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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/fan-fiction-and-ghost-taxis).

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

(Music, introducing Craig)

And this is episode 241 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

A special thank you to Med Dyer who cut together that weird intro of all Craig’s saying, “My name is Craig Mazin.”

**Craig Mazin:** I mean, Med Dyer is definitely on some meds.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** That was trippy.

**John:** That was very trippy. Our episode this week is sort of trippy because we’re talking about a lot of different things including some ghosts, some taxi drivers, some dead chemists living in basements. It’s another one of those How-Would-This-Be-A-Movie episode.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’re also going to talk about Creed and a lawsuit surrounding that, and the nature of fan fiction and what that means for people trying to use things that are other people’s things. So a big busy episode this week.

**Craig:** Well, we should probably just get right into it, instead of doing our usual 25 minutes of random chit chat.

**John:** Yes. So there’ll be no female reproductive health this time. It will be straight to the important business of follow-up, including cow tipping. So Travis writes in, “Being from Kansas, I felt the need to weigh in on cow tipping,” which was my One Cool Thing from a couple of weeks ago and the fact that cow tipping never existed.

He says, “You don’t have to drive too far out of town where I grew up to find open pasture and cows and I have seen it attempted twice in my younger days. I want to preface, I was only an observer, never a participant. Once, when I was in high school, where I witnessed a group of inebriated classmates try. There were about 10 of them and had no luck whatsoever. The second time I saw this attempted was in college by a 6’4″, 250-pound rugby player, who was made of all muscle. He went running at the cow at a dead sprint, made contact and shattered his collarbone. The cow hardly flinched. The guy had to have surgery and wore a sling for six months. Bottom line, your One Cool Thing is correct and don’t mess with cows.”

So there’s no such thing as cow tipping or I guess the point is, you can attempt to tip a cow, you will not succeed and you will hurt your body even more than you’ll hurt the cow.

**Craig:** I really do love the idea of this rugby player charging the cow and then popping off of it like a bird hitting a window. And the cow — I loved that also the cow hardly flinched, the cow was like, wah? I mean, you think about it, like, cows, right. So we’ve all seen that great scene in the original Rocky where he’s training by punching sides of beef.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s just a part of a cow, right?

**John:** Yeah, it’s part of a cow.

**Craig:** And he’s punching as hard as he can and we get it, it’s like, “Ouch, that hurts.” This is two sides of beef plus all the stuff inside of it. Yeah. No, of course, you’re not going to tip the cow over, it’s crazy.

**John:** It’s crazy. I just want to be that rugby player who has to explain it for the next six months. “Oh, how did you hurt yourself, was it playing rugby?” “No, I ran full speed at a cow and shattered my collarbone.”

**Craig:** Although I feel like in Kansas people will be like, “Oh, yeah, no, no, that’s the number one injury to rugby players right here.” [laughs]

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Cow-tipping incident.

**John:** I wonder if that ever fully heals, or he’s kind of scarred for life with like a slightly droopy shoulder because of his cow incident?

**Craig:** Yeah, like, he’s 93 and in an assisted living facility.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** His mind is a little gone and people are like, “Boy, what’s the story with this shoulder?” Like he’s moaning a lot and we don’t know why and they take an x-ray and they’re like, “What the hell happened?” And we’ll never know.

**John:** We’ll never know.

**Craig:** But it was cow tipping.

**John:** It was cow tipping. So at some point they’ll search the transcripts, they’ll figure out his height, and figure out when it would have happened and realize like, “Oh, this must be the guy who tried to tip the cow.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I like that they’re pouring all those resources to try to figure out.

**John:** Because absolutely no one is going to tip a cow after this because we are such a popular podcast that everyone will now know that you can’t actually do cow tipping.

**Craig:** You know what the overlap between our listenership and the cow-tipping population is?

**John:** It’s vast.

**Craig:** It’s really miniscule. It’s so small.

**John:** The Venn diagrams don’t even touch. They just sort of like bounce off of each other.

**Craig:** I feel like they kiss. They just slightly kiss.

**John:** Just a tiny little kiss, yeah.

**Craig:** There’s like one. We have one.

**John:** Yeah, it forms like an infinity sign. They just barely touch. Doug writes, “I saw Craig decline a request for the Hangover 2 and 3 scripts on a Reddit thread a couple of weeks ago. I would imagine that he wouldn’t say no if it was his choice. So what is keeping him from showing those scripts?” Craig, what is keeping you from showing those scripts?

**Craig:** In that case, it’s because I’m not the only writer of those scripts. I co-wrote Hangover 2 with Todd Phillips and Scot Armstrong, and I co-wrote Hangover 3 with just Todd Philips, so they’re not really mine to send out there willy-nilly. That’s why on that one.

**John:** Doug continues, “Also I remember him offering to put up the Identity Thief script on johnaugust.com library, and that hasn’t happened.”

**Craig:** Yeah, that has not happened and that’s my fault.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** So that one, I can put up. Well, technically I share separated rights on that one with the fellow who I co-wrote the story with, you know, we had — well, we didn’t work together but he has shared story credit, but I don’t think that that, that he would have an issue with that. What I want to do is put up my version of Identity Thief because, you know, there were like three of them and then there’s the shooting one I guess, but, you know, I actually think that it’s more interesting to see like, “Okay, here’s what I would have liked.” But that means I have to cobble it together and it takes time and —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So that’s — yeah. I’ll get there one day.

**John:** One day it’ll happen.

**Craig:** It’s on my list of things.

**John:** Yeah, and it is a very interesting point because we talked about this with award seasons scripts, it’s like, “Are they sending out the script they went into production with? Are they sending out something that resembles what the final cut of the movie is?” It really depends on the situation. In your case, you know, you would love to see the script that you think is sort of the best script that existed or, you know, could exist, and they’re all different things. It’s the process of drawing blueprints for a movie and then there’s the final version of the movie and they sometimes resemble each other, and sometimes they don’t.

**Craig:** Yeah, and I understand when it comes to giving out awards, what choice do you have? You have to give an award for the screenplay as it appears on the screen, so that should be the shooting script. But in this case, I’m presuming that people want to look at this to learn something.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they can sit down and just watch the movie. Well, they can see the movie if they want, but I think it’s more interesting to see like, here’s a script that got made and here’s what it looked like, and then also to see where things changed and then we could always discuss why. Some of those changes, you know, happen in spite of the writer. What else can you say, you know?

**John:** Yeah, I would say in my very early writing career, reading the James Cameron scripts for Aliens and also for Point Break, which we had done work on, it was really illuminating to see like, “Oh, this was what was on the page. This is what was shot.” And sometimes you can see like, “Oh, that translated directly to this,” or like, “Oh, wow. That whole character, that whole sub-plot went away.” And you can start to figure out, you know, what changed because of that change.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. Yeah.

**John:** So it is useful.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a good archaeological dig to do.

**John:** Indeed. All right. Something that came up in the news this week was the movie Creed which someone has filed a lawsuit saying that they, essentially the idea for doing Creed was stolen from them.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I’ll give you some backstory here. So it’s a guy named Jarrett Alexander who’s suing the filmmakers of the Rocky sequel, including producer Sylvester Stallone and writer-director Ryan Coogler, and he alleges that they, “Took ideas from him and turned it into a multi-million dollar picture without compensating him.”

So I’m going to link to the article that Oliver Gettell wrote for EW. It’s actually more sophisticated than sort of like, you know, “Ah, they took my idea.” He pitched it. He wrote it up as sort of a spec idea and he was trying to get in the room with the folks who patrolled the rights to do it and he did not succeed apparently in getting in the room to convince them of his idea. He went so far as to shoot a trailer for it which is well before Ryan Coogler’s Creed.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So what’s fascinating is like this is not a copyright claim. And probably the reason it’s not a copyright claim is he doesn’t control the copyright on those underlying characters. So he doesn’t control Rocky. He doesn’t control Apollo Creed. So he’s suing instead for misappropriation of idea, the breach of implied contract, and unjust enrichment. Craig, do you think he will succeed?

**Craig:** No. No. Jarrett Alexander has such a terrible case here that even if he were in a room with all the other ding-a-lings that file these stupid cases and lose, they would all look at him and say, “Well, you’re crazy.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is the dumbest of all the ones we’ve looked at, this is officially the dumbest. So let’s break it down here. First off, you can’t be as you point out, it can’t be a copyright suit because he violated their copyright. Let’s just put that out there, okay?

This is the insanity of this. Part of copyright is that you control the right to make derivative works. Derivative works certainly cover the idea of a sequel or a prequel or anything like that. He’s violating their copyright by creating this thing. But fine, you could say, “Well, what are the damages?” It’s not like it’s out there in the world taking away ticket money from the real Rocky movies or from Creed, obviously it didn’t impact Creed at all. So, yeah, it’s not worth going after the guy on. But, just pointing out, yeah, so he’s violating their rights.

Then, according to the lawsuit, Alexander and his associates, god only knows who these people are — by the way, think about what they’re doing, how stupid it is. They’re already demonstrating that they don’t understand how either the business or the law works, right? They think they can go and sell this thing, but that isn’t theirs to sell. They then attempt to pitch the idea to various industry professionals, sending around the screenplay, and circulating links to a promotional reel, and they — including trying to get Stallone via Twitter, and there’s no response, right?

So they’re just literally flinging this thing out the car window as they drive down Hollywood Boulevard going, “Who wants this? Who wants this?” Right? Then, Sylvester Stallone and Ryan Coogler make their movie. So their suing misappropriation of idea, what does that mean?

Well, we know that ideas are not intellectual property. So it’s not copyright. What misappropriation of idea comes down to is that there are times when people engage in a certain kind of business discussion where it’s understood, I’m bringing you an idea that could turn into value, and you are listening to this idea with the implied understanding, and that’s what implied contract means, that if I like it, and I want to exploit it, I will engage in a good faith negotiation with you to purchase it.

And what happens is, so we engage in that formal discussion, I say, “I don’t want it”. I’m given — in other words I’m given the chance to reject it. I do reject it. And then I develop it anyway without you. That, the courts have said, “Yes, that is a contractual issue. It’s not copyright.” It’s contractual and then you can sue for some kind of damage there because there’s a breach of an implied contract.

**John:** So, Craig, is there examples of this happening in Hollywood? Because it sounds more like a, “I’ve come up with a great new business idea, I’ve come up with a service that I want to sell. A company I’m going to form.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Is it used in Hollywood?

**Craig:** No. Not that people haven’t tried. And partly it’s not used because generally speaking, people actually do honor the implied contract of that arrangement. Because Hollywood is built around a system of checks and balances, like any stable system, and Hollywood is a stable system. You go in and you pitch something. You, John, you go and you sit down with, let’s say, Donna Langley at Universal and you pitch her an idea, and she says, “Hmm, no.” You leave, and then two weeks later you hear that Donna Langley has hired somebody else to write your idea. Well, she is not just accountable to you. She has to deal with the UTA now. And UTA has all these actors and directors and people that she needs to work with all those agents. She’s just — it’s bad business. She can’t do that. And so she won’t.

In the past, there’s one notable case where somebody tried this angle. So there was an important case called Grosso v. Miramax, because you’re right by the way that implied contract usually it’s a Silicon Valley issue. But down here Grosso v. Miramax, this guy named Grosso said, “Hey, Miramax, you made that movie Rounders, and Brian Koppelman and David Levien, they must have stolen my idea because I came and I pitched you some vague idea about poker, a movie about poker, and you’ve stolen my idea.” And Miramax said, “No, we haven’t, and ideas aren’t intellectual property.”

Grosso then appealed and said, “I’m not” — “You’re right. I’m saying you violated my implied contract.” And the court said — the Appeals Court said, “Yeah, you can absolutely sue for implied contract.” And everyone went, “See, a victory for the little guy.” Ah, no, no, all they said was, “He could sue for that.” So he went back and sued for a violation of implied contract and got his ass handed to him to the point where it was a summary judgment against and he had to pay for Miramax’s court fees. That’s how bad his case was.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So in this case, Jarrett Alexander is attempting the same thing. He’s actually got a worse case.

**John:** He does have a worse case because clearly he did not control any of this underlying material that he was trying to sell them.

**Craig:** He didn’t control it nor did he have a formal pitch with them in which they had a chance to reject, according to everything I’ve read. So literally, what he’s saying — and all you have to do, I mean, it’s not hard to think like a lawyer. All you do is just extend the circumstances to see if the law would actually pass the smell test for everyone. If Jarrett Alexander wins, so that means, all I have to do is go on Twitter every 10 minutes with some stupid log line for an idea and then anytime anyone ever makes something similar, I just go, “Oh, implied contract.” No. Stupid.

**John:** So let us circle back, and like, let’s wind the dials back and say you are Jarrett Alexander and you have created this — you have this idea, you’ve written a script, you’ve made this demo reel, the sort of pitch reel about what your movie is and you had gotten into the room with someone who controls some of the rights. So Stallone, somebody else who could actually make this movie. I think even if you had gotten into that situation, you still have to convince them that you are the person to do it, and that is a very tall order when you really have nothing to show for yourself other than this idea. Is it possible that it could have worked? Yes, it is possible.

It is possible they would say like, “You know what, we like this guy, we think his script his good,” they may not hire you to direct it, but maybe they’ll buy this property from you, at which point they control it fully and could do it. I just don’t see that happening. I have a very hard time imagining that this was going to happen ever for him. So in many ways, I think it’s absolutely fair for him to sort of like, you know what, as a writing sample, I’m going to write this movie that is basically a what-if Apollo Creed’s son came back.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But if I were to do that, I would never have the expectation that I could sell it or that I could ever sue anybody if they made a movie like it.

**Craig:** Yeah, there is where the delusion happens. I mean, first of all, you have to be delusional, truly delusional, to think that there is something that remarkable and unique about the idea that Apollo Creed’s son is trained by Rocky.

Anybody looking at those movies, if anybody pointed a gun at any Hollywood screenwriter and said, “Come up with a new Rocky,” they would look at Stallone’s age, and they would look and then they would think, well, who were the other characters that we care about? And then think, well, wouldn’t it be interesting if? It’s not. It’s not some brilliant bolt from the blue idea. It’s kind of obvious that what makes Creed a good movie is not that. And this is what people don’t understand, they think ideas are the thing, like, “Oh, yeah, all you had to do is just say, yeah, this guy trains that guy,” Yeah, no. That’s worthless. Truly worthless. And I can line up 50 filmmakers to make a terrible version of that movie that nobody wants to see.

**John:** Yup. And Ryan Coogler made a great version.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So I assume that this lawsuit will not proceed, or if it does proceed, it’ll get shut down for the same reasons that Grosso v. Miramax ultimately got shut down.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I want you to check with the larger issue which is, this is essentially fan fiction, this is essentially like, I see something out there that I really like a lot and I want to write more about it. And we see that a lot with books so that you have the Twilight fan fiction, you have Harry Potter fan fiction. There’s a whole community of people who write using characters that are not their own characters to extend franchises and sort of bend them to their own will and way. And it’s a thing that’s become increasingly popular the last 10, 20 years.

And so in some cases that fan fiction has become real fiction, so you have Fifty Shades of Grey. Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight fan fiction, and EL James took what she started as Twilight fan fiction and essentially just bent it enough so that it was no longer those same characters but it’s the same kind of basic dynamics, the same situations, and became original fiction. That’s something that could have happened with this Apollo Creed movie, and theoretically you could have started with the idea of like, “What if this famous boxer now has to go back and train the son of somebody that he defeated a long time ago?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He could have done. He could have essentially filed the serial number’s off and made it seem like its own original thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But by making it Rocky, it became a real problem.

**Craig:** Correct. And he can do that because ideas aren’t property, right? So in the case of fan fiction, and this is why this just shocks me that this guy has the gall to this when he’s the one that’s been trespassing on someone else’s property. With fan fiction, you have to understand that you’re always going to be playing a risky game. If your fan fiction is embedded enough in the source material in terms of taking characters, clear settings, then you are always living at the mercy of the rights holder who can squash you at any point.

Really, I don’t know of any other fan fiction works that have succeeded the way that Fifty Shades of Grey has. But in the case of that, I never read the fan fiction or the novel or saw the movie for that matter. So I really don’t know anything about it other than it involves people getting whipped. But it was based on Twilight but it apparently didn’t have much to do with the elements that are crucial and inevitable to Twilight like being vampires, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re not vampires in Fifty Shades of Grey, right?

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So it was entirely portable. You just change some names and in the end what you were was you were inspired by one book to write your own book and that, I mean, look at — I mean, my god, how many Hunger Games-like books are there?

**John:** Or look at all of the fantasy literature that is influenced by Tolkien. I mean, that’s, you know —

**Craig:** Right, exactly.

**John:** Probably most of our sort of fantasy fiction has some debt, some emotional debt to Tolkien, some sort of literary debt to Tolkien. But that’s a different thing. And so I don’t want to sort of slam down on fan fiction because I think fan fiction is a really important way that some writers learn to write and some writers develop confidence in writing and develop a community around their own writing. But you have to be mindful of there’s a ceiling to sort of where you’re going to be able to go if you’re writing with other people’s characters and there’s also still a stigma to be a fan fiction writer. There’s a perception that it’s not real writing and that may not be fair but it’s true.

In the show notes I’ll put a link to an article by Cassandra Clare about fan fiction. So Cassandra Clare is now a pretty big, you know, YA novelist, middle-grade YA novelist. She has the Shadowhunters series. But she used to write fan fiction. And it took a while for people to understand that she was no longer writing fan fiction, this was original fiction and they kept looking for — in her original fiction they kept trying to find parallels to existing works assuming that they were fan fiction.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s frustrating.

**Craig:** It is. Look, we all pay prices ultimately for the first works we do. People just expect us to keep doing the same thing and, you know, everybody looks at patterns but people can be retrained and obviously she’s done so. The deal with fan fiction is you’re absolutely right, new writers sometimes work in fan fiction because it’s like having training wheels on. There are a bunch of things they don’t have to figure out. Those things have been figured out for them.

It’s a little bit like building IKEA furniture. So the characters have been figured out for them. The tone has been figured out for them. The setting oftentimes and even major plot elements have been figured out for them and now they’re working within those things. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

You learn to ride a bike by first starting with training wheels. I assume people that learned to paint have done some paint by numbers or similar kinds of things or copying other stuff. That’s part of it. But just understand, when you are playing in somebody else’s sandbox in order to learn your craft, the price is it’s not something that you can then hold out to the world as being worthy of the same kind of respect and also financial remuneration that the works you’ve taken from command.

**John:** Yup. And I haven’t seen examples of — I suspect these will occur at some point where it’s ruled to be a transformative work, a transformative to the point where sort of like a lot of visual art sort of falls under that transformative thing where like they’re taking something and converting it so fully that it’s a sort of statement on the original work and it’s therefore protected as art. So you look at some of Warhol’s Soup Cans, you look at Jeff Koons’s works with existing things where he takes and changes the scale of them so dramatically or changes what they’re made of to the point where they are ruled to be their own unique copyrighted works.

That will probably happen at some point. We’ll see something that is so completely transformative that it gets its own protection and becomes an original work, considered an original work. But Creed was never going to be that. And I guess Fifty Shades of Grey sort of was its own thing. Like, at no point was there a lawsuit that I know of from Stephenie Meyer’s people saying like, “Oh, no, no, that’s Twilight fan fiction,” even though —

**Craig:** I’m sure they must have explored it but at some point they realized, look, if she changes these names —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And doesn’t use any of your characters, really, she’s just a lady inspired by your work, we’ll lose the case.

**John:** Yes, and embarrass ourselves.

**Craig:** And embarrass ourselves. In the case of Jarrett Alexander, he’s not Andy Warhol painting Soup Cans. He’s a soup company making soup cans that say Campbell’s.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It just doesn’t work.

**John:** It does not work. Anyway, we will come back to this case if there’s any resolution. I suspect the resolution will be that it will go away and we’ll not hear about it again. I was happy to see that there wasn’t sort of like a big, you know, Internet outcry saying like how dare they stole his work from him. I think the Internet seemed to understand like, wait, you know, you’re saying he stole Rocky from you?

**Craig:** Look, at some point I think after the 19th of these in a row, these are the lawsuits that cry wolf. Everybody I think at this point is like, you know what, until somebody actually wins one of these things and no one ever wins ever.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Until someone wins, I think you can all ignore it. It’s noise.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Noise.

**John:** Noise. All right. Let’s go to our feature of how would this be a movie. We have three of them this week. And we’re going to start with a missing scientist and I’m not sure who, which of our reader sent this through to us this week but it was fascinating and I was just — I pulled out my popcorn as I was reading this because it is so bizarre and so strange.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So this is about a missing scientist found living in a basement drug lab. So a couple from Cottage Grove, Minnesota discovered a man living inside a secret laboratory in their basement. So this was a few Tuesdays ago, officers with the Warrington County Sheriff’s Office went to the Morgan’s family’s house after receiving a call of a possible break in. When the officers pulled up they saw the Morgan family standing by the road.

“They ran up to them and said that they heard a man shouting inside their basement and that’s when they called 911,” said Captain Bruce Normans with the Warrington County Sheriff’s Office. Officers said they could hear a man yelling in the basement the moment they entered the Morgan’s house. But when they moved cautiously in the basement they saw nothing but could hear banging sounds coming from behind the northern wall of the Morgan family’s basement, specifically echoing behind a large storage cabinet.

When the officers moved the large metal cabinet, they uncovered an entry way into a large basement room that was filled with various science equipment along with a terrified elderly man. The 83-year-old man was identified as Dr. Winston Corrigan, a chemistry professor from the University of Minnesota, who went missing in the fall of 1984 and was a previous resident of the home.

So essentially this chemist had sort of barricaded himself in this sort of secret room in the basement, had been living there since 1984 presumably.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so the article includes like a photo of this man who seemed very, very out of it. So, this was fascinating. It would be even more fascinating if it were true.

**Craig:** Yeah. It turns out it’s not true.

**John:** Yeah. So we’ll also link to the Snopes article that discounts all this. So it’s a fake news site and so we can talk about whether the original story and like what that would be like as a movie because that’s creepy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or we could talk about sort of the site that put up the story and sort of why they put up a story. It’s basically it was a site called IFLscience.org which was deliberately sort of not even a parody but it deliberately wants — makes itself look like this legitimate site, this sort of legitimate news and science site and just sort of like why you put up a story. There’s something fascinating about the whole culture of fake news stories.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, I mean, the actual story itself has some problems. I mean, there is some interesting stuff there I suppose if you wanted to do a creepy horror movie. The idea of someone living in your home. The problem is it’s a guy living in your home in the basement. He’s got to go in and out, a little bit like Hollyfeld from Real Genius. And he’s got to eat stuff and use the bathroom. So I’m not really sure how that works if it’s, you know, the man who died in the house is living in your basement or didn’t die. Some kind of twisty sort of thing, I suppose, maybe. But, yeah, actually kind of interested in the — I don’t know if either — I mean, the notion that you create a fake news site and then you put up these fake news stories. Do you remember that movie — was it called Conspiracy Theory with Mel Gibson?

**John:** Yes. Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** So the idea was he was a nut who believed in a million conspiracy theories and he would publish them in this crazy, like a crazy man’s ranting publication and he just happened to be right about one of them and suddenly people were after him. And so it was like, what happens, it’s that old saying, you know, just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not after you and that was that movie.

**John:** Do you remember that one time though where Mel Gibson was crazy?

**Craig:** I love Mel Gibson. You know I love Mel Gibson.

**John:** I didn’t know you loved Mel Gibson.

**Craig:** Oh, no, I’m obsessed with Mel Gibson.

**John:** That’s fantastic.

**Craig:** I think he should get a break.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know, man. Look, it’s like I understand. He said some things about gay people. He said some things about Jews. That covers both of us. [laughs] I still feel like I would give him a break. He was drunk. What are you going to do?

**Craig:** Plus all these things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So let’s talk about the, if the story were true, and so like you’re taking the “true version” of that story. I think the idea of somebody living in your basement is a good starting place for either a thriller or a horror movie where like, you know, somebody in the family thinks there’s something happening in the basement or the kid sort of sees a person living in the basement and no one else believes them and like the secret door that he’s hiding behind is so good that like you can go down there you swear there’s nobody in your basement. And so you think you’re paranoid and of course there actually is somebody in your basement. And it’s kind of like Panic Room but in reverse like, you know, there’s that hidden place that’s going to come out and there’s a good psychological aspect of that because it really represents — you worry that there’s a sort of secret room in your own self that you’re not aware of.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, that feels promising and there’s something very cool about that especially if you’re newly moved into this house, you could barely afford to buy the house. It has all the aspects of a haunted house thriller, except like —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You don’t actually need to have the super natural element and that could be very cool. I wonder if the trailer would play it both ways where like you’re not sure whether it’s supernatural or normal and there’s something fun about that as well.

**Craig:** Is there any way to do a movie where — like this where you flip the perspective and it’s a young couple moves into a — they move into a house. It’s like it’s not a very nice house, it’s kind of a junky house. And then they keep having these visions where at night they’ll have a dream where they go up to their roof and there’s this other house suddenly above them with these people in it and they can’t see them and those people are kind of threatening to them and then it becomes real and then eventually you realize they’re the ghosts in someone else’s basement.

**John:** Okay. That was a movie.

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

**John:** And so spoiler warning for people who haven’t seen The Others.

**Craig:** Oh, you know what, I did see The Others. So maybe that’s —

**John:** And now you remember.

**Craig:** Yeah, they were the ghosts.

**John:** Yeah, god, we’ve ruined a movie for people to see.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I totally forgotten that one but, yeah, you’re right. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, that was The Others. So I agree flipping the perspective is interesting. I thought you were going to go for like you can actually flip the whole tone. It’s like what if you — like, you know what, I’m never going to leave this house. And so you’re like, the house sells or the house gets foreclosed because of bankruptcy and you’re like, you know what, I’m going to hide in my secret room. They’re never going to kick me out of this house, I’m going to live in that house. That could be kind of fun. And so it’s your relationship with the people who bought your house could be kind of fun.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t know. This one is a tough one.

**John:** I don’t know that it sustains a whole movie, but it’s certainly a premise.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a something.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a something.

**Craig:** I don’t think this is going to be one of the ones that we light the path for Hollywood to follow as we have done numerous times before.

**John:** No. But what I think it will probably not be a movie but is actually a fascinating character study is this next one. This is an article by Terrence McCoy in the Washington Post about Debi Thomas who, if you are old enough to remember and followed figure skating as I did as a child, she was the first and best ever African-American figure skater. She was fantastic and she was also very smart. So unlike most Olympic athletes who don’t go to school and don’t go to college, she did both. She landed her triple axels and got her medical degree and was just tremendously driven and successful. This article finds her living in a trailer, bankrupt and —

**Craig:** Down by the river.

**John:** Literally down by the river with a sort of a no good fiancé and clearly some mental health issues. So it’s a really sobering, not cherry look at what can happen after the glow fades.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think actually this could be a movie. I don’t know if — I think that this could inspire a movie. I don’t necessarily know anybody wants to see a bio pic of Debi Thomas.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I think that you could take from this an inspiration to make a movie about what happens to the perfectionist when the world refuses to accommodate them and they break. And it’s really interesting and obviously you’d want some sort of path back to hope because she is a fascinating individual, you know. I didn’t know this at the time. I remember her being a skater back in the Katarina Witt days, you know, the Reagan era.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And, I mean, I understood that she was driven the way that all of these Olympians seemed to be driven but then she had this whole other thing which is, you know, I’m also now going to be a doctor. I’m not just a doctor. I’m going to be a surgeon, right? She ended up being an orthopedic surgeon and was just remarkably driven in this sense. And then, you know, it’s hard to say, I mean, in this story it’s put out there that she was diagnosed — well, first of all, she claimed that she was going to hurt herself and she had a gun and so they committed her temporarily and then medical board records because she lost her license, they indicated that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder which is one of the more over-diagnosed and misunderstood conditions.

And she’s saying, “I don’t have that.” And a lot of other people are like, “Yeah, it doesn’t seem like she has that. It seems like she has something else.” One doctor diagnosed her and said her erratic behavior was not a symptom of bipolar disorder — and this is where I kind of got interested in the character for a movie — but “Naïveté, overconfidence, and her expectation that if she works hard enough she can overcome any obstacle. Her experience as a world class figure skater reinforced this expectation and confidence.” It’s a little bit like what happens to Tracy Flick 20 years down the line.

**John:** Yeah, I can see that.

**Craig:** From Election. There’s this break that happens when your drive and will to power is thwarted by the world somehow but it’s clear that, I mean, just from — I mean, it sounds vaguely paranoid, it sounds a little schizophrenic something is seriously wrong with her. There’s no question.

**John:** Yeah, there definitely were delusions of grandeur — weird to say delusions of grandeur when she actually was sort of champion of the world at a certain point.

**Craig:** [laughs] I know, right.

**John:** So maybe she has reasons to believe that she could be grand. But, you know, in my own life when I have had to deal with people in my life who were going through similar kinds of things and could not connect the dots of their life and sort of believe that everything was going to change tomorrow, I recognized some of the same things coming out of her mouth as she was describing her own situation or sort of what was next, or to the blaming of sort of what happened before. I think she’s a fascinating character.

The question for the movie is at what point do you start the movie and at what point you end the movie because it doesn’t seem like it’s useful to do a bio pic from she first puts on skates to where we are now.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** That’s not going to be a great journey. So are you meeting her at the river as this crazy, just sort of a crazy woman, and then going back to see how she got there? Are you just starting her there and like filling in the backstory just through dialogue of who she was before and moving her forward hopefully to a place where she progresses?

I’m assuming that she is an essential character of the movie but that’s not necessarily the case. She’s also a great ancillary character. If she had kids to be in the movie, they would be fascinating characters to follow through, too. Like if you were her kid what would you do and that’s an interesting dilemma.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think you’re right to the point of kid although I wouldn’t make it her kid. I think that if I were going to write a movie here I would use the idea of this. I would create a character inspired by this one and I would create a kid who was trying to achieve something most likely what she did. Let’s say it’s ice skating. It doesn’t have to be. We can make it anything. Let’s say it’s ice skating and she knows that — and this is her idol. She herself is this young girl who’s maybe 14, incredibly driven, trying her hardest, and idolizes this woman who was maybe the greatest in the world and then is just gone and nobody knows where she is. But she believes that she lives like in the town over and so she goes to see her and finds and then you create.

I’m always fascinated by these kind of dual redemptions stories where they kind of save each other but in the end there has to be some tragedy here for the older — like that character doesn’t — it doesn’t go well for that character. That character I think dies.

**John:** So it’s Katarina Witt’s daughter who comes to track down Debi Thomas who defeated her mother back all these years ago and that’s the story you’re building.

**Craig:** Well, I wouldn’t do the defeat thing. I would probably make it just more like —

**John:** Well, Craig, I’m pitching that it’s Creed basically.

**Craig:** Oh, you want to do that. Yeah, no, listen, we can’t do that because that guy is going to sue us.

**John:** If you want to file off the serial numbers of the Creed you just make it ice skating instead of boxing —

**Craig:** Make it ice skating, exactly.

**John:** And make them women instead of men. Done.

**Craig:** Right, done. No one will ever know.

**John:** It’s so simple.

**Craig:** Change white to black, black to white, you’re done.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** There’s something beautiful about, I think, about characters who have failed but in their failure there’s one last thing they do before they go away forever and that’s help somebody else avoid what they did and then that person kind of can blossom and succeed without ending up in a van down by river.

**John:** Well, what you’re hoping for the older character is a moment of insight because they’ve probably been lacking insight. They’ve been lacking the ability to understand what it is they’re doing and why they’re doing it and sort of why it’s not working. And perhaps the presence of a younger character can actually make them understand the truth of their own life in ways that they never could before that point and get to a happier place. So not everything has to be resolved, but sort of get them back on a track is sort of the goal of that interaction.

**Craig:** Yeah. It also allows you, I think you want to identify with somebody that is discovering slowly that this person is a mess —

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And we start to see the layers of mess. There’s that great moment in Karate Kid where it’s like, okay, we got like this kind of cartoony Mentor with a capital M and this kid and he’s teaching him how to wax on and wax off. And then one night he shows up and the guy is drunk and he’s crying about his dead wife and you’re like, wow. When you see the broken nature of your heroes, it’s very touching, it’s very dramatic and it’s also a sign post of a coming of age movie because that’s a coming of age kind of thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I think that that’s probably where I would go and that’s actually like I feel honestly like that could be a movie people would — you could write a good movie like this.

**John:** Yeah, okay. You’ve got me mostly convinced and I think the good version of that movie introduces a character I think like we’re describing who can be a conduit into meeting this older character and through that process you fill in the backstory, so it’s not —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah, you’re not limited to just being in the perspective of that first person. It’s also about, you know, she’s a fascinating character because she is so driven and she clearly was so driven and the thing that drives her ultimately becomes her undoing. I mean, it’s the same — I don’t know — I find that with a lot of directors is like the really good directors are kind of crazy because there’s something that’s a little bit broken in their brains and so they just won’t stop. Where other people would’ve stopped, they just will not stop. And as long as they keep directing movies, everything is happy and good and great. But if anything gets in their way, they can be very challenging people to be around. And that seems like it is with her that she was so driven to, “No, no, I’m going to do it all and just watch me do it all,” and when she can’t do it all she sort of turns on herself.

**Craig:** Yeah, and underneath here there is this beam I think where you go right at the nature of the desperate and terrible nature of perfectionism that in your desire to be perfect you will then cause the thing that will make you imperfect or even less than you could have been because the desperate need to be perfect is what unwinds you and destroys you. And this girl in the beginning seeks her out because she wants to be perfect because she saw, like, in my mind in the scene it’s like no one’s ever gotten a perfect score, it’s like she’s Nadia Comāneci kind of thing. No one’s ever gotten a perfect, perfect score except this one time. This one championship she did it. She was perfect.

I need to find her so I can be better and win. And she finds her and finds this broken woman. And ultimately what she learns is if you try and be perfect that’s what happens. It’s a bit like Whiplash has that kind of same vibe to it, you know.

**John:** Absolutely. Yeah, so Whiplash is a really good comparison for this, too. You have somebody who is a really dysfunctional person — actually you have two really dysfunctional people who feed off of each other in a very unhealthy way and yet are able to sort of make something amazing because of it.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so you see like for those of you playing along with the home game, you know, these articles and these stories, you don’t have to necessarily just make the straight line. You know, you’re allowed to kind of fictionalize it and embellish it. Just find something at the core that inspires you and who knows, you know. I mean there’s probably 12 different ways you could be inspired to make totally fictional movies from this sad story.

**John:** At the Austin Film Festival, one of the How Would this be a Movies we brought up, there was a woman in the audience who said like, “I tried to get the rights to that story and I couldn’t get it.” It was about, I think, a hoarder who had died. And she’s like, “Well, I can’t get the rights to that story.” And I kept saying like, “No, no, no, you don’t need that story. Just take whatever that story means to you and like build a new story. She’s like, “No, I can’t do without that story.”

I was like, “Well, I’m sorry but I think you’re being too stuck on the specific details of what this one thing was that happened and not what the emotional narrative is for you.” And I think it’s the example here. I don’t think you need the Debi Thomas story. I think you need to make the story about probably these two women and what that journey is.

**Craig:** Yeah, I remember that and I remember thinking that whether that woman knew it or not who asked that question, she was limiting the appeal of the story itself.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Because we are less interested in the very specific than we are in the stories that kind of touch us all. I mean, even like the Eddie the Eagle movie that just came out is such an everyman kind of story that it was okay that it was specifically about this one person and it kind of had to be because it was unbelievable, you know, so we needed that bit of truth in there. But a lot of times if you make it really specific about what you read in that article it just seems small or like homework.

**John:** Yeah, or it feels like a Lifetime movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s very much like it’s written about like this one thing taken from the headlines and you are going to hit all these beats and you can read the Wikipedia article about it and sort of get the same information out of it. And so we’re certainly not arguing against specificity, you know, that’s our favorite thing in the entire world, but it needs to be specificity in relation to these characters and this setting and the exact story that you’re telling, not specificity related to that thing that actually happened in real life.

**Craig:** It’s funny, you know, fictionalizing actually gives you more of an opportunity for specificity because you can specify everything exactly the way you want. What shouldn’t be specific is the appeal. That should be as general as possible I guess is how I put it.

**John:** Agreed. Our final How This Would be a Movie question is about ghost passengers. This comes from an article in a Japanese news site. It was also replicated in The Mirror in UK and a couple other sites. It’s about the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Specifically, these taxi drivers who have been picking up fares who will ask them to drive to a place that was basically decimated by the flooding and then the passenger disappears, so they are ghost passengers. And these taxi drivers have multiple reports of like picking up these ghost passengers who are not scary per se, but are just sad and like wanting to go back to a place.

So this all stems from a woman named Yuka Kudo who’s 22 and she went to that region every week in her junior year to interview taxi drivers waiting for fares. She asked them, did you have any unusual experiences after the disaster? She asked the question to more than 100 drivers. Many ignored her, some became angry. However, seven drivers recanted their mysterious experiences to her. So, Craig, what is the Japanese taxi ghost movie?

**Craig:** Oh, boy. I mean, first of all, I don’t believe her.

**John:** I don’t believe her at all.

**Craig:** I’m just going to say like she’s made this up completely, because they’re not even good stories, not even good ghost stories. The problem here is that it’s so narrow. This would be a very cool scene in a movie. I think that you would want to sort of — my instinct would be if you’re writing a horror movie and it feels like it has to be a horror movie, I don’t see any other kind of movie involving this sort of thing, that you would maybe say there are ghosts left over from a flood and what do we do and it’s a great opening scene, like it’s a great way to open a movie. Somebody takes a fare. This person says they want to go somewhere.

I love this one line. She said this is one story that a taxi driver definitely did not tell her but she claims he did, [laughs], at least in my opinion. The taxi driver says a woman who was wearing a coat climbed in his cab near Ishinomaki Station. The woman directed him, “Please go to the Minamihama District.” The driver, in his 50s, asked her, “That area is almost empty. Is it okay?” And the woman said in a shivering voice, “Have I died?” Surprised at the question, the driver looked back at the rear seat. No one was there.

That’s goosebumpy. That’s a great way to start a movie. I’m intrigued. There are ghosts. But that’s it. I definitely don’t want to see that happen like three more times with three different cab drivers. [laughs] That would just start to get funny.

**John:** Yeah. It would be tedious. So I think the question for me is that is it a bunch of people who are trying to do this or is it one specific person because if the bunch of different people that to me it suggests that, well, maybe it’s a TV show, maybe it’s like a limited series where you’re following these different threads and like there are these ghosts who need to get places and you’re piecing together what is actually happening. There’s a reason why these things are happening. Or it’s actually kind of funny where it’s like you’re essentially the ghost taxi like when ghosts need to get some place, they’re basically signaling you and like you’re the person who like always is picking up the ghosts.

**Craig:** [laughs] Ghost taxi. It’s just so dumb. We got stuff we got to do.

**John:** Stuff we got to do.

**Craig:** And we have places to go. We can’t walk.

**John:** No, we can’t walk.

**Craig:** Well, I can walk to a taxi.

**John:** Well, as you saw in the movie Ghost when we did our Ghost episode, like the ghosts ride the subway. So ghosts presumably take taxis as well. It’s natural, it’s New York City.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s natural. And it’s a great way to take it. I mean, you take cab and you never have to pay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think you could do a horror movie, sort of a Grudge-like movie where the character is Yuka Kudo, 22, senior at Tohoku Gakuin University, and she’s invented out of whole cloth this graduation thesis that has impressed people and become a news story and she just made it up. And she starts getting visited by the ghosts of flood victims who want their revenge because she’s trading in on their sorrow. That’s definitely not what Yuka Kudo was hoping from our podcast. That’s maybe —

**John:** Yeah, but I think there probably is a horror movie version where sort of take that same Yuka Kudo character and so she’s heard this one story and she goes to investigate and turns out like she’s finding these other people and then she’s obsessed like actually meeting one of these ghosts. And so it’s one thing to hear about these stories, so she’s interviewing these people, but then, like, she’s determined she’s going to find one of these ghosts. And in trying to find one of these ghosts she uncovers dot-dot-dot. So like that’s the initial sort of, you know, initial setup, it’s like a lot of these people have this experience and by the end of the first act she’s actually found one of these ghosts and gotten herself into really serious trouble and that is essentially just a premise. It’s a starting place, but like what those ghosts are trying to do. Is she there to help the ghosts? Are the ghosts ultimately malevolent? What is the psychological feeling of people who have drowned in this flood?

There’s something potentially interesting there. It might be a little bit more like the French series, The Returned. There’s also an American version of The Returned. Where like these dead people keep coming back and like why are they coming back?

**Craig:** Yeah, and you could, I suppose, give her a personal interest. Her father died in the flood.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And then she hears that a taxi driver picked up a ghost and the thought that maybe that’s all real means that maybe she could talk to him again, you know. You could do something like that. I’m not big on horror movies. I got to be honest. Like it’s hard for me with these because I feel like it just comes down to ghosts.

**John:** Yeah, it does come down to ghosts. So I would say like there definitely is a clear trajectory for like what the horror version of this would be. If there’s a romantic version or if there’s some other, you know, way to bend it, I think that could be very interesting, too. Sort of like once you understand like why she’s doing what she’s doing and what her motivation is. So like her father is a great one but I think it’s her fiancé that she’s looking for, that’s fascinating too.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s a romantic comedy ghost tradition. There’s Blithe Spirit and Jeff Lowell made a movie called Over Her Dead Body or Over My Dead Body and, you know, I could see that she’s a cab driver and she picks up some guy and then they have like this really interesting connection and this great conversation. And then they get to this place and then he’s gone.

**John:** It could be kind of a While You Were Sleeping Forever kind of a movie.

**Craig:** Right, exactly. While You Were Dead.

**John:** While You Were Drowning.

**Craig:** [laughs] Why are we laughing about this? It’s just terrible.

**John:** Yeah, it’s gallows humor, quite literally.

**Craig:** Meanwhile I think honestly now somebody is pitching this stupid thing.

**John:** I’m sure someone is absolutely pitching — the minute this thing was — the minute we publish up someone is making this. So let’s predict which of these movies will become movies. I think there will be some inexpensive version of ghost taxi in the next couple of years.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think ghost taxi might be the one. It just seems like the most digestible bite size thing. There is an interesting Oscary kind of vibey movie to be made of that’s inspired by the Debi Thomas kind of story.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** And missing scientist, no.

**John:** No, I don’t think it’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s not even real.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** It’s time for One Cool Things. I’m going to cheat and do two One Cool Things.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** The first is by Ingrid Sundberg and she has this thing called The Color Thesaurus, which is actually a very smart idea. When you’re describing colors in screenplays and writing in general you can sort of get stuck on like, “oh, what’s the word for that kind of color?” And she basically just designed this website, and I think there’s also a poster available that just like shows kind of all the colors and like provides words for all those colors and you sort of realize, like oh wow, there are actually a lot of different words that mean different kinds of white for example.

So it’s a useful website when you’re sort of thinking about a color and it’s like, wait, what am I calling that color? And it’s sort of more in the literary sense because there’s always those colors that you can sort of get at a paint store. They have like random like, you know, vibrant dandelion, but these are sort of more useful color names, so I thought that was a great little site.

**Craig:** It’s cool. I’m looking at it right now. I think she’s misspelled fuchsia.

**John:** Yeah, that happens.

**Craig:** But still, this is really cool.

**John:** Yeah. My second thing is the Walk of Life Project. His hypothesis behind this site is that the Walk of Life by Dire Straits is the perfect song to end any movie. And so what he’s done, he’s taken endings of a whole bunch of movies ranging from The Matrix to 400 Blows to all sorts of different movies and he’s replaced the ending music with the Walk of Life.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** It’s actually kind of fascinating because surprisingly it does work for a lot of movies. I think the reason why it works is because the last shots of movies tend to be sort of about what’s going to happen next, it’s that uplift about sort of the thing that’s going to happen, and Walk of Life just kind of perfectly fits that. The last shots of movies also have like a sort of tendency towards tracking shots, towards sort of like sweeping shots that go out over things and Walk of Life fits very well for that. So, I would recommend you waste some time at the Walk of Life Project, it’s wallproject.com.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. Now if I remember correctly, the Walk of Life also begins with this very cool organy intro like —

**John:** [hums]

**Craig:** Yeah. So I think maybe also it’s like it kind of — yeah, it seems like, yeah, I’m going to watch all of these.

**John:** Yeah, there’s sort of churchy/spiritual quality to the initial organ of it all. And then it gets sort of upbeat.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s what I mean. Exactly.

**John:** So he does it from everything from The Matrix to Friends to, you know, Chinatown probably. Everything is there.

**Craig:** [hums] Oh, yeah. I’m going to check these out. That’s awesome. My One Cool Thing is also kind of a trailery sort of thing but it is a trailer for one movie and probably a lot of you have seen it already. It’s called Hardcore Henry and this is a movie that I think actually has been in the world for a bit maybe like a year but it’s getting its proper release here in the United States. On my birthday. April 8.

**John:** Oh, how nice.

**Craig:** And it is this action movie that it shot entirely in first-person perspective like, you know, first-person shooter style. Remember like in RoboCop there were those scenes where after he dies and he’s been turned into robot, his eyes open and people are looking down at him, you know, saying, “Oh, are you in there?” It’s that but that’s the whole movie, everything. So it’s him running and shooting. And the trailer is incredibly fun. I don’t know if I need to see the movie now that I’ve seen the trailer. I feel like, yeah, that was fun. Like, I don’t know if I need 90 minutes of it. Two and a half minutes was awesome.

So we will include a link to the trailer in the show notes. It’s fun. It’s obviously going to be a very violent movie. So if you don’t like violence, weirdly enough it also doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would make me puke, you know.

**John:** Yeah. I remember seeing Jackass, the first Jackass and feeling very, very nauseous thereafter because a lot of the hand-held stuff, but you control it carefully, maybe it’s going to work.

**Craig:** Well, because the thing is the camera feels pretty rigid, like GoPro videos don’t necessarily make me feel pukey because they don’t have that weird shake that is moving in a way that my eyes wouldn’t move. They’re actually moving in a way my eyes do move. So it didn’t make me puke at least not there, maybe on the big screen it would but cool trailer to watch and some people — and the movie, I should add, is written by Ilya Naishuller and then additional writing by Will Stewart, which means it doesn’t sound like a guild credit. It must have been done overseas. But some people have been asking, is this the future of action movies? Are we going to be now doing first person the way that 3D kind of came back and became this disruptive thing?

Eh, I don’t think so. But this one looks pretty good.

**John:** It does look cool.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Also in the show notes, I will throw link to The Bronze which is an upcoming movie. Actually it came out at Sundance last year, so I think it’s still coming out which is about an Olympic gymnast who has to go back and train somebody which I thought of as we were discussing Debi Thomas.

**Craig:** Oh, well there you go.

**John:** But it’s a comedy. And that’s our show for this week. You can find our show notes at johnaugust.com where you’ll find links to many of the things we talked about including these trailers and many of the articles we discussed. You can also find us in iTunes, just go and search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there you can also find the Scriptnotes app which gives you access to all the back episodes, all 240 episodes that exist before this.

Scriptnotes.net is where you sign up for all the back archive stuff and it is $2 a month, so thank you if you want to get all those back episodes. They’re also available, the first 200 episodes at least, are available on the Scriptnotes USB drive and so those are at the store. There’s a link in the show notes for how you get those.

Our show as always is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Woo.

**John:** Our Outro this week comes from Sam Tahhan. If you have an outro you’d like us to play, send us a link at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a great place to send questions and longer follow-up pieces. Otherwise you can just reach us on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. And that is our show this week. Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* EW’s Oliver Gettell on [the Creed lawsuit](http://www.ew.com/article/2016/03/04/creed-lawsuit-sylvester-stallone-ryan-coogler-sued)
* [Grosso v. Miramax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosso_v._Miramax_Film_Corp.) on Wikipedia
* Business Insider on [Fifty Shades of Grey’s origin as fan fiction](http://www.businessinsider.com/fifty-shades-of-grey-started-out-as-twilight-fan-fiction-2015-2)
* [Cassandra Clare on fan fiction](http://cassandraclare.tumblr.com/post/77957376225/ok-dont-get-me-wrong-because-its-just)
* Snopes on [the fake missing scientist news](http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/missingscientist.asp)
* The Washington Post on [Debi Thomas](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/the-mystery-of-why-the-best-african-american-figure-skater-in-history-went-bankrupt-and-lives-in-a-trailer/2016/02/25/a191972c-ce99-11e5-abc9-ea152f0b9561_story.html)
* Ghost passengers in [The Asahi Shimbun](http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/life_and_death/AJ201601210001) and [Mirror Online](http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/horrified-cabbies-pick-up-ghost-7293766)
* [Ingrid Sundberg’s The Color Thesaurus](http://ingridsundberg.com/2014/02/04/the-color-thesaurus/)
* [The Walk of Life Project](http://www.wolproject.com/)
* [Hardcore Henry trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96EChBYVFhU)
* [The Bronze trailer](http://variety.com/2015/film/news/the-bronze-trailer-melissa-rauch-watch-1201644980/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Sam Tahhan ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-job-of-writer-producer).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. And this is the standard explicit language warning for this episode of Scriptnotes. There’s some heavier language than most episodes, so you may want to save this one for later on if you’re driving in the car with your kids. Thanks.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 238 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today, we have a special guest. We are joined by Dana Fox.

**Craig:** Ah!

**John:** She is a writer and producer whose credits include The Wedding Date, Ben & Kate, What Happens in Vegas, and the new How to Be Single.

We are going to try to talk about the transition between being just a writer and being a writer-producer like Dana is. And we’ll also get into other stuff about her life and her career. She’s one of my favorite people. Dana Fox, welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Dana Fox:** Hi, I’m so happy to be here. You two are my favorite human males besides my husband.

**John:** Aw. That’s so sweet.

**Craig:** I don’t really — I know your husband. I don’t think you need that qualifier.

**Dana:** [laughs] I’m really excited to be in this sandwich. Thank you for having me.

**John:** Her husband is Quinn Emmett who is a writer and an all-around good guy, who often comes to our live shows. So, it’s nice to have you here, live in person with us.

**Dana:** I’m so happy to be here.

**John:** Before we get into your career, your life as a writer and producer, we have some follow-up from previous episodes, so we’d love your opinions on these topics as we just go through them. So, last week we talked about tipping. We talked about tipping in two different ways. Questions about whether you should tip the valets at studios. Because you know how like Paramount has a valet?

**Dana:** Oh, that’s interesting.

**John:** Or Sony does, too. Dana, what’s your opinion? Should you tip those guys? Do you tip those guys?

**Dana:** Wow, that’s bumming me out big time, because I have literally never thought of tipping them, and I’m going to immediately commence tipping them right now. That makes me feel really sad inside my soul place.

**Craig:** [laughs] Wow.

**John:** What I was saying last week —

**Dana:** Thank you for laughing so hard at me, Craig. I really appreciate that. I’m so glad this is such a safe space for me to share.

**Craig:** It’s not. At all.

**Dana:** It’s really starting this off nicely.

**John:** So, one of my points last week was that normally when you’re parking a car, when there’s valet parking, there’s already cash being exchanged, so the tipping feels like it’s just part of that whole cash exchange. Whereas on a studio lot, there’s not a natural transaction happening there, so it feels weird to sort of suddenly pull out money and give.

**Dana:** That’s exactly right. It does sort of feel like you’re saying something is happening there that isn’t necessarily happening there. I always sort of thought it was like, oh man, now I just hate myself. I don’t even want to talk about anymore.

Here’s my problem. My problem is not about tipping. My problem is about ATMs. I never have cash on me, because I feel like the second I have it in my wallet it just like shoots out of wallet at great, great speeds. And so I don’t keep cash because I spend it instantly when I have it. So, that’s a bummer.

And then also Uber has kind of kept me from needing money for tipping valets. Because valets was sort of the only reason I needed to tip. So here’s what I do at the SoHo House. Spoiler alert: I may be not a good person at the end of this story as well.

I don’t ever have any money on me, so I never tip them. And they’re so nice to me. And I actually love those people who work there like family. Like, I was more excited to tell them about the birth of my third child then like anybody who is my actual friend. And so what I do is I give them like $60 one day and then I don’t tip them for like a month.

**John:** Okay.

**Dana:** That’s how I do it. Because I can’t — it’s every day, I can’t have the money in the wallet. I can barely get myself out of bed in the morning. I have 17 children. I can’t pull it together.

**Craig:** I feel like you’re not the person we should be talking to about this.

**Dana:** This was not a good follow-up.

**Craig:** Yeah, with that story, you’ve excluded yourself.

**Dana:** Can there be like a drinking inappropriately to fall asleep follow-up like right now? Because I could talk about that at length.

**Craig:** No one needs that follow-up. We all know how to do that. There’s no decisions to be made. We got into this thing last week about this, and I mean, I love what you just said about Uber, because I got in a little bit of trouble. So, I do — I tip those valet guys at studios. I just — I said last week, sometimes I just worry like is this insulting somehow. Do you feel like — ?

**Dana:** That’s what I’m saying. Yeah, exactly. It’s like sort of saying like, well, I’m assuming you’re getting paid a decent salary by this studio. But I should not assume that, because I am often not paid a decent salary by the studio —

**Craig:** Well, there you go.

**Dana:** — so why would I assume they would be?

**John:** So, we asked our listeners to write in, both on Twitter and on Facebook, with their opinions about tipping, both tipping studio valet people and tipping Uber drivers, which was another thing that came up.

**Dana:** What did everybody say?

**John:** So, let’s start with Mike from Huntington Beach. He wrote, “As a former valet during my teens and 20s, I can assure you in almost every circumstance a valet prefers a tip. There are two circumstances I can think of that a valet may reject a tip. Number one: When a valet’s employer issued a wholehearted threat to fire any valet on the spot who will accept a tip. Even then that valet might be coerced into accepting the tip if the amount is sizable enough and gifted with enough finesse.

“Or, number two: When the tip is change that amounts to less than a dollar.”

So, that’s from Mike from Huntington Beach.

**Craig:** But Mike, I mean, thanks, but this was not an issue. We know to tip regular valets. This wasn’t the question. We all tip valets. I mean, nobody doesn’t tip.

**John:** I think Mike is saying any valet at any place on earth will take the tip is what I think he was saying.

**Craig:** Okay, well, and look, that may be true. And I default to that. I do tip those guys. It’s the Uber thing opened the whole can of worms.

**Dana:** So, are people being expected to tip their Uber drivers? Is that a thing?

**John:** Yeah.

**Dana:** Oh my god, you guys, I am an extra triple horrible person.

**John:** Dana just Ubered to this interview right now.

**Dana:** I literally just Ubered to this house.

**Craig:** Well, this is the question. Because we discussed this last week. And my understanding was that, no, the whole deal with Uber is you don’t tip. It’s built in somehow. And the whole point is Uber says don’t tip your driver. And it’s a non-cash transaction deal.

**Dana:** But maybe it’s built into the way that Uber is boning their Uber drivers. And that’s what we don’t know about. Ah, man.

**Craig:** Well, here’s the situation. We got a lot — so a lot of people tweeted at us. And part of the thing that’s confusing is Uber is confusing about it. They used to be clear. Now they’re less clear.

The other thing is there’s a lot of different kinds of Uber. So I don’t use Uber a lot, because I love to drive. But, when I do, I use I guess what you would call Uber Standard, which is usually a sedan, you know, like the black car.

**Dana:** Say sedan again.

**Craig:** What’s that?

**Dana:** I just liked the way you said sedan.

**Craig:** Sedan?

**Dana:** Sedan. [laughs] I don’t know. Keep going. Keep going.

**Craig:** I feel like you’re trying to bring out Sexy Craig. [laughs]

**Dana:** [laughs] I love Sexy Craig.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig is the best. He loves to — yeah.

**John:** I’m pushing for our Whole Foods Craig. Whole Foods Craig is not a [crosstalk].

**Craig:** No, he’ll show up soon enough.

**Dana:** Wait, who is Whole Foods Craig? I need him so bad. Where is he?

**Craig:** He’s about to show up.

**Dana:** Does he work at the checkout at Whole Foods, or is he in like a specialized area giving out samples?

**Craig:** You know what? It’s like, yeah, I work there, if you want to call it work. Wherever man. If they tell me to go there, I do that. The whole thing is doesn’t really matter, you know.

**Dana:** Oh my god. I love that Craig.

**Craig:** It’s a label. It’s not me.

**Dana:** [laughs] I do love that guy.

**Craig:** So, there’s Uber X, which is sort of the more affordable Uber. And I guess the deal is some of those drivers aren’t getting paid that much. So, a lot of people are like, “No, you have to tip them.” I mean, when people are lecturing you about tipping, it’s so hectoring. Somebody wrote something at me in all caps and I just wanted to punch my computer in the mouth. So, you know, there’s a lot of confusion about it.

And I said, I mean, to this date I’m like, no, I didn’t think that that was the thing you did. John was like, no, I always tip my Uber driver. So I’m glad that you’re here. Because you’ve been aggressively not tipping.

**Dana:** Okay. So, for me personally, what I think Uber needs to do, because I think of Uber as the whole entire reason I take Uber is because I have entered my credit card once into a thing and I never have to deal with it again. For me, it’s like on Postmates, I’m tipping like a crazy lady on Postmates. I’m tipping like I’ve got all the money in the world, because all I have to do is click that button baby.

**John:** Exactly.

**Dana:** I just click it. And if there was an Uber question at the end of it, where it was like, “Do you want to do 15, 10, whatever,” I would just hit it and I’d crush it. I’d be 20%-ing it.

**John:** So, Lyft lets you do that. And Uber doesn’t. So, here’s what Carrie T writes, “You should tip. I drive for both Lyft and Uber and sometimes we average like $9 an hour. That sucks. Especially if you’re going to the middle of nowhere. Leave a big tip because your driver will take a big loss driving back to civilization without the possibility of picking up another passenger.”

**Dana:** Oh my god. Yeah.

**John:** Bradley Dennis writes, “As a Brit, my view is that if you want more money, raise your prices. Giving a lowball figure and expecting people to just give you more out of some form of expected guilt is just bizarre and sneaky. It’s anything but genuine.”

**Dana:** Well, and that’s what makes me so uncomfortable if I ever get the luxury of traveling to Europe, is I feel like there’s this emotional transaction that occurs when you’re tipping. For me, obviously tipping is like just about psychology. It’s just about how do I feel. What weird power dynamic did I get into with this waiter? Like how much did I learn about their personal life? How sad do I feel about the job I know that they lost? Whatever it is, I get way too involved in everybody.

And in Europe, it’s just like you just pay the thing. They bring that weird little credit card thing over to your table. Like you don’t even — nobody goes in — they just come over to you and you swipe it and then you’re done. And you’re walking out. But if I can’t have that weird emotional/psychology moment at the end of it, I don’t quite know what tipping is about. That’s what it’s about for me.

**Craig:** This is weird. The whole tipping — look, I understand the tipping economy for waiters and bartenders. The whole deal there is that their management is allowed to pay them less than minimum wage or something like that, some crazy deal. But like, you know, I was talking about tipping — like here’s the insanity of tipping. You go to a restaurant and you sit down and you’re at one table, Dana, I’m at the other. Okay?

**Dana:** Interested. Listening.

**Craig:** Same restaurant. We have two different waiters. My waiter does a fantastic job. Your waiter does an okay job. The only difference is that I happen to order the sandwich, you got the steak. Your waiter gets more money.

**Dana:** That’s really interesting. I’ve never thought about that.

**Craig:** It makes no sense. It makes no sense.

**John:** So, I think people will write in to Craig to let him know that in restaurant situations, tips are generally pooled, so they’ll be shared among the waiters, so there’s some way it averages out.

**Dana:** So sandwich guy and steak guy have to put their money together.

**Craig:** Okay, well then let me extend then. You’re at the restaurant next door. Okay? I’m at my restaurant. My restaurant just happens to charge more for food. It’s fancier food. The fancier the food doesn’t mean that the waiter somehow has to work harder, right? In fact, sometimes the lower end restaurants, the waiter is working even harder because there is families in there and kids screaming and dumping their sippy cups. Meanwhile over at Café Swank, everyone is sitting perfectly quietly eating their $20 piece of tomato. Why do those waiters get more?

**John:** I don’t think it’s fair.

**Craig:** It’s not fair.

**John:** It’s not fair. And it’s not reasonable. And yet this is the system that we’re in. And so I think what’s been good about sort of the feedback we got was that a lot of people who are actually doing the job of driving cars for Uber or for Lyft or who are parking cars for valets at studios are telling us like don’t assume that we’re getting paid really well for our job. And so tipping is appreciated and is not an affront to be offering them a tip.

**Craig:** So the people that make money off of tips —

**Dana:** I appreciate this new information, honestly. I feel like I’m going to change my ways. Did you guys hear that thing — I feel like it was on something I listen to with my ears. So, it was something that I got to believe it was like This American Life or something. They talked about tipping and they were saying that you assume that waiters who are nicer to you and who are more friendly make more money, and actually it’s the ones who like grumpier and more withholding. And what they think it’s about is because the people who act happy and pleasant, the person having the dinner seems like, “They like their job. They’re having a great time. They’re just doing this for fun. They’re just bringing me that sandwich for fun.”

Whereas the people who are like very clear that it is a job, and they are doing it for a job to give you your food, and because they have to for their job, you tip them higher. I thought that was kind of interesting.

**John:** That’s why I like what you’re saying about like if there’s an option for like, you know, 10, 15, 20 percent, I would just click the button, and it would always happen.

**Dana:** I click the button every time.

**John:** It would always happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Dana:** Give me the button.

**Craig:** Yeah, I would click it, too. I don’t know how accurate it is for people that would benefit from tips saying, “You really should give us more tips.” I’m still — here’s the deal. Uber needs to be really clear about this, and they’re not. And they need to smarten up and just solve this once and for all.

Because, yeah, look, if they were okay with the tipping culture, first of all, there never would have been this whole thing of you don’t have to tip your driver. They used to have a thing that said, “Don’t tip your drivers.” And then instructed their drivers, “If you are offered a tip, decline it.” Right? So that’s how that whole thing started. That’s what —

**Dana:** And was this an effort to differentiate them from taxis? Was that sort of part of the idea?

**Craig:** Yeah. The idea —

**John:** But if you look at how Uber has evolved, I mean, Uber was just the sedans for a while, just the town cars who had availability. And the way it’s become, my perception of Uber is Uber X. it’s the only thing I ever take. And that is a low end and those people aren’t making a lot of money.

**Craig:** I don’t take Uber X because I’m just concerned that I might get assaulted.

**John:** So, I will tell you a great Uber X story. I was going to Kelly Marcel’s party a couple weeks ago. And happy birthday, Kelly Marcel. And we took Uber. And I was talking with the driver and he had a fascinating accent. And I said like, I’m so sorry, but what is your accent, because it’s fantastic. And he’s like, “Oh, I am from Czechoslovakia.” Or specifically, “I’m from Czechoslovakia, not Czech Republic, but Slovakia.”

I was like, so the character I wrote in this last script was supposed to be Slovakian. And like I’ve had the hardest time finding an English speaker with a Slovak accent. And so I’m like, would it be really weird if I like got your information and I Skyped with you and like recorded your accent? I really need it as a language reference.

And it was great. And so we had an hour-long conversation with Elan about his history, his backstory, and I have this great footage of his accent for down the road.

**Dana:** Ah, that’s amazing. And I’ve read that script and I love that script.

**John:** Yeah. So she knows exactly who that person is.

**Dana:** I know exactly what you’re talking about and I am into it.

**Craig:** Honestly, that’s my nightmare. Talking to a driver for an hour?

**Dana:** Craig, what kind of an assault — is it like your ear’s assault? Like your ears are going to be assaulted with like a story? Or is it like you actually think you’re going to be sexually assaulted?

**Craig:** I’m always worried about sexual assault, you guys. [laughs]

**Dana:** [laughs] You think everyone is trying to sexually assault you.

**John:** Well, when you’re as sexy as Craig Mazin, it’s going to —

**Dana:** He’s a very, very sexy man. I get it. I totally get it.

**Craig:** You guys, you can’t be too safe.

**Dana:** As we all know, sexual assault is a crime of hotness, right?

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Let’s open a can of worms. Would you like to open that one?

**Dana:** Yeah, I just opened that for everybody. God, I hope everyone knows I’m kidding.

**Craig:** It’s a crime of hotness for me.

**Dana:** Oh.

**John:** Craig basically doesn’t want to have any interactions with people that he can’t completely control. And it does — I will grant that starting a starting with your Uber driver does feel like, okay, this could go a lot of different ways. It could go terribly.

And so most times I’ll just stick to the pleasantries and not go any further. But when I heard this guy’s accent I was like, you know what, we’re going to have this conversation.

**Dana:** You know what I do also is I have a little convo in the beginning, and sometimes I get really involved and I talk to them the whole time. And other times I don’t. But I always ask permission to make work phone calls. That’s how I do it. Because I think it’s a polite factor where it’s like I’m in your car. If you were just a person I was in the car with, I would ask you if it’s okay with you if I make a phone call. So I always do because I like to be polite about it.

**Craig:** You’re paying them to drive you somewhere, and you’re asking them permission?

**Dana:** I’m a human being, Craig. I have a heart.

**Craig:** I don’t understand this.

**John:** But I think the social contract with Uber is just a little bit different than it is with sort of a normal taxi. Because like, yes, you’re paying them to do it, but also you’re getting into their space, and you’re sharing it in a weird way.

**Dana:** It’s also like everybody you talked to that drives for Uber honestly has another job or is trying to be something or has an interesting story for you. And so I always get the sense that like I assume that anyone who is driving a car is like a doctor in the country that they came from and like can’t do that here. And that’s like my baseline for who I think is driving me. [laughs] So I usually have like just a lot of respect for those people.

**John:** So, most of the Uber drivers, I would say at least half are screenwriters. And so I’ll talk to them, “So what else are you doing?” It’s like, “Oh, I really like this because it gives me time to write,” and blah, blah, blah. And I’ll just shut up.

**Dana:** You shut down. And I’m out.

**John:** It’s like I’m not volunteering any more information.

**Craig:** It’s an absolute nightmare. It’s a nightmare. So I’ve never used this version of Uber. Ever. I’ve only used like the kind where, you know —

**John:** Fancy.

**Dana:** The fancy guy.

**Craig:** But it’s not Uber limousine. It’s just like, you know.

**Dana:** I’m just not comfortable unless the car is a little bit like my car, where there’s like so much stuff in the backseat that shouldn’t be in there. Like then I feel right at home.

Although I have to say, I got into a car the other day on my way home from — I went to London for the premiere of How to Be Single. And the guy that drove me home, god bless him, I loved him so much. That was one of the guys I got very involved in — P.S. emails were exchanged. I like emailed him honestly like the second I got home, because that’s how much I loved him.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**Dana:** I know. I’m you’re worst nightmare, Craig. This is why we’re not married and you’re married to Melissa.

**Craig:** Ah, thank god.

**Dana:** But he had like a little tray on the floor. And there was like Kleenex and like lotion. And then like hand sanitizer. And I’m like does he just assume like everyone is jerking off in the back of his car?

**Craig:** Yeah, man.

**Dana:** Because it was just like a jerk off tray. It was really interesting. And then there were like mints for afterwards for yourself.

**Craig:** So you could kiss yourself.

**Dana:** So you could just like freshen yourself up. I don’t know. I don’t know what was going on.

**Craig:** Listen, do you mind? I’m asking you permission. I’m going to be making business calls and jerking off back here.

**John:** [laughs]

**Dana:** Yes. I’m just asking your permission to jerk off while making a business call.

**Craig:** Yeah. Is that cool? [laughs]

**Dana:** Oh, lord.

**John:** Now we have to put the explicit —

**Dana:** You guys, this is amazing. You got to put the explicit thing at the beginning.

**John:** — warning on this podcast.

**Craig:** We knew that was coming.

**Dana:** There was a zero percent chance we were not going to need that with me.

**John:** All right. So you’re on your back from your premiere of your movie, How to Be Single, which you produced. I was so happy to see the little PGA after your name when the credits rolled by, so you’re officially the Producers Guild producer on this movie. But when I first knew you, back when you were my assistant, you were just a writer. And so how did this transition happen? Like what was the process that took you from, oh, I’m going to write movies that other people can make to I’m now making these movies.

**Dana:** Back when I was your assistant, you forgot to say I was just a really bad assistant. You were the world’s most amazing boss. And every day I would be like, “I just don’t know exactly when to take my nap.” I was like, “John, could you help me figure out when to put a pillow on my head and have your dog sleep on me, because I’m going to need to do that at some point today?”

You were literally the world’s greatest boss. So, how did I do that? I think what happened was the transition for me really crystallized around the TV experience. I was working as a screenwriter in movies, and getting treated the way that screenwriters in movies get treated, which is like you’re very disposable. They will fire you without thinking twice about it. And they will hire — I always think of it as like there’s a Crayola box and you’re like you’re the writer that’s like the nude color. And then they pull you out and they do what they need to with the drawing. And then they want a different color, so they grab the different writer out of the Crayola box.

And there’s some writers who are great at doing lots of things, and so they get to stay on longer. But I just felt like after —

**John:** Let’s talk about you being that Crayola. So were you brought in to do the work on like these characters aren’t working, please add a voice to these characters?

**Dana:** I got put into that a lot. I also got put into the “we need the girl voice.” Like we need the woman to sound like an actual human being was a call I got a lot. You know, it’s like there’s these big boy movies and the girls don’t sound like real humans. So I got that call a lot.

And I chose not to be offended by that. I chose to just be like, great, this is work. I need work. This is great.

**John:** And so through that experience you’re building up your quote and you’re building up your experience. You’re building up relationships, so you’re getting employed to do more and more of these things, but they’re not necessarily the jobs that you would dream about. And a lot of times your name is not on them because you were just doing a couple weeks of work?

**Dana:** Right. And what would happen is, you know, the movie would go to get made and then you would be completely blocked out of the process. And that was the part where I always felt really frustrated, because as a writer, you think about absolutely every choice you’re making on the page. And you’re very careful about like why the comma is where the comma is.

And, of course, you have ideas about what clothing the people would be wearing. You’ve thought about absolutely everything else about the character. Of course you know what kind of outfits they would wear. But no one asks you that because you’re just the writer.

So it was always really frustrating to me to just kind of hand it off, and once the process got really good all of a sudden I wasn’t invited to the party. Well, actually, you know, Couples Retreat was the first one where I was on set every day. That was sort of the thing where I was like, “Oh…”

**John:** So Couples Retreat is the movie with Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau and other folks. And you were on an island in Tahiti, right?

**Dana:** I was in Bora Bora for a month and a half staying. And Craig knows because he has stayed there.

**Craig:** It’s great.

**Dana:** In like the world’s nicest over-water bungalow, with like a hole in the floor where you can see the fish. And it’s this whole thing. And it would normally have been like the most amazing experience. But every day I woke up feeling like I was like fighting for my life, because it was just a really tough shoot.

And we were changing things on the fly all day long. And there’s a lot of pictures of me just like standing in knee-high water, like holding a laptop. Just like in a flop sweat.

**Craig:** So you’re movie plays 24/7 on one dedicated channel at the St. Regis Resort in Bora Bora. It’s just, that’s it. It’s just a channel that does —

**Dana:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Well, there’s two channels actually. One in English. And one in French. And when I was there with Melissa, we used to come back from our day of whatever, you know, petting sharks and —

**Dana:** Snorkeling or like, yeah, rubbing your body up against a sea creature of sorts.

**Craig:** A thing? Or a person.

**Dana:** Or your wife.

**Craig:** And we’d come back. And so like Melissa is in the shower, and I’m just sitting there, and there’s not anything to watch except Couples Retreat. So the two of us watch Couples Retreat like 100 times in bits and pieces.

And I remember I wrote you and I was like, “We’re here and we’re in St. Regis and we’re watching your movie. This is the best place ever.” And you were like, “Oh, that’s nice. All I remember about it is typing and crying.” [laughs]

**Dana:** That’s all I did the entire time I was there. I remember one night I was in the fetal position sobbing saying, “Vince Vaughn is my father.” And Quinn, who was my lovely husband at the time, who was I swear to god 25 years old, was like, “I think I’m in a little bit over my head here.” I was like, “I can’t do it anymore.”

No, but Vince was actually really, really a great sort of graduate program on having tough skin, because he is a very, very hard worker and he just demands that everyone around him is working as hard as he is. And he taught me that work ethic, which is I guess great.

But, yeah, a lot of crying. And then a lot of very, very small croissants. And like eating so many chocolate croissants that were miniature size that I could make like a giant croissant inside my stomach with them. I did that a lot.

Yeah, Bora Bora was kind of hard core. It was amazing. And I look back on it and I think how did I not enjoy that.

**John:** So was that your biggest onset experience?

**Dana:** That was my biggest onset experience. Yeah. And I was there pretty much every day of that whole shoot. And it was a really long shoot. So, I got a lot of experience with that. And I started to just sort of discover that for me the writing almost begins onset as opposed — you know, most people feel like that’s the destination and once you’ve gotten there you’re done. But for me, that was like the start of the real writing. And I felt like so much changes when you’re there with the actual actors and they’re saying the actual words. And you see stuff. And you go, “Oh my god, well this could be better.”

And I loved sort of challenging myself to imagine what the editing problems were going to be later, and then fixing them in the moment so that we wouldn’t have those problems later. And then that experience kind of made me really sort of hungry for the onset experience.

And so then I decided to do a television show. My friend, Liz Meriwether, was doing New Girl. And she was just like, “It’s amazing. They actually think writers know what they’re talking about.” And she sort of encouraged to meet this woman, Katherine Pope, who is this incredible executive/perfect human being. And Katherine just kind of slow played me and talked me into being in television.

And then that was when I really understood like, oh, this is what I want to do. I want to be the person that gets to answer the question what is the person wearing, and what color should the wall be. And all that stuff, because I had the answer for all of that. I knew what the answer was and no one was asking me that.

And so then I just decided, okay, I think I have to start producing things in movies to stay close to the process while it goes all the way through to the end.

**John:** So Ben and Kate was a really quick rise. I remember meeting up with you in New York, because Quinn was running the marathon, and we were racing around the city. And I think you had shot the pilot, or you were about to shoot the pilot. And it was like sort of last minute. And like, “Well, we’re doing this thing. We’ll see what happens,” and suddenly you’re on the fall schedule. And you have this giant spotlight on you. Were you ready for it? Is anyone ever ready for it?

**Dana:** You know, it’s so funny. I don’t think anyone is ever ready for network television. It is so bonkers insane how many hours of TV you have to reduce in such a short amount of time. It’s like making a movie over, and over, and over again without stopping. And you’re making like three movies at once.

And so I would have a to-do list board up on my wall, because I had to be able to visualize it, otherwise it just felt infinite. And it would be like pitch, you know, writer’s room on this episode, pitch document on that episode, outline on this episode. There’s a script on this episode. There’s a cut on this episode. I mean, it was like there literally were like ten episodes going on at any given time. And so it was really hard to kind of keep all that stuff straight. I had some really great writers on the show who were just amazing, helping me and Katie Silberman I met on that show. And she was just like a killer. She was so awesome and so great at helping me kind of keep stuff straight.

But, yeah, I was as it turns out completely ready. And I felt like finally I felt like a fish in water. And it was weird. I think it was partly because Katherine Pope and also Liz Meriwether were just kind of like, “Of course you can do this. You’re awesome. Go.” That was really helpful.

And I just — I guess I just had spent so much time kind of as a woman, and I hate to get kind of feministy about it, but doing the tap-dancey, like I am a scared little girl and I don’t know the answer, but maybe the answer is this. But it’s your idea, and you just thought of it. And I had done so much of that. And I realized I always had the answer, I just was giving it to other people and pretending that they had thought of it. So then I was like, oh look, I can just take credit for the answer and I don’t have to be ashamed of it.

And then that was an amazing moment where I feel like I came into my power and I felt like, oh, I don’t have to ask for permission anymore. And when you know that you don’t need permission, that’s when you really don’t need permission anymore.

**Craig:** I mean, I love that. I love that you’re taking that additional capacity on. And we’ve talked a lot about this idea of the writer plus. You know, even if you don’t necessarily have the title of producer, a lot of times in features you can work yourself into a position where you’re the writer plus. I mean, for instance, like you were on Couples Retreat, you were more than just a writer, even if you weren’t producing that movie.

And then you kind of take on this additional thing where, okay, now I am in fact the official producer of this movie. And my question for you is, so, there’s one thing that producers that I — because I’ve thought about this a lot, but generally I shy away from doing any producing whatsoever. And part of it is because there is this thing I think really good producers that aren’t you, and that aren’t writing, can sometimes service this wonderful buffer between you and the outside world.

Some of them are bad and all they do is take what’s in the outside world, amplify it, and then shove it in your face. Those are the worst ones. Frankly, those are the more common ones. But occasionally you find ones that shield you. Did you feel more exposed as the producer because there wasn’t any kind of buffer between you, and the studio, and all the politics, and all the baloney?

**Dana:** Yeah. Well, that was what my question to you was going to be. Is the outside world like the studio and all the actors being crazy? What do you think of as the like stuff that it’s all that stuff?

**Craig:** It’s everything that’s not in my head in the screenplay, or sitting with the director and blocking a scene. Anything that’s not making movie, but all the other stuff around it, which is a lot.

**Dana:** Yeah. That was tricky on this one. I mean, to compare it to the TV experience, I had a whole crew of people who were there to support me in the creative endeavor on the TV show. And then on this one, on How to Be Single, like I was the person supporting everybody else, but I was also sort of expected to be able to do all the scene work that you’re expected to do as the writer onset. And that was really a huge challenge. And I have to say, like, thank god for Katie Silberman, because she was with me onset every day. And she kind of would have the script. And she would come up with all these great alts. And I had some good alts in the moment, but a lot of times, you know, I spent a lot more time dealing with the political stuff and just all the stuff that you’re talking about than I normally would as a writer on set. And so, yeah, it was really, really difficult to juggle and to manage.

But, I think when you sort of have that super power, which is the like I can talk to the studio. I can talk to the actors. I can talk to the director. I can talk to everybody. It’s hard to sort of put the super power away. You know what I mean? It’s like —

**John:** Let’s talk about the relationship with the director, because that seems like that would be an interesting and challenging shift in dynamics. Because in television, of course, the showrunner is ultimately responsible for the show. It’s this ongoing process, so the director is there for an episode. And so whatever that director does, well, you’re going to sort of decide what makes it through the edit.

You’re ultimately going to be picking that director and picking what’s going to be shot. It’s your show. But with a movie, that’s not traditionally how it works. And so as we look at the people who are like you, the writer-producer, so I think you, Chris Morgan, Simon Kinberg, there’s a growing number of these people who are doing that job of I’ve written the screenplay and I’m going to shepherd the screenplay through production. It changes your relationship with the director, doesn’t it?

**Dana:** Yeah. And I think I get away with it a little bit more because I’m like brutally honest. I’m not afraid of conflict. I’m not afraid — I’m super nice, but I get to the point. And I’m not afraid of stuff. So, I think I have like a personality that’s kind of built for it. But you’re right, it’s a really complicated — you do sort of have to walk on egg shells a little bit at certain moments, because the director is absolutely the boss in the movie business.

And so I was very lucky on How to Be Single in that I had a director who liked me and thought I knew what I was talking about. And so he and I were good at working together. The actors and I all got along great. And so we were all good at working together. It just — I don’t think I’ll ever do a movie again and not direct, honestly.

**John:** Oh, that’s the question.

**Dana:** And that’s the sort of weird twist of I guess this podcast which is that I think I will either just write it, and I will hand it to someone and be like, “Good luck. Have fun at 3am on the streets of NYC without me. I’m going to be in bed,” or I’m going to be directing it. Because it is very hard to feel like you kind of have the answer and feel like you could be the person the way that you are in television and then all of a sudden you’re like, oh no, wait, I’m not the boss-boss.

**John:** I described it, when I Jordan Mechner was writing the script for Prince of Persia, I was just a producer on the film. And I would see these things happening in the script and say like, “I know how — just let me fly the plane.” It’s like you’re in the cockpit of a plane, and you know how to operate the controls, but you’re not allowed to touch the controls. And it was so bad to not be able to use the controls.

**Dana:** You actually used that analogy with me. A long time ago you told me that. And I have quoted it a million times, because that’s exactly what it feels like. It feels like you’re in a 747 and you’re going through turbulence and everything is kind of crazy. And you’re like, “Press the red, oh god, can you just press the red button — no you’re not pressing the red button. You’re putting the, oh, god, you’re pressing the green one. Okay.” It drives you nuts.

**Craig:** It’s worse in a way because sometimes if you’re going to make the analogy really accurate, the person flying the plane is doing a poor job. You are a much better pilot than they are. Not only are you not allowed to touch the controls, somehow it’s considered rude to suggest that maybe they do something else.

**Dana:** By the way, you’ll get kicked out of the plane sometimes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Dana:** If you suggest that you should, yeah. 100%.

**Craig:** That is so nuts. And I’ve found that the better directors aren’t like that. You know? Just looking at all the directors I’ve worked with, it’s the ones that are insecure and frightened who turn you away and get super weird about that old school auteur baloney nonsense. And the new ones aren’t like that as much. And the good ones aren’t like that as much.

**Dana:** I’m so happy to hear you say that, because I guess I can amend what I was saying before, which is that if I found the right directors who really wanted a collaboration, I would 100% do it again, because I absolutely love it and I know I’m good at it. It’s so funny that you should say that, because when I was on my television show I had a really moment with some people that worked on the show and they sort of suggested that I was losing my power because I was deferring to other people who I thought were smart. And instead of sort of taking that bait and being a dude and saying, “You’re right, I have an ego. And I’m not going to listen to you. And I know the answer,” I actually said, “I think it’s what makes me powerful is that I pick the right people to listen to, and that I know that there are creative people here who can give me better ideas than even I can think of.”

And to me those are the really exciting sets to be on are the ones where everybody sort of feels like if you have the right group, you know, the contributions are welcome. And to me it’s like if the idea can’t withstand a little bit of criticism, then it’s not the right idea.

So, how could you get panicky about somebody else telling you they think they might know the answer? I take it all in. And I don’t take it — if I don’t agree with it, I just don’t take it. I filter it out and I go on to the next thing.

But, you can take it in. You know, that’s not an ego jab. I don’t know.

**Craig:** I agree.

**Dana:** It’s interesting.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, the people that said that to you, this was the show you were running, correct?

**Dana:** Yes, it is. And I’m happy to know that, Craig, you’re experiencing it, too. Because sometimes I feel like I’ve gotten into slightly more feministy/sexism-y place lately because I’ve experienced some more examples of that that are kind of shocking. And I hadn’t really experienced it before.

But it’s like I wish I was almost at like an all-girls school in Hollywood so that I could just say like, “Oh yeah, there are still the bossy women who want to talk all the time and — ”

**John:** All right. Because Craig and I could never talk knowledgeably about this, because we don’t experience it, can you give us some examples of the things you encounter — and so obviously you can change the details around it, but what are some things — because no one is doing more better movies than you are for this kind of space. Like you have big movies that open with big movie stars, but what are you encountering?

**Dana:** You know, I think it’s like there’s a sense that any time you get emotional about something, you’re being an emotional, hysterical woman, as opposed to I’m being passionate. That’s how I get when I really believe in something. And it’s not like I cry at work. Like, of course I’ve never cried at work. I’m like basically a dude, but I just — I think that if you say something that’s emotional, and a lot of times actors are very emotional people. That’s why they’re actors is because they’re super empathetic — or not all of them, but many of them are very emotional. And so I’m interested in psychology. I mean, my mom is a psychology professor. I’ve talked about psychology. I used to read the DSM-3R, you know, mental health case book when I was like 10 years old as like a bed time story.

**John:** Oh, Craig is so excited to hear that. Because he loves his psychology.

**Craig:** You said DSM-3?

**Dana:** It was the DSM-3R, I believe, is the edition that was out when I was growing up. What was your edition?

**Craig:** Well, you know, I prefer 4 or 5 is really interesting. Five is good. Five is good.

**Dana:** I love that you’ve read all of them. That makes me so happy. But, Craig, you can back me up on this. Those books were like my first access to — they would have a little example of a person who was whatever mental illness they were talking about. And they would tell a little story about them. They’d be like, “Sally, name changed, age 35, has blah, blah, blah.” And you’d read these little stories and I think it was like my first access to sort of character types and people who behaved in certain ways.

And I was really interested in that stuff. But for me, when that — that is a part of what we do. You know, this is a business, but it’s also emotional and it’s kind of a little bit art. And it’s kind of a little bit all these things. It’s very organic. It’s very living and breathing.

And I found sometimes that when I would talk about like an emotional thing, like I’d say, “Hey, this is actress is having trouble because she feels blah, blah, blah,” there was definitely a lot of male executives around me who were like rolling their eyes at me. And it’s like, you know, and that was a little bit frustrating because I kept trying to explain to them like this is a business conversation. Because this emotional thing is affecting our business. And so we need to address this emotional thing.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a bunch of trying to make art, which is by its nature an emotional experience. And trying to make it in a very difficult way. But to expect that everyone is going to behave rationally and sort of clinically cleanly at all times is unrealistic.

**Dana:** Yeah. Absolutely unrealistic. And, you’re getting together a group of people who all are probably slightly different pages in the DSM-3R case book, including myself. And I’m sure I’m like page 68, you know, OCD and this, that, and the other.

But, you’re getting together all of these different sort of personality types, and then you’re kind of putting them into a war zone type situation where there’s so much money at stake and everyone is kind of in their most heightened behavioral state. And that’s why you sort of need a person like me that kind of dives — I take my body and I just like dive on grenades left, right, and center every day. That’s sort of what I would do.

**Craig:** I’ve been watching these discussions online. A lot of times there will be these Twitter battles between screenwriters. And a lot of times the fights are about these issues — issues of sexism, perceived sexism, and how it’s working in the workplace in Hollywood.

And it strikes me that part of the disconnect that’s going on is women will say, “Look, this is how I’m treated and this is no good.” And then guys will say, “Well, hold on. I’ve been treated that way.” Because, you know, all writers are treated poorly to some extent.

And so there’s this interesting disconnect, like, “Oh, you think that’s just because you’re a woman.” The problem is that it is worse for women. We know that there’s just facts. Right? So there are these facts.

**Dana:** Yeah, there’s just numbers. There’s like actual data. Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s actual data. And so, you know, on your DSM thing it’s true. We’re all worried about our own emotional well-being. Our emotional well-being is the most stark and salient to us. So, we come home — so you’ve got some guy who comes home, he’s just been beaten up by his producers, belittled, made to feel like he doesn’t belong. Told that he was being difficult, and emotional. And then he gets online and someone is like, “This is how they treat us because we’re women.” He goes, “No! It’s because we’re screenwriters!”

And that doesn’t help. [laughs] It doesn’t help at all.

**Dana:** Yeah. It’s so funny, because I’m sort of bummed that I even have to engage in these conversations about sexism, because up until now I feel like I kind of ignored it, just because I’m bored with it. I don’t want it to be a thing. And I feel like, you know, the film business is so hard. It’s so hard to be successful, whether you’re a woman, or a man, or any of it.

But the place where I feel like it does actually come into play, again, going back to like weird psychology stuff, is I think that women are afraid of failure in a way that men kind of grow up not being as scared of screwing up. We’re told that like you’ve got to be a good girl, and you’ve got to get the A-plusses. And you have to be a good girl, do it right.

And so we aren’t taught by society that it’s okay to screw up at stuff and be bad at stuff. And this is a business where you have to mess up over and over again and you have to get your — like you were describing, Craig, you have to get the shit peed out of you over, and over, and over again, every single day. And then you have to get up and dust yourself off and just start over again. Day in and day out. And day in and day out.

And I don’t know that that’s the way that girls are socialized in our culture at least.

**John:** Well, talk about the failure. The first cut of every movie is going to be terrible. It’s going to be just awful. It’s going to be unwatchable.

**Dana:** Yeah. Your skin is going to crawl.

**John:** But I could definitely imagine if you are delivering that first cut to the studio, there’s a different reaction because it’s like, “Oh, she really screwed up that cut. That cut sucked.”

**Dana:** Right. Yeah.

**John:** Versus like if it’s a guy who delivered it, it’s like, well, every first cut sucks.

**Dana:** First cuts always suck. Yeah. 100%. And I think that is the place where it’s actually real and actually damaging. Which is I think that women don’t get as many chances as guys do in this business. And I think Diablo Cody said it really well at one point. She was talking about how like if you fail once as a woman, it’s like you’ve failed for all women kind. Whereas guys fail all the time and they get second, and third, and fourth, and fifth chances.

Women fail once and they never get another chance. So that’s a little tricky. And, you know, I do think that — again, Lorene Scafaria had a good point to me the other day about like financiers. It’s like, all of this is all about — it’s all about money. It’s always about money. Which is why I always urge people, like if you want to see more movies like this, you have to go to the movie theaters on that opening weekend and use your money to vote.

Because if you don’t go see them, Hollywood is going to stop making them. They’re just going to follow the money. So, Lorene mentioned like all the financiers are male. You’re looking to try to make a movie and then you also have to get involved in a conversation with a guy who is looking at you as either his wife, he ex-wife, or his daughter.

And that’s tough. Again, like critics also are tough. Because critics can make or break a movie, and I would say the majority of critics are males, probably age 50. Would that be sort of a fairish thing of saying?

**John:** That sounds about right.

**Dana:** And those people don’t like our kinds of movies.

**John:** Yeah.

**Dana:** So, you’re going to get bad reviews if you make a movie about a female journey. The same movie with a male protagonist that’s dealing with relationships, like they would never have called 40-Year-Old Virgin a romantic comedy. They just called it a comedy. But it was about a guy and romance and relationships. That literally all that movie was about. But that’s a comedy.

**John:** Yeah. So any of the Apatow movies are just comedies, but any movies that have more than three women in them are romantic comedies.

**Dana:** Exactly.

**John:** And so your movie, How to Be Single, got lumped into the, oh, it’s a romantic comedy, even though the romance of it is not a big factor. It’s like an Apatow kind of movie, but with girls.

**Dana:** Yeah. Exactly. And that’s frustrating because, you know, again, it’s not an ego thing. I don’t’ read reviews because I think it’s really self-flagellating and weird. It’s like don’t go to that place. Because if a tree falls in the forest and you didn’t hear it, it’s like I don’t have that in body. I don’t have that horrible thing that that person just about me in my body, because I didn’t read it.

But, you know, I occasionally dip in because I sort of have to know what are people who are trying to go to the movies this weekend reading, so I dip in a little bit. And, yeah, it’s frustrating because you get marginalized by being called a rom-com. And the truth is nobody goes to theaters to see romantic-comedies because they want to see them on their TVs at their houses.

So, that’s messing with my business, dude. It does actually affect the business, which is a bummer.

**John:** I hear you. So, you mentioned their names before, so we should talk about Diablo, and Lorene, and Liz, and the four of you, the Fempire. What was the genesis behind that? So, these are four young writers who have sort of set out and were going to kind of work together to make projects?

**Dana:** It wasn’t really that we were ever working together. It was just there was a New York Times article written by the great Deb Schoeneman, who is now a writer in her right and doing awesome. And it was back in the time when the four of us had just kind of become friends. And we were all doing our own stuff, but somehow we got called the Fempire and it kind of seemed like it was the group.

We would more sort of casually help each other with our stuff, so like I would read Lorene’s script. She would read my script. We would give each other notes. And I would read Liz’s stuff. And she would read mine. So it was a little bit more casual like that. But what I liked about it is I liked that it kind of said, you know, this is a group of women who are all trying to do the same thing, and we’re not being catty to each other. We’re being good to each other. We want to help each other. We want to watch each other succeed. And that’s the thing — like I have absolutely no patience for women who don’t like other women. Like I think there’s a very special, delicious place in hell for women who are mean to other women.

So, I just liked that it was like these chicks are all trying to do the same thing, and we’re all really proud of each other. And it could have been like this story about these four people who kind of never ended up being friends, or staying together, but we all are still really good friends. And we still love each other and we still support each other and come out for each other. So, it’s just like kind of a cool thing to have.

**John:** But seeing you guys work, you guys would help each other out on things in ways I’ve never seen guys help each other out on things, which I thought was really laudable and great.

**Dana:** That’s cool. Like what? I love that.

**John:** There would be times where it’s like, “Oh, I got to help Lorene with this thing that she’s writing.” Or, I just feel like reading other people’s stuff is one thing, I feel like you guys were kind of in the room helping each other out in ways —

**Dana:** Yeah. And —

**John:** And ultimately you went through New Girl, which I know actually you got paid to work on New Girl, but like I felt you were a very important part of the early years of New Girl.

**Dana:** Yeah. And Lorene actually directed a bunch of New Girls. Because, you know, we would just convince Lorene. And she directed a Ben & Kate. Like, we would just convince — Lorene is mostly just a feature director, and she only really directs her own stuff, but we would just kind of convince her like, hey, come be with us on TV for a second because we thought she’s so talented. And we tried to convince her to get over there.

But, yeah, there was some formalizing of it. Like I would watch cuts of New Girl and kind of like help Liz out. But, I mean, I think it was — now that I’ve been in television and I understand that sometimes, for some people writing is a very solitary thing. I imagine for you, you like to get into a hermetically sealed train and get sent to space on your space train and do it there or something.

And, Craig, I don’t know if you’re the same way. But, for me, I think by talking and so I needed other people around me to kind of like figure out what my ideas where. Because I sort of — by pitching stuff out loud over and over again, that’s how I kind of land on it. And so, yeah, like Lorene and I would tag in to help each other just sort of stand there — a lot of times it was literally just an emotional support animal. Like, you know, like Lorene would just stand there and be like, “You can do it. You’re okay. Breathe. Have another coffee. You can do this.”

And a lot of times it was emotional support. And other times it was tagging in with actual, you know, she would come up with a great line for me, or I would come up with a thing for her. And now that I’ve been in television and I see how fun that can be, and how collaborative that can be, that’s what I’m trying to bring into features in a weird way as well, is just a little bit more of like a TV sort of collaborative environment in features.

I think in television, I can name off the top of my head a lot more female boss ladies. So, I think that means it’s better in television. But I think it’s getting hard across the board because the business is contracting so much.

I feel like when I started out, they made 30 movies a year that were the kinds of movies I could have written. And now I see maybe eight of those every year that get released. And you sort of look at it and you say I wonder where I would fit into this new marketplace. I’m so impressed with what Deadpool dead, even though they kicked me in the dick and stole probably $5 to $10 million from me last weekend. God bless you, Deadpool. I’m so happy for you.

I am happy because it’s an original movie that people were excited by because it was original. So that makes me happy. And then I go, ooh, like should I be trying to get into the Deadpool tent pole business? And, you know, I talk to people about it and I start floating that idea, because it’s like I’ve got ideas that are big like that. I’ve got huge super hero ideas all the time. It’s just not my genre, so I haven’t really pursued it. And the response I tend to get is like, “Oh yeah. We’ll look and see if there’s a Cruella de Vil, or like a female super hero thing.”

And I’m like, but, oh, so I get it. You would never in a million years consider me for the male job.

**Craig:** Out of curiosity, who is giving you that response? Your agents? Or — ?

**Dana:** I mean, just anybody I talk to about it.

**Craig:** But who are these dummies? Honestly, like —

**Dana:** How many women do you know though, Craig, seriously, like I love you. You’re my favorite, because you’re a total feminist. You guys both are. But like how many women do you know that have written on those big movies? The Marvel movies?

**Craig:** No, no, I’m not questioning that it’s happening. What I’m questioning is who are these people saying this? Like I want to know who they are. I want to know —

**Dana:** Do you want to key their cars for me? [laughs]

**Craig:** Well, I just feel like it’s just so profoundly dumb.

**Dana:** It’s a little backwards looking.

**Craig:** And you know my whole thing is I decry all of the isms, but those are all underneath the thing I hate the most which is dumb.

**Dana:** Dumbism?

**Craig:** It’s dumb. It’s just dumb. I don’t understand it.

**Dana:** Yeah, it’s dumb.

**Craig:** Why would you — what?

**Dana:** It’s because they don’t want to do the hard thing. And what I’ve learned —

**Craig:** Well, let me ask you this question.

**Dana:** Yeah, please.

**Craig:** Is the dumbness, because I’ve gotten this kind of dumbness before, too. Is the dumbness, they look and they say, “Well, here are the movies that you have done, which of course we’ve been allowing you to do. So we look at what our filter has allowed you to do and we’ve decided that must be the only thing you can do.” Is that — are they giving you any rationale for this, dumb, dumb thing?

**Dana:** I think it’s exactly that. But, to bring it back to I think the point that you guys were making before about maybe it’s just because we’re writers, I think that either of you guys if you wanted to do something that was so far outside of your genre, you would have to do the same thing that I would have to do, which is you have to write your way into it.

So, you have to either take a really deep pay cut to do something outside of your genre. Like if I wanted to do a period piece on television, like some of the weird British stuff that I like, you know, I would have to just write it, and prove to someone that I could do it, so that I just took the question mark out of the equation.

And I’m assuming you guys would have to do that, too, right? Or would they give you the benefit of the doubt?

**Craig:** No, no.

**Dana:** I don’t think they would.

**John:** I think they give us more benefit of the doubt than they might necessarily give you.

**Craig:** I don’t feel like I get any of it. I mean, I did — I’m working on something that is definitely — like characterized I think the way you just said, something that’s really outside. And, yeah, I just said, let’s not even bother. Money doesn’t — we’ll just do it. I’ll do it for scale. I don’t care.

**Dana:** Right. So you have to do that, too.

**Craig:** Just let me this. Let me do this. There are times I think where —

**Dana:** And that’s how you had to win that job.

**Craig:** Yeah. But, I think that where there’s this pernicious thing is that people may say, hmm, well this guy is saying that he’s willing to do all that. Wow, he’s really passionate and he’s really aggressive about it. I admire that. And I wonder if when a woman does it they’re like, “Desperate.”

**Dana:** Oh, 100%. Because, again, the dating stuff, and the psychology plays into all of it. It’s like no guy ever wants a woman who is coming after him, because they’re biologically programmed to want to chase after the cheetahs because the cheetah is the meat and they’re going to survive if they catch it. So, like if I’m a woman, and I stand there right in front of you and go, “I’m available,” it’s like, ew, gross. I don’t want her. They need to actually see the other cavemen trying to fuck me.

**Craig:** I’m okay with that actually.

**John:** It’s such a weird metaphor. I’m trying to visualize it.

**Dana:** It got a little confusing there.

**John:** Are you eating the cheetah? I don’t know.

**Dana:** I think we’re eating — yes.

**Craig:** Does anyone eat cheetah?

**Dana:** We’re both fucking and eating cheetah.

**John:** I mean, I hear cheetah is delicious. So, I mean, I don’t want to — it’s a specialty.

**Dana:** But it was like a sexual eating of the cheetah.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Dana:** So there was some of that in there, too.

**John:** [laughs] Sexual —

**Dana:** It was like a really weird picture.

**John:** Dana Fox and Sexual Cheetahs.

**Dana:** This is why they hire me for the writing.

**Craig:** [sings] Sexual Cheetah. Sexual Cheetah.

**John:** So, Elizabeth Banks directs Pitch Perfect 2 —

**Dana:** The greatest.

**John:** She’s the best.

**Dana:** Love her.

**John:** And that movie is a giant hit. And I think her really valid frustration is why are you not offering me this Marvel movie or this other giant tent pole thing when she did a kick ass job directing that movie.

**Dana:** I’m not speaking for Liz. I love Liz to bits. And I think she’s amazing. And I’m not speaking for her here, but I do think that a lot of the time when women direct stuff, they think it’s like a fluke or something if it’s successful. It’s like look at that accident that lady tripped on and fell into.

**John:** How great was that, yeah.

**Dana:** How did she fall into all that money by accident? Like if you think about it, I had never heard that the person who directed Mamma Mia, which made like a bazillion dollars worldwide, I did not know that was a woman. I don’t know her name. I don’t think she’s been allowed to direct anything until she’s about to direct Bridget Jones 2.

I mean, like why? That’s super weird, you know.

**John:** It is super weird. Because I would say that, my personal opinion, I didn’t think Mamma Mia was especially well directed —

**Dana:** Didn’t see it. Making lots of comments about it, but never saw it.

**John:** Made lots of money. But I do agree with you that like any man who made a movie that made a gazillion dollars, their next movie is easy to make.

**Dana:** Gets another chance. Yeah. They get another chance. The next one is immediately green lit. Or whatever they want to do is immediately green lit. I do think that’s interesting. And I think, you know, with Liz, there’s probably a little bit of a sense of like, “Well, she had that property before, and she was part of that property all the way along, so maybe she… blah, blah, blah.”

And it’s like this is the thing that happens to women is that they’ve got to prove themselves over and over and over and over again.

**John:** Well, they explain away the success, rather than sort of celebrating saying how do I get a piece of that.

**Dana:** Yeah. Exactly. And I personally kind of thrive on the energy of needing to prove myself over and over again. I, much like Hamilton, am young, scrappy, and hungry. And I think if I remain young, scrappy, and hungry, like my country, I’ll be okay. So, in a way I sort of get excited —

**Craig:** It worked out for Hamilton just perfectly. [laughs]

**Dana:** It worked out for Hamilton you guys. Oh, that makes me sad. It didn’t work out.

**Craig:** I’ve imagined my death so many times. Just like a memory.

**John:** I get to see Hamilton next week, and I’m going to be so excited.

**Dana:** Wait, have you not seen it?

**John:** I haven’t seen it yet.

**Dana:** Oh, god, John. I can’t even —

**John:** No spoilers.

**Dana:** The spoiler is zero. Zero spoilers.

**Craig:** He dies at the end. He dies, he dies.

**John:** I can’t believe it. History is the worst.

**Dana:** I mean, he does.

**Craig:** History has its eyes on you.

**Dana:** The magical thing is I have — I’m so proud of my education. You know, went to Stanford. Went to USC Film School. Like super educated. Sort of a blank spot where all of American history is concerned for me.

**John:** It’s really not that important.

**Dana:** Like just didn’t really, I don’t know, either go to that class, or pay attention in that class. So, Hamilton to me, the whole time I was like, “Oh my god, what? America?”

**Craig:** Slavery? We had slaves?

**Dana:** Wait, what was Britain doing in this whole thing? I mean, the whole thing to me was like a shocker. The plot of that thing. It’s the first time in forever that my own ignorance has created like an incredibly magical viewing experience.

**John:** You managed to avoid all spoilers.

**Dana:** It was amazing.

**Craig:** You were kind of in suspense to see if we won the Revolutionary War.

**Dana:** Oh yeah, 100%. I was like, did he play golf?

**Craig:** That’s spectacular. John, you’re going to love it. It’s the greatest.

**Dana:** John is literally going to have to take like a Hamilton vacation for a week and a half afterwards to like reevaluate who he is as a person. I felt like a different human being. I felt like I was born during that show, and I came out of it and I didn’t know who the new me was.

**John:** I’m really glad you’re not trying to set expectations too high for it.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s a little absurd. That’s just crazy. That’s your DSM acting up.

**Dana:** I don’t, man, I had a really emotional reaction to it. I really DSM’d it. I DSM’d it hard.

**Craig:** Yeah, you DSM’d it. I mean, it’s an amazing show. The one thing that I actually had to do was take a break because I couldn’t sleep. Like I would keep cycling Hamilton songs in my head. It was bad.

**Dana:** I know. I have been doing a thing where I just had a baby three months ago, and I’m trying to lose the last of my baby weight. And I’m tricking myself into running by only allowing myself to start at the beginning of the Hamilton soundtrack, so I only get as deep into the Hamilton soundtrack as I can run, as far as. So I keep getting to like My Shot or like the Skylar Sisters. And it’s like, that’s like a 20-minute chunk. And I’m like, I can’t go further.

**Craig:** You should start a little bit later, because I would imagine Wait For It would be a great running song.

**Dana:** Oh, god, it would be so good. But I got to earn it, dude. I got to run that far so I can hear that song.

**Craig:** I get it. I get it.

**John:** Bringing up your baby is actually a perfect last bit on this topic of, oh, why are women not more successful in Hollywood. Oh, they have to stop and have babies. You have three kids under three.

**Dana:** I have so many babies. They’re all babies. I just have babies. Three of them.

**John:** You have nothing with babies. And you were pregnant with your first child while you were creating Ben & Kate.

**Dana:** That’s absolutely right. I mean, I actually had sort of a dark — this is dark. I don’t know if your audience can handle this.

**John:** We love dark. We love dark.

**Dana:** But I actually had like a ton of trouble getting pregnant. I had to do seven IVF cycles and I had two miscarriages. And the first miscarriage I had, or the one that was really tough for me, which was like about 11 weeks or so, I found out that it was not going to work out. I found out the baby was dead the morning of my Ben & Kate pitch.

So, I had to go into the network and be like the funniest person in the entire world with like a dead baby inside me. And as much as that’s like just sort of a horrible story —

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, it’s the best story ever.

**Dana:** Everybody said, “We have to cancel the pitch. We have to cancel the pitch.” And I was sort of like, why do you think I have a sense of humor? Because comedy to me has been what has saved my life throughout my whole life. I mean, comedy for I think so many people who are in comedy is a defense mechanism. It’s a way to survive. It’s a way to kind of like make the world okay if you feel like the world isn’t going to be okay.

I had a pretty great childhood. I love my parents. It’s all cool. But, you know, it’s hard. And so I made people laugh as the way to kind of make everything okay. And so everyone kept saying, “We got to cancel this pitch. This is so creepy. This is so dark.”

And I said, no, I need this pitch. Like I’ll kill myself if I don’t go to this pitch.

**Craig:** Good for you.

**Dana:** So I went and I just like crushed it.

**Craig:** Love that. I love that.

**Dana:** And I was really glad I did it.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what? Cry later.

**Dana:** Cry later, man.

**Craig:** Go do your job. Cry at home. I think that’s amazing.

**Dana:** But that sort of set the tone for my —

**John:** Definitely. You’re going to have three beautiful kids and a kick ass career simultaneously, and you’re going to make it work.

**Dana:** And for me personally, I never stopped while I was pregnant or having babies. I went back to work three weeks after the first baby. I went back to work two weeks after the second baby. And I think I was like working while cranking the third baby out of my body.

**Craig:** Unbelievable. I mean, not to — listen, I don’t judge any woman and how she behaves after a pregnancy, and particularly I don’t judge my own wife because, you know, I don’t think like —

**Dana:** Your wife is the most awesome creature.

**Craig:** She’s the best.

**Dana:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** She was like, after those babies were born, she was like, “Okay. I’m going to sit here as still as I can sit and you’re going to help me.”

**Dana:** I think her stillness was my work.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Dana:** Like I think people are just different, people are just built differently. And the way I was built was, you know, for me, working is my passion. I love it so much. It keeps me going and also the more I keep moving, the less I have to deal with things that are scary, or sad, or I don’t want to deal with.

So, and the first one, I was having weird post-partum depression, but I don’t think I realized it was that at the time, because I’m such a chipper motherfucker most of the time. So, I was like, wow, this is kind of weird. I can’t seem to stop crying. Wow. Boy am I crying a lot. Is anyone noticing how much I’m sobbing? This is pretty weird.

So, I was like sort of positive about my depression. And then I went back to work and I was around people and I was doing what I loved and it made me feel like everything was going to be okay. So, you know, I think all women should do exactly what their body and their brains are telling them to do to make them feel like their happiest, best selves.

**Craig:** You only have three kids is the way I say.

**Dana:** Craig, stop tweeting babies into my body. Stop getting me pregnant, Craig.

**Craig:** I’m going to tweet another baby at you.

**Dana:** Don’t tweet that baby at me. I can’t have four babies.

**Craig:** Done. It’s done.

**John:** One more plug for How to Be Single. It has the best baby I’ve ever seen in a movie probably.

**Dana:** Oh my god, that baby was incredible.

**John:** It’s a scene with Leslie Mann and this baby, who is just the most angelic perfect baby. And their conversation, which is a good like — it felt like two minutes of conversation, a one-sided conversation with a beautiful baby, is just delightful.

**Dana:** I cry every time during that scene. I cannot pull it together. I almost have a fourth baby every time I watch that scene. It’s so bad. I’m like, where is Craig when I need him while I’m watching the scene. It’s such a beautiful scene.

**Craig:** I’m here.

**Dana:** And I hope everybody goes to see How to Be Single because I’m really proud of this one. And I really love it. I think it’s different. I think it’s interesting. I think we sort of casually do some kind of interesting stuff that I don’t know if we’re getting credit for. But like there’s an interracial relationship that we like 100% don’t comment on. It’s like not a big deal. It’s just like people get together sometimes and they aren’t the same race.

**John:** There’s an ex-boyfriend who is actually very sympathetic. And you can completely understand the movie from his point of view and sort of why he is doing what he’s doing. And in any other movie he would be a villain.

**Dana:** He would be vilified. Yeah. He would be vilified. And we have an incredible amount of respect for the men in our movie. We don’t sort of make them into the typical arm candy characters that women are sort of relegated to in movies where the main story is about a guy. We really tried to give those people respect. And like most of the dudes in the movie, I mean, they’re flawed just like the girls are, but they’re good guys. Because I didn’t want to —

**John:** I feel like Jake Lacy is a really good guy.

**Dana:** Jake Lacy is like the greatest guy of all time. He’s my favorite. My favorite line that Katie Silberman came up with on the day was, “My Halloween costume when I was in sixth grade was the stay-at-home dad.” Like how much do you love that guy? He’s like of course I want to be the daddy of your baby. What are you talking about?

But, yes, please see the movie, because I’m really proud of it, and I love it.

**John:** Hooray. It’s time for our One Cool Things. So, every week on the show we talk about One Cool Thing. So, Dana, you can go third so you can figure out exactly what your One Cool Thing should be.

**Dana:** Okay. I’m going to think about it. I think, for me, my One Cool Thing —

**Craig:** She doesn’t understand what third means.

**John:** She doesn’t understand the idea of you go third if you want to.

**Dana:** I can go third. I can go after you guys? Wait, but I’ve got to really think about it, you guys. I don’t have a cool thing.

**Craig:** That’s why he said you could go third. And then you were like, “Okay, so my One Cool Thing — ”

**Dana:** Okay, I’m going to say my One Cool Thing and I’m going to alienate every single one of your listeners. It’s going to be amazing.

**Craig:** Do it.

**Dana:** Okay, you do your stuff first.

**John:** Okay. So I’ll go first. My One Cool Thing is this great article I read about cow tipping. So, going back to our tipping discussion, here’s a great article about cow tipping. I’m going to poll both of you. Is cow tipping a real thing or a made up thing?

**Craig:** That is a made up thing.

**John:** Dana, what do you think?

**Dana:** I am going to go, because I’ve seen the movie Heathers, it has to be a real thing. And I think it’s offensive and creepy.

**John:** Okay. Cow tipping is not a real thing.

**Dana:** Oh, thank god.

**John:** So, this article by Jake Swearingen for Modern Farmer gets into the realities of cow tipping, which never was a thing and is actually almost impossible to do. So, for many reasons, like cows don’t actually sleep standing up necessarily. It would take so much force to push over a cow. You couldn’t do it. Cows would run away before you could get anywhere close to them.

So, it’s the movie Heathers, which I love the movie Heathers, that sort of kind of first put it in popular culture as a thing, like, oh, that’s a thing —

**Dana:** Did they make that up? But it sort of popularized it?

**John:** They popularized it.

**Dana:** Oh, that’s interesting.

**John:** It was already sort of a meme that was out there, but they sort of like grounded that meme. And so you see it in all of these movies and it’s like a thing that never actually happened.

**Dana:** That gives me great relief. I really worried for those cows.

**John:** You don’t need to worry for those cows.

**Dana:** I’m like upset about the cow tipping. Do you think the guy that wrote that article plays huge on that all-farmer dating website? Have you seen the commercials for that?

**John:** He’s the star of the all-farmer dating website. I think he’s going to be great. My question is, if you tip a cow, do you have to tip them afterwards? Do you have to give them like 20% if there’s —

**Dana:** If there was a button I would do it, but not if I had to do with cash. Zero percent on cash.

**John:** If there was an app for it, that made it really simple?

**Craig:** Wait, I’m sorry, there is a dating app just for farmers?

**Dana:** You’ve never seen this commercial? There’s a commercial on weird television programs. I don’t know. I watch a lot of like weird stuff. Just sometimes I’ll end up on like a weird — I’m in like a weird Steve Harvey place right now. I’m just really into Steve Harvey. And then you’ll get there, and you’ll be like what’s the demographic. Who is watching these shows?

And then you see the commercials and you’re like people who want to date farmers, apparently. There’s an all-farmer dating website. You should look it up, Craig. You could play huge on that, too, because you’ve got that beard going that’s pretty sexy.

**Craig:** I’ve got the beard. I know, I feel like a pair of overalls, I could kill it.

**Dana:** Oh my god, you would crush it. Also in the gay community. Careful.

**Craig:** What? Why? At this point, who cares? Do you know what I mean? It’s enough already. You know what, man, it’s like gay/straight — those are words from like my grandpa’s time.

**Dana:** Oh my god, I love that know that we’ve circled all the way back Whole Foods guy, and Whole Foods guy is not going to be labeled gay or straight.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why should I be? Why should I be?

**Dana:** I love that guy.

**Craig:** Like Hector is like, okay, you either work in produce or not. And I’m like, wrong Hector. Wrong. I don’t care what it says on my sheet.

**Dana:** I work in the chocolate bar. You know, don’t you feel like that’s going to be the next thing? It’s just going to be like what percent cocoa there is.

**Craig:** I mean, the word cocoa gives me dick shivers.

**Dana:** It upsets me so much.

**John:** Dana, I see the look in your face. I think you have a great One Cool Thing figured out.

**Dana:** Okay, so my One Cool Thing is the Spectra S1 breast pump. It is a new breast pump that has literally changed the face of my earth. And nobody is talking about it, and so I’m going to alienate every single person in your entire audience, except for the one pregnant/potentially nursing lady in your audience.

**Craig:** Oh, no, I think we’ve got quite a few I would imagine.

**John:** So tell us what makes this breast pump better than other breast pumps?

**Dana:** It’s special. It comes out of Australia.

**John:** We like everything that comes out of Australia.

**Craig:** I’m not impressed by the way.

**Dana:** I like all Australians.

**John:** Do you watch The Katering Show? The Katering Show is great.

**Dana:** Oh, no.

**John:** We’ll send you the link.

**Dana:** Wait, what? Oh, John, you know that’s right up my alley. That’s going to work.

**John:** You’re going to be so excited. It’s Australian. But tell us about this breast pump.

**Dana:** I have like a really deep hole where The Great British Bake Off is. Like I need new Great British Bake Off. Oh wait, can I change my One Cool Thing, or do you want me to do the breast pump?

**John:** Stick with the breast pump. Everyone knows about The Great British Bake Off.

**Dana:** It’s an Australian breast pump. And they created, you know the Dyson guy who talks about vacuums in this really creepy way? I feel like maybe that guy created this because they’re basically like, “The sucking mechanism of the breast pump,” is much more like an actual baby. And so you get — the long and short of it is you get like twice as much in half the time, and it has literally changed everything. And it doesn’t hurt. And it’s kind of incredible.

**John:** That’s great.

**Dana:** So, I’m just going to urge all women to throw their creepy Medela things out the window, because they hurt and it’s a bummer. And go to this weird Australian one.

**Craig:** My wife had that. She had the Medela one. And, honestly, the thought of more coming out, you know, my job was to save it all and put it in those bags and stick it in the freezer.

**Dana:** Yeah. Every good man.

**Craig:** My wife, it’s not like — you know, you know her, she’s not like super chesty or anything, but oh my god. I mean —

**Dana:** Really? That’s awesome.

**Craig:** It was crazy. I was like we need to open a store or do something. Because it was like our freezer was just overflowing. Yeah, it was crazy.

**Dana:** Black market Mazin milk.

**John:** So when Stuart does the show notes, will he be able to find this breast pump online?

**Dana:** Spectra S1. You got to get the S1, because that one has a battery involved inside it. So you just plug it in. The battery is all charged up. You can cruise around town with it. All good. On my way over here in the Uber — I really should have tipped that guy — because I was pumping in the car on the way here.

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. So you got your lotion. You got the breast pump thing.

**Dana:** I can jerk off, and pump, and sanitize myself afterwards. It’s perfect.

**John:** It’s good stuff. Craig Mazin, try to top that.

**Craig:** Can you use the breast pump to jerk off with? I mean, describe the sucking action on this thing?

**Dana:** There’s probably like an online hack that would allow you to do that.

**Craig:** Someone has hacked it.

**Dana:** You should look on YouTube. I imagine it exists.

**John:** Or a board that you sort of solder and you put together.

**Dana:** Definitely.

**Craig:** Well, you know, that’s what we do. When it comes to jerking off —

**Dana:** John August will have like a brain trust on this and it will be solved by next week for sure.

**Craig:** I have no doubt. Well, my One Cool Thing is nothing at all to do with nipples. Weird. It’s called Sky Guide. And there are a lot of apps for your phone where you can hold it up to the sky and it tells you what you’re looking at. You know, oh, that’s Venus, or that’s a constellation.

What I love about this one is they track the schedules of passing satellites, of the space stations that go by. And the deal is at times when things are going by, they will reflect the sun from the other side. So like at night, like for six seconds, literally six seconds, they’re reflecting sunlight from the other side just because of the angle that they’re at. And then it’s gone.

And so you’ll get like a little ping. Go outside. It’s a minute away. And you stand out there and it tells you like look over here. And you look there and it counts down and then you see it.
**Dana:** Like a little flair?

**Craig:** You see like a shooting star because you’re catching a piece of satellite or something. And I don’t know, it just reminds me of the big, big beyond.

**Dana:** That’s really romantic. I like that technology can be romantic and can bring you back to something that’s so sort of primal and outdoorsy, even though it’s very computer-y.

**Craig:** And then I also have that breast pump on my dick while I’m doing it.

**Dana:** [laughs] Oh my god. Can you edit out the fact that I just spit water all over when you said that?

**Craig:** No. Are you kidding me?

**John:** All spit takes have to stay.

**Dana:** All spit takes.

**John:** You have a recurring spit take in your movie.

**Dana:** I do. I have a spit take call back, no less.

**John:** Well done.

**Craig:** The best.

**John:** We have a tiny bit of news here at the end of our show. So, listeners will know that we were supposed to have Lawrence Kasdan on our show, on our live show, and he couldn’t do it for that night. And we were very lucky to have the Game of Thrones guys fill in for him.

But, we’re going to do our Lawrence Kasdan interview live with an audience on Saturday April 16 at the Writers Guild Theater. It’s a joint program with the Writers Guild Foundation and Academy’s Nicholls Fellowship.

So, this is not a normal Scriptnotes live. This is actually their event, but we’re going to crash it and do the interview with Lawrence Kasdan there with an audience. So, if you’d like to come to see us talk to him live, there will be a link in the show notes. So, you can join us for that.

And that’s our program. So, most of the things we talked about, including the breast pumps, and the international space station tracking app, will be compiled by Stuart Friedel and put in our show notes. You can find them at johnaugust.com.

You can find me on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Dana, you are?

**Dana:** @inthehenhouse.

**John:** Very nice. Oh, because you’re a fox.

**Dana:** Uh-uh. Fox in the hen house. Everything with the word Fox was taken by like some porny weird stuff. So, I had to get creative with it.

**John:** That’s nice. We like it.

If you have comments for us, you can join us on Twitter, but you can also leave comments on our Facebook page, which we actually checked this week, so that was kind of cool.

**Craig:** Wait, we have one of those? [laughs]

**John:** We have one of those.

**Craig:** Oh. Wow.

**John:** And so the things we talked about today, those were from the Facebook page, Craig.

**Craig:** Uh…yes. Of course.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** I knew that.

**John:** You can write in with questions to ask@johnaugust.com. That is a good place for the longer things we sometimes address on the show.

If you would like to subscribe to Scriptnotes podcast, join us on iTunes. Just click subscribe. And while you’re there, please leave us a comment. That helps other people find the show.

We also have the Scriptnotes app there. That lets you get access to all the back episodes of the show.

We also have a few of the 200 episode USB drives that have all the back catalog of Scriptnotes which you can get. So, if you’d like one of those, just go to the store. It’s at johnaugust.com. There’s a link in the show notes.

Our outro this week is by the same guy who did our outro last week. His name is Adam Lastname. I don’t know what his last name actually is. It just shows up as Lastname.

If you have an outro for us, you can write it to the same address, ask@johnaugust.com.

Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli. It is produced by Stuart Friedel. And thank you for listening. We’ll see you next week.

**Craig:** Thanks Dana.

**John:** Thank you, Dana. Bye.

**Dana:** I love you guys.

**Craig:** Love you, too.

Links:

* Dana Fox on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Fox), [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1401416/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/inthehenhouse)
* [DSM-III-R](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders#DSM-III-R_.281987.29) and [DSM-5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5) on Wikipedia
* The New York Times on [The Fempire](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/fashion/22fempire.html)
* [How to Be Single](http://howtobesinglemovie.com/) is in theaters now
* Modern Farmer on [Cow Tipping: Fake or Really Fake?](http://modernfarmer.com/2013/09/cow-tipping-myth-or-bullcrap/)
* [farmersonly.com](http://farmersonly.com/), and [their YouTube page](https://www.youtube.com/user/FarmersOnly)
* [Spectra S1 breast pump](http://www.spectrababyusa.com/#!products/cjg9), and [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DBKFFJM/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [The Katering Show](http://thekateringshow.com/) is fantastic
* [The Great British Bake Off](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b013pqnm)
* [Sky Guide](http://www.fifthstarlabs.com/#sky-guide)
* [Get tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/wgfestival-2016-craft/) to see John and Craig interview Lawrence Kasdan as part of WGFestival 2016
* [USB drives with the first 200 Scriptnotes are available now at the John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Lastname ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))