfway do multicam people would be – they would throw the script across the room. It’s a really different look.

**Craig:** Are the multicam shows all exactly the same? Or are some different than others?

**John:** You know, there are going to be some house styles. But part of the reason why I know what multicam looks like is the new Highland has multicam as a template. It looks so different. Here, I’m sending you a link to what this looks like. I’m going to send you the link in screenwriting.io, a website that our own producer Megan McDonnell updates, to show some of the big differences here. I’m going to throw it in Skype for you.

**Craig:** What the F? This is stupid. I hate it. All action and description is in all caps. Well, I guess they hate – you know what? I sort of understand. How much action and description can you have when you’re in the same damn set every time? You know what I mean? So maybe that’s why they do it that way. That’s so weird. All right.

**John:** And so I also put in an image there.

**Craig:** What the – that’s ugly as F. Oh, and they put the characters underneath. It’s almost like a cross between a play and a – yuck.

**John:** My guess is that the multicam format evolved sort of with the birth of television and it was a little bit more like a play. And if you really think about it, television and film came from kind of different worlds. And so film was done out here in Los Angeles. It was a thing that sort of grew up 100 years ago. TV had its own origins. It sort of came out of radio and plays and multiple cameras doing stuff. And they’ve co-mingled, I mean we think about them in the same way, but multicam shows are written in this different way. And it’s jarring when you first see it.

So you still see INT. You still see DAY. But character names are listed in there. There’s much more underlining, all uppercase. It’s a really different looking thing on the page.

So, getting back to I think Craig’s more important point is that the writing is also different. There’s an expectation in multicam shows that we are getting to jokes and that the jokes are presented and are landing and they are acknowledged by generally a laugh track and an audience. And there’s just a timing and a spacing. We’ll put a link into the show notes for this great YouTube clip of Big Bang Theory without laughs.

**Craig:** It’s so great. It’s eerie.

**John:** It’s so disturbing. But it’s this moment that like plays totally natural with laughs, but if you take the laughs out feels just bizarre. So, you will know whether your show is meant to be a multicam or a single cam. It’s also weird we still use the term single cam because all of the “single cam” shows they use multiple cameras. It’s just they are shot more like a drama or a TV show in that they have – yes, they have coverage. They’re shooting A and B camera. They’re doing more complicated things.

So, the shows, half-hour comedies that are single camera include things like Modern Family, Blackish, The Office. A lot of these shows have that sort of half-conceit of there is a documentary crew there. But the other ones that are just truly fully dramas that happen to be half an hour long.

You will know whether your show is which one. But they are actually very different. I’ve never written multicam. But some people love it.

Roseanne is a modern example of a multicam that is hugely successful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I obviously have never written in it because I didn’t know that it was a different format. And I’m kind of hoping that there’s somebody out there that’s working on a multicam show that’s striking some sort of blow against the tyranny of this very silly format.

**John:** Absolutely. Another format which is related to both of these but different still is the graphic novel format. Graphic novel format is not as standardized as either screenplays or this multicam format is. But it’s a way of sort of reflecting the script of a book and sort of where the panel layouts are and what is dialogue. It’s not just screenplays, you learn.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** Charles writes, “When writing a period piece, how would you establish a time period? I suppose putting something like The 1920s in description would suffice, but it feels a little too simplistic and the opposite of artistic.” Craig, how would you specify the time period for something like Chernobyl? What details do you put in there to let us know – to anchor us in a time and place?

**Craig:** Well, you have some choices. I mean, the first thing you can decide is exactly how you want your reader to discover the time period and by extension the audience. Obviously the audience does not see scene headers, right? So I don’t like to put in the establishment of a time period in a scene header. I feel like that’s the least interesting way because, again, the audience won’t have it.

So what you start with are some key things. We know that there are certain things that stick out. Appliances. Streets. Clothes. Technology in general. And even language. There’s all these little bits and bobs that kind of make indications. Smoking in a weird way has become a signifier of a time period.

So, little things like finding a cool reference to a brand that no longer exists. Little subtle ways so that people can figure out the mystery on their own. And then, if you desire, if it’s important for your story, you can indicate exactly when this is. It depends on the time period. People may think, well, this is 30, 40 years ago. If it’s important for them to know which then you throw the subtitle up on screen.

But first I like to kind of let people figure it out on their own. So we’re talking about our environment. Hair. Makeup. Props. Location. Language choices. All the things that make a period as vibrant as it is.

**John:** So situations where you may want to put the year in there is if it has to – like there’s multiple time periods in your script and you need to make it clear which time period you’re in for this thing. That’s a great time to put some time period in your scene header.

Or if you’re anchoring two specific real world events, then that’s a situation where you might honestly just put it on screen because it’s clear that this is a very specific moment in time and you want the audience to be crystal clear on exactly when you are in time and space, because this is going to be a hugely important part of your story.

But what Craig describes is right. I think your job – remember always – in the screenplay is to be the movie in paper form. So if there’s specific things we’re going to see and hear in the film that are going to clue us into what time period we’re in, those should be in your script.

**Craig:** Yep. Even sounds. You may have somebody walking along a street at night. And it might not be necessarily evident from the way that they’re dressed what the time period is. But you hear a car going by in the background and a horn. And there’s a certain kind of old car horn. That alone just puts you in a space. So use all of the things that exist. And I can tell you now that I’m here and we’re shooting a show that is period, every single thing has to be thought about. Everything. And the question that is often asked is “Did they have this?” That would be the worst thing of all. Like, “Oh, we put a thing in that just didn’t exist during that time.” That would be a nightmare.

But every single thing there is an attempt to source it to period so that it is accurate and the world feels true.

**John:** Absolutely. All right, so it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing could not be more related to what you just talked about. So in terms of anchoring you into a place and time this is a re-endorsement actually. Dana Stevens on Slate Culture Gabfest mentioned this. It’s from 1911. And so the Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern took a trip to NYC and they filmed it on the motion picture cameras of the time. And so we’ve all seen that kind of footage. It’s all herky-jerky and odd because the frame rates are different. But this person named Guy Jones on YouTube has taken that footage and adjusted the frame rate so it’s smooth to modern eyes. And he added sound effects. He added ambience and full sound effects. And it’s really amazing because it’s like, “Oh, that’s what it actually looks like.” So we’ll put a link into the show notes, but you see horses and cars both simultaneously moving around NYC. You see the Flatiron Building which looks just like the Flatiron Building.

Everybody wears hats. We’re in Chinatown. You see this little Chinese kid and he’s doing what kids now would do is like, “Oh, it’s a camera. I’m going to try to get in front of the camera.” And that’s just a great sort of instinct. It’s just really cool to see the real version of this, because I’ve seen movie versions of the same time period a lot, but we can never actually build something this big. I mean, you see all of these people on these giant sets and it really is incredible. So I encourage people to take a look at this thing. And also just to – the sound design on this is really good. It’s very convincing and it’s more believable and more interesting because it feels like you’re really there in the time. Because this was a silent film, but they built a really good ambient track for it that feels like the period.

So, that’s my One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Well, my One Cool Thing is somewhat similar, but I’m not looking at the way things really were in 1911. I’m looking at the way things really were in Cleopatra era Egypt.

**John:** Ooh.

**Craig:** And Greece. Yeah. Because I’m playing Assassin’s Creed Origins. Of course. And I believe it is accurate in all ways. So naturally at the time I would have been this wonderful man named Bayek who goes around – only in pursuit of justice – just shedding massive quantities of blood. But it’s a really good game.

I like the Assassin’s Creed series. Have you ever played an Assassin’s Creed, John?

**John:** I never have.

**Craig:** There’s this underpinning concept to it that is so stupid I don’t even – it embarrasses me to say it. But you’re not really – the idea of the game is you’re not actually an assassin running around in ancient Egypt or in 1800s London or in Renaissance Florence or all the things that they’ve done. You’re actually a person in the modern era accessing genetic memories of somebody. It’s absolute nonsense. I hate that part of it.

**John:** I saw that in a trailer for the movie. So I saw Michael Fassbender in this big rig. And so that’s what you’re describing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like if it had been me – no one asked me to write Assassin’s Creed – but had they asked me I would have said just slice away this ridiculous thing and no doubt they would have said to me, “Um, Ubisoft, the company that’s licensed us the rights, they’re not going to let you do that.” Then I would have just fired myself.

Regardless, the actual gameplay though of Assassin’s Creed is really good. They’ve made a lot of them. They seem to make one a month. So, I had kind of gotten off the Assassin’s Creed wheel. But the aforementioned Chris Morgan said, “Oh no, this one is really, really good.” And it is. It’s really fun playing as somebody in a completely different culture. The Assassin’s Creed games have generally been white, white, white, white, white. So, it’s fun to be an ancient Egyptian. Well, I wouldn’t say ancient. I mean, you’re talking a little bit before the Common Era as they say.

But it’s just a cool time period. You’re riding a camel. You’re lopping people’s heads off. It’s great. So, you know, I’m a big fan. I say yes Assassin’s Creed Origins.

**John:** Yes Assassin’s Creed. The common thing said about Cleopatra is that she lived closer to our time than to when the pyramids were built. I don’t know if that’s actually true. But it’s a thing I hear repeated a lot.

**Craig:** It is true. And, in fact, it is mentioned in a splash screen at one point while the game is loading up.

**John:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** Yes, so that is true. Cleopatra was fairly modern. I mean, we’re talking just – we’re starting to edge towards the 0 Common Era. But you do – there’s one point where you’re running around. You’re doing stuff. And you just happen to turn to the left and there in the distance are pyramids. And it’s quite breathtaking. So big fan.

**John:** Very nice. That is our show for this week. So, as always, our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Tim Garcia. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send the lyrics to the song you’ve now written about being on the other side of a velvet rope so you can join us for the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend special Q&A thing.

If you have longer questions like the ones we answered, those are great at ask@johnaugust.com. But short ones are easy on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you would like to leave us a review, that’s lovely. It helps other people find the show.

Here’s my reminder that we have a game that is out there in the world that is called AlphaBirds. It is a fun game for people who like words and like Scrabble or Boggle. Craig played it along with Melissa, god, like two or three years ago at Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yeah, in Austin, right? Yeah.

**John:** It’s a fun game.

**Craig:** It was fun.

**John:** Back then it was called Sparrow. It’s now called AlphaBirds and it’s available for purchase. So that’s at store.johnaugust.com. Or alphabirdsgame.com.

You’ll find show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. The transcripts go up about four days to seven days after the episode airs. All the back episodes are available at Scriptnotes.net. It’s a subscription. It’s $1.99 a month.

We also have a few more of the USB drives that have the first 350 episodes of the show on them. Craig, delightful talking with you across the world.

**Craig:** Indeed. Thanks, John. I’ll see you next week. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* To win an invite to the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend event on Wednesday May 9th, send your lyrics to “The Other Side of the Velvet Rope” to ask@johnaugust.com
* Amazon Studios is no longer accepting [unsolicited submissions](http://variety.com/2018/digital/news/amazon-studios-shuts-down-open-script-submissions-1202753480/)
* The Deadline [article](http://deadline.com/2018/04/talent-agency-business-writers-guild-deal-proposal-shakeup-packaging-deals-1202373395/) that outlines the WGA’s proposal to renegotiate the Artists’ manager Basic Agreement
* [Dick Zanuck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Zanuck) and his [credits](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005573/)
* Multicams are [formatted differently](https://screenwriting.io/how-are-multicamera-tv-scripts-formatted/). This clip of the [Big Bang Theory with the laugh track removed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASZ8Hks4gko) shows how different the rhythm of a Multicam can be.
* Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern’s [footage of New York City](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aohXOpKtns0) as adjusted by Guy Jones
* [Assassin’s Creed Origins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin%27s_Creed_Origins)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [AlphaBirds](http://alphabirdsgame.com) is our fun new word game!
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Tim Garcia ([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_347.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/love-aptaker-berger).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 345 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re doing something a little bit different. We often answer listener emails, but I thought we’d actually have the listener here with us as he asks his email.
So, would you mind asking your question that you wrote in to us with?

**Isaac Aptaker:** Yeah, sure. “Dear John, you are one of the rare few to have both a successful screenwriting career and an accessible email address. I am an almost out of high school 18-year-old planning to pursue a career in TV. Next year I will enroll in the screenwriting program at either USC or NYU. I’ve gotten tons of advice from guidance counselors, family members, even a chatty, slightly overzealous cab driver. I wanted to ascertain whether you believe one school has a significant advantage over the other.

‘I’m inclined to stay on the East Coast for a few years before I make the move to LA for what I assume will be the majority of my working life. And I tell myself that a solid spec and good people skills are what really matter. But then I read those oh-so-persuasive articles about the SoCal-educated Josh Schwartz wunderkinds of TV. The ones who sell scripts right out of college and are helming their own shows before they can get rental cars. And it seems they always throw in a thanks to those Trojans shout-out.

“So, if you can offer any advice I’d really appreciate it. That cabbie made a damn good U-turn, but I’m not sure he knew a ton about scripted television. Thanks, Isaac Aptaker.”

**John:** All right. I wrote Isaac back and I wrote, “Hey Isaac. Both schools are great and more than anything count your blessings. Two questions: where do you want to live and what do you want to do? If you want to live in NYC, go to NYU. While it’s not an easy city to be broke in, you’re more likely to be content in your poverty living there during college than afterwards.

“In terms of Art, with a capital A, if on a given weekend you’re more likely to see the indie movie than the blockbuster, NYU might be the better choice. My sense is that there’s more independent bent at NYU and less of an asking for permission attitude.

“In terms of screenwriting programs themselves, I can only speak to USC’s which I didn’t attend but I visited. I think it’s good but only as good as you make it, which probably applies to any writing program anywhere. If you want to be a Hollywood screenwriter for the good and the bad that implies you’ll get more exposure to that career and the whole film industry at USC.

“Honestly, a lot of what you learn at USC wouldn’t happen on campus but navigating your way through internships and meeting people for the drinks. The film industry is a much bigger part of daily life in LA than it is in NYC. It sounds like your instinct is NYU. Listen to it. If you decide to move to LA after that you’ll have some catching up to do, but that shouldn’t be the deciding factor. Whichever place you
decide to go, here’s my one piece of advice: work really hard. Don’t think about grades as much as becoming the writer you want to be. Josh Schwartz didn’t get the OC because he was lucky. He got it by working his ass off. John.

“P.S. Let me know what you finally decide.”

Now, he also wrote to Craig, so Craig you had separate advice for him.

**Craig:** He did. I don’t see his version of the email that was sent to me. So I’m just going to assume that he also started with, “Dear Craig, you’re one of the rare few to have both a successful screenwriting career and accessible email address.”

I wrote back, “Isaac, I strongly recommend USC.” I just want to point out, I always strongly recommend things. Always.

“I strongly recommend USC. My understanding is that USC’s program is far more vocational than NYU’s, which is a bit more, shall we say, academic. However, don’t make any decisions just yet. I’ve forwarded your question to Howard A. Rodman who teaches at USC. I’m hoping he has a more informative answer for you. Full disclosure: I didn’t go to USC or NYU, so no bias here. Craig.”

**John:** All right. So, Isaac, we have you here with us. We’ve been wanting to know the answer to this question. What school did you choose to go to?

**Isaac:** I went to NYU.

**John:** All right. And has that all worked out OK for you?

**Isaac:** It worked out. It did.

**John:** All right. It worked out so specifically well that here is the twist in all of this – the emails that you sent were 13 years ago.

**Isaac:** Yeah.

**John:** So you were a high school student. You are no longer a high school student.

**Isaac:** I’m not. Unfortunately. Or fortunately. Both.

**John:** You are a writer working in film and television. What are the most recent things we would know you for?

**Isaac:** Yeah, my writing partner Elizabeth and I just wrote the movie Love, Simon and we’re also the co-showrunners of This is Us on NBC.

**John:** So that’s a pretty busy life. Isaac Aptaker, Elizabeth Berger, welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Isaac:** Thanks.

**Elizabeth Berger:** Thank you. Thanks for having us.

**Craig:** This is so cool. Because, I mean, first of all we were so nice.

**Isaac:** You guys were so nice.

**Elizabeth:** So nice.

**Craig:** You have to understand, because this is 2005 when Isaac writes this to us. So we actually don’t even really know each other at that point, or barely. We kind of knew each other.

**John:** Yeah. At this point did he have his website up?

**Isaac:** Yeah, you must have.

**Craig:** So we had talked a couple times on the phone, but we were far from doing a podcast together or anything like this. And we were both actually very – we wrote you back. Thank god. I mean, how often does this work out, right?

**Elizabeth:** You’re inspiring me as I’m sitting here. I’m like I need to write nicer emails back to people. It’s really incredible. And I imagine you really took it to heart.

**Isaac:** Yeah, it was a big deal. It was like, oh, this is so cool.

**Craig:** Well, that’s nice, probably though – maybe John you always write back to people like this, but I generally will be nicer if the email is well written and there’s some indication of intelligence there and I don’t think I’m completely wasting my time writing to this person. So, good eye for talent. We should have signed him.

**John:** We should have signed him then.

**Craig:** Right. We should have gotten both of these.

**John:** Yeah. Little finder fees. So I guess the reason why I did write back the more lengthy answer is because your email was asking one specific question between two different schools. You seemed smart. You had like a whole narrative to like what your story was. The cab driver was a recurring character in it. That was a question I could answer that you would actually maybe take my advice seriously.

And, of course, you did take my advice and not Craig’s advice.

**Isaac:** I did. Yeah. It’s true.

**John:** And went to NYU.

**Craig:** Which worked out.

**Isaac:** It did.

**Craig:** I mean, although, in my defense—

**Isaac:** Who knows what would have happened?

**Craig:** Correct. I mean, no offense to Elizabeth—

**Elizabeth:** Totally.

**Craig:** He could currently be everything.

**John:** Because you’re doing OK.

**Elizabeth:** There is room for improvement.

**Isaac:** I haven’t created a franchise yet.

**Craig:** I think the good news is the worse of his outcomes has been pretty good. But I was at least honest about the fact that I really didn’t know how to answer your question. And so I sent him off to Howard Rodman who obviously blew it.

**John:** Did you end up talking to Howard Rodman?

**Isaac:** I don’t remember. I don’t know if he ever reached out. I do remember it was a little trickier, because I had actually – I had applied to NYU early so I had already signed a contract and committed and then I found out I got into USC. So there was this whole like I would have to break that. There was a whole legal situation to it, too. But I don’t remember if Howard reached out.

**John:** All right. So, what I’m so excited to have you guys on the show for today is to talk about writing as partners, to talk about writing film and TV, and to your role in terms of running a show and what that is like now because this is all stuff that Craig and I don’t know a ton about. So, this is – it’s great to have people on who know more about what the kinds of things that writers are actually facing. So let’s start
back to NYU. So you wrote this letter. You decided to go to NYU because you got good advice from me.

**Isaac:** Yes.

**John:** How far in this process did you meet Elizabeth?

**Isaac:** Oh, I think we met pretty much on day one, right?

**Elizabeth:** Yeah. We were both in – we were dramatic writing majors, which is a concentration in screenwriting, television writing, and playwriting. And we were both in sort of the core class that you have to take which is called The Craft of Dramatic Writing. And we met on day one.

**Isaac:** Yeah. We became – in those classes you have to read your work out loud and people critique it. So we knew we liked each other’s just sort of general sensibility. We became friends. And then towards the end of school we became roommates with another guy in the East Village. And we decided to write a
pilot together about sort of that 20-something pilot or movie that everyone kind of has to get out of their system.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Isaac:** So we wrote that and got a little $10,000 grant from NYU to actually produce it in the apartment we were living in with this very generous third roommate who let us take over. And we didn’t kind of kill each other through that experience of making a show in our home in this tiny little place. So we decided to move out here and give it a go professionally.

**John:** Great. So NYU was undergrad, right?

**Elizabeth:** Yes.

**John:** So it was undergrad so basically you’re 18 years old, you’re in NYC, you’re going through this film program together. You’re also doing all your other college requirement classes. You’re roommates. You shoot this little pilot. How soon after graduation did you move from NYC out to Los Angeles?

**Elizabeth:** Pretty soon. Isaac went pretty much immediately. And I think – thank goodness he did because he sort of – I would have probably dragged my feet longer otherwise. Isaac went. He found an apartment. He found me an apartment in the same apartment complex. And then he was sort of like, OK, I mean, you can tell from his letter who you’re dealing with. And then he basically was like I’ve got everything set up. Are you coming? And then I followed.

**Craig:** I think that’s wonderful. And I think that every time I hear these stories about two people that meet each other in a writing class and then you hear her writing and she hears your writing. And then I hear these other stories of like he goes out and he does the thing. In my mind I’m already working on the psychological profile. What safety and comfort does she bring you and what safety and comfort do you bring her? Because it’s so scary to do these things, to move to LA, to write at all. I mean, John and I, we just like being scared alone. But there’s something that you guys do for each other. And it was like there from the start which I think is amazing.

**Elizabeth:** For sure. And I will say even that first day at NYU, like we are all sort of gathering as freshmen. And Isaac is the one person in a buttoned down shirt and like slacks. And I was like who is this guy. And I think there was–

**Craig:** Who’s this nerd?

**Elizabeth:** No, who is this grown up amongst us?

**Craig:** He’s clearly disinterested in fashion.

**Elizabeth:** From the beginning I could tell that he had a plan. And that was something that was very helpful for me who loved writing but wasn’t necessarily thinking about what’s the most pragmatic way to go about this.

**Craig:** Right. And so he brings the plan and you do all the writing?

**Elizabeth:** I do all the writing. He’s never written anything.

**Craig:** He’s kind of more your agent really is the deal.

**Elizabeth:** No, Isaac does a lot of writing, too.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So a very classic thing has happened here which people are always writing into us about. Basically when should I move to Los Angeles? And you decided to move to Los Angeles right after you finished film school. You had a couple things written together. What was done before you got out here?

**Isaac:** We had written two pilots together. Back then they were like really big on writing a spec of an existing show. They were like you have to write – that was all we did at NYU for such a high amount of money. So we had a 30 Rock spec that we wrote together.

**Elizabeth:** But that was when we came out.

**Isaac:** Oh, we wrote that when we first came out, yeah. And then Elizabeth had a job writing celebrity gossip that she took with her from New York and I got a job working for this movie producer named Robert Cort who produced like all the movies that we grew up, like he had 40 or 50 credits in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Like his lobby is insane.

**Craig:** Bob Cort.

**Isaac:** Exactly. And so I was his assistant at a very small company, just a couple other people, and he found out that I was a writer and was very generous and said “I want to do more young comedy. Come in and pitch me whatever you’re working on.”

**Craig:** I love that you called exploitative generous.

**Isaac:** Hey, at the time—

**Elizabeth:** He was amazing for us.

**Craig:** Listen, you move out to LA and you’re like, “Exploit me. Would somebody please exploit me?”

**Elizabeth:** You’re like, “You want to do anything with me?” Yeah.

**Isaac:** Somebody who has actually made something? So we were writing our first movie at the time. We came and pitched that to him, which was this movie called Lauren Pemberton is No Longer in a Relationship. And it was right when Facebook was just sort of becoming a huge thing. And it was that notion of like what happens when that girl you’ve been in love with forever finally becomes single. And then all of these guys come out of the woodwork in the Something About Mary kind of way and pursue her.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s smart. I like that.

**Isaac:** So we developed that with him for like eight or nine months while I was on his desk rolling his calls and stuff. And then he was cool and sent it out and we got signed off of that. So it was pretty – we were fortunate. It was pretty fast.

**Elizabeth:** We were very lucky.

**John:** All right, we got to connect more dots here. So you wrote this 30 Rock spec. What was the premise of your 30 Rock? What was the A story? What was the B story?

**Isaac:** Oh man.

**Elizabeth:** Oh my god.

**Isaac:** It was called Traliz Jormon. And the premise was that in the cold open Liz Lemon and Tracy are accidentally photographed hugging. And then the paparazzi assume they started dating. And it’s very good for the ratings of the show. So Alec Baldwin forces them to continue this charade and hilarity ensues.

**Craig:** That sounds about right.

**John:** A very good premise for that episode. So you write this spec of 30 Rock. What else were you writing while you were developing this pitch for Bob Cort? Would we even call it a pitch?

**Elizabeth:** No, we were writing a movie.

**Isaac:** We wrote it on spec. We were just writing a movie.

**John:** So you wrote the movie on spec.

**Isaac:** We wrote that pilot about prostitutes in a department store, right? That was not good.

**Elizabeth:** I don’t know. But, yeah, we were mostly focused on Lauren Pemberton.

**Craig:** You do know. You know.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah, that’s very vague in my mind. No, we were writing the movie and Robert was amazing. He was really giving us development lessons. He was really pushing it forward and it really – it took more time because we were learning a lot while we were doing it.

**Craig:** And you guys were – we’re talking 22?

**Isaac:** I was 20.

**Craig:** 20, OK.

**John:** So you went to college early?

**Isaac:** I graduated a little early. And then moved out here.

**Craig:** Did you skip a grade?

**Isaac:** In a high school I did, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, he skipped.

**Isaac:** But I moved out here and I couldn’t get into bars to go to those assistant mixer things. I would like talk to the bouncer, and I was like “I’m running out of money. Please, I’ll have a ginger ale. I’ve just got to go in there and talk to someone.” And eventually it worked.

**Craig:** Just by time elapsing you got to 21 and then–

**Isaac:** Yeah. And then I was allowed to drink legally so it was all fine.

**Elizabeth:** I was like his older companion that would travel with him.

**Isaac:** Elizabeth was 42 at the time.

**Elizabeth:** No, I am two years older than Isaac.

**Craig:** I’m always fascinated to hear these stories about that particular time when people come out here because it just reminds me of when it was me. And it was the same thing. I had just turned 21. Got in my car, drove out here. And everything that happens to you is so vivid. And even now it is still so vivid to me the people you meet, the meetings you had, and the fact that you were late for one. And I still think about it. Getting lost in the Paramount lot, trying to find parking.

**Isaac:** Yeah. All the time.

**Craig:** Everything that happens to you in the first year is so vivid and so panicky.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And sweaty, and terrible, and wonderful. And I just love the – did you have the, because you went to–

**John:** Oh, absolutely.

**Craig:** I only ask if it’s different for you because you were here at USC. So there was kind of already a little bit of a connection.

**John:** There was a little bit more structure around you, but it was still the random people you’d meet out at drinks became important, or not important, or the sense that like, “Oh, that person who I just met now has a giant TV show. And they were just like – I was buying them a drink last week.”

**Craig:** I know. And then you start to analyze. You’re constantly analyzing. OK, what did they do? How did they do it? Why didn’t it happen for me? What’s going on? What do I do? What am I missing? All this thinking, right?

Then, I’m just jumping ahead a little bit. We’ll get back to it. Then you guys end up where you guys are now and you go, “All of that wasted thinking.”

**Elizabeth:** Yeah. The anxiety.

**Isaac:** I know.

**Craig:** Because none of it was really important at all.

**Isaac:** But it’s so important at the time. Every meeting is so important.

**Craig:** Every choice you make. Everything you wear. Everything you say. Everything you do, where you go.

**Isaac:** It’s exhausting.

**Craig:** It’s exhausting. I know, I love it.

**John:** So, you write this script. So Bob Cort is going to be producing this thing. It goes to representatives first, or it goes out on the town? What was the process for that?

**Elizabeth:** Reps first.

**Isaac:** Managers first, yeah.

**John:** So you sign a manager off of that, and then an agent? Or what was the process?

**Isaac:** Yeah. We signed with our manager who is still is our manager to this day, Aaron Brown, who was at Industry Entertainment at the time. And that was like December of 2009, I want to say. And then first thing in the New Year they sent it out to agents and we took meetings, because they wanted us to have a team before they sent it out as a spec. So then we signed with Verve, who was a brand new agency at the time.

**Craig:** Verve.

**Isaac:** Then they sent it out really wide and everybody had really high hopes for it. And we were like, “Oh my god, this is incredible.”

**Elizabeth:** “We’re huge writers.”

**Isaac:** We did it! And it did not sell, of course. But what did happen is we took a ton of generals off of it. They did a great job getting every single person to read that script. And it had enough kind of heat that everybody talked about it. And so we were able just to go out and meet so many people.

**Craig:** That does actually take the sting away. I mean, there’s certain outcomes in this business are final outcomes. A movie opens, it bombs, final outcome. Wah-wah. But those things, I’m sure it was kind of a rough weekend maybe, you know, but then suddenly you have these meetings. People are like, “I loved it. I loved it. I love what you guys do. I love your writing.” They start telling you what you do well,
whether they’re right or not.

And then jobs occur. I assume jobs occurred?

**Elizabeth:** Yeah, and it’s healthy psychologically too, because even though you’re not making any money, you’re at least like I’m in the industry. I’m going to meetings. I’m talking to people. And it makes you feel like you’re on your way to something as opposed to just waiting around.

**Craig:** So a little pro tip for people that are looking to exploit young people arriving in Hollywood, it’s validity that we are so desperate for more than anything. We want validation. We’re so, so desperate for it. And there is an entire psychological maelstrom that is going on in our heads during that time. So it was good that you guys got that. It kind of got you back on the horse.

**Elizabeth:** Yes.

**Craig:** And then jobs.

**Isaac:** And then jobs.

**John:** So I was in the same situation with Go. So like Go went out and everyone read and is like, “This is fantastic. We’ll never make this movie. But write us something that’s like this but that we can actually make.” And so you were getting – I suspect you went into a lot of meetings where it was like the water bottle tour of Los Angeles and you’re chatting about stuff, they like your thing, and they pull out this little card that has all the projects that they’re looking to make.

**Isaac:** Yep.

**John:** And then you go back in and you try to pitch on one of those. Was that the next step for you?

**Isaac:** Yeah. We made so many mistakes.

**Elizabeth:** Because you just want to be working, so you’re just like “I’ll do that one, and I’ll do that one, and I’ll do that one,” and you’re not really thinking it through very carefully. And it’s something that we had to learn was don’t say yes to everything. Like even if it feels like that will move things faster, it actually moves things slower because you end up committing to a bunch of stuff that is sort of half-baked and that you’re not that passionate about.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** What was the first thing you were paid to write?

**Isaac:** The first thing we were paid to write. We were only really pursuing feature stuff, but through the director David Dobkin, because we had sent him Pemberton to direct, he had a pilot that Neustadter and Weber wrote called Friends with Benefits that went to series on NBC. So we weren’t like formally staffing but Jeff Kleeman, who was Dobkin’s exec at the time, really liked our writing and said you guys
should come to the show. You’d be great for the show.

So Ira Ungerleider, who was the showrunner, met us. And it was our first ever staffing meeting, because that wasn’t what we were doing. We were so scared. We were terrified. And he tried to intimidate us a little to see if we could handle a writer’s room. And we got that job. So that was in the spring of 2010. And that was our first – that was our Writers Guild job.

**Craig:** So Kleeman is responsible for this.

**Isaac:** Kleeman, yeah.

**Craig:** That guy is great.

**Isaac:** He is. He’s the best.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah. We love him.

**Craig:** Does he still run the Ellen DeGeneres Company?

**Isaac:** I believe so.

**Craig:** I love that guy.

**John:** Great. So suddenly you’re staffed on a TV show in its first season, correct?

**Isaac:** Yes.

**John:** And it ran 13 episodes?

**Isaac:** 13 episodes.

**John:** Great. So you’re figuring out how to write a half hour. You’re figuring out how to put all that stuff together. And that was a single-camera half hour, correct?

**Elizabeth:** Yes.

**John:** So it was still within the realm of experience of what you’d actually written before. So it was like your script probably.

**Elizabeth:** Yes.

**Isaac:** But it was still scary.

**Elizabeth:** But the experience of being in a room was so different and so terrifying. And we were with real seasoned veterans. I don’t think either of us said a word for about 14 days. And finally Ira called us into his office and was like “You guys deserve to be here. I need you start speaking.”

And then we were like, “OK, OK, OK.” And then we came back the next day and we started to talk.

**Craig:** And then you started speaking. And I bet everybody was like, “Wait, where did these two come from?” Well, because that’s kind of the way it works. I remember definitely being intimidated by everybody that had done the job before because they all seemed very relaxed. And I was not relaxed ever.

**Isaac:** Right.

**Craig:** And over time I started to realize that a lot of them really it’s just that they were relaxed. They actually didn’t have anything else of value to offer. They were just super comfortable sitting. And then I thought, you know what, I think I can do this. I think I can write. I just need to be relaxed now. And then I got it made. So I just had to work on relaxing my body.

**John:** Can we talk about some finances during this early period because–

**Craig:** Do you have receipts?

**Isaac:** Are you going to audit us?

**John:** Absolutely. So you guys had moved out here straight from college. Obviously your expectations of living standards were low because you had just come out from college. So you guys are living separately in the same building. You’re making kind of no money, and then when you start working you’re splitting a salary. Was it lean those first– ?

**Elizabeth:** Oh yes. Yes. Isaac found me an apartment that I couldn’t quite afford, which was a one-bedroom apartment which had like a living area and the bedroom off of it. And we were like, well now I need a roommate, but I don’t have another bedroom. So we found the one person in Los Angeles, this lovely girl named Sara Randazzo who was like, “That’s OK. I’ll live here and I’ll build a wall out of bookcases.” So I basically had this girl living behind shelves with me.

**Isaac:** It was so dangerous.

**Craig:** In earthquake country.

**Isaac:** Yeah. Like nine-foot-tall IKEA Billy Bookcases that were not secured in any way to the wall. Just like waiting to go down on her.

**Elizabeth:** And then I had my freelance gossip job, which I actually could just pay my rent with, which was good once I was splitting it with Sara. But we did not have a lot of – when you were saying that you remember things so vividly, it’s those meals that we would eat are so clear in my mind like with what we would have.

**Craig:** What was your go to?

**Elizabeth:** The two of us combined. I just remember a night of broccoli with breadcrumbs.

**Isaac:** And marinara. Every night. Frozen Trader Joe’s.

**Elizabeth:** Frozen pudding.

**Isaac:** What’s frozen pudding?

**Elizabeth:** I feel like Isaac is pretending he doesn’t know what this is.

**Craig:** There’s frozen pudding?

**Elizabeth:** OK, I think it was pudding and then berries that were–

**Isaac:** Frozen berries that you microwave on pudding. Yeah, yeah.

**Elizabeth:** I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Because they don’t really sell frozen pudding. By the way, they should.

**Isaac:** That sounds delicious.

**John:** Well, there’s pudding pops.

**Elizabeth:** Right.

**Craig:** Yeah. But we can’t talk about pudding pops anymore.

**Elizabeth:** No, it was just pudding and frozen berries.

**Craig:** I remember when I first moved out here I got an apartment in North Hollywood, near the high school, and this is in 1992 when it was bad. Like a guy literally was murdered outside my window. I’m not joking. Like they knocked on my door in the morning. “Did you hear the murder?” And I’m like I didn’t hear the murder. What happened? There was a murder?

And so I had a friend of mine from college who was sharing the apartment with me. And he was Korean-American. He had Korean relatives. And they would just give us this huge industrial shipping crate full of ramen. And that’s what we just – [name of ramen]. That’s what it was. It was like, oh, it was the best. Like five days in a row, awesome. Day six, you’re like, oh man, no.

And where was this apartment building?

**Isaac:** Now it’s really cool. Back then it was East Hollywood adjacent. Now it’s where Sqirl is and all those cool places on Virgil.

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

**Isaac:** Nothing was there when we were there.

**Craig:** But you know, like in New York, too, I mean, it’s insane.

**Elizabeth:** Oh yeah, how different, yeah.

**Craig:** Crazy.

**Elizabeth:** Crazy. Even when we lived in New York, we were on 6th Street between—

**Isaac:** Fifth and B.

**Craig:** Oh, Alphabet City.

**Elizabeth:** And it was just starting to be an OK neighborhood when we were there.

**Craig:** Because when I was a kid you literally couldn’t – Rent – the whole point was like we can live in a building here and light barrels on fire. Like, no you can’t, not anymore.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah. Now it’s so fancy. Now it’s so trendy.

**Isaac:** When we were there a guy died on a bench outside of our building. It was still like that a little.

**Craig:** Death bench.

**Isaac:** Yeah, death bench. It’s still there.

**Craig:** It’s still there. Sorry John.

**John:** No, so you guys were going through – you were working on this show, you were splitting a salary. So I just want to make sure everyone is clear that you guys were splitting one writer’s income. You were paying a manager and an agent and a lawyer.

**Isaac:** And a lawyer.

**Craig:** That’s 25% right there.

**Isaac:** I mean, you can look it up. Back then it was like $3,500 a week minus 25%, split. And it’s for 20 weeks, because it’s a 13-episode show.

**Craig:** And then taxes.

**Isaac:** And then taxes. And you have to pay your Writers Guild initiation which is a lot.

**Craig:** And they found you for that one, didn’t they?

**Isaac:** Oh, they find you right away.

**Elizabeth:** I feel like you have to pay it before you start getting paid.

**Isaac:** Before you get health insurance.

**Elizabeth:** You have to pay it so quickly.

**Craig:** You do. I mean, that was the first thing – that’s how I knew for sure that I’d been hired was that Corinne Tippin from the Writers Guild called me.

**Isaac:** I know. And they keep calling and calling. One guy, another staff writer on our show who was also new was like dodging it, like dodging the draft. He was determined not to – he was going to go to Canada and cut off a finger.

**Craig:** They will garnish your wages.

**John:** They will find you. So, these 13 weeks pass. That show only went one season, correct?

**Elizabeth:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And so what happens next? Do you immediately start trying to staff for another show? Were you guys writing a feature?

**Isaac:** So by that point we had met Dan Fogelman who we share a manager with. He was on the set of Crazy Stupid Love and had a lot of downtime and was looking to read new writers. So our mutual manager sent him that script, Lauren Pemberton, and he really liked it. And so we met up for a drink and he was like, we hit it off, and he said, “I would love to produce your next thing.”

So we started developing a movie that we were going to send to him to produce, and simultaneously we saw on Deadline an article about an MTV show called I Just Want My Pants Back that we thought sounded very cool. And we were both desperate to go back to New York at that point. It was filming in
Brooklyn.

We went to our representatives and said we want to go up for this cable show. And they were like, you’re crazy, you’re getting off of an NBC show. It was different.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah, now there’s no stigma like that. But back then–

**Craig:** But then still it mattered.

**Isaac:** They were like, no, you’re on a network show. You stay in network.

**Craig:** Because streaming hadn’t muddled anything.

**Isaac:** Right. It wasn’t a thing yet. So there was this clear definition. But we really pushed them on it and we said it’s Doug Liman and we want to work with him. We believe in the show. And we got that job. And so then we packed up, after being here not that long, and moved back to New York to do that.

**John:** I never saw the show, but I can imagine a show produced by Doug Liman was chaotic.

**Isaac:** It was so chaotic.

**Elizabeth:** It was chaotic, but it was amazing for us because they kept Isaac and I on. We wrote all of those first and then they shot the show. And they kept us along with the showrunner to be sort of the onset presences. And it was so – it was all on location throughout Brooklyn with Doug grabbing the camera on the fly and sort of running around filming. And for us it was just like this incredible crash course in production.

**John:** That was probably the best part of it. Because doing a normal 13-episode show, there’s a whole bunch of people whose job it is to do that stuff. And with a Doug Liman production, I can tell you that your job is to do all the stuff – pick up all the pieces that fell on the floor.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah.

**John:** In the best possible way. So that was probably as much film school as your NYU experience was.

**Isaac:** Yeah. The budget on the show was so low, so we would film two units simultaneously. So the showrunner, David Rosen, would go with kind of the main whatever bigger scene was happening. But then we would be left with this whole unit and we had never been on a set before. We didn’t know
what we were doing.

And one night we were with Doug. He’s friends with so many people. He had convinced them to turn off the power. We were doing a blackout episode. So we turned off the power in a big chunk of Greenpoint. And I was alone with Doug. I was like 22 or 23. And trying to give him a note on a scene in the pitch
black. And he doesn’t want to hear it from this dumb kid. And I’m like how am I being entrusted with this right now.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** That’s kind of how it works. No one really can prepare you for these moments because they just happen. And when they happen, honestly, I do believe those are the moments where people either stay or go. I really believe it. That at some point the school is over and the safety is over. And then something happens and you are put in a crucible. And I remember my crucible like that was – I was working for this ad agency. It was before I wrote any scripts or anything. And this is when networks used to do fall campaigns. And I was 22. And my job was to write every single thing that every single CBS primetime

star was going to say. And then I had to go into all of their trailers and convince them. They didn’t want to be there. They didn’t want to do it. They were forced.

Had to convince them to do it. Rewrite it if it needed to be. Do it all day. And I’m talking like Candice Bergen, William Shatner, Dick Van Dyke – William Shatner was, no shock, the weirdest one. Angela Lansbury. The best.

**Isaac:** That’s a good one.

**Craig:** She was the greatest. I learned a lot. I learned so much. And that was I think a day where when it was over I’m like, wait, they let me do that?

**Isaac:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s insane. I love that you guys just jumped in like that and did it. It was so smart of you to not
stay safe.

**Elizabeth:** Uh, yeah. You kind of have no choice in those moments. But, yeah, for us it was the best time. It was like film school, except on the streets of NYC making this little show.

**Craig:** I love it.

**Elizabeth:** It was cool.

**John:** So it was a phenomenal hit and of course got like 19 seasons.

**Elizabeth:** [laughs] Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Once again, the show killers.

**Isaac:** Exactly.

**Elizabeth:** We brought our magic touch.

**Isaac:** Just did our 12 and out. Yeah.

**Craig:** You guys are ratings round-ups.

**John:** You guys were able to come back to Los Angeles, and were you on another show after that? What was the next step for you?

**Isaac:** So we had a good experience with MTV, so they wanted to keep us in the fold. So they had a couple new shows at the time and we wound up going on this show called Zack Stone is Gonna Be Famous, this little whiz kid Bo Burnham who was a YouTube star/comedian. He’s so talented.

**Craig:** Really funny guy.

**Isaac:** Created – he’s a genius. And so we did that for – that was really short. That was like a few months.

**Elizabeth:** It was really short.

**Isaac:** Which was a ton of fun.

**Craig:** And you guys killed that show.

**Elizabeth:** We killed that. Quickly.

**Isaac:** Killed that show. Brought that one down. Three shows in under two years we killed.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** You guys did what you do.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah, we brought our little touch.

**Isaac:** Sprinkled our death dust all over it.

**Craig:** By the way, I mean, there is kind of a point though that unlike directing, and I think acting to this, writing – there is – it’s not the show succeeding… – I mean, hits are hits, and they’re wonderful for you, obviously. But you don’t die because the show dies. If you work and you’re responsible and you do good work, they kind of just keep the writers going.

**Isaac:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which I think is great.

**John:** So you’re plowing through, killing shows.

**Isaac:** Just taking them down.

**John:** At what point are you back in Los Angeles full-time working?

**Elizabeth:** That was back in LA. So we did Zack Stone. And then after Zack Stone, Dan Fogelman created The Neighbors, this alien sitcom on ABC.

**Craig:** Which you killed.

**Elizabeth:** We did two seasons on The Neighbors.

**John:** Wow.

**Elizabeth:** That was huge for us.

**Isaac:** Kept that one on life support for a while.

**Elizabeth:** So that was a lot of fun.

**Craig:** But that show ultimately could not withstand your participation.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah.

**Isaac:** Dan elevated it enough that he squeaked out two years as we tried to bring it down.

**John:** Can we talk through your credits, basically what you’re credited onscreen for these things, because it seems odd – so you started in on this first show as staff writers?

**Elizabeth:** Staff writers.

**John:** And then for I Just Want My Pants Back, were you still staff writers? Or what was your credit?

**Isaac:** We were still staff writers.

**John:** Even though you were basically–

**Isaac:** That’s the hardest bump to get.

**Elizabeth:** Yes. It’s a hard bump. And also there were only like four writers on that show. And they were looking for staff writers. That was the only position we went up for.

**Isaac:** What we did get, pro tip for anyone who is listening, for young writers: we were able to negotiate script fees, which is a thing I don’t think people know to ask for. But if you’ve been a staff writer and you’re returning and you’re willing to not take the bump, they’ll sometimes give you script fees, which is a big deal.

**John:** So as a staff writer on a TV series, their staff writer salary that they’re paying you normally would include one or two script fees?

**Isaac:** It’s however many you write until it exceeds what you’ve been paid as a staff writer.

**John:** So essentially you have to be paid scale for the script you’re writing unless the salary they’ve already paid you would be more than that scale.

**Isaac:** So, for example, on Friends with Benefits, we wrote three episodes of the show. But that did not exceed our total pay, so those were totally free scripts. Whereas another writer would have gotten $25,000 to $30,000 for those.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So getting paid your actual script fee on top of your staff writer salary is a great thing to negotiate.

**Isaac:** It’s a big deal. It really helps.

**Craig:** Fresh cash as we call it in Hollywood. Fresh cash.

**John:** Talking up through the hierarchy of titles for television, so you start as a staff writer. You got bumped up to story editor at some point? Or you skipped over that step?

**Elizabeth:** We skipped that. On Zack Stone we were Executive Story Editors.

**John:** Fancy ESE.

**Isaac:** ESE.

**Elizabeth:** It was huge.

**Isaac:** That’s the weirdest title in all of Hollywood.

**Elizabeth:** All of them are sort of bizarre.

**Isaac:** Executive Story Editor.

**John:** Does that actually mean anything different? Or that was just a different title?

**Isaac:** No.

**Elizabeth:** No.

**John:** OK. A lot of people will go from Story Editor to just Producer.

**Isaac:** It goes Co-Producer. There’s so many of them. Co-Producer. Producer. Supervising Producer. Co-Executive Producer. Executive Producer. And then Consulting Producer is this wild card title that nobody understands.

**John:** Consulting Producer is often a person who was an experienced producer from some other show who is being helicoptered in to do a little bit of work on something.

**Elizabeth:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** All right. So, quickly can you talk us through some of the other shows you worked on to get up to where you are now?

**Isaac:** Yeah. So we did two years on The Neighbors with Fogelman, then we jumped over to – we wanted to work with Jason Katims. We were big fans. And he had About a Boy. So we jumped on to that for the second season of the show. And then after that we talk an overall deal to work at 20th and that landed us on Grandfathered, which was the John Stamos sitcom, which was a lot of fun. That Fogelman also produced.

And then from that, This is Us came along. And we jumped over to drama.

**John:** Great. So Fogelman, Katims, you’re sort of bouncing back and forth between the two of these sort of showrunner-y producers. At what point were you not just the folks brought in to sort of help along?

At what point were you more sort of fundamentally involved in the overall direction of a first season? Does that make sense?

**Isaac:** Yeah. I mean, I think we’ve been really lucky where most of the showrunners we’ve worked for were real mentors, starting with Ira. He was on the original Friends when he was very young. So he took a real interest in us and would let us sit in on notes calls. And he would send us off to go try to write a draft without a lot of help just to like push us.

And then Dan was the same way. He really sort of helped grow us and gave us a lot of scripts to write. Would send us to set and send us into editing by ourselves, sort of giving us increasing responsibility, both I think because he’s awesome and was a mentor, and also because I do think at a certain point we showed we could do it and it would make his life easier.

**Craig:** Let me just give you a little insight into this. Dan is a great guy. So I’m not denying that he was being generous and mentoring. However, to have people you can rely on, I mean, if I can say, “OK, I have 14 million things to do today, I am petrified. There’s no one I can trust – oh, no wait, I’ve got Elizabeth. I’ve got Isaac. Hey, you guys, I have a great opportunity for you.”

I mean, it is the most rare and precious thing. This is how you get ahead. How do you get ahead in Hollywood? By being someone that other people can rely on in their moment of need. And every moment that they have is a moment of need.

**Elizabeth:** It’s really true. And we see it now as showrunners. Like if you have that person that you’re like please rewrite this scene for me while we go into editing and it can be done when you get out, it’s the best. It’s like a hug. It’s like really the best feeling ever.

**Craig:** Comfort.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah.

**John:** To what degree are you guys together as one brain – to what degree can you guys split apart and just do your own separate things? Because that’s a real challenge with writing partners is the degree to which “Are they one person or are they two people that can be used?”

**Elizabeth:** In television, we were pretty much together all the time until we became showrunners of This is Us. And then it’s just too massive for it to be possible. So it was actually pretty new for us to be like, “OK, you rewrite this script, I’ll be in editing. I’ll see you in four hours.” But it’s just sort of the nature of the show.

**Isaac:** Yeah. We kind of had to rethink the whole way we work together. Because now it’s like we come in a little early, we have a morning meeting and make a plan for the day, and then usually we go off and don’t even necessarily see each other until dinner.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Isaac:** It’s sad.

**Elizabeth:** But not all the time. I mean, there will be moments where we’ll both have four hours in the writer’s room and that’s fantastic. But just when it gets crazy.

**Craig:** See, the more successful you get, the less time you have to do your job.

**Isaac:** Yes.

**Craig:** And do it the way you like doing it.

**Elizabeth:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s really frustrating.

**Isaac:** There’s so many emails.

**Craig:** There’s so many emails.

**Isaac:** There’s so many. You could do email all day.

**Craig:** Listen, this is my first deal with it now because of this miniseries. Every morning when I’m here, because they’re all in Europe. Every morning I wake up and there’s 40 emails about – and it’s not about any of the things I’m used to talking about, like writing. It’s all like “This wig, is this OK, and this person has decided to move this scout to this…”

It’s a lot.

**Elizabeth:** It’s a lot.

**Craig:** So much. So it’s good that you have two of you.

**Elizabeth:** I know. And Isaac does those well. Thank god.

**Craig:** Well, yes, it’s Isaac, it’s you, it’s Dan. So maybe I’ll just take one of them.

**John:** Pull one away.

**Isaac:** It really is a multi-person job.

**John:** What happens when you guys don’t agree?

**Isaac:** It happens, but it’s not that prominent.

**Elizabeth:** It’s pretty rare. I mean, it would only be related to a script and then we can usually compromise.

**Isaac:** Usually if it’s like we really – it’s whoever is more passionate wins, it tends to be. Like, if Elizabeth feels really strongly about something and I feel sort of strongly, she’s probably right because she cares about this particular point more. That’s usually how it goes.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah. But we don’t have disagreements on like this is the correct way to have a meeting or anything like that. It’s always like very nuanced debates that then, like Isaac said, one person will be like, “All right, you seem to care about this.”

**John:** Now, with This is Us you’ve not managed to kill the show yet. It’s actually incredibly successful.

**Elizabeth:** We’ve been trying. [laughs]

**John:** So can you talk us through the development of an episode of This is Us? And so let’s say it’s not the first episode of the season but episode three. What does that look like? What is the process of going from, “OK, this is the blue sky sense of this is what’s going to happen in this episode” to the room, the board, the outline, the writing of the episode? Like what is that process of figuring out episode three of
the show?

**Elizabeth:** Sure. Well, we break everything as a group. So we would say, all right, this is episode three. We know generally where we’re going in the season by the time we’re up to sort of doing one at a time. And then we just figure it out really as a room for a few days. And sort of slowly start putting down scene by scene what everything is going to be until one writer is ready to go off and do it.

**John:** Are you doing act breaks first? What is the process for This is Us?

**Isaac:** No, on This is Us, it’s weird, the act breaks are not that important. There’s so many stories and an episode is so tricky that a lot of times we completely restructure the episode in post. So we really – we keep the stories all pretty separate and break them and then blend them together. And what’s really important on This is Us, because it jumps through so many times, is finding the transitions between scenes when you’re jumping from past to present so it feels cohesive. So those we look for.

And we do break it with acts, of course.

**Elizabeth:** But we’ll do that later. So we’ll think like, “OK, here are five great Kate beats for our story.” And then once we’ve done that with everyone then we start organizing them and sort of thinking, “OK, this will be an artful way to go from this present day story to this past story.” But that’s sort of next layer.

**John:** So how you’re moving back and forth between them, that’s still done as the group?

**Isaac:** Yes.

**John:** On the big board. That’s not the individual writer who is responsible for the script? He or she will come in knowing like this is the plan at least for how we’re going to get between these two stories?

**Elizabeth:** Exactly. Not that there aren’t occasionally things that are found in a cool way once you’re off. But we try and lock those things down, just because the show is so complicated that the more someone goes off with the more chance they have of being successful.

**John:** Are both of you in the room while these things are happening? Who is responsible for that whole process? And how many writers are in the room as you’re going through this big thing on the board?

**Isaac:** There’s ten writers.

**John:** That’s a huge show.

**Isaac:** Yeah, it is. Because it gets small so fast, because once you get into production someone is always on set, someone is always in prep, someone is always writing. And all of a sudden your ten writers, it’s like “Who works here?”

**Craig:** It’s like three.

**Isaac:** During preproduction we’re both there because there’s nothing going on. Once it gets up and running it’s usually one of us, because there’s set and editing and content meetings and director meetings and so much going on. And then Dan is very involved in the show, extremely. He’ll come in, you know, he’ll come in and hear every story before it goes off to script. And he’ll give extensive notes. He loves editing. He lives there a lot. So he bounces around. But he’s super involved.

**Craig:** And then you just kind of together are on this hamster wheel that moves along. I mean, because how many episodes we’re talking?

**Isaac:** We do 18 a year.

**Craig:** So it’s like slightly under the traditional massive number of network episodes, but it is still far more than the length, so last week I was talking with Alec Berg on the show. So Alec does Barry, he does Silicon Valley. I think they do eight, maybe ten. Maybe?

**Elizabeth:** Yeah. We get so jealous when we hear this.

**Craig:** I know. And it’s like Robert King, because somebody was talking about just how rough it was schedule wise on their show because, I don’t know, the cable network had decided to go from 10 to 12. And he was like, “Oh, did they?”

**Isaac:** Oh, really, boo-hoo. I know. I love that The Good Wife owned that for their award campaign. They were like we make 22.

**Craig:** That’s a very Robert thing to say and do. But he’s right. And 18 is a lot. I mean, it’s a lot.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah. It gets pretty crazy. Because what did we do, we aired 10 in a row this last season. There’s a point where it just becomes you’re just racing against the clock. You’re trying to finish one script and you’re trying to edit something that goes on television in a day.

**Craig:** It gets a little scary I would think, you know, just that thing of, “Wait, is this good anymore? Because we’re going so fast.” But it’s good that you have each other.

When they talk about – I don’t know if they discuss the economics of all this with you, but it used to be that it was really simple. They would do 22 episodes on network television a season. And the whole point was you did 22 a season. Roughly at the end of the fifth season you had enough to syndicate and
everything else after that is – but they don’t really syndicate anything anymore. It’s very hard to rerun shows that are highly serialized like This is Us. So why do you have to do 18 episodes?

**Isaac:** NBC just wants – that’s the number. They want more. But, yeah, the 100 episode thing is not really relevant anymore. Our show is presold into syndication. Hulu bought it domestically right away. And internationally it’s different places. But the whole model is so different. Because, yeah, like you said, with a show where it’s so serialized, it’s not like you pop on an SVU and it’s contained.

**Craig:** No, you’ve got to basically binge seasons.

**Isaac:** So in that sense for the streaming services it’s really valuable because it just keeps you going.

**Craig:** Yeah. My daughter has definitely started mainlining This is Us. She’s all about it.

**John:** So while you guys were doing a TV show, you’re very, very busy. So I think you should add features on top of all this. So let’s talk through some feature stuff, because two weeks ago you had Love, Simon come out, which is fantastic. Congratulations. But why do features on top of TV? What’s the motivation?

**Elizabeth:** I don’t know.

**Isaac:** We’re crazy.

**Elizabeth:** No, I think it’s so different to write a movie. You have this space to create and to write. And it just is such different pace. And we really love it that we kind of can’t resist.

**Isaac:** It’s so nice to write something with an ending also. I mean, network television goes on. You just have to find an engine to keep things going. Just a story that’s two hours and it has a beginning and a middle and an end is so satisfying.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s why I still like – I just never think about true serialized television because I don’t know what the ending is. I’m just dumb. I need to know how it ends. I don’t know what to do otherwise.

**Isaac:** Right. I know. I’m so jealous of what you’re doing. I would love to write a miniseries. Like Big Little Lies. Just that whole kind of template is so cool.

**Craig:** Do it. I mean, do it. You guys can do whatever you want.

**Isaac:** One day.

**John:** When you’re not busy. So talk us through Love, Simon. How does Love, Simon come to you? So it’s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. This book comes into your orbit. What was the process of getting Love, Simon together?

**Elizabeth:** Sure. The producers at Temple Hill brought us the book. And we love those guys. We’ve wanted to work with them on something before and it just had never sort of materialized. They brought us the book and we were sort of like, “Oh, we’re really busy in TV. I don’t know if we want to do this.” And then we read it and we loved the book. And we also then learned that there had never been a major studio movie with a gay teen lead like this before.

**Craig:** I love that they had to learn that. It’s actually a really good sign though.

**Isaac:** It seemed crazy to me.

**Elizabeth:** We thought it was nuts.

**Craig:** When we moved out here if somebody said “You realize there’s never been a gay teen – yeah, no, we realize that. There’s never been gay people onscreen.”

**Elizabeth:** We were like how could that be true?

**Isaac:** We didn’t believe it. Yeah.

**Elizabeth:** But there’s been these amazing smaller movies, but there just hasn’t been this before. And we were just like we want to do that. That feels like that should be done, and we couldn’t resist doing it.

**John:** All right. So you read the book. You figure out your take on it. It’s a Fox/2000 project. You go in, you say like we’re the ones to do this. How are you stacking this work on top of TV work that you’re doing. Because this was before This is Us, I assume?

**Isaac:** Yes. We were on Grandfathered at the time. And it worked out nicely. We were a little bit on the show when we started writing it, but what’s so great about network TV is it does move so fast that you have a few months off. You have a hiatus. You’re killing yourself for eight or nine, 10 on This is US, months of the year, and then you have a couple months to do other stuff. So we wrote that on hiatus from Grandfathered before we went onto This is Us.

I mean, we’ve written a bunch of assignments, and this one was so just charmed. Elizabeth Gabler and Erin Siminoff at 2000 got it. They wanted to make the movie right away before anyone was involved. They said we’re going to shoot this in the spring. Let’s get a director and just do it.

**Craig:** See, it’s one of those movies you can’t stop.

**Elizabeth:** We’ve never had anything like that.

**Craig:** And you won’t again, by the way.

**Elizabeth:** We don’t think so.

**Craig:** I’m serious. But when it happens, it’s crazy. It’s amazing. And not always, by the way, does it mean that the movie is going to be any good, so in this case like everything lines up. That’s fantastic. Are you now sort of tempted to – well, I don’t want to get you in trouble or anything, but it’s fun writing movies isn’t it?

**John:** You guys are doing another Temple Hill thing which I don’t know if it’s announced yet.

**Isaac:** We’re doing John Green’s new book, Turtles All the Way Down with them and 2000, because we just had such a good experience.

**Craig:** Keeping the band together. I love that.

**Isaac:** Keeping the band together. And we’re trying to find something else with Greg Berlanti who was phenomenal.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Terrific.

**John:** Turtles is going to be a really tough adaptation. I don’t know where you guys are at in it, but I read that over the Christmas break. And it’s just delightful writing but it’s so incredibly internal to her experience. And so good luck externalizing some of that stuff.

**Isaac:** Thank you. We just started.

**Elizabeth:** Thank you. That is obviously the biggest challenge of it is it’s such a beautiful book, and how do you take a thought disorder essentially and make it cinematic. So in even thinking about should we do this/can we do this that’s obviously the number one challenge. But we’re excited. We have plans that we hope will go well.

**Craig:** Here’s what you should not do. I’m obsessed with Dune, David Lynch’s Dune. I just have this thing about it. I love it. And one of the things I love about it is it what you shouldn’t do, but it is fascinating and I talk about it every now and then because I just think it’s so bizarre. When people think things in his movie they do their own voiceover while he’s on their face. So they’re having a discussion, like we’re
talking, and then suddenly I’ll stop talking and the camera is still on me and then you will hear me go, “He doesn’t understand.” It’s the craziest decision that’s ever been made in movies and I love it so much. Don’t do that.

**Elizabeth:** OK. We won’t do it that way.

**John:** I don’t think that’s going to work for you. The other challenge, and so I’m not trying to make your road more difficult ahead of you, but obviously what you’re going to see here is that the book sets up an expectation that it’s going to be a mystery that’s solved in a classic way and it’s not solved in a classic way at all. So you guys are going to have to do some work that you’re not going to get credit for in a weird way in terms of like honoring our expectations of like what’s supposed to be happening in a movie versus what happens in the book, and because the book is so successful you also have to meet everyone’s expectations about this is what happens in the book.

**Craig:** He’s telling you to quit.

**John:** I’m not telling you to quit.

**Elizabeth:** I think it’s the challenge of an adaptation is how do you preserve what’s so beautiful about a book, but also make it your own in a way that strengthens it for the screen but still preserves what’s incredible.

**John:** Absolutely. And some of the John Green books have been just remarkably good transitions. Neustadter and Weber did a fantastic job. So just do what they did.

**Elizabeth:** We’re going to try.

**Craig:** Do you know those guys by the way?

**Isaac:** Yeah. We do. Weber sent us a very sweet email like, “Welcome to the John Green adaptation club. Good luck. That’s awesome.”

**Craig:** They are the best guys.

**Isaac:** They’re the best.

**Elizabeth:** They’re the best. It’s actually, it’s kind of a funny story. But when Fault in our Stars first came out, Isaac and I read it. And we were like, “Oh my god, we love this so much. We would love to write this so much.” And we kind of knew, but we didn’t have all the information that they were talking to other people. And they were kind of far along. We didn’t know how far along they were. We wrote 20 pages of
The Fault in our Stars.

**Isaac:** In one night.

**Elizabeth:** Because we were going in to meet with Temple Hill. So we were like what else do we have, we have to try. And we went in and we had our 20 pages. And we meet with Wyck Godfrey and he was like, “Guys, I can’t read that.”

**Craig:** By the way, good for Wyck.

**Isaac:** He felt so bad.

**Craig:** Marty would have absolutely read it.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah, Marty would have. But he was like heartbroken for us. But he was like, “Guys, we pretty much hired these guys. And even if we hadn’t, it’s illegal for me to read that.”

And we were like, “OK.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Marty would have had them writing the other 80 pages.

**Isaac:** I’m like, great, it’s already a quarter done.

**Craig:** Yeah, keep going.

**Elizabeth:** But it worked out because obviously those guys did an incredible job, and I think we were so heartbreaking that Temple Hill remembered us and came to us down the line.

**Craig:** When you have some passion – again, what are people looking for? They’re looking for people that will comfort them. They’re looking for people that they know they can rely on. They’re looking for people with passion. And as it turns out, weirdly enough, I think 90% of the people that are trying to “make it” in this business don’t have that passion, aren’t comforting, aren’t the people you can rely on. If anything they’re here to kind of take.

There’s a lot of people that show up here looking to take, fame and money. And it doesn’t work that way. You guys did it the right way, which is fantastic.

**Isaac:** Thank you.

**John:** To circle stuff back around, so 13 years ago you sent through this email. If some kid were to send you that same email right now and write to you—

**Craig:** Delete.

**Elizabeth:** No, Isaac answers stuff.

**John:** What advice would you give him or her about sort of entering the industry now or sort of like what choices to make now because you guys are much closer to this than we were obviously? So, what advice would you give to a young kid applying to one of these film schools or thinking about how to get started in the industry?

**Isaac:** I actually just got asked this a couple days ago by a kid I used to babysit for who wants to be a writer. What I see so much right now is that people get so caught up with like how do I find an agent, how do I get a job, how do I become an assistant that they don’t leave themselves any time to write.
And so they’re great and they wind up in a position where they have all this access and all these people who are rooting for them and would love to read their script and they don’t have the script because all they’ve been doing is networking and getting writers lunch and all that stuff.

So I think you have to find a lifestyle that allows you time to write the thing and also meet the people who will read the thing. Because without both parts of the equation you’re not going to get there.

**Craig:** So, so true. And I got to tell you, I still don’t really know what networking is. I mean, I know what people describe as networking. I’ve never done it. I don’t know what it is. I didn’t do it when I got out here. I did my job during the day and then I would go home and write.

**Isaac:** Right. Exactly.

**Craig:** And other people were networking. But to what end? If you don’t have anything to show?

**Isaac:** If you don’t have a script no one can help you.

**Craig:** Congrats on your networking. That’s not a job. Really, your job is going places, having two drinks, and boring people with your talking. Which is, again, a wanting. It’s a need. I’m here to see what you can all do for me.

**Isaac:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And I was always just trying to write things to see what I could do for other people. You guys did it right.

**John:** Elizabeth, any other advice for that writer who is– ?

**Elizabeth:** Yes. I mean, tacking on to Isaac, I think it’s write as if someone is waiting for it. I mean, one of the things that was so incredible for us about having a partner is we would set deadlines for each other. And of course they didn’t really matter our deadlines, but we took them so seriously. So if I knew I had ten pages due the next day for Isaac I was staying up late and writing those pages. And he was doing the same.

And I think if you work as if someone is waiting for your work, at a certain point someone will be ready to read it and you just want to be ready for that moment.

**Craig:** Discipline.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Discipline.

**John:** All right. It’s come time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Love these guys.

**John:** Craig, start us off with your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** OK, my One Cool Thing. So, as everybody knows who listens to this podcast I’m a big crossword puzzle guy. There is a collection of crossword puzzles called Queer Qrosswords. I’m going to read their description. It’s a dynamic pack of 22 LGBTQ+ themed crosswords which you can get just by donating $10 or more to a LGBTQ+ charity like the ones listed below, and then they have things like the Trevor Project, and even broader ones like ACLU, and Immigration Equality, and so on and so forth.

I’m a friend of the LGBTQ+ community, but also really mostly I like crosswords. So, I chucked some dough at the ACLU, I got this pack. I’m about halfway through. I do a couple a day now. But there is – I think I’ve talked about Mark Halpin on this podcast before. He’s one of my favorite crossword constructors. And he does this amazing puzzle omnibus meta puzzle madness thing every Labor Day. He has a puzzle in this that is just spectacular. He’s so good at it. It’s really clever. It’s really smart. He’s very good with the meta stuff.

So if you like crossword puzzles, Queer Qrosswords. And this is the annoying part, but we’ll have a link. But it’s Queer and then Crosswords they spelled with a Q. I don’t like that. But it’s QueerQrosswords.com

**Isaac:** That’s tough.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t like it. That’s the one mistake they made. Otherwise, great pack. And, you know, it’s a good cause. $10 to help some people out.

**John:** Very nice. My One Cool Thing is taking Twitter off your phone while you’re on vacation. So I went to Japan for two weeks and I deleted Twitter off my phone and it was incredibly helpful. I find that if I have Twitter on my phone those dead moments I’ll just pull up Twitter and I’ll just become outraged. And it also keeps me too connected with my life here. So just deleting it off my phone, I still had it on my iPad so at night I could check Twitter. But it was great. And so I put a little pin at the top saying “Hey I’m going to be slow responding because I took Twitter off my phone.” And it was really good.

So I put Twitter back on my phone now that I’m back in Los Angeles, but I would just say when you take a vacation take a Twitter vacation as well. And it was a really good thing for me to do for these past two weeks, so I really enjoyed it.

**Craig:** Smart.

**John:** Do you guys have One Cool Things for us?

**Isaac:** Do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Elizabeth:** I have a similarly technology-based one to John’s. I’ve been doing this thing where I’ve told myself I’m not going to be embarrassed to just sit while I wait for someone to show up. Because usually I’m like – I look weird if I’m not on my phone. So even if I don’t want to be on my phone I’m on my phone. But now I’m like, no, I’m going to sit and that’s fine. Like I used to do before I had a cellphone. And you notice the world. Like you notice interactions that you haven’t noticed in a while.

**Craig:** You also have to figure out what to do with your arms.

**Elizabeth:** It’s very unnerving. I mean, I hate it right now. I’m still in the process where I’m trying to break myself out of feeling uncomfortable, but I think it’s good. It’s like we used to have those moments to sort of process things and now we don’t do them as much.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely true.

**John:** Isaac, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Isaac:** Well, related to that. A lot of people already know about this, but Elizabeth introduced me to it. This app called Headspace. It’s a guided meditation app. It is my favorite thing in the world. Do you guys talk about this on the show a lot?

**John:** These two weeks in place of Twitter I put Headspace in the same spot.

**Craig:** So this is me, just so you understand, like This is Us, This is Me. I have it. I have not used it. Every day it sends me a reminder. Get some headspace. Now I’m angry at Headspace.

**Isaac:** It’s making you anxious.

**Craig:** It’s actually making me anxious and angry.

**Isaac:** Oh, it’s so great.

**John:** Isaac, how long have you been doing Headspace?

**Isaac:** A couple of years now. Every day at lunch usually for 10 minutes. I lock the office door and try to get Elizabeth to do it with me, or she answers emails while I do it. But it’s so accessible. I’m not a meditation guy. I’m not a yoga guy. It’s like these fun cartoons. You get levels up like in a video game. And this guy Andy who invented it just has the best speaking voice I have ever heard.

**John:** It’s crazy how good it is.

**Isaac:** And if you’re ever stressed there’s these three minute packs. You just put it on and you just learn how to control your body. It’s great.

**John:** Yeah. The best metaphor that he sort of has done in these first two weeks I’ve done it is essentially there’s all these cars going by and you just notice the cars but you don’t try to hold on to the cars as they go by. And it’s really that same way with thoughts. That thought just went by and I don’t have to hold onto it. And it really is good for that because, you know, as writers we tend to be so worried about like that – what if that idea gets away from me? And it’s like, nope, just let it go.

**Isaac:** It’s the best.

**Craig:** And you’ve been doing it a while and it hasn’t stopped him from writing or anything like that. And he seems pretty well-adjusted.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He’s pretty well-adjusted? You’re the nervous one?

**Elizabeth:** Oh, Isaac? Well, the best is when we both – there are those rare times we’re both doing Headspace in our office, lying on the floor, and praying no one walks into the room.

**Isaac:** Our assistant doesn’t come in and be like, “Oh my god, where do I work?”

**Craig:** They’re sleeping again. Yeah.

**Elizabeth:** We’re pretty creepy.

**John:** Very cool. Guys, thank you so much for coming.

**Isaac:** Thanks for having us. This was great.

**Elizabeth:** Thank you so much.

**John:** Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Travis Newton. 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 one Isaac asked.

For short questions, we’re on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. Are you guys on Twitter? Do you want people to tweet at you?

**Isaac:** @iaptaker.

**Elizabeth:** Oh yes. I’m @bergernight.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** She’s so proud and not proud.

**Isaac:** That’s also the name of her company.

**Elizabeth:** The fact that I have to spell both words doesn’t exactly make it roll off the tongue.

**Craig:** You miscalculated.

**Elizabeth:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Berger Night.

**John:** You can find us spelled quite simply on Apple Podcasts for Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a comment. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. They go up about four days after the episode airs.

All the back episodes are at Scriptnotes.net. If you want to see things that Isaac and Elizabeth have made, you should watch This is Us, which you guys are about to go back into the room to start writing.

**Isaac:** Yeah. We’ll be back on September on NBC.

**Craig:** Yeah, get to work. My daughter demands it.

**John:** Love, Simon is in theaters right now. What else should they look for you having done?

**Isaac:** That’s pretty much all we have out this year.

**Elizabeth:** That’s it for now.

**Isaac:** Hopefully Turtles All the Way Down will be out in theaters in a couple years.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Guys, thank you so much. Bye.

**Elizabeth:** Thank you.

Links:

* Thanks for joining us, [Isaac Aptaker](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4170842/) and [Elizabeth Berger](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0074165/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1)!
* [Love, Simon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love,_Simon) is in theaters [now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0cbWdlQg_8)! Isaac and Elizabeth also run [This Is Us](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Us_(TV_series)) on [NBC](https://www.nbc.com/this-is-us).
* [Queer Qrosswords](http://queerqrosswords.com/) rewards your donation to an LBGTQ+ charity with crossword puzzles.
* Taking Twitter off your phone while you’re on vacation
* Not being on one’s phone while waiting for someone
* [Headspace](https://www.headspace.com/) guided meditation app
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Isaac Aptaker](https://twitter.com/iaptaker) on Twitter
* [Elizabeth Berger](https://twitter.com/bergernight) 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)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Travis Newton ([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_345.mp3).