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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/how-would-this-be-a-movie).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 201 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, our communication can open up to a whole new frontier. I can now send you my heartbeat because I have an Apple Watch just like you.

**Craig:** I mean, let’s just run down the things we could do. We can send each other heartbeats. I can draw like a dick on my phone if I want —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And I can draw a boob and send it to you.

**John:** You can send an animated Emoji kind of thing.

**Craig:** Which I actually — that we could do I think to anybody.

**John:** I think it would just come through as a normal Emoji though. I don’t think it comes —

**Craig:** No, it does.

**John:** Through as the cool animation.

**Craig:** It does. It comes through.

**John:** Does it?

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. They can’t send us one but we can send anybody one of those.

**John:** Yeah, so it’s unilateral Emoji power.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. But the little like, “I’m going to draw something and blah, blah, blah,” you know, frankly, there’s no real utility in that. I don’t —

**John:** If I were a high school student, I would love it.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure.

**John:** I’d be drawing dicks and sending them around all the time.

**Craig:** Dicks and boobies everywhere.

**John:** That’s what it would be. So far, I’m enjoying it. You know, once I started treating it like a watch that could do extra things versus a tiny iPhone, I was much happier with it. But I found that that first hour I kept trying to do iPhone kind of things on it, it really is not an iPhone.

**Craig:** No, not at all. And that’s a very good observation. You just treat it like a watch. The truth of the matter is that 90% of the time, I’m just using it like a watch where I check the time. I like the fact that it — I don’t know what face you’re using, but the way I’ve got mine designed, I’ve got just a standard analog face. I’ve got a little digital time as well. I’ve got the date and day. And then at the bottom, a little summary of what the next event is coming up, you know, on my calendar.

**John:** I suspect you and I are both using the utility face.

**Craig:** I think I am using the utility face, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Apparently, it’s the most common face used by Apple Watch users.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** But I use the same thing. And in my upper left corner I have little circles that fill in for my activity. And I enjoy that as a concept. I’ve been a little bit frustrated that I have a very hard time getting the move circle to fill in all the way. And I think my humblebrag for this will be that my heart rate is really, really low. My resting heart rate is really, really low. And so things that I think should count as movement, my heart rate doesn’t go up high enough that it doesn’t feel like I’m actually really working at it.

**Craig:** You know, I was wondering —

**John:** So that’s my only frustration.

**Craig:** The heart rate thing is a little, I don’t know. I’m a little suspicious of it. Well, actually, geez, god, my heart rate is ridiculously low, too. 61.

**John:** Yeah, I’m 60.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** But maybe that’s because we’re so calm whenever we’re doing the podcast.

**Craig:** Because we don’t move, man. Let’s just face it. [laughs]

**John:** We don’t.

**Craig:** Just real lazy —

**John:** This podcast, we will not be moving whatsoever but we will be discussing some topics and doing a whole new kind of featuring segment which I thought up this week and I hope will be fun. This week, we’re going to take a look at three stories in the news and look at them from a screenwriter’s perspective saying, how would these be movies?

And so we’re going to look at the FIFA scandal. We will look at the Large Hadron Collider and we’re going to look at the situation with Laura Kipnis and the Title IX Investigations and sort of that whole issue of sexual conduct on campus.

So we’re not actually going to reach any conclusions about them as the actual news stories, but we’ll look at them as how do you make this into a movie, which is most of what screenwriters do is try to think about how something could be a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that, actually, as an exercise, is very much like what we’re doing all the time when we sit down with producers or executives. At some point, someone will say something like, “Hey, you know, we’ve been thinking about making a movie about FIFA.” Or, “Hey, we’ve been thinking — you know, my boss, insert famous person here, is just obsessed with origami. How do we make an origami movie?” And you’re constantly being asked to take something and narrativize it. Well, let’s see how we do with these.

**John:** Yeah. So this will be our first experiment in narrativization with three news stories. And then we’re going to take a look at the advice of “follow your passion” or “do what you love” and to the degree with which that applies to writers and screenwriters but to the degree with which it could be damaging advice overall. So we will get into that. And Professor Craig has a bunch of stuff in the Workflowy for us to talk through about that.

So it should be a fun new kind of episode.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll see. I like to hold my applause.

**John:** You’re setting expectations low.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig Mazin specialty.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it could be a disaster.

**John:** But it could be fun.

**Craig:** But, look, it’s free. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, I mean, come on.

**John:** All right, let’s get into this. So we’re going to talk about each of these issues. We’ll sort of do a quick summary of what actually is happening, in case you’re listening to this six months after the fact and you don’t remember what the story was.

But then I want to take a look at this from — maybe spend the first little bit of it talking about like, well, what kind of movie in general are we talking about making, what’s the genre, what sort of general type of move would this be. Look at the characters, look at what the storyline might be, and also answer the real question like, “Would anybody make that movie?” So let’s start with FIFA.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So FIFA was a big scandal this last week. Do you want to summarize it? Should I summarize it? What do you think?

**Craig:** You know, there’s not that much to say. I mean, FIFA is the international organization that supervises football, you know, what the rest of the world calls football, soccer. And they control the World Cup. They also control what city gets the World Cup. And that’s a bit like the Olympics. Cities bid for it, they compete heavily for it because it’s good for your economy to have, you know. God knows how many people filing into your country to watch the World Cup.

And unfortunately, what that means is that there’s the opportunity and possibility of corruption because you have FIFA officials that are in possession of a decision. And lots of other countries want them to decide for them. So you could see how it’s like, “Oh, hey, take this briefcase of money.” “Oh, hey, why don’t you have a free whatever and give it to us?” And I think frankly, the rest of the world had resigned itself to FIFA’s steady, consistent corruption.

**John:** Until about 10 days ago when it suddenly changed.

**Craig:** It suddenly changed.

**John:** So what happened is this was in Zurich and a bunch of plain-clothed police officers came in and arrested and then later indicted a bunch of FIFA officials and other marketing officials for essentially kickbacks and bribes. This was all at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice. And so, it was suddenly, you know, sort of out in the open. And at the time, Sepp Blatter who runs FIFA, claimed the responsibility. He has the best name.

As we get into like the storytelling of it at all, like Sepp Blatter is just too impossibly great —

**Craig:** [laughs] Sepp Blatter, I mean, they’ve got to just put that into the new Star Wars movies.

**John:** That’s so good.

**Craig:** Darth Blatter? Come on.

**John:** [laughs] So he was initially sort of like not publicly part of the investigation, like he wasn’t sort of indicted in this first round. He won the election as Head of FIFA two days later. And then after another few days, he resigned from it because it was clear that he was going to be ensnared in the investigation. His words though were, “The mandate does not seem to be supported by everybody in the world of football,” in his hastily arranged news conference in Zurich. “FIFA needs a profound restructuring.”

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. FIFA needs a restructuring, all right. I mean, good lord. I mean, we’re not supposed to comment on the news story itself. We just want to make a movie out of this somehow.

**John:** We do. And so as I was thinking about what kind of movie this would be, one of the details that came up which I found so fascinating is the structure of FIFA which tends I think to lend itself to some of this corruption is that each — it’s not even countries, but each sort of locality who has a team gets to have a vote on where the World Cup is being held.

And so you can have these tiny little island countries that have as much of a vote as Germany or France does on where these things are being held. And so because you have these little countries and one official of this little country having so much power in how this is being done, they’re very prone to bribery. And also, I found the possibility for that little guy from Bora Bora being ensnared in this whole thing potentially fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s definitely one way to go is to just say, “Let’s take the villains of FIFA and let’s make an underdog movie here.” So, a little country wants the World Cup and they love soccer, and there’s no chance they’re ever going to get it, but they pick their aging soccer hero. They sort of say, “Hey, leave this charge and give our kids something to think of.” And he gets caught up and swept up. And then there’s probably a woman that he’s falling in love with. And he goes. And he basically gets screwed over by these evil guys. And so, he fights back.

And, you know, they end up playing the World Cup on big floating platforms in the Pacific Ocean because they’re French Polynesia or something.

**John:** So what you’re describing is sort of falling into the sports movie overall genre. So there’s things like there’s aspects of Cool Runnings. That Matt Damon, South African football movie, or rugby movie, which also involved Morgan Freeman as a backdrop for telling the larger story of Nelson Mandela. There’s definitely all of that stuff because you have this cinematic game that you can watch. There’s actually sport. There’s action happening right there.

The other way I was thinking about doing this was sort of the Coen Brothers comedy, which is that you have these larger than life characters doing this sort of absurd thing and taking money for, you know, soda contracts. And there’s some kind of great black comedy to be made about what that life is like.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. So we’re talking about genre here and in a weird way what happens is you start to go right to, well, what’s this about, you know. And in the first instance we have this broad comedy. And what it’s about is, you know, what most things are always about. The underdog wins.

And then a darker comedy or a Coen Brothers style comedy is really about the Byzantine Kafkaesque nature of the world. FIFA and its nonsense becomes a stand-in for, you know, the mythological maze that the hero would find himself in. And those can be fascinating and really funny. The collision of different nationalities you could see lending itself to some fun there as well.

You know, where of course the other way to go is to take it just head-on. And say, “Okay, well, let’s just deal with how can we make a political thriller about this.” There’s probably not any violence, but people have become accustomed to sort of the unwinding of international things if it’s done with some real drama.

There is an interesting theme here that I think could be explored in a movie like that. One thing that came out of this whole thing that I found fascinating was that in a time when most of the world, and particularly Europe where so much of football mania is centered, has lost its love for the United States. There was this remarkable outpouring of appreciation. It was like the old days where people went, “Here come the Yanks. Good for them. Finally, they’re going to come and clean this up. And hurray for them. And you know what, they may not love football the way we do, but they saved us. They’ve saved our beloved sport.” That’s interesting to me.

**John:** The kind of movie you’re describing makes me think of Syriana or Michael Clayton in that they’re taking it straight on. They’re sort of trying to peel back the layers and really looking at what’s happening underneath this thing.

And like they’re also dipping into what we consider the villain’s point of view at times. I think of the scene in Michael Clayton where she’s like hiding in the bathroom stall making a phone call. There’s some really great tension to be found there.

But I would also question whether, you know, there’s not obvious like people being murdered in the streets in this kind of movie. But if you look at the situation in Qatar, which Qatar was awarded the World Cup, and there’s real concerns that, you know, essentially the slave labor that’s going to be building the stadiums in Qatar would result in many, many deaths. So there’s ways you could probably frame this as a real human cost to this kind of corruption and scandal.

**Craig:** That’s right. And in doing so, you find why it matters to people. So the question is, forget who’s going to go see this, who’s going to make it, right? Because the who’s going to make it involves who’s going to go see it.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** And people that are going to be spending $30 million, $40 million or $50 million a movie, what they want to know is, well, what ultimately draws me to this if I don’t care about soccer or even if I do but I’ve read the story and I get it. And what draws people to all these things is some kind of human drama, whether it’s the simple comedy drama of the spirit of the underdog or if it’s something about a repressed underclass in the dark side of a happy sport. Something, we have to find that thing to connect through.
I actually think that you could make a really interesting movie about this. My instinct, if I were running a studio, would not be to make the sunny comedy version because that feels a bit played out. And I think that this is too — frankly, it’s too interesting. The fun version of that is Cool Runnings where it’s about kind of a very minor sport and minor country. And the comedy is the fun part. My instinct here would be to go head on.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would go head on and Syriana with this thing. I guess, ultimately, what I’d be trying to find in it is a path for America to become what it once was. Not the world’s policeman, but the world’s best example. And use that as the sort of joy at the end of this.

**John:** So what you’re describing I think could be a really cool movie. And it reminds me of Zero Dark Thirty. So Zero Dark Thirty, you’re trying to take on the assassination of Osama Bin Laden but, like, what is the actual human story you’re trying to tell within that? And so they decided to focus in on the single woman. We’re seeing this from her perspective as she’s trying to do this mission. So finding who that relatable U.S. person is or whose journey we’re going to follow and whose struggle we’re going to follow trying to make this happen could be great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So let’s take a look at who some of these characters are we’re going to encounter. Obviously Sepp Blatter is just, come on, just phenomenal.

**Craig:** Sepp Blatter.

**John:** So we have Loretta Lynch who’s the U.S. Attorney General who is pushing this investigation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** She is certainly a possibility. But I have a hunch that there’s some other man or woman who really led the charge and said, “You know what, I think we can get them on RICO charges,” which is normally how you would bring down the Mafia. I think if you could frame this story in a way like the same kinds like, you know, The Untouchables or the same way you could sort of frame these Mafia stories, you might be able to frame it from — use that as a framework for what kind of a movie this is.

This is like the U.S. taking down the Mafia. That may be a way in to sort of both how we’re going to describe the movie internally, about what kind of movie we’re trying to make. But also you’re thinking about what kind of movie are you ultimately going to need to try to market when you put it out there in the world.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this is where you come up with these little moments that help people understand. And by the way, you’re exactly right. You can’t make Loretta Lynch, our U.S. Attorney General, the hero of the story because she’s simply too big and too public. It’s like making the President the hero. That was kind of my problem with, you know, the White House Down, Olympic Fallen movies because the President doesn’t punch people. He’s too big. He’s not real, you know. He’s not real to me.

**John:** Yeah, exactly. Unless you’re literally making Air Force One which like you so deliberately constrain it down. Like, well, it has to be the President.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But that’s not this movie.

**Craig:** It’s just not this movie. So you do want somebody that we feel accessible to, somebody that we can identify with. But there’s that moment where they’re in a room and the person is saying, “Here’s what I want to do. I want to bring them up on RICO charges.” And someone else says, “Okay, when you say them, let’s just run down who you’re talking about. These 17 countries, these following people, none of whom we have jurisdiction over, all of whom are bribing these people to not give us evidence, we can’t go here and we can’t go here. These people hate us, and these people hate us. And you want to bring them all down on a RICO charge within two months?” And the person says, “That’s right.”

And you start to get a sense of what this movie is about.

**John:** You know, the other movie this is reminding me of is Erin Brockovich because you might have an outsider who’s come in to say like, “This is what’s happening. This is what needs to be done.” So even if he or she doesn’t have the expertise to do exactly the thing that needs to be done, they have to convince someone who does have that power to do it. And the way they do that is the compelling human story of how we are getting to this place.

So then the issue becomes, how do you set up your competing themes of like whatever this individual journey is versus what FIFA is doing overall and what soccer is like. You know, how do you combine the ideas of like that kid playing soccer, your own kid playing soccer on the field and this giant sports machine that is corrupt and is employing slave labor in a faraway place. How do you make that all fit into one movie, that’s your struggle.

**Craig:** That is. And, you know, my instinct would be that the person involved here actually doesn’t understand soccer at all. They don’t play it, their kids don’t play it. They are as American as American gets, in fact, which is a part of their problem.

For instance, I could see a character who had been working in the state department for a while and working in an area where frankly every time they try to do something that “helped,” they hurt, which is kind of the story of the post 9/11 United States. Every time we try and fix things, we seem to make them worse.

And this person is consumed by this. And they seize upon this that the thing that no one is looking at. And they say, “Wait a second. If you pull the lid off of this, you start to see how many people are really being hurt, this is the kind of thing we should be doing. We shouldn’t necessarily be droning every time we have a problem. Maybe this is what we should be doing, going after the rich and corrupt who are, in the name of capitalism and a good show, are hurting a lot of people. That’s the way we used to be.”

And then it becomes about that person redeeming themselves and maybe giving us all a little bit of a glimpse of how we could be better.

**John:** Something you just touched on there is that by having this person be an outsider to the world of soccer and maybe even outside to the world of how FIFA works, by having your hero be that outsider, you give the movie and the audience a chance to learn with the hero how stuff fits together. And you also get the ability to teach the audience what is important and what is not important about this world you’re introducing them to, because you’re not going to need to teach them all the rules of soccer. That’s not going to be important to your movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But you’re going to be able to teach them how this bigger game works. And so, as I’m throwing out other examples of movies. You think of Moneyball. And Moneyball, it didn’t just teach you how to like hit the ball, it needed to talk to you through about sort of this is what trading is like. This is how you put a team together. This is the structure of this world. And having your hero be the outsider to this could be really, really useful.

**Craig:** Yeah. And as you mentioned, Moneyball, you were psychically connecting to something I was already thinking when you talked about how the audience goes in on this outsider path with their hero. And that is that you’re creating an opportunity for great relationship. Somebody that’s bought in to help you navigate that world. So you don’t know anything about soccer. And you don’t come from that world. And you have this idealistic view of what you can accomplish.

And they pair you with somebody that isn’t a crusader or government official but knows a whole bunch about soccer and the soccer world. That’s a great odd couple pairing. And watching those two people help each other, the cynic makes it clear to the idealist what they’re really up against. And the idealist reignites a little bit of a candle of hope in the cynic. That’s classic stuff. But you’re always looking to create characters that need other people. Or else, your movie is going to get super lonely.

**John:** Yeah. The thing we need to always remind ourselves is when you put all FIFA overweight there on the shelf and just look at it from whoever we pick as our hero, what is going to be her journey through this movie. And how are we going to find the moments of triumph and failure along the way. How are we going to get to that place where all hope is lost? Where do we get to that darkest night? And how are we going to structure the story so that character could have those moments, because that’s what would let it be a story about a person rather than a story about a scandal that we just sort of fundamentally don’t care about. That’s honestly the challenge with most of these movies that are based on real life events is trying to find a way that you can have — you can really chart a hero through this whole thing.

You look at what Aaron Sorkin did with The Social Network, which is still one of my favorite movies. It was so smart in creating a character in Mark Zuckerberg who wasn’t the real Mark Zuckerberg but allowed a character to have progress in the journey and to have these ups, these downs, and to really articulate the frustrations in really smart ways. That’s what you’re going to be able to find with this story is how do you find a character who it can be about them and not be about soccer?

**Craig:** Every movie ultimately must be about people. We simply don’t watch fictional movies, even dramatizations of real things for the events themselves. That’s why we watch documentaries. And even in documentaries, they make it about people. Otherwise, it’s a textbook. It’s just your history textbook on film. It’s a news reel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You have to make it about people. That’s how we connect to everything. So Sorkin looks at Facebook. And he says, here’s a man that started Facebook. Facebook is so that you can make friends. This man doesn’t seem to have any friends. Good. Let me start there. That’s a good place to start. Really good place to start.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s go on to our next big news topic. This is only sort of halfway news because it’s existed for a while, but this last week they reignited some stuff and upped the energy on the things. We’re going to talk about The Large Hadron Collider. So for people who are not scientifically oriented, The Large Hadron Collider is this giant ring, this particle accelerator built on the border of France and Switzerland. It’s run by CERN, the organization for nuclear research in Europe.

There’s 10,000 scientists, it’s a tunnel 27 kilometers circumference. And what they’re looking for are supper symmetric particles. It’s really trying to understand the fabric of the universe. It’s trying to understand dark matter, trying to understand the very first moments after the Big Bang. It was incredibly expensive. It was incredibly controversial when it was getting made. There’s always been sort of this background worry about like well what if we sort of break something in the universe by trying to build this thing. So let’s just take a look at here’s The Large Hadron Collider. What is the movie there?

**Craig:** Well, you’ve got some possibilities. You could, again, let’s just start with the real easy one. Straight ahead, it’s a drama about whether we’re going to find this or not. I think that would probably be pretty boring.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** When we talk about movies where people are pursuing specific scientific breakthroughs The Imitation Game or Beautiful Mind, it’s really about the individuals and their interesting personal struggles whether it’s with being a homosexual at a time when it’s illegal or whether it’s having schizophrenia. In and of itself, this probably straight ahead will be — no one will care. So then of course, you go let’s fling ourselves the other way into science fiction, right? Okay. Science fiction tends to come in two flavors. It comes in the hopeful flavor or the be careful flavor. My guess is that this would probably fall under the be careful flavor of science fiction.

**John:** Do talk through both versions.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So let’s start with the pessimistic, but let’s also talk the optimistic version.

**Craig:** All right. So optimism, we’ve got this wonderful thing. And if we do it, perhaps, we get — I could see, well, geez, I don’t know how to make it optimistic, because the truth is what happen is you’re guessing about things like what do you, you know, do you find heaven?

**John:** I was going more towards Jodie Foster in Contact where essentially you, you know, by building this thing, you’re able to understand some fundamental mystery. And therefore either travel to a different place, have communication with the new species. I was also thinking back to in Star Trek lore there is the prime directive which is basically non-interference with other cultures. But The Federation will reach out when a civilization has reached a certain point. So in one of the movies, I guess this First Contact, Zefram Cochrane builds the first warp drive. And therefore The Federation reaches out and says, “Oh, hey, Earth. There’s other life out there.” And that’s how Earth joins The Federation.

So I think there’s a possibility for essentially by basically knocking on the door by building this particle accelerator thing, somehow, a higher civilization reaches out to us. The conflict of the movie is do you trust them, do you not trust them? Is it Escape from Witch Mountain? Like what is the — that’s not giving me sort of what the story is, but that might be the background for what it is. Like an optimistic future that’s there. Tomorrowland is a bit of that, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Contact, I love Contact. And one of the things that Contact did was it posed a problem. It imposed a problem. It imposed a question. What do you do if you are contacted by someone else? But in this concept, we are doing the meddling. We are meddling with the ultimate stuff of the universe. And so it feels — my instinct is that when we meddle with things willy-nilly that if the result is something good, it’s less satisfying dramatically.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s as if we push the first domino that went all the way around through a Rube Goldberg device and gave us a nice cookie. When we push that domino, I want stuff to go bad. And then I want us to continue our Star Trek analogy here, it’s like Q. Q shows up in one episode. They say, “Oh, you know, we’ve got things figured out. We’re not scared anymore. We know what we’re doing.” He says, “Oh, really? You have no idea what’s out there?” And they’re like, “Yeah, we can deal with it. We’re cool. We’re the Enterprise.”

So he just flings them into deep, deep, deep space where they encounter the Borg for the first time. And they lose. And then he brings them back and says, “You see, stuff out there, it ain’t any good.” So I could see something here where when it works at first, it seems like they just did a thing. And there’s no problem. But then, some weird things start happening. A little bit like what was the Joel Schumacher movie where they would almost die?

**John:** Flatliners.

**Craig:** Flatliners.

**John:** I love Flatliners.

**Craig:** I love Flatliners. In Flatliners, same thing, they’re meddling with science. They’re trying to see how long they could be “dead” before they can be brought back to life. And as a result of their experiment, weird things start happening to them. They start witnessing people from their past, people that are interacting with them. And ultimately, it turns into kind of a supernatural morality tale about making peace with your past.

But I can see a similar kind of thing happening here where it’s almost as if Neo was a scientist and flipped a thing on and then starts to see The Matrix without anybody explaining to him what The Matrix is. Perhaps also they turned it on and it summons — it essentially draws attention to us. And bad people come.

**John:** Yes. And so, the version of bad people come could be the incredible $100 million, or at this point $400 million movie version. Or it could be something more like Primer, which is you know, again sort of experimenting with scientific things and the danger of sort of unleashing that but done on a very small scale.

I also want to throw out the option of like, well, what if it’s not a science fiction genre at all? So what is this as a romantic comedy? So I was thinking like what, you know, is there a way that we can take thematically the idea of like things coming together and clashing together and build a romantic comedy out of that? Like what is it like if these scientists fall in love? What could we do with this ring idea that this is sort of a giant tunnel and that there might be something really fun to do with using this as a backdrop rather than having it be the actual center of the story? What would that be?

**Craig:** Yeah. For instance, I could see a story where two scientists work on this project. And there’s something wrong between them. And they turn on the switch, they achieve success. And in achieving success, it becomes clear that they’ve caused a problem. And there’s going to be essentially there’s a certain amount of time that’s going to go by and then the universe will collapse.

They’ve got three days. And they’re the only two that know about it. They’re the only two that figured it out. Everybody else thinks it’s great. And so, you have this romantic comedy where everybody in the world is just going about their day, but two people know for sure the world is going to end in 72 hours.

And what do they do with that time? That would be very interesting. Of course, you’d probably not want to destroy the world at the end of the 72 hours. Perhaps they figure out a way. Perhaps one of them has to sacrifice himself or perhaps they can just fall in love. But there’s something really fun about the idea of two people, you know, because they’ve — I’ve seen this movie where there’s apocalyptic movies and the world is going to end and so people fall in love, but everybody is doing it. I kind of like that only two people know about it, and they’re like should we tell people? Why? What for if we can’t stop it?

**John:** Yeah. And there’s also that uncertainty principle maybe like essentially you don’t know what’s going to happen. So they know that there’s like a 50% chance that the world is going to end. So like, you know, there’s a 42.1% chance that the whole universe will implode in 48 hours. Do you tell people? Do you not tell people? That’s an interesting question because you could sort of ruin the world by telling them. But of course, you want people, you know. It’s an interesting ethical question.

What you’re describing is the high concept romantic comedy. I feel like there’s a low concept romantic comedy that could also be fun just because it’s a comedy set in a world I have not seen before. I’ve seen a lot of comedies set in higher education. I’ve seen comedies set in other work places, but it’s such a weirdly specific workplace that it’s locked down, it’s scientific. Everyone there is probably on Craig’s favorite thing, somewhere on the spectrum. And that could be really great.

And so to see the normal kind of bureaucracy happen but in a scientific way, and there’s always sort of weird safety protocols to be able to make those thematic observations about the difference between physics and chemistry, you know, and sort of like what that means for in a romantic sense or in sort of an emotional sense.

There could be some really interesting stuff to do there. So it doesn’t feel like a Nancy Meyers comedy. But I could see Nora Ephron making a great comedy set in this kind of world, or I could have imagined her making a comedy set in this kind of world where you have these characters who have really strongly held beliefs that are going to naturally come into conflict.

**Craig:** That’s also some nice thematic stuff there about people that are working on a project in which the pursuit of truth at any cost is the name of the game. And extending that theme to interpersonal relationships can be pretty interesting too.

**John:** Yeah. So if we get Marc Webb in there, Aline writes the script, sold.

**Craig:** Sold.

**John:** Let’s talk about the reality though of trying to make this movie. So I can completely imagine, I’m sure there are at least a hundred spec scripts out there that involve a science fiction thriller, aliens arriving kind of thing, about the Hadron Collider —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It just has to be out there.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m sure it is. Again, if I were running a studio, I would not make that movie. I don’t think it’s specific or interesting enough. It just feels like we’re taking a phrase from the news that maybe 2% of Americans know about and just trumping up yet another, you know, effects laden aliens getting angry at some people. I wouldn’t make that movie.

**John:** I agree with you. I wouldn’t make it. If I were a studio, I wouldn’t make this smaller, smarter, primer version because I wouldn’t know how to release it. But if I were a filmmaker who made that smaller, smarter Primer version and took it to Sundance, I could see that being a big hit at Sundance. I could see that the indie version thriller of that happening.

I think the romantic comedy version could sell with the right package. And that it would be a really good pitch or it would be a script. It wouldn’t be just like a, “Oh, we have this lark of an idea.” No, you would really need to pitch that whole thing through.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I’m not sure there’s enough there to really support it. I don’t love this one, you know, it just feels — you know, what you want to avoid — basically this is the problem is that everything ultimately gets narrowed through this lens of marketing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** While it’s annoying and perhaps creatively odious, it is realistic, because in the end, people are going to go, “Oh, it’s a comedy about two people falling in love and they are like super nerdy scientists. Okay, so it’s like The Big Bang Theory, but a movie.” And it’s going to be hard to make that feel special just on the basis of the fact that they’re working at the thing, you know. I don’t know, it’s a tough one.

**John:** It’s a tough one too. I think in some ways, the sharper version of your high concept like because super collider there’s an additional sort of world effect might help you out there too. And it might lend itself to like, “Oh, I can see what the casting is like on that.” You look at Pixels, the movie coming out, like that’s a really, really, really high concepts comedy pitch, but like if you say like, “Yes, I can see what that is, I can see what the trailer is, go for it,” I have a hunch that if you and/or Todd Phillips had an idea for a comedy set in the Large Hadron Collider and you can go in and pitch that and set that up, and people would be excited to try to make that.

**Craig:** Well, I mean to be honest, I think if Todd, forgive me, if Todd Phillips has a pitch about a blind squirrel and a bucket, they’re going to buy it, too, because everybody just believes in him and they have been richly rewarded for believing in him. But I suspect that if there is a — for instance, if you took the high concept comedy of two people, two rivals, scientific rivals who both arrive at the same conclusion, they’ve never agreed with each other ever. The one time they agree with each other, nobody else agrees with them and that is that they figured out that the world is going to end in three days, that’s interesting.

So in a way, I guess what I’m saying is the Hadron Collider part of it is probably a minor thing. If it’s going to be part of a romantic comedy, it’s a minor thing the way that where the man and the woman work is sort of a minor thing in a romantic comedy. Like what was it, The Wedding Planner?

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** She’s a wedding planner, I get that, haha, wedding planner, but she’s never married, well. But in the end, that’s not really — it’s not even that important. What’s important is the relationship she has with Matthew McConaughey. I think in What Women Want, Mel Gibson was an advertising guy, so there was a little bit of thing of like, ah-ha, he thinks he knows what women want because he’s in advertising, but doesn’t really know. Okay, fine. But once you get that out of the way, it comes down to the relationship.

**John:** Yeah, the upcoming movie with Bill Hader and Amy Schumer, he is like a sports doctors and she has to write a profile on him. That’s just the conceit to get you started. But that’s not going to be what the bulk of the movie is like. I would say, probably most romantic comedies, the essential premise is just there to get the first 30 pages going and does not become a very important part of the rest of the story.

**Craig:** No, because —

**John:** Usually.

**Craig:** Not really an important part of romance. I mean what you do for your job, I mean, it’s just the way romance works. That may be how you meet somebody, maybe what initially attracts you to somebody. But after the first three or four dates and the first five fights, it’s not about any of that anymore. So in that case here, I think to the Hadron Collider would essentially act as a McGuffin for romance.

**John:** Yeah, I agree with you. All right, our third and final possible movie that we’ll talk through, this is all about the two articles and the articles written about the articles by and about Laura Kipnis and her situation, so challenging to talk through this and not getting lost in the weeds of the specific stories and specific allegations. But essentially, Laura Kipnis is a professor. She writes a story for the Chronicle of Higher Education, called Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe. That’s right, I should say academe, right?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s academe.

**John:** Academe. So a little background, just one paragraph from this article so you get a flavor of what it is. “When I was in college, hooking up with professors was more or less part of the curriculum. Admittedly, I went to an art school, and mine was the lucky generation that came of age in that too-brief interregnum after the sexual revolution before AIDS turned sex into a crime scene replete with perpetrators and victims. Back when sex, even when not so great or when people got their feelings hurt, fell under the category of life experience. It’s not that I didn’t have my share of mistakes, or act stupidly and inchoately, but it was embarrassing, not traumatizing.”

And so in this article, she talks about the relationship between professors and students and how that used to be kind of common. And now that’s become criminalized or at least frowned upon, maybe sort of outlawed on campuses. And it has created some really terrible, awkward situations and has changed the nature of academe by its existence. So that was her initial article.

And then in the follow-up to that, she was investigated under Title IX complaints by her university. And so this is what sort of happened here. She writes that, “I wouldn’t be informed about the substance of the complaints until I met with the investigators. Apparently the idea was that they’d tell me the charges, and then, while I was collecting my wits, interrogate me about them. The term ‘kangaroo court’ came to mind. I wrote to ask for the charges in writing. The coordinator wrote back thanking me for my thoughtful questions.”

So essentially, from this initial article, one of the people who had accused a professor and the situation was sort of described vaguely in the original article had brought up charges against her saying that this was retaliation and it was just a giant mess.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So Craig, this is thrown on your lap saying like, you know, a producer says, Lindsay Doran says, “Hey, you know what, I think there might be a movie about either specifically this Laura Kipnis situation or the nature of sexual politics on campus and professors.” What do we do with this? What is the shape of this kind of movie?

**Craig:** [laughs] Run. Well —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** You’ve got some choices here. And the first choice you have to make is, “Am I taking a position or not?” There are movies that are designed to thought provoke. They are carefully crafted to make you think. And there will be some villains, there will be some heroes. But everybody will be imperfect. And you will not feel good at the end of it, necessarily. And sometimes those movies are brilliant. And you’ve got Rashomon as the granddaddy, but there are just — there’s a long tradition in literature of what you’d call the nobody wins, nobody loses, everybody’s human. That’s certainly one way to go.

The other way to go is to take a position here. And the obvious position I think to take is that a professor who, by the way, seems to have been a longstanding well-established feminist is now somehow getting caught by a mob that perhaps she feels she might even be complicit in having created in the first place.

And so then you get into the human politics of what happens when disempowered people get power as a group, the trampling of individual rights and how we have to weigh individual rights against social justice. And it gets really messy.

Here’s my problem. My problem with this is that I don’t see where the dramatic victory is for anyone to make this into a movie because what makes this interesting is your unique perspective on it as a person. You may have a general tendency towards individual rights and liberties. You may have a general tendency towards social justice. And you may work very hard to try and balance both. I hope that you do like I do.

But it’s too intellectual, frankly. It doesn’t feel like a movie is the proper treatment of this. I feel like, frankly, the proper treatment of this is discussion in public space. Sometimes these things resist drama. I feel it would be a bit leaden and could turn into sort of a lecturey kind of vibe. So, you know, I’m a little worried about this one.

**John:** I’m worried about this one, too. My first instinct is that it feels like a play because it feels like you might want to actually do this with a limited number of characters in sort of an enclosed space with long scenes where you’re really digging and talking through those kind of things.

And as we’re talking — if you heard me typing — I was trying to find the name of this play that it reminds me of, which is a professor and a student who are having this relationship. And it’s unclear, it’s sort of deliberately unclear sort of where the boundaries of this relationship are. Actually, now that I think about there’s probably four plays that are sort of the same territory. There’s a Theresa Rebeck play is one of them, but there’s an older one I was thinking about, too.

A play might be a really good vehicle for talking through this. You talked about Rashomon. You know, in some ways, our TV series tend to be our Rashomon right now where you can revisit certain scenes and sort of see them from different perspectives.

What I also liked about what you should, though, is that mob mentality. And the degree to which this in some way is an intellectual zombie movie, where it’s like once the zombies are after you, there’s essentially nowhere to hide. There’s no safe place.

And I think it’s a really interesting commentary on the universe we live in right now where outrage is enough. And so the sort of presumption not of guilt, but that in her article Kipnis talks about this woman who was identified as a survivor rather than accuser and sort of what the boundary and the differences between, you know, being accused of something and that thing actually having existed.

And so whether a person could call themselves a survivor of a situation that you’re not even sure actually happened. So there’s all sorts of really interesting questions, really challenging to pit them as a movie, though.

**Craig:** I completely agree. I love the idea about a play, by the way. It does feel like a play. The problem with the movie is you’re right, your tendency is to say, “Well, this is a kind of a zombie movie. It’s about an intellectual mob.” But the problem is that when you say any intellectual group is a mob or any philosophical group is a mob, you have demonized them.

And the truth is I’m not sure that anybody wants to see people that are very upset about sexual assaults or abuse on campus be demonized. Because the truth is I think most people who are concerned about this do not move en masse as some sort of unthinking mob ready to burn down anybody that looks at them askance. What we tend to do when we make these movies is pick on ideologies that we have all socially decided are just Wrong with a capital W. So occasionally, somebody will make a movie about, say, McCarthyism. We’ve all decided that’s no good. So that will be a good intellectual zombie movie.

**John:** Or if we’re making a McCarthyism movie, we might make it, though, in a different context. So we might make The Crucible which is about McCarthyism.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But it can be about witches.

**Craig:** Right. So we all agree that the Salem witch trials were bad. [laughs] We all agree that McCarthyism is bad. Now, The Crucible was particularly relevant because of when it was written. And it was a clearly a commentary in something that was part of the culture. If you make a movie about the Red Scare now, you’re just being boring because it’s been done too well too many times. It is frankly no longer relevant.

If you made a movie today about how a lot of people in Germany got together and became Nazis and did terrible things, while I’m sure it would have value, but probably it’s too late. We’ve well established how that works. We’ve made those zombie movies already.

In this case, I don’t think that we can yet agree what the nature of this mob is if it even is a mob or if this is just the loud voices of certain people, for instance, in this case what’s happening to Professor Kipnis seems to be the result of one or two people making complaints that must be followed-up by law. Well, if that doesn’t quite qualify, you — I think the real villain is probably academic bureaucracy but it may also just be bureaucracy in general or maybe where the law fails to encompass common sense, but none of it feels like I want to watch a movie of it. I don’t want to see that unfolding cinematically.

**John:** Yeah. So thinking back to The Blind Side, and so you look at John Lee Hancock’s movie. What was interesting is late in the story sort of the NCAA challenge comes out. And so there ends up becoming an investigation. By the time that becomes an important part of the story, we already love all the characters because — and the story wasn’t fundamentally about that thing. So when that stuff comes out, when the investigation comes out, we have a strong rooting interest in one side and we believe what they are saying.

In this movie, and the reason why I still think I wonder if it’s a play rather than a movie which we might be more comfortable with the ambiguity is there’s going to be some central incident about whether this person was rightly or wrongly accused. And our expectation of the movie is like we want to have an answer for that. And we want to feel good about the answer for that. And I don’t know that we’re ever going to come to that place in this movie.

We talked about Erin Brockovich when we were talking about the FIFA scandal. And if Erin Brockovich, if we were ambiguous at the end about sort of whether she was right or whether she was wrong, that would not be a successful movie. That’s not the kind of movie we paid our $8.50 at that time to go see.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t want to watch a social crusader crusade against something that at the end the movie says, “Well, maybe that wasn’t so bad.” It’s not satisfying for you hero. The play that I was thinking of, when you said play, I immediately thought of — I don’t know if you ever saw Twilight: Los Angeles by Anna Deavere Smith.

**John:** I never saw it.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s so good. So Anna Deavere Smith is a playwright. But in this particular play, what she did was she interviewed dozens of people about the Los Angeles riots, the 1992 riots. And some of the people were public figures like Daryl Gates who was the Chief of Police at the time and some people were just, you know, people who were there watching on the corner. Reginald Denny, for instance, the guy, the poor guy who got dragged out of his truck and beaten nearly to death.

And what she did was she then performed their monologues, verbatim, as them. One woman. Fascinating. And you got such a remarkable understanding of how an event gets dispersed by all these completely different point of view. Totally dispersed. And you walk away thinking, anybody that tells you that they understand the LA riots is nuts because you can’t. And so I could easily see a play like that where you approach this thing and at the point of it all was, everybody who is sure, sure, sure of their point of view is nuts because you can’t really wrap your mind around something this complicated. It defies you.

**John:** So as you were talking, I was Googling, and I found the name of the play that I was thinking about, which is Oleanna. It’s a David Mamet play.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** It became a movie as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So that’s the power struggle between a university professor and his female student who accuses him of sexual exploitation. That’s one of the things underlying that. I think what’s potentially different about this as a story is the second level thing where it’s, you know, you aren’t even involved in this initial act, you’re not even trying to determine whether this sexual event happened, but rather even talking about it is creating the situation. And that someone’s hurt feelings is in some ways more important than academic freedom. A really interesting idea, but challenging to do as a movie.

**Craig:** It’s just not cinematic. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthy. It is worthy. Frankly, it’s too worthy. It’s too serious and too complicated to be portrayed cinematically. We use cinema just in a different way than that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would much — I think eventually, you could come to it. But right now, I think smart people need to debate this in good faith and not through fictionalization.

**John:** So I say, book or play for this right now. Movie, when it becomes a giant hit.

**Craig:** Concur.

**John:** Concur. Let’s talk about your topic there, Craig. Do what you love. Do you love doing this podcast, Craig?

**Craig:** I do love doing this podcast. I do.

**John:** Aw, I do too.

**Craig:** I love doing this podcast. And notably, it is not my career.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s this interesting essay, I guess you call it essay, in Slate. I guess we’re sort of friends of Slate now, aren’t we?

**John:** We’re friends of Slate, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s called In The Name of Love. Elites embrace the “do what you love” mantra. But it devalues work and hurts workers. By Miya Tokumitsu. And what Miya says is that this mantra of do what you love disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is a privilege. It’s a sign of socioeconomic class. She says, “Even if a self-employed graphic designer had parents who could pay for art school and co-sign a lease for a slick Brooklyn apartment, she can bestow Do What You Love as career advice upon those covetous of her success.”

So what’s she’s saying is it’s a little bit of the you are born on third, you didn’t hit a triple. So when you’re born on third, why are you shouting down to the batter, hit a triple?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And there’s this other flipside of it, which is that most people do not do what they “love”. They do a job to support themselves and their family. They may be interested in their job. They may be good at their job. They may show great care and attention to their job. But do they love it? Probably not.

**John:** Are they even doing a job that anyone could love?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** She points out like, you know, is anyone going to love washing diapers? No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No one is going to love washing diapers.

**Craig:** No, no one is going to love washing diapers. So then the question is, well, is this whole do what you love thing devaluing the experience of those people? And the answer I think, frankly, is yes. I think that there is a very useful argument to say to people, not do what love, and love what you do. But whatever you do, also, find some time to do what you love. Don’t expect to be paid for that. Don’t expect that to be your career. It may be. It may very well be. But if you love singing, make sure you take some time in your life to sing. Do not think that if you don’t sing professionally, that you have somehow failed to chase your passion. You have not failed.

**John:** So way back in episode 192, I brought up this book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport. And he was talking about the same sort of thing, but he was talking about it from the other perspective.

So Tokumitsu was writing about how this do what you love, follow your passion advice is impossible for a large swath of the population. Newport is looking at even the people who it could theoretically be possible for, it ends up becoming this trap of impossible expectations. So anyone who theoretically was born on third base who is not loving their work will just keep switching careers and switching careers and switching things like, “What am I doing wrong that I don’t love this thing that I’m doing?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And Newport’s argument is that you can’t do what you love until you know how to do it. And that’s so much of loving something, loving the work has to be being good at it. And so the initial part of any new career is usually a grind. It’s usually terrible. And I certainly found that with writing, too. Like those first scripts to write were kind of brutal to write. But then I got much better at it and now I love being a screenwriter. But it doesn’t mean I necessarily love the process of writing.

**Craig:** Right. Well —

**John:** And I think we can create really unrealistic expectations by putting up a big banner saying to do what you love.

**Craig:** The problem is right there in the word love, which people simply misunderstand. You and I both have been married a long time. The excitement, the headiness, the intoxication that we felt when we first met our spouses, that’s not sustainable. If you sustain that overtime, you have some kind of mental problem. And [laughs] you won’t be able to live your life because, you know, falling in love really is a version of insanity. Love, proper love, is the result of the commitment. It’s a result of the long time, the agreement that you will be with someone. It becomes its own reward. And it is different, it is more complicated, and less dopaminergic, if I may, than —

**John:** I like you using those words.

**Craig:** Thank you. Than that instant love, right? That passion, that excitement. I don’t have intoxicating love for screenwriting. I have an old guy with his old wife love of screenwriting. And what I know about that is that that’s not about passion. It is about other things. It is about a compulsion to do a thing. It’s about a safety that I find in doing a thing. It’s about a certain kind of control over something, a working towards a mastery of something, even though you cannot attain it.

It’s also about an inherent will to power, which is a very Nietzschean term. It basically means I want to affect the world. I want to do something and change something out there, which is true, by the way, for everyone that does anything, even the diaper washers.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There is a wonderful video online, we’ll link to it in the show notes, of some men that are building a bridge in Switzerland. And this bridge is essentially going across this massive valley between these two communities. It’s a footbridge. It is 270 meters long. So for those of you who don’t know about meters —

**John:** We’ll say yards.

**Craig:** We’ll say yards [laughs], exactly. It’s nearly three football fields long. They had to build this thing — well, imagine, how are you going to build a footbridge over 300 yards of space hanging over thousands of feet into a gorge? Well, they just decided they would do it. Did they love what they did? I don’t know if they loved it, but they were compelled. And the work itself was its own reward. Some of those men did nothing but hammer boards into place. But they were part of it.

So I say to people, forget about doing what you love and loving what you do. Look at work as its own reward. There is an honor to labor and to service. There is an honor to earning a day’s pay and taking care of yourself and supporting other people. And remember this, if you do have creative passions or any passion for which no one is willing to give you money, then look at the work that you are paid for as an opportunity to create some freedom and some space for you to do those other things that you do love. Make your uncompensated passions possible.

**John:** Absolutely. So that means, you know, treating your day job as a day job that lets you have a night life and a chance to create, you know, amazing things that are not part of that work life. Some of the best writing I did early in my career was working a really mindless job at Universal filing papers. And I came home every night and had my brain free to write things. And that was exactly the right job for me at the time.

**Craig:** Look at J.K. Rowling who conceived of and wrote the Harry Potter series or at least the initial book while she was a single mom, unemployed, and trying to make ends meet on the dole, you know. And you don’t necessarily have the circumstances that you want when you’re creating things or when you are following your passion. And if no one had ever liked her book and no one had ever bought her book, she still would have — that would have been an exercising of a passion for her of a kind. And that is its own reward.

**John:** Agreed. Circling back to your, you know, why do we engage in artistic pursuit, quite early on in the podcast, you singled out Jiro Dreams of Sushi which is exactly that kind of sustained artistic pursuit over the course of decades to try to perfect something. And so does he love sushi, does he love fish? I don’t know. But he really values the work he’s doing. And that is his reward. He doesn’t want to call in sick any day. He doesn’t want to have anyone else run his restaurant because he is doing the thing that he does. And that is his life is trying to perfect the making and delivery of sushi.

So that’s another way to look at sort of the why you keep doing something even if it’s not necessarily financially valuable.

**Craig:** It’s hard for us sometimes to think that we’re going to go through life and we’re never going to be rich. We’re going to go through life and we’re never going to be famous. We’re going to go through life and we’ll never be the boss. Well, that is true for almost everyone. So the question is, how do you let go of that and find a different way to define your own happiness and satisfaction?

I would suggest that when you let go of that demand, you are probably that much more likely to achieve that demand. But you may not. And so I think that we have to stop telling each other, “Hey, man, you know what? I know you drive a cab but you really want to be a rock star, so quit.” We got to stop saying stupid crap like that. It’s just dumb. And frankly, it’s —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** It demeans people who do actually value and care for any job that they do. In my mind, if you work and you’re paid, you are an honorable person doing an honorable thing.

**John:** Cool. Craig, what is your One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** Oh, so I’m a little late to this. John, have you played or are you familiar with Telltale Games, their Game of Thrones mobile game?

**John:** I’m not familiar with the Game of Thrones game. I see it here in the Workflowy, so tell me about it.

**Craig:** So Telltale Games, I think they may also be the people behind The Walking Dead games. I’m not sure. I should —

**John:** Yeah. I know they do those.

**Craig:** Okay, great. So basically, they are story-based games. They come in episodes. They have released four episodes of a six-episode season. Each one takes about an hour to play through. And basically you’re following an episode of Game of Thrones that they have made with their own characters. And occasionally, you make context-based decisions. So people put you in a tough spot and you have to decide, am I going to punch this guy or am I going to try and create favor with him. So it’s all that sort of thing.

It’s done really well. I have to give them an enormous amount of credit. They pretty much got almost everything right. I love that they made a story-based game for a story-based property. I love that they created new events in the game that integrate into show events occasionally sort of the way that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, you know, like it’s that kind of, “Okay, so we’re going to have a discussion.” Meanwhile, in the background, we see the pigeons flying out of the pie and we know that’s Joffrey’s wedding and he’s about to die.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** But we’re over here in a different place. [laughs] So that part is great. There are some cameos from established characters. You’ll see Tyrion and Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen. But most of the characters are new characters that they’ve created. And they’re really good. They’re really good characters.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** They’ve created a whole new house, House Forrester, that is in a really bad situation. There are shocking deaths, which is appropriate for Game of Thrones. Moral quandaries abound. But I think more than anything, the reason I love playing, and I’ve run out of episodes and I’m waiting for Episode 5 is they did such a good job of emotionally investing you in the heroes. They really beat the crap out of their heroes. And the villains are the worst. I mean, they’re actually worse, frankly, than like Joffrey. [laughs] They’re the worst.

**John:** [laughs] That’s great.

**Craig:** And you just desperately want to see them dead. So it gets so much right. A couple of things it doesn’t quite do great, occasionally, there’s fighting. Not frequently. I think three or four times an episode you’ll have to do a little fight. And the fighting is a QuickTime event-based fighting. You’re familiar with that concept in video games?

**John:** I hate those.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it’s like —

**John:** It’s Tempo-based, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s basically you watch something and then suddenly it tells you “Tap here,” “Swipe Here”. And you do it and then fine, whatever. But frankly, I’m not watching it for the fighting, so I don’t care about that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The facial graphics kind of run the gamut from awesome like Jon Snow really looks like Jon Snow, to “Oh, no.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I got to say Tyrion, poor Peter Dinklage, he honestly looks like Peter Dinklage after a fire and his face was reconstructed by a —

**John:** Yeah, but from memory.

**Craig:** Yeah [laughs].

**John:** Like someone who met him once like trying to put his face back together.

**Craig:** From memory and they didn’t have good tools or an education.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just his face is absolutely horrifying. He looks like Peter Dinklage wearing a Peter Dinklage mask. It’s just terrible. But I did want to cite, because we are screenwriters and we love writers out there, the people that I think are most responsible for the success of this game are the writers. And these are the ones that I found on the Internet, so forgive me if I left any names out.

Andrew Grant, Nicole Martinez, Meghan Thornton, Brad Kane, Dan Martin, John Dombrow, and Joshua Rubin. So, congratulations. You’ve all done an excellent job. I’m very excited to play the next episode. I think it’s 20 bucks to get all six, which is a lot of game play. Or you can get individuals ones I think for five bucks or something like that.

**John:** And do you play it on the computer or on the iPad?

**Craig:** iPad.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** And is this the Brad Kane that we know?

**Craig:** Do we know a Brad Kane?

**John:** Don’t we know the Brad Kane who’s the voice of A Whole New World?

**Craig:** Oh, my god. Is it? Is it that Brad Kane?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know. It just says Brad Kane. But, yeah, you’re right. Bradley Caleb Kane. Well, how about that? I wonder if it is him.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s —

**Craig:** I mean, it’s kind of a common name but it might in fact be him. So if it is, awesome job, dude.

**John:** Yeah, the singing voice of Aladdin.

**Craig:** He was the singing voice of Aladdin and a screenwriter, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. My One Cool Thing is actually a blog post but also a series of discussions and one of those rare times where the comment thread is actually worth reading through. It’s a post by Tyler Cowen who’s looking at the question of, “If you traveled back into the past, what could you trade for present gain?” So essentially, if you were to have a time machine that you could go back in the past, what should you take with you from the past to bring to the present that would be valuable?

And which is sort of the inverse of a lot of these question. Usually it’s like, “Oh, if I could travel back in time with an iPhone, I would be like the richest person alive or I would have stock knowledge.” So what can you take from the past?

And one of the obvious choices like, “Oh, I’ll take a piece of art.” But then of course the problem becomes that piece of art wouldn’t exist in the timeline from the past. It wouldn’t have value, it can be perceived as a forgery.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It wouldn’t carbon date right. So there were a lot of really interesting ideas. Like honestly one of the best suggestions in there is just to go back and find an original edition of a comic book and put it and seal it and so therefore the reason why it’s pristine is because it’s actually new to you. But interesting thought. And as we were talking through all of these ideas about like, how would you make a movie out of that, this feels like one of those like, “Oh, is that a movie idea?” Like people who are traveling back and sort of trying to do arbitrage on things they could take from the past.

**Craig:** Right. So like not time cops but time robbers.

**John:** Yeah. Time bandits.

**Craig:** Time bandits. The thing that pops into my mind probably would be stock certificates, you know, like —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like get a whole bunch of stock certificates, just buy a whole bunch of stock certificates in, I don’t know, Johnson & Johnson or something like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, those would have appreciated dramatically by the time I get back. I could certainly see that.

**John:** Yeah. But again, the challenge becomes, if there’s any question of authenticity, any sort of dating on things would be an issue. But that probably is not going to be an issue with stocks.

**Craig:** Well, no, they’re real, that’s the thing. I mean —

**John:** They are real but they wouldn’t be old enough is the issue. It’s like, I guess the artwork is the thing that you could really tell like this Grecian urn —

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** It’s only like five days old rather than, you know, 5,000 years old.

**Craig:** I guess. But I don’t know, that’s an interesting — like they wouldn’t be weathered or something?

**John:** Exactly. I mean, or literally carbon dating would not show them right.

**Craig:** Oh, well, yeah, I doubt anybody would carbon date your stock certificates but —

**John:** Yeah, they wouldn’t. That’s too recent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s a good thought.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s something.

**John:** It’s something. It’s always something. That is our show for this week. If you would like to subscribe to this show, you should go to iTunes and click the subscribe button. And you should also leave us a comment. Maybe it’s a little rating, would be lovely because that helps people find our show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** While you’re on iTunes, you could get the Scriptnotes app which gives you access to all 200 and now one episodes of the show, dating all the way back to the very beginning. Scriptnotes.net is where you sign up for this service that gets you all the back episodes.

There will be USB drives with all 200 episodes on them. So if you are debating about where to save your money and spend it later on, next week or the week after, we’ll have details about where you can get those USB drives. Craig signed them.

**Craig:** Ha-ha.

**John:** Craig and I both signed them in a way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You will see our thanks on every drive.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And edited by Matthew Chilelli. I’m not sure who did the outro this week, but I bet it will be swell. You can find out who did the Outro by going to see the show notes which are at johnaugust.com. We have show notes and transcripts for every episode of the podcast.

If you would like to ask a question of Craig Mazin, you should write to him on Twitter. He’s @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Longer questions, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com. And that is our show. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** All right, see you soon.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [A timeline on the FIFA scandal](http://www.latimes.com/sports/soccer/la-sp-fifa-scandal-timeline-20150603-story.html)
* [Large Hadron Collider turns on ‘data tap’](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32976838), and the [Large Hadron Collider on Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider)
* Star Trek’s [Prime Directive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive) and [Zefram Cochrane](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zefram_Cochrane) on Wikipedia
* [Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe](http://chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia/190351/) by Laura Kipnis
* [Title IX Investigation Opened Against Female Northwestern Professor Over Column, Tweet](http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/05/29/laura_kipnis_title_ix_investigation_feminism_political_correctness_controversy.html)
* [In the Name of Love](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/do_what_you_love_love_what_you_do_an_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html)
* [“Carasc” Tibetan Bridge](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCUw3Fpqyaw)
* [So Good They Can’t Ignore You](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455509124/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Cal Newport
* [Game of Thrones by Telltale Games](https://www.telltalegames.com/gameofthrones/)
* [Traveling back into the past to trade for present gain](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/05/traveling-back-into-the-past-to-trade-for-present-gain.html) by Tyler Cowen
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-200th-episode-live-show).

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

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

**John:** And this is the 200th episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

We are here live, recording this episode for the whole world to listen to. I was thinking back that our very first live episode was in a pretty small room. That was in Austin, right? That was the first live show.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think so. That’s right.

**John:** Since then we’ve done shows in Austin, Los Angeles, New York City.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** This time we’re doing it live for the entire world to hear at once.

**Craig:** Oh, my…

**John:** Yeah, I know. It’s daunting.

**Craig:** And we’re live streaming it, right?

**John:** Yeah, we are. There are 198 people as we recorded this show who are listening to this show as we are recording it.

**Craig:** And so while we talk, they can give us feedback in real-time —

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So they can complain about me instantly.

**John:** Absolutely. Keith Vacario says, “Hello world.”

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So that’s absolutely the kind of thing to do.

**Craig:** God, you know what the funny thing is, you know, we watch things like this all the time. But when you do it, suddenly you feel like you’re the first person to ever do it.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Like, “Oh, my god, I’m flying a plane in the air. Look at me.”

**John:** It’s amazing. We’ve landed on the moon.

**Craig:** Whoa!

**John:** And there’s no better person to be in the cockpit with us as we’re trying to attempt this moon landing than our own, very first guest, our Joan Rivers, Aline Brosh McKenna. Welcome Aline.

**Craig:** Yay!

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** Yay! You had to say cockpit.

**John:** I had to say cockpit.

**Aline:** You had to work blue.

**John:** I had to work blue. I had to bring it back to phallic humor.

**Aline:** [laughs]

**John:** Aline Brosh McKenna, you were with us at our last live show. And at our last live show, you described this TV show that you were trying to make with Rachel Bloom. I’m so sorry it didn’t work out. But we’ll get in to all of that stuff. We’re going to talk about TV. We’re going to talk about whether the quality of a movie affects its long-term prospects at the box office.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And we’re going to answer a whole bunch of listener questions including the ones that people are typing right now —

**Craig:** Right now.

**John:** Into the little field.

**Aline:** Type, type, type, type, type.

**Craig:** Type your questions. This is it. This is your chance.

**John:** This is the show. Aline, when we saw you last you brought Rachel Bloom with you and she sang for us and she described the show called Crazy Ex-Girlfriend that was —

**Aline:** What month was that? It was Christmas, right?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It was the Christmas show.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was right before New Year’s.

**Aline:** Right. So what was happening at — do you want me to tell you the —

**John:** Tell the story.

**Aline:** Okay, so what happened at Christmas was we were feeling pretty good about the show’s chances. We had just delivered the cut. We were doing the show for Showtime and they’d been super encouraging. We had a great experience with Showtime. And they were kind of saying the things that you say when you want to take the girl to the prom. It seemed like they were really interested in doing it. And then in January, we kind of started to hear, well, in Christmas, we had thought we would already be hearing from them and we kind of didn’t. But we kind of thought, well, maybe he’s going to call us later.

**Craig:** Maybe they’re busy. Maybe they’re at church.

**Aline:** Yeah, they’re on vacation.

**John:** So, like, Showtime wasn’t ready to leave his wife.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Aline:** Showtime was not showing up with the corsage. And, you know, I always say that in show business good news happens really quickly and the rest of it doesn’t. Anything that doesn’t happen quickly is basically bad news.

**John:** So when did you have a sense that things were not going to happen?

**Aline:** January.

**John:** Oh, really?

**Aline:** So in January I started to feel like, “Hmm, this is taking an awfully long time,” and I just could tell, you know, having done this for a while, you can tell when there is that level of enthusiasm in phone calls and it kind of wasn’t there and we had had such a good experience with them that it was one of those breakups that was like everybody really liked each other. We’d had a great time.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** They were really sad. We were really sad. It ended up not being a good fit for them kind of tonally and brand-wise. And it was kind of great and difficult because I understood where they were coming from because the show ended up being a little bit more sunny and upbeat than it had seemed on the page. On the page, it had seemed very edgy I think. And Rachel is sort of a pretty naturally cheery, upbeat, lovable person. And try though we did to squelch that, we failed.

**John:** You could not break her spirit.

**Aline:** And we could not. So what happened after that was that we all went to what I have now come to see as one of the stages of grief when you work on a TV show is we’re shopping it to other networks.

**John:** Now, this is about the time that I ran in to Rachel Bloom because she and I were randomly both flying to Boston. We were seated next to each other on a Virgin Atlantic plane to go to Boston. And so, I had not seen her since the live show. I was like, “Hey, Rachel, what’s up with your show?” And she was at exactly the stage of like, I guess, it is past denial to bargaining?

**Aline:** But having to run into a lot of people who’s like, they have a busted pilot. And you say, “What are you doing?” It’s like, “We’re waiting to hear from Epics.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Is that a thing? Is Epics a place?

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s a real place.

**Craig:** What is that? [laughs]

**Aline:** So what you come to find out which I didn’t know because I actually haven’t worked in television that much is that so many people do programming.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** And our joke with my friend Kate who is our executive at CBS is that we were right at the point when we were thinking someone was going to call and say, “You know what, Eggo is doing programming now and it’ll be on your toaster and you’ll be in the morning making your Eggo and there’ll be a TV show.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And we would have been like, “We’re perfect for them. We’re perfect for toasters and waffles,” and you got to this place where, honestly, they were places that I had never heard of that were considering the show anyway.

**John:** So at this point, you have the show.

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** If you have the cut.

**Aline:** We have a pilot.

**John:** You have the cut.

**Aline:** We have a pilot and we have episode two and episode three written.

**John:** Oh, great. So, you are showing them this pilot that you’ve cut and it’s cut sort of for Showtime. They’re seeing that pilot and they’ve seen these two other scripts. They could theoretically come into the room with you if you guys wanted to talk.

**Aline:** Exactly.

**John:** But what was the conversation? Was it just your agent sending it out or were you doing — ?

**Aline:** They were sending the link and the scripts to people and we got a variety of reactions. And I guess it’s sort of like putting a movie in turnaround. We got a couple of instances where somebody liked it and then they would try and bump it up to someone else.

**Craig:** To the next level of approval.

**Aline:** Right. But TV is like — people are developing very specific products for their network and what they think is their brand. And so they don’t really, you know, it’s rare for shows to move. And so, you know, as —

**John:** And yet there are examples of like shows that did move and became giant breakout hits. CSI is I think the most classic example.

**Aline:** Was it shot though?

**Craig:** Who let CSI go?

**Aline:** No, it wasn’t. I don’t think it was shot though. I think it was a script.

**John:** I thought CSI was shot. I mean, I may be misremembering.

**Craig:** How can they let that go?

**John:** Isn’t that crazy?

**Aline:** Somebody should tell us right now live.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Absolutely. Someone who can do research live, tell us where CSI was actually shot for and who picked it up.

**Craig:** It’s about time these people paid us back.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** There are a lot of instances of scripts being picked up by other networks but not that many of things being shot because people in TV in particular want to feel like they put their stamp on it.

**Craig:** So where did it end up?

**Aline:** So what happened was in the meantime while we were shopping it, I had gotten very into this show called Jane the Virgin.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** On the CW because I had several friends and a bunch of them are our mutual friends who insisted that I should watch it and that it was great. And then I would love it. So I started watching Jane the Virgin and I was simultaneously obsessed with it and sort of broken-hearted because I felt like even though it’s not like our show, there’s something about it in spirit. I felt like it reminded me of our show.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** So I called —

**Craig:** More wine?

**Aline:** Here is your half glass.

**Craig:** Thank you. Here is my half glass.

**Aline:** So I called our executive and I said, “You know, I know we’re only going to cable places but do you think there’s a possibility that we could send this to CW, what do you think?” So he sent it to CW. I’m going to make this story shorter. We sent it to the CW. They really liked it. We had a meeting.

**Craig:** CW is Warner Bros.

**Aline:** So CW is half CBS and half Warner Bros.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Aline:** It used to be UPN and the WB. They merged into The CW. They’ve recently gotten a lot of shows that are very popular and critically acclaimed. Two of them are superhero shows, Berlanti does —

**John:** Flash and Arrow.

**Aline:** Flash and Arrow.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** And then they have Jane the Virgin which has done really well and won a Peabody and its lead won a Golden Globe.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Aline:** So they’re doing cool stuff. So they expressed interest in our show. They really liked it. They really dug it. The people there really kind of got what it was. We had a meeting with them and they said, “Can you do an expanded version of it?” So what we did was we took the existing pilot and we — in the script stage, not in the edit. You know, we just wrote what our scenes would be. And what I didn’t realize is that a network — how much longer — okay, so a cable half hour and a network hour, what do you think the time difference is?

**Craig:** A cable half hour, my guess is it’s probably like 26 minutes. And a network hour is like 43 minutes.

**Aline:** So the cable half hour is like, it can be 30, 31, even 32 minutes.

**Craig:** Oh, like a real half hour.

**Aline:** Yeah, a real half hour because they don’t have commercials.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** And the network hours can be like anywhere from 41 to 44 minutes, something like that.

**Craig:** I wasn’t that far off.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** You weren’t that far off, yeah.

**Aline:** So basically —

**Craig:** I barely know what TV is.

**Aline:** Right. So basically we had to add — we have to add about 10 minutes.

**Craig:** 10 minutes.

**Aline:** 10 minutes.

**Craig:** No big deal.

**Aline:** So it wasn’t double, which some people thought we were doubling the size of our script.

**Craig:** You know by the way the story about Game of Thrones? Not to interrupt.

**Aline:** Yeah, go ahead.

**Craig:** But I’m interrupting.

**Aline:** Interrupt.

**Craig:** Dan and Dave did their first show and they were having this problem because they weren’t hitting their time, you know. Like they had, basically, they had done like, I don’t know, they had shot now like nine episodes and they just weren’t timing out. They needed more time. So they had to set aside a week where they just wrote extra scenes to put in for all of the shows.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And then they just shot a bunch of scenes of like people talking to pad out the shows, but in a weird way those scenes where it was like it’s just two people talking were some of the best scenes of the first season.

**Aline:** That people enjoyed the most.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because it was just what people wanted to see.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They wanted to see two interesting people talking. But it’s like the whole timing thing is a fascinating thing.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I know that Derek and Chicago Fire, they are constantly dealing with the breaks and all that stuff.

**Aline:** Right. And so it’s a different format. It’s also a different format because you don’t break obviously on a cable half hour.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Aline:** You don’t break. So we had to build in breaks. We did that. We lengthened it. And here is what happened which is funny, I think, and interesting for writers. So that was in April, we had that meeting. And they said, “We’re interested and can you expand it? And we are thinking about maybe you for off season development,” which I had never heard of before. And we were like, “Okay.” And they said, “But we don’t need to have the script back until later, until after we’ve finished with our development.” And so, Rachel and I had actually started working on something else and we sat down in my office and she goes, “You know what? Let’s just do it. Let’s just do the script. Let’s just expand the script and hand it in and just be done with it. We’ll know it’s done before we do something else.”

**Craig:** Smart girl.

**Aline:** Jew.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Jewish. That’s a Jewish mind at work.

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** Are we going to be in trouble if we talk about Jewish people like that?

**John:** No, I think it’s absolutely fine.

**Craig:** Because we’re Jewish.

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** Yeah, you guys can talk about anything.

**Aline:** We can do that.

**John:** I’ll stay silent here.

**Craig:** John, what are your opinions about the Jews?

**John:** As a German I feel —

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Aline:** So we did it. We turned it in. And I think it showed them that there was a show there that had some viability that didn’t involve a ton of changes.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** We had profanity in the Showtime show and we had some sexy stuff but we were able to pull it back pretty easily. And so, what ended up happening was we went from being like something they were going to consider offseason to midseason to a show they were putting on the fall schedule.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Which is, congratulations. So you are now a show on The CW fall schedule which is nuts.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s awesome.

**Aline:** And we’re going to be the lead in to Jane the Virgin —

**John:** Great.

**Aline:** Which is like a Cinderella story. I mean, it’s just like a happy thing for me because I am such an obsessed huge fan of that show.

**Craig:** Well, fantastic.

**John:** So, I think you’re allowed to say that you’ve sent me the link to see the show and it’s amazing. I just love it.

**Craig:** I’ve watched a bunch of it. Now, how did I watch a bunch of it?

**Aline:** You watched a — there’s like a six-minute trailer.

**Craig:** That’s what I watched.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I watched a six-minute trailer and it was —

**John:** So I watched the whole show and it’s just great.

**Craig:** Okay, I’m not surprised because I love her. I love you. I love musicals. But also, in watching that trailer it really reminded of that segment from 500 Days of Summer that Marc Webb shot —

**Aline:** Yes.

**Craig:** Where Joseph Gordon-Levitt turns his problems and his joy into this outside Busby Berkeley dance number.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** Oh, here’s the thing that I did not know which is that Marc Webb could go toe-to-toe with you on the musical theatre stuff.

**Craig:** Oh, I have no doubt.

**Aline:** He knows absolutely so much about musical theatre.

**Craig:** But is he having coffee with Seth Rudetsky this weekend? No. I am.

**Aline:** Well, he did, though, take us to Marie’s Crisis. Do you know what Marie’s Crisis is?

**John:** No, so therefore you’re much more knowledgeable.

**Aline:** OMG. So Marie’s Crisis is this bar in the Village.

**Craig:** I don’t live in the Village. It’s not fair.

**Aline:** Well, you go to New York.

**Craig:** I did meet him in the Village.

**Aline:** And they sing show tunes.

**Craig:** Well, that sounds pretty great. But I mean, I sing show tunes in my car.

**John:** Singing show tunes in a bar is —

**Aline:** But it’s a bar filled with people and there’s a piano in the middle and he sings show tunes.

**Craig:** So what you’re telling me is there’s a gay bar in the Village? Is that what you’re telling us? Is that the big news?

**John:** [laughs]

**Aline:** I’m telling you that Marc Webb goes there and took us there.

**Craig:** I would totally go there, by the way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** Yeah. You would love it.

**Craig:** By the way, Seth Rudetsky is, if you are in Los Angeles, I’ll just give Seth a plug.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** He’s playing Largo Saturday evening. He’s doing his Seth Rudetsky Deconstructs —

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Broadway songs at Largo.

**Aline:** Oh, wow.

**Craig:** So go check it out.

**Aline:** I love him.

**Craig:** I’m not going to be able to make it myself, so I’m just going to have a special one on one. By the way, I talk about Seth Rudetsky like the way other people might talk about Tom Cruise.

**Aline:** Yeah. Right. [laughs]

**John:** Absolutely. [laughs]

**Craig:** Nobody cares.

**John:** You’ve named him so often that —

**Craig:** Most people don’t even know who he is.

**John:** Like Seth Rudetsky is like a —

**Aline:** I think he’s great.

**Craig:** By the way, you want to know how cool I am? I know Seth Rudetsky and people are like, “Ah, is that your rabbi or — ?” [laughs]

**John:** So let’s do some real-time follow-up. Stuart Friedel sitting off at the corner.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Can you do a Google search through all the transcripts and see how often in johnaugust.com Seth Rudetsky shows up? For a person who’s actually not part of the show, I bet he shows up at least 10 times.

**Craig:** Stuart has leapt into action.

**John:** So —

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** You are going to be so busy.

**Aline:** So busy.

**John:** Oh, my god.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** So because you were kind of late to this whole process —

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** You had to race to get a staff together, correct?

**Aline:** Yes, yes.

**John:** You had to have a staff that could also like write songs.

**Aline:** Well, I had another friend who got a show picked up and I called her. And I said, “So what writers are you [laughs ]meeting with?”

**John:** Oh, no. [laughs]

**Aline:** And she said, “Oh, we’re done.” Because she knew from, like, weeks that they were getting picked up. So she had already staffed. So we’ve been staffing which has actually been really fun. I’ve read great people and that’s been really interesting. We do have original songs. So we’re trying to get kind of into our season early because we’re going to write — and for the first 13, we’ll have like maybe 25 songs. And Rachel is our primary songwriter.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** So, she’s the sort of the showrunner of the song staff. But she, you know, has a million ideas. So it’s fun. I mean, I think for people who listen to this show, what’s interesting is that when you’re a writer of a screenplay, you have a completely different role from being the showrunner or the executive producer of a television show. You really are a producer and writing is your sort of, I would say, your main, your core responsibility. But there’s a lot of production stuff.

And I can’t remember who said that producing is the stuff that writers do to procrastinate.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** Like making phone calls and taking meetings.

**Craig:** Right. So now it’s like they’re paying you for it.

**Aline:** And now it’s like a huge part of your job is a lot of phone calls, meetings.

**Craig:** Sure.

**Aline:** And meeting executives. We did have a —

**Craig:** You’re still going to have to write.

**Aline:** But we have a lot, a lot of writing to do. So I have people around us who really can help us, you know, get the logistics of the show going. We had an amazing, amazing line producer, Sarah Caplan, who did Lost and —

**Craig:** Jewish.

**Aline:** She’s British, though.

**Craig:** Oh, British Jewish. That’s barely Jewish.

**Aline:** So it’s interesting. She did Lost and she worked on thirtysomething. So she’s great. Anyway, we have a lot of people helping us. But it’s fun. You know, it’s a different role from being a screenwriter because as a screenwriter, your role is always mediated and mitigated through the director no matter how close you are. You’re really not the boss, unless you’re the producer, in which case you’re still not the boss.

**John:** Yeah. On the 100th episode which I just recut for like two episodes ago, we talked about this idea of like the screenwriter-plus. And we were talking about people like Simon Kinberg —

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** Who are sort of that screenwriter-plus. They are the person who’s essentially showrunning this idea of the movie.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** And now you’re going to have that firsthand experience of showrunning an actual show.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** And you will love it and it will also just drive you crazy.

**Aline:** Well, I know your experience. I remember your experience.

**John:** Yeah. So I’ve done a couple of these. And the one time we actually went to series, it was soul-crushing. But you are wiser and more mature and you have better people around you. So I think you’re going to flourish.

**Craig:** And you’re Jewish. I mean, I think it’s a huge thing.

**Aline:** [laughs] We keep going back to that.

**Craig:** I’ve got my own little series that I don’t, you know, I have yet to write anything. I still have to write the pilot. But if that happens, I would be in that position, along with our good friend and guest of the show, Carolyn Strauss.

**Aline:** Oh, right. Carolyn Strauss.

**Craig:** And, you know, I’m kind of looking forward to something like that. But it’s funny. Sometimes that, you know, even Simon who’s oftentimes the screenwriter-plus, there are probably jobs where he’s like, “No, I’m just the screenwriter.”

**John:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s kind of a weird thing, you know. Like, “Oh, yeah, on this one, I’m just the — ”

**John:** I’m just the words.

**Craig:** I’m just a guy.

**Aline:** Well, something —

**Craig:** Nobody really cares. [laughs]

**Aline:** Something that’s interesting is that, you know, we talk a lot about why there aren’t more female directors. And I think that if we shot a substantial amount of movies in Los Angeles, that that would change. Because if you look at, there are so many powerful, successful female showrunners —

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** And most of them shoot their shows in L.A.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** Jenji is here, Shonda’s here.

**Craig:** Shonda’s here.

**Aline:** And, you know, you can have that, you know, whatever happens no matter how many hours — and I had been on the track to direct a movie which would have taken me to Eastern Europe for months at a time. And so even though my workload here might be difficult, I’ll still be able —

**Craig:** You’re here.

**Aline:** To be here. And I think if we —

**Craig:** They have that huge complex in Santa Clarita.

**Aline:** Yes.

**Craig:** Your show is set in the Valley anyway.

**Aline:** Yeah. We’re going to shoot it —

**Craig:** Is that where you’re going to shoot it?

**Aline:** We’re not shooting in Santa Clarita, I think. But we are going to shoot in a place like that. Our show is set in West Covina. [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** [sings] West Covina.

**Aline:** Which is like a —

**John:** California.

**Aline:** Which is like a, you know, a sort of a sun-baked California suburb. Luckily, most of Southern California looks like that.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** But I do think that if there were — it’s such a Shonda, just to keep it Jewy.

**Craig:** Oh, not Shonda Rhimes, but this is a different Shonda.

**Aline:** It’s such a Shonda —

**Craig:** That’s Yiddish for a sin.

**Aline:** That we don’t have more production here in L.A. where everybody is based. You would be —

**Craig:** I know. It’s a Shonda.

**Aline:** But wouldn’t you be? Yes.

**John:** Stuart did complete his research and found out how many mentions of Seth Rudetsky have occurred on the Scriptnotes podcast.

**Stuart Friedel:** Nine.

**Craig:** Nine.

**John:** Nine.

**Craig:** Well, now it’s up to like 20.

**John:** Exactly. We’ve mentioned Seth Rudetsky so many times.

**Craig:** Seth Rudetsky.

**John:** You’re basically his publicist.

**Craig:** Look, I would love that, you know. By the way, Seth Rudetsky [laughs] I’ll just say another thing. He has a show. It’s really, really funny, called Disaster. He’s trying to bring it to Broadway. It’s hysterical, hysterical.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So.

**John:** Broadway —

**Craig:** I will, yes.

**Aline:** You’re an uber fan.

**Craig:** I’m a huge fan.

**John:** Let us —

**Aline:** Let’s move on.

**John:** Congratulate Aline on her amazing show.

**Aline:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** Well done, Aline.

**Aline:** Thank you.

**John:** And we’ll put a link to the trailer in the show notes so that people can —

**Aline:** Thank you. [laughs]

**John:** Our next topic is something that Stuart found. Stuart found this thing. It was a subreddit, which is talking about the relationship between a film’s quality and its box office. And so what this guy did, it was a Reddit user named tcatron565 which is like a totally Reddit name.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s the perfect statistical mean of all Reddit names.

**John:** I’m sure. It’s a subreddit called DataIsBeautiful. And he looked at the wide releases in 2013 and figured out what percentage of their total gross came from their opening weekend. And then he charted that against their audience score from Rotten Tomatoes. So he’s basically saying like, how much money did this movie make on its opening weekend versus total.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And do people like the movie. And intuitively, I think all of us here would agree that like —

**Aline:** Big multiple.

**John:** Big multiple. And so it was interesting to look through this subreddit because they didn’t have the same lingo that we would have for it. They were talking about like —

**Craig:** I loved it, by the way.

**John:** Yeah, I really loved —

**Craig:** Because I was that dork from college. I thought it was great. I actually thought that guy did a great job because first of all he picked two interesting criteria. One was that he picked the audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, not the critic ratings.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which one would imagine probably is more relevant to determining how a movie resonates with an audience. And I also like the criteria of what percentage of the movie’s total box office was earned in the opening weekend because the theory is, okay, well, if a movie earns most of its money in its opening weekend, there was a big drop-off, it probably means there was bad word of mouth.

Now, that’s not perfectly good because there are some movies that have so much pent up demand and interest they’re always — like if a movie opens to $150 million, there’s no way it’s coming back next weekend and doing another $75 million. It’s not possible.

**John:** What’s interesting looking through this is that they didn’t have the lingo that we would have for what that was. So Aline said it right from the start. What was the multiplier?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Basically, what percentage of its total box office came from that opening weekend. So if you opened at $10 million but you made it to $100 million, you have a 10 times multiplier which is crazy.

**Craig:** That would be awesome.

**John:** That would be amazing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Almost unprecedented.

**Craig:** Right. And whereas like a 2.5 — I mean, the standard really you’re looking for is a 3 multiplier, right? That’s sort of middle of the road. And that’s exactly what he found. Roughly the average was around 3.2 or 3.3 multiplier was average.

**John:** The other thing we would talk about is what was the drop-off from first week to second week.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And we would definitely weight that based on what kind of movie it is.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so if a prestigious art film drops off 50% in its second week —

**Craig:** Probably bad.

**John:** Doom.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But if something like, you know —

**Craig:** A horror movie.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** A horror movie, totally expect that drop-off to be 50% or more —

**Craig:** Because —

**John:** Or a giant box office, you know, it made $100 million, it’s going to drop off hugely.

**Craig:** It has to drop off. And especially with real genre pictures that appeal to teens in particular, you’re always going to get that drop-off because teens are, as we know, they’re highly motivated to see movies opening weekend. So, horror movies, broad comedies, they tend to be really frontloaded just because the nature of the audience. It doesn’t necessarily mean when all is said and done that people didn’t like the movie.

But he did a really aggressive and thorough statistical analysis. He was talking about regression to the mean. He was talking about his R-values, his R-score. I mean, there’s all this like really good stuff in there. And buried in the thing, he sort of said, I was kind of surprised how loose the correlation was.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Now, alternately, there was a very similar study that was done and posted on The Black List blog, and we’ll throw that link into the show notes. And that one I wasn’t as much of a fan of because that one, it was the same thing. On one sense, it was what percentage drop-off was — or what percentage of your total box office was your opening weekend.

But the other one was they used the Metacritic score, which as far as I’m concerned, is irrelevant. And, you know, then they charted out all these things. As far as I could tell looking through the charts —

**Aline:** What were the conclusions of the first Reddit thing?

**Craig:** Well, the conclusions of the Reddit thing was that there was a loose, a very — here’s the thing. Statistics. You can say anything you want in statistics, but it’s all about but how robust is the correlation. So if you flip a coin twice, you could say, “Well, it looks like this coin is going to come up heads all the time but it’s a very loose correlation.” So he was saying there is a loose correlation between —

**Aline:** Between the “quality” of the movie.

**Craig:** Between the audience’s affection for a movie —

**Aline:** Perceived quality, yeah.

**Craig:** And the box office multiple.

**John:** Yeah. You had sent me a link this afternoon to the second thing which is on The Black List. And what I found interesting about it is because this guy broke out movies by sort of like their total box office tier, it was useful to look at, you know, a tiny little indie movie, like the multiplier factor is really huge. When you look at the giant box office behemoths, they will make a tremendous amount of their box office that first weekend just because —

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Of the nature of the kind of movie they are.

**Aline:** Right. So that —

**John:** So that tiering was useful for me.

**Aline:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** The tiering was, I mean, it’s the kind of movie it is, and then also you have to remember, huge budget movies have massive marketing budgets behind them.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So of course they’re motivating an enormous part of the audience that might normally slip to week two. They’re showing up at week one because they’ve just been motivated. They’ve been bombarded. So it’s a little difficult to make this correlation. I think it’s fair to say that if people love a movie, it will have good word of mouth and it will do better. Duh, right?

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** There’s no big surprise there. I think it’s a mistake to try and equate good movie with, say, Metacritic score, or even with Rotten Tomatoes score because that’s a self-selecting audience anyway.

**Aline:** But I just think it’s interesting, you know, every weekend you have these postmortems where people try and figure out, and they’re doing it right now with Tomorrowland —

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** Trying to figure out was it this, was it that, is it original in content, is it not, is it… — And the truth is that, you know, it really goes back to the Goldman rule like, you know, we all do the best we can in a inexact science and you can’t really account for why certain things — you can account for a certain amount of these phenomena, but really, things break out because of a million reasons or don’t break out for a million reasons.

**Craig:** And Tomorrowland, correct me if I’m wrong, made mid-40s, right?

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Made like $45 million. That’s good.

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** What happens now is people will say, “Well, it’s good but not good in light of its budget.” The audience doesn’t care about the budget.

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** The audience doesn’t care about your profit and loss sheet.

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** $45 million worth of tickets sold is good.

**John:** So the real conversation will be next Sunday or Monday as the second week comes through and everyone will take a look at like what was the drop-off, which will probably be a factor of what was the reception of the audience.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And the audience reception was mixed. And so that will be curious to see sort of how it plays out next week.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** That’s the sort of normal conversation we would have. What’s so fascinating is to look at, you know, a person with a stats background who didn’t have any of our terminology trying to explain this phenomenon he was seeing.

**Craig:** It was interesting. There’s another thing that people forget sometimes when they do these analyses. And there are two movies come to mind, Austin Powers and Pitch Perfect. Movies that come out and kind of bomb in their own sort of way. And then find this life on video and —

**Aline:** And they’re also, I mean, they’re marketed. They have marketed themselves. I mean, Pitch Perfect had marketed itself for, you know, the months since it came out because people watched it over and over again. It caught on and that, so —

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** There was so much marketing that was beyond the marketing they were actually doing.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Aline:** And so those movies have such built-in awareness.

**Craig:** If you just look at the point on the chart of how much money did Pitch Perfect 1 make at the box office. Austin Powers 2 made more in its opening weekend than Austin Powers 1 made its entire run.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** Oh, I think that’s true of Pitch Perfect as well.

**Craig:** I’m sure it is. It has to be.

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** And so that’s really the lesson there is, well, box office isn’t necessarily the only test of success either, because some movies are discovered after. Office Space is the bomb of all bombs when it comes to theatrical release. And God only knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars —

**Aline:** Do you think if they made a sequel now people would go?

**Craig:** Oh, my god. If Mike Judge ever did it, and he won’t —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But if he ever did, it would be massive. No question.

**Aline:** That’s interesting.

**John:** I think that’s true as well. And it’s a thing we encountered with Big Fish because Big Fish was not a huge box office hit but it actually did so well in its afterlife that we continue to sort of get interested in doing more stuff with Big Fish because it did so well.

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** There you go.

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** And so that’s an example. Like that’s not a movie that lends itself to a natural sequel. There’s not a Big Fish 2 on the docks, but like it’s useful for things down the road.

**Craig:** Wasn’t Free Willy kind of in its own way a sequel? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, it really was.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s its own sort of unique thing.

**Craig:** It’s its own thing.

**John:** I think it’s time to open up for some questions.

**Aline:** Yay.

**Craig:** How do we sound, Stuart? Stuart, I’m check —

**John:** Oh, we got a thumbs up from Stuart.

**Craig:** Stuart gave us a thumbs up.

**John:** We have two questions that came in early, so —

**Aline:** [makes noises] That’s my alien voice.

**Craig:** I know. [makes noise]

**Aline:** [makes noise]

**Craig:** What have we got? Live questions?

**John:** Well, we had two questions that came in before we started the show at all. So I was wondering if Aline might read the first question from Molly.

**Aline:** Okay, the question from Molly is —

**John:** Because it’s a question from a woman.

**Aline:** Hi, John and Craig and Stuart.

**Craig:** Awww.

**John:** Stuart.

**Craig:** Stuart. If can’t get Stuart married off of this?

**Aline:** I’m writing a script that is an adaptation of the life of a former U.S. president. I strive for authenticity —

**Craig:** I hope it’s McKinley.

**Aline:** And historical accuracy. So I would like to use direct quotes from the president’s speeches, letters, and memoirs as dialogue. Is this an acceptable practice in biographical films or seen as unoriginal because the dialogue didn’t originate with me, or is it plagiarism? If it’s acceptable, do I somehow need to cite which lines are actually historical and not my own original creation? Looking forward to the show tonight, Molly.

**Craig:** Molly.

**John:** Molly.

**Craig:** That’s a really good question. I have an answer for you, Molly.

**John:** I do, too.

**Craig:** The answer in order is yes, no, no, yes, no, no. So, it’s absolutely acceptable. It is not plagiarism. It is part of public record. Presidents are public figures. Their speeches are absolutely reprintable in all ways, shapes, and forms. No, nobody would look at it as plagiarism. In fact, quite the opposite. Take an obvious example, if you were doing a movie about Lincoln, which of course has already been done, and you change the text to the Gettysburg Address, people would be angry.

**Aline:** But let me throw in a caveat.

**Craig:** Yes. What is your caveat?

**Aline:** With Selma —

**John:** I was going to say Selma.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Aline:** They did not have the right to his speeches.

**Craig:** Okay. I think they did. Here’s my point. My feeling is that they would have had the right to those speeches but they could also be sued and have to battle over it. And then they have a movie about Martin Luther King that is being sued by the estate of Martin Luther King, which is bad press. But I actually think an argument could be made that as a public figure delivering a public speech, that is now part of the public record and is absolutely public domain.

**Aline:** But she had to paraphrase them and you don’t think that she — do you think she just didn’t want to take the risk?

**Craig:** I think the studio combined with the — I’m sure the screenwriter initially had that in there completely. You get into trouble there where it’s like, okay, if we’re making a movie about Martin Luther King and the family is like, “Boo, you’re exploiting,” oh, it’s a nightmare.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But if you’re making a movie about McKinley [laughs], I don’t know why I like to go to McKinley always —

**John:** You should.

**Craig:** Somebody should make a movie about Franklin Pierce. If you’re making a movie about Franklin Pierce, go for it. I mean, obviously, A, everything is in public domain now anyway because of the age. So always check, you know, if you’re making an old — if you’re doing one about Ford, you should be fine anyway, I think.

**Aline:** But do you think like in the way that Martin Luther King’s speeches are owned as intellectual property by his estate, like if you were doing a John F. Kennedy movie where he has a lot of famous speeches —

**Craig:** I don’t —

**John:** Here’s a question. Like if you took something from Profiles in Courage, John Kennedy’s book —

**Craig:** That’s different. That’s different. And by the way, of course John F. Kennedy did not write Profiles in Courage.

**John:** But his name is on it.

**Craig:** His name is on it. It was ghostwritten. But that’s a novel and that’s expression in fixed form. But if you do a movie about Kennedy and you have him stand up and say, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” —

**John:** Well, of course that’s fine.

**Craig:** Well, you say of course that’s fine but really —

**Aline:** But that’s —

**Craig:** But that’s what the King family was saying is it’s not fine.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** And I think that’s about avoiding an unpleasant battle in public opinion, especially on something as sensitive as Martin Luther King and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. The last thing you want to be is like, “A white corporation going against the wishes of the family,” you know, like it just smells bad. It’s bad business.

**John:** So going back to Molly’s question though, she’s writing a movie about a president, which is awesome. Make the best presidential movie possible. If you think you need to use a lot of stuff from his speeches, then I worry that you’re not making the best possible presidential movie.

**Craig:** Or maybe there’s one speech or another.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** I mean, let’s say she’s doing like Teddy, you know.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Teddy had some good speeches. But I guess even beyond that, regardless, you should write — this is the time where you get to do whatever you want. I mean, if the downside of being a screenwriter is that we’re not actually making a movie but we’re making a movie on paper, the upside is we can do whatever we want.

Down the road, some roomful of lawyers will give you advice on that stuff. But nobody will look down upon you for actually using the text of publicly delivered speeches by political figures.

**Aline:** And I’m assuming that Molly is going to be writing conversations with him and his spouse and his advisors. She wouldn’t have access to those anyway.

**Craig:** Right. Dramatize —

**Aline:** She’s going to be making that up. Especially, if they’re famous speeches, obviously people will know that she’s excerpting. But in general, she’s going to have to make up probably what consists of her dramatic writing, she’ll have to make up anyway.

**Craig:** Word.

**John:** Word. Craig, another question that came in before we started recording.

**Craig:** Yes. This one came from Cody Tannen-Barrup.

**John:** What a great name is that.

**Craig:** The best. Hyphenated, Tannen-Barrup. Hey, John and Craig. Thanks for everything you do. That’s weird, Cody didn’t thank Stuart.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** But I guess that’s just —

**Aline:** Also, I wasn’t thanked.

**Craig:** And also Aline wasn’t thanked. [laughs] You’re welcome, Cody Tannen-Barrup. Question. I was asked by an agent to send him a script. I sent it two weeks ago. What’s the etiquette of following up? How long do I wait? Do I just expect that if he liked it he would get back to me, unless I should move on? Thanks. Cody from Northampton, Massachusetts. Sent from his iPad.

**John:** Aline, tell us, when should you follow up?

**Aline:** Well, this is a great question. I’m glad that we can share some of this. I’ve been doing this a long time. I have never gotten any better at the waiting to hear part.

**John:** I haven’t either.

**Aline:** I don’t know what it is.

**Craig:** You’re human. [laughs]

**Aline:** There’s something about the minute you press — it’s like the minute you press send, you go back into the document and you find a typo instantly.

**Craig:** Always.

**Aline:** Instantly.

**Craig:** By the way, isn’t that amazing?

**Aline:** You press send —

**Craig:** Always.

**Aline:** You go back in there and you’re like —

**Craig:** It’s sick.

**Aline:** Yeah. That’s I think —

**John:** In the old days when we used to print out scripts —

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** I would wait for the messenger to come and pick up the script and take it away. And then I would look through it, like, “No, typo.”

**Craig:** I know.

**Aline:** Always.

**John:** And now it’s a PDF.

**Craig:** I know.

**Aline:** It’s something, honestly, that I still work on when I hand in a script. My husband pretty much wants to get away from me. I have not gotten any better at this. In the beginning of your career, it’s so difficult and it’s so heartbreaking.

**Craig:** I mean, like we send a script in to some agent or whatever the hell we do, two weeks go by, maybe it’s slightly bad news. But when you’re trying to start your career and this is — well, one agent you know and the one person who showed you interest and now two weeks have gone by, it’s your whole world focused on that one return call.

**Aline:** But I think it’s fascinating. It’s sort of like, you know, when you’re driving and there’s a pedestrian in front of you, you’re like, “Move more quickly. I’m going to hit you. [laughs] What are you doing?”

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** And then when you’re the pedestrian, you’re going [makes noise].

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, easy car.

**Aline:** And it’s the same thing when someone —

**Craig:** I know.

**Aline:** Gives me a script to read. It’ll often sit in my inbox for a long time and I won’t respond or won’t read it. And it doesn’t mean I don’t like it or I didn’t it —

**Craig:** So what do —

**Aline:** Here’s the thing. You can’t read anything into the two weeks.

**Craig:** But what do we tell them? Like when should you write back?

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** So I think you should write back with — if you sent it on a Thursday or Friday, you should write back on Tuesday to make sure that they have it.

**Aline:** Oh, interesting. Interesting.

**John:** So I would give them a weekend, which counts as sort of one day. Otherwise, you give them like just, you know, a few days to make sure that —

**Aline:** I might give them a week.

**Craig:** It’s funny, like I’m actually a two-weeker guy.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** Like I feel like email works. And so I would check in two weeks later. By the way, also you can always call the assistant.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Like for instance for that one, like four days later, give the assistant a buzz and say, “I’m so sorry to bother you — ”

**Aline:** I just want to make sure.

**Craig:** “I just want to make sure it came through and then I will leave you alone, I promise.” And they’ll say, “Oh, yeah. It came through.” Then I would give it two weeks and then I would just drop a quick line.

**John:** So I had a conversation with my agent, David Kramer, about this and he said that it’s one of his great frustrations is when people don’t send the email back saying, “Got it.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just acknowledge that you received it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because it honestly reduces your stress load tremendously to say like, “Got it. Thanks.”

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** And so just this last week I had a situation where I sent something through and I expected like, well, it’s a long weekend, whatever. And then I get the email back today saying like, “Oh, because of Con, we didn’t send it through, so it’ll be like another week.” I’m like —

**Craig:** So frustrating.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like, oh my god, the whole time I was like —

**Craig:** It’s so frustrating.

**John:** I’m picturing all the bad news that possibly could’ve happened.

**Craig:** You know what the word for what you were doing was?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** Because this is what my therapist tells me I do all the time.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Catastrophizing.

**John:** I love that word.

**Craig:** You were catastrophizing.

**Aline:** Oh, and that’s what happens when you turn in a script, all you can do is picture them thinking, “Oh, my god. What do I do? How do I — what do I say to her?”

**Craig:** It’s catastrophizing. But not only does this draft not work, this person can’t ever work again in Hollywood or anywhere.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And should be punished publicly. [laughs]

**John:** This person —

**Aline:** And it’s funny because even —

**John:** This person is an impostor.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** The impostor has now been revealed.

**Craig:** At last we know the truth.

**Aline:** But you kind of build up a thing where “You know what, I feel pretty good about this one. I’m just going to hand this in and go to the Grove and I feel great.” And it takes anywhere between two minutes and 11 minutes to go into the spiral.

**Craig:** It breaks everyone.

**Aline:** So if it makes Cody feel any better, it happens to everyone. I would say after a couple of weeks, you can lob in. And I would probably, if John’s saying a Tuesday, I would say the end of the following week, I would say lob in an email saying, “Hey, just checking in. I wanted to make sure you got it. Would love to hear from you about it. Would love to talk about it with you.” If you don’t hear from them way soon after that, I think you can just take that as being French for no.

**Craig:** Well, you could. I mean, the truth is that sometimes it takes time, and especially if you are a flier. An agent is like, okay, a friend of a friend and you come, whatever. You send me your script.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s at the bottom of my pile.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So at some point, they’re going to pick it up.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you just have to be patient. And in your mind, essentially you have to remove yourself from that sicko equation of this is going to change my life. You just got to keep going on with your life and assume that that’s not going to change your life. And then if a wonderful thing comes crashing in, like the letter from Hogwarts inviting you and telling you you’re a wizard, then that’s great.

**Aline:** But the thing I would also say when you’re starting out is give your script to lots of people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** Give your script to a friend. Give your script to an agent. Give your friend who’s an assistant. And I always think of it as like you’re putting little paper boats into the Central Park reservoir.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you who I give my script to. Just the other day, one of the smart — here’s an unsung screenwriter — he’s sung. But one of my favorite people in this business and he’ll never come on the show because he’s like a weirdo shut-in and he’ll never listen to this, so I don’t have a problem [laughs] with saying —

**John:** So you can call him a weirdo shut-in and —

**Craig:** He’ll never know that I called him a weirdo shut-in. But Bob Gordon, do you know Bob Gordon?

**John:** I know Bob Gordon.

**Craig:** So smart. So Bob Gordon is probably most known for writing Galaxy Quest. Brilliant, brilliant guy. I met him in Nashville actually. And like you know when you meet someone, you’re like, “Oh my god, you’re like me [laughs], you know, but even weirder. This is great.” And I sent him my script and he had such a smart comment that was just so good and really —

**John:** Was it devastating?

**Craig:** No. That’s the thing. First I thought, well, because I really like to be open about these things, I thought, “Okay, well, if I took that on its face, it could theoretically be devastating to the structure of the story.” But then the more I thought about it, I thought, “No. You know what he’s getting at I can actually solve and it will make so many things better and I could do it in three pages at the start of the script.”

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** And it was so helpful that —

**Aline:** But, you know, you just —

**Craig:** This isn’t about praising Bob Gordon.

**Aline:** You put your little boats in the water, send them out, as many as you can.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** And then try not to worry about them. And some of them will come in.

**Craig:** That’s what Seth Rudetsky would do.

**John:** [laughs] So a question from the feed.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Steve Bethers asks, “Craig, do you think Robert Mark Kamen is Writer X?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Wouldn’t it be great if like these two threads came together? So Robert Mark Kamen was the unsung screenwriting hero that Craig brought up last week and Writer X was this screenwriter who — wouldn’t that be amazing? I think it’s impossible, amazing.

**Craig:** It would be shocking, obviously. It would shatter me in many ways.

**Aline:** Wow. Will Writer X ever be revealed?

**John:** I’m not sure there ever was a Writer X.

**Craig:** Writer X will never come back.

**Aline:** Do you think he’s not a real person?

**Craig:** No, I think Writer X was a real person. I think that —

**John:** Well, I think Writer X had no produced credits, so that was the issue.

**Craig:** Right. And so Final Draft was like, “Hey, Writer X, why don’t you do this and we’ll give you a hundred bucks.” I don’t know if they even paid him. But I think after the shellacking that occurred, Writer X probably will not appear again. No, I don’t think Robert Kamen is Writer X. At the risk of being a dick —

**John:** Isn’t that amazing?

**Craig:** I don’t think the writing was good enough to qualify as Kamen level.

**Aline:** Kamenesque.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was not Kamenesque.

**John:** All right. We’re going to scroll back through the feed and look for a new question. So if you have a question for us, put it in the feed and we’ll hit it. Stuart has one all highlighted.

**Craig:** Ooh, god, Stuart, you’re good.

**John:** We have a question here from G Red asking, “Aline, there was some discussion about dress codes in Hollywood for writers. ‘Don’t be the best-dressed person in the room.’ Is that true for women?”

**Aline:** Yeah, I remember hearing that and I giggled through that at the thought that Craig or John would be at all concerned about —

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Aline:** How they were dressed with respect to the others.

**Craig:** I think that was a Writer X thing in a weird way, wasn’t it?

**Aline:** It was a guy who’s saying that he shows up at meetings dressed in a suit and he feels more comfortable in a suit.

**Craig:** Whatevs.

**Aline:** I mean, I will say for women that, you know, I remember when I very first came out here I had bought a lot of fancy clothes and suits. This was a long time ago.

**Craig:** Like Hilary Clinton suits?

**Aline:** Yeah, kind of. And my agent said to me, “You’re a writer, wear Converse.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** I think that dressing well in Hollywood is a little bit different from dressing fancy. You want to show that you have some — well, for a certain type of writer, it’s not —

**Craig:** [laughs] Meaning not me.

**Aline:** Terrible to show that you have some taste and that you’re cool and that you’re — you know, I think dressing fancy, dressing up, wearing heels, wearing a skirt, wearing a blazer, that’s not really what writers do.

**Craig:** Don’t dress like a suit. That’s basically —

**Aline:** Don’t dress like a suit, yeah.

**Craig:** You don’t want to be corporate.

**Aline:** You can be cool and people can see that you’re making an effort in how you look. But fancy is not really du jour for anybody.

**John:** On the podcast, I had discussed Wes Anderson. If Wes Anderson showed up for a meeting, you kind of want Wes Anderson dressed like Wes Anderson. So if you were a female writer, a female director, it would be appropriate to dress up kind of like the person who you kind of are.

**Aline:** I know more people whose thing is that they do something odd in the other direction. Like they always wear hoodies or they wear pajamas or, you know, writers are more known for doing that kind of thing —

**Craig:** There is a writer, I won’t say his name but everybody will probably figure out who it is when I say it, who’s constantly just doing these very contrived things with his clothes. He wears a mask. [laughs] He’ll put on a clown nose. It’s just —

**John:** I know who you’re talking about.

**Craig:** You know who I’m talking about. It’s ridic —

**Aline:** I do not.

**Craig:** I just mouthed it.

**John:** Mouthed it.

**Aline:** Right, right.

**Craig:** It’s ridiculous and it’s just insecure and dumb. I mean my whole thing about — this is one area where there’s definitely sexism going on for sure. For a guy, you know, I always feel like I have the confidence of thinking, it doesn’t what I’m wearing. I’m going to be wearing something sort of schlubby because that’s who I am. But if I can start talking impressively, nobody will give a damn what’s on my body. I do think that people are judgy about women. I actually think that it’s — a lot of a women are judgy about women with clothes, and that’s a bummer but it does — I think if what you’re saying is don’t look like a not-creative person —

**Aline:** That’s right.

**Craig:** But don’t also try and look like some contrived example of a creative person, you should be fine.

**Aline:** Yeah. I don’t — I think it’s just — it’s we live in a casual city and people dress casually.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And you can look cool. But it really isn’t a thing of dressing up. People don’t really wear suits, so you would look, you know, odd. That being said, there are some people who that’s their thing. Sam Raimi wears suits. Everybody knows that.

**Craig:** If it’s natural to them —

**Aline:** And if it’s — and if it’s your thing.

**Craig:** Paul Feig does it.

**Aline:** Yeah. Paul Feig is dressed —

**Craig:** Paul Feig directs in a suit.

**Aline:** Yeah, he is dressed to the nines all the time.

**Craig:** Which is crazy. That’s like taking a shower in a suit.

**Aline:** You’re right.

**Craig:** It’s nuts.

**Aline:** He’s dressed to the nines all the time.

**Craig:** Do you know who dresses great?

**Aline:** Who?

**Craig:** Sexy Craig. Oh yeah.

**Aline:** Sexy Craig. Sexy threads.

**Craig:** You like this velour? Yeah, it’s real velour, 100%.

**Aline:** This is from J.Crew.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** We have a lot of speculation in the chat thread about who you were talking about when you mouthed off —

**Craig:** Oh, really? Who did they come up with?

**John:** Some of the things are fantastic. Carrot Top. Is it Nolan?

**Aline:** I read a great thing.

**Craig:** No, Nolan is a jacket and tie guy.

**Aline:** I read a great thing that somebody tweeted which is like, if you have a Carrot Top, shouldn’t your hair be green?

**John:** That’s a really good point. Wow.

**Craig:** Mind blown. Mind blown. Inception.

**John:** All right. Another question from Stuart from one of you listeners. Jason Bob Gardner II writes, can you break down the skill set difference or responsibilities between a showrunner for a show versus director of a feature film?

**Aline:** The showrunner for the show is the producer and the writer. So you’re doing really what a feature producer would do for a movie, you’re doing for every episode. And you’re the writer. And then you choose a director and the director figures out sort of how the thing is photographed.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Aline:** If that makes sense.

**John:** I think that makes a lot of sense. A director is still incredibly important in television because that director is Marc Webb in your case, who did your pilot, is figuring out the vision for sort of how the shots go together, especially on a pilot. But even on a given episode, like how you are going to make that day’s work work, how you’re going to put this whole thing together.

**Aline:** You’re translating the visual — translating the script into the visuals, yeah.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And then editing that pilot together.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** At least the first stab at it.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** And the real difference, though, is that unlike a feature screenwriter, the showrunner has tremendous influence and power in sort of deciding what the final cut of something is going to be.

**Craig:** True.

**John:** It’s hiring that director onboard.

**Aline:** It’s sort of like you’re in charge of the whole — and the whole is not the one episode. The whole is the series.

**Craig:** That’s right. The showrunner is going to be there later. So they have to be in charge of things like, you can say, “Well, as a director when you make a feature film, what are the characters wearing?” That’s your job. It’s not your job on television. It’s everyone’s job in television particularly the showrunner because the showrunner is stuck with that for when you’re gone.

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** In features, if a director is also the writer, then frankly they are kind of like a showrunner. In that regard, it’s very similar.

**John:** Yeah, they’re a showrunner who’s doing a pilot.

**Craig:** A showrunner doing a two-hour pilot. Exactly

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So like, you know, Todd Phillips, basically is like a showrunner on his movies. He is the producer, he is the director, he is the writer or at least, you know a co-writer. And so —

**Aline:** And often, showrunners direct. I mean, Matt I directed the finale of Mad Men.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**Aline:** I mean what’s interesting for me is that I had a big adjustment to make in being a screenwriter because I am fairly sociable. I like to be around other people. I like to talk to other people. So especially for the first 10 years in my career, it was very difficult for me to deal with the being alone in a room. I’m also, and this will be a surprise to everyone, a bit bossy.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** No, not true.

**Aline:** And so —

**Craig:** What?

**Aline:** I enjoy — working on a TV show is fun because it’s rather gregarious, lots of people. You have a crew, a cast, a family, a set. You know, I like to make decisions and I’m comfortable with extending the writing decisions into the production decisions.

**Craig:** So bossy. Just —

**Aline:** Just a little bossy.

**Craig:** Who am I scared of more than you? Nobody.

**John:** Nobody.

**Craig:** Nobody.

**Aline:** That says more about you than me.

**Craig:** It does.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Completely.

**Craig:** [laughs] Absolutely. Whatever you want me to say.

**John:** Chris Percal writes, as someone rushing to finish a TV spec for the Fellowships, how important is it to follow a showrunner’s format? Specifically, if the showrunner has a few formatting quirks that are atypical? Thanks.

So Aline, you must have read a bunch of scripts.

**Aline:** I couldn’t care less about it for a minute, I think.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, if you’re — you have to stick to the structure of the show.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you’re — if the show that you are mimicking or writing an episode of starts with a cold open every time —

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** You’ve got to do that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If the show has a certain amount of breaks, you got to do that.

**Aline:** I will say this. I know how you guys often say, you know, the first 10 pages of a screenplay are really important, blah, blah, blah. Wow, the first 10 pages of your pilot that you’re submitting for consideration —

**Craig:** Sure.

**Aline:** Couldn’t be more important because you don’t really have the time to read past and, you know, the people that I have read for staffing where I read the 10 pages and I’m like, “I’ve got to read this whole thing.” If you can do that, you stand out so much. You’ve got to grab people in the beginning.

**Craig:** So that’s more important than nailing the tiny little formatting, quirky, baloney, rules, baloney?

**Aline:** Also, do not save your good stuff for page 48.

**John:** Yeah. Right at the start. You must have read more in this last of couple of months than years.

**Craig:** What’s the state of writing out there? [laughs] Not good, huh?

**Aline:** Well, when you find somebody who can really do it, I think particularly for the beginning writers, it’s a bit like music. You know, I always love that thing when the first couple years of Idol where people would audition and Randy Jackson would say, “You know what, singing, not your thing man.”

**Craig:** It’s not for you.

**Aline:** It’s just not for you.

**Craig:** It’s not for you.

**Aline:** You know, what else you like you to do?

**Craig:** And he would say —

**Aline:** Remember, he would say, “What else do you like to do?”

**Craig:** “What else do you like to do? Do you have other hobbies?” And they’re like, “But all my friends tell me that I’m great.”

**Aline:** Right. And I think you can tell particularly with the emerging writers, right away, if they, you know, there’s a voice and a music. I mean the thing that really kills me and continues to kill me is, particularly in television, people writing things you cannot see.

**Craig:** I know.

**Aline:** She remembers the summer by the sea.

**Craig:** Makes. Me. Crazy.

**Aline:** But particularly like I feel like I will give more leeway to that in a screenplay where you’re setting a mood and maybe you write in a more of prosey style.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** But when you’re writing a television episode —

**Craig:** I know.

**Aline:** If you want to tell me, she smells hyacinth and thinks of her Aunt Lou, I got nothing. There’s nothing I can see.

**John:** She’s throwing your script across the room.

**Aline:** Yeah. It’s tough.

**Craig:** And by the way, these are people that have agents, have managers.

**Aline:** Oh, yes.

**Craig:** Are represented.

**Aline:** Oh, yes.

**Craig:** And still you’re —

**Aline:** And also, it’s a taste thing. I’m sure there are scripts that I don’t respond to that other people pick up and think are great.

**Craig:** I actually, I think that I’m pretty good at telling the difference between my reaction to a script. If I read it and I think, “This is not my taste versus you are bad. You’re actually incompetent. This is not right. This chair only has three legs and you’ve forgotten the back is upside down. And I can see glue blobs.”

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** There’s a difference.

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** And it is, I got to say, it is amazing. And this should be encouraging for our listeners out there, following along live as we stream. There are a lot of bad, bad, bad writers who have agents. And you can take them out. And by the way, a lot of people think I’m one of them.

**Aline:** So I have a bunch of friends.

**Craig:** So you can take me out, too.

**Aline:** I have a bunch of friends who are writers because they were readers.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** And they were reading a lot of the scripts and they thought, “Man.”

**Craig:** I could do better.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, but it’s that shit plus one thing that makes me so nervous.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** It’s making a —

**Aline:** What?

**Craig:** Terry Rossio’s crap plus one. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So his crap plus one theory is that a lot of people look at Hollywood and they go —

**Aline:** Oh, right.

**Craig:** “Well, that’s a bunch of crap. All I have to do is plus one of that and I’ll be fine.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But they don’t realize that —

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** The crap that you see eventually —

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** Has already been broken — like something started brilliant —

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** And then the process just destroyed it down to crap.

**Aline:** Right. But you can — it’s kind of glorious and interesting to see people who just have an ear and this is what they were put on Earth to do.

**Craig:** It’s fun. It’s great finding people like that.

**Aline:** And, you know, how much of it is learned and — but, you know, I have by and large enjoyed the process of reading. And I don’t think for a second about the format, is the short answer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. One last question from Adam Alterburk. He writes, “Who decides when script is locked for production? And how does one handle the political side of this decision?” We’ve never talked about that.

**Aline:** That’s a great question.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** What a good question.

**Craig:** Well, locking for production is something that you — if you are the writer now that’s sort of the production writer, and in fact I’m doing this right now for The Huntsman.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I have to talk to the line producer, a woman named Sarah Bradshaw. And she and I coordinate. What I say is, “Look, I don’t — it doesn’t matter to me when I lock this. It doesn’t matter to me what we call the white draft. And it doesn’t matter to me what we call blue or if we should lock pages at this point or issue a whole new draft. What would make your life easier on your end?” And then she tells me and that’s what I do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because that’s not creative. That’s about a process. There are times when I’ll say, “Look, because of the way this last week went, we’ve just changed the second half of — there’s like every page, there’s a single asterisk gone and it’s super annoying. Why don’t we just not — why don’t we issue a whole new draft?” And then they’ll say yes or no. And that’s what we’ll do. And it’s as simple as that. You just coordinate with the line producer and get to know them. And it’s really important for you to be a master of your software.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you know exactly how to do it and you know exactly know how to not screw them up. They have all experienced screenwriters who have screwed them up.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s huge mess. And they don’t like that. So know how to work your stuff.

**Aline:** It’s also great to find somebody who knows how to do it, too.

**Craig:** That’s the best.

**Aline:** You know, somebody else who knows how to handle the program. But the one thing, I have worked with people who hate revised pages. I worked with a director and a producer who want to keep the script as white as possible. And so they want you to lock as late as possible so you don’t end up with a script that’s stuffed with confetti.

**Craig:** Sure. No, I get that. But, you know, at some point you have to be able to —

**Aline:** Of course.

**Craig:** To move around. And so what I’ll do like, for instance, I know that there are some things I have to write that are for what’s coming up in the next three weeks of shooting. Rather than just send one thing at a time which would create multiple revisions.

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** What I’m doing is I’m saying, “Okay, look, here’s the new stuff, not in a script. Take a look at it, let’s get it approved by the director and the studio.” And then if everybody approves, then I’ll just say, “Okay, here’s a bunch — an aggregated bunch of approved stuff. This is now our green draft.

**John:** So I’m going to talk people back through who have not been through production drafts to understand what we’re actually saying. When a script goes in production, it has a locked draft. Basically, all those page numbers are going to stay the same.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That is considered the white draft. And then if there are changes that are made to that script, they release it as colored pages. And those colored pages will fit into the script that was already released and locked. So if you have change something on page 56, and you’ve added a page between 56 and 57, that is page A56 or 56a depending on how your numbering system works.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And those pages will go in there. So it’s a way of like not reprinting the whole script every time, which is a really good thing. The issues and challenges become, when do you close that down? And most scripts that I’ve brought into production, it tends to be about like two weeks beforehand, it has pulled the trigger and suddenly like, okay, that’s the white draft and everything from that point forward.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But what Craig is saying is really smart too, is that if it is just a small change and it’s not going to shoot really soon, you hold back on releasing those pages so you can release it as a block so it’s much less confusing.

**Aline:** You just to be careful because sometimes there’s departments that are waiting for those pages for some reason.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s why to me, there’s a sort of like two levels. When I try and do this stuff. I mean I would do this like with the Hangovers, this is how Todd and I would do it. We wouldn’t — because we were changing stuff all the time. But we wouldn’t just like every five minutes, go — we made sure like, “Okay, who needs to know this?”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Here’s three pages that’s not script stuff. And it’s not like pulled from the script. It’s just a scene that we all now we’re going to be doing. Obviously, you never mess with scene numbers. That’s the one thing you can’t do. And then if everybody knows, then we can hold it and then we do an issue.

**Aline:** The funny thing about scene numbers, I know you guys have talked about this is that, people rush over to you and say, “Are you doing something to 56?” And you’re like, “What’s 56?”

**Craig:** What is 56?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How would I possibly know what 56 is? But they know — the crew —

**Aline:** Well, eventually you kind of learn.

**Craig:** Always knows.

**Aline:** Eventually —

**Craig:** I don’t.

**Aline:** Never?

**Craig:** I never once — I’ve gotten to the end of a movie and somebody’s like, “All we have left is 83a”

**Aline:** 73.

**Craig:** And I’m like, I still don’t know.

**Aline:** Yeah, once in while, there’s ones that become, you know, important or you know that scene is being revised.

**Craig:** I don’t have space in my brain. [laughs]

**Aline:** And in 27 Dresses, it was scene 69. And every time it came up —

**Craig:** How’d you remember that one, huh?

**John:** A question for you guys. I suspect you do the same thing. I always keep a printed out copy of the script so I will do like one last idiot check if I’m going to release pages to make sure they will actually fit in the real script. Do you keep a printout of your script or do you just trust that it’s going to work?

**Craig:** I don’t. What I do instead is I have the prior draft and the current one. So, for instance, if I’m working on, I don’t know, what’s the order, blue, yellow, pink?

**Aline:** Blue, pink.

**Craig:** Blue, pink, yellow. So I’ve got — let’s say I’m going to yellow. So I take my pink draft. I save it as. And now I got my pink draft on the left, I got my yellow draft on the right. And then when I’m done with my yellow changes, I just look back —

**John:** You’re looking at the PDF that you created out of it?

**Craig:** No, I’m looking at my screenwriting files.

**John:** And I would never trust that. I will always either create a PDF or literally print it just to make sure there’s no like —

**Craig:** That’s what a German would do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s very German.

**Aline:** Brings it back around. There’s absolutely nothing worse than realizing that you’ve unlocked some page or not locked a page.

**John:** Oh god.

**Aline:** Or starred a page.

**John:** I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight, Aline.

**Craig:** Why would you do that? What’s wrong with you?

**Aline:** You’ve done five hours of work and not locked or unlocked or released or marked —

**Craig:** Stop talking. Please stop. Stop. [laughs]

**John:** I will have nightmares.

**Aline:** Because there’s no way you can go back and recapture all those keystrokes. That’s really — so when you’re doing —

**Craig:** I’m getting pee shivers.

**Aline:** When you’re doing production revisions, you have to turn on the part of your brain that is the librarian that can —

**Craig:** Yes.

**Aline:** Sort of monitor what you’re doing.

**Craig:** Because my god, they will hate you. And also, it’s not just hatred. It’s a hatred plus you’re an outsider who doesn’t understand our world. It just makes screenwriters look worse in that — as screenwriters, we have to be able to operate the way the crew operates.

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** Or they won’t respect us.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They don’t really care that we, “I invented everything. None of you would be here without me.” They don’t care.

**John:** They don’t care at all.

**Aline:** But the first time you do the job — the first time you’re the job, the writer in production —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** There’s a little bit of like, “So okay, listen, I was just still wondering. Guys, what do I…?” You have to sort of — I guess it’s like any job. Anybody who’s ever worked in production, you kind of fake it till you make it. You kind of use your, you know, your wits. I, you know, when I —

**Craig:** Sure.

**Aline:** The first movie that I did that on, there was no Internet. Oh god, I can’t believe I said that. But I couldn’t Google like how do you lock that, unlock that, what did I do, what were you doing?

**Craig:** What year were you born? [laughs] The no Internet.

**Aline:** The first movie that I wrote when I was doing the production edits was ’99.

**Craig:** Oh, there was the Internet in ’99.

**Aline:** But I mean, we weren’t on there. Like you wouldn’t —

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** You weren’t going to Google and saying, “How do I lock this?”

**Craig:** No. That’s — oh that, yeah.

**Aline:** “Unlock this?” You know.

**Craig:** I mean my first production —

**Aline:** No, I feel like people now —

**Craig:** Was ’95.

**John:** Mine was ’98 for Go. Yeah.

**Craig:** Mine was ’95 for America’s favorite —

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** Classic RocketMan. And —

**Aline:** Well, I’d done TV stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** I have another Cool Thing. I have Two Cool Things.

**Craig:** You have Two Cool Things?

**Aline:** Yeah, I just realized another one.

**Craig:** That’s not my Cool Thing.

**Aline:** I just realized two things.

**John:** Okay. Start us off Aline.

**Aline:** With our two things?

**John:** Cool Things.

**Aline:** Okay. I realize one, there’s a diet thing that I haven’t discussed with you guys, which is this — and I would like to put the — if we could find the study, put it in the show notes. There is a study that shows that it matters when you eat. So you should eat within a 12-hour span. And they did a study with mice or rats where mice who ate all of their food, no matter how many calories they had, in a 12-hours span, never gained weight. And the mice who ate the exact same amount of calories over a 24-hour span, gained tons of weight.

**Craig:** But who’s eating over 24 hours?

**Aline:** Well, but a lot of people eat from 6 o’clock in the morning until midnight.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** I’ve heard this general theory like you should only eat during —

**Aline:** So the general theory is you should eat from 7am to 7pm.

**Craig:** So explain why Spanish aren’t super fat.

**Aline:** They don’t start eating until — I don’t know.

**Craig:** They wake up, they eat breakfast.

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** Then they have like, they take a nap.

**Aline:** I am only —

**Craig:** Have a huge dinner. And then they eat dinner at like 11pm.

**Aline:** Well, I’m just reporting the fact. I’m just reporting the facts, ma’am.

**Craig:** And then they —

**John:** Twelve hours diet.

**Aline:** Twelve hours diet. And then the other thing is —

**Craig:** That sounds like baloney to me.

**Aline:** All right.

**Craig:** It smells.

**Aline:** I wanted to run it by you just to see how —

**Craig:** It smells.

**Aline:** How it went on the umbrage, because you know what? I want to tell you something. I totally believe it.

**Craig:** You believe it?

**Aline:** I totally believe it.

**Craig:** Something about it smells.

**John:** There’s science in mine as well. But go to yours.

**Aline:** Okay. So then the other thing is —

**Craig:** Mine is all about science.

**Aline:** So bone broth has gotten very trendy.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, bone broth?

**Aline:** Bone broth, do you know what this is?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Do you make broth out of bones?

**Craig:** Is it broth out of bones?

**Aline:** So if you guys lived in Brooklyn or in Silver Lake —

**Craig:** I was born in Brooklyn.

**Aline:** You would know what these things are. So bone broth has become very trendy.

**John:** Stuart Friedel is from Silver Lake.

**Aline:** It’s a — you know what bone broth is?

**Stuart:** I’ve heard of it.

**Aline:** Yeah. Bone broth is a soup that you make by boiling bones for hours and hours and hours.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**Aline:** And people distill it and they make, you know — and Kobe Bryant drinks it and it’s trendy.

**Craig:** Oh, then it must be good.

**Aline:** And when you go to a butcher, you can have bone broth.

**Craig:** Yeah, it makes sense.

**Aline:** But bone broth is —

**John:** Somebody in the thing just said, Aline Broth McKenna. [laughs] Congratulations, Craig McDiarmid. You won the feed.

**Aline:** Well done. So, but bone broth is something that Korean people have been eating for centuries.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Aline:** And we lived in Koreatown. And I found this place that makes authentic Korean bone broth.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** And it’s awesome. It’s the only thing they serve.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** And I love restaurants where it’s the only thing they serve.

**Craig:** We serve bone broth.

**Aline:** We serve bone broth. You go in. And you decide —

**Craig:** I’ll have the bone broth.

**Aline:** But you can have bone broth with flank, brisket, intestines, tripe and tongue or mixed. So you get a bowl with the bone broth and it’s supposedly one of the most nourishing things you can eat.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**Aline:** And you choose the kind of meat. And then it’s unsalted. So you salt it and they bring you scallions and they bring you hot sauce and they bring you kimchi and rice.

**Craig:** Everything other than the bone broth there, sounds awesome.

**Aline:** It’s like a delicious beef soup. Anyway, it’s supposed to be —

**Craig:** If you boil bones long enough, you’ll get glue.

**Aline:** It’s supposed to be the most restorative wonderful thing. And I found this place in Korea that does it. It’s not a trendy place.

**Craig:** In Korea?

**John:** Koreatown.

**Aline:** Koreatown.

**Craig:** Oh.

**Aline:** Did I say in Korea?

**John:** You said Korea.

**Craig:** Because that’s a whole —

**Aline:** Wow, the wine is kicking in.

**John:** 1.5 glasses of wine.

**Craig:** Well, there’s South Korea —

**Aline:** The wine is kicking in.

**Craig:** And there’s North Korea.

**Aline:** Anyway, it’s called —

**Craig:** They would love bone broth in North Korea.

**Aline:** I sent the link to myself so that I can remember the name of it, and it’s in Koreatown. And it’s called, for the eight people who are going to drive over there, oh good lord, where is it?

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Aline:** Where is it? It’s called Han Bat Sul Lung Tang.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Stuart will have that in the show notes. So everyone can like feast on bone broth there in Koreatown. Craig Mazin —

**Aline:** There’s also a line out the door.

**Craig:** I have a One Cool Thing that in many ways is just wonderfully oppositional to the nonsense we just heard about 12 hours and bone broth. This is a new Alzheimer’s treatment that they are working on in Australia. And it’s actually pretty remarkable and I have to say, very exciting because, I don’t know — do you guys have anybody with Alzheimer’s in your family?

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the worst.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the worst. My aunt had it. It’s the worst. And it’s just a brutal, brutal disease. So Alzheimer’s happens basically because there are these proteins that start to gather in the brain that should be cleared up by glial cells and they’re not. And so they basically become like sticky, tangled bone broth in your brain that are kind of blocking transmissions and disrupting memory and ultimately destroying you as a person.

So what these guys in Australia are doing is they’re actually using this kind of ultrasound — so they’re — it’s not invasive. It’s not pharmacological. They’re actually ultrasounding your brain and it’s disrupting those tangles of proteins. And what they found in rats is that they were able to restore 75% — they had rats with memory problems. I don’t know how exactly they get rats to have Alzheimer’s but they just do.

**John:** [laughs] They try to do the crossword puzzle and they can’t.

**Craig:** They can’t.

**John:** They can’t do it.

**Craig:** So they pulled them out. So they had rats with Alzheimer’s, 75% of them regained all of their memory after this treatment, all of it.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Which is astonishing. So it was so promising that they’re already kind of moving towards human trials which is amazing. They think they’ll be able to get human trials going in 2017. If this sort of thing works, you and I —

**Aline:** Won’t have to worry about it.

**Craig:** And Stuart will not have to worry. I mean I’m kind of hoping that we can hit the singularity and just be put into —

**John:** Yeah. I would say that Alzheimer’s is way up there on my list of overall fears because the idea of not being able to, you know, be myself and sort of have my memories and have my own personality is terrifying to me.

**Craig:** It’s terrifying. And if there’s something as simple as this to solve it —

**John:** That would be great.

**Craig:** That would be awesome.

**John:** Great. My One Cool Thing is also about simplification and science. So it’s a article that was in FiveThirtyEight this week by Emily Oster called Everybody Calm Down About Breastfeeding. And Emily Oster, she is not a doctor. She is an economics professor. And she was looking at the data behind breastfeeding and sort of like the real study is to see like what is actually really going on behind the scenes when they’re doing the studies on breastfeeding.

And because we’ve always been told that like breastfeeding is awesome.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And I kind of believe breastfeeding is awesome. But I also had this sort of suspicion is like, but how are they really testing for that? And are they really taking care of all the other variables?

**Craig:** How do you measure awesome?

**John:** How do you measure awesome?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because are you really like taking into account the age and background and economic setup —

**Craig:** Socioeconomic status.

**John:** Of all the people who are breastfeeding.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And she was able to do that. So she took a look at all the studies. And when you actually filter out for all that other stuff, you find that a lot of the advantages of breastfeeding aren’t quite so pronounced or aren’t —

**Craig:** They’re not boob-based. They’re sort of related to other issues.

**John:** Exactly.

**Aline:** They’re correlative?

**John:** They’re correlative, rather than causal. So I bring this up because, you know, I think breastfeeding is still awesome and I’m a fan of people who want to breastfeed, I think we need to make sure that we make it an option for any woman who wants to and sort of create structures for that.

**Craig:** And not demonize women who don’t.

**John:** Exactly. Not demonize families that don’t do that because, you know, we’re a two-dad family. And so we did not have breast milk.

**Craig:** [laughs] Try as you did.

**John:** But we know other two-dad families who did like, you know, they would have —

**Craig:** They would buy it.

**John:** They would buy it.

**Craig:** I told my wife to sell it. We had a freezer full of this. She would make me freeze every stupid extra bag. She made so much — my wife is not a big bosomed woman.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She makes so much milk.

**Aline:** Making milk has nothing to do with the size of your boobs.

**Craig:** Apparently, I did not know that. I just went like, big, you know, like a guy, big boob, big, lots of milk. No. She made so much milk. And so our freezer’s full. So I’m like we should sell this. And she was like, “No, I can’t sell it.” She was weird about it.

**John:** Yeah, she totally could have. But I think the question is, you know, we had other two-dad families who ended up like, you know, having breast milk frozen and like FedEx’d and every day they were using that stuff.

**Craig:** And it’s probably —

**Aline:** So I think a lot of us, you know —

**John:** But according to science, it’s actually not necessarily —

**Craig:** It’s not worth all that trouble.

**John:** No.

**Aline:** A lot of this with parenting all these like, you know, strongly held beliefs that people have are just, you know, their talisman that they’re clinging to because it’s so scary and it’s so challenging emotionally. So people cling to things which are “we’re attachment pair, we’re not, we’re breastfeeding, we’re not…”

**John:** Right. Absolutely.

**Aline:** You know, it’s all sort of like things you tell yourself that is going to —

**Craig:** And then they go away.

**Aline:** It’s something that’s going to make you safe.

**Craig:** Like remember co-sleeping?

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** Co-sleeping, everybody had to co-sleep. So our baby, our first kid was born and we tried co-sleeping for two days. And we’re like, screw this. He’s sleeping, we’re not.

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** This is the worst.

**Aline:** And we just don’t have enough —

**Craig:** He doesn’t remember.

**Aline:** Of an emphasis on our culture in happy parents make happy babies.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** And sort of do what works for you. And we cling to these things in a very anxiety-ridden, unrealistic way, punish each other. It’s the same thing with childbirth and natural child birth —

**Craig:** Yes.

**Aline:** And not. And there’s so many judgments attached to it. Whatever works for you.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Aline:** Whatever makes you a happy parent is what makes for a happy child.

**Craig:** I’m so with you on that. You know, we were like — I remember, we went to my son, our first kid was born at Cedars because we lived near here. And we went to this talk that the retired head of obstetric anesthesiology ran. He was no longer in practice, really old guy, he’s like 80 years old. And he was talking about epidurals and why and how, you know, why he thought it was a good idea. And this one woman raised her hand and she was very like and she said, “Well, I’ve heard from my friends that an epidural can prolong labor and I don’t want to prolong my labor because I don’t think it would be good for my baby.”

And he said, “Well, in my experience, actually, it shortens labor because when you’re in pain, you’re muscles tighten. When you’re not in pain, you’re relaxed, you relax and labor actually goes faster. Granted that’s only in my experience, I’ve never had a baby myself, but I have overseen the delivery of 70,000 babies.”

And that’s when I leaned back and went, “Okay, epidural.” [laughs] 70,000, that’s good enough.

**Aline:** You know, it’s funny my dad — but do you know there are some people who have like a very valid reason for not wanting that and that’s important to them.

**Craig:** Totally.

**Aline:** And they should do that. When my parents were raising me and they didn’t have a lot of, you know, they were living in a country they weren’t born in. And I remember my dad went to a lecture that a parenting expert gave. And, you know, everyone asking these questions about should you do this, should you do that and do that.

And the guy said, “You know, what’s really important, the most important thing is to love your children.” And my father thought, “Well, I’m doing that.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So what could go wrong?

**John:** I think it’s really good on the 200th episode of this show that we’ve brought all the way back down to really the crucial fundamental issue of what Scriptnotes is.

**Craig:** Vagina.

**John:** Vagina. Female health.

**Craig:** We’ve always been a gynecological podcast.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** We have like a shadow gynecology podcast. We dress it up as screenwriting.

**John:** Yeah, but it’s really —

**Craig:** But we’ve always been about gynecological issues.

**John:** A pretense about that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Two hundred episodes.

**Craig:** Unbelievable.

**Aline:** I can’t believe it.

**Craig:** John, congratulations.

**Aline:** How long ago did I start emailing you and saying, “What’s going to happen for the 200th?”

**Craig:** I know, I know. Aline was very excited.

**John:** Episode Four or five.

**Aline:** I was very excited. [laughs]

**Craig:** But I have to say, John, what an adventure we’ve been on. I mean, you know, I wouldn’t have foreseen this.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** I mean we — this is over — almost four years.

**Aline:** Wow.

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** It’s insane.

**Aline:** And I know I think I’ve said this before, but when each of you said I’m doing this thing with the other guy, I thought, “Well, that would be interesting.” [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s not going to work. [laughs] Well, that’s kind of why it does work.

**Aline:** It does, yeah.

**Craig:** I think, I mean if we weren’t an odd couple, it would be very boring.

**John:** We’re both strong personalities, but very different personalities and —

**Craig:** Well, you know what I think one of the things that helps us, we are both strong personalities, but I decided very early on — I don’t even think I decided. I just did it. I decided to be the beta male. [laughs] I decided to be the beta podcast male because it’s just — it felt right.

**John:** If people are watching the Twitter feed, I posted a photo of Craig and Aline and Teddy who is our summer intern. And Teddy, the dog is the alpha dog even though he looks like the beta dog.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s crucial to see dogs in their own environment having their own sort of space.

**Craig:** I’m totally the beta podcast guy. Now, what’s — how many people actually showed up for this?

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** Oh, we had a total of like 250 people in our —

**Aline:** Wow. Nice.

**Craig:** Oh, thank you, everyone. Thank you. That’s awesome.

**John:** That’s amazing. So that’s like a big full house. So thank you guys very much for listening.

**Craig:** And we can kind of cull some of these questions for another Q&A.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** So we’re going to be saving the transcript of all the Q&A here.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So we’ll get back to some of those things.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Guys, thank you, guys, so much for listening.

**Aline:** It was fun. Thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks. And thank you, Stuart. Two hundred — and Stuart, have you been here for all 200?

**Aline:** Oh wow.

**John:** Stuart Friedel has been here from the very beginning.

**Aline:** Wow.

**Craig:** Stuart just nodded.

**Aline:** And it was as if, yeah, it could have been grief. It could have been joy.

**Craig:** It was as if I had asked him do you like tuna fish. He just has one emotion which is mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

**Aline:** I like tuna fish.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** He does like tuna fish. Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did the outro for this week’s show. Thank you, Matthew, and he did our intro and so much stuff for the show.

**Craig:** He’s the best.

**Aline:** Lala.

**John:** If you have a question for me or for Craig, you can write to us @clmazin for Craig, @johnaugust for me. Longer questions, go to ask@johnaugust.com. People who listen to the show know where we are.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We are on iTunes. We’re Scriptnotes. Look for us there. We have an app which is downloadable. You can find our show there.

**Craig:** {laughs]

**John:** It’s been two glasses of wine. It’s a lot.

**Craig:** John hit two glasses and has just fallen off —

**Aline:** Yeah, that’s it, it’s going off for a cliff.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** Craig Mazin, thank you always. But Aline Brosh McKenna, thank you for coming by.

**Craig:** Aline. Thank you, Aline. You are our Joan Rivers, but alive.

**Aline:** I want to be Supergirl.

**John:** You could be our Supergirl. Did you watch the Supergirl trailer?

**Aline:** I did. It’s my friend Ali’s show.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** I’m excited about it.

**John:** I’m excited for her, too. And I heard like negative buzz on it. And it was like — but the show is not for you. I mean like the show —

**Aline:** No, I think it looks like lots of fun. She’s adorable.

**John:** She’s adorable.

**Aline:** That actress is amazing. She’s the girl from Whiplash. Supergirl —

**Craig:** I have to recuse myself from discussing any issues regarding superheroes and gender. Thank you.

**John:** And thank you all for listening. Good night everyone.

**Aline:** Bye-bye.

**Craig:** Good night.

Links:

* [Aline Brosh McKenna](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0112459/) on episodes [60](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes), [76](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice), [100](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode), [101](http://johnaugust.com/2013/101-qa-from-the-live-show), [119](http://johnaugust.com/2013/positive-moviegoing), [123](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-holiday-spectacular), [124](http://johnaugust.com/2013/qa-from-the-holiday-spectacular) [152](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-rocky-shoals-pages-70-90), [161](http://johnaugust.com/2014/a-cheap-cut-of-meat-soaked-in-butter), [175](http://johnaugust.com/2014/twelve-days-of-scriptnotes) and [180](http://johnaugust.com/2015/bad-teachers-good-advice-and-the-default-male)
* [CW picks up Crazy Ex-Girlfriend](http://deadline.com/2015/05/crazy-ex-girlfriend-dc-legends-of-tomorrow-cordon-cw-series-1201422393/) on Deadline, and [the first-look trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ctFmXGm_yE)
* [Jane the Virgin](http://www.cwtv.com/shows/jane-the-virgin/) on CW
* [Marie’s Crisis](http://www.yelp.com/biz/maries-crisis-new-york) on Yelp
* [Seth Rudetsky’s Deconstructions](http://www.sethtv.com/watch-tv/deconstructions/)
* u/tcatron565’s Reddit post, [2013 Domestic Wide Releases Opening Weekend Out of Total Gross Over Audience Perception of Film](http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/37d8fg/2013_domestic_wide_releases_opening_weekend_out/) from [r/dataisbeautiful](http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/)
* [A Cliff or a Rolling Hill](http://blog.blcklst.com/2015/05/a-cliff-or-a-rolling-hill/) from the Black List blog
* [Can You Copyright a Dream?](http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/selma-martin-luther-king-can-you-copyright-a-dream-114187.html#.VWyxT1xViko) on Politico
* Hear about Writer X on [Scriptnotes, Episode 194](http://johnaugust.com/2015/poking-the-bear)
* The New York Times Magazine on [A 12-Hour Window for a Healthy Weight](http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/a-12-hour-window-for-a-healthy-weight/?_r=0)
* EaterLA on [Korean bone broth soups and where to get them in LA](http://la.eater.com/maps/bone-broth-korean-los-angeles-koreatown-map-guide), and [Han Bat Sul Lung Tang](http://www.yelp.com/biz/han-bat-sul-lung-tang-los-angeles) on Yelp
* [Ultrasound Restores Memory to Mice with Alzheimer’s](http://www.popsci.com/ultrasound-restores-memory-mice-alzheimers) on Popular Science
* [Everybody Calm Down About Breastfeeding](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/everybody-calm-down-about-breastfeeding/) on FiveThirtyEight
* [Supergirl first-look trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOAMGpRilnI)
* [Intro and Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))