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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to episode 699 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, before you begin pitching a project, you need to be able to pitch yourself. How do you do it without sounding like an egotistical jerk? We somehow spent nearly 700 episodes without really digging into this topic. Luckily, it was brought to us by one of our favorite returning guests, the wonderful Pamela Ribon. Welcome back, Pamela.

Pamela Ribon: Thanks. It’s always nice to be back.

John: Now for folks who don’t have their cheat sheets open, let’s remind them of the projects you’ve written on including Moana, Nimona, and your Academy-nominated short film and a wonderful thing many times, My Year of Dicks. Let’s also talk about underemployment because this is something a lot of our listeners are encountering now, especially our writer listeners. My friend Ryan suggested we discuss some of the pernicious effects that not working has on our choices but also the opportunities that are presented by the times that you’re not working. Especially if you know you’re not working for a certain period of time, that can actually be liberating. We’ll dig into that.

We have listener questions. Since I have you and our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk a little meta conversation about podcasts because you are a podcaster yourself. I am looking at your podcast set up here on the Zoom and I’m so happy to see it. As we approach episode 700, we’re talking about making some changes around here and I would love your thoughts on that. We have Scriptnotes episode 700 coming up next week and we’re going to do a live show on YouTube. It’s happening tomorrow, Wednesday, August 13th at 10AM Pacific Standard. If you want to watch us live on YouTube, just subscribe to the Scriptnotes podcast and you’ll get a little alert when it’s happening.

Pamela: I love that I’m on the odometer rollover. The 699. We’re getting there.

John: It’s the eve of the 700. It’s setting us up for success. Drew, we have some follow-up.

Drew Marquardt: We do. Some listeners wrote in that a former How Would This Be A Movie article from way back in episode 348, the Rent-A-Family industry in Japan. It looks like it’s being made into a movie. It’s called Rental Family starring Brendan Fraser.

John: Great. We’ll put a link to the trailer in the show notes. I watched the trailer and I think that’s what we expected, although I wasn’t expecting it to be a white guy in Japan doing the thing. I thought that we would move the whole concept over to here instead it’s a large white guy serving as a token white guy in this movie. They’re addressing it in the trailer that he’s the one American who’s being placed into these family situations.

Pamela: Awesome. One of the co-writers here, Hikari, was my cohort when I did the film Independent Director’s Lab.

John: Oh my gosh.

Pamela: She’s awesome. She actually made the film that she went into the director’s lab with. It’s called 32 Seconds. I don’t remember how many seconds. It came out a couple of years ago. I also tried to get this project. I had a pitch. I was thrown in the mix. I was in the thing. It’s very scripted.

John: Can you tell us more about this because this is being released by Searchlight, but what was the process behind this?

Pamela: First you let people know like, “Hey, I found this article. I think it’s going to be a thing and I’d like to see if I can be involved in however it’s getting adapted.” Then they–Boy, this is so long ago so I’m trying to remember how it went this time. Sometimes you just hear like, “Oh no, Lucky Chap has it.” You’re like, “Okay. Bye. Thanks. Of course.” I think in this one, it was like, “Do you have someone that you could attach to with this? Is there a company already that would do this with you?” Because I’m nobody. I can’t remember because this one went very quickly. By the time I was interested in trying to gather a group, there were big people going out with this.

I think that eventually it was just I didn’t move the needle enough to be in the runner-ups for the next top screenwriter. Here it is.

John: It seems like it was probably a long journey to get there. It’s based on the same article but you don’t know everything that happened along the way behind the scenes. Maybe as it comes closer to getting released, we might get some more backstory. I’m just curious what the journey was and how it got to Hikari.

Pamela: I just remember thinking like, “This is such an interesting concept.” I’m sure mine was more in the vein of her or something like that where it was like, “You don’t really care for your life anymore so why don’t you just go be the person that other people need at these moments?” I remember pitching like, “Please, can you fire this person for me? I don’t want to do it.” That kind of stuff.

John: All right. Let’s get to our main topic, which is the topic you brought us. We actually have a question from a listener that sets this up perfectly true.

Drew: Charles writes, I’ve written a pilot and I’m fortunate enough to have gotten some general meetings from it. For all intents and purposes, I’m no one and they know nothing about me. What are the best practices or tips for starting a meeting? You sign on to Zoom and you’re suddenly met with a face and now you have to be interesting. When you’re no one, you can’t count on them knowing anything about you and it’s weird if too much about them. What are some general tips to ease into the general meeting?

John: Pamela Ribon, you’ve actually done workshops on this, like how to talk about yourself as a writer. I’d love to see this conversation to you if you want to direct us here.

Pamela: Sure.

John: What is your best advice for someone in Charles’s situation and really any writer who’s going into a situation where you have to talk about yourself.

Pamela: I like to talk about this topic whenever it’s film festival masterclasses or whatever because this is the thing that you have to do first. Sometimes before you’ve even written something, you have to talk to people about writing and if you want to write or that you have written and what are you going to write next? I find a lot of people start by apologizing for even feeling this way, for having a dream or for having accomplished a script and they’re like, “It’s just this thing. I don’t know. It’s whatever. I don’t know. It’s dumb.” Even in this question, it’s weird if you know too much about them.

You’re having a meeting. Knowing a lot about them shows that you did your homework. You’re excited to meet them. You’re equipped. I know we talk about like it’s a first date but it’s not. We’re not going to keep dating. There’s not like, am I attracted to this person or is that how they always dress? It’s more about how does this flow fit? When they ask me a question about myself, do I feel comfortable answering it? When they answer a question that I have, do I feel like they’re looking at me and talking to me? Do I feel like a real person in this room? These are basic questions that– In a general you can get yourself too hyped up to even bother to look for.

John: Somebody said there, I really want to pull apart is that you think back to a first date and if someone asks you about yourself on a first date, you’re going to come out with a set of answers that make you look good along a certain axis. You’re not going to get the same answers in a general meeting that you would on a first date. It’s a positioning thing you’re trying to do. You’re trying to explain to them who you are, what you’d like to write, why you wrote this thing, why you’re there. It’s good to practice this. If you’re giving a masterclass, you’re talking to people about this, what are your first bits of advice for the things they need to come into the room ready to say?

Pamela: What I usually do is we just have a general in front of the rest of the class. Someone brave enough to go first, I say, “You’re going to walk in here and I’ll already be seated, you’re going to come in like you’ve walked into my office.” Then you just do it because they figure it out. You walk in, you’re like, “Hey, how are you doing? Do you need anything? You want some water? Did anybody get you coffee?” You sit down and then you small talk. Was it hard getting here? Oh, it’s hot today. All the things we do at the top of a general, which at the top of a Zoom– Just so I’m also modern.

It’s the same way you make sure that you’re looking at the green light every once in a while so that you’re making the closest eye contact as you can make. You make sure that you’re comfortable, that you have water, that you have all the things you need. You start with whatever. Like we did when we first logged on of, here’s what traffic situation I was just in and here’s how things are going. Then, you gradually find yourself moving into the topic of why are we really here? Sometimes they start it where if they’ve read something of yours or someone recommended they meet you, that’s a kindness that they may do but you may start because a lot about it and you can start with, “I just saw this, I loved it.”

That’s enough to get things going. If they’re not giving you anything back, this isn’t a great room and you can learn very quickly. I don’t have to sweat here. We’re not going to work out. Like you said, you’re not going to give the same answer as on a first date but I know enough that when people go, “I don’t know anything about.” You can say, “Oh, I can do that.” I moved around a lot. I went to 13 schools and then I moved my way into the early internet and the older net. Then, that started me getting into rooms and I did comedy rooms and sitcoms for a while until I got the call from Disney. I just did so many years.

John: Some good at heavy lifting there. I liked as it showed a journey and it showed like, “Oh, if they’re curious about any bits of that, they can jump back to talk about that.” What were those early rooms like? What were you doing in those places?

Pamela: What shows or where did you end up? What was your last school? We can start by Austin. People in LA really like to talk about Austin.

John: They do.

Pamela: You can do that. Sometimes you’re talking about people you know in common. That thing of like someone said I should meet you or I saw that thing and it was great.

John: Or I see that you’re working with this director. I had a great experience with them or what this is. In some cases it’s the subtly coded like, “That director’s challenging for these reasons. I hope you’re having a great experience.” I love them. It’s also challenging on this thing.

Pamela: Finding your mutuals is a nice– When you have found your mutuals, you learn a lot about them too. Like, “Oh, I love her. She’s great. No, I haven’t met him.” Even just the things you’ve seen. They often ask, what are you reading right now? It’s not quite small talk, it’s medium talk because it’s small talk with cues of, do we think that one day when we’re arguing over a plot point, we’re going to get to a place together because we actually are on the same wavelength. Sometimes that just flies by and all of a sudden an hour has happened because you ended up talking about anything from Taylor Swift to some new app you’re playing with.

You never know where it’ll go. Being flexible with the time or just being free to explore wherever this conversation’s going to go and not get nervous about what you did or did not talk about. You don’t need to put that pressure on yourself. You can have an agenda of I really want to make sure I mention this one thing but you can’t script it.

John: Many episodes ago, Craig and I were talking through this article and we’ll try to find a link to the actual original article. The writer was talking about how good conversations have doorknobs and handles. Basically, there’s ways you can open and keep going. It’s about making sure that you’re providing them things like your bio of all the schools you went to, all the things. You’re giving them handholds that they can pull on and actually keep the thing going. In some of the early general meetings I had, I just didn’t get the flow of it quite right.

I would answer questions without lobbing it back so that they could do the next thing or really that I could ask questions about what it is that they’re looking for. Because if the meeting’s going well at a certain point it does transition into like, “Here’s what we’re working on and here are things that might be a good fit for you.” That’s the dream situation. Other cases it’s just like, “What are the general areas in which we might have some overlap there.” Things that they’re looking for, if it’s an actor’s production company, like what is that actor seeking? If it’s a director, what things never cross the line for that director? That place you’re hoping to get to in these conversations.

Pamela: I used to always have prepared screenplays I wish I had written.

John: For sure.

Pamela: Because that lets them know and let it be varied if it’s varied. Now I know myself well enough, please forgive me if I’ve already said this on this podcast, but I will say, I just am not into dragons, politics, or when people pay money out of a pouch.

John: Great.

Pamela: That’s it. I know it. It doesn’t matter. You can put other things in that pouch, jewels maybe or secret but not farthings.

John: Nimona had dragons and pouches for sure.

Pamela: I turned it down the first time it came around. 100% I was like, “It checks every box I don’t like.” Then they came around again and they were like, “The thing is you don’t have to come all the way out to Connecticut anymore because of Zoom. What if we come to you?” They were like, “They’re punk rock dragons. I don’t think we have to have any pouches.” I was like, “Okay, let’s try it.”

John: All right. My list for that, it’s not a thing I would often say in meetings, but I would definitely tell my reps is like, “ No gnomes, elves, dwarves or Christmas.” I just like no. People will still come to me with Christmas but it’s like, “No, I don’t care about Christmas as a concept.” Even there was a good documentary that was about Christmas trees in New York and the whole business of Christmas trees in New York City. It’s is actually fascinating but it’s also, “No, it’s Christmas. No, it’s just bah humbug.” I just don’t want to do those.

Pamela: Really does help them immediately go, “Oh, we’re going to put down a number of these things.” It may make them say, “What is it that you like?” I think with me in particular, they’re not always assuming what it is that I like because they’re– Now that you have produced credits, they’re like, “Oh.” There have been times when I’m like, “Do you think I’m a cartoon person? Is that what you’re doing?” They’re like, “Yes. Sorry, I don’t know why I’m doing that.” People have a way of learning about animation that is limiting.

You’re always having to show your other sides and the dynamics of you. Often, I’ll tell you what, we end up talking about roller derby.

We end up trying about what I do when I’m not writing and your hobbies, your family, whatever it is. In those generals, I’m always talking to this person until we find that thing that lights them up. Then I know we got it. Sometimes he’s like, “I collect trains.” I was like, “Tell me more.” Then, you watch them become the person they want to be in front of you because they’re talking about their passion.

John: Absolutely. You may not give a rat’s ass about trains but the fact that it is interesting to them, there’s going to be something there that’s fascinating. There’s something that’s driving them about that.

Pamela: They have stories because of that. That’s when you see the storyteller come to life.

John: Again, I’m forgetting exactly where I learned this but Rod Stewart apparently is a big model train builder and collector. I appreciate Rod Stewart so much more now just recognizing that he has an obsession, a hobby that has nothing to do with music or songwriting. That’s fun. That’s nice. Let’s talk about part of the general meeting is talking about what you’re working on right now, which could be a delicate subject because it could be in flux. It could be like, there’s a director on, director’s not on, there could be an NDA. How do you best do that? I think sometimes in animation where we’re under NDAs a little bit more than we are in live action but talk to us about that.

Pamela: For a while I would be like, I’m working on things I can’t tell you about for years and that would be enough. It depends on the room. Sometimes you can realize you’re at a Disney meeting or you can be like, “We’re all in the family here. I’m working on Moana.” If you’re in a position where you can’t really– Let’s say right now I’m working on Emily the Strange for Warner Bros Animation with Bad Robot. That’s all I can say about it.

John: It was announced in the trades. You’re safe there.

Pamela: I’m safe there. I’m talking about who I’m working with and I focus on the great things about it because we have hard days, and I try not to launch right into like where it hurts and just talk about where it’s working and what’s great and what we’re still excited about. Because really the NDA is often so that you don’t like talk about stuff that they wouldn’t want in a press release and you know that in your heart. There’s things that are set up that aren’t quite happening yet. I have a spec that went out this week. Here’s something, you guys. I’ve never sold a spec before, ever.

John: I’ve sold exactly one. It was Go. That was the only spec I’ve ever sold.

Pamela: Good for you. That’s amazing. Tell me what it’s like. I’m excited but I don’t know what’s going to happen and maybe nothing will happen. I have a little piece of news this week that I have a spec that’s going out, which if I were in a general, they’d be like, “Can you tell me about it? Can I get it? Can I get it on that list? Can I read it?” That’s the mystery. You can use an NDA to your benefit of a mystery. You’re working. I’ve got a project at FX. I’ve got something going on at Disney TV Animation or whatever. These things take forever and they all have their own timeline, you bounce around to being– I genuinely like to balance a bunch of projects at once.

I try to talk about the one that either is the closest to next that anybody could see but you also know that a lot of stuff you work on maybe no one will ever see. You try to talk within what is the you of it, not the all of it. I’m working on this project. It’s really fun. We’re putting some stuff together. You can sometimes say where you’re at in it but I just try not to get into what’s not my business.

John: If I can bring it back to my process, that’s also a useful thing too. I can say I’m writing this movie right now for this company and it’s under NDA but I can say– It was one of the rare cases where I needed to write the outline first and it’s just actually such a luxury to have a really big fat outline because as I go to my daily work on doing the scene, it’s like, “Oh, what happens in this? Oh, exactly. This is what happens.” It’s like so many of the fundamental questions have actually been tackled in the outline form. It gives me a chance to talk about myself as a writer, which is nice.

Pamela: Oh yes.

John: Another point of commonality I’m thinking is business affairs. We say like, “Oh, there’s this thing.” Business affairs is so slow. I don’t know when it’s going to happen. It’s like everyone will just nod because business affairs is crazy and it just takes forever to get contracts done. Something will be sold at a place and eight months later, you’re allowed to start writing because the contracts are finally done.

Pamela: Sometimes you are like that. The deals are taken. There’s a lot of heavy hitters in here. We’re waiting on some stuff. You can also say lawyers. These things take time but your excitement stays the same. You really get to talk about how you got– Even talking about how you got that job or how you met everybody, how you ended up with it. That’s a good one.

John: If you can sell the enthusiasm that you– If you’re excited to write this thing for them and they want to see writers who are excited to engage. I can imagine like Charlie Kaufman is a great writer, but I don’t imagine he’s great in a room in terms of being really enthusiastic about this thing he’s doing. It’s like, if you come in as a curmudgeon, maybe that’s true to your authentic personality but it’s not going to be like, “Oh my God, I can’t wait to work with him.”

Pamela: That being said, you do not have to fake, like some of us like going outside and meeting other people. Some of us do not. I think sometimes the pressure is on of do I have to be someone else in this general? Do I have to lie and be a fundamentally different person? Sometimes you have to fake a little bit the confidence to be yourself. Then, that’ll get easier. The more that you’re like, “Oh, I was myself and nothing bad happened.” You just do that again and do that again and get used too. Sometimes it takes them a minute to get used to me. Even as the extrovert that I am, I can tell that I’m like, “Hey, I’m very excited.”

I can say like a little bit too much coffee, a little bit haven’t been outside in a while. Give me a second to settle. I’m not so much nervous as I am jittery. I think all of those things of, “I am shy. I’m really happy to be here but you should know that I haven’t had that many generals. I’m a little shy.” Just be a person. Be a person and that makes everything easier on both sides.

John: 100%. I was on a pitch this week and usually there is the ramp, the warmup, getting into things. Everyone logs in and they’re like, “Great. Let’s go.” It’s like, “Sure.” I’m there and I’m pitching away. It went fine. It went great. You also have to be prepared. Sometimes there’s just not that on [unintelligible 00:20:22] and you’re just like, “Go. Okay. Great, I’m doing it.” Be ready for it. That’s why I think if you are actually pitching a project, really rehearsing that first minute or two, just so you feel really comfortable with how you get into it is going to be a huge help because it could just suddenly happen.

Pamela: I don’t record myself and watch it again but I do record myself sometimes for the pitch so that I don’t have to do that part.

John: You’ve talked about this on the show, I think, before, where you actually will send them a link to a pre-recorded pitch.

Pamela: People now are more able to be in the Zooms or you might be pitching knowing it’s being recorded for someone else who’s not in the Zooms, so you do have to be your game face on. If they do say go, like you just did, you’re like, “Oh yes, this is happening?” It’s totally fine to do that and be like, “Here we go, hold on. I’m going to pull up my draft and I’m ready.” I’ll do disclaimers at the top of you can totally stop me for questions. I hate pitching to mute buttons so whatever you want to do, we’re all people here and I’ll just get through this pitch together.

I find that they, in the Zoom room, when you’re pitching, they do sit back like here’s a little TV show. In a pitch where you’re with people, they are probably more likely to go, “Oh wait, did you or that’s funny.” Because you’re people.
John: You’re people rather than being little boxes with faces in them. Post-pandemic, how many pitches have you done in person, where you’ve gone in? How many general meetings have you been in, like a cross run person and then pitches in person?

Pamela: One?

John: One or two for me. This one studio has wanted me to come in in person twice. I’m looking at Drew to see if he can remember other times, but two or three times. Basically everything has been a Zoom since the pandemic. I’ve talked to some friends who was like, “I don’t know that I could pitch in person anymore because I’m so used to having my slideshow deck. I share a screen and I go through my slides and to do that in person, I wouldn’t know what to do.”

Pamela: One of my friends said, “This is terrible because I’ve learned a key component of liking me is the third dimension.” All credit to Don Todd. That one that I did in person, it was really early pandemic. It was literally the first time I had gone into a room with someone. I said to her when I sat down, she was a big, important person. I sat down, I was like, I can’t believe that we’re taking masks off. I’m like, “What is happening? Look what I’ll do for my career.” That’s still it. I’ve had a room where we all got together for a kickoff. I’ve done some of those kickoff in the room but not this type thing that we’re talking about. They’re all–

John: The kickoff stuff, I was in a room and meeting everybody in person but the initial things have basically all been Zoomy situations. This one that I did this week, I didn’t have a deck. There was no images. I just talked for 15 minutes and described it and it went great. I’m so used to having the fallback of like, “Here’s the next image, here’s the next image and [unintelligible 00:23:31] to not have that.” I’m sure we’ve said this on the podcast before but if you do have notes and you’re doing it on a Zoom, move your notes to the very top of the screen up by your camera so you’re not looking down, you’re looking closer to the lens. Just so you’re making more eye contact.

Pamela: I actually, I put the Zoom in the tiny little bar with the people I want to be pitching to under the green light. Then, my pitch notes are right below that. I have no choice to be looking into that little corner and I can read how they’re doing if they’re listening.

John: It’s good. Another hint is if you have somebody in a second for somebody who’s on your side, they can talk without the facts. You can see how are people actually responding? Because people’s faces are small, it’s a little harder to read the sense of the room afterwards.

Pamela: They can also do the flipping for you if you want so that you are only doing your talking part.

John: All good choices. All right. This is helpful. Any last wrap up on introducing yourself, how to talk about yourself, how to not to be a jerk?

Pamela: We have on here, how to not be a jerk but we have what is too personal and how do you feel confident about your work that you don’t sound apologetic for being in the room. I just want to say that my first general happened the day after my father passed away. I was like, “I’m not canceling this general. I’ve never had one before. I’m not going anywhere today.” My dad had entered hospice. He was like, “I’m going to go outside and I’m going to go do this career thing.” It was the very beginning of all of this. Trauma and time have made me not remember everything but I remember it was the Disney old animation building.

I sat down and she liked the script, which is about my different family members, but about generational trauma and such in a comedy. I don’t know. We just at some point started talking about families and I told her what had happened last night. She ended up talking about her dad. I do remember that we both at some point were just crying a little bit sharing stories with each other. Then that was it. I think that was a really good general. Even though that’s not– Most people are like, “No Pam, you take the day off. What is wrong with you?” I know that but I also know that’s what I wanted to do. That’s what he would have probably suggested I do, just go out there and talk.

Sometimes you bring the day in with you and that general is what I was trying to say about what’s too personal and what’s not. If there’s no getting around it, that your day is with you end up having some pretty profound general sometimes because you’re not doing this checklist of things and you’re just some people talking to each other. If they didn’t get around to the thing they wanted to talk to you about, they’ll call you again. You’ll have a follow-up or it becomes the beginning of something. The too personal, I think the line is you don’t owe anybody your story.

You don’t owe anybody the worst things that have ever happened to you in order to validate being able to talk about whatever you want to talk about. I think sometimes we get worried that we have to spread our hearts open and then give everything on that first try. You’re learning what they deserve to.

John: For sure. All right. Let’s move on to our second topic here. This comes from Ryan Knighton, who is a guest who’s been on the show several times. He’s a writer who lives in Canada who comes down to the US to write sometimes. He sent in this voicemail.

Ryan Knighton: In answer to your question, what would be advice I would give about being unemployed as a writer. I was thinking about it. One of the things that I’ve experienced at least is that unemployment can make you incurious as a writer. The anxiety of the unemployment can pull you towards the middle of things, towards the safe and what you might think is predictable way of doing your work or the subject matters you take or the approach you take. That’s on my experience is that I start to chase what I think people might want instead of following an investment in my own curiosity and hoping that it will connect somewhere in the road in some form.

I battle against the pull to the middle, to the pull to the safe and work I don’t think I would enjoy but I would enjoy if I took a risk, not riskier, that’s not the word. I think you get what I mean.

John: I do get what he means.

Pamela: I’ll never sound as beautiful or wise as Ryan.

John: He’s got a great voice.

Pamela: Oh man, yes.

John: You and I both know a lot of writer friends who are not working as much as they should be working and that’s always the case, but it feels increasingly so now just with the other fewer shows, staffing fewer writers and there’s a lot more scrambling. In that scrambling, it resonates what Ryan’s saying in terms of this pull towards safety, not taking risks. When you stop to think about it, the better instinct should be to take some risks now because it’s a chance to grow and do things that are breaking out of the box.

Pamela: It’s some form of a pandemic again right now with that kind of stuff. A lot of us during the pandemic became pioneers again and baked bread and learned the piano. I’ve taken up embroidery and all of those things that are important to keep your mind moving, learning a new language or whatever. We all have this confident delusion, hopefully that we will work again, this is temporary. If you’re not deciding am I retired or not? You’re waiting for that next opportunity then it has to feel like a hiatus. When you’re working in television, you have hiatus so it’s like–

Or you’re between gigs and you’re pretty sure you’re going to have another one but you don’t know when. Do everything that you’re going to miss when you’re busy, pack in family time or alone time or a stack of books or whatever. I know that doesn’t feel like you have that luxury when you’re feeling like I’m unemployed. That’s different that you’re running for safety. I understand that’s like taking care of your own and your future but your brain, I think that where Ryan’s worried, like am I ruining my risk-taking brain? Then there’s these other things that you can do. I’m making a documentary that’s crazy. I was like, this is some downtime. If I don’t fill it, I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself. I don’t know that I would have thought of it the way that Ryan’s describing of moving toward some– It’s almost like he’s saying I don’t want to be basic or something. He’s like, “Am I going to be less awesome the more this goes? Am I going to lose the me-ness of me?” Am I getting that right of what he means?

John: I absolutely do. I think you’re getting it right. That question of should I change my shape in order to fit this world, to make it easier to get through these doors and the limited number of jobs that are available to make myself more appealing to that? Should I write the thing that is more conventionally commercial? That is simpler to see like,” Oh, I get what this is.” I’ve gone through that at times in my career too. I remember just being frustrated that other movies were getting made that weren’t my movies. Maybe I can write that kind of movie too. Just like, I’ll write that movie. It was a waste of my time because it wasn’t the best thing for me to have been doing.

Pamela: I would imagine that no matter what you were doing, you were still making your version of that kind of a movie.

John: I was. Listen as you know every script you write is months of your time that you could have been doing something that is just truer to your own experience. When Ryan uses the verb chase, that is a thing you see yourself doing sometimes. You’re chasing a project and wait, is that a thing you’d actually even really want to write. Maybe not, but it’s something that’s out there. It’s a thing you could do so therefore you feel like you should do it. If you were to see that somebody else in the trades got this thing, it would be frustrating to you.

Pamela: I see that. That sometimes you only know that when you go a little on that journey. Then there’s just a moment where they want you to do another round of notes or another meeting where you’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to. This won’t feel good anymore. If I take that meeting, I hate myself.”

John: I try to pass quickly on a thing where it’s like, “No, that’s just not for me.” On the Christmas tree thing I was like, “No, that’s not for me.” There’s been other things which I feel over the years have engaged on more than I really should have because it’s a thing I could do but it’s a question, is it the thing I should do? I try to get back to the algorithm of just heck yes or no. Either absolutely 100% I’m going to do this or I shouldn’t do it. I think like, “Am I the person who should be writing this movie or is there five other people who are clearly better suited to be doing this movie?”

Pamela: You learned all that going through flirting. You learned all that the hard way, I’m guessing.

John: Yes.

Pamela: There’s a little bit of that here but I also think, in the little for me, little for them of how to do stuff, sometimes you’re like, “Man, I think I can get that one. I think I can get it quickly. I think I can do it quickly.” Then, that’s going to make me feel better about the rest of the year and next year and then I can go back to the thing I want. If you’re feeling that unsure about stuff and you can grab a fish maybe. You just know this is for this reason.

John: Being honest with yourself about that I think is important. You don’t have to be honest in the general meeting and say like, “I would do this for the money.”

Pamela: Can you imagine? It’s in the general feeling. You guys need anything back there. I’ve got like two weeks for you.

John: I used to do a lot more weekly rewrites. In that process it was just fully mercenary. I see what the problems are, I’ll becoming in and solve these problems. I’m going to deal with these difficult personalities and get through this thing. This is not my movie. It’s not my dream. It’s not my goal. I’m here to help out to maintain some relationships, but mostly you’re paying me cash. That’s fantastic.

Pamela: Maybe you think of it as money. It’s in the list but you still have to go to that job. You have to think like, “I can be helpful here. What can I do?”

John: Sometimes it’s really nice just to be able to use your craft to be able to do a thing and to just to recognize a problem, and solve a problem feels great because so much of what we’re doing as writers is so amorphous. I’m like, “Did that actually make it better? Is that even going to be a thing?” It’s also nice to write on something that actually gets made because so often the things we do just disappear. I’ve done so much work to contribute to a thing and then it just never happens.

Pamela: You should remind me what I do. I start mentoring. I volunteer for things. I try to mentor. Because when you’re talking to the people who are spending their whole day trying to figure out how to be where you’re sitting, it does remind you of where you’re at and how far you’ve gone and what you want next. It helps with goals and dreams and it helps reposition yourself into thinking like, “Oh, it’s not over.” I’ve been here before in some version. It just feels different now because I have a hundred more responsibilities or whatever your reasons are.

John: I was talking with Drew this week about– There’s a situation I’m finding myself approaching and I’m reminding myself that this always happens and it always feels this way and it’s going into it. I’m going to feel this way and we’ll get through it and it’ll be fine. There was this anxiety approaching. It’s like, “Oh yes, but I know what this is. It’s nothing new.” To get back to Ryan’s question here is that the anxiety that you feel when you’re unemployed is that, will I ever work again? That’s the thing that is so frustrating, which makes it so different than a writer on hiatus between two seasons of shows. Do all the things because you know you have a job to go back to.

Pamela: Usually. Sometimes.

John: Sometimes you don’t. Is there any advice we should give to writer listeners who are hearing this and thinking about so what should I write? Should I write this commercial thing that my manager wants me to do? Should I write this thing that has been a passion project that I’ve never allowed myself to do because I’ve always been busy writing stuff for other people? What guidance can we give to our writer listeners?

Pamela: I’m the kind of person who might try both at the same time and see which one is winning because maybe they’re right. Maybe you can crack some code and because you’re you and you’re thinking differently. I know when I’m on these pitches, the first thing I usually say is, “This is not going to be what you’re expecting but you called me so here we go.” In the end, they’re like, “You’ve given us something to think about.” It’s something I hear a lot. I also know that that’s just what is going to happen and if I wanted to be more of a sure shot, I would really be having to use different muscles of how I break things.

You can try that but probably what it’ll do is lead you back to the thing you were like, is this worth my time? I want to write this thing that’s in my head and feels more me.

John: Always a great time to remind people that as a writer, you have this amazing power that you can just go off and write. No one has to hire you to do anything. Unlike an actor or a director who has to be put onto a project, you can just do whatever you want to do at any moment. I think the worst thing for you to do during a period of unemployment is nothing. You’ve got to find something to write, whether it’s commercial, whether it’s something for yourself to keep those muscles going.

Pamela: It also doesn’t necessarily have to be a screenplay because you might find a play in you or a song or a book, all of a sudden you’re like, “Oh, I’m writing a novel that I will eventually adapt into a screenplay with success.” Not deciding, unless you’re like this is the break I need to get back to my painting, the clay, the garden, the something. Just something that allows your brain to keep processing all these thoughts instead of thinking, this is useless, I’m useless, I’m nothing, I’m yesterday because that’s just not true.

John: All right. Let’s get to some listener questions.

Drew: We’ll start with Marie in Brussels. I’m telling the story of a couple. My main narrative point of view is that of a man and we begin with him, finish with him, and above all the main question addressed by the film is driven by him but at many moments throughout, I write from the point of view of the woman. The story’s about motivations and I would like to fully understand her. I listened very carefully to your episode about point of view, episode 358, but could you explore in more depth how to alternate point of view? What do we need to pay attention to and how can you make the alternation fluid?

John: Great. Marie thinks she’s writing a single point of view story and it feels like it might be more of a two-hander. I think she’s asking the right questions. I’m excited to just see where she’s going with it. I’m not nervous on her behalf, but I understand her question because she wants to make sure that it really does feel like the movie is centered around this man even if he’s not in every scene.

Pamela: I have a script like this but I want to say it’s unproduced. Maybe part of it is the problem. I’m doing it because one is a realist and one isn’t, and so I also want the audience to be a little unsure. I want them to believe in both of them actually. That both of them have a valid point in their way through the world and they both could be true. I want to understand her without making guesses. I use his point of view to ground us. If it’s mostly about this man and she’s not the B story, when you move into her point of view, it has a different feel. My writing has a different feel a little when we are in her point of view. It allows for the magical realism of her life.

When we’re in his point of view, the things that he’s doing, the world that he’s in, the way that it’s written is more clipped. It’s his practical point of view. Your script can feel like your characters and maybe that helps with that fluidity you’re looking for.

John: The movie’s about Edward Bloom but the Will character, the son, does have a lot of storytelling power. He drives scenes by himself but it’s in an effort to understand his father better. It makes sense that you’re switching POVs between those two things. This also made me think about The Brutalist, which is all about Adrian Brody’s character, yet sometimes you’re switching to the wife’s point of view or other characters’ point of view. about the scenarios that’s happening here. There’s scenes that he’s not driving. It’s absolutely doable. I think just be mindful of when you’re shifting to a different character’s point of view and make it count. Make sure that the scenes where you’re shifting point of view there really is a good reason why you’re doing it.

Pamela: That it’s very clear from the beginning we’ve changed point of view. That we’re not just waiting for him to enter and be the scene.

John: Such a great point. As an audience, we don’t know what’s going to happen in a scene and so if we’re just standing around waiting for him to show up, we’re probably not paying attention to what you’re trying to get us to see in the scene. Our next question comes from Brandon.

Drew: I recently wrote a script that used the word sinister three times. Is that too many? Would you feel comfortable using the same adjective three times in a script?

Pamela: Is it a five minute piece?

John: I would throw the script across the room if I saw it. On the third time I saw it, sinister didn’t have it.

Pamela: Wait, is it called sinister? Is one of the characters named sinister? I guess why? If there’s a reason, if it’s like Act one, Act two, Act three and sinister means something different, is it thematic? Why? You already have flagged it. Is it too many depending on what you’re trying to do?

John: Brandon, if it feels weird to you, then you’re using too many. If you’re noticing it, then sinister is just not a was or a house or a common, it’s a rare enough word that for it to show up too often, it’s worth addressing and finding a good synonym there to avoid it.

Pamela: For me, it would need to be– I’m going to notice it too and so you want me to notice it. Every time it’s something different is happening here. That’s why we’re using the word sinister.

John: Agreed. English has so many words. It’s so many words. You have your choice. If you’re writing in Esperanto, I could see the problem here. It’s a much smaller vocabulary set but you got so many, tons. Let’s do one more here from Ryan.

Drew: Ryan writes, I’m currently outlining a period biopic feature with no shortage of fun and memorable scenes. The anecdotes play well in a room whenever I tell them aloud but in a film form, I’m finding the whole and then of it all is working to the detriment of my story. It doesn’t add up to something substantial like I’m hoping for. Any advice on how to confront this linear stringing out of events and bend them into a more consequential series of scenes and sequences?

John: We’re nodding here. Just to make sure everyone is hearing what he’s asking in this question is, there’s a moment, there’s a scene, and then there’s a moment, there’s a scene, and then it doesn’t feel like there’s a causality between things. It’s just a bunch of stuff happens without feeling like there is a purpose, a drive, a natural flow of cause and effect between them. That’s where I think, Ryan, you need to step back and think about– There’s the real version of stuff and then there’s the movie and you got to write the movie and the movie is going to have causality. Our main character has to be causing these things to happen in a pursuit of some goal of theirs.

Pamela: Just change and then to because and see what happens. At this point, you want to track the emotional journey of your story. All these cool moments that happen in real life not only because of this happened, because of this she went this way and because of this he got married. How do you want the whole thing to feel? You also don’t necessarily have to tell it in the order of the way you’ve been pitching these fun scenes. The one that gets everybody hooked that might be somehow even first and you end up doing a Stewart special. Whatever it is that you’re tracking, how’s the movie going to make you feel from the beginning to the end? Then, you know and it’s because I felt this, that I was able to feel this and then this happened and because that happened, this very terrible thing happened and then you have the flow of your movie.

John: You’re starting with an advantage because you have these moments to do play well in a room, and so you know that there’s something to those moments. It’s making sure those moments really feel earned in your story and that we’re getting into and out of those things in the right way. It’s why setups for jokes are so important. It’s making sure that it really feels like you’ve led us to this place where we get to have this experience and then we can use that energy to get to us to the next place. It’s the right stuff. I would say stop writing scenes for a moment and really look at an outline and really look at what the overall shape of this is best served us.

Pamela: Motivations. Now, where are they trying? How come these scenes feel like achievements? These moments that you can pitch, like what did they try to do that got here? Because they got here, they had to go try something else or had a setback or whatever.

John: Be careful of things that happen to your character rather than because of your character. All right. It’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is something that has actually been around for a long time but I just found out about it this week. Pam, you grew up in Texas. You are used to thunderstorms, I’m assuming. I grew up in Colorado. We had some thunderstorms. In California, we just never get them. If I did get thunderstorms here in Los Angeles, I would use the Real Time Lightning Map. This thing is really cool. On this website you see, basically all the lightning strikes happening in the world, especially in North America because of these sensors they have places.

What’s cool about it is, if you are someplace in the middle of a lightning storm, you can look and see where lightning strike was. It’s timed in a way that you’ll see the radius expand. You’ll hear the thunder at the same time that the radius expands to wherever you are. The timing is built that way. We live in an age of wonders.

Pamela: I’m afraid of lightning, so I don’t like this map. I used to just tell people, “Do you know lightning strikes the earth 100 times a second?” Now I can see it.

John: Now you can see this.

Pamela: It’s terrifying.

John: There’s some lake in South America that has a thunderstorm every night. Literally every night. Don’t go there. It’s my recommendation to you. Pam, no.

Pamela: Spent a lot of time in the deep South, there’s a lot of lightning.

John: Pam, what’s your recommendation? What’s your one cool thing?

Pamela: I started with what turned out to be a rerun. I’m glad I got to find the second one cool thing. You mentioned Texas, so this is a nice segue. Segue man to studentsengaged.org, SEAT it is. Man, it’s amazing. It’s one of those things where you’re like, “Why didn’t we do this?” Gen X thinks they’re so awesome but this current generation that is like, “We want a seat at the table.” This is a group of young people throughout Texas who are trying to have any school board has a student representative on board. They go to the Capitol and they introduce bills. They speak on legislation.

They stand up for their rights, and they also have a bill of rights to help other young people know when their rights are being violated. How to get involved at the Capitol building and how to get your community involved, how to make politics personal and get them empowered. I’m just so proud of these people. I hope this is everybody’s future because as we’re all learning, the entire country is Texas now but they are teaching each other how to be leaders not later, how to be leaders now, and how to bring people along.

Just the basic decency of tampons being free and available in every bathroom in school because you shouldn’t have to go to the nurse and you shouldn’t have to miss class and nobody should be embarrassed about basic private body functions. Why didn’t we think of this? We thought we were so cool. The Breakfast Club should have said, “I would like a seat at the table, please, to make my own rules about detention.” Anyway, studentsengage.org, you can get involved, you can donate to their work, you can just go see what they’re up to and what they’re doing. I hope it inspires a young person or you in your own life.

John: I want to celebrate what they’re doing and give us and Generation X a little grace because we were doing this at a time before internet, at least early internet, so it was hard to mobilize people. You had the people right around you, so within a high school you might be able to affect some changes. I remember I was a student leader so of course I was doing some things inside of my high school, but it was tough to mobilize and see the bigger picture around you. You couldn’t find all the other teens.

Pamela: Did you think that you could go to a school board meeting?

John: I went to school board meetings.

Pamela: You went to city council and talked to the big room?

John: I was in Boy Scouts so I had to for a merit badge.

Pamela: Oh. We just had student walkouts that would give you maybe detention.

John: We are in an age of horrors but it’s also nice to see that there’s some bright spots there and people who are pushing back against the horrors. It’s nice to see. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We love our outros and our larder of outros is getting a little bit lean and so we would love some more outros from our listeners. Ask@tjohnaugust.com is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today.

You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing and pre-orders on the Scriptnotes book. The book comes out December 2nd. If you pre-order your book, thank you, and you just send that receipt to ask@johnaugust.com. Drew is collecting all those, and we’re finding a very fun thing to send you via email before the book comes out. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau.

You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Your premium subscribers are the absolute best. You are going to be getting an email about our live show we’re recording tomorrow, the day after this comes out, the episode 700 live show, but everyone is welcome to join us on YouTube. That’ll be next week. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the present and future of podcasts. Man, this was a very good present podcast. Pamela Ribon, thank you so much for joining us here today.

Pamela: Thanks, anytime.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Pamela Ribon, you have been in various kinds of media, online media. You were early on the recapping world. You were early in podcasting too. How long have you done podcasts?

Pamela: I loved being a professional guest. It took a long time before I had my own podcast. Legally, we all have to have one.

John: We’re required now.

Pamela: We’ve been doing Listen to Sassy. I don’t know. We don’t really count it like that. Are we in our fourth year? Maybe. Yes, it doesn’t feel that long. Before that, I would just guest anywhere.

John: You’d guest anywhere. You’ve followed podcasts but talk to me about what you perceive as being a podcast because if there’s two people talking on YouTube, is it a podcast?

Pamela: Now it is, I guess because people want to watch their podcasts. I asked Tara and Dave, I was like, “Are we not ever going to do one of these even as a bonus for our subscribers?” They were like, “Never. I don’t want anyone to see me doing this.” We would do watch parties where we’d put a movie on and then we all chatted while it was on. We said hello before and after. My friends, they don’t want to be public facing.

John: I hear that. We’ll put a link in the show notes to two articles, one from The Wrap and one from The New York Times, talking about how so much of the podcast market has moved on to YouTube. 30% of podcast listeners play the video in the background or minimize rather than just the audios. It’s like people are listening, watching podcasts on YouTube. Just my daughter who’s 20, she will say like, “Oh yes, I watched that podcast.” I’m like, “Wait, that’s the wrong verb. You’re listening to podcasts.”

Pamela: I think when the comedians all got involved– It’s just a stage. First we were like, however I get in your ears, I’ll put it in a podcast. Me and my buddies talking about being funny. Then you’re like, “This is the show of it all.” Let them see us. That’s now I have my own show. I get that. My kid also would prefer just watching YouTube to listening to things. We just like looking at people doing things. We like looking at windows where things are happening, like the zoo. Oh, the Panda Cam. It’s the original podcast.

John: The New York Times article interviews some people about it. They’re saying they want to be able to look at the screen, even if they’re not mostly looking at the screen. Just like us Gen X’s, sometimes they’ll start a podcast and they’ll do their dishes. They’ll do other stuff while the podcast is playing, but they’re not necessarily looking at it. Which raises the question of should Scriptnotes be recording video for our podcast? We’re on Zoom right now so we could use this video. I went on Mike Birbiglia’s podcast. For that, they do shoot three cameras of video for the whole thing. They edit that and they put that up on YouTube.

It seems like a lot of work for us to honestly be doing. Matthew’s busy enough cutting the audio and making it sound good. To have to think about the video too is an extra factor.

Pamela: Is his show like on Wondery or something? I always assume that’s what happens when you’re getting paid to do your podcast. They need to put it on TikTok and all these little clips that get people driving to more clicks. You have to be like, “I guess I’ll wear my good shirt.” Other than that–

John: Mike’s podcast does have ads but the YouTube version of it does not have ads. I guess they’re getting some monetization off of YouTube in general. I don’t believe he’s part of a bigger network behind it.

Pamela: He’s a comedian. I just think that’s it.

John: It’s driving people to come see his stand up. It’s probably part of it.

Pamela: Part of him is his physicality. You’re only getting some of it if you can hear him. Why not?

John: You got to go get a hold of Mike Birbiglia a package.

Pamela: There’s a reason that I’m asking Tara and Dave, can we turn the cameras on? I want to.

John: Absolutely.

Pamela: The third dimension. That’s how he’s used to communicating with his audience. I get that.

John: I think what we’ve been talking about is when it gets closer to award season, that’s when we start to have filmmakers and directors and writers coming on the show. We have to deal with publicists to get stuff going. We’ve had Christopher Nolan on. We’ve had Greta Gerwig. It’s lovely to have them there. I think we do a great job on the audio of those things. It would make sense honestly to record video for those situations. To record video in our setup, it’s a really tiny little space and pulling out the cameras to do all that stuff feels like a lot.
We’re considering for the episodes where we do go video, we’ll just rent an existing studio to do a situation. We’ll go to a place that just records podcasts and just rent it by the hour or whatever to do that. We have video for just those ones where we decide to do it.

Pamela: The events. That’s fancy because you could just record the Zoom.

John: We could just record the Zoom for the ones that are on Zoom. We actually have those people in person. Christopher Nolan actually showed up here.

Pamela: Oh, that was fancy.

John: That was fancy. We have like Julia Louis-Dreyfus came to our office and she’s sitting at this shitty little table and it would make more sense, I think, to do it in a professional place.

Pamela: It depends on however you get the actual vibe of your show. If moving to that studio makes you guys more formal and weird and it’s actually funny to watch you guys just be at a table with Julie. I want to see you with them, particularly when we find out, “Oh, you guys are friends.” We’re going to see that better in a less formal situation.

John: That’s true. Basically we need to create an artificial space that’s well lit that seems like it’s just hanging out at our place. That’s what we’ll do.

Pamela: That’s what the garage is for.

John: That’s what the garage is for. We have to have the lawnmower hanging there on the wall. It all feels fun and random.

Pamela: Honestly, it’s just getting to watch you interact. I don’t know that you need to worry about if the quality of the sound is good and we can see all three of you. If all three of you were in the same room with three different Zooms, it’s still going to get that feeling of you’re looking at each other and talking to each other like a general. I don’t know. You throw some money in and it gets fancy. Now you’re going viral on TikTok.

John: Absolutely.

Pamela: Here you go.

John: We’ll see what ends up happening. It’s weird to be 13 years into a podcast and seeing-

Pamela: The growth.

John: -the medium itself evolve and figure out like, “Oh, are we going to still be doing the same stuff we’ve been doing? Is the official version of an episode the audio?” To me, it always will be. The video may just be a little fun bonus.

Pamela: You’re evolving your podcast into the next version of it. A lot of times it’s just people looking like this sitting at their desks. It looks like when behind the scenes of a radio station. It looks like Frasier.

John: You in particular, you’re sad because of the louvered blinds behind you there. It feels like, “Oh yes, she’s at a radio station.” Some drive time traffic there.

Pamela: I’ve got all kinds of sound effects over here. I’m ready to hit. It’s just a peek at your humanness. I don’t know that you should worry about it looking like a big production because it’s just a hang. It’s a good hang.

John: It’s a good hang. We’re going to hang. You are a fantastic hang. Pam, thank you so much for bringing a great topic at just the right moment. Craig couldn’t be here today, but it’s so nice to see you and so cool to hang out with you.

Pamela: A lot of fun. Thank you so much.

John: Awesome. Thanks.

Links:

• Scriptnotes Episode 700 – LIVE
• Pamela Ribon
• My Year of Dicks
• Rental Family trailer
• Japan’s Rent-A-Family Industry by Elif Batuman for The New Yorker
• 37 Seconds
• Good conversations have lots of doorknobs by Adam Mastroianni
• Real Time Lightning Map
• Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT)
• Who Is Watching All These Podcasts? by Joseph Bernstein for NYT
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 698 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we discuss movies that never existed, from high-profile projects that got shelved at the last minute, to our own experiences with unmade projects. Then, it’s time for some listener questions covering multi-language dialogue and multi-part movies, among other things.

In our bonus segment for premium members, if no one paid us to write screenplays anymore, Craig, if they would never get made, would we continue to write them as a form?

Craig: Uh. [chuckles]

John: Yes, you have an hour to think about that.

Craig: I don’t know if I need an hour, but all right.

John: We’ll talk about the pros and cons of the screenplay format. It’s a literary thing independent of a way to make a movie. Craig, this last week, I ran the San Francisco Half Marathon.

Craig: Congrats.

John: Which was really fun. I’d done the second half of it six years ago. This week, I did the first half. As I was running it, I was thinking like, “I wonder if Craig knows these things.” How do they know when a racer crosses the finish line? How do they know the time of a racer?

Craig: If I had to guess, I don’t think it’s as fancy as like an RFID tag in a bib.

John: It is an RFID tag in a bib.

Craig: Oh, it is? It is as fancy as that.

John: The day before the race, you go and you pick up your bib, and that’s the thing you have paper-clipped onto your shirt, or we have little fancy magnets now because we’re fancy. On the back of that bib is an RFID tag, and so as you’re running the race, you’re constantly passing through gates that are tracking that you ran through. There’s an app that you install on your phone-

Craig: For friends and family to follow on.

John: -to find you, but also, it tells you in real time what your pace is.

Craig: Oh, so you actually carry a phone with you as you’re running?

John: I do carry a phone with me as I’m running.

Craig: Because that’s extra weight.

John: It’s extra weight, but it’s fine. Most people are, I think, are running with phones these days.

Craig: Running with phones, yes. It would be rough if you were tracking this, your loved one is in a marathon and they just stop.

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: They stop for a long time, then you hear sirens. It’s rough.

John: It’s not good.

Craig: No.

John: It’s helpful for your friends and family because that way, they can figure out where you are on the race, so they can come and cheer you on on a certain place.

Craig: Yes, that makes absolute sense. It’s a nicer scenario than the one I suggested.

John: The whole idea of RFID and tracking leads to a bigger question because earlier this summer, I was on a cruise in Alaska. On this boat, you wear this little medallion that has an RFID with you, and it’s super handy because, again, you pull up the app and it’s like, “I want a cup of coffee.” Wherever you are on the boat, [crosstalk] press one button, they find you, they bring you this stuff. It’s nice.

Craig: Oh, they’re bringing it to you?

John: They bring it to you, not to your cabin, just to you-

Craig: To you.

John: -directly, wherever you are.

Craig: Yes, right now, I guess our phones are that thing, but eventually, we’ll all be chipped at birth.

John: Both the race and the cruise ship were cases where that kind of constant surveillance I liked, but I don’t want to have it everywhere all the time. I don’t want to be forced into it.

Craig: No, I don’t want to have a situation where a corporation can track me wherever I go, although, currently, that is the situation I have. Let’s face it.

John: It is, yes.

Craig: They know everything. I was just thinking in my mind, if you did start to chip human beings at birth.

John: Yes, because you’re a parent who wants to know where your kid is.

Craig: Let’s say the state has decided. In our rougher scenario, every human shall be chipped. I’m trying to think biologically where to put this so that it won’t be dislodged by growth. I’m struggling. I think everything grows. Nothing is fully sized when you’re born, not even one little tiny thing.

John: Yes, your eyes are bigger, proportionally bigger, but the eyes are still going to continue to grow.

Craig: Everything grows, so I don’t know where to put it.

Drew Marquardt: With animals, they’d put it under the skin and it sits on top.

Craig: Animals grow, yes, and they don’t grow as much as we do. Humans are ridiculous. We’re born so stupidly small compared to–

John: Early because–

Craig: Early, because of our dumb heads.

John: Otherwise, we wouldn’t fit through the birth canal.

Craig: Yes, but I think you could put it under the skin, I suppose. I just wonder if it would get irritated, or it could move, it could shift.

John: Yes, you might swap that at a certain point.

Craig: Yes, maybe you do like a little baby tag. Then you do a kid tag. It’d be great. Kids would love it.

John: Oh, fantastic. Alrighty, the issue of tracking your kids and turning on Find My Friends and Find My is a thing. I remember talking with you at a certain point, and we realized that I think our daughters are at the same concert in Boston. You’re like, “Let me pull up,” and was like, “Oh yes, she’s there.” You did that. I didn’t do that because I sort of have an unspoken thing that I don’t find my friends when she’s not in Los Angeles.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting. I never have to look at it, but when Jessie was in school in Boston, I never went to go look for her. I would look for Melissa, like, “Where’s my wife?” Always at the tennis. The tennis is where she is. It has a list. It’s like, “Melissa is 8 miles away. Jessica is 3,000-something miles away.” Then I’d be like, “Oh yes, look, there she is in Boston somewhere.”

John: I only share location with family. I don’t share with

Drew. That feels like–

Craig: I share my location with Drew, which is weird.

John: It’s just strange. Yes.

Craig: I just want him to know. No, just family. Just really, just actually, not even my full family, just Melissa and Jessica. You know what I don’t use enough? When you are meeting somebody somewhere in a large public place, you can share your location with them, which obviously Drew and his generation does constantly. I’m like, “Oh yes, I forgot.”

John: Yes. I will do that temporarily, but I don’t do it with friends. Drew, do you share your location with any friends?

Drew: I only do the temporary. Even me and my wife don’t share. We don’t have Find my Friends.

Craig: What? Oh wow.

John: Wow.

Drew: Pure trust.

Craig: It’s not about trust. It’s not like I think, “Oh, she’s going whoring again.” I–

John: To me, it’s always like, how close is Mike to being home?

Craig: Yes, exactly. If I’m going to order food, should I see if she’s going to be here or–?

Drew: I don’t know. It feels like a threshold that because I haven’t crossed it yet, I don’t want to cross it yet.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: You’re up to something.

Drew: [laughs]

John: It’s all– [crosstalk]

Craig: I am absolutely [unintelligible 00:06:01] Drew is up to something.

Drew: I’m whoring.

Craig: You’re whoring?

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I love whore as a verb–

John: He’s a secret assassin. He’s out there killing people.

Craig: Not anymore.

John: Not anymore. Some follow up. Hey, remember we wrote a book?

Craig: Oh my goodness. We wrote a book, and John, I have an author page-

John: On Amazon.

Craig: -on Amazon, which as you can imagine is populated with almost nothing. It’s got my picture.

John: Yes, got your picture. People have been sending Drew their pre-order receipts, which is great.

Craig: Amazing. How are we doing? Are we going to be doing a lot of signing?

Drew: We have about 150 so far.

Craig: Oh, that’s pretty good. Of just people that sent receipts?

Drew: Just people who sent receipts.

John: Oh. A reminder, if you pre-order the book from wherever you order it from, so not just Amazon, but any place– [crosstalk]

Craig: Sure, anywhere.

John: Send your little receipt through to Drew, ask@johnaugust.com, and we will send you something cool. We’re not quite sure what it’s going to be yet. It could be a bonus chapter. It could be some successful video report.

Craig: It could be a brand new car.

John: It could be something cool, but we’ll send that out well before the book comes out.

Craig: Do we have any sense, other than the receipts that you have received, does Amazon tell you how many people are buying it or–?

John: Pre-ordering it? I think Crown, our publisher in the US, has had this,-

Craig: Oh, they got– [crosstalk]

John: -and so at some point, they’ll tell us.

Craig: At some point they’ll give us the bad news.

John: They’ll say, “We’re really worried, John, Craig.”

Craig: [laughs]

John: No, I think they’re happy with almost anything.

Craig: Wow.

John: No, because here’s the thing, it’s–

Craig: That’s a low bar.

John: There are books that need to be giant hits out of the gate and needs to hit those lists. We are a catalog title, where there’s like, we’re evergreen.

Craig: We are not the latest Stephen King novel.

John: Yes. Questions that I got off of Reddit and other people asking, audio book. Yes, if you see, there’s a listing with a little button for audio book, there’s plans for an audio book. There’s nothing to announce yet, but there’s going to be an audio book. It’s not me and Craig talking.

Craig: Should we just get Ryan Reynolds to do it? [laughs] Just hold Ryan down and force him to do it at some point?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’ll be fun.

John: Yes, good.

Craig: Because occasionally, in the middle of an audio book, you get the sense that the person reading it is a hostage. [chuckles] They try and run, and there’s scuffle, and then they come back and resume reading.

John: For the podcast, they did lauch about the [unintelligible 00:08:02] books. The episode I did about the audiobook was actually really fascinating because I met the guy in LA, who actually recorded the book, and just his whole process was great and crazy.

Crown came to us and said like, “Hey, do you and Craig want to record the audiobook?” I’m like, “No. We record a podcast every week, and that’s plenty. No. No, thank you.

Craig: Yes, it’s too much reading.

John: It’ll be great to have a real professional do it.

Craig: Yes, terrific, so Ryan Reynolds?

John: Or somebody like Ryan Reynolds.

Craig: Yes, somebody bigger.

John: Yes.

Craig: Tom Hanks? [chuckles]

John: Yes. Crown said we should go for Tom Hanks.

Craig: Tom Hanks would be great.

John: Yes.

Craig: is he doing stuff? We’ll check into it.

John: I’ve heard that the Britney Spears biography that is read by Michelle Williams is incredible, so maybe Michelle Williams should be the choice.

Drew: That would be perfect.

Craig: That’s kind of amazing.

John: The person who I think is actually going to record it, is actually listening to the podcast right now, and he’s so upset that–

Craig: He’s like, “I’m an effin’ person.”

John: He’s an effin’ person in the world.

Craig: I’m an effin’ person.

John: Other questions were about the international versions, and so, there are no plans right now for a translation, probably because if you’re listening to this podcast, you speak English, you can probably read English. People ask about like, “Oh, I want to buy it in Europe. I want to buy it in Asia. Where do I get it from?” I asked, and the real answer is, wherever you get your English books is where you should go, so go to whatever bookstore or whatever online site is that you buy books in English, because they will have it. They’ll either get the US or the UK version. They’re both basically the same.

Craig: Yes, it’s an interesting question. I suppose that the marketplace will determine these things, if there’s a clamoring from a particular country. I’m looking at you, Brazil.

John: Yes, my agent was saying that there are cases, you’ll be in India, and you’ll see the US and the UK version side by side on a shelf. That’s just what happens.

Craig: Does just that color is spelled differently?

John: No. Honestly, the UK version is not changing our spelling.

Craig: What is the difference? Page size?

John: I think page size and slightly different pricing.

Craig: Oh.

John: Because of imports and–

Craig: What, tariffs?

John: Tariffs and things.

Craig: What? What? What?

John: What? What? What? Books are physical things that are printed in places. Other bits of follow up. My game Birdigo that I made with Corey Martin is out now on Steam. It’s a whopping $8.49.

Craig: Oh my God.

John: It’s a huge burden.

Craig: Ugh.

John: Ugh. We’ve gotten so many good reviews in the press,-

Craig: Great.

John: -and we’re currently 100% positive on Steam itself, which is great.

Craig: Only 100%?

John: Only 100%.

Craig: If I go in there just as a jerk, I can get it to 99%? [chuckles]

John: Weirdly, it would actually help us a little bit because how Steam ratings work is that it’s based on total number of reviews. We’re at the threshold where we’re listed as positive, but once we get to the next threshold of reviews, which is 50 or 100, then it becomes very positive.

Craig: I see.

John: Then it becomes overwhelmingly positive.

Craig: I see.

John: If you are a person like Craig who has played the game and enjoyed it and want to leave us a review, leave us a review because it actually does help.

Craig: That makes sense because if you put something on there, you could say, “Hey, I’m going to get 50 of my friends to do a review.” They need to know that it’s more than just the friends and family. I get that.

John: Yes, so that’s what–

Craig: That’s fantastic.

John: Yes, that’s good news.

Craig: Birdigo.

John: More follow up. Last week, we talked about Solar Storms as part of How Would This Be A Movie. Drew, what did we hear?

Drew: Multiple people wrote in that it sounded very much like the novel Aurora by a former Scriptnotes guest, David Koepp.

John: David Koepp, that hack.

Craig: Koepp, what can he do? By the way, David Koepp has quietly crushed the Summer Box office. Everyone was going on about Superman and Fantastic Four. Meanwhile, Jurassic, Jurassic-ness?

John: The Jurassic World Rebirth.

Craig: Jurassic World Rebirth has done better than both of those movies. It’s just massive.

John: Massive. Massive.

Craig: It’s like it’s grossed like almost $800 million globally. That’s David Koepp still doing it.

John: Also, Presence, a movie that Drew and I both saw, directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Drew: Black Bag too.

John: Yes, Black Bag also.

Drew: Black Bag is great.

John: Just killing it.

Craig: Just Koepp, just–

John: Keopp it in. Koepping it real.

Craig: You cannot beat David Koepp. Also, side note, and we’ve had him on this, one of the loveliest people. Just incredible guy. Love him.

John: Love it. I should not be surprised that he saw the scientific thing that exists in the world. It’s like, I should–

Craig: Of course he did.

John: I should write a book about this.

Craig: Yes, he’s sort of casually predicted that we would eventually get that and fumble it. Although, if you have a David Koepp novel, and it has not yet been turned into a movie, that is an indication that it should not be a movie because you know people must have tried.

John: Yes. What’s wrong with a book that it’s not–?

Craig: I think the book is probably great, it’s just that it’s not movie-ish.

John: Maybe.

Craig: How does that not happen?

John: He’s so angry now listening to this podcast.

Craig: I hope he is.

John: Yes. We were talking back in Episode 675 about lost genres or genres that people should see at least one example of a movie in. A bunch of people wrote in with recommendations for genres that people need to at least see one thing in. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Andrew writes, “Yakuza films, they are more often than not just as economical as noir films, but even more stylish, cynical, and tragic.” He recommends Pale Flower from 1964.

John: I’ve not seen any of these in the genre, and I think it’s a good recommendation.

Craig: Sure.

John: What else do we got?

Drew: John James recommends giallo, which is Italian horror.

Craig: Of course, yes, no.

Drew: Dario Argento’s Deep Red.

Craig: No.

Drew: No?

Craig: No. Not for me.

Drew: Not for you?

Craig: I’ve seen some of it. It’s not for me. It’s gross.

John: I’ve seen an Argento movie, and I do understand it as a genre. It’s just nothing for me. Either too, but it’s–

Craig: Right, other people, sure.

John: Should see it.

Craig: I think Suspiria-

John: Suspiria, yes.

Craig: -that’s the one to see, and then you would know.

Drew: I think nerds say that that’s not quite a giallo for some reason.

John: Oh.

Craig: No.

Drew: That would be my pick.

Craig: Nerds say that?

Drew: Yes.

Craig: I’m not going to listen. Let’s see if some of them write in. [chuckles]

John: What if we said like, David Koepp’s genre is dinosaurs, and then it’s just like, “Oh, but I also made Black Bag.” There’s no dinosaurs in Black Bag.

Craig: Black Bag’s not quite a dinosaur film. Then we’re like, “Yes, it is, nerds.”

Drew: [chuckles] Absolutely, and they just get angry.

John: Because this is about old spies and young spies.

Craig: Yes, it’s dinosaurs.

Drew: Dwayne writes, “Post-Michael Moore Americana documentaries, featuring cheeky editing, eccentric people, and small stories about the alluring weirdness of pre-9/11 Middle America. Documentaries like Hands on a Hard Body, or American Movie, or Wonderland.”

Craig: You know what? I’ve seen two of those movies. Yes, they were both interesting snapshots of a time.

John: Yes. Also like a style in editing. It’s good to point out what it is. It’s not that Michael Moore’s sort of like, “Here’s a broad statement about a thing.” It’s very specific on people and behaviors.

Craig: Hands on a Hard Body probably got 40% of its audience just from title confusion. Just brilliant.

John: Love it. So good.

Craig: Do you know what Hands on a Hard Body is though?

John: Absolutely, it says something about–

Craig: Oh, you might have seen even the show. They made a show.

John: Yes, they made a Broadway show of it.

Craig: Yes, I saw that show.

John: I never saw the show, but how are the songs? Were they–?” [crosstalk]

Craig: I remember there was one great one. I remember that. There was one really good, like eleven o’clock-ish kind of number.

John: How was the truck? Was the truck good?

Craig: The truck was great. They had it on a turntable, and the cast had to keep their hands on it. Although they were allowed to sort of like astral project forward to sing their solos and then move back to the truck.

John: Oh yes, that makes sense.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes. Did you ever see Waitress either on stage or-

Craig: No.

John: -the musical version? It’s one of the rare cases where they captured the Broadway version and really filmed it in a way that’s impressive. I’d recommend it for people who want to see it. Last one.

Drew: Last one is Aldo says, “If John likes Memories of a Murder, he’ll probably dig Cure by Kiyoshi Kurosawa in the Japanese horror genre.

John: I don’t know very much about Japanese horror, and that’s another good recommendation for me. If we could combine Yakuza horror,-

Craig: I’m sure that’s good.

John: -that’s has to have– Oh my God. As I said the sentence, like that one can happen.

Craig: Japanese horror is pretty cool. I had a pretty cool moment. Then Korea came along and just ate its lunch-

John: Yes, crazy.

Craig: -for East-Asian horror films. Kairo, aka Pulse is Japanese, they tried to– Well, they attempted to adapt it here in the US. Didn’t go well, but that movie has one of the scariest single scenes in it where basically, nothing happens. Totally worth it for that. Just the scene of a ghost walking down a hallway. It was very cool.

John: Love it.

Craig: If you know, you know.

John: Some more follow up. We had Scott Frank on and we’re talking about writing education.

Drew: Tim says, “I’m a high school film and TV teacher, and I’ll admit I’ve been guilty of teaching structure as a shortcut to storytelling, mostly because I don’t get much time with my hundred plus students before we need to move on to the rest of film and TV production. The conversation about craft versus voice really landed.

The Scott Frank school of screenwriting seems to emphasize practice as a path to discovering voice, which also helps to answer a question I’ve been wrestling with. Why teach students to write screenplays if AI can do it better than most of them? The answer is ChatGPT doesn’t have a unique voice, we do. This year, I hope to shift my focus to helping students find their voice and maybe a little less on the proper use of a parenthetical.”

Craig: Oh, wonderful. That sounds great. Because structure and all the rest of it, these parentheticals, margins, rules, format, all that stuff, you can pick that stuff up in three days if you feel like it. What you can’t pick up in three days is knowing what to write. I could certainly see a class where everybody has to write the same scene, and they have to rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it, until it’s something special. This is how you find your voice.

John: Love it.

Drew: More follow up, this one from Kate. “I’m a playwright and I teach theater at a small high school. I actually had to step into this job mid-year when the other teacher had to leave unexpectedly. I was so excited because in addition to my theater classes, I’d be teaching a screenwriting and playwriting course. The previous teacher had focused a lot on pitching outlines and working on index cards. Students wanted to talk about their ideas, but had trouble putting anything on the page.

I often got the feeling that students felt stuck or afraid when it was time to write their projects because they had an outline that they had to follow. Almost like they were afraid to write a scene because it may be wrong or different from their original outline. When you suggested writing short scenes with no pressure to be part of a larger script, I was practically fist pumping in my car. Yes, short exercises give young writers permission to experiment. Be messy, make mistakes. This is how we learned to write.”

Craig: Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Look, we may be changing things one teaching program at a time. Again, here’s your assignment, a scene. Write it, rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it. Have your classmates perform it. Rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it. If you could take a class where you end up with one great three-page scene, you’ve come so far, baby.

John: Absolutely. Because you would probably have started this class thinking, “I cannot do this thing. I have no idea what this looks like in my head,” but the ability to actually visualize, “Okay, this is what’s happening in the scene, that I can picture the whole thing. I can hear the whole thing. Now I’m going to capture it down on paper in a way that makes sense,” is so crucial.

A thing I did for myself when I was in high school, I think, is I had an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I had recorded on probably VHS. I just went and transcribed it, and then actually tried to write what the actual scene would look like on the page. That’s a good practice too, just like how do you– You see a thing, but what does it actually look like in words on paper?

Craig: Yes. The iteration, I think, is an incredibly important thing. I think that that’s not given enough attention. Being forced to rewrite the same thing over and over, it sounds bad, except you write a scene and then you share it. It is exposed. You learn how it’s landing. People give you feedback. Are we bored? Are we interested? Do we have questions? This doesn’t make sense. Or I’m just bored. What else could you do here? How could this be richer? What does the room smell like, look like? All those wonderful things we do. Then you rewrite, and you rewrite, and you rewrite. At some point, you’re going to find something.

John: Yes. As you talked about in the episode, acting classes are so helpful because that paradigm of just like, you have to be on your feet and doing a scene and you’re getting feedback on it. It’s just like, you just have to do it.

Craig: You have to do it.

John: You can’t talk about acting a lot.

Craig: Because you’re performing the scene, you are required to think about the things that happen in between your lines. Where were you the moment before? Massively important. How did that statement land with you? Are you lying? All these wonderful things need to be in the scene you write when people are learning how to write. If they’re concentrating on hitting the fricking midpoint, whatever the hell, they’re just not going to get it.

John: All right, let’s go to our main topic today, which is movies that never were. I’m not quite sure how this idea came to me. It could have been an article I read, but this week, I got thinking back about giant movies that never happened, things I sort of know about or I’ve heard about, but it never actually became movies that we saw in the theaters.

A lot of these are superhero movies. There was the Tim Burton version of Superman with Nicolas Cage.

Craig: Yes, I remember that.

John: McG Superman that had a script by JJ Abrams. Okay. James Cameron’s Spider-Man. I’d actually read that script a zillion years ago.

Craig: Oh, okay.

John: It was a, Spider-Man versus Electro. There was like a–

Craig: Oh, which they ended up doing anyway.

John: Yes. There was a Justice League that was supposed to be directed by George Miller.

Craig: Oh.

John: Yes. I think it was around the time of the earlier Record strike. Of course the Batgirl movie that was actually shot, but then it got shelved.

Craig: It got shelved.

John: Which is a really rare situation. Superhero movies are really common for this, but also Jodorowsky’s Dune is sort of legendary. There’s a documentary about that. Then Mouse Guard, which was the very expensive adaptation of a beloved children’s book or middle-grade book that Wes Ball I think was supposed to direct. They pulled at it the very last minute.

Craig: There are also these movies that I’m sure you either wrote on or somebody asked you to write on them that have been floating around seemingly forever.

John: Yes. Did you ever work on Bob: The Musical?

Craig: No, but I know that Alec Berg did.

John: Yes, I wrote on it. The amount of money spent on scripts for that movie, it’s got to be astronomical. Real composers did songs for it.

Craig: There are things like this.

John: Here’s the good scene of Bob: The Musical, a man who hates musicals wakes up and discovers he’s in a musical and has to get out of the musical. It’s a comedy in the world of a Liar Liar or those kinds of things.

Craig: Sure. Which it sounds like the premise of Schmigadoon!, which obviously came after the 800 years of development of Bob: The Musical. Yes, they’re just these movies. I remember in the ‘90s working on Stretch Armstrong. There are movies that they really wanted to make out of a toy or an object. Eight Ball’s been floating around for a while, the Magic Eight Ball. Then Monopoly. Monopoly–

John: Oh, yes. There have been so many versions of Monopoly.
Craig: I think they announced a new one recently. Every year, a new Monopoly is going to not happen.
[laughter]

Craig: It’s actually kind of amusing that that’s the property that people lose so much money on. [laughs]

John: Let’s just talk about the pure development projects. Because Monopoly, as far as I know, never went to pre-production, never spent that money. It was probably just on scripts.

Craig: Yes, endless development.

John: The endless development things, sometimes it’s all with one company. Therefore, it’s one property that has hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of script fees against it. Some cases, which I suspect is the Monopoly case, they didn’t set up this place or that place or this place or that place. Those all become new projects, essentially.

Craig: The rights lapse.

John: Therefore, the studio burned a certain amount of money on a script, but they can’t make the property anymore.

Craig: Clue they’ve been trying to redo again. Risk is one that was going around for a while. What are you supposed to do with that exactly?

John: No. Yes. There’s a version of that movie that could have been terrific, but we never saw it.

Craig: Board games are not a great idea to adapt. I understand why everybody went for them.

John: Yes, it’s a recognizable title.

Craig: Clue–

John: Clue is a better idea than most. It actually has characters.

Craig: The Clue that was made is a cult classic and I love it. It is probably the one that’s most– Because there’s a narrative to it. Someone killed somebody with a thing in a place. Monopoly, Risk, they’re just words we know.

John: Here we’re talking about the IP that is just like, is that even a really good idea for a movie? In other cases, like they are good ideas for movies that are based on a really good book.

Craig: They just don’t seem to be able to happen.

John: Absolutely. Let’s talk about the things that don’t happen and why-

Craig: Sure.

John: -they don’t happen. Sometimes there’s a piece of talent who was keyly involved in getting it set up and getting the momentum going on it. Like a Will Smith. I’ve been on a couple of really expensive projects with Will Smith that didn’t go forward. He loses interest or another thing comes up in front of it. When a director or a star has like 10 projects, nine of those aren’t happening generally. Sometimes you’re one of those things. People are gambling like this is going to be the one that they’ll say yes to.

Craig: Sometimes there’s projects where everybody, it feels like, is tight. The pressure to make it, the costs of the rights, some sort of window to get an actor or a director makes everybody tight. Everyone’s tense. Everything is overexamined, overthought, overanalyzed, and nothing can survive that generally. Nothing is natural about that process. Everything is hyper-coordinated, and you end up with a hyper-coordinated script, which nobody wants to make.

John: Some cases it’s not the script that was ultimately the problem though. It was that to actually make the movie, it just became impossibly expensive.

Craig: There is that BioShock.

John: Yes, so BioShock is a great, great property, but the world building in it is so expensive that it’s hard to justify making that as the movie. They’re trying to do it as a series now, we’ll see what that is, but those are real issues.

Craig: I think now in the era of these big streaming shows, it’s doable to do BioShock, for sure. I do remember being on the Universal lot. There was a building that used to be Ivan Reitman’s company, Montecito. It’s a big building, and they had all this great Ghostbusters stuff in there, and then–

John: Was that the big blue house or a different one?

Craig: No, it wasn’t big blue house. It was more like this squarish modernish building. It was pretty cool. It was near the big blue house. Then it got taken over by Gore Verbinski when they were well on their way to making that BioShock. I remember going in there, I think to meet with Gore, and there was a big daddy– I don’t know [unintelligible 00:26:23] Just this big oldie timey diver suit with a drill hand, full life size in the lobby. I’m like, “Oh, this is going to be awesome.”

John: Then, it didn’t happen.

Craig: Then, it didn’t happen.

John: Let’s talk about that because more than I think the money you’re spending on scripts, that kind of R&D where you’re actually starting to really go into prep, that’s where you’re spending some real money. There was a project I was on a few years ago that I finally asked, “What actually happened?” I realized and I was told, they spent tens of billions of dollars that I did not know they were spending on storyboards and everything else.

That momentum, it’s a weird thing. You think, “Oh, it’s a sunk cost policy, so therefore, they’ll make it because we have to keep going because we already spent all this money,” but at a certain point, they realized like, oh, no, no, that the movie itself is going to be too expensive to make and we have to stop.

Craig: One of the things that is true about Hollywood, and I’m not sure it’s quite as true in other industries, is that there’s much more turnover. Now, Hollywood has actually been a fairly stable place leadership-wise over the last few years. When you look at how long Donna Langley has been running Universal, Bob Iger came back to continue to run Disney.

Generally speaking, every three, four years, somebody got kicked out and a new person got put in, and that was the point where they would sit down, look at stuff and go, “This isn’t my Concorde fallacy.

John: No.

Craig: -this thing is absolutely turning around.” They would just drop the axe on those things knowing full well that they couldn’t be blamed for the money that was spent. They could only be rewarded for not spending more money. In that regard, Hollywood had these weird safeguards against the sunk cost fallacy.

John: I’m sure there is a corollary to the sunk cost fallacy where if someone just recognizes it doesn’t matter how much we’ve spent before. With the project I see right now, is there a way to go forward and have this make sense?

Craig: Yes, that’s the fallacy part, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: Somebody else comes in and goes, “Oh, I see we’ve all been engaging in the sunk cost fallacy on this. It’s over.” That’s a traumatic thing. When we talk about storyboards, and a large statue, and rooms of people that are trying to find locations. There’s a lot of jobs. A lot of those jobs at least used to be here too. Now, those too start to go away.

John: There’s other issues that come up. Once you think you’re making a movie, you’re starting to reserve a stage space, and so you’re like, “Oh my God, we need to shoot this in Australia. We need to shoot this in London. We need to scramble to get these things,” so you’re putting holds on things. I remember talking with a producer who coming out of the pandemic, it was like, “We have to reserve stage space, but I think we’re going to be okay to start shooting, but I’m not sure we’re going to be–“ Just having to make these calls, because it’s like, you can be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on a stage that you’ve rented that you can’t actually use.

Craig: Stage space is probably the largest pressure behind ratings for any network streamer to decide if they’re going to renew a show. They may be on the fence ratings-wise, but while they’re there, somebody from that show is going to say, “If you don’t renew us in the next week, we won’t have stages and we won’t be able to make the show.”

John: No.

Craig: “Are we going or are we not?” Stage space is the thing that makes some places– As attractive as the tax credits may be. For instance, in Australia, not a ton of stages.

John: No.

Craig: UK, amazing tax credits but not as many stages as you would think.

John: When I was shooting my one and only TV show up in Toronto, it was at a Canadian boom. There were so many things shooting in Canada, we couldn’t find stage spaces, so we ended up having to shoot like a warehouse.

Craig: Warehouses.

John: That was not really meant to be this. I’m sure you ran into similar situations like Calgary was not intended to have as much production as you were doing.

Craig: No, Calgary had one facility that was actually constructed to be stage space. The other large facility was two massive warehouses that they had retrofitted, but barely. In Vancouver there are both kinds, but there are a lot. Part of our thing, we’re going to be up there I think going side by side with Shogun this time, so Justin, and Rachel, and I are like, “Hey, are you using this person?” “Yes.” “Can I have that?” “No.” Where are your stages? Who’s your makeup person? It’s been a lot of that.

They have constructed more stage space there. When you look at other places the other issue is size of stages. Northern Ireland built quite a few stages during the Game of Thrones boom, but size like sometimes you need an enormous. Then there are the specialty stages, like at Warner Brothers, which has 20-something stages that are currently sitting mostly empty. Just tragedy. They have one, I think it’s stage 16, with the floor actually, you can remove the floor and it’s got a pit, which is very cool for all sorts of interesting things.

John: Let’s talk about this from a writer’s point of view and how this matters and what to think about with this. Some of the properties you mentioned early on, like the superhero movies or the things that are based on titles, the reason why a screenwriter might pursue them and take them is because they will pay you money to do the thing. It’s not like some wildfire. They’re actually going to pay you your quote to do a thing, and that can be great and that’s fantastic. I always go into those jobs knowing it’s like I might so naive to think like I’m the one person who’s going to crack the Monopoly movie that everyone else has been trying to do.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. I remember I think somebody had asked Ted Elliott around the time that the third Pirates movie came out, and they were saying, “How do you pick projects? Because people come to you and offer you things. What kind of movie do you want to write?” He said, “Movies that are getting made.” [chuckles] That was it.

John: That’s always been my answer about what genre- [crosstalk]

Craig: Genre is movies that are getting made. Yes, when you take one of those jobs, you have to know I am seventh in a line of 14.

John: You have to go in both hoping and expecting that it’s going to work, and then also, holding your heart a place that like, I understand why it could not work.

Craig: Yes, it’s a job. Yes. Everyone’s looking at it that way too. Sometimes the executives are like, “We don’t know why somebody made some deal with a wraith and we have to make this film or we’ll be cursed forever. We don’t want to, so we don’t really care.”

John: I want to distinguish between those two things. Listen, this is the luxury of where I’m at in my career, that I don’t pursue those things that I just don’t care about. Like Drew will say, like a lot of stuff comes my way, and it’s like, “No, that’s not for me.” I’ll often say like, “That’s not for me, but there’s a writer out there who will love that, and I’m so excited for them to do that adaptation of–

Craig: Monopoly.

John: Yes. There’s somebody who said that’s their favorite property at all time, but I try not to approach those jobs with such cynicism. For a weekly, if I’m just going on to fix a problem for a person–

Craig: Yes, I’ll do anything for a week.

John: Yes. Oh I know some of the movies you’ve worked on.

Craig: I’ve worked on just Extraordinary Girl. I’ll work on anything for a week. What do I care? You know what? I can’t make it worse.

John: No.

Craig: I try, I do my best, I make sure to listen to everybody, and I improve it. I really do.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: I do the job I’m paid to do. What I know is, and I’ve said this at times to them, I’m like, “I just want you to know I’m making this corpse okay for an open coffin funeral. That’s what I’m doing. Just so you guys know. This is not a patient I can cure, but you’ll be able to look at it.”
[laughter]

Craig: They’re like, “Great. We thank you. That’s what we were hoping for. We just want mom to be able to see her boy there in his little suit. Sometimes that even that’s hard.

John: Yes. Sometimes there’s just this fundamental problems.

Craig: Yes, but I’m always honest about it, but yes, for a week. To actually do a movie– When I started out, there are movies where I’m like, It’s job. A job’s a job.

John: A job’s a job.

Craig: I got to to it. I need money. You know what, I will learn along the way.

John: I did.

Craig: I did. I will also gain fans along the way. People that hire writers. Everybody calls everybody and asks. They all have their lists. Writers move up and down the list.

John: I was on Zoom this week with an executive who I’ve known and then talked about parties and had meetings with for 30 years. I’ve never worked with him or for him, but like, “Oh it’s great to catch up with you, Michael. I’ve not seen you.” I’ve not had a chance to do it, and it would be great to be able to do this project with him.” Going and knowing like it may not happen, and it’s okay also it doesn’t happen.

Craig: Sure, yes. There are some things you can just sort of smell the curse on them.

John: Yes, and I will run away from those. I’ve also learned, it’s like, “Oh, there’s this terrible person who’s attached to this intellectual property.” I will never touch it because that person, I cannot have in my life at all.

Craig: Correct. There are things where people start talking about them, and I think, “Oh, this is– Oh. Oh.”

John: Sure, yes.

Craig: “I wonder why this hasn’t–“

John: Absolutely. I remember loving that book and like, “Oh that guy.”

Craig: “Oh, this person’s involved.” Goodbye.

John: All right, let’s get to some listener questions. What do we got first, Drew?

Drew: Vanessa writes, “I’ve been listening to your podcast for a while now, and every time the intro comes around and the chime starts playing, I think I’ve heard that before. This email is asking if the chime is fully original or inspired by a movie or something like it.”

John: That is the “boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.” That is a thing I wrote originally for my short film, The Remnants. I thought I just needed a quick little intro that I sort of felt like The Office, but even quicker than that. I think it’s original, but you can actually find it in other things. Over the years, people have said like, “Oh, I found this theme from the ‘70s, which actually that has the same chord progressions.” It’s so simple that–

Craig: Yes, I know, it’s five notes. It’s five notes. Of course. It’s five notes that resolve. Yes, it will be in other things. It’s not like an identifiable jingle from any popular thing. Yes, but sure, you can find a five note progression before. There’s no new five note progression.

John: I will say, as we come up to episode 700, one of my favorite things about the show is that our incredible listeners starting with Matthew [unintelligible 00:37:03] who did so many of the incredible early intro, but just have taken those five notes and just done remarkable things with them. I’ll have a new one this week and every week. Please keep sending in your interpretations of the intro to make our outros.

Craig: Love it.

Drew: Larry writes, “”What’s the best way to watch a movie to put money back in the pockets of the people who made it? I half remember at one point that renting something out iTunes was better for y’all, but I feel like perhaps that’s out of date.”

Craig: No, that’s in date.

John: In date. We’re talking about the rental on iTunes or Amazon or wherever you rent those things. That rate is actually really good for us.

Craig: That is the best residual rate we have of anything. We got that all the way back in 2000. Yes, 2000, I’m pretty sure it was, or 2001. I think we got it mostly because the companies hadn’t really caught on yet. They were like, “What are you? Okay.” I remember the deal was that they refused to do sales. It was they were just like, “We’ll give you rentals. We’ll give you a great rate on rentals.”

John: If I’m this is a movie that I want to watch and I feel like I’m going to watch it once, I will rent it. If the movie is like, I think I may want to watch it again or if there’s something like an adaptation, I’ll buy it off of iTunes. Listen, there’s times where it’s like, “Oh, it’s got to go be streaming someplace,” and it’s like, “Sure, I’ll spend like two minutes to look see if it’s streaming someplace,” but just buy the movie or rent the movie because it’s just, I just have it.

Craig: I will say too that is very nice that he’s asking, but the truth is, the nicest way to watch anything, assuming you’re not pirating, is to watch it however you want. Rent, buy, stream, add support, doesn’t matter, just do it. Then, if you like it, tell other people to watch it too because the that’s the best residual rate we get is popularity. Spread the word, and that’s as best you can do, but you don’t need to be too concerned about the ethical viewing. [chuckles]

John: Yes, as long as you’re not pirating it, you’re making ethical choices. My movie The Nines, I think it’s it showed up on streaming every once in a while, but it’s basically always been a purchase or download, and so just like it’s cheap, it’s like $3.99 to rent the movie. Just watch the movie. It’s a good movie.

Craig: Just watch that.

John: Just watch the movie.

Craig: It’s all good.

Drew: Jeremy writes, “As a non-american, I’m horrified to watch what’s happening in your country, and my screenwriter brain was wondering how you would go about writing it in a humane, empathetic way. How do you write scripts in the era of neo-fascism that won’t dehumanize those who suffer most?”

Craig: I’m not sure I understand the question.

John: Yes, I think we may be some language barriers here, but I think I take this to mean like recognizing that your country’s is falling into fascism, how do you go approach writing movies, and does that change how we’re thinking about the stories we’re trying to tell and the choices we’re making?

Craig: if you’re writing a story that touches upon themes like that, then yes, you would want to touch on things, the part that I’m not quite getting is the, how do you be humane?

John: Humane. I think, from the context of the whole email, it’s something along the lines of like, if you’re writing about these big things, making sure that you’re thinking about the people who are affected by these big things.

Craig: Isn’t that what you would be writing about?

John: Here’s an example I can take from my own life. A project that we’ll see if I can end up getting it set up, but there’s a big military and international cooperation aspect of it, and it’s like, oh, it’s a different movie now than it would have been three or four years ago.

Craig: Sure.

John: Just because our allies are not our allies again. Europe isn’t necessarily on our side, and so those things change. You have to understand that, but in pitching it, it was actually nice to be able to say, “No, this is actually a moment where international cooperation becomes incredibly important, an outside threat unites us all together about a thing,” and that felt good and useful. In terms of, I’m not writing, I don’t have an extra appeal writing something dystopian and bleak, I think because I’m living in a bleak, dystopian moment, and I also know that I’m not going to get joy from writing that, but I also know that no one’s going to want to make that.

Craig: Right. I guess people have been writing about fascistic regimes, terroristic regimes, repressive regimes forever, whether they live in them or not. We are all, as artists, impacted by what’s going on around us. I don’t think it should be a challenge for anybody to write victims humanely.

I think sometimes there is an undertone of fear in some of the questions we get, and I don’t mean fear of fascistic regimes, although we should have that and quite a bit of it, fear that we’ll make a mistake in our writing. You use the phrase, make sure to, which is a very defensive position when you’re writing. I just want to make sure that I don’t blank, or I want to make sure I don’t blank. Make sure that you write something good, true and honest. If you do, some characters are going to be ugly, and I mean ugly on the inside, and like all of us, some victims will be imperfect. That’s part of what makes it true, interesting, and upsetting.

The weird attraction that Spielberg gave Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List, that strange hypnotic power he had, made that interesting more than just, there’s the dickhead Nazi. Because he understood that the truer that person gets, the scarier he gets. Yes, I wouldn’t worry so much. I would just write what’s true.

John: Absolutely, and I also need to recognize that your movie, when it happens, will resonate with the culture of the time that it comes out. The most recent Superman movie really resonates with this moment that we’re in terms of world crisis, and yet it was two years ago, three years ago, that it got put in motion. It wasn’t actually responding to the moment that we’re in, it’s just because of when it comes out, it resonates with the world that it’s actually in.

Craig: Yes, things take on stuff. I wasn’t thinking about, Donald Trump wasn’t the president when I started working on Chernobyl. Truth wasn’t necessarily under global attack at that moment. If you write about things that are evergreen concerns for humanity, and you write them truly, without fear of making a ‘mistake,’ then I think you’re off to a good start.

John: Let’s go to this question here from John about stamina.

Drew: “I’m quite fortunately a consistently working writer who has had a handful of produced credits, and I feel like I’m firmly in the prime of my career. I’m suddenly becoming very aware that my stamina as a writer is nowhere near where it used to be. I’m starting to have more anxiety over whether this means I’m losing my love for the job, or that sometime soon I won’t be able to do it at a high level anymore. Then I stress over the actual work itself. Do you have any tips for how to keep your energy for the job up when you know that you’ll never be the version of yourself that you were 10 or 20 years ago?”

John: Oh, for sure. Yes, I nod with all of this, and I do recognize it. I think, John, you already have the insight of that you’re just never the same person you were at 20 or at 30. Because on those, I could stay up to like four in the morning writing a thing, and my life was just different. It was before I had kids. We often talk about how kids are just career killers.

Craig: Vampires.

John: Vampires sucking away at your life and your time, and yet, I’m still productive. I still get a lot done. I think if you actually look at the output of work that I’m able to do now, it hasn’t really diminished much. I have found my habits changing, and I do write in shorter sprints and get stuff done, but stuff does still happen. You can both recognize that your stamina has changed and not panic that it makes it incapable for you to write stuff.

Craig: This is one of those areas where– first of all, John, I’ve felt all of those things that you’re feeling, and I feel all of them. The other day, I had lunch with Brian Johnson the other day, and we were both talking about how like, “Are we just slowing down?” It feels like we’re slowing down, but the work keeps coming, so the problem is feels like. It feels like it sometimes.

I think part of it is because, okay, John says he’s in the prime of his career. What that tells me is he’s done enough work now at a professional level, seen enough of it go in and out of the machinery to have improved. As you improve, it becomes harder to write because you can’t write garbage the way you used to. When you start out, you’re just wee, right? I’m awesome. Because you don’t know enough to know that you’re not. You’re freer. It’s a lovely feeling. Then later, after life has beaten that a lot of you, but also after you create a little bit more of a sense of inner scrutiny, then the crucible of your own judgment becomes much hotter.

Yes, then it is a little harder, and it can feel like you’re losing stamina, but you’re not. You’re just more exacting, so you know more. You have the burden of knowledge, John. Your anxiety is normal. Just make sure to not draw any conclusions from it. You’ve made a mistake of drawing a conclusion from it. You think because you’re anxious, you are in trouble. You are not, you’re just anxious.

One of the things I’ve really tried to accept as I’m getting older now is that part of why I do what I do is because my brain is attuned to scary things. Everybody that we write about, we’re usually writing about somebody that’s afraid of something. We have very fear-attuned minds. No surprise, I’m afraid all the time. I just have to accept that is part of the package of doing what we do. What you’re feeling right now is incredibly normal. It’s actually a fantastic sign that you are a good professional writer. If you felt as free now as you did when you started, oh boy, I don’t know what to say. Something’s wrong with you.

John: If you were a professional athlete, you would have the same kind of questions, like, I don’t have the same stamina as I did earlier in your career. It’s like, well, that’s true. That’s objectively true. You can actually measure those sort of things. What we would have is experience, technique and all the other things that make it worthwhile. Unlike a professional athlete, there is no forced retirement date. You’re never going to break your back and be unable to play again.

At a certain point, you may decide you don’t want to keep doing it, which is great, but that’s not what I’m hearing in this letter. I think I agree with Craig, it’s just anxiety and fear.
Craig: Yes, you’re not at the place yet where you actually are slowing down and preparing to stop. That will be a different feeling. I don’t think I’m at that place yet.

John: A friend of mine did retire and he actually is a writer friend who worked in TV for many, many years and it’s just like, “Yeah, I’m done.” I love it for him.

Craig: Listen, in the throes of certain phases of making a large TV show, I fantasize about just pulling the old ripcord, but I know that it’s not time yet. Really what I’m reacting to there is this is hard.

John: It’s hard.

Craig: When things are hard, there’s a little boy or girl in us that wants to quit. Then there’s our memory of our mom, dad, coach, older sibling, somebody saying, “You can want to quit, don’t yet, don’t.”

John: In the time of doing this podcast is when I started distance running. I will say that it’s been a useful metaphor for some of this stuff because it’s like, you just want to stop running. You just want to stop and just walk for a while. It’s like, no, but you actually, you really can just keep running and you just keep running.

Craig: You’ll be fine though, John. You’re in a good spot, actually, weirdly. It’s an encouraging question.

John: Let’s take two more questions, first from Kat here.

Drew: I wonder if you could settle a rumbling question for my university peers and I.

John: We can.

Craig: For my university peers and me.

John: Sure.

Craig: I’m just going to correct right away. For me, object of the preposition.

John: We understand that it’s standard to render non-English languages as English on the page with the indication in parentheses that it is in Mandarin or whatever the language is, potentially mentioning whether or not it should be subtitled. Then along came Celine Song, who, as you’re aware, used Korean text on the page in past lives, setting an industry precedent by writing bilingually with all Korean translated into English.

My tutor has said that for the purposes of the degree with Celine’s industry precedent, I can use Chinese in my script. I would very much like to use this. Characters speak in their native language unless noted otherwise. Where rendered in English, the dialogue will be subtitled. Where written in Mandarin or Taiwanese is the intention not to use subtitles.
My cohort feels this would be unacceptable. to the industry. I could be getting the characters to say all sorts of nasties, unbeknownst to the producers.

What are your thoughts on the wider industry acceptance of having small parts of the script unintelligible?

Craig: The answer is in the question. Celine, by the way, one of the best people. I like that when she did that, it became an industry precedent and therefore is now allowable at universities. That just tells me how broken the university instruction system is around screenwriting.

John: Because if there’s one movie from a filmmaker that was successful, now, I guess, sure.

Craig: What was the point of all of that dogmatic nonsense to begin with? The answer is do whatever you want. Clearly do whatever you want. She was nominated for an Oscar. Why is this person worried about what the university will think?

John: All choices you’re making have pros and cons. It’s the question of like, is it a problem that certain blocks of text in your script will not be intelligible to a person who only speaks English? It could be, but maybe it’s absolutely fine. You won’t know until you try it. Yes, if it makes sense for you, you should do it.

Craig: The whole point is to say to an English reader, you won’t understand this. Isn’t that the point?

John: Yes.

Craig: So, do it. The idea that you would be putting in stuff that so like, after the movie comes out, they’re like, oh my God, one of those characters said the Holocaust didn’t happen. That’s not a thing.

John: That’s not happening.

Craig: It’s not happening. That’s such a not worry. Who asked this question?

Drew: Kat.

Craig: Kat, listen, you write this however you want. If you are a good writer, Kat, who is going to succeed as a screenwriter, you are already beyond the concerns of this university. You have already escaped its surly bonds. If you’re not, you’re not, so it doesn’t matter. You write whatever you want.

John: Last question here from Henry.

Drew: A few big films recently are the first of a multi-part series, and while I’ve enjoyed watching them, I always leave the theater feeling that I’ve only seen half a movie. I think there’s something off with the structure here, where they’re basically making one really long film instead of discrete parts that can be watched on their own, because I don’t feel this way with, say, The Empire Strikes Back or The Fellowship of the Ring. Do John and Craig have any insight into what’s going on here?

Craig: Money.

[laughter]

I mean money’s going on. Harry Potter, the seventh book, was broken into two books, because it was very long, and I think they looked at it and they were like, okay, so on the one side, a very long movie. First of all, people don’t like to see very long movies, so we’re going to lose some people. Two, fewer showings per day on a blockbuster, we’re going to lose some money, or we split into two and we get two hit movies.

John: Let’s say, hypothetically, there was a screenwriter who was approached with the property of Wicked, and was just like, so Wicked, you could do it as one long movie.

Craig: Somebody smart.

John: Somebody smart would say like, no, and actually, let’s approach it from the start, saying like, what if at the act break, we actually split it into two movies? How do we make sure that the first movie is as rewarding and successful as possible, and the second movie is as rewarding and successful as possible? I think Wicked made completely the right choice.

Craig: Oh, I’m sure they did.

[laughter]

John: Now, Henry, I will say that there have been some movies recently where I did feel a little bit of that, what, because I wasn’t expecting it. That rug pull can be a thing. I felt a little bit on the last Spider-Verse movie, where it was like, oh, wow, I really thought we were going to resolve this, and we didn’t, it’s just a cliffhanger. Same thing happens in the 28 Years Later, where the movie resolves nicely, but then there’s a code that’s not a post-credit scene, that just basically sets up the whole next movie. I’m like, wait, what?

Craig: Right. Certain things have built-in dotted lines that you could see yourself folding or tearing the page. Wicked is obviously one of them. It has a huge intermission, and the last song before the intermission is Defying Gravity and as I recall, someone saying to the people there, “How in God’s name can you sit around after Defying Gravity?” Defying Gravity happens, roll credits, go home. There are certain circumstances where it makes absolute sense.

There are movies like Harry Potter, where you’re like, look, you’ve been on this ride for six movies. Let us give you a larger feast for seven and eight. Henry, I do know what you mean, and I think sometimes there’s been a little bit of indulgence. It’s that same indulgence I see in limited series sometimes, where it’s like, oh, this is a seven or eight episode limited series. It should have been a five episode limited series.

John: There’s some padding and some, oh, yes.

Craig: It’s just some sort of stretch and pull and froth, and yes, I can see that is sort of happening as movies try to accomplish some of the things that television series can accomplish. In television, we can just work with a bigger canvas, and movies want that, but I know what you mean, and I think we all smell it when it’s happening.

John: The Avengers finale, which was a split over two parts, I enjoyed the entire experience, but I really couldn’t tell you what happened in one part versus the other part. It’s just like, it was a big two-part thing.

Craig: Again, if you have successfully laid out another sequel, I don’t know how many movies we’re talking about at any given point in that one. I think it was four total, right? Then, okay, if you want the finale to be a big, big finish, sure. If you’re just starting and you’re like, hey, or if it’s part of a series, but it’s not really like, each one of the series is its own thing.

For instance, I don’t know how many James Bond movies we’re up to, but if the next James Bond movie, just being made by Denis Villeneuve, it’s going to be awesome. If the next James Bond movie did that, it wouldn’t necessarily be earned because James Bond isn’t like, okay, it’s one, two, three, done. Avengers, I got that. They want to do a big finish. [crosstalk] Yes, I’m cool with that.

John: I’m cool with that, too. It’s time for one cool things. My one cool thing is actually on the back of my phone right now, Craig, I’m going to show it to you.

Craig: Great.

John: It’s called the Mott Magnetic Wallet Stand.

Craig: This is very much in my interest.

John: It is a little thing that magnetically clips to the back of your phone, and it magnetically clips down, so you can have it be a stand vertically.

Craig: I didn’t think that was going to be what it was.

John: Or horizontally.

Craig: Okay, that is cool. For what that is, what I thought I was getting shown was one of those back of the phone wallet replacers.

John: It is awesome. In that little slot, you can put two cards.

Craig: Two cards?

John: Only two cards now. If you want more than that, you’d need a different thing.

Craig: This is very slim.

John: It’s slim, and I don’t use a case on my phone.

Craig: Really?

John: I’ve never used cases on my phone.

Craig: Interesting.

John: Not for a very long time. I also use it, just I loop a finger through it and just to help hold my phone, so that I’m not bending my pinky– I’m not holding the weight of it on my pinky.

Craig: What would you call the color of that, out of curiosity?

John: I would call it–

Craig: I have a color in mind, but I don’t know if I’m right.

John: Purple is probably the closest, but I think purple is a scrappier than that.

Craig: I’m going to say mauve.

John: Mauve, okay, yes.

Craig: But is that right?

John: That was my go, Mauve. Mauve, yes.

Drew: Mauve.

John: Yes, it’s a good color, I like it.

Craig: It’s like a grayish purple.

John: Yes, I like it. If you’re looking for something to help hold onto your iPhone, the Mott Magnetic Wallet Stand, it’s like $28.

Craig: That’s fantastic. Oh, 28, that’s not bad. Just a little bit more than that, and you can get the Scriptnotes book.

John: Yes, delivered to your home.

Craig: Really, if you had a choice, I would say Scriptnotes.

John: I haven’t put it out, but as soon as I put it, it’s also available as a e-book. People are like, oh.

Craig: Of course, and that’s even cheaper, I assume.

John: People ask about the paperback, and there’s not currently plans for a paperback. We’ll see.

Craig: If it does well, there will be a paperback.

John: Probably, but there’s also increasingly some books are just never going to paperback, because-

Craig: Because the e-book sort of takes that place.

John: It does, and it’s also, our D&D books are never paperbacks, because they would rip apart. For something that you’re referring to a lot, it could be useful.

Craig: Sure. I remember my Syd Field book was paperback, and I’m sure the many Save the Cats is paperbacks.

John: Yes, are paperbacks.

Craig: My one cool thing this week is a podcast that I appeared on as a guest. I don’t know if it’s– it must be out by now. The podcast is called Total Party Skill.

John: I’m guessing it’s a D&D podcast.

Craig: You know it, a little take on Total Party Kill, and it is a Dungeons & Dragons podcast that is, I wouldn’t say hosted the podcasters, are Gabe Greenspan, Dylan McCollum, and the delightfully named George Primavera. George Primavera, by the way, sounds like a bad character name, like– [chuckles]

John: Yes. Oh, 100%.

Craig: Yes, like Gene Parmesan from– [laughs] George Primavera, and all three of these guys were absolute gentlemen and scholars, all three deeply, deeply well-versed in Dungeons & Dragons as players and DMs. They’re just fun.

John: That’s great.

Craig: We had a fun–

John: You’re not playing the game, you’re just talking through stuff?

Craig: The topics, one topic was just, “Okay, it’s been a minute since we’ve got the 2024 rules. Now that we’ve had a chance to play with them for a while, what are the things that we really love? What are some of the pain points of things we don’t love?” We had a pretty good in-depth discussion of that.
Then they did a little fun draft where we were drafting classes.

John: Right.

Craig: The question was, you’re drafting classes to survive an apocalypse. Then, I think they’re a Patreon thing. One of their Patreon subscribers wrote in to say, “Oh, here’s a name of something. What would you home brew this thing to be? Item, spell, weapon, what would it be?” It was just a joy talking with those guys talking with those guys.

John: Love it. Sounds great.

Craig: Check it out, Total Party Skill, on wherever you get your podcasts.

John: I listen to so many podcasts, and deliberately have not added any D&D podcasts, because that’s just too much. I’m sure there’s so much good content that would just eat up more of my time.

Craig: You know I don’t listen to podcasts, but I actually will listen to this podcast.

John: That’s great.

Craig: Not the one I’m on, the other ones.

John: For Craig to start listening to a podcast is a pretty big deal.

Craig: It’s got to got to be about D&D, basically.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, and edited by Matthew Ciarlelli. Outro this week is by Steve Piotrowski. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

You will find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this show each and every week, along with our videos and other things.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those backup episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on whether we would still write screenplays if we weren’t going to sell screenplays.

[laughs]

Thank you for pre-ordering the book. Pre-order those books and send those receipts to drewaskatjohnaugust.com, and we will send you something cool. Thanks, Craig. Thanks Drew.

Craig: Thank you.

[music]

John: This bonus topic came from a question. Drew, would you read us the question?

Drew: Your recent Scott Frank episode wrapped up with a bout of brutal honesty concerning the likelihood that any of us will have a career in screenwriting. I realized this was in an effort to encourage folks to be unique, advice I think I need myself, but I’d love to hear your perspectives on the idea of art for art’s sake. If, for whatever reason, nobody could ever pay you for a script again, would you still write them?

Craig: I wonder if Fraser– it feels like Fraser’s really asking this for themselves. Do I have permission to write screenplays if I’m not doing it professionally? The answer is, absolutely. I think for me, it’s a different question because I’ve written 4,000 scripts now and drafts and versions and things, and so, would I want to do it just for fun? No. I don’t think that’s a thing anymore. I would always want it to have a purpose just because I would.

If I hadn’t done so much screenwriting, I could see absolutely doing it for enjoyment.

John: I take this more as a question about the format of screenwriting as a worthwhile literary pursuit or a thing to spend your time on if it weren’t in the pursuit of actually making it into a movie or making it into a TV show. I agree with you. If I hadn’t done this job for so long, I could start writing screenplays.

I enjoy the form. I think it’s a great form, but it’s not a very shareable form. It’s not a form that other people are going to read and enjoy with you. I think having written books, and I have a graphic novel coming out next year, having written other things, I think there’s better stuff to write that for people out there in the world to read. You don’t have to write for other people to read stuff. You can just write for your own purposes and your own self.

Given what I like to do, I think I do like to write for other people to read it. I think books or stage musicals, or other things would be a better– it’s how I would spend my time.

Craig: One thing that this prompts is the idea that people pursue artistic expression for its own sake because it makes them feel good. It is part of our behavior as humans. We want to express ourselves creatively and artistically. I think it’s important that anyone give themselves permission to do so, as long as they acknowledge that they are not entitled to an audience.

If you want to write songs to make yourself happy, just don’t force your family to listen to 12 of them. You can play one maybe at Christmas, see how it goes. If you want to write a book or a poem or screenplay, great. Don’t make everyone read it. If people want to, great. I guess my point is, if you’re doing it for yourself, do it for yourself with no expectation because I think sometimes people say they’re doing it for themselves. What they really want is for everybody to tell them how great they are, and that’s a different thing.

John: It is. I feel like Fraser’s question is especially relevant in this era of increasingly powerful AIs that can generate things that look like the work that we’re doing, and just do it with seemingly effortlessly. Why even bother spending the emotional time and energy to write a thing when I can just generate a thing?

I still think there is meaning and value, and there’s discovery that happens when you’re actually trying to write a thing that is unique and wonderful. Those moments when I’ve written something, even if no one read it, I felt really good to have written it. Yes, fantastic, but I don’t necessarily need that to be a screenplay form. It could be something else.

Craig: It’s its own pleasure, right? If Fraser wants to write a screenplay because he enjoys writing screenplays and he’s able to accept that perhaps he may not write professionally, but that’s okay, he just likes writing, then that’s fantastic. There doesn’t need to be any reason to do that because there’s really no reason to do anything if we consider our mortality. What’s the point of anything? There is none. You die, so really, do you need to paint that painting? No.

We do it because it feels good. It helps us figure ourselves out and it might help us connect to one person. Beyond that, yes, just lower the requirements.

John: I always love the stories when they find some person who died and they find all this incredible writing or all these paintings that this person did. It’s like, oh my God, this person would have been a known artist, but they just chose not to do it or whatever circumstances, they didn’t. The work still is valuable and if they still enjoyed doing that thing, they did it for their own.

Craig: It’s not valuable for them anymore.

John: Intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. They did it because it was meaningful to them.

Craig: Absolutely, it felt good. Then there’s the counterpart to that, which is the Kafka situation where while Kafka’s alive, he goes, “You know what, I hate all of this, I’m burning most of it.” No, don’t, and he did. That can happen too.

John: It can.

Craig: I think, make a good point, there are authors that are discovered posthumously, there are artists that are discovered posthumously, but it just doesn’t matter, actually. If you’ve decided it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Certainly, I would say, give yourself permission for it to not matter.
I wish I liked writing screenplays enough to just wake up and go, “You know what I’m going to do today? I’m going to write some screenplay. Make myself feel good.”

John: Yes, that’s not me.

Craig: It’s not me. That’s the way I approach solving puzzles.

John: Playing D&D.

Craig: Playing D&D. Playing D&D, what’s the point of that?

John: No, it’s absolutely pointless.

Craig: Fellowship.

John: It is fellowship.

Craig: Fellowship, and it feels good. It’s fun, it’s interesting.

John: It’s problem solving.

Craig: It’s problem solving, but it’s creative. We get to–

John: Collaborative.

Craig: It’s collaborative, it’s creative. We get to express ourselves, does all these things. For its own sake, we are not critical role. Look, if we wanted to go, hey, some platformer, even if we went to the critical role people were like, hey, it’s me and John, and we’ve got Tom Morello and Dan Weiss and Chris Morgan, and all these cool da-da-da, Phil. Hey, we’re going to go ahead and just do it. Yes, they’d be like, yes, we’ll do it. You can make money off of it.

John: It would ruin it.

Craig: Of course, it would ruin it.

John: It would ruin it.

Craig: It would be horrible.

John: Also, the things we say around the table would get us canceled immediately.

Craig: I don’t think we would make it past a minute, but even if we could, the point is we’ve never even considered it because we don’t need it.

John: No.

Craig: Not because it’s that we don’t need money, it’s that we just don’t need to do it for a reason. It is ontological.

John: Also, we’re happily amateur D&D players.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Yes, and so I want to shout out to community theater because community theater is pointless, and also amazing and wonderful.

Craig: It is professionally pointless, but it fills people’s spirits and souls. And Waiting for Guffman, if that is not the most beautiful love letter to community theater, I don’t know what is.

John: Love it. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

Craig: Thanks.

Links:

• Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
• Birdigo on Steam
• Aurora by David Koepp
• Pale Flower
• Deep Red
• Suspiria
• Hands on a Hard Body
• American Movie
• Wonderland
• Hands on a Hardbody the musical
• Cure
• Pulse
• Moft magnetic wallet stand
• Total Party Skill podcast
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• Outro by Steve Pietrowski (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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