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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/the-post-weinstein-era).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So, today’s episode has some strong language. Standard warning. You know what, headphones might be appropriate. Also, on today’s episode we talk about some serious things including sexual assault. If you have been a victim of sexual assault, please know you are not alone. Consider contacting rainn.org, or call their national sexual assault hotline at 1-800-656-4673. Thanks.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 322 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be discussing sexual harassment and other despicable acts in the case of Harvey Weinstein.

**Craig:** You just said that so merrily, by the way. [laughs] Yay, today we’ll be learning how to bake a nice cake and sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein.

**John:** But we’ll also be looking at what should happen or might happen in the post-Weinstein era, Craig.

**Craig:** There may be some cause for optimism there.

**John:** To help us do that and have that conversation we’ll be joined by two amazing guests. First off, Daley Haggar is a writer whose credits include Cristela, Anger Management, Friends with Benefits, and Big Bang Theory. She also wrote a terrific article for Lenny entitled “Why I’m Snitching on Hollywood’s Sexism,” which you can actually listen to in the Scriptnotes feed. We recorded that half an hour ago.

**Daley Haggar:** Hello.

**John:** Welcome to the show, Daley.

**Craig:** Welcome, Daley.

****Daley:**** Thank you.

**John:** And also Dara Resnik is a writer whose credits include I Love Dick, Shooter, Jane the Virgin, Castle, and Mistresses. She also co-wrote an article this last week with Gillian Boher for the Washington Post titled “Don’t be so sure Harvey Weinstein is going away for good.”

Dara, welcome to the show finally.

**Dara Resnik:** Thank you for having me. I feel like this is long overdue, so I’m thrilled to be here.

**John:** It’s very long overdue.

**Dara:** For a terrible reason.

**John:** No, a terrible thing has brought us all together.

**Dara:** It’s true.

**John:** So before we get into the meat of the episode, we have some news and some business, some podcast business. Craig, what is the most common request we get as we go to live shows and as people are coming up to us and saying, “Craig Mazin, when will you provide us with…”

**Craig:** With branded meat snacks.

**John:** Those are not things that we actually provide to our listeners. We provide quality entertainment once a week, but we also provide clothing.

**Craig:** T-shirts.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It was either going to be some kind of meat snack or a t-shirt.

**John:** So I’m happy to announce that we actually do now finally have t-shirts available for purchase. They are on Cotton Bureau, just like last time, but they are new shirts. They are brand new shirts.

**Craig:** All right, so new designs.

**John:** New designs.

**Craig:** And they’re spectacular designs.

**John:** Let us talk through the designs and we can have like honest feedback from our guests. They can tell us which of these things they would actually want to wear.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** So, the first t-shirt is Scriptnotes Classic. It is a typewriter with the word Scriptnotes on top of it. What’s different about it this time is it comes in a normal light mode and a dark mode, so it’s the same t-shirt, the same colors, but there’s a dark t-shirt and a light t-shirt. I think it’s fun.

**Dara:** I like that one. I would wear that one, but I have gotten a preview and I think there’s one I like more.

**John:** All right. The one I think she likes more is called Umbrage & Reason. And it says Umbrage & Reason on it. And it also says Scriptnotes on the arm.

**Craig:** Now which one of us is Reason?

**John:** I think I’m Reason.

**Dara:** Definitely. Yeah. It’s like not even a question.

**Craig:** See, I would have said umbrage is reason. But I get it. I get it.

**John:** Yeah. Unreasonable people could have umbrage.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s more of a raving to me. Umbrage, to me, is always justified. You’ll be hearing some of it today.

**John:** I think so. Our third and final t-shirt is the Umbrage Strikes Back. It is a Star Wars homage. It features the Scriptnotes little typewriter surrounded by laurels that suggest a Star Wars type universe.

**Craig:** And because you’re using my catchphrase, what percentage of the monies will I get?

**John:** You will get the standard Craig Mazin cut of all proceeds coming into the podcast.

**Craig:** So zero again?

**John:** Zero again. Our t-shirts help pay for Matthew who cuts the show, for Megan our producer, for hosting, and for all the other things. So, guys, thank you for buying t-shirts. But they’re mostly there because people like t-shirts and it’s a pleasure to see them out in the wild. Even this last month in London I saw them out on the streets of London, which was terrific.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s very, very cool. We do see them and I was at a restaurant, just like a lunch, and I was walking out and it was one of those little side streets where you have to kind of park far away from the restaurant. It was Little Dom’s. Do you know Little Dom’s?

**Dara:** Oh, I love Little Dom’s. I used to love the original, the Dominick’s.

**Craig:** Where was that?

**Dara:** It was on Beverly. It closed.

**Craig:** OK. But this one is in Silver Lake I guess.

**Daley:** Los Feliz, I think.

**Craig:** Los Feliz, thank you. Thank you, Daley. But you got to park on some far flung street. And so there’s just a guy jogging by, and I just glanced over and he was wearing a Scriptnotes t-shirt and I went, huh. And then I kept walking and he just sort of stopped like, wait, you’re the t-shirt guy. And we had a nice little chit-chat and then he just kept on running. It was very cool. They’re out there in the wild. It’s always nice to see them.

It reminds me that people do listen to the show. I know that John is fully aware that people listen to the show. But I forget. All the time.

**John:** Yeah. We will be seeing a bunch of our Scriptnotes t-shirts, I suspect, in Austin. This next week we’ll be there for – we have two live shows. We have extra special events. So, come see us this week in Austin if you’re there.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. We will have an excellent, excellent time. And definitely check out the live show that we’re doing on Friday night. Because that’s the one where John and I and some other writers go and drink a little bit too much. Not too, too much, but we probably go over our standard 1.5 drinks.

**John:** Yeah. We might get all the way up to two. That’s what I heard.

**Craig:** Which is crazy for me, you know, with my little Jewish liver.

**Dara:** Like thirsty in the morning hungover, but not like headache hungover?

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, that’s my thing. I don’t really have headache hangover. I either have thirty in the morning hungover, or dead. Like dead all day. I can’t do it. Yeah, my liver doesn’t really—

**Dara:** Work?

**Craig:** It works, like in the sense that I’m not jaundiced all the time. But it cannot – like you’re German. You could probably drink an enormous amount.

**John:** I can. Yeah. I can drink an enormous amount.

**Craig:** But like, Dara, I’ll bet you cannot drink that much before you get crazy sick.

**Dara:** I can drink. I can hold my own. I think there are a lot of people who might be listening to this who would say, “I’ve seen Resnik hold her own.”

**Craig:** Really? So all this time I’ve been blaming it on being Jewish, and it’s just that I suck.

**Dara:** And I’m really Jewish, and smaller than you.

**Craig:** Yeah, oh no, for sure.

**Dara:** We should test this and see which one of us can—

**Craig:** No we shouldn’t, because I don’t want to lose. And then I’ll be dead. You were not listening.

**Daley:** This podcast is a drinking contest.

**Craig:** It would be an amazing drinking contest.

**John:** Yeah. We replaced your water with vodka and we’ll see how it is at the end of the show.

**Craig:** Blah.

**John:** Blah. Last bit of news. This is a segment we’ll call John’s WGA Corner, because I actually have a few things I need to talk about. First off–

**Craig:** WGA Corner! You just named that on your own. I’m coming up with a better name for that. Not today. I’ll think of one. Go ahead.

**John:** If you are a WGA member and you got an invite in your email box to come to an outreach lunch, please do. This last week I was happy to host a lunch for screenwriters where we talked through issues. And it was really great. And to just have 15 people around a table to talk about what’s really going on was a unique opportunity.

My question for you guys. I asked in the room how many of you have changed agents or managers in the last two years. What do you think the show of hands was? What percentage of people raised their hand?

**Dara:** I would say very few. I would say 5%.

**Daley:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would go a little higher. I would say it actually probably – because it’s agents and managers. I would say it’s closer to a third.

**John:** It was more than 50%, approaching two-thirds.

**Dara:** Wow.

**John:** And so when you actually dig into why they switched agencies or managers, it’s really fascinating. So, that was a thing we wouldn’t have known about if people hadn’t come to these lunches.

So if you get an invite to come to one of these, please do. We’re talking to screenwriters first, but we’ll be talking to other writers in other categories down the road. So, if one of these things shows up in your email inbox, please do come, because it’s incredibly helpful to us.

Second off, if you are a writer who is working in comedy variety, so you’re writing for a show like Colbert, or Samantha Bee, the process of applying to get one of those jobs, you end up submitting a writing packet of your stuff, a submission packet. Daley, have you ever done that? You’ve written comedy before.

**Daley:** Many, many times.

**John:** So, a thing I was just naïve and didn’t understand is that I assumed it was just things you had already written, but they actually ask you to write specific things for that show. And I got sent a few of those things, the submission packet requests, and it was tremendous amount of work. And it felt like a lot of unpaid labor.

And so that’s a thing the WGA is looking at now. So, if you are a WGA member who has gotten one of these submission packet requests and it seems like, wow, that’s just a crazy amount of free work they’re asking for, send it in. There’s an email address called contracts@wga.org. And we’re just taking a look at that to make sure it’s all kosher and above board.

What were things that you saw when you were doing that?

**Daley:** So, I know some shows do or used to, sort of, used to have a policy to prevent against either accusations of theft or maybe just people doing free work, but like Letterman for instance, I applied a million years ago. They have you write top ten lists about old news. And I think same for shows like The Daily Show. Because there was a controversy with the Jimmy Kimmel Show when it first started. They were asking people to generate theoretical material for this brand new show. Which makes sense why they would ask that in a packet, but I think the WGA did end up getting involved. There was a little settlement. I got like $150 or something. And my packet was terrible. There’s no way I was getting a job there. But, you know, I did get—

**Craig:** So it was not worth $150?

**Daley:** It really wasn’t. [laughs] But I just remember it was kind of that same free labor issue.

**John:** Yeah, a writer I was talking to described it as like imagine you were trying to get staffed on CSI and they asked you like, OK, write an episode of CSI. It was crazy in the amount of work they were asking for. And so trying to find where that natural line is is really important.

**Craig:** In the arrangement, though, they’re not saying that they’re owning that work I assume, right?

**John:** No, so they’re not saying that they own the work that comes in. They’re signing some sort of thing, but the point being if you’re writing a specific bit for one show, it’s great that you own that thing, but you’re not going to be able to use that for anything else.

**Craig:** I agree. It’s a real issue. But then, of course, you have to figure out how it is exactly that these shows are going to figure out who to hire.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, what some shows have turned to doing is they look at sort of general packets and then they ask specific people to write these things. So it’s not an open call for everyone to submit these things. They’re asking – or they’re even paying.

**Craig:** Well that’s the thing. You could actually just give someone $5,000, satisfy the minimum basic agreement. Own the material, by the way. I mean, this is the part that blows my mind. If I were running one of these companies, no, I’m not going to throw $5,000 across the board to 100 people. No. But if I look at general packets and I narrow it down to 10 candidates, of course I’m going to spend the $50,000. And also if – and then I get to keep the work. It just doesn’t make any sense.

**John:** It doesn’t make any sense. And we’re talking about comedy variety people, but the issue of leave-behinds when you’re going to pitch a feature. The same type of thing where that is spec work you’re asking for people, and that can be really problematic, both for the writer and legally for the people who are asking for it.

So, again, if you are encountering these kind of situations, write in to contracts@wga.org. And we just want to keep an eye on it.

**Dara:** I actually think this is related to some of what we’re going to get into, which is a culture of respect for people in this business. And I think that’s pervasive in all ends.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Amen.

**John:** So let’s get to the topic at hand. So, to recap, in case you’re listening to this a year later and trying to remember hey what happened, because like before the nuclear war.

**Craig:** But there’s still podcasts.

**John:** There’s still podcasts. Because, remember, we sell these USB drives that are indestructible.

**Craig:** Indestructible.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s not tempting fate at all.

**John:** No, not a bit.

So, Harvey Weinstein and his brother, Bob Weinstein, created Miramax. And then later the Weinstein Company. Together they produced hundreds of movies, everything from Sex, Lies, and Videotape, The Crying Game, Pulp Fiction, The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, The King’s Speech. Plus, Scary Movie.

**Craig:** Yes. Scary Movie 3 and 4. I worked almost exclusively for Bob Weinstein for about seven years.

**Dara:** Wow.

**Craig:** So I have perspective.

**John:** You have perspective. October 5th, this past year, New York Times ran an article by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey entitled “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades.” So that one detailed – started talking about Ashley Judd, but other actors and employees who were working for him and encountered terrible, terrible things that he was doing.

A subsequent article by Rowan Farrow for The New Yorker extended the list of other bad things that had happened. Weinstein was fired. And that sort of catches us up to now. So, we were off the air for two weeks while this was all happening, but in some ways I think it was good that we have a little bit more distance and perspective. We’re not talking about current events, but sort of more what happened in general and what can happen next.

**Craig:** Well, who wants to dig in on this? I mean, you both did excellent work, I have to say, both the article and the essay were fantastic. And I kind of – I mean, I have my own things to say about the Weinstein situation, but I’m sort of fascinated to hear what you guys have to say.

**Dara:** Do you want to – this is like that Amy Schumer sketch where like the women look at each other and it’s like—

**Daley:** Totally.

**Dara:** I’ve got nothing to say. You go first. Do you want me to dig in or do you want to—

**Daley:** Yeah, you can go and I’ll—

**Dara:** I’ll dig in. I thought this was one of the best things to happen in a while, while being completely horrified. I was really floored and impressed with the number of people who came forward in such a short period of time. You know, when the Cosby case broke, that was sort of a slow trickle, which eventually became a flood. This was like dozens of people all coming out at one time. And as we saw, not just with the dozens of people, but then with the social media response and all of these people posting Me Too, Me Too, Me Too, and posting their experiences being assaulted and raped and harassed, there’s a safety in numbers with that.

And I think it’s making a dent. I don’t know how big a watershed moment this is. But I think we have changed some hearts and minds towards being allies for women and other marginalized voices.

**John:** Daley, did this take you by surprise? Like when this happened, what were your initial instincts?

**Daley:** The Harvey thing specifically? That did not surprise me, because of course we’ve all heard stories from guys, you know, about how abusive he was. But, yeah, I’m a little surprised just in the sense of there has always been this culture – I mean, I’ve never worked in the movie business, only TV. And there’s this real culture of, like, there’s a whole thing of the writers’ room, it’s sacred, and it’s a cone of silence, and all that stuff. And you’re not supposed to talk shit about the writers’ room, or even talk about anything that happens in it, because it is this sort of sacred, disgusting place.

[laughs]

But, you know, I’m glad for that reason that this did come out. The article I did, the Lenny piece, I had written months ago. So it was pre-Weinstein. And it just, very coincidentally, the intended publication date was right in the middle of this.

**Dara:** That’s crazy.

**Daley:** That helped it kind of get out.

**Craig:** That worked out.

**Daley:** Yeah, it really did. It was crazy.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** Back up and talk about the sense that everybody knew. So, I would say that personally I knew that Harvey Weinstein was kind of a jerk and a monster, but I didn’t know that this thing was happening. I didn’t know that he was abusive to women in the ways that he was abusive to women.

You were around the Weinstein brothers more. What was your sense, Craig, of what was happening?

**Craig:** Well, you know again, I almost exclusively worked for Bob. I had probably six or seven encounters with Harvey over those years. And they were fairly limited. They were unpleasant. No shock there. I did not know at all that there was any kind of – I guess what you would call harassment or assault taking place. And, of course, rape.

What I knew was rumors I had heard. And the rumors I had heard were rumors of kind of a – I guess you’d call it quid pro quo arrangements, right, so that “Well you know this actor and this actor Harvey had a quid pro quo arrangement. They slept with him and he made them famous.” Now as it turns out, and I’m not going to bother repeating the names because it’s just rumor-mongering, one of those actors said, “No, that’s not true.” She was propositioned, but nothing came of it. And the other actress said not even that happened.

So, those rumors were incorrect. And I never heard anything about that. I’m kind of – I don’t know if you guys saw Scott Rosenberg’s piece that he did.

**Dara:** I thought it was really lovely.

**Craig:** It was amazing, but it also – I was like, my god, so the Weinsteins really – I mean, they hate each other. Obviously you can see that. Two scorpions in a small box. That company was very divided. So there was the Harvey side and the Bob side. And the Harvey side was trying to win Oscars and the Bob side was shlock. And, of course, being from Staten Island, I’m on the shlock boat.

So I’m reading this, Scott’s talking about how on the Harvey side there was parties and there was glamour and there was award shows and red carpets. And he was getting flown to these vacation spots. And I’m like, oh my god, on the Bob side it was just darkness and occasionally you would get, you know, like he would give you a Diet Coke. And then they actually changed that. I remember in the office – in the office – they took Diet Cokes and stuff out of the refrigerator and put in a vending machine for their own employees. I was about to say that’s how horrible they are.

**Daley:** Telling.

**Craig:** But I realize that the raping is probably slightly worse. So, anyway, the point is I did not know at all. That said, not – it certainly wasn’t one of those things where I’m like, oh my god, I can’t believe that person is that person. No. this seems, yeah, I can connect the dots here.

**Dara:** I heard rumors – I was a PA in New York in the late ‘90s and would hang out with other PAs. Some of the names of which I remember and some I don’t. And the conversation often turned towards “He’s a really bad guy and here’s some stuff I think might be happening, but I don’t really know.” And that was obviously confirmed.

**John:** Sarah Polley had a great piece this last week where she talked about going there with a publicist and the publicist says like I’m not going to leave you alone in a room with Harvey Weinstein.

**Craig:** They knew. The publicists knew.

**John:** So that publicist knew. And so the question of if you’re a person who knew, or like strongly suspected, what was your responsibility? Like what should that publicist had done? And what should any of these actors who were in these situations should have done. And that’s one of those sort of impossible to roll back time to figure out.

**Dara:** Well I think the issue with that is it places a lot of responsibility on the victims, and on friends of the victims, and ignores a much bigger issue of power structure and power dynamics. And the way that you have to weigh the cost of speaking every single time you do it.

I even tell my students – I teach at USC – and I’ll tell them, you know, you might hear a joke and you might think “I want to say something,” but you do have to consider what the cost of that is going to be in the long term and do you want to use your capital now, or do you want to use it later for a more “serious” offense. So I don’t know what the “responsibility” would be. It’s a much bigger conversation about power.

**Daley:** I also think it brings up the need for specific policies. I know we’re a free-wheeling business and we’re artists and we don’t teach all that corporate crap and HR, but I do think it’s not even that people who don’t stand up are bad people. I think it’s human nature to see – I’ve certainly seen things that were not good and let them just go by because most people aren’t confrontational. We’re not really programmed for that.

But, again, it’s why if there’s specific sort of procedures to follow, because going to HR we all know is kind of a joke right now in this industry. It gives at least a path for kind of doing the right thing, which may help.

I also think, just as far as the TV thing goes, having more women there. Like I have been at shows where it’s usually the youngest person there was getting harassed, in a couple of cases. I had women come to me and I was able to kind of run interference a little bit. But when you have one woman on a show alone–

**Craig:** Also not really your job. Right? You’re supposed to be there writing.

**Daley:** Right.

**Craig:** And now, I mean, I don’t know how to feel about say the assistants who knew what was going on and were essentially engaging in this charade. They knew perfectly well that when they said, “Oh yeah, come on up to Harvey’s room, we’re all going to be there,” they were not going to be there. And they knew that was the deal.

On the other hand, I know that place. I know those guys, and I know that business. And everybody was in fear. Everybody. That is a – it is an impossible situation. It makes you, well, it’s like he separates – both of those brothers – separate you from what is normal. And they separate you from what is humane. And then you’re just in another culture.

**Dara:** I think that that’s actually true, though, across Hollywood. And you guys are lucky, because you write features, and there’s a lot of this stuff that you get to avoid. It doesn’t mean that you don’t get exposed to it, but we’re in writers’ rooms. And I have definitely been in a structure where you start to normalize abusive behavior and go, oh it’s OK, it wasn’t that bad today.

**Daley:** Yep.

**Dara:** And people do operate in fear, because there’s always the unspoken and sometimes spoken thing in the room of, well, if you don’t want to do this job there’s a thousand people behind you who can do it and who I’ll trust to do it. So, if you want to keep your job, then you have to just suck this up. And for me I actually feel like my career and my life changed when I decided not to be afraid anymore. And I’ve walked off jobs for bad treatment. And, you know, you find another job. If we stop operating in fear then, you know, things change.

**Craig:** Well, I’m glad you brought that up because one thing that has blown me away is just how much braver so many of these people are than I am. And I was. You know, and it’s specifically around this issue, because I know what the time that I spent working for Bob did to me. And the therapy I had to go through and the toll it took on my body and my mind. And there was no sex involved at all. And so I think about these women, and I’m like “I don’t know if I would have gotten out of bed.” And when people say, well, why did they take so long to say something. Why did they go back to work? Why did they agree to be photographed with him?

Those are the most rational responses, because you’re trying to somehow maintain your sense of how the world functions. You’re a decent human being. Something terrible happened. Another person did a terrible thing to you. Well, obviously we – there’s a relationship there. No, there’s no relationship. You just don’t understand.

**Dara:** And, Daley mentioned HR. You know, I believe that there are situations in which HR can be helpful, not related to sexual harassment. I think they can be part of the problem. I went to HR once at a studio that I will not mention, because I wanted to tell them that a friend of mine was melting down. And their response was, when I told this executive to tell HR this, their response was, “Are you sure it’s not just a disgruntled girlfriend?” Oh boy.

**Craig:** You know, I think HR kind of gives it away by their name. That is the most – I mean, “human resources.” Why don’t you just say meat? Meat Department. They don’t give a damn.

**Dara:** Right. No.

**Craig:** They are there, essentially, I believe in corporate structures to protect the corporation from accusations and liability, right? Now, in a place like the Weinstein Company, especially when they were completely divorced from Disney, HR, are you kidding me? That person is also scared for their life. Everybody is absolutely, I mean, anyway.

**John:** So, let’s talk about, you know, there’s a power structure, but what sort of structures would we want to see in place that would help mitigate or at least make these situations less common? So, a suggestion from Sarah Schechter this last week was blanket rule no meetings in hotel rooms. Period. Stop that as a thing. That cannot happen. And if CAA and all the other agencies said like “We are not ever going to let our clients have meetings in hotel rooms, particularly not like first meetings,” done. And none of this – forget the gamesmanship of like “The assistant is going to be there.” No. Meetings should not take place in hotel rooms. A simple thing.

But I also wonder about general best practices for all of us. And so if we see something, what should we do? And it feels like it’s not our time to inject ourselves not knowing what the full situation is, but at least to talk to the person who is going through it, let them know that you saw it. Let them know that they’re not crazy. Document it, even if it’s not going to go into HR or something else. I find the contemporaneous documentation of things that have happened is so helpful, because then you can actually see like this is the thing that happened. It helps you process it emotionally, but also like you know this is a real thing that actually happened. You’re not crazy. You can’t be gaslighted. This happened at this moment.

And I feel like if we all took it upon ourselves to notice when these things are happening and write it down, some of this stuff could be at least brought to light.

**Daley:** I think another thing we need to be doing, again, this speaks more to the TV end of things, because there is a locus of power on a TV show. It’s the showrunner almost always. That person is almost always a writer. Which means that person is not necessarily a manager. And we need to be training showrunners. And, again, I know our industry resists this because we’re artists and we don’t need that. And he’s a genius. And what you have is these – especially if it’s a very popular show – you have a cult-like kind of atmosphere. It’s like what Craig was talking about. Just everyone is afraid.

Usually if women are being abused, men are also on some level being abused at those kind of places. So we need to be doing a better job selecting and then training showrunners to deal with this stuff. And letting them know it’s not OK, because in the case of the Lenny piece especially, we had a showrunner – I don’t think he was malicious, but he let things happen and then ultimately kind of put the blame on me. I mean–

**John:** They put the blame on you for being a distraction.

**Daley:** Right. And that was a literal quote, by the way.

**John:** So this thing that was being done to you was a distraction to the show, so therefore you had to go to the B room and be out of sight.

**Daley:** Right.

**Craig:** This I think goes right to the heart of what has to happen in our business. The reason that I think somebody like that feels OK to even think that, much less say it, is because the most important thing in our business is the show or the movie. We have elevated that to everything. That is why certain people who are just notorious bastards are almost celebrated for it.

I remember reading an article about Scott Rudin years ago. It was almost glowing in its detailing of how vicious he was to other human beings. Same, by the way, for Harvey. Bob has always floated under the radar, but just as bad. And we know others, right?

And what it comes down to is this: Hollywood as a business, from the top level, needs to say for the first time that human beings and the treatment of other human beings in a humane manner is more important than the movie or the TV show. Holy shit. What a revolution that would be. Because the truth is what they have to be able to say to that showrunner is we’re killing your show. How about that? This is actually more important is not being a total piece of shit to another human being.

That obviously covers sexual harassment. It obviously covers sexual assault. And it also covers bullying, which is so endemic in our business, because it is essentially – our business enables bullies.

**Dara:** The problem is those are gigantic corporations that operate in a capitalist society. And so unless it affects their bottom line, and there are quite a few lawsuits that are successful and take them for a whole bunch of money, I don’t think they’re going to change their practices.

That being said, I do think – and I said this in my Washington Post article with Gillian, I do think a lot of this is a reaction to Donald J. Trump being the president. I think–

**Craig:** Oh you had to use his middle initial.

**Dara:** I think that we saw him – we in Hollywood, which is mostly if not liberals, certainly open-minded thinkers is sort of necessary to being a creative person – we saw this guy who did all of these things and treated people so crappily get up there. And we said, you know what, screw it. We’re not going to let this happen here anymore. And that’s one of the reasons I have hope that this is – even if it’s not a watershed moment, a moment that makes a small dent in this issue.

**Craig:** I agree with you completely. And I do think that Trump is absolutely part and parcel with this, because people are looking at him and then they’re turning and they’re looking at Harvey and going, “Wait a second. You’re the same guy.”

**Dara:** Totally.

**Craig:** And they are the same guy. I do think we live in an era now where it is harder for corporations to get away with this stuff. I think corporations are starting to figure it out as well.

Disney let Miramax – well, they fired the Weinsteins away. And I remember when that happened. People were so confused. Why would they let these cash cow guys go? I suspect it was because at some point Disney realized, A, they – I’m just guessing here – were probably not financially appropriate. And, B, because this was going to inevitably tarnish – they’re Disney for god’s sakes. And they knew on some level these were bad dudes.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was at Disney at the time I believe, came out and said Bob was just abusive, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t think you can now get away with this stuff the way you used to. And the more these things happen, I hope the more they continue to happen. I’m not in favor of a culture of accusation. I’m not in favor of a culture of presumption of guilt. I truly am not.

**Daley:** I like due process.

**Craig:** Due process is a wonderful thing. However, when you have somebody like Harvey Weinstein with, what are we up to, 40 accusers, and he’s on tape admitting that he did it. And he’s also a known piece of shit. Then I’m OK with it. And I think we have some other ones in our business. And I think people need to basically tell those people your treatment of people will not be excused simply because your movie or your television show makes money.

**Dara:** And I think that goes back to also what John was asking about, responsibility. I mean, if I was going to say where the responsibility lies, I think it’s in uncommon allies. I mean, there’s a lot of sort of what you might name patriarchal white men in my midst who sort of knew that this was an issue in America and knew it was a problem and sort of had a heart about it and would think about it. But I think that the inundation of these stories has had a deep and lasting effect on them. And as it stands even this week I saw them – some of these guys in my life – speak up when they saw something crappy happening. And it was the first time I’d ever seen those guys speak up.

I’d seen them sort of ha-ha laugh along with everyone else. And instead they spoke out. And those are the kind of allies, you know, you can’t leave it to the people who are marginalized to speak up for themselves. You also need allies who are in power.

**John:** So, we talked about Trump, but let’s also talk about Mike Pence and sort of the Mike Pence rule, because I also worry that that’s a thing that could come out of this, a negative repercussion that could come out of this. It would be the sense that men being so paranoid about having women around that they just like, well, the safest thing to do is to keep all women away. And never be alone with a woman. And sort of like never allow situation – never mentor a woman.

And I do worry that that can have a chilling effect, too, where it’s like basically all of the phone calls that don’t happen, all of the “Let’s talk in a hallway” kind of things that don’t happen because they’re worried. There’s a paranoia about being alone with women. That hurts the women who are not having those conversations.

How do we address that? Did that make sense?

**Daley:** I’m not sure how we address it, but that’s definitely a fear I have, you know, especially on the TV side because the movie business and even in the TV business will never say, “Well we just can’t have any actresses.” But what they can do is discriminate on the writer front. And I know I had direct experiences and was told by people post-Friends lawsuit – I think everybody is familiar with that. The woman. And regardless of the merits of that particular suit, the attitude kind of coming down from that was, you know, women are trouble. It’s sometimes better just not to hire them. Or you’re lucky we hired you. We really don’t. We’re afraid to have women here. We just don’t want the trouble. You know, all of that stuff. I have no idea how we stop it other than kind of raising awareness about it, trying to get more women in the mix and more women.

You know, quality writers have the kind of power I think you were talking about. Like it’s not a corporate level power, but Hollywood does run on reputations and kind of who is the cool “in” writer we want. And if those people refuse to discriminate and refuse to work with people who do, my hope is that will help change things.

**Craig:** I’m with you on that. Look, I can’t necessarily speak to how to solve the writers’ room problem, because I don’t know that culture. But I will say that, to me, the greatest burden is on men not being assholes. It’s actually not hard. I have a woman that I’ve worked with for – I think we’re up to now I’d say six years. And her name is Jack Lesco. Jack is short for Jacqueline.

And she is like my editor. So she reads everything. I’ve talked about her on the show before. And she’s an integral part of my work life. She reads everything I write. She takes all the notes. She gives me comments. And she’s in my – my office is two rooms in Pasadena. I’m in one. She’s in the other. Door’s open between them. And we’re there every day together. And here’s the deal: if you are a decent person, I think you should be aware that in that situation you have an obligation to affirmatively not do shit that is going to be creepy.

Because here’s the thing. A lot of times, I think, people do things because they’re not thinking and it comes off creepy. And then it gets bad or worse. Sometimes they’re legitimately bad people. But how about just read the room. Read the situation. And put yourself in the shoes of another human being, which is what we’re supposed to do all the time as writers anyway, right?

This is a smaller, physically weaker person than you, who may have had – probably statistically has had – bad experiences with men before. How about you keep that in mind? It’s actually not hard if you’re just mindful about it. It’s not hard to be not a piece of shit. It’s Melissa Mazin’s rule of life. You don’t get credit for doing the right thing.

**Dara:** I would say it’s not hard for you to not be a piece of shit. I do believe that humans are primal creatures and that there is a certain amount of deep-seeded rage in all of us. And some of us learn how to listen to the better angels of our nature better than others. One of the things – I was trying to think of a response when you asked that question in terms of how do you avoid a culture in which now we just can’t have older mentors and such. I think, you know, right now they give you these sexual harassment seminars and they’re treated a little bit as a joke, which I think I also talk about in the Washington Post article.

And I think that there is something to really taking those workshops seriously, but not having them run by lawyers, which is what they usually are.

**Daley:** Yes.

**Dara:** Having them run by people who know – I mean, when I worked for Jill Soloway she brought people in to workshop with us and talk about issues of power. And really to talk to each other. People of different types and from different backgrounds. And I think it would really behoove every show and every corporation in this town to do something like that. Especially because women and people of color are going nowhere. I mean, I actually do believe that we are on the rise out here and people are going to have to learn—

**Craig:** You mean “Going nowhere” meaning they’re not disappearing, not that they’re not making progress.

**Dara:** Yeah, yeah. Sorry, that’s confusing, you’re right.

**Craig:** You’re here to stay.

**Dara:** I think women and people of color are here to stay. I think men have been telling stories for thousands of years, and some of those stories are getting boring. You guys tell wonderful stories. No offense.

**Craig:** Every now and then.

**Dara:** But it’s time for some new voices. And with 450 shows shooting, they need new minds and new backgrounds. And we all have to figure out how to respect each other and give each other much more dignity than we do now.

**Craig:** I just want to tell you. I am not always a good person at all.

**Dara:** No, I don’t actually think you are.

**Daley:** Oh, we know.

**Dara:** I was trying to be nice.

**Craig:** And, in fact, I have had, and it’s in part like I definitely had issues with – it’s never been with women. It’s always been with men, where I have mistreated men. Because in part you get into the cycle, especially when I was working with Weinstein, you get into the cycle of daddy hits you, and you turn around and you hit the guy below you. And it was bad.

I know that I have sinned. And I think it’s inevitable. We are, all of us, you know, imperfect. And you try and get better. The thing that I think men have to acknowledge is that we have the capacity to do more damage when we are imperfect. And I think a lot of men get very nervous about this thought. That somehow we’re being picked on.

Nah, you’re not really being picked on, dude. You’re just bigger and stronger. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s like, I’m just not as threatened by a large woman as I am by a large man, because I’m not rational. I could die. You know?

**Dara:** And I also think there’s something to taking responsibility, like you are, like Scott Rosenberg did. I mean, one thing I didn’t see that I wanted to see were more people in power with specific examples of “I did this.” I think they probably didn’t because they’re worried that they’re all going to get sued. But I would love to see that. I think that that’s a huge step going “I did this thing.”

**John:** Well I think what you’re describing is the difference between a narcissistic monster, like what we saw with Weinstein, and guys who aren’t overall bad guys but have done some shitty things. And sort of how do we – I mean, feel like you need a truth and reconciliation thing to sort of talk through like these are the things that happened and these are the things that can’t happen again in the future. And these are the paths that we’re going to take to sort of move forward.

So, talking about sort of in the writers’ room, because Craig and I are not in the writers’ room very often, what are situations that women encounter in the writers’ room that a man in the writers’ room might not be aware that they’re doing?

**Dara:** It’s complicated in a writers’ room because of that Friends case. That Friends case basically says that anything that happens in a writers’ room is creative. It’s creative fodder. So, it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about someone’s junk. It doesn’t matter if you’re sort of making fun of somebody or bullying, like a character or people in general. I couldn’t aim anything at you. I couldn’t comment on what you’re wearing or how you look.

But what ends up happening in those environments often is because you’re in this creative space where you’re talking sort of lewdly about people, it does often get aimed at somebody accidentally, sometimes intentionally. And engenders an environment sort of outside the room where you’re a little bit more comfortable I think saying things that might be inappropriate.

I will say one of the things that’s complicated for me is I actually believe in that ruling. I believe that in the writers’ room you need to be able to say insane, sometimes disgusting, things—

**Daley:** Yeah, me too.

**Dara:** In order to get to the creative juice. But sometimes it crosses a line and that’s where I think a workshop might come in.

**John:** Well let’s talk about process though. Because even if the content is it’s OK to say anything, I hear from a lot of women saying it’s hard to get heard. Or the talking over. Dana Fox was on the show and she talked about this sort of weird way you deliberately undercut what you’re about to say so that it doesn’t sound too aggressive or too judgy. I see you both nodding.

There’s a syndrome that women can end up falling into where they make it seem like they’re discounting themselves before they even pitch an idea out.

**Daley:** There’s a situation where women kind of fall into, and again, this isn’t sexism on a Weinstein level, but it is a type of sexism. We basically fall into like a Mother Pence role of being the moral arbiters of the room, which in a writers’ room as previously described is not welcome, because for the guys to say crazy things and be bad, and then the women end up sort of, if you try to make a point about a joke, well, that may not make sense in this context, you know, or maybe that’s a little harsh of a joke. You know, having that criticism taken as – and again, in a writers’ room it depends what you’re rank is. And there are all sorts of rules of etiquette for questioning a pitch, say. Or questioning someone’s riff in the room on say my boobs, which was a thing that happened a lot.

**Craig:** That’s not – yeah.

**Daley:** Yeah, that’s not really creative environment. That’s abusing the environment.

**Dara:** And that’s not under the Friends ruling. You would not be able to do that under the Friends ruling. You can talk about the character’s boobs, but you could not talk about the boobs of somebody in the room. I think I just want to keep saying boobs.

**Craig:** Boobs.

**Daley:** I know. I started. Sorry. But, yeah, and we don’t want to be that person who’s always kind of correcting and moralizing, which again is why it’s good when men sort of chime in on that if something bad is happening.

**Dara:** And I’ve been called the PC police by talking—

**Daley:** Yes, that’s it.

**Dara:** And not just talking about you know saying, “Hey, you can’t talk about Daley’s boobs.” Like I’ve been called the PC police by saying that I don’t think that that is something that that character would do because we’re trying to amp up who they are in the run of the series or whatever. And it’s like, “Oh, that’s just something that you’re saying because you feel like you need to speak for all women.”

**Daley:** Yeah, there’s a real like straw man kind of situation that happens all the time and it drives me nuts. Where a guy will think like his joke, like no one is laughing, or they cut the joke because it’s too un-PC. You know, well Norman Lear didn’t – you ain’t Norman Lear. Your joke just wasn’t funny. It didn’t work. That’s why it got cut. It also happened to be offensive. But, you know.

**Dara:** Also, Norman Lear was subverting the culture. Like it’s a whole other, yeah, ball of wax.

**Craig:** It’s very difficult to explain these subtle things to people who are unsubtle and dull. You know. And it’s frustrating when they try and use these arguments. I mean, the truth is, I think, that when I listen to these examples that it’s really either you get it or you don’t. Right? Like you can see the matrix or you can’t.

**Dara:** And I think part of what happens, too, when you’re called the PC police is the person in charge, or whoever it is that’s saying that, is not acknowledging that you’re coming from a trove of experience. That it’s not that you’re just trying to—

**Craig:** Grinding an ax.

**Dara:** You’re not just grinding an ax or trying to manage what’s happening. It’s that, “No, I’ve been assaulted in my life and I feel a responsibility as a culture creator to put images into the world that do not beget that for other women.” And that’s a visceral thing. Not an intellectual thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**Daley:** And partly I think these issues are, I’ve said it before, but they are partially solved by just having more women there. It doesn’t need to be 50% on every show. It doesn’t have to be some mandate. But just getting a few more women in there makes it — one, you have allies, and two, there’s a kind of related sexist problem in writer’s room. Have you guys ever heard the phrase penis phone?

**Dara:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**Daley:** Very bad Sports Illustrated gift with purchase. No, it’s a term – did not do well. Yeah, they recalled a lot of them.

**Craig:** What is the penis phone?

**Daley:** The penis phone is – and it’s a term and I’ve heard it used almost exclusively by men. And it’s a joke term. There will be a situation like this. We’ll be in a writer’s room. Maybe I’m the only woman there, or one of a couple of women. Guys are all, you know, it’s kind of an aggressive atmosphere, the pitching. And a woman will pitch a joke. And it just won’t be heard. And there’s psychological studies confirming this. When there’s a majority group of men, women’s voices literally can’t be heard.

And it’s not willful. I think it’s just part of group dynamics. Anyway, the woman’s joke will be ignored and then if you have an ally in the room who is a guy, he’ll repeat the joke. And hopefully give you credit. So say, “Hey, I liked Daley’s pitch” and repeat it. This is known as dialing in a joke on the penis phone.

**Craig:** That’s hysterical.

**Daley:** And the fact that it’s a term in use in multiple rooms shows that, OK, guys know this happens. You’re not totally innocent. Don’t let it happen. Listen.

**Dara:** I had a writing partner for many years who was my husband and who is a man. He used to work for John. He’s been spoken about in the show. Chad. And he acknowledged that it was happening. I would pitch something. No one would hear it. He’d pitch exactly the same thing, and they’d be like, “Oh, that’s a great idea.” It was insane. We were like our own sociological experiment.

**John:** You’re like you need a Remington Steele.

**Dara:** Totally.

**John:** You’re controlling behind the scenes.

**Dara:** And in terms of that thing that women do where they undercut their own pitch, what’s interesting is I’ve worked in rooms run by women. And in rooms run by women you can totally say that stuff and it doesn’t undercut you, because they know that that’s just part of the vernacular and that’s how our minds work. And you can say “This might be a dumb idea, but.” Or “Maybe we can harvest something out of this. I don’t know.”

You can’t say that in rooms run by men. And I tell my students that all the time. When they are discussing notes in my workshopping classes and they go this might be dumb, I go, no, start again. This is what I think. Because most of the time you aren’t going to have a woman running the thing and you’re going to need to know how to speak like that.

**John:** Wow. So we have a lot of listeners who are aspiring writers. And so I want to maybe wrap up this segment by talking about what advice we have for people who are aspiring to work in this industry given what’s been happening this last month. Has anything changed? Is there anything you would want to tell this writer who is considering packing up and moving to this town?

**Daley:** That’s a tough one. At least in terms of television, you know, you have to start with great material, which with luck won’t be read with like a gendered lens. You never know. But once you’re in the room, I mean, the advice I would give is still “Don’t be a dick. You’re the lowest man/woman on the totem pole. Use your sort of bandwidth to pitch concise, clear jokes that are jokes, where jokes are asked for. Because there will be moments in the script where it becomes clear we need a pitch here. Don’t be pitching on something that’s already in there that people like. That’s not your job as a staff writer, or future staff writer.” Even writer’s assistants, sometimes they’ll be encouraged to pitch.

And keep it fast. Keep it concise. And make sure it is a joke. That will go a long way to kind of giving you credibility.

**Dara:** I would tell the people who are coming to Hollywood nothing new that I wouldn’t have told them two weeks ago. I think that what the post-Harvey Weinstein era will be about is better leadership. And that they should change nothing about how they approach this. I think everybody should still come. I think this is still a town that is predominately made up of dreamers and creative weirdos and wonderful people. And you just have to hold those people super close. And hope that something is going to change within their run in the business, and hopefully in women my run in the business, that will make it so that this stuff happens a lot less than it does now.

**Craig:** That’s great to hear. Because the truth is I do worry. You know, we’ve talked about this before. Sometimes when we go through the annual WGA report on the numbers, it’s like, well, here’s another batch of terrible, terrible numbers. And we worry sometimes that what we’re transmitting out there is, “Hey ladies, hey black writers, hey Asian writers, don’t bother. Right? These numbers are terrible. Just stay home. Go do something else.” And, of course, perversely that will make it worse.

And I do think that, Daley, when you said more women in the room, it just sort of – all you have to do is just project yourself into your mind theater and, yep, I can see how that is fixing a whole lot of problems instantly. So, please, women do come. And as part of the encouragement I would say that certainly the discussion about sexual harassment/sexual assault has never been more prominent in our business than right now.

And, two, that over the last couple of years it has seemed that there has been an awakening. Doesn’t mean that they have fixed things, or that things are – well, I think things may be trending a little bit better. But certainly there has been an awakening. There is an awareness. And so I think while we are far from good, it’s not as bad as it was, I guess. That’s – damned by faint praise, but that’s kind of where I’m at.

**John:** I think you’re speaking to a sort of expectation also. If you come in expecting that it’s going to be terrible in these ways, you sort of normalize it for being terrible in these ways. And so you can’t be normalized that this kind of behavior is acceptable. So, notice it when it happens. Speak up when it’s appropriate. And just make sure you find your allies around you.

**Daley:** Yeah. Because when you do speak up, I kind of tried to make this point in the piece. If I had said something, I mean, maybe I would have gotten fired. But I got fired anyway because I couldn’t get jokes out, you know? So, yeah. Try – try a little gentle confrontation if something bad happens.

**Dara:** And I will say I think it is going to change piece by piece. On Monday night when I taught my USC screenwriting class, right before I went into the class I happened to see on my Facebook feed the response to the Me Too feed, which was “I believe you, I believe you, I believe you.” So I went in there already very emotional. And my students brought up that I had written this Washington Post article. And I sort of put workshopping aside and said let’s talk about what’s going on and how you guys feel about it.

And one student said, you know, she works for one of these bigger companies during the day and she said, “I just feel like in the end nothing is really going to change.” And I told her that I really thought that what happened over the last week has affected some people very deeply on an individual level. And I told them the parable of the starfish. Do you guys know the parable of the starfish?

**Craig:** It’s a good one.

**John:** Tell us.

**Dara:** It’s a really good one. A little boy is walking down the beach at sunrise and there are starfish way down deep into the distance who are going to die as the sun gets hot over the course of the day. So he’s going down the beach and he’s throwing these starfish back into the ocean. And an older, more experienced man, who knows much more about life comes up and says, “Little boy, what are you doing? Can’t you see there’s starfish as far as the eye can see? You can’t possibly make a difference.”

And the little boy thinks about that for a second and he picks up a starfish and he throws it in the water and he says, “I made a difference for that one.” And then I started to cry in class, which was probably really weird for them. But I believe that. I believe in that parable and I believe that moments like this make a difference for a few people. And in the end maybe a difference for a whole beach of starfish.

**Craig:** That is spot on and terrific. We’ve been doing this podcast for, how long John? Because I don’t pay attention.

**John:** 322 episodes.

**Craig:** Thank you, sir. And how many years is that? Six years. About six years. And the truth is, I mean, we started for all sorts of reasons, but for me it has always been part of my penance, not for necessarily being – look, I’m not a criminal.

**Dara:** Except for that one time.

**Craig:** There’s been a number of times. Never crimes, just you know. But it’s part of my penance because we have an obligation I think once we realize how it’s working in our heads. And we start to understand how fear and shame have kind of undone us. To then turn around, find other people that are like that, and help them.

It’s why we spend a lot of time talking about psychology on the show. And it’s why we spend a lot of time trying to just help. You know, so we know we’re picking up a starfish every now and then. And maybe one person, literally out of all the years, something special happens to them. But you got to try. Right? You got to try.

**Dara:** Nothing ever changed by saying nothing will ever change.

**Daley:** Totally.

**Craig:** We should get that on a t-shirt. And also Stop Being Dicks I think is pretty good t-shirt material.

**Dara:** I want that tattooed.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a real simple, good rule.

**John:** All right, it’s come time for our One Cool Things. We talk about one thing that we liked this last week. For me, it was an absolute godsend. So I was in London and I was working on a different project. And I saved a file and then I opened it the next day and it was gone. It was just an empty file. And it was a chapter for Arlo Finch. And I was panicked, because usually on my home computer I have Time Machine. So I’d go to Time Machine and I’d pull it back. But I was just on my laptop in a hotel room.

Then I discovered something that I did not know. Dropbox saves versions of everything you do.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes it does.

**John:** So if you go into the web version of Dropbox–

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s awesome.

**John:** There’s a little dot-dot-dot button. Click that and it goes Version History. And it will show all the saved versions.

**Dara:** Oh my god, you just changed my life.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. Because not only can you find the thing that maybe somehow you blew away by mistake, but you can also like do an archeological dig of shittiness. Like, “Wow, look how bad this scene was for a while. It’s all there.”

**Dara:** Until I figured it out.

**Craig:** It’s waiting.

**John:** Yeah, so Dropbox is amazing for a thousand reasons, but that was just a tremendous godsend that saved, you know, it saved a chapter. God bless Dropbox. So, yet another god bless Dropbox.

**Craig:** God bless Dropbox.

**John:** Dara, do you have one?

**Dara:** My One Cool Thing is sort of in the future and it’s related to a thing that happened this week. My One Cool Thing is that I’m running the Avengers Superheroes Half Marathon through Disneyland on November 12. This is a thing that I do. I like to combine my cosplay and my running.

**Craig:** Naturally.

**Dara:** Because that’s the thing.

**Craig:** Why would you not?

**Dara:** It’s so awesome. I’ve dressed as Woody from Toy Story.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**Dara:** I’ve dressed as a fairy. I’ve dressed as a princess. It’s wonderful.

**Craig:** And what about this time. Can you say?

**Dara:** This time I’m going to be Black Widow.

**Daley:** Nice.

**Dara:** Really, really excited about it. I’m going to run with her swords in my hands. But what I found out this week is that Disneyland is canceling all of its half marathons for 2018 and possibly indefinitely.

**Craig:** Why?

**Dara:** They are saying it’s because of all the construction for Star Wars Land.

**Craig:** It’s Rian Johnson’s fault.

**Dara:** But I’m not actually sure that’s it. There’s been rumblings that the City of Anaheim has had issues with the fact that tens of thousands of crazy people in costumes take over the town for a weekend. So I partially wanted to say it, because if anybody ever wanted to dress up and run 13.1 miles…

They have stops along the way where you take pictures with superheroes. And you run through the park at dawn. And it’s really cool. And there’s still entries.

**Craig:** So I get to wake up at dawn. I get to run 13 miles. I get to put on a costume. I cannot not want this more.

**Dara:** It’s my favorite thing in the world. I was more devastated than I should have been when I found out that they were canceling 2018 races.

**Daley:** I thought once about doing a 5K.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that was exhausting. Right? Just the thought of it.

**Daley:** Yeah. I started signing up and then I thought better.

**Dara:** I did a 5K while we were sitting here.

**Craig:** I actually did a negative 5K. And what about you? What’s your One Cool Thing?

**Daley:** My One Cool Thing is the CIA’s Twitter feed. Which normally would not be something you’d want to follow. It might be a little scary. But they’ve been posting, I believe her name is Lulu. I believe she’s a black lab. A dog who basically rejected/failed out of the CIA training, but there’s very funny, adorable pictures. It’s on their Twitter feed. Check it out. It’s funny.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing this week, I just mentioned it to you guys before and you were like, “Oh, that should be your One Cool Thing.” And it’s frivolous but it’s so bizarre and weird. And it’s kind of old news, but I love it anyway. Somebody made this page called Rihanna Can’t Wink. So, Rihanna, the very famous pop star, occasionally likes to wink. It’s one of her things. It’s one of her affectations. So sometimes she winks in concert. Sometimes she winks in the music videos. Sometimes she winks on a commercial. And sometimes she winks on a talk show.

The thing is she can’t really wink. She does not understand or is not capable of the winking mechanism. The winking mechanism is one eye goes down and up. Blink. One eye. The other eye does nothing. She can’t get that other eye to not do things. Sometimes she blinks and just blinks. Sometimes one eye closes and the other one sort of moves halfway down. Sometimes she closes both and opens them in succession. And the person commenting on this is hysterical. So you just Google Rihanna Can’t Wink.

Of all the crimes in the world, that’s probably the most mild.

**Dara:** Maybe it shouldn’t be her move. I mean, if it’s a thing she can’t do, it should be out of the repertoire. She’s got a lot of other talents.

**Craig:** But here’s the thing. On the other hand like, you know what, go ahead.

**Dara:** You’re Rihanna. It’s fine.

**Craig:** Just keep not-winking winking, because you know what, you don’t care. I like it.

**John:** While you’re on YouTube, I would also steer you towards Mariah Carey dancing, Mariah Carey choreography. And there’s one specific video I’ll put a link to in the show notes that has Mariah Carey singing and there’s a bunch of men around her, but they basically just lift her up and move her, so she basically never moves herself.

**Craig:** That’s pretty great.

**John:** It’s a spectacular video.

**Dara:** I was watching her spectacular New Year’s Eve meltdown like in real time.

**Craig:** Oh, you were there.

**Dara:** I wasn’t there there, but I happened to be watching the TV at a big party where no one was paying attention. And I was like, guys, guys, something amazing is happening right now.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’re missing this. That was extraordinary.

**Dara:** It was great. Yeah, it was special.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our spooky outro this week. It’s Halloween when this episode drops, or just about Halloween.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place to send longer questions. But short questions, we’re on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Are you guys on Twitter?

**Dara:** I am. I’m @badassmomwriter.

**Daley:** I’m @d_haggar.

**Craig:** Not to play favorites, but Daley’s Twitter feed is hysterical.

**Dara:** She is. She’s pretty amazing.

**Daley:** Thank you.

**Craig:** If you like Megan Amram, you know, like play the Netflix game. If you like this, you would like this. If you like Megan Amram’s one-liners, you will love Daley Haggar’s one-liners. Very similar – it’s like surprise. Surprise, weren’t going to think of that one.

**Dara:** Daley and my friend Liz Hackett are often on the same—

**Daley:** She’s awesome.

**Craig:** Completely funny.

**Dara:** Yeah, Liz is special.

**Craig:** Yeah, Liz Hackett is hysterical.

**Dara:** As is Daley.

**Craig:** That’s another good one to follow, and she’s not even here. Why are we giving her help?

**Dara:** I’m basically her agent. Love you, Liz. Mean it.

**Craig:** Ridiculous.

**John:** We are on Facebook. Look for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts at Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a review. That helps people find the show and we read those sometimes. It’s very nice.

**Craig:** We do. John does.

**John:** I do. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts going all the way back to episode one.

We have new USB drives with all the back episodes. Or actually the first 300 back episodes.

**Craig:** Are they the cool metal kinds?

**John:** The cool metal survivable kinds.

**Craig:** They look like little tiny suppositories.

**John:** But you should not use them as that.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Off-label use.

**Craig:** I’m only pointing it out in case we are ever redefined as contraband.

**John:** Oh yes.

**Craig:** One could…

**John:** One could.

**Craig:** Theoretically.

**Dara:** I smell a Christopher Walken monologue.

**Craig:** You smell something.

**John:** If you do not want to have a physical object completely inside you, you can always subscribe to Scriptnotes.net. It’s $2 a month.

**Craig:** Better plan.

**John:** And you get all the back episodes and bonus episodes.

**Craig:** That’s a good pitch. $2 a month. No need to–

**John:** Put anything up your butt.

**Craig:** Secrete something inside of your person.

**Dara:** This is a little what a writers’ room is like, in case you’re wondering.

**Daley:** Totally.

**Craig:** We get that part.

**Daley:** Then someone would demonstrate it.

**Craig:** That’s the problem. See, we understand boundaries.

**John:** Dara Resnik, Daley Haggar, thank you so much for joining us on the show.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**Dara:** Thank you for having us.

**Daley:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

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* If you encounter a late night submission packet that seems iffy, you can email them to contracts@wga.org.
* Daley Haggar’s [“Why I’m Snitching on Hollywood Sexism”](http://www.lennyletter.com/work/a1024/why-im-snitching-on-hollywood-sexism/) for Lenny Letter.
* Dara Resnik and Gillian Boher’s [“Don’t be so sure Harvey Weinstein is going away for good”](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/10/13/dont-be-so-sure-harvey-weinstein-is-going-away-for-good/?utm_term=.76dbbe5b0dc3) for The Washington Post.
* Here is some information about [Harvey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Weinstein) and [Bob](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Weinstein) Weinstein who founded [Miramax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miramax) and [The Weinstein Company,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weinstein_Company) for reference.
* [“Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades”](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.html) by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey for The New York Times, and Harvey Weinstein’s official [response](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/05/us/statement-from-harvey-weinstein.html).
* [“From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories”](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories) by Ronan Farrow for The New Yorker.
* [“Harvey Weinstein Is Fired After Sexual Harassment Reports”](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/08/business/harvey-weinstein-fired.html) by Megan Twohey for the New York Times.
* [“‘Beautiful Girls’ Scribe Scott Rosenberg On A Complicated Legacy With Harvey Weinstein”](http://deadline.com/2017/10/scott-rosenberg-harvey-weinstein-miramax-beautiful-girls-guilt-over-sexual-assault-allegations-1202189525/)
* The case of [Lyle v. Warner Brothers](http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/05/04/grossman.friends/index.html) (aka the Friends lawsuit) and [the Supreme Court’s dismissal](http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/21/local/me-friends21)
* The last [Disneyland Half Marathon](https://www.rundisney.com/super-heroes-half-marathon/) (at least for a while)!
* The [CIA’s twitter account](https://twitter.com/cia) (feat. dogs).
* Rihanna [can’t wink.](http://www.vulture.com/2016/08/can-rihanna-actually-wink-a-twitter-expose.html)
* And Mariah Carey [doesn’t dance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWyfuaAjUiI).
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* [Daley Haggar](https://twitter.com/d_haggar) on Twitter
* [Dara Resnik](https://twitter.com/BadassMomWriter) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_322.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/should-you-give-up).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So Craig and I recorded this episode almost a week ago. And a few things have happened since then. For starters, Harvey Weinstein. You know Craig has opinions about that so we’ll talk about that in a future episode.

Another thing that happened is that if you’re a screenwriter in the WGA West, you may have got an email from me and the WGA Board inviting you to a lunch to talk over screenwriter issues and this current state of the studio system.

There are five lunches conveniently located all over town, all happening this next month. So if you’ve got the email, please RSVP for one. I’ll be at two of the lunches, will even try to get Craig to come to one of them. So you can ask him in person for his Harvey Weinstein umbrage. Now, on with the episode.

Hello and welcome, my name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is episode 320 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode consist entirely of listener questions. We’ll be talking about Bulgaria, Netflix and the quote-unquote, “growth mind set.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** But I thought today, we’d start with the giant question we’ve never actually addressed. Craig, do you want to tackle this big question?

**Craig:** So we’re going to present to you this question as if somebody wrote it in, but really it’s an amalgam of the question we’ve been asked a million times. And it goes a little something like this:

“ Dear John and Craig, over the past few years I’ve written a couple of scripts, I think they’re pretty good. Some folks have read them but no one is busting down my door to make them.

“My question is, at what point do I throw in the towel and decide that maybe screenwriting isn’t going to work out for me. I always think back to my high school coach saying, ‘winners never quit and quitters never win.’ But that can’t be right, can’t it? At what point am I allowed to say, ‘enough’ and move on?”

Oof, heavy one.

**John:** Oh, this is a heavy one. And I think the question kind of underlying a lot of the conversations I have, you know throughout the time we’ve been doing this, even back when I first started answering questions on IMDb for, you know, about screenwriting. It’s like I’m doing this thing but it’s not really working or doesn’t seem to be working, can I stop doing it?

The first time actually I heard it’s actually asked of me were sort of like, you know, come back to me was we did a live show and I remember being at the WGA Theater and it’s afterwards that this guy came up and it’s like, “Hey, I just want to let you know that like I listened to your podcast says, that it be okay for me like to stop screenwriting?” And at first I was just like, “Oh that’s horrible.”

[laughs]

**John:** And he said no, no, no, it’s good. Like, you know, maybe realized that like screenwriting is not a thing I actually really want to do and I feel like talking about it but I don’t actually enjoy it. And he was happy and so it made me happy. And so I thought we’d dig into this sort of all of the issues bundled up here about, you know, this aspiration of screenwriting and when you’re allowed to give up that aspiration.

**Craig:** And in doing so, we are not just standing on but embracing, hugging this third rail especially in our culture today. David Zucker, his answer to this one is always when someone says, “Should I quit?” He should say, “Yes, you should quit.” And if you ignore that advice, you’re halfway there to making it. And that’s clever but it is essentially a spin on the kind of advice you get all the time which is non-advice, apologies to David.

Because really what people are saying is, you should definitely not quit if you’re going to make it, eventually. And if you do quit, we know for sure you’re not going to make it. So the real trick is can you tell if you’re going to make it or not? Well, no. Generally speaking, you can’t. However, I think that for a lot of people, they can probably tell if they’re not going to make it.

And so part of the trick here is to have a very honest self-appraisal of the work you’re doing and the kind of response it gets and ask yourself, “Okay, if this just landed in front of me in a mix of scripts that eventually got turned into movies, would it even feel like it belonged in the same world of these other scripts? Or do I have enough evidence that actually this is not something that I can do at that level?”

**John:** Yeah, there’s a quality of self-delusion, which is so crucial to you know any new endeavor. And so whether you’re doing a startup, you’re like you’re launching a new business, a new venture, you’re some sort of tech product that you’re going to put out there, there has to be some level of self-delusion where like, “I know there’s a way I can do this.”

And at a certain point, you have to sort of stop and assess like, “Am I just still doing this because of sort of the sunk cost fallacy, like, I’ve invested this much into it emotionally and sometimes financially that I just have to keep doing it? Or can I step back and take an honest assessment of this is how far I’ve gotten, this is not where I want to be.

The hardest I think to appreciate when you’re in the middle of something is the opportunity cost of the things you’re not doing because you keep trying to do this one thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s one of the things where like, you know, if you are pursuing a career you don’t like, you’re just like, “Oh, but I could go off and do this other thing.” And okay, that’s great. You know, I can make that natural change. But with something like screenwriting, like, you might kind of like it. I mean, you might feel like it’s hard to sit down and write but like I feel like I’m doing something each time but all the time you’re spending trying to make it as a screenwriter or as an actor or a musician, there’s a lot of other careers which are so similar, that’s time could’ve been doing something else, something else you generally would enjoy and be good at.

I sat down for dinner this last week with CGP Grey who’s a great YouTuber and podcaster and he had a video out recently and one of the things he sort of touched on was this toxic idea of “follow your bliss” and basically, you know, that idea you should be delightfully happy doing whatever it is that you’re doing and it creates this system where you feel like, “Well, if I’m not doing the thing that I love most in the world, I’m a failure,” and this is sort of self-perpetuating cycle of like nothing will ever be good enough. And so–

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It might be worth an assessment of like what is it that you actually enjoy? What are the sort of goals you have in your life and is screenwriting high on that list? Great, but if it’s not high on that list then maybe you do need to stop and really think about where you’re spending your hours of your day.

**Craig:** I agree. I have some practical advice for folks who are starting out or maybe are early on in their journey, and it’s to ask yourself a critical question. What is it that you are fantasizing about? If you’re fantasizing about being a writer, that is dangerous. What you should be fantasizing about is writing. The amount of times in any given year that I experienced, let’s just call it the nowness of being a screenwriter is very limited. Here and there we have a meeting where you’re a screenwriter or somebody who refers to you as a screenwriter or you get a call from somebody, but most of the time, the vast majority of the time, and I’m sure it’s the same for you, we’re writing.

It’s actually a life of action not of being a thing and I think that people think because of what they see which is the final product that you’re a thing. I am a writer. If your identity is invested in that, then it’s going to be very, very hard for you to, A, honestly asses your own work and, B, let it go if it’s not working. Because now you’ve entwined who you are with this imaginary position in the world. I don’t really feel like I have any position. What I do is write movies, but I don’t think about a position that I occupy. I think about the work I’m doing every day. So if you make it about the doing as opposed to the being, I think you’re already better off.

And the second thing I would suggest to people is that you remove any notion of romance from what it means to be a screenwriter. In reality, it is terribly unromantic. I would argue everything that we think of is being romantic, every occupation. If you actually do it, is not romantic. The joy you get from writing television scripts or movie scripts, day after day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade, is like the joy of being married for a long time which is something that you and I both know.

It is not the heady excitement of an early romance. It is not intoxication. It is that more subtle, calm satisfaction. It’s hard to describe, but it is not exciting in this fireworksy kind of way. And I think sometimes people are chasing that. If you’re comfortable with “I am writing and I don’t need it to be romantic, I just like writing” then you keep writing. And make sure that you’re supporting yourself or anyone that’s relying on you while you’re doing it however you need to, and then you’re fine and either it will or will not happen, but, for you, you’re writing and so you’re okay.

**John:** Craig, I think that noun versus verb distinction is crucial and when I see people who are so obsessed with the status or the image, the idea of themselves as a writer as opposed to the person who’s doing the writing, it’s very clear sort of where they’re at in their process. In talking about, though, that the verb is what it matters that the writing is what matters, I don’t want to, you know, have people give up on their business because writing is really hard and writing isn’t fun. It’s not fun. It is hard.

And so the day-to-day process of sitting down at the computer isn’t always a joy, and in fact it is often really difficult. Even the stuff that should be fun can be really difficult. So I’m here in London and we’re doing Big Fish and so we’re in the studio, we’re preparing to get to the stage and there are things you see as like, “Oh , I actually need to write something new here because that isn’t going to work the way we’re trying to do it now.” And so, you know, I’ll move from, like, being the writer or sitting at the table. I feel like, “Crap, I need to figure out how to write something here that’s going to make this all make sense.” And that’s — it’s pressure and it’s sort of exciting that’s also sort — it’s work and it’s not easy and so I don’t want anyone to decide like, “Well, I’m going to abandon this because I don’t like sitting down at the computer everyday to work.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s probably most writers — most working writers you’re going to talk to are going to have similar experiences there.

**Craig:** Yeah, you don’t necessarily have a thrill when you start writing. However, if you can’t find a certain deep sense of, I don’t want to call it joy, but I think satisfaction is the right word.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you can’t find the deep satisfaction once you’re going —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then that’s a problem because I think that being a writer is a symptom of writing and a lot of people think that writing is a symptom of being a writer. I hear a lot of things like, “Well, I’m a writer so I have to write.”

No. No. No. I mean, look, if they killed my job tomorrow and I had to do something else, I wouldn’t eat a gun, you know? I would be bummed out because I do love writing on some sort of deep, non-romantic, satisfying level but it is not the only thing in the world. There are other things I love. There are other things you love. So it’s really about the process and finding your satisfaction with the process. No one can take that from you and in fact there are people that go to karaoke once a week without fail and they have the best time. They cannot sing at all. No one ever says, “You’re an idiot for enjoying that,” because they’re not. They’re enjoying it.

Maybe you love the process or, again, you find that deep satisfaction and you’re just not very good at it but it still gives you something good inside, keep doing it. The world will let you know one way or another if money is coming, but if it’s not and you’re enjoying it fine. If there is something else you can do that is as satisfying where you will be rewarded more, then it’s okay to go do that.

**John:** I completely agree. So there’s a bunch of little questions that came in that are about the same topics, so I thought we’d fold them into this discussion. Let’s start with Michael from LA who writes, “What’s your opinion on aspiring screenwriters who are not yet getting paid as a writer saying, quote, ‘I’m a writer or I’m a screenwriter,’ in conversation with a person not familiar with their occupation, without the aspiring modifiers/disclaimer?”

Craig, what do you think of aspiring writers saying I’m a screenwriter?

**Craig:** It’s a tough one. I remember never doing that. If somebody would say “What are you doing?” then I’d say, “Well, this is my job but I’m working on a screenplay.” I would say that because I felt like it was a little pretentious in the most specific form of that word like “I was pretending” in that sense. You know, you can say you’re a painter but if you’re just painting on your own and no one is asking you to paint anything for them, you’re kind of a painter, but not the way people think of painters.

And so it’s a little bit — I mean, look, in the end it really is all about intent. If you are humble and you acknowledge where you are and you’re not trying to impress somebody or put one over on them or puff yourself up, then it’s okay. But if you feel like you need to say this to impress other people or to impress yourself, then I think you have a noun-verb problem.

**John:** Yeah, the noun-verb is the great distinction there, so I would always say identify yourself by your day job and then you can talk about that you’re also writing and then it’s fine to sort of transition the conversation about the writing that you’re doing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** When I talk to people at conferences and stuff, I will often ask like what are you writing because I’ll assume like if they’re here they’re probably a screenwriter and like it’s a natural thing to start talking about the work rather than sort of like “What have you actually gotten produced?”

**Craig:** I remember when I was first out in Los Angeles. I was 21 and you remember the 21 parties, John, when you were 21 in Los Angeles?

**John:** Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** You’d end up in like someone’s bad apartment, like, jammed onto their balcony. Everyone drinking cheap beer and everyone is 21 and everyone is just reeking of desperation. Everyone is trying to get into this business and we’re all feeling each other out and everything. It’s a weird time. And I met this guy, I was just chitchatting with him and, you know, I didn’t know what he did. I don’t know — he didn’t know what I did and then someone else came over and then they asked this guy, “So what do you do?” And he said, “I’m a successful screenwriter.”

And I mean, I couldn’t believe it and I thought “If he is a successful screenwriter, what’s wrong with him? How do you become a successful screenwriter if you’re so bad at words that you would think that would be a good answer to that question?” [laughs] So then later I looked him up and no, he wasn’t. And, you know, it took me a while to kind of get over the 21-year-old umbrage into the more mellow middle age umbrage which was — not even umbrage, more, honestly, pity. You’re scared, you’re insecure, and you’re desperate for people to know that once somebody paid you 10 grand to do something, but it’s not a good look.

**John:** No. Not a good look at all. Ryan has a question which is “I have one issue that grinds my ears. Several times Craig has talked about the potential success of aspiring screenwriters in terms of quote, ‘having it or not having it.’ I think this is a toxic idea. I think the skills that have made you and Craig successful screenwriters can be learned. This is the difference between the growth mindset that says that skills, traits, intelligence are not fixed but are instead subject to be learned through effort, experience and training versus the fixed mindset which suggest that skills and traits are innate, we are just born with them. Craig, do you want to tackle the growth mindset?

**Craig:** Yeah, I feel like Ryan is script-splaining to us here. [laughs] You know, he’s explaining to us why we’re successful like your theory of why you’re successful is not at all correct actually. Oh, John, you know, I’m so woke.

**John:** Yeah, I’m very woke. Yeah.

**Craig:** John, I’m so woke. Oh my god, I’m the wokest. Right, so Ryan, I think actually what you’re suggesting is the toxic idea. Now, this should not be shocking to you. You probably knew this was coming, but it’s okay that we disagree. Here’s where I think you’re going wrong. You’re kind of engaging in the either-or fallacy. You’re saying, “Look, it’s not that you have it or don’t have it. It’s then you — and that the skills, traits and talent aren’t fixed, instead you learn them through effort and experience in training.” And so it’s that or the fixed mindset, and what I say is you have to have both. This is the worst news of all really. I believe that, of course, there is an innate talent to any form of artistic expression. I can’t necessarily prove this to you other than to say that if you’ve ever sat in a class in 3rd grade and everyone is asked to draw a picture of a clown, one kid’s clown is going to be fricking awesome and then one kind’s clown is going to, and mine, is going to look like this pathetic collection of squiggles to the extent that people might wonder if perhaps this 9-year-old child had suffered a stroke in the middle of it, okay?

There is a talent to artistic expression. It is innate. It is not in of itself enough. And when it comes to writing which is something that is influenced repeatedly by an expanding vocabulary and an expanding philosophy and an expansion of your human experience, absolutely you begin to grow as a writer. Effort and training and learning lessons and falling down and getting up and avoiding pitfalls because you’ve fallen into the pits, all part of it. But writing apparently is the one area where people say, “Unlike athletes or painters or singers, you folks, you just — you can grind your way to this,” and no, not even remotely.

Why — John, do you think it’s because everyone can write something so is that the confusion?

**John:** I think that is, because if you look at the other examples you listed so a singer and athlete, there’s a physical quality to them that is different than other people. So, you know, singers may have these remarkable vocal abilities that could be sort of how they are born and this is the reason why singing can run in the families. There’s — if you look at, you know, athletes, sometimes if it’s a case like basketball like height is a true advantage.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But there’s also marathon runners or sprinters. They’re just built in a certain way that is incredibly helpful for the sport that they’re trying to do, but at no point are we ever expecting like, oh, that person is always going to be that fast. He doesn’t need coaching. He doesn’t need any sort of training. He doesn’t any sort of —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Practice to do that stuff like, in fact, all we do if we talk about athletes is practice and training. And so while, yes, I think, you know, the practice of writing and the constant feedback can improve a person’s writing, and I’ve seen it time and time again. There’s also a reality check of, like, there are some people who are not going to be fantastic writers, and that doesn’t mean we should give up on them or sort of, you know, move away from them but to acknowledge that like there are some people for whom writing comes naturally and they can become better. And these people for whom writing is really a struggle and they can get better, but they’re probably not going to ever get up to the level of the people who is really great for. One of the other–

**Craig:** Terrible. You know, it’s okay to say these things.

**John:** Yeah, one of the things that I think is interesting about screenwriting as opposed to writing novels or other works is that because screenwriting is just this intermediate step towards making a movie, it’s conceivable to be a person who is, like, pretty good at throwing things on the page that will ultimately become a movie. There’s a lot of sort of writer-directors who are kind of really directors who are not fantastic writers and they made stuff happen and so there’s — you see like a whole class of people who are moving into screenwriting not really with the goals of, you know, writing the best thing on the page possible but just do like “I want to make a movie” and that that weird transitional thing is what’s odd about the career that we’ve chosen.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that there is a flipside to what Ryan is suggesting, and I find it a little troubling, and that is that if what he’s saying is true then to all the thousands of people that are working very, very hard to try and sell screenplays and become professional screenwriters, well, they’re just not working hard enough apparently or they haven’t taken the right class or they haven’t read the right book. The point is there’s a thing to do and when they do that thing then they too will be like you, John. I think that that’s a rough thing to say to those people, because I think they’re trying incredibly hard.

I think that there is an industry of people who want them to believe what Ryan is saying: that they’re one book away, they’re one seminar away and there are quite a lot of film schools that are peddling the same thing. But the fact is that you and I, both, and honestly, anyone that’s every read any screenplays has certainly come across a screenplay where you think, right, this person should not be doing this at all. And there is no version where someone can come along like Henry Higgins and get this Eliza Doolittle to suddenly be something that she wasn’t in the beginning, because it’s not about learning how to pronounce your Hs and not go “aw.” It’s talent. Talent is a thing. It’s okay.

People — it’s one of the best parts of life. I am fascinated when I meet people who have these talents for things. I mean, you and I both worked with musicians. When I sit with Jeanine Tesori and I watch what she does on the piano, and I watch how her mind works, and I watch how she is doing a different kind of — a different kind of writing in her mind with a different grammar and when she does these things, I just think what a gift that I get to be here and watch it because in a million years I couldn’t do it. And I’m a musical person, but she’s got something else and it was certainly there from the start. How could it not have been?

**John:** But saying that it was there from the start does not negate that she’s not spent years of doing this and–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Learning this and teaching herself, and so it is both but there was something there to start with, I fundamentally believe.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Absolutely.

**John:** A question from Nate in LA. He writes, I moved to LA two years ago. In that time, I’ve managed to form genuine friendships with a handful of professional writers whose work I respect and whose careers I admire. So my question is, is there a reasonable way to ask them to read my work? These people know that I hope to write for TV, but so far none of them have offered to read my scripts or pass them along to agents or managers. I don’t want to soil the friendships by asking them point blank to do this, but, at the same time, I realized it’s a business of who you know and I actually know people who are situated where I would like to be someday. Do you have any suggestions for tactful and non-friendship risking ways of asking them for help with my career, or should I just keep things casual and wait for it to happen organically?

**Craig:** Well, this is a good question. When you’re talking about writers — so most writers aren’t going to be able to hire you to write something because they’re writing things, you know, so it’s a slightly different thing than if you were to say, you know, ask somebody whose job is to hire people or represent writers and so on and so forth. I think if you’re going to ask a writer, one way you could always say is, “Hey, I would love for you to read this, but I know what that means and I know nobody wants to read anything and I respect that because I don’t either.”

“So I’ll tell you what? I’d love to give you five pages, and you are allowed to just — that’s it. I’m not going to bother you about it. I’m literally going to give you five pages and I will never mention it again. Either you are going to come back to me and say “I want to read the rest of it” or you are going to come back to me and say “I’m not — I don’t want to read the rest of it but here’s what I think about the five pages” or you’ll never mention it again or you’ll never read it. I’m okay with that, but would you be okay with that deal?” I think most people would say, “Yeah, I’d be okay with that.”

**John:** There’s an episode in the bonus episodes of scriptnotes.net where I sit down and talk to Drew Goddard and talk through sort of how he kind of got started and it sounds sort of like what Nate was doing. And so Drew had been working as a PA on films shooting in New Mexico. He moved to Los Angeles. He didn’t really know anybody, but sort of started sort of picking up friendships with people, started hosting game nights with other writers and eventually people started reading him and eventually said like, “Hey, why don’t you come in and we can see if we can get you staffed on this show.”

It organically did happen, but it felt like what was crucial was he was never pushing it. And I think Nate has a good sense of like not wanting to push it or ruin it, but at the same time you can’t sit back forever and like not–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, not put it out there as a thing that could happen. The way you described it, Craig, is a term we coined around the lunch table — you’re sort of doing a pre-traction where like in saying — you’re actually retracting it as you’re saying it like, you know, “I know this is really a bad idea but” — or “I know it’s weird for me to be putting this out there but if you would ever like to read something I’d love to hear your feedback on it.” That’s totally fine and fair and natural to do.

So Nate, I think you’re right in the right spot in terms of figuring out how much to push and how much to sit back.

**Craig:** Certainly the tenor of Nate’s question is a good sign.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So he seems to be aware of what other people might be thinking or feeling, which is it turns out as one of the talents of being a writer. And I would say also, Nate, that when you have a relationship with somebody that is based on more than you want something or they want something or what they do for a job or what you do for a job but rather you’ve worked on something together or you have helped them or anything, then in that context things are different, because most people are decent. I believe that. And most people want to help somebody, and if you’ve been a good guy then I think there is — you know, there is a reason that people might go, “Yeah, you know what? You’re a good guy. Sure. Sure.” Not always but I think, yeah, sure.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Do you want to take this last question from this batch? This is Chaz from Glasgow.

**Craig:** Right, so Chaz from Glasgow says, “I’ve recently started writing everyday for the first time in a number of years. I’ve got a degree in scriptwriting and filmmaking, but in the six years since I completed my course I’ve bouncing from job to job and can’t seem to hold one down. I also have a criminal record so I can’t enter the United States. But anyway” — this is a great transition. But anyway enough about that.

“Is there much of a point in continuing screenwriting with my limited experience and general F-ed upness? I can imagine why no studio would want anything to do with me.” Well, Chaz is in a little bit of a bind here. What do you think, John?

**John:** Chaz shouldn’t sell himself short in terms of like “No studio would want to deal with me.” I think some people might find it fascinating that you have a criminal record. But I think he raises a good point overall. It’s like, if he’s in Glasgow, it sounds like it’s going to be hard for him to travel to the US. If he’s serious about filmmaking, he needs to be looking for stuff he can do in Scotland and stuff he can do in Europe so that it’s actually a possible thing.

I would also just say though, if he’s writing every day and he seems to generally enjoy writing, write some things that are not movies so you can actually see those things come to light. Like, write a book. Write short stories. Write something else that’s not movies if you’re really concerned that movies or TV are not going to be a thing that’s going to be possible for you based on what’s happened in your life and the challenge of trying to get outside of Scotland.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s all great advice. I mean, look, here’s the good news, Chaz, writing is writing, right? So, your script can enter the United States and a good script is a good script. People will want it. Here’s what concerns me a little bit. You say that you’ve been bouncing from job to job and can’t seem to hold one down. And it doesn’t sound like you’re saying you’re bouncing from screenwriting job to screenwriting job. You’re bouncing from regular job to regular job, and can’t seem to hold one down.

Now, there may be other things going on in your life here that are causing some distress or keeping you kind of on a stable path. As it turns out, the only way to be a consistent, successful writer is to live a very — well, just kind of a rigid life. It requires a certain stable, patterned, consistent nose to the grindstone, disciplined life. And if you have trouble living that way, it’s going to be difficult to be a screenwriter at the very least. There are other kinds of writing that can be done by people who aren’t quite as patterned and disciplined in their daily work. But screenwriting, a bit tougher. Because unlike novels where it’s just you and your mind and you go as you wish, in screenwriting, you’re constantly being held accountable to what will ultimately be a crew of many hundreds of people as well as a studio chockfull of employees and then, ultimately, audiences.

So, I’m not sure, based on what you’re saying here, that screenwriting is necessarily the most compatible thing for you. But if you’re really good at it, you should just keep doing it. That’s the thing. The only other thing I’d mention to you is you don’t say what the crime is, just that you have a criminal record. Some crimes are — you know, you’ve paid your debt to society, you have a record, people understand and they evaluate your script without putting it in the context of your past.

There are other crimes that are a little more difficult. There are certain crimes that people consider, I think rightly, to be horrible. And if you have committed one of those, then people may be very reluctant to get into business with you. The thing about show business is it’s a very public business. So they don’t necessarily want, you know, a murderer. I’m not suggesting that that’s what you’ve done, Chaz. But I think, Chaz, I think you know what I’m talking about, the kind of crimes I’m talking about. I think you get it. But, no, if you were involved in a breaking and entering 10 years ago, I don’t think that’s an issue.

**John:** I agree with you. Craig, I do want to push back about sort of like “Writers have to have a stable life so they can have sort of a steady way of getting those words done every week.” I feel like I know a fair number of writers who don’t have a particularly stable life, who are the sort of like catch-as-catch-canning and like they will bunker down and get a bunch of stuff done and then they’ll just sort of go off the reservation for some weeks.

And I would say, yes, it’s more challenging to be a screenwriter that way because people are kind of counting on you a little bit more. But there’s a lot of kind of not particularly stable people who do the kinds of jobs that we do. So, I would try and figure out sort of what percentage of the writers I know I would say like, “Oh, their life is really well put together.”

**Craig:** Well, maybe I’ll shape it a little bit here and I don’t know if this will bring you closer to where I’m thinking or not, but it’s not so much their lives have to be stable, in a sense that they have healthy, stable relationships with another person like a partner in their home, or that they’re well dressed, or that they don’t drink too much, none of that. What I’m really saying is the writing part of their life is somewhat stable, that they get the writing done.

**John:** Yeah. Okay. That’s fair. And probably more so in screenwriting than in like sort of the classic person who goes off and — the songwriter can have a very chaotic life because there’s not that expectation of like, every day, I have to generate like this many verses. That can be just you can get a bunch of stuff done and then not do it again for a year.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The screenwriting is — I guess because you’re going to be writing such long documents that if you are not able to actually sit down and finish a long document, it won’t ever happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s kind of what I’m getting at.

**John:** Cool. All right, some other questions that came in that we might tackle.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Josh from Albuquerque writes, “I have a question regarding the Paramount Decree which has been discussed a few times in recent episodes. How can Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon act as producers, distributors, and exhibitors while major Hollywood studios cannot? I understand the simple legal answer is that they are not, quote-unquote, ‘theaters.’ However, could you see a time in the next decade when streaming services become so dominant that the Supreme Court rules as an antitrust sort of Netflix Decree, or is the current entertainment landscape so broad, from movies to TV, videogames, YouTube, that we’ll never see another monopolization like there was during the Golden Age?”

**Craig:** Well, Josh, I don’t think that this is going to happen with, say, an antitrust Netflix Decree kind of thing, and here’s why. The whole point of the Paramount Decree was there are a bunch of theaters in the United States, they are physical spaces. And if the studios own those theaters, then no other studio can really come into be because a studio requires a theater to show its product and all the theaters are owned by these companies. A theater can’t exist just by showing a new company’s films because there won’t be enough. So, essentially, it was an anti-competitive practice.

None of that really applies to the internet, because there is an unlimited distribution space. Netflix is incredibly popular because people like their shows and certainly, there are a number of large players out there, all of which are owned by multinational conglomerates. But, someone can come along and start showing other movies on their platform if they can afford to license them and distribute them, and there is no physical space that they’re being locked out of.

Where it gets a little dicey is if, say, Warner Bros. which owns HBO said, “The only place we’re ever going to put any Warner Bros. movies is on HBO.” Then you could say, “Well, HBO has an unfair advantage.” The problem though is that other movie studios are going to put all their movies on these other things and Warner Bros. is going to start losing money because other people want Warner Bros. movies on platforms other than HBO.

So it does seem like right now, the kind of vibe is that things get spread around. The original content on Netflix just being on Netflix I don’t think is enough, frankly, for an antitrust Netflix Decree.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s worth stepping back and taking a look at — so the Paramount Decree, you had limited physical spaces where those movies could be shown and that kind of vertical integration made it impossible for some — for a movie to break in to those spaces.

If you look at sort of how FinCEN worked in television where studios could not own networks and so that there had to be some difference of relationship, that all broke down — there was a sense of, like, there was limited space out there because we were on the airwaves, and so there could only be a certain number of channels. That sort of all fell away as cable rose.

And Josh’s question points out like, you know, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon act as producers, distributors, and exhibitors, well, really, so does Disney. I mean, Disney has its own channels that it’s putting stuff through. It’s already murkier than that. Where I think the interesting thing that’s going to happen down the road is the question of our antitrust laws, our ideas of monopolies just are from a very different era.

And so, if you look at the Amazons and sort of like how powerful they are and how much they can sort of use their incredible dominance in one area just to sort of move into another area into another area, that could become a factor as we look at media things down the road. But I don’t think it’s something that’s going to happen anytime soon.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the test basically is not whether or not you’re a monopoly. Antitrust laws do not proscribe monopolies as far as I understand them. What they do is say “You cannot be anti-competitive.” So, if you’re a monopoly but you’re doing nothing to stifle the natural birth of new competition, I think you’re okay.

So, Microsoft, for instance, was a monopoly. They were the operating system monopoly, essentially. They vanquished Apple. And so, now, Windows was by far the dominant operating system. And that was okay until they created a new product that was a browser. And they weren’t the first browser. There was an incredibly popular browser out there called Mozilla which became Firefox and that was the dominant browser in the market. And then, Microsoft said, “You know what? Let’s leverage the monopoly we have on operating systems and force people — not really force them, but basically channel them towards our new browser called Explorer.” And that’s called bundling. And that got them into hot water.

If Amazon starts doing things like that or if Netflix starts doing things like that, then, yeah, definitely they’ll catch the eye of the Feds. Maybe not in this administration, but, you know, in a reasonable one. [laughs]

**John:** And the other thing to look for is classically in the US, antitrust concerns come over like whether prices are rising for consumers, and which seem to be a very natural way to sort of look at it. A weird thing that happened though is you look at Amazon’s dominance in e-books, and so, Amazon with the Kindle and controlling a vast percentage of the digital market there. When Apple came in with iBooks, really, it was Apple who was the one who got slammed by unfair —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** — business practices because they cut deals with the publishers. Zooming out, it looks like the energy was misplaced by our regulators because you actually want competition and they were slammed for basically trying to create competition. So, that’s another kind of situation where I could see down the road these giant media companies jockeying for space, that kind of friction could happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, price-fixing is another big part of this sort of thing. But, I think, Josh, I think they’re kind of in safe — they’re in safe places right now.

We’ve got something here from Mike in London who writes, “I’m working on a script at the moment where there are lots of characters who feature more prominently later on in the film, but I also want to make sure that they are in earlier scenes. These earlier scenes include lots of people like weddings or other mass gatherings, but I find that putting them all in action lines pulls focus a little bit. There are only so many times I can write ‘Bob and Julie are also here. You’ll hear more about them later.’ And then, Bob and Julie are also present. So, for times like this, would it be acceptable to include some kind of note that simply says, ‘X character is present in scenes X, Y, and Z’? I just feel it would make it a little clearer.”

“Also, there are some specific notes I have regarding costumes and how they should deteriorate as the play goes on. Would something like this be okay to write in some kind of note section at the start of the script? I guess my questions both revolve around notes and whether it’s okay to include them or whether it steps on too many toes and I should just assume they’re unnecessary.”

John?

**John:** It’s a very good question and I’ve definitely been in a situation where there’s characters who become important later on but they would have been in earlier scenes. I don’t have sort of one great blanket answer for you. I would say most movies do not find that they need to do this kind of thing where there’s sort of a meta note outside of the script that sort of says like, “These characters are in these things.”

But, if what you’re trying to do, it is just really clunky and sort of like include them in every scene or like call them out in every scene, then I have done it in my own scripts. Like, a little sort of bracketed note to sort of say like, “This is a meta note. Like, these characters are in the next seven scenes or like they’re in all the scenes that take place here, but I’m not going to single them out each time.” I would never say the “I’m”. But like, “The viewer will see these people and they’re going to become important later on.” That’s entirely fair.

This thing about costumes deteriorating, my instinct would be to just clock it along the way so that three scenes in, have some reason to say that his thing has gotten worse.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That his jacket is falling apart. But I wouldn’t sort of bring it out because that does feel too much like you’re just having a sidebar with the wardrobe department.

**Craig:** Correct. You don’t want to feel like you are having sidebars really mostly because it’s taking people out of the world of the movie, and you’re trying to show them a movie with your words. I wonder how frequently these characters need to be in these scenes.

What’s catching me a little bit is that you’re saying they’re in these scenes, but they feature prominently later on. Well, what are they doing in these scenes exactly? If they’re just passing by in the background, then, I think it’s fair to just say, “In the first time, in the background we’ll see so and so. We will see them later or we’ll hear more about them later,” like you say, and then just not mention them again because if you’re not making a point of looking at them in these subsequent scenes, do they even need to be there at all?

If you are going to put the camera on them, then there should be a reason that the camera is on them. If they’re literally just moving like background artists — and I’m just kind of wondering if we’ll even notice them at all. So I would suggest to you that maybe for some of these areas, you may have a decision to make about whether you really need them there or not. And if you do and you want the camera on them, give me a purpose for that camera there.

Lastly, I would say the one thing you should never worry about is stepping on too many toes. It’s your script, step away.

**John:** Yeah. I think one of the things we’re hitting on here is that Mike is looking at his script as being the blueprint. And like, if this were a blueprint for building a building, you cannot leave out those incredibly important like rafters and girders. But this is still like a reading document. So, make sure that it reads naturally and cleanly.

And so, in doing so, you may leave out some details that will become important for the AD later on, but you have to have trust and faith that, like, those other professionals who are going to be working on actually making this movie, they’ll have those conversations and figure out like, “Oh, do we want those characters in that scene?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so, you don’t have to sort of worry about like everything being incredibly logic’d out at this stage.

**Craig:** Yeah, and you’re right. If you have this note that you think is important, save it, wait for the green light, then send it to the production staff.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And then they’ll know.

**John:** Ben in Colorado writes, “A question for John. In the writing and editing Scriptnotes, Craig mentions the dangers of auteurism in modern filmmaking. As someone who’s worked successfully with one of the great modern auteurs in Tim Burton, what is your experience with auteurism as a very successful screenwriter?” And I would say you also have worked with some filmmakers who have a very distinct style, so like, you know, working on the Zucker brothers movies.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Like that’s a person who has a very distinct style.

**Craig:** Or Todd Phillips, same thing.

**John:** Todd Phillips, another great choice. I would say one of the remarkable advantages of coming in, working with somebody who has a very distinct style and a very distinct cannon of work is that you can come in with a sense of like “These are the things that are going to be interesting to him, and these are the things where I know he can sort of knock this stuff out of the park.” And so that is a great luxury to sort of come in with a set of expectations that you can sort of push beyond. And so, you know, the first time I’m sitting down to write I guess Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the first new thing I’ve written for Tim, I can approach that meeting with like, “Okay, these are some things I think he’s going to really respond to just based on like all the other movies of his that I’ve seen.” And that is really, really helpful.

Auteursim as a general concept, for me, is just — it can be frustrating to see people write about auteurs as if everything they’ve done is entirely through their work and that there really were no other people involved in those things. That sense of like it’s just of this one sole creator behind stuff. And yet, I would say the process, at least for me working with Tim Burton movies, has been really great because you have a director who knows very much what he wants.

**Craig:** It feels sometimes that people confuse auteurism as it was originally imagined, meaning the director is the single creative authorship voice behind a movie with directors who have distinct styles.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Having a distinct style doesn’t necessarily make you an auteur, particularly when you’re a director that’s not writing at all. Now, if you’re a director that writes and directs your own material, I think you can start to make arguments about this. But if you have a distinct style, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re an auteur per se.

But in talking about directors who do have a specific style, I couldn’t agree more with John. There is such a relief, a burden lifted, when you’re sitting with a director whose style is unique to that person enough that when they say “That’s not going to work but this will” you don’t have to wonder if they’re right or not. They’re right because they’re making — because Todd Phillips is making a Todd Phillips movie and David Zucker is making a David Zucker movie.

There are directors that make all sorts of different kinds of movies and they don’t have this really clear distinct sharp style which is perfectly fine. Some of my favorite directors are like that. But then when they say, well, I’m not sure about this, I’m not sure about that, well, okay, let’s discuss it. But when somebody with a distinct style like Tim Burton says, “That is not — I don’t think that’s good for me at all,” there’s really no argument because what he’s saying is that’s not part of the Tim Burton thing. So then you’d be Tim Burton-splaining to Tim Burton which is just what’s the point, right? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But then the greatest part is when they’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s going to work.” You think to yourself, “It’s going to work.”

**John:** One of the greatest moments in any pre-production I’ve done with Tim is I’ll go into his office and I’ll see like tacked upon on all the walls are watercolors of like different characters and the different stuff, the, you know, different sets. And it’s like, oh, okay, this has been processed through his brain. He knows how to do all this. This is going to be great. This is — there’s a plan for this. Like this is all making sense.

And I agree with you that sometimes you talk with an author who has a whole bunch different styles and those first, you know, three weeks of meetings with them is basically them figuring out sort of like what kind of movie they’re making in general.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s great. That’s can be a part of the process, but, you know, when you have somebody who has a very distinctive voice and style, you can skip past along that and that’s incredibly helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean the flipside of course is that directors like that often as much as you love them and love working with them, you know that okay, well, this material — no, like you write things and you will, okay, the one person I know I cannot give this to is Tim Burton, he’ll hate it and it’s not at all what he does. Whereas I know some directors who I think “I bet you could probably direct anything assuming you wanted to, there’s nothing I would limit from you.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s — so I — you know, I never want to feel like I’m over praising the stylist, the unique stylist in any way that diminishes the other directors because I think I just — anybody that does a good job directing is a little miracle for me and so I’m just happy to know them all.

**John:** I agree. All right, last question comes from Andreas in Norway. He writes, “I’ve seen quite a lot of different takes about how a car chase is written especially in terms of formatting choices and the layout of the structure. For example, keeping the exterior to simply read ‘road’ and using terms of like ‘on a Land Rover’ or ‘on the Ford’ to shift the focus of the reader. I’d like to hear your guys’ takes on writing car chases.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean look — and car chases are like any other action sequence in that what you’re describing ultimately needs to be focused through the lens of humans making decisions and the world impacting them. So you’re making a chase and you’re trying to define it by what the character behind each wheel is thinking and doing. And then if a boulder rolls into the road, obviously you need to call that out as well. But “on the Land Rover,” “on the Ford,” “behind this,” “inside of this,” all that punchy kind of vibrant kinetic language I think is a perfectly good way to move around. You certainly don’t want to be languid. Your writing kind of needs to match the vibe of the score you would imagine playing under your scene.

**John:** One of the questions Andreas is trying to ask there is like, “Do I have to go INT/EXT for every time I go inside and outside of the car?” And that will kill you if you try to do that too much.

**Craig:** Oh god, the worst. The worst.

**John:** And so if every other line is a new INT or EXT, then people stop reading. So that’s where you use — getting down to single lines, getting to the “on the Ford”s. You know, let it feel like just the flow of what it would actually look like on the screen, but don’t get trapped inside of where we’re at in cars. It’s going to be intercut anyways. So just feel that energy as you’re writing the scene.

**Craig:** Well, that’s exactly the point. Look, the whole purpose of interior and exterior is not to satisfy some sort of format god in the sky. It’s there to help production understand what kind of lights are we using, because is it night or is it day, are we inside or are we outside, all that stuff, right? Once you establish the car chase, which is certainly going to occur in real time. You know, it’s not like — people don’t montage a car chase over the course of a day and a night. It would be kind of cool, I suppose, if they did. But typical car chase takes place in roughly real time in a movie. So once you establish “exterior,” so we’re not car chasing inside, which has happened for instance in the Blues Brothers, and what time of day it is, you’re done. You gave them the information they need. And now, what they really need to know is, “Okay, what car am I looking at and am I inside of it or outside of it while you’re describing things so that I get a sense of the geography and the movement?” Simple as that.

**John:** Yeah. I said the last thing was the last question, but in this setup, I said Bulgaria, so I wanted to get to this–

**Craig:** You promised us Bulgaria, John. So Peter in Bulgaria did write in to say, I’m a white male from Bulgaria, the poorest country in the EU. Am I a diverse writer?

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. I mean, look, this whole diverse writer thing, no, on one hand, if you’re talking about programs that are targeted to diverse writers in the United States, we’re not talking about white men from Bulgaria. That’s not to say that being in white man in Bulgaria is easy or that, frankly, being a human being anywhere isn’t easy because everybody’s got their own story and some people have it great and some people don’t. But specifically speaking for those programs, no. They’re not talking about white men from Bulgaria.

However, in the larger sense of things, obviously, your unique situation helps inform who you are and makes you interesting, certainly more interesting than a white male from Sherman Oaks, California. Lastly, I would say to you, Peter, don’t worry about that because the deal is this: people get wrapped up in this stuff and they forget that the reason that these programs exist is because the numbers are stark and clear. More white males are working at these jobs than not white males. So if you’re worried about the statistics, well, they’re still in your favor I guess is how I would put it as a white male. They’re still out of whack. I think people get really hung up on this stuff.

And I understand it, we’ve talked about it before from an emotional level. You never want to feel like you’re being judged for your race. Ironically, that’s exactly what’s going on regardless and that’s what some of these programs are trying to combat. So don’t get hung up on it, Peter in Bulgaria. The thing that you should be hung up on is writing something terrific. There is nothing that will stop a wonderful script, nothing. It continues to be, and I believe always has been, the single best way to get into the entertainment business.

**John:** Absolutely. Last bit is just actually follow-up. So in the previous episode, we talked about Exposition News as Craig called it. This is where you turn — there’s a cliché of turning on the TV to find it playing exactly the news story you needed at the moment. And so I was pretty sure that other shows had — or maybe said call it out as a thing and of course they did and of course our listeners are the best listeners. So they point to at least four examples of this being done. So we’re going to slice in at the end of the episode some examples of this. So, from Arrested Development, from Community, from The Simpsons, and from Shaun of the Dead. So you’ll hear snippets of how other shows have tackled that trope.

**Craig:** I think my favorite of them was the Arrested Development one because it was so awkward. [laughs] Loved it.

**John:** It goes on and on, yeah.

**Craig:** I just loved it.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a thing that has actually been out for a while, but I had not known about it until I listened and clicked through a different story. So the BBC added Nigerian Pidgin as one of the languages that they have stories in on their website. And so, then I fell down a deep rabbit hole of like figuring out, like, what is Nigerian Pidgin.

And so, Nigerian Pidgin is a form of English but it’s not quite English, that’s spoken in that portion of Africa and linguists could argue whether it’s a Creole or a Pidgin because there are second generations that are speaking it. It’s still sort of this being formed kind of language. But it’s really fascinating, so I’ll put a link in the show notes to the BBC site for Pidgin.

And you can see the stories and like, you look at it, it’s like, “Oh, that’s English,” and then you’re like, “Wait, no, that’s not quite English.” You can sort of understand it, but some verbs are just working very differently. I thought it was fantastic and I thought it was, you know — as you read more about sort of like how they figured out how they were going to do it and how to sort of formalize and standardize some things that are still very nascent, just hats off to the BBC for this sort of new venture into Pidgin.

**Craig:** I love that word. I’ve always loved that word, Pidgin. When I was a kid, I had a little paperback book — I think I might have even gotten it from the Scholastic Book Club — that would teach you Hawaiian Pidgin. That was the first Pidgin I had heard about and the first time someone had said that to me, of course I thought it was pigeon like the bird. And in my mind still, it’s sort of pigeon like the bird.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they–

**John:** Two different words.

**Craig:** And it eternally shall be.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, I have a related One Cool Thing. How odd. My One Cool Thing is a real-life Babel fish. So, if you’re a fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which you should be, then you know about Douglas Adams’ famous science fiction fantasy invention, the Babel fish, which solved this really annoying problem that Star Trek and other shows have solved by simply ignoring which is, why does everybody talk English across the galaxy? And his solution was this tiny little fish that you would stick in your ear and it would just automatically translate things back and forth. Wonderful.

Well, Google — you’ve heard of this small company — they have come up with these things — well, I mean, they kind of ripped them off from the Apple ear buds, you know, the new AirPod things where, okay, they’ve taken the headphone jack out of their new Pixel phone. But their little ear bud things connect to it and they flawlessly use Google Translate. So the idea is you hold your phone up, right, and someone is speaking in Spanish, your phone hears it, does a Google Translate on the fly and pipes that into your ear.

And as we have discussed before, Google Translate has sort of taken these huge leaps because of the new way that they’re processing it with the neural net. And right now, they have 40 different languages. It’s pretty bananas. And you can presume that if this works even okay, that means in 10 years, it’s going to be fricking awesome and everywhere, and then, then the world gets really interesting.

**John:** Yeah. That really will make a huge difference, because there definitely — like, you know, this last year, that I was living in Europe. You know, so in France, we can speak French and it was fine and it was easy. And then, you know, Germany, everybody speaks English okay. Even Athens, everyone speaks English. But then as we made our way out of central Greece and into the mountains, there were definitely some times where it’s like, wow, we were just having to communicate on really basic levels.

I remember going into a restaurant and trying to sort of start and they’re like, “No, no. Stop, stop, stop,” and then they hold up their phone and like they’re calling the one guy in town who can speak English, who then runs in and is like, “Oh, hi. Let me help you.” To be able to move past that I think will be fantastic. And there’s definitely, you know, amazing opportunities for letting people venture deeper into places where there’s not going to be anybody who could speak the same language.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, that’s the key. It’s when we get rid of the language barrier finally, then a lot, I think, of the misery of separation begins to go away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not all of it, mind you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, I still hear people speaking English and saying insanely awful things.

**John:** Yeah. Weirdly, on a daily basis we’re hearing that.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, sometimes at the highest levels. But I think it would help a lot and it would — look, more communication is only a good thing, I think. So this is an exciting thing. And, you know, unfortunately, it looks like it is only available on their phone, which, mind you, could be a possible antitrust thing if it gets big enough. Like, no, it’s going to be everywhere, pal. So let’s see what happens.

**John:** That sounds very exciting. Before we wrap up, I want to make sure that we’ve drawn a good enough bow around the — the fundamental question of the episode is, should you give up? And I hope that in talking about that question, we have not sort of inspired people to, you know, give up on their dreams, but to maybe like set themselves free of this vision of like, “Oh, I have to be a screenwriter or I’m going to be unhappy in my life.”

It was interesting. This last week, I was here in London talking at the London Screenwriters’ Festival and they had this special coffee thing. And I spoke to a couple of people who were like, they just like the show. Like, they were Scriptnotes fans who like the show and they like listening to us talk about stuff, who was like, “Yeah, I have no aspiration of actually writing a screenplay.” And that’s fine, too. It’s okay to not be a screenwriter, I guess, is what I’ve come back to.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And it’s okay also to write screenplays without necessarily insisting upon yourself that they must sell. Those things are going to happen, or they’re not going to happen. And while you can help it with a certain amount of effort, at some point, the script is going to have to speak and do the work for you, right, once you’re done with it.

So if you can find joy in the writing, then do find joy in that writing. I don’t think you should ever define your life by any vocation, at all. I think that we are all so much more interesting than some dream we imagine. Remember, if you’re not yet a professional screenwriter, your understanding of what it means to be a professional screenwriter is a massive guess. It’s just a huge guess. Even if you sat with me or John or any other professional screenwriter every day for a year, all you’d really find out is what it’s like for us to be screenwriters.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But what we know is, because we talk to each other, we’re all special little snowflakes. So you don’t know what it’ll be like for you. And that is true for all these things. So dreams are great, but just remember that they are dreams. The real thing on the other side is something else. So don’t define yourself by some dream that you are imagining. Let that be a motivation for you, but not your definition.

**John:** That sounds great. All right, that’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro to send us, you can send that link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions, on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. We’re on Facebook. Search for the Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcast, look for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a review. That helps us a lot.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs. You can find all the back episodes at scriptnotes.net and we now have the USB drives back in stock.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** So right before I came to London, Megan was busy, like, bundling them and putting labels on them, so they’re now back at the warehouse and they are shipping out to people. So if you want those first 300 episodes, you can get them now on your little USB drive.

**Craig:** Nice. Nice. Papa’s going to get a pair of brand new shoes. [laughs]

**John:** So looking forward to those shoes. They’re the fanciest shoes in the world.

**Craig:** Whoo.

**John:** Craig, thanks for a fun show.

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

**John:** All right, bye.

Links:

* [CPG Grey’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGP_Grey) [video,](https://youtu.be/QC-cMv0e3Dc) [channel,](https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey) and [website](http://www.cgpgrey.com/)
* Exposition News on [Arrested Development](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjqbiMFonR8), [Community](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGg8Cddkocw), [The Simpsons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VueRO6xot8), and [Shaun of the Dead](https://youtu.be/d8A254PJjWc)
* The BBC adds [Nigerian Pidgin](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/bbc-digital-pidgin-language-service)
* Google’s [Pixel Buds,](https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/04/google-pixel-buds-translation-change-the-world/) or the real-life [Babel Fish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Babel_fish)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [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 Rajesh Naroth ([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_320.mp3).