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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 728 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

What is the basic unit of story? In the outline and treatment phase, it’s probably the beat, whereas in the script is the scene. As film and TV writers, how do we move from beats to scenes? I’d argue it’s perhaps the fundamental skill in our craft.

Today on the show, we welcome back a guest to help us to discuss this transformational process. Drew Goddard is a writer whose credits include Cloverfield, Cabin in the Woods, The Martian, Bad Times at the El Royale, Daredevil, High Potential, and a new film, Project Hail Mary, which is absolutely fantastic, Drew, and I got to say this last week. This is coming out, presumably, in a period of time where the embargo is off, so we can say how good it is. Congratulations. Welcome back, Drew.

Drew Goddard: I’m so happy to be back. Thank you for having me, John.

John: It will not be confusing at all that you are both named Drews, Drew Goddard and Drew Marquardt.

Drew Goddard: We’re interchangeable. All of the Drews, we’re like the board. We can just move one Drew into another Drew.

Drew Marquardt: Were you ever an Andy?

Drew Goddard: I never was an Andy.

Drew Marquardt: All right. Good.

Drew Goddard: That’s right. An Andy, of course, wrote The Martian.

John: Andy Weir, yes.

Drew Goddard: Are you an Andrew or did you start Drew?

Drew Marquardt: I started Drew. I’m full Andrew, but always Drew.

Drew Goddard: Great.

John: It’s always confusing when our business manager will say, “Well, Andrew does a thing.” Like, “Who is Andrew? Who is this person?” There are other times where I’ll be talking to my husband about Drew, and it’s like, “Is that Drew Barrymore? Is that Drew Marquardt? Which Drew is that?” It’s the list of Drews.

Drew Goddard: Again, all interchangeable.

John: All the same. On this podcast, Drew Goddard, I want to talk about this movie, obviously, but writing, your career in general, and we have some listener questions that I think are going to be perfect for you.

Drew Goddard: Let’s do it.

John: In our bonus segment for premium members, I’d love to talk about TV because you grew up in TV. You still do TV. You have one of the recent hit broadcast shows, so I want to talk about the future of television with you.

Drew Goddard: Let’s do it.

John: We’ll solve it. For listeners who have been longtime subscribers to the podcast, you were on the show in 2015, but it was a bonus episode. It wasn’t part of the main feed. I think we referenced it before. Did we ever rerun the whole episode?

Drew Marquardt: I don’t think we have.

John: Maybe we should do that at some point when we need to.

Drew Goddard: Please don’t. Let’s go with this one.

John: Let’s briefly recap because you grew up in Los Alamos. You had a transformational experience with Olympia Dukakis upon arriving in Los Angeles.

Drew Goddard: That was actually in Santa Fe.

John: Santa Fe, all right.

Drew Goddard: I was a PA on a movie called Scattering Dad With Andy Griffith and Olympia Dukakis, and I almost bled to death on her porch. We don’t have to get into that. We can just breeze past that detail.

John: People should listen to the other episode where we go into further depth on that. Upon arriving in Los Angeles, I remember that you were working on Buffy in a period of creative crisis, and were able to contribute at a meaningful time, which is an experience which is true for myself and a lot of other people. It’s like when things are going great, sometimes it’s hard to get your way in, but you were able to help out in a pinch.

Drew Goddard: I think that’s the case. I think that in TV in particular, there’s a lot of crises. There’s a lot of crises constantly happening. I think I dropped in at a time where it was like I was young. You’re like, “Oh, I’ll stay and work 24 hours a day. This doesn’t seem strange to me. This is what I want to be doing.” I think that that has opened doors for me to learn there’s just no better experience than just doing it.

John: Absolutely. Let’s talk about the just doing it because our main topic I want to get into is beats versus scenes. Let’s talk about, what do you think about with a beat? Because there’s the outlining kind of beat, that sort of unit of story, but there’s also beats within scenes. You’re planning a story. You’re planning an adaptation of The Martian or Project Hail Mary. What is a beat when you’re talking about that level of granularity?

Drew Goddard: By the way, I’m so glad we’re talking about this because this is, not to just jump into Drew’s speeches in the writers room, but you’re going to hear what I talk about a lot because I do believe our job is to make scenes. At the end of the day, the thing that differentiates us as screenwriters are scenes. I see it a lot with young writers is they will come into writers room, and they’ll have beautiful grand ideas about what this needs to be about, what the themes are, all these wonderful things that you want from writers. At some point it will get very quiet, and one of the upper level people go, “Yes, but what’s the scene? What is the scene?”

That’s what we’re here to do, is figure out, how do we shape this scene? Jumping in, I think beats to me are just moments. My process is very much, whether it’s an adaptation or not, I tend to just start with moments that I respond to. It could be big or it could be small. It could be just, “Oh, I like when he said that thing to her.” It could be, “Oh my God, this giant story turn. I’ll put them on a board,” and I’ll just start noting them. Then at a certain point, I’ll go, “I have enough beats,” or just things that I like just to make it simple and go, “Okay, let’s start trying to put scenes together.” Then that takes a while.

Then at a certain point, I’ll go, “I have enough scenes to start thinking about structure.” It builds out. That could take, in the case of something like bad times, years. We’re describing years of my life as I would just put, “Oh, here’s a moment. All right. I don’t have no idea how these things will stitch together, but I like this.” I find myself drawn to this moment over and over.

John: When you’re talking about these moments, they could actually be pretty big. They could be set pieces. They could be sequences rather than scenes. They’re pretty big ideas. These are the big note cards on the board. To achieve the goals of that big note card, it’s a bunch of smaller moments that actually get there. Something that Sorkin talks about is that when there’s an obstacle that forces a new tactic, that’s a beat. Basically, when you see a character make a choice, make a change, do a thing, the story has changed because of this incident, that is a beat.

That’s the granular, smaller version of that. Starting from this big picture of these are the giant tentpole moments, you’re getting the smaller moments that are building up to those bigger things.

Drew Goddard: I love that. He sounds smart.

John: He does sound smart.

Drew Goddard: Sorkin or something?

John: Yes, Aaron Sorkin.

Drew Goddard: Let me jot that down.

John: With two As.

Drew Goddard: Oh, got it.

John: Seems smart. Let’s go back to the writer’s room, though, because this is where you’ll often find beats being discussed. We’re talking about beat sheets also, which is basically the very rough bullet point outline of what’s going to happen in the course of an act or a movie or a script. What are you looking for in a beat? What’s going up on the board? How much are you breaking that? How granular are you trying to get?

Drew Goddard: There’s no right answer. There’s no wrong answer. It’s like you just start shaping. Let me think. There was a Daredevil episode. Here’s a good example of how this starts. The second episode of Daredevil, which is one of the scripts I’m most proud of that I’ve done, on the board, we were just brainstorming ideas. I wrote Matt in dumpster. That’s it. That was the beat. Matt in dumpster. We go, “What is that?” I’m like, “I don’t know, but I like the idea of starting an episode early with our main character nearly beaten to death in a dumpster, and let’s just see.” That beat goes on the board. It’s not a scene yet. We don’t even know what we’re doing here. It’s just, “This sounds interesting.”

You put it on the board, and you think about it. It does start to beg the questions like, “How did he get there? What happens next? Who’s going to find him?” Now we’re starting to shape it. Now we’re starting to start asking questions that connect. “Oh, if somebody finds him, that is going to suggest the scene.” On its core level, this is how we’re building story. Really, when I’m saying, “Yes, but what’s the scene?” What I’m really saying is, “What are the actors going to do?” Because I know, having done this a long time, that’s really what this is about.
We need to figure out what are the actors going to do. You are going to be called to the carpet over and over and over about, “What are the actors going to do here?” You start to just start to build and build things around that very question.

John: It’s, what are the actors going to do? Also, where is the camera? What are we looking at? What is the sequence of events in it? We’re talking about adapting books, but I’ve written many books myself, and those books have beats in them. They don’t have scenes, per se. There’s sections where you’re in one continuous moment of time, and there’s beats that happen within them, but it’s not the same as what a screenwriter does in the sense of there being an actual scene that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, which I guess we have to define what a scene is. A scene does have a start and an end.

While it’s something that could change in the editing, it has a point of view on, “This is where we’re coming into it. This is what happens during the middle of it. This is how it exits. It should exit with a different energy than it started.” That’s the crucial fundamental thing. Your writer’s room could come up with a list of, “These are the beats,” but then you still have to transform those beats into actual scenes.

Drew Goddard: Yes. Part of it, and then to make it even more difficult, you need to make the scenes have a relation to each other. Each scene has to inform the next scene. It doesn’t have to, but it’s helpful if it does. I’m glad you brought up the visual part of it, because one of the most important things that happened to me, this was at Buffy and Angel, I turned in an early script. I think my scripts early on were very sparse description. I remember reading things like, “Don’t know, leave that to the director, leave that to the director.” I turn in the script, and Jeff Bell, who was a wonderful writer and very important to my growth, said, “Okay, but where’s the camera in this scene?”

He made me talk about where the camera is. It wasn’t in a way of direct this because we have directors, but it’s like you as the writer, I want you to think about how this is actually happening. Is it important to you in this scene what we’re focusing on? If it is, we’ve got to figure out a way to put that on the page. If it’s not, that’s okay, too. You don’t want to force it. There are places where you want to let the directors play, but if you know, “No, this is a living, breathing organism. We are making a document for 300 people to figure out how to make this show,” and your job is to direct their attention to what matters for you so that they can go be the best versions of themselves as artists. It took me a while to understand that, but I think they all tie together with what you’re talking about.

John: Going from Buffy to Angel and other early TV experiences to working on Daredevil, working on High Potential, how detailed do you like the beat planning to be? Is it a several-page beat sheet? Is it a detailed outline? What do you like before you start writing scripts?

Drew Goddard: Part of this is just my own, what works for me. Part of this is, it started on Buffy, where we would spend, if you have a pie chart of how much time a script takes, you would spend 90% working on the story and getting it, not even the outline, just getting the board to a place where you can defend every moment, and you can tell production, “Here’s what we’re doing.” What it did was it allowed you, when you started writing, to actually be more free, if that makes sense. I think there was this thought, and part of this is TV. Part of this is the grind of every 8 days you need 60 pages.

In order to do that and do that in a way that you can keep that train moving, you have to be very clear about what you’re shooting early. That got deeply instilled. There’s no better training than having to do that 22 times each year, 22 times each year, and then in Lost, you get to Lost, it’s 24 times each year. That’s an insane amount of pages, an insane amount of beats that have to become scenes. That, really, I’ve internalized that almost to a depressing degree, whereas I will work on beat sheets or outlines for years. I will do 50 because the goal for me, I don’t like to do lots of drafts. I think it’s much easier to be ruthless when it’s in beat sheet form.

John: When you don’t have sharp characters saying [crosstalk]–

Drew Goddard: You don’t have characters and you don’t have things that you fall in love, you don’t have these moments that have taken this become living and breathing. I fall in love with these things, and it’s harder for me, but when in beat sheet form, it’s like, “We’re great, we’re done. Let’s cut it, let’s try it. Let’s try this other thing.” I can be much more free creatively, and so I will do, and I force, there’s an amount of time, especially in the feature world, where they’re like, “Just do a draft, just do a draft, and let’s just start this.” I’m like, “Absolutely not.”

To me, the hardest part is we need to get to a place where we all agree what we’re doing so that then I can go be playful. If I try to be too playful too early, we’re going to end up not making something.

John: I absolutely hear that and want to protect that as an idea. I will say, to give the other side of this argument, is that sometimes you do, it’s actually writing scenes that you discover what your story is, and who the characters are. You actually hear all of it together. We had Katie Silverman on the podcast, and she was talking about how before she starts writing something, she will write a bunch of scenes with these characters that don’t have to actually fit into the movie so she knows what they are.

Drew Goddard: I do that too. I love doing that. I used to. Part of that came from TV where the job nobody wanted was, “Oh, you got to write sides. You got to write sides for the actor.”

John: Tell me about side scene for that, for casting.

Drew Goddard: For casting. If we know, and usually you have to start that process before you have a script in TV. What happens is whoever’s writing the script is not going to do the sides. They’ll say it usually gets dumped to a lower-level writer. Like, “Will you go write a three-page scene that will showcase this character in three pages?”

John: “Make sure that we’re getting the tone that we want, what it feels like.”

Drew Goddard: Exactly. Make it hard. Make it really difficult so that you can see it. In the case of almost everything I work on, make it funny and make it break your heart in three pages. Make it over and over. I got dumped on a lot as a lower-level. I grumbled about it at first, and then I started to really love it.

John: Of course. I would love that too.

Drew Goddard: Oh my God.

John: The stakes are weirdly high and low at the same time.

Drew Goddard: Once you start having fun, you can throw crazy shit in there. You’re just like, “Oh my God, a tentacle comes out of nowhere and eats the person,” because you’re never going to shoot it. It’s fun when you’re in the room. All of the bad times in the casting process for that, all of those scenes are delightful because you’re free in a way you’re never free, because you’re like, “We’re never going to shoot this. Let’s just make it fun for the room.”

John: Then the actors are always weirdly disappointed when they get the actual script. They’re like, “Wait, I think I did. I wasn’t even there.”

Drew Goddard: That was Cabin in the Woods, by the way. Cabin in the Woods. If you can imagine how crazy we went in that movie, the sides were 100 times crazier. Then they would come up, Hemsworth would be like, “What about that?” The scenes I was doing, I was so excited for that. Like, “I know we can’t do that part.”

John: It was never going to be part of. It was all, it was bait-and-switch.

Drew Goddard: That’s part of it. No, I preface this by saying there’s no right answer here. I know friends who will do 30 drafts. They will constantly be doing draft after draft and they find it that way.

John: Scott Frank overwrites, and then has to cut back down, and overwrites.

Drew Goddard: To be fair, when I’m doing the beat sheets, outlining, I’m doing a version of that. On Lost, Our outlines ran longer than the scripts, which is really hard to do.

John: That’s crazy. That’s really hard to do.

Drew Goddard: It’s really hard to do because we were still in screenplay format, but without dialogue.

John: They’re scripting?

Drew Goddard: Yes, but to go longer than the script without dialogue is insane.

John: That’s crazy. That’s wild.

Drew Goddard: That’s not something we’re proud of. You would learn be detailed is the point. When I say outline, they’re functioning as drafts.

John: You have this incredibly detailed beat sheet or outline, but there’s still a fundamental skill of going from that to, “This is really what it’s going to feel like.” I guess you’re capturing some of what it feels like in that outline, but it’s the specifics of what the characters are saying, how they’re interacting with stuff, which line comes first. Are your outlines that detailed that it’s essentially a script but in a prosy form?

Drew Goddard: Sometimes or some scenes are. If I know a scene’s really hard or very technical, I don’t want to be doing anything other than having fun when I’m writing. I will do the hard parts. If I’m like, “Oh boy, I don’t understand,” like with Project Hail Mary, the scientific concept, I don’t want to be sitting there trying to write the scene because I hand write everything. I don’t want to be sitting there trying to figure out the science part. Knowing that I’m making outlines for myself, I’m doing the work so that I don’t have to worry about that part. Like, “Oh, I better detail out the beats of this part.”

If I know the emotional point of the scene, that’s enough. Then I’ll get real simple. Like, “Oh, this is what he’s going through, this is what–” Because I know that will be fun to write, and I don’t have to worry about it. It’s really for me. By the way, we should talk, part of this is an outline for me to write as the writer. Then there’s also the part that you need to do to convince everyone to let you do this. Those are two separate things. I’m looking at it both ways. In that case, what I just described, I probably wouldn’t put all the scientific stuff in there.

If I’m doing this to get people to sign off, whether it’s our directors, whether it’s the studio, whether it’s our producers, in that case, I’m just saying, “Here’s what the story is. Let’s just walk you through the basics of the story. Here’s the point of the scene,” if that makes sense.

John: It does. It’s helping me understand something I’ve never really gotten about TV writing, and TV writing with rooms for especially network is, you do all this work to create these incredibly-detailed outlines and sheets, and then you get approvals on those, and then someone goes off to draft. It seems like going off to draft, it’s a short process and surprisingly simple. I always think, “Oh, well, to often write a draft, I must take three weeks.” It’s like, no, actually, if it was a really detailed outline, it could be incredibly quick because you know exactly what’s in there.

Drew Goddard: I wish that was true.

John: You wish that were true. Okay, yes.

Drew Goddard: Every writer that’s gone through this is mad at you for saying that right now, because, invariably, you then get it off the board, you get the outline, and then you’re sitting with that blank screen or page in front of you, and you’re like, “Oh, God, none of this works. None of this works? What was I thinking?”

John: When none of it works, is it the stuff within the scenes that’s not working or is it the flow from scene to scene to scene, or both?

Drew Goddard: Or both, or just like you start to question your own existential reason for writing this script. That happens a lot where you’re like, “Why did we think this was a good idea as a group?” Sometimes you need just the emotional support. That’s the other reason writer’s rooms are helpful of like, “No, no, no, no. We all know what it feels like to panic,” because that’s the other problem. I would get anything for reads. I think the average, Buffy was four days. Same with Lost, four days. Again, not a good way to do this. I’m not suggesting this.

One of the nice things about how we’ve moved the model from 24 episodes to 8 or 10 is you do have more time. It is the grind of being so far behind, but there’s benefits of that part, too, because you also go, “Oh, I can’t second guess it. Let’s just go.” The beats are not so much dialogue-based. As you know, dialogue’s also really hard in which you want to do it well. Then if you get into that stuff, you’re trying to shape it. No stage is easy. There’s never an easy part of the process.

John: Now, as a showrunner, you’ve had situations where you’ve figured out a whole episode on the board, you’ve transferred that down into a written document, you’ve assigned it off to a writer, and then that writer is struggling, or that writer’s having a hard time doing it. What is the conversation with that writer who’s having a hard time going from, “This works as an outline,” to, “This is working as a script,” what do you do?

Drew Goddard: I start from a place of compassion because I’ve been in that writer’s shoes. I just have the amount of times I was having a nervous breakdown. I remember early some of my showrunners saying things like, “It’s okay. You might wipe out. It’s okay. That’s why we do it this way. We do it this way so if you wipe out, we are all clear on the story, too.” Whoever’s the show writer is, “I’m clear on this too.” It takes the pressure off of, this doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, it’s not going to be perfect. In fact, there’s things that we thought we wanted that you are going to write, and by you writing them, we’re going to realize, “Oh, that’s wrong.”

John: It wasn’t necessarily their bad execution, it wasn’t a good one.

Drew Goddard: It was like, “Oh, this is what it is.” I think it’s important for writers to hear that. I do think that the fear of failure is one of the great things that stops us in our tracks and can really paralyze us as writers. By the way, as artists, with actors, too, with any of the artists, is why when I’m directing, I want to take fear of failure off the board. In fact, say, “Failure is actually a wonderful part of the process. If we’re not screwing something up, it means we’re not pushing the boundaries hard enough, we’re not trying to.” I think especially when you’re early and you haven’t worked with people before, it’s really important to let them know, “It’s okay. It’s not going to be perfect. This is really hard, what we’re doing, and we are going to get there. We’re all safety nets for each other.”

John: Advice to a staff writer who, for the first time, is taking this document and turning it into the script, how faithful should you try to be to what that was? Is it your own discovery process? When do you need to check in with the show runner if it’s something that maybe it’s not working? Or do you just try it and deliver it? What’s the best way to do it?

Drew Goddard: I think the important thing is before you go to draft, start developing the skill of trying to figure out what’s important to the show runner. Every show runner’s different, and it’s not always clear, because you also have passionate people in a writer’s room who have their own points of view of what’s important. The show runner’s the person that’s going to have to arbitrate all of this. You really want to get a sense of, “Oh, this scene is really important to the showrunner. The show runner, she’s pitched this exact line of dialogue every single time we’ve talked about this. “That line, I better put in.” “This place, she’s adrift. Let me play around here.”

That’s what you’re looking for, you’re listening in. If you’re unclear, talk to the show runner. Say, “I’m not sure about this.” Hopefully, your show runner will be able to talk through this a little bit.

John: All of this is built around the classic broadcast model where the writers were employed in a room during this entire time, and therefore have a lot more exposure to the show runner now that we’re getting onto shows that will have a 10-week development room, and then maybe another 10 weeks to actually do the thing. There’s less time around that writer to get that stuff. That must be a real challenge for getting a sense of what the showrunner wants, and needs, and how the whole thing is going to fit together and work.

Drew Goddard: It’s not ideal. It’s not. It falls upon showrunners to carve it out and do what best they can to get as much time with the writers as possible. It’s a struggle we’re all going through, but it’s crucial. It’s crucial.

John: How do you as a showrunner decide which of the writers in the room is the right person to do a given episode? Is it the one that you see that they spark most closely to, that they do it, or is it just, it’s now we’re rotating through, and it’s now this person’s turn?

Drew Goddard: It’s a little of all of the above and every show’s a little different. Part of the reason I got so much experience so quickly at Buffy is they went in the order of seniority. There’s a reason for that, is that then the seniority leaves to do an episode so that they can come back when it’s time for the younger writers in the room to be there. It cycles. What happened at Buffy was suddenly everyone either had to go off on script or had babies. Suddenly, it was just me by myself. It was like, “Oh, come to set, work with the showrunners on set, and just learn how to do this because there’s nobody else. Everyone’s gone.” I don’t know that that was ideal.

Part of it is weirdly the math of, “Well, if that person’s off on script, who’s in breaking the story? Who’s figuring that part out?” Which is in the back of your head as a showrunner, because you know as a showrunner, you’re going to get pulled 100 directions, and you need to know who’s in the room because some people are really good. It just comes with experience, frankly, at breaking story. You don’t want to abandon the younger writers in there. You can find what makes the most sense, and there’s no right or wrong answer.

John: There are, classically, some shows that they have writers on staff and they are never in a room together. They work on everything separately. There’s different ways that different shows work, and you have to understand what your show is. We’ve been talking a lot about TV, but I want to talk about features. Beats and features are just as crucial, and yet there’s not a room. It’s just you. Can we talk about The Martian, because we actually have pages from The Martian. Just available for us here. We’re looking at pages 12 through 14 of The Martian.

What’s happened in this section is the rocket has taken off without our hero, without Matt Damon. He’s announced that Mark Watney is dead. The Earth has announced that Mark Watney is dead. Then we’re back on Mars and we find that, oh, Mark Watney is not dead. He was just passed out, and is needed to go back to the base. He realizes he’s alone on Mars. Can you talk to me about your experience of reading this sequence in Andy Weir’s book? Let’s talk about what the beats were in the book. Then we can look at specifically how you’re implementing this, where the camera is in trying to tell the story.

In the book, I read Project Hail Mary, but I did not read The Martian. Is it a third person? Is it as a neutral POV on the thing, or is it all from his point of view?

Drew Goddard: All from his point of view.

John: This is very different. Even though it’s a very close third person to the movie, it’s a different experience. Tell me about reading it in the book, and then how we got here.

Drew Goddard: At least I should say, this part is all from the first part, because then it does shift as we start getting back to Earth. When I look at it, it’s funny because this was the original opening to the movie. If you look at it, what I’m trying to do is start, and this is the way the book starts, which is a guy wakes up, injured on Mars, which I always thought was delightful.

I was like, “Oh, this is a wonderful way to begin a movie,” right? If you look at this, what I’m trying to do here is find the moments, okay, he’s going to wake up, and slowly but surely, you’re trying to look at the beats of the scene. He looks down, he sees a jagged length of antenna in his abdomen, right? We’re telling a story, we’re building the mystery of what the hell happened to this guy, right? At a certain point, I realized I need some context for this, which made the previous scene necessary. I was like, “Oh, it’s too much, I’m throwing too much.”

What I need to know, the sentence that I need to, which is the end of the first scene is, “But Mark Watney is dead,” I need the audience to know that the man they’re about to meet, the world thinks is dead. I think that’s really important to this next part, because then you’re building this sort of mystery of what the hell happened, but also, I try to be emotion first and foremost, right?

I want the audience to understand just how lonely this man’s about to become, because, it’s one thing to survive on the planet, it’s another thing that the world doesn’t know you’re alive yet. I feel like that was a crucial part of this movie.

John: You had to backfill and to get up to like, well, how do you actually get to that press conference? They actually need to see the sequence, so we need to spend tens of millions of dollars for this whole sequence of the escape from Mars and why he’s left.

Drew Goddard: What we did, that sequence was in the middle of the movie. That sequence was in the middle.

John: You’re saying that this sequence was originally in the middle of the movie in your early drafts or in early things you handed into people?

Drew Goddard: No, all the way through shooting.

John: Oh, wow, crazy.

Drew Goddard: All the way through shooting, including the first couple cuts. This sequence was in the middle of the movie. The sequence that showed what happened to Mark before was in the middle of the movie, and it was delightful. There was a building of like, “Oh, I want to see what happened.” “Oh, we’re finally going to show you what happened,” and it worked. Then Ridley at some point calls me and he says, “You’re going to hate this.” Because we had talked about this a lot. He’s like, “Can I just show you a cut of the movie where we moved that before?”

He was really nice because he wasn’t sure himself. It wasn’t like he was demanding. He was like, “Well, you just watch. Let’s just watch and see.” I was grumbling thinking this is not going to work for all these reasons. It’s going to ruin all this beautiful tension I have created. Then we watched it and I was like, “Oh, it’s better. It’s just better.” You just felt it. You’re like, “Oh, I like this.”

John: By the way, the reveal of things later on, of course, the movies, is what you end up doing in Project Hail Mary so successfully. The whole movie is built around that, which is not the mystery engine of this. The mystery engine of Hail Mary is, why is he there by himself in space? Getting to that point is built up throughout the whole course of the movie. This was a one-off.

Drew Goddard: It’s a good lesson of nothing ever really dies. If I can’t do something in one place, it’ll work its way back in. If I really want to try something like that, and we definitely found our places in Hail Mary.

John: Yes. The writing and the sequence is great. The reason why I picked this is because there’s essentially no dialogue. It’s a great way to show like, “Oh, scenes are not just dialogue. Scenes are what characters are doing, the obstacles, the challenges, and how they move past, the choices that they make.” We are seeing him wake up on the surface of Mars, realize that this piece of antenna is piercing his spacesuit, getting back to the airlock into the base, trying to treat his wound, and realizing, “Oh, crap, I am alone,” and then we smash cut to the title, The Martian.

Drew Goddard: It means a lot. You say that it’s fun looking at this, because I do take scenes seriously when there’s no dialogue in them. I really feel like that’s one of the things that separates good from great in screenplays because nobody wants to read blocks of texts. There’s something in your brain, especially in a screenplay form, that you’re used to how quickly it moves. I work, even just looking at this now, which I haven’t looked at in 10 years.

John: It’s well done. There’s a reason why you should have gotten an Oscar nomination for it, and you did.

Drew Goddard: Bless you, John. If people are trying to learn, without even reading the words, you can sit back and look at the page and see, “Oh, there’s dense words in certain parts, we’re taking space,” and those words are, “Here’s the character’s name, here’s the thing the person’s going through.” I’m using italics sparsely.

John: You’re using italics, though, just to show what the internal mental state is. The thing that we could see as an audience, we could register that on his face, but you need to stick it there on the page that as a reader, we get it.

Drew Goddard: If you look, what I’m trying to do is actually make the reader complicit in this. I’m trying to make the reader the main character. These are the main character’s thoughts when I’m going into italics that are, in some cases, that are putting you in his place, which I find is very effective, especially if you’re trying to get people on board doing this. Something that, long sequences without dialogue, it really helps to have a point of view.

John: Things like, on page 13, in parentheses, this is not exactly going to be easy to watch. Yes, and that’s true. Again, you’re complicit, you’re saying, “We’re going to get through this together,” and there’s a point of view and a purpose. Drew Goddard, are you still a double-spacer?

Drew Goddard: Oh, yes.

John: Oh, yes, you haven’t changed.

Drew Goddard: Oh, I will, until the day I die. How much do you want to hear my rant?

John: Tell me your rant, because I was a double-spacer, I switched back, but tell me your argument for maintaining double-spaces. In the light of all rationality.

Drew Goddard: Great. I will be happy to go down as well.

John: Let’s start with the screenplay form. The screenplay form is ridiculous. Take a moment and realize that the screenplay form is something that was designed because of typewriters, and how quickly that we could use typewriters, and how quickly you do revision pages. One of the nice benefits of the form that came to be is that, in general, one page equals about a minute of screen time.

John: Yes, the roughest approximation, but useful.

Drew Goddard: It’s crazy how close it comes. In most scripts, you’re not that far off. Now, each page might be way off, but in the aggregate–

John: Most scripts are about 120 pages or about 2 hours long.

Drew Goddard: Yes, and I’ve found that shocking, because I’ve written wildly different forms of scripts, whether it’s straight comedy, or hardcore action, or whatever it is, end up at the same place, which I find incredibly useful. I find it incredibly useful to understand when you’re getting into the budgeting phase, when you’re getting into the directing phase, when you’re getting into time management phase, it’s really helpful to know how long this scene is going to be. For me, why are we changing this? It’s arbitrarily because people don’t text that way. Yes, people don’t write in Courier.

Also, I’m a believer that the negative space on a page is almost as important as the positive space on a page. I believe that if the goal is to be helping your reader through an artistic experience, the negative space on a page is a wonderful weapon at your disposal. Why would you want to crush that weapon? Why would you? Let it flow. I understand we’ll all knife fight. I also understand I’m probably the last person on the hill. If you want to see Drew lose his mind, there was points that we could talk about Hail Mary. There was parts when Chris and Phil would write, our directors would write scenes, and single-spacer, and you would look at it, and they would put the single spaces in the middle, which is the worst defense. At the very least, if you’re going to force it–

John: If you’re going to rewrite me, you should at least double-space it.

Drew Goddard: Or make it all single-spaced, and I will be ashamed. To jump back and forth is the most egregious in a script. To read a script that you’re doing both, we should all be shot.

John: There have been cases where I’ve come in to do cabinetry work in a script where basically I’m not changing, but I’m just doing some certain scenes, and I will try to match the style of whatever was there, including double-spacing or just the difference between double dash and dot, dot, dot. I will do what the thing is just so it actually reads like the thing. That said, if I’m doing a page one rewrite on thing, I’m searching for double spaces and breaking them down to one space because that’s just where I’m at now.

Drew Goddard: I respect that. I do the same, by the way. You and I do a lot of script doctoring. I want to be respectful, but I will start by talking to the writer and saying, “Are you sure? Because if you don’t feel strongly, let’s try it this other way. If you feel strongly, we will go with your version.”

John: That’s great. Let’s talk about Project Hail Mary because it’s just fantastic. Andy Weir has written a new novel. At what point does it cross your transom? When do you start having the conversation like, “Hey, maybe Drew Goddard should adopt this movie since he did such a great job the last time?”

Drew Goddard: Andy and I have stayed in contact just in life since The Martian, but that’s 10 years ago now, right? I actually remember the date because it was so clear. It was April Fool’s Day, so April 1st, 2020. Two weeks after the pandemic shut everything down, world sky is falling. We are in full.

John: It’s not clear that civilization will survive.

Drew Goddard: It really feels that way. Andy texts me and goes, “I don’t know how you’re doing, but I did just finish a new novel. Do you want to read it?” I’m like, “Andy, I’m trying to find groceries right now. No.” He’s like, “Come on.” I’m like, “Of course, I do want to read it.” I also was like, “Are you messing with me on April Fool’s Day because that’s not–”

John: Yes, not cool.

Drew Goddard: He was like, “No, it’s lovely. I’m really proud of it. Would you read it?”

John: Had he told you anything about it before?

Drew Goddard: No. He probably would have if I’d pressed, but I tend to not press writers when they’re in the middle of writing unless they want to open up. I’d love to, but I also know give it space to be nurtured. I didn’t know anything. I prefer that, especially if it’s something that I may want to work on. It’s better so I can have a clean experience. Then he said, “Ryan Gosling is already attached.”

John: Oh. How that happened?

Drew Goddard: Andy’s at CAA. I think CAA sort of put it together. Those are the two pieces I knew.

John: He’s ideal casting. Also, it’s a weird situation to come in with just that piece.

Drew Goddard: Luckily, yes. If it’s in the list of weird situations, that’s a weird situation you want, right? Great. I was also insanely busy with other things. I thought, “There’s no way I’m going to be able to just life-wise, I’m not going to be able to do this,” which I gently tried to tell him because I knew, I’m like, “If you’ve got Ryan Gosling, you guys are going to go. You’re going to be shooting soon, and I’m not the person to be shooting soon right now just because of life.” He said, “We’re going to wait. If you do it, we’ll wait.” He was very sweet about that.

I said, “Well, don’t do that. I’m not going to let you do that.” He said, “Well, will you just read it?” Then I read it. When I’m reading something that I might do, I don’t know if you’re this way, John, I’m constantly looking for ways out.

John: 100%. Absolutely. Oh, this is there, yes.

Drew Goddard: I’m looking all the reasons to not do this, because I know, especially if it’s people I’ve worked with that I don’t want to let down. I’m like, “I want to do a good job for you,” so I’m looking for all the ways I’m about to do a bad job for them. I’m reading it and talking myself out of it, trying to be like, because quite honestly, this book is a screenwriter’s nightmare. It’s a screenwriter’s nightmare, and we’re going to get to that in a second.

John: I read the book well before I saw your movie. I was reading and thinking like, “Oh, Drew easily has this.” Yes, it’s challenging, but it’s not impossible. The reason why I want to talk about beats versus scenes is because the beats of the book are the beats of the movie. It’s just like the challenge is how do you actually implement them, and the fundamental decisions you’re making in terms of how close you’re sticking to his POV, and how to get out of his head. I’m sure as you were reading that, you were thinking like, “This is all inside his mind.”

Drew Goddard: It’s all inside his mind. Then when you finally– All right, let me tell you, I disagree with you passionately that it’s going to be easy.

John: All right. Great.

Drew Goddard: I also knew everyone else that this to me all the time. “It’s going to be so easy for you it’s like The Martian.” I’m like, “It’s not. The Martian–” It’s surfacely like The Martian, but where it becomes wildly different, you have a disaster movie where the threat, the disaster is microbial, so I have to get into microbiology to help an audience.

John: You have a lot of good text from the book that can be incorporated into his drylands figuring out what’s going on.

Drew Goddard: Yes, but you try to make it visually interesting.

John: I’m sorry.

Drew Goddard: Try to do that part. Yes, try to shape it. Okay, that’s step one. Step two, most of it takes place in a narrator’s head who does not know what’s going on. Not only do you not have someone to talk to, he actually doesn’t know what’s going on, which is challenging.

John: Yes, but fundamentally, there’s a second character.

Drew Goddard: Great. I’m glad you brought up that second character. That second character is a rock who speaks in whale songs. He speaks only in whale songs, and he’s a rock, and he’s delightful. Don’t get me wrong. You realize these are challenges when going back to scenes. You’re like, I have an actor.

John: Every crisis is an opportunity. I’m sorry. I’m going to sell you on adapting this book.

Drew Goddard: It’s true. I said yes for the reasons that you’re saying, but I also knew this is going to be way harder than everyone realizes, because when you read it, it moves, but once you sit and go, “Wait, what’s the scene? What is the scene?”

John: “What is the scene?” That is the challenge.

Drew Goddard: That’s where you go, “Oh my God, I’m screwed.”

John: Yes. You had to make fundamental decisions. Reading the book and then watching the movie, a lot of the choices he made were the choices that I also saw in my head, but the actual nature of the ship itself is much different because you needed to create physical spaces that would enable you to have individual scenes and moments in development, and to get out of just his head so he can have physical challenges to get through to demonstrate what the emotional, intellectual puzzle he’s trying to face is.

Drew Goddard: Yes, exactly. Part of this is also your job is not just, I got to make a scene that Ryan Gosling wants to act in. I need to make a scene that my directors are going to want to direct. I need to make a scene that the production designer is going to want to design. [crosstalk] That’s in a good way. That forces you to go, “Okay, let’s think about the room. Let’s think about the space that we’re in. Let’s actually be in this.”

John: Yes, the spaces are bigger than I would have expected them to be, which is completely appropriate.

Drew Goddard: To be fair, that’s the directors, also like, that’s Chris and Phil, because what you’re describing is expensive. I’m like, “I’m not handing you something that’s going to drive the budget through the roof.” They’re like, “We got that covered. We’re going to drive the budget through the roof.”

John: They can handle it all by themselves.

Drew Goddard: Then, to their credit, I watched the movie, and I’m like, “I have no idea how human beings made this.” It is a stunning [unintelligible 00:40:34] production design. It is unbelievable. It was scary. What we’re really describing is my own fear of myself failing. Going back to fear of failure, I didn’t want to fail for Andy. I didn’t want to fail for Andy above all else.

John: You read the book, you have all your excuses for why you’re not going to do it, and then how did the yes come–

Drew Goddard: No. Two-thirds of the way through the book, something happens that made me sit up. I don’t want to spoil it for people, but you will know it. You will know because it will be the thing that you have not seen done yet. At least, we can compare notes later. I don’t remember it happening. I sat up and went, “Oh my God.” There’s four or five of those things in the movie. There’s one in particular that made me go, “Oh, all of the hardships that we are describing actually is set up for the thing that happens.” All of the reasons that I’m complaining as I’m reading this book, I go, “Oh my God, this is what’s going to make this movie transcend,” from my point of view.

A couple of things I do when I finish the book like that, that I’m actually thinking of doing, I quickly write down the 5 or 10 beats that I think that I love more than anything, that are the things. I write them down. I put them in giant font on my wall before I speak to anyone because I know at some point, all of these things are going to come under siege, all of them. Also, not just the outside world, not just people working on the film, not just executives, not just– also by me because you do start to second-guess everything in the course of making a movie. I kept looking at that.

One of those things that I describe is on that wall, which we don’t have to get into that part, but there’s a lot of fights about that. There’s a lot of fights. Anything that’s bold and different, I promise you somebody wanted to cut along the way. You have to remember, “Oh, but when I first read it, that’s why I wanted to do it.”

John: Watching the movie, you can say it’s long, but it’s really this full length. It does the whole thing, and it’s an entire experience. Luckily, I think we’ve become more appreciative of long movies that work really well. They don’t feel long because it’s always exciting and always invigorating. The Marvel movies, to some degree, are probably part of the reason why we’ve been trained to take longer movies, which is great.

You get all of the book in there. As I was watching through it, it’s like, “Oh, what did they actually cut?” The cuts are so smart and so surgical. They’re generally things that a reader of a book who has all the time in the world and all the pages in the world can sort of like, “Oh, that’s an interesting thing about how we paved the deserts of the Sahara.” It doesn’t affect the stakes of the movie that we’re watching. That was good, and it was crucial. There’s reasons to go back to Earth, and there’s reasons not to go back to Earth. You basically chose not to go back to Earth when we didn’t need to anymore.

Drew Goddard: Having done this a lot, the thing that every time I’m working with a new novelist, I have to gently say, “Page count-wise, I have room for about 5% of your novel.” We all have to make peace with that and figure out what are we going to use? You know going in that you’re going to have to do some brutal cuts that are going to hurt. If you love the book like I love the book, it’s going to hurt me more than anyone.

One of the things on that list of 10, at one point—and we’ll just talk about it because it’s not in the movie—was they make a decision to nuke the polar ice caps. It’s wonderful. I loved it, and I thought it was the one thing on the list that’s not in the movie because we all were like, “Let’s try to–” but when you went to what is the scene for that, there’s no version of seeing that quickly. If you want to do it correctly, you have to set up what is the problem, what are we trying to solve, why is this the correct solution. You can’t just say, “And then we nuke the polar ice caps.”

John: In a 10-episode series, it absolutely makes sense. In a three-hour movie, it does not make sense at all.

Drew Goddard: It’s an [unintelligible 00:44:26] end sell. It was a late cut. Even after we had shot it, we were still trying to be like, “Can we try? Let’s try. Let’s mock it up.”

John: Yes, “Let’s nuke the ice caps.”

Drew Goddard: This is a credit to Chris and Phil, our directors. They are not afraid of anything. They were like, “Oh, we’ve already shot a full movie. Great. We can still nuke–” They’ve been right. It’s been wonderful working with them because they come from animation.

John: They’re used to it.

Drew Goddard: They’re like, “If the idea is good, we’re going to figure it out.” There’s something thrilling about that. We tried, but part of it, it’s the scene. You couldn’t figure out what the scene was that could do efficiently.

John: Who’s POV are you in? Ryland doesn’t really make sense for it.

Drew Goddard: No.

John: Sandra Hüller’s-

Drew Goddard: Character could do it, but–

John: -could do it, but what I like about what you do in the movie is that her character exists for how she interacts with Ryan Gosling’s character. That’s the relationship.

Drew Goddard: When you’re setting out to adapt something, you’re going to make a ton of cuts. You need a defining principle. I, very quickly, not that this is deep, but it’s important to say it. You’re like, this movie is about Grace and Rocky. That’s what this movie is about. Every scene needs to be in service, even if neither of those characters are in it. It’s on the B side, on the space side. Then it’s about Stratt and Grace on the A side. That triangle is telling the same story. It comes together. Do you understand?

John: Trust, yes.

Drew Goddard: Yes. Sacrifice and what this means, and what the bigger purpose of life is. When you think about it like that, it’s like, “Oh, yes, every scene is on theme between that.” When you start to divert from theme, it ends up on that cutting room floor.

John: Yes. You’ve decided to say yes. What is your internal process for coming up with an outline? Are you sharing that with anybody else? Is that just yours? What was that process for you?

Drew Goddard: Before I say yes, I like to come up with a very simple beat cheat of like, “Okay, do I think there’s a movie here that I can see?” Even if I don’t have the answers, is there enough that I go, “Okay, I don’t want to disappoint anyone. I want people to know, okay, it’s going to be hard, but we’re going to figure it–” I’ll do a very rough beat cheat only for myself before I even engage. It’s very, like, “In this 30 pages, this happens. In this 30 pages, this happens. In this 30–” It sort of [unintelligible 00:46:40]. It’s not thought through. It’s more what happens every 15 quite often.

John: If it was a road trip, what it is you’re going to stop at on the way?

Drew Goddard: What’s great about Andy is he does have a wonderful sense of structure. He really does. It’s one of the things I respond to so strongly in his writing. There is an inherent structure in what he does.

John: Cliffhanger after cliffhanger after cliffhanger, which is what pulls you through the book so quickly.

Drew Goddard: Exactly. It makes all of the problems we were just talking about easier because you know, “Okay, we can build to these things.” I do that. Then at that point, Chris and Phil were on to direct. Chris and Phil, we’ve been friends for two decades now. We’ve had parallel careers. We both started in TV. They were doing Jump Street when I was doing Cabin in the Woods. We have always been fans of each other and trying to find things to do. That was thrilling, but I also knew our processes could not be more different. They are very much when we’re talking about–

John: They’re jazz. Is there–

Drew Goddard: They are. It comes from animation, and it works really well for them. Whereas it’s not measured twice, cut once; it’s measured 20 times, cut once. They’re, “Why are we measuring? Let’s just cut, cut, cut. We’ll just keep packing away and building something.” I was kind of excited because I knew it was important to try a different process. It was important for me as an artist, when I respect the other artists, to say, “Oh, let’s give this a try. Let’s see how this works.” I think they probably felt the same. I knew, “We need to talk about this now. We need to talk about what this is because we have very different process.”

What I said to them was, “I don’t want my process to stop you from your process. I think the way to do that is let me hyper-focus on structure. If I hyper-focus on structure so that we know this is when this needs to happen, this is the rough structure of the movie, and we can agree on it, you guys can go crazy. You guys can have so much fun.”

John: To paint within the lines here.

Drew Goddard: Yes, “Have fun. I want that, but let’s start with structure.” Those conversations were crucial because then, as I’m doing outline after outline, the goal is to say, “Let’s find a structure that we can be playful inside of.” That is what’s on the screen. We’ve moved scenes around here and there, but if you look at the big arcs of the things, it’s like we have not deviated that much from the initial outlines.

John: Yes. The movie is funny and funny in ways that you wouldn’t necessarily expect, given the stakes of everything that’s happening. That’s because I think you have both a very strong backbone for everything and then a lot of moments for the natural comedy that comes up that I’m sure some of it was scripted, but some of it was just finding in the moments that can absolutely play.

Drew Goddard: Without question. I’ve learned from doing comedy and drama,-

John: The intersections.

Drew Goddard: -if the scene does not have a dramatic reason to exist, it’s okay. You can sometimes have diversions that are purely comedic, but it’s really helpful if they have a reason to do both.

John: Going back to the beat and scene description, it’s like that beat that it just has a bunch of funny banter; it’s not really a beat. It’s not a thing that happens. Nothing changed over the course of it. It’s very unlikely it’s going to first survive the outline stage, but then actually survive the edit. Because it can go away, so therefore it will go away.

Drew Goddard: Especially on something like Hail Mary, where screen time is a premium. You’re constantly having to look at, “I need to do exposition in this scene, I need to do emotional growth in this scene, I need to drive the story forward, I need to explain what the hell’s happening with the science.” You can’t do each one of those scenes on their own. All of the scenes have to be doing a version of that, for the most part.

You realize what starts to happen as we got into it is Drew became the internal clock of, “Do we have the page count?” which I try not to do, but at a certain point, you’re like, “It’s going to really hurt us later in the editing room if we don’t have a structure here.”

John: Congratulations again on the movie. It’s just so, so good.

Drew Goddard: It’s a joy to talk to you, John. It really is. Thank you for having me.

John: We have a listener question here, I think might be really good from Carlos.

Drew Marquardt: “I’m currently working on a pilot. I’ve organized a schedule that requires me to write a specific number of scenes per day, two to three tops, in order to meet the deadline. However, I find it hard to give my brain a rest in between writing sit-downs. Sometimes after an hour or two of writing, I find myself too mentally drained to start the next scene, even though I know what happens in it. Do you have any advice on activities that could help disconnect and recharge the brain battery effectively?”

Drew Goddard: I do.

John: Yes, please go. Go for it.

Drew Goddard: This is a great question. When Twin Peaks: The Return came out, there’s an eighth episode that’s all in black and white, and it’s exquisite. Have you seen it?

John: I haven’t anything.

Drew Goddard: It’s exquisite. I highly recommend it. It’s so bonkers that it made me go, “Whatever David Lynch does, I want to see what he does,” and I started doing meditation. It’s the thing that made me go, “Let me try meditation. Let me see–” I’m not super new-agey, but I was like, “Let me understand how this works.” What works for me is it calms the nervous system. It does exactly the thing that you’re describing, Carlos, which is how do you turn your brain off for a second? The other thing that works is walks. I’m a big fan of walks.

John: Yes, I was going to say walk would be the right choice.

Drew Goddard: Put the pen down, stop writing, just take a walk, and build that into your process because what will happen is those things will become the reward for the writing. Both of those things really help me.

John: Great. Yes. Walks, showers, anything to get you out of your–

Drew Goddard: Showers. I mean showers, especially in the age of smartphones. They were always important. I know this Aaron Sorkin of which you speak; he also talks a lot about showers, and there’s a reason, because it’s forcing you to be bored. That’s the other thing you’re looking for, is: it’s so hard to be bored right now in our world, and you have to force yourself to find ways to do it.

John: The other thing to remember is just like Carlos says, after two hours of writing, I sort of came to the next thing. It’s like, “Yes, because you were working really, really hard. If you were digging a ditch for two hours, you would know that you had to take a break. Your muscles would tell you you have to take a break. Your brain is telling you have to take a break.” Yes, it’s the right instinct to go do something else.

Drew Goddard: It’s a thing I don’t think people who are not writers understand, that it is grueling. There is a fatigue that sets in. By the time I’m finished with any script, I do feel like I’ve run a marathon, I do. I always talk about those videos of runners whose legs stop working just as they’re getting to the finish line. That is how I feel when I get to the end of every single script.

John: Yes, for sure. Let’s try this question from James:

Drew Marquardt: “My friend Simon and I had the same idea for a movie and decided to team up and write it. Because we have jobs, it took us two years to write the first draft. After Simon went through some personal issues as well as losing some interest in the project, we agreed that I take control of the rewrite. I was happy about that, as I thought we’d struggle to have a succinct tone and voice as a pair anyway.

I’m aware that legally this script will always be written by James and Simon, and I’ve no intention of cutting him out of anything, but by the time I will have finished the rewrite, I’ll have probably rewritten 95% of the screenplay. When we start entering competitions or shopping it around, how can I position myself as the writer who has really made it what it is, even though the characters and story were a 50-50 effort?

It’s not about money; I just want to be recognized as the person who’s put the extra hours in to get the screenplay where it is.”

John: Wow. It’s a group project, and somebody did most of the work in a group project. That’s the reality of it, and that it’s probably always going to be true. There’s never a partnership that is equal 50-50. This was not a good partnership. You probably should not write another thing with this person.”

Drew Goddard: I think that’s right. To answer your question, if you really want the credit, you need to write something else on your own if that’s what you’re seeking. Even in the best of times, it’s probably not going to happen, nor should it.

John: All right. It is time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing is Kalina, K-A-L-I-N-A, which is the last name of Noah Kalina, who is a photographer in upstate New York; he mostly does landscapes. He has this series called Kalina on YouTube, which is a bunch of video wallpapers of just video from upstate New York, forests, mostly, that are so amazing and meditative and just quiet and wonderful. You should watch them on the biggest screen you can.

If you have the YouTube TV app for your Apple TV or whatever, put them on a big screen and just watch them there. They’re, I think, better than the Apple screensavers because they are, lots of times you’re in a forest, and you’re just watching him walk around taking photos, but it’s just one still shot. You hear the forest. It is great. Sometimes it’s snow, sometimes it’s rain.

Drew Goddard: Wait, say it again. That sounds fantastic.

John: Kalina, K-A-L-I-N-A. Noah also has a newsletter that’s great, also. You may have actually seen him once before because he was one of those first photographers who was taking a photo of himself every day, and it stacked up. You can see going from 20s to 50 or whatever, and just what time does to a person. His nature photography is incredible, and to have it as video is just an absolute gift. Just free on YouTube. Often, we’ll be watching a show and then when we’re done watching a show, when we’re not quite ready to go to bed, he pops that up on the TV. It’s delightful.

Drew Goddard: Sounds fantastic. Great.

John: Drew, what do you got for us?

Drew Goddard: I think teachers have been on my mind because this movie is about teachers saving the world. My mom’s a teacher. She’s been teaching for 50-plus years. I love teachers. I would not be where I am without teachers. Since we’re talking about screenwriting, the most important thing that happened to me in my career is that I arrived at the University of Colorado at the exact same time that Lucia Berlin, the author, showed up to start teaching. We found each other. She was the person who believed in me, and she was the person that said, “I’m going to spend the next three years with you. We’re going to do this together.”

She was doing it with lots of other students, too, but we really had a connection. She changed me as an artist and as a person. I think because this is on my mind, I’ve been rereading her short stories. I cannot recommend them more highly. I think especially if you like the sort of stuff I do, which is big in genre, it’s not that, and yet you will see the influence. A good place to start, her short stories got repackaged around 2015, and she finally exploded. She’s been dead for a while, so she didn’t get to see this. It would delight her. Start with any of them, quite frankly, but A Manual for Cleaning Women.

John: I’ve heard of that, yes.

Drew Goddard: It’s exquisite. I can’t recommend it more highly.

John: Lucia Berlin?

Drew Goddard: Lucia Berlin.

John: Great. Fantastic.

Drew Goddard: Great.

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

The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. We’ll give you a Scriptnotes book while you’re here. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram: @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts, hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers.

You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes, including Drew Goddard’s back episode, and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on television. Drew Goddard, an absolute pleasure chatting with you about film and TV and your incredible movie.

Drew Goddard: John, it has been an absolute pleasure. I hope we get to do it again.

John: Hooray.

[Outro – by Nick Moore]

John: All right. Drew Goddard, we’ve talked about some television over the course of this thing, but mostly about putting stuff up on boards and figuring that out. I want to talk more about TV overall, because in addition to everything else you’ve done, you adapted a French series into High Potential, which is one of the few breakout broadcast shows over the past few years. How optimistic are you about TV in general? How do you feel about TV at this moment? What’s possible? What’s good? What are you seeing?

Drew Goddard: I suppose I’m perpetually optimistic, even knowing there are dark skies above us, if that makes sense. I remember, and part of this is just coming from New Mexico, coming from a small town, not understanding the business at all. When I got here in the late ’90s, everyone was saying, “Oh, it’s a terrible time. It’s a terrible time. It’s not like it used to be.” I was like, “But I just got here. We work in Hollywood.

There’s elephants walking down this set. What are you talking about? Let’s go and enjoy this.” I think that’s always stuck with me. I do think every time period has challenges, and we are definitely in a time period of challenges, but also, what are we supposed to do? Give up? Let’s keep making stuff. Right now, they want to make it, so let’s start shooting. That tends to be my approach of, “Can we shoot something? Let’s go shoot something.”

John: High Potential was a pilot.

Drew Goddard: Yes.

John: It’s a very classical model because you think, “Oh, you just go straight to series and stuff like that,” but you wrote a pilot, they shot a pilot, and we had friends in common who worked on the show originally, so yes.

Drew Goddard: Look, I think I’m a contrarian by nature. When I first got out here, the only thing people were making was CSIs and versions of that. I was like, “No, I want to go work with Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams. J.J., he’s only doing this alias thing. Nobody really wants it because there’s serialization, and we hate serialization here in Hollywood. I was like, “Yes, but I want to write that. That sounds fun,” and that guided my career.

Then what happened was suddenly everything swung. TV became an eight-episode series that probably have been three episodes that we’ve just stretched out. I like episodes. I like beginnings, middles, and ends. Even when something is highly serialized. When I think back on the television that has moved me, I think in terms of episodes. Like, it’s Jose Chung’s From Outer Space in The X-Files. It’s every episode of The Sopranos, if we’re being honest. We could just go down the list. It’s The Body from Buffy. I love episodes.

I was like, “Wait, hang on. We’ve over-corrected here.” There’s something about this art form that I like. I do like broadcast. I don’t like the part of broadcast that makes it impossible to see your family.

John: Yes, the meat grinder of it all.

Drew Goddard: I thought, “Oh, I can create this as a concept.” The French version—I’m always looking to say no. We talked about this—when I saw it, I was like, “Oh, this feels special. This feels like a voice that is needed right now. A single mom speaking truth to power feels like something that we need right now. Maybe I can help Trojan horse it.”

John: Well, it’s also a very clear engine, which is basically, every week, it is a case of the week kind of thing with a different protagonist at the center of it. It feels very doable. Also, let’s talk about the sustainability of it. You wrote it, and there was a star attached who was like, “I need to stay in Los Angeles.” It’s designed for a star who’s going to stay in Los Angeles, a show that would shoot in Los Angeles. Those feel like fundamentally good choices.

Drew Goddard: I realized this before our studio and network, which is the main character’s a mom. That suggests a certain age range. They want somebody who’s a known quantity. In that age range, asking somebody to then go drop everything and move to Budapest or wherever the tax break is right now, it’s not going to happen when you’re trying to do this many episodes. Our only hope of finding a name is to say, “I can get you home to your kids. I can make your life good.”

I said, “We’re looking for two places, New York and Los Angeles. You guys need to come to peace with that because you’re going to hope we can find some actress that will be like, ‘Sure, I’ll move to Toronto.’ It’s not going to happen. It’s just not.” That’s what we said to Kaitlin Olson. She was like, “I don’t want to do this.” I’m like, “I understand. I get why you don’t want to do this, but let’s talk about how we can do this in a way that actually will be delightful to your life,” because that’s how it used to be.

That was Buffy. We shot here. We shot [unintelligible 01:03:29] here. We shot all of my first shows until Lost, which you couldn’t shoot here. There is a joy and an efficiency to being here that I don’t think the studios fully understand. I was like, “This is a show that lends itself to the processes of the days of old. I actually want to shoot a pilot because you learn a lot from shooting a pilot. I actually want to do these things.” There was a reason we did these things. It wasn’t arbitrary. It gave you opportunity to make the best product possible. Not everything needs it, but this one did.

I’m glad to hear you talk about story engine because I think that is the single biggest mistake young writers make. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read pilots that are very good pilots that I read, and I go, “There’s no story engine here. What you’re really writing is a longer feature.” That’s fine. I know there’s lots of wonderful six-episode shows that have been wonderful. If that’s what you want to do, fantastic. I’m always like, “Don’t tell me what Episode 1 is. I need to know what Episode 50 is.” Not in the plot of Episode 50, but where are we? I’ve been a person that’s had to sit in those rooms and go, “How are we ever going to get to this?” You realize the importance of where is the story coming from.

John: There’s a project I’m working on where I wrote, it’s a very premise-y pilot. It’s starting up the things, but then when you actually have the conversations with buyers, you have to say, “This is Episode 2,” because you have to explain, “This is what you expect to happen over the course of a normal episode.” That’s fine. Lost is a premise pilot. You have to explain, “Episode 2 is crucial for this is the kind of thing that happens in a normal episode of Lost.”

Drew Goddard: I believe that Episode twos are the hardest episodes. You can look at most shows. I’m in awe when people do Episode twos well. If you can look at Breaking Bad as a phenomenal Episode 2, they’re really hard to do for the exact reason that you’re talking about. They usually derail everything, if we’re being honest, for a while. In most shows, you learn, “We got to spend extra time on Episode 2.”

John: Yes. It’s always so fun to see, like, the set completely changed from Episode 1 to Episode 2, because I didn’t actually figure out–

Drew Goddard: Yes.

John: That happened to you, too. Yes.

Drew Goddard: We shot in Vancouver, and then we’re here, and so it changed.

John: Tell me about High Potential. You wanted to do this adaptation of this French show. You wrote the pilot, but you didn’t direct it, and you weren’t going to be a showrunner there. How do you make the decision to, like, “Okay, I want this to exist, but I don’t want this to become my life”? Is that really what–

Drew Goddard: That factors into it. That’s part of the equation, but it’s not the only equation. I also really like collaboration. You can look at my career. I am not a person that’s just secretly always wanted to direct, and bitter about it. There’s times I really want to direct. There’s stories that I feel like I’m the best person to direct, and then there’s times where I’m like, “I am not the best person,” and it’s delightful to work with other people. I enjoy that tremendously. I think that’s hard for people to understand, where I go, “No, no, I enjoy being this screenwriter. Right now, I enjoy that part and let you be the director, and I can support you.”

In the case of High Potential, I was like, “Oh, no, Alethea should direct this.” Alethea directed our pilot. She’s better than me at this. For this project, she is better at this. The same goes with showrunner, I knew very quickly, “This show, I’m going to try to start deconstructing the show.” I will start to get bored.

John: You’ll get bored, yes.

Drew Goddard: On a plot level, on a character level, I will start to be like, “And all of these characters by episode 18, they’re going to end up dead, and that’s not what we should do here. I don’t think that’s–“

John: Because you have meta-exploration of what it means to be a procedural showrunner.

Drew Goddard: I don’t want that. I actually think that it’s going to require a resolve of a different time, and part of that resolve is saying, “Drew shouldn’t be the person doing this.” I can be helpful with all of the other parts, but I don’t need to be. It’s fun. It’s fun to not be the showrunner. I’ve done that too, and I enjoy that, too. Every project has its own; it’s like you’re building a combination of what’s the best thing, and I’m lucky that I get to choose.

John: There are more pilot shooting this year than last year, and there’s also longer episode orders coming through, which seems like a promising development. I don’t know that we’re going to get more series to happen, but if we can get more episodes, it’s not just more work, but it’s also just more sustainable.

Drew Goddard: I hope, and this is going to sound cynical. I don’t mean it as cynical, but what I hope is studios are going to remember that this is wildly profitable. I think part of the problem with four/six-episode seasons is it was hard for studios to make profit on that. I don’t care. Studios meant to be clear, I don’t care. I care in the sense that if it’s profitable, they’re going to let us keep making more stuff, and they’re going to let me hire more people, and we’re going to get to do this. These things build on each other. I think we over-corrected as an industry as we were trying to get people to sign up for Screamers. That’s stopped, and now you’re remembering, “Oh, no, the longer this goes, the more profit there is,” and I think that’s helpful for all of us.

John: What recent series have gotten you most excited? What series are you watching that you didn’t create that you’re like, “Oh, wow, that’s a show”?

Drew Goddard: Again, I’m not saying anything that we don’t know, but Succession, I thought, is the show that I go back to. I’ve been rereading the scripts and looking what Jesse and his writing staff did, and I’m in awe of the writing. If you really want to study writing, study Jesse’s scripts. Jesse is really operating at a level right now that I find very profound. Even though obviously showered with Emmys, I still don’t know that people realize how much he’s writing about at the time, and seeing that move forward. It’s good when I’m looking at the scripts and wanting to reread the scripts. That’s the one.

John: Over the weekend, I was having a conversation with somebody who knew a lot of stuff behind the scenes at HBO and was saying that for years, HBO was looking like, “What is our next Six Feet Under? What is our family drama that actually has an engine to it, so it’s a family, but stuff,” and that was Succession. It took a long time for them to find their new Six Feet Under, which became Succession, which was, again, an even bigger hit.

Drew Goddard: It’s one of those, “Not try this at home.” I don’t know how you would ever pitch it. I don’t know how you would ever figure out what Episode 2 is of that show. All of the rules went out the window, and yet, in hindsight, it all makes sense, right? When you look at it episode by episode, I’m like, how did human beings pull this off?

John: They did. Thanks, Drew.

Drew Goddard: Thank you.

Links:

• Project Hail Mary | Trailer
• Drew Goddard on IMDb
• The Martian screenplay
• Twin Peaks: The Return – Part 8
• Noah Kalina on YouTube and Substack
• A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You are listening to episode 727 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what is work? What is free? Putting those terms together, what is free work? How should writers think about the time and effort they’re putting in before getting paid or after handing in a draft? We will offer some guidelines for both writers and those seeking work out of writers. We’ll also answer a bunch of listener questions. In our bonus segment for Premium Members, Craig, let’s discuss how writers should think about portraying law enforcement in this era, where previous assumptions do not seem to hold.

Craig: All right. I’ll follow your lead.

John: Yes. We’ll talk about cops and FBI, and everything else.

Craig: Nice.

John: First, some news. Birdigo, which is a game I made with Corey Martin, is now on the App Store. You can put it on your iPhone or your iPad, your Macintosh. It turned out great. It feels very native to these devices. We got featured by Apple as one of the Apple games we love.

Craig: Nice.

John: If you’re curious about it, it is free. Just put it on your phone and play it.

Craig: It’s free.

John: It’s free.

Craig: It’s free.

John: It’s a free game.

Craig: Is there any in-app?

John: You can do one migration per day. If you want to do multiple migrations per day, it’s a one-time purchase, four bucks, and everything else is in there forever.

Craig: I like it when there’s an option. I like when there’s an option to kick a little money somebody’s way.

John: There are no ads.

Craig: Oh, thank you for that.

John: Yes, it’s just cute, pudgy birds.

Craig: You may understand this because you create apps. I’ll play a lot of escape games.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: There’s a lot of junky ones that are made, and they’re just ad-supported. They don’t even give you an option to get rid of the ads. The ads are almost always for some other dumb game.

John: Yes, it’s a whole ecosystem.

Craig: It’s a specific dumb game where you either are mowing down waves of zombies, or you’re like that.

John: Or you have to save the king from being–

Craig: Save the King, some crap about the king.

John: I don’t care about the monarchy.

Craig: Right. Why are we so into that?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: Like, “Oh, my God, I got to save the king.” No. Why don’t we form a Democratic Republic?

John: I like that as a choice. If you are playing Birdigo and want to send through a screenshot of your highest score, your highest playing word, I would love to see those. Those are always really fun. If you are playing it, please give us five stars. Leave us a review in the App Store because that helps people find the game. Another app is Weekend Read. Drew, you have the award season scripts up in there, right?

Drew Marquardt: Yes, I’m not doing Weekend Read as much anymore.

John: That’s right. Of course, Chris is doing it now.

Drew: Chris is doing it.

John: Tell us about the award season.

Drew: We’ve got all of the four-year consideration scripts from 2025 in the 2026 award season. Now on Weekend Read, for the features.

John: All the features.

Drew: All the features.

John: Yes, so it’s good. You saw the movie in the theaters, you loved it. Now see what it actually looked like on the page and see what is the same, what changed. I love that. You can start to see-

Craig: Useful.

John: -what it was like before it became the future that you loved. Very important follow-up. Craig, you have solved your email crisis.

Craig: Well, somebody solved it for me. We had a listener write in to give us some advice, and it turned out that I needed to align DMAC and DKIM, and SPF, and a whole bunch of other things that I don’t understand. But I followed the instructions, and I have to say, the instructions were not written well. There were multiple steps where you tried to do something. It’s like, you can’t do that until you do this. I had to go into the domain system and add a bunch of CNote and blah.

There was so much crap to do. At some point, I thought, I’m probably going to just screw up all my email with this. This seems dangerous. I’m like, “Sometimes you do something where someone will say, ‘Oh, if you want to fix something, let’s say, in macOS, go into the terminal and enter this command.'” You’re like, “I hope this doesn’t blow my computer up.” It was a lot of that, and I thought, “It’s never going to work,” and it worked. It fixed it. It was just one of those things where Google’s very fussy about the domain name needs to match where it’s coming from, and so I needed to do a little bit of alignment. It was fixed.

John: I was so excited when I got your email, and it actually came through properly. It was joy.

Craig: Fantastic news for me. I installed Outlook, like everybody who works. I have 12 different emails based on which company and for what. HBO me email and a me email and a Gmail, but my main one, it was nice that you were able to finally receive it. Now you can receive numerous sternly worded emails.

John: Exactly. That’s what I need daily. In episode 723, we were talking about comps, and Craig, I got some real-time in-person follow-up because you had brought up the idea of, quote, “Jumanji in Space.” Raphael Bob-Waksberg, who was the creator of Bojack Horseman, came up to me and said, “You need to tell Craig that Jumanji in Space already exists. It’s called Zathura, and it was directed by Jon Favreau in 2005.”

Craig: Nice.

John: Yes.

Craig: I’ll tell you something. I know this. Whenever I said Jumanji in Space, the part of me that understood that Zathura existed, it just was turned off. That part of my brain was just switched off. It’s not even like I can say, “Oh, my God, you know what? That’s what I wasn’t.” No, that part of my brain was switched off. It has now switched back on. Thank you, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, for a number of things like A, BoJack Horseman, B, turning my brain back on Zathura because, yes, that is, in fact, exactly Jumanji in Space.

John: Here’s the long line for Zathura. Two young brothers are drawn into an intergalactic adventure when their house is hurled through the depths of space by the magical board game they are playing.

Craig: It’s Jumanji in Space.

John: It’s just straight up.

Craig: You know, he must have been so concerned about me, like, “Is he an idiot?”

John: “Did he have a stroke?”

Craig: Yes. “Did he have a stroke? Does he just not pay attention to anything ever?” Me saying Jumanji in Space should be something is as stupid as me saying, I don’t know, there should be a movie that’s not about pulp fiction, but it is in the style of pulp fiction, and it could be called Pulp Fiction.

John: Yes, or a movie about caddies and a gopher.

Craig: And feature a shack. It’s that stupid. I was that stupid. I like that. You know what? I like that he didn’t lead with, “Hey, Craig’s stupid.” That was really nice of him.

John: Yes, and he kept that in the subtext, which is important.

Craig: Since he listens, I hope he can feel my gratitude pouring through.

John: But, Craig, I could have also pointed out that Zathura existed, and I also forgot. I think it’s just one of those movies that people don’t talk about Zathura.

Craig: No one talks about–

John: They don’t.

Craig: That’s the first rule.

John: That’s the problem.

Craig: Yes, no one does talk about Zathura.

John: It’s this movie star, Josh Hutcherson, who became famous off–

Craig: The Hunger Games.

John: Hunger Games movies and Kristen Stewart.

Craig: Also famous.

John: Yes, Twilight.

Craig: Also famous. Yes. It is fun when you go back, and you see sometimes these movies where there’s a lineup of all these people, and everybody’s the third through seventh character. Each one of those is a huge star 20 years later. It occasionally comes up from time to time.

John: Or Pedro Pascal being in a random episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Love it.

Craig: Which happened.

John: Happened.

Craig: It happened.

John: It happened for real.

Craig: He knows it. He hasn’t forgotten that. Like I forgot Zathura.

John: Absolutely. That paid his bills for a while.

Craig: Hell, yes. Those jobs will pay.

John: We have some follow-up on AI coverage.

Drew: Michael in Palo Alto wrote us to say, “The depictions of LLMs on the show, especially from Craig, is not keeping up with the rapid advances in these models. The image of LLMs regurgitating and recombining text from their training data set is a fair descriptor of the prior generation of AI. But the current generation was built using fancier techniques like reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards.

For tasks like coding and math, where you can reliably verify whether the answer is correct, this lets the model try lots of different reasoning chains and gradually gets better at thinking by picking the ones that work the best. So my question for you is, do you think similar techniques could be applied to screenwriting or other creative filmmaking tasks in the future? What would be needed to make this happen?”

Craig: Wow, Michael, that’s a really good observation. I feel like you’ve made a pretty good point. I guess I should reconsider. You’re absolutely right. Things are getting better, and I hope they continue on this path, AI. AI talk, AI vibe, AI like, ah, great. I don’t know what to make of this because I don’t know what it means.

John: I recognize a lot of what Michael is saying, and so I do feel that we have this sense that, well, AI is just a text prediction engine, which was really very true to the first versions that were coming out. If you just use the free versions of ChatGPT right now, it still feels like that, but much more sycophantic.

Craig: Exactly. That’s a great point, John.

John: Once you actually pay for can do much more impressive things in terms of synthesizing a whole bunch of stuff and coming up with a meaningful answer on a thing. That’s what I think he’s talking about in terms of when there’s a verifiable ground truth to come out of it, like code that will actually run; it is much better at that now because it can actually work towards an end goal and test to see if it actually worked. It all falls apart when it comes to creative writing for obvious reasons.

Craig: Yes, there is no right answer. There’s no answer. There is no way. In fact, if you look at how what we do is “verified,” I guess you’d have to go to either box office, or ratings, or critical thinking from critics, or from audience scores, none of which ultimately matter either, because it’s all a complicated dance, and some movies which were very popular disappeared from our minds, and other movies, which were bombs in theaters, some became huge hits later, and people discovered them. Nobody can use this method. There is no way to reliably verify anything. Ask any executive in town, “Boy, do they wish there were.”

John: Oh, God.

Craig: Their jobs wouldn’t be constantly on the line. I think that while Michael is in Palo Alto, so, okay, I’m not surprised he’s a little bit bullish. I will give you, Michael, that you’re clearly keeping up with the rapid advances more than I am. No, I don’t think what you’ve described would have application to creating something. What it has is application to getting an answer correct, an answer that we could have also gotten to ourselves. In this sense, we’re still in calculator territory, even though it is quite more complicated and linguistic.

John: Yes. We’ve talked before about one of the– This was a link that I included in an earlier conversation about this. It feels like there’s something about writing and creative writing that actually does involve having a physical body, and actually having a sense of what it feels like to be in a place to actually encounter things, to experience things, to be in a moment that it’s not synthesizable. It is actually the experience of being in a thing, feeling shame, like wondering whether you should interrupt somebody or not interrupt something. The inner talk.

All of these experiences that humans recognize as being like, “This is part of the human experience that inform every choice we’re making, whether we know it or not.” Will systems like LLMs get to something that is a process that makes it so closely that we can’t tell the difference? I don’t know, but I doubt it. I do think there’s something fundamental about the human experience that these things aren’t going to do in a way that will obviate the need for actual people doing this work.

Craig: Another thing that came to mind, I was rehearsing a sequence the other day with the actors, and we were in full costume, and we were going through things. It struck me how even if I hadn’t written it, even if someone else had written it, everyone understands that they are working with and to some extent somewhat accountable to the creative work of someone. Therefore, there is a certain level of respect hopefully built in.

When you say to somebody, or if you were to say to somebody, “Here are the pages, these were generated by AI.” No one has any respect for that inherently. We are quite free, in fact, to say “I don’t care.” Would computer thought this is a good idea? I don’t. Someone else will say, “Yes, this doesn’t– I don’t like this for–” Everybody can tear it apart, because writing can always be torn apart. The veil that protects it sometimes is the fact that a human being wrote it, and we have a connection with each other, and we can dig in and ask that person questions and debate, and consider. I just don’t think anybody would respect the writing.

John: Now, you’re talking about intentionality and accountability, and these ideas that are specific to the social experience of making a thing, and then watching a thing, and the process is really part of it. These AI systems that are just, ‘boom,’ generating these fight scenes on rooftops between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Well, I guess the intention was the prompt, but that’s not actually how you would get to anything in the real world.

Craig: No, nor would Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise want to do that if they got pages telling them to do that. Also, that is an incredibly derivative thing anyway. How do we get to Tom Cruise? We get to Tom Cruise through Risky Business. Good luck, AI. Good luck writing that.

John: Yes, that’s why whenever there’s AI actress signing a deal, well, that’s absurd.

Craig: That’s just a stunt.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: It’s like, how many times can I see the robots from Boston Dynamics jumping on top of something and then jumping off? I get it. You guys can jump on tables.

John: I get it. I still love it.

Craig: I love it. I get it, but it’s enough already. The stunt is adorable. The stunt of the “AI actress is just internet Ouroboros.” Is what it is.

John: Well, let’s go from new technologies to older new technologies. In 725, we were talking about what should I do with my DVDs? We had a couple of suggestions. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Trent in Seattle writes, “I wanted to flag an option that might not be on your radar. Scarecrow Video in Seattle. They’re a nonprofit that houses over 150,000 titles, and they gladly accept DVD, Blu-ray, VHS, and even Laserdisc donations. It’s the coolest video store on the planet, and it’s one that’s really changed how my family watches movies. Case in point, my four-year-old is obsessed with Godzilla.”

Craig: Nice.

Drew: “Most of the Godzilla catalog isn’t available on any streaming service, but Scarecrow has all of it. Watching him tear up and down the aisles, picking out movies, gives me that same blockbuster on a Friday night feeling I had as a kid, and that’s not something I expected to be able to share with him. Scarecrow even rents nationwide by mail.”

Craig: Whoa, that’s a cool idea for a business, renting DVDs by mail.

John: I know. I love it. I love it. Watch them circle and become another internet thing.

Craig: In like 20 years, Scarecrow owns Warner Bros., Disney. Yes, this sounds great.

John: This is actually like two-level follow-up because, Drew, you said in 662, we actually mentioned them?

Drew: Yes, we mentioned that they were doing, Scarecrow Video had a fundraiser to save the store. I mean, it sounds like it worked.

Craig: Oh, great. Wow, maybe it worked too well. These guys are out there, they’re crushing it.

John: Yes, if I can find a place to take these, I will gladly put them in someone else’s hands because I think about these the same way I think about books in my library. As we’re sorting through stuff, it’s like, “Is the best place for this book my shelf, or somebody else’s shelf?” If I’m never going to read this book again, it should be on somebody else’s shelf.

That’s why I always donate books to a library, because they have the library sales. Some stuff would go into the collection, but most stuff is just generating money for the library. Good. If someone else wants to read this book, that’s awesome. If nobody wants to read this book, at least they probably have a good way to recycle a bunch of books and chop them up to make new books.

Craig: Chopping them up, new books.

John: Yes. Unfortunately, you can’t chop up DVDs very well to make new DVDs.

Craig: No. All right. Well, thanks for that, Trent.

John: Teresa writes about why physical media is important.

Drew: “When stuff is on streaming, or even if you buy a digital copy of something, it can be taken away from you at any time. There’s things that are not only taken off of streaming, but now aren’t even offered on DVD or Blu-ray anymore. Shows by marginalized creators that were made during the streaming boom, like the Gordita Chronicles or Minx, are just gone now. You could say that people weren’t watching anyway, so who cares?

A big part of why people weren’t watching was because these shows were created in a glut of shows, and they flew under the radar, and they weren’t supported properly. Many of those that did find the shows or films, they loved them, but they can’t recommend them anymore because they’re hard to find or purchase or buy or whatever. Remember, Ellie in The Last of Us didn’t learn Take On Me from finding the song on Spotify. She learned it from a cassette tape or a CD that someone preserved.”

Craig: She actually did learn it on Spotify. No, she didn’t.

John: The whole world went away, but then somehow Spotify was formed early in your universe.

Craig: Yes. No, we do think about that all the time, that if the world ends in 2003, physical media is still king. People do watch movies in the apocalypse because they have cassette tapes. In fact, we’re going to feature one of those movies soon in season three, in fact. She did learn it from Take on Me. You’re right, Teresa. They have been sending stuff away, and they can take it away. Even though technically you are only licensing something to watch when you purchase a DVD, there’s really no effective way for them to revoke that license.

What it comes down to, actually, I think, is the viability of the playing devices. Those are the things that actually we got to think about because they don’t make them. If they stop making Blu-ray players and they stop making, just like they stopped making Walkmans and so forth, it can get tricky. If we have ways to preserve some of the methods to play these things, I think Teresa’s right. Physical media is important, especially if you have something that you suspect would be the thing they might stop providing.

John: Yes. The idea of you cannot see the thing that you created anymore is incredibly frustrating. Also, I remember that showrunners throughout time have made things that they couldn’t show to people anymore, also. In a pre-streaming era, anything that was not on the TV was just not available.

Craig: It’s gone. If it didn’t get syndicated. You could do four seasons of a show, and it wasn’t enough to get syndicated, and no one would ever see that show again in any form whatsoever. The thing is, you and I are used to this, actually.

John: True.

Craig: In fact, when we were kids, if you missed a movie in theaters, you didn’t see it because there was no video for a while, until what, were you maybe nine or something?

John: Well, people will bring up H.R. Pufnstuf, people of my generation, and I have just no idea what it was because it didn’t broadcast in Colorado, where I grew up. I’ll talk to my Boulder friends. It’s like, “Have you been haunted by H.R. Pufnstuf?” It’s like, “Yes.” It’s a thing that other people know that we just don’t know because it just never aired in Denver.

Craig: Yes, well, in New York, we got H.R. Pufnstuff.

John: Yes, see?

Craig: They were awesome. Witchiepoo. Man, they were high. Wow, those guys are– For people who don’t know what this was, it was a children’s show, and it was like kids in a
special island with a bunch of big puppets, and the people who made it were just so clearly high in the best, most lovely way.

John: All good points. I think as I go through and sort through these DVDs and things, maybe I will hold on to the movies I just genuinely love, that I would actually be heartbroken if I could not watch them when I wanted to watch them, but that’s going to be a small subset of these movies. Most of them should go to Scarecrow Video or someplace like that, so other people can use them.

Let’s get to our main topic this week, which is free work. Craig, free work is a comparatively new name for something that we’ve encountered our entire life as feature writers because we just [crosstalk] from every angle. As feature writers, we are constantly going in to pitch on projects and doing a lot of stuff to figure out how to win this movie, win this job, and before we got paid anything to write it, and then a bunch of free work for after we hand in a script, people are always asking for more and more stuff before they pay us again. As feature writers, we’ve always encountered this.

In conversations with TV folks, they’re encountering a lot more of it now, too. Not just in the development process, trying to get that pilot to happen, but sometimes writing scripts after the room has closed because the scripts are just not done. Let’s just talk through the kinds of free work that writers are apt to encounter, what to do with different stages, and try to hopefully find some framework for thinking about, “Is this a thing I should consider doing, or is this an absolute red line, don’t cross this line?”

Craig: Let’s start with what the law is. The law, per the WGA, is you can’t do it. The WGA has, I think, it’s a Working Rule 8, that says, “You cannot write without an employment agreement under the WGA contract for anyone.” The end. Also, that is an impossible standard to hit in a sense. Part of the problem is even defining what writing is. What if I’m just sitting with you and we’re coming up with some ideas for something, but we don’t write it down, or just you write it down, we’re just thinking about it? What if we’re emailing each other?

Again, technically, everything that’s written down is writing, but it is probably an untenable position to say, “It’s never going to be the case that you’re going to write something down without an agreement.

John: Let’s wind it back to, obviously, writers have the luxury. We can just write anything at any time. We can write spec scripts. We just write our own things. That’s how we all get started, is writing our own things. That is the great luxury of being a writer. A director has to have a piece of material to go off and direct, an actor has to have a piece of material to audition with, to stand in front of the camera and say. Writers can just do these things. What often happens is it can be a vague line between this is the thing I’m writing for myself or this is the thing I’m writing for somebody else.

I describe this idea to a producer. The producers like, “Man, I really love that. You should write that.” Are you writing it for that producer, or you’re writing this for you, and that producer may become involved at some point? Those are the blurry lines that feature writers have always been experiencing, but TV writers increasingly are experiencing too.

Craig: You have some things that help balance it out. The biggest one is if you’re writing something and it’s “free,” maybe a better, even though no one will ever call this a better term, would be unhired writing. If it’s unhired, that means they can’t use it.

John: Exactly.

Craig: Now, a lot of times you can’t use it either because it’s based on something existing. They may come to you and say, “Here’s a book, The Chronicles of Narnia,” even though Greta Gerwig’s doing that movie, but let’s just pretend in there, “Here’s The Chronicles of Narnia. Can you give us a sense of how this might go?” Then they just keep– “Can you write it as a summary? Can you write it as this? Can you write us the first 10 pages?” By the way, they’re not allowed to do any of that either, but they can’t use it if they don’t pay you, if they don’t hire you for it. It is not usable by them.

That is something that they’re aware of. Sometimes I feel like they’re not, but it seems to me like the biggest areas where I would have red flags on so-called free work or unhired writing, or whatever you want to call it, [chuckles] is when you are feeling coerced, when you are being told it is a quid pro quo, “Do this in order to get that,” which should not happen, or when you feel like you actually have been paid. You have been hired. They’re just trying to get more steps out of you without paying you for steps. Those are the three danger zones to me. The problem, just as is the problem with all areas of human behavior, is power dynamics. “Am I being coerced?” Hard to say sometimes.

John: Are you being coerced, or are they meaningfully trying to get this thing to exist and to happen? “Listen, I think your script is good. I think if you were to do this, then we can take it out on the town to do a thing.” If it’s a producer saying, “Ah.” If it’s a manager saying that, you’re like, ” Now look.” If it’s your agent, who is in theory your fiduciary person who’s there because they’re going to make money only when you make money, that’s a cleaner attachment, but it’s still always tricky and challenging to figure out what this is like. I do want to acknowledge that we’re talking about writing here.

Obviously, any artist, any person who creates creative output, this resonates a bit with you too because so often, “Oh, could you design this brochure for me? I can’t really pay you, but it’d be an exposure, or this could lead to something else?”

Craig: There’s wonderful examples online of people posting their graphic artists, and people are saying, “I want a logo. I’m not going to pay you, but I will give you exposure.” Then they’re like, “Sorry, no, I get paid to do work,” and then people throw fits, which is hysterical. I think for us, we just always have to be aware that people are trying to take advantage of us. I don’t even want to villainize the people that are trying to take advantage of us. I think they’re taught to. I think that’s part of their job. I think that the idea of getting something for nothing is extremely attractive to people who work in business.

We don’t work in business. We write inside of a business. They’re trying to take advantage of that, and they will try to convince you. Sometimes, as you say, they’re right. Sometimes you’ll want to do it. You will want to do more because you feel like it’s in your best interest, but figuring out which is when–

John: Let’s give a concrete example here. There is a book that a company owns. They’re talking to writers about adapting this book, and they’re meeting with writers about adapting this book. For me, that was How to Eat Fried Worms. The very first project I ever landed was one of these open writing assignments. They were meeting with me and several other writers about this.

We were doing a lot of work and a lot of writing that we were not handing in, but a lot of writing on our side to convince the production entity that we are the people who should be adapting this book. Weeks of my life, a lot of my writing time, doing this to try to land this job. It was the right choice for me because I landed the job, and it got me started. If the situation had been set up, if there were a rule that you had to be paid to pitch, basically, anybody going on this project had to be paid for it, I wouldn’t have had a chance to pitch on it. That’s–

Craig: Worse than that. Pay to pitch is such a bad idea because for some pittance, A, it’ll weed out a lot of people that would have gotten a chance and now suddenly don’t, and B, they just bought everything you said for five grand. You know what I mean? It’s such a bad idea, but I did the exact same thing you did. That was quite a common thing, I think, in the ’90s, and the way that the feature business ran was, it’s funny, I think it’s changed.

Back then, it seemed to me what would happen is there’s something out there like How to Eat Fried Worms or I think Stretch Armstrong was one that was across my desk and many, many others. You would sit, and the expectation was that you would come in and you wouldn’t pitch a take or have a conversation about, you would describe a movie beginning to end. You weren’t handing them anything on paper, and they would often ask.

John: They would ask.

Craig: [chuckles] I would say, “Hmm, now the thing is actually don’t have a written on paper in a way that would make any sense to anybody. It’s all scribbles,” which is not true. That was part of how you got the job, but the real important thing is you didn’t give them writing. You spoke it. Technically, you’re skirting around the thing.

John: There was no literary material being exchanged.

Craig: That’s right. They don’t have it. They can’t hand it to anybody, and they will have to pay you for all the words that happen on paper, but to me, of course, that’s writing. It’s mind writing. It counts.

John: It’s mind writing. Оbviously, there could have been a person in that room writing down everything you said. Now, of course, with AI, they can just pull the transcript of exactly what you said. It’s a little bit moot whether you’re handed in the thing, but it’s also important you didn’t hand it in the thing because there’s no implied that you were giving them this thing, which they couldn’t own anyway because it’s still your work.

Craig: Exactly. That is correct. It is still your work. You did not sell it. They can’t own it, but that was a free writing.

John: What we’re describing here is pre-writing. This is before you got the job. This is actually– it’s a challenge for the guild, any guild, to enforce rules about this, because you’re not an employee of this company yet. You’re trying to land a job. We can talk about why no writing left behind, why you’re not doing these things, but the guild can’t, and sure shouldn’t stop you from going in and pitching on things, because that’s how you get jobs. That is the thing. The other kind of free work is you are an actual employee. You’ve delivered something, and they’re still asking for free work after that.

Craig: That’s a rough one.

John: Which is bad, but really common.

Craig: Very.

John: That is a situation where it’s about you recognizing your own self-worth and saying no, having reps to say no, and honestly, having the guild to say no at a certain point, or even go after and get payment that you should have gotten for work that you really were doing that they weren’t paying you.

Craig: Yes. I will say that we’ve been in the WGA for about 30 years now, you and me?

John: Yes.

Craig: They’ve been talking about this for 30 years. They have not fixed it in 30 years. There have been some great ideas and so many different kinds of ideas. Ultimately, the problem is the guild is not in the room. If the studio executive, or let’s say more commonly, the producer and the writer agree to do a thing, they’re doing it, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Yes, writers will say, “I don’t want to agree,” but you did. We’ll say, “Well, okay, call the guild.” “Well, I don’t want to do that because I don’t want to get in trouble.”

My favorite proposed solution, there is a guy in the 2000s. His solution was, every meeting that happens between every member of the WGA and any producer or student executive has to be recorded and transcribed, and all transcriptions sent to a clearinghouse that looked through to see if there’s– I was like, that also wouldn’t work, but it would cost a billion dollars.

John: It would cost a billion dollars less now with AI, but yes.

Craig: Also, people would just be like, “Hey, we need to meet.” [crosstalk]

John: Absolutely. Whisper, whisper.

Craig: Yes. Of course, you can get around everything. When there’s a will, there’s a way. When people are twisting someone’s arm, and that person is new, as you and I once were, it is difficult. Of course, I was in situations early on in my career where I–

John: Well, and there’s also going to be moments where the producer says, “Hey, listen, this is great.” These are two things. These are two red flags before we hand it into studio,” because I know this is a situation. You can’t fight back against that, because that’s actually good advice at times.

Craig: No one’s upset about that.

John: Let’s talk about some actual remedies here. Things that have worked for us. Giving us a producer before the deadline. If it’s eight weeks, and you give it to the producer at seven weeks, and you can say, “Hey, I’m turning this in next week,” and make it clear, “This is going in, whether you like it or not. This is what’s going on.” That has worked for me.

Craig: It can be taken as a declaration of war by a number of producers, because you can say, “Hey, well, it says in my contract, I got turn it in.” A typical writing period, I think, is 12 weeks. “It’s been 12 weeks. I got to turn it in.” They’ll be like, “No, you don’t.”

John: No.

Craig: They don’t care. They just want it to be good. They’re right in that the studio is like, “Please, keep writing. We paid them for 12 weeks. We’re not paying them more. Keep writing.” That is the silent conspiracy that’s going on behind the scenes to get you to write more when there are perfectly described steps in your contract for writing more.

John: In terms of perfectly described steps, on one project, the producer/director came to me and said, “Hey, I’m about to turn this in.” They came with a whole ton of notes. I said, “This is too much for me to do,” and we actually did negotiate that we took a step out of sequence, so I did my polished up before my rewrite, and that was a solution.

Craig: They’re well defined. This has worked for me, where I will give something to the producer. Generally speaking, if I agree with their feedback or requests, it’s probably not that hard to do them. I want to do them because I think it’s going to make it better. There’s no value in me turning something in and saying, “By the way, I know how to make this better. I just didn’t yet.”

John: [laughs]

Craig: When it’s not great, which is honestly more often than not, then at some point you say, I want the benefit of everybody’s point of view on this, because I want to make sure, especially as you get later on in your career, I’m getting paid this much money. It seems like the person who runs the studio should get a vote, too. What the producer can’t say is they already did. If they did, they broke the rules, and it got submitted. Now they got to pay me, so they can’t say that, so it jams them up. That’s worked a few times for me. Early on, unfortunately, what it comes down to is your agent has to say enough is enough to them, because the agent has other clients that have more power than you do.

John: Agents classically have so many other relationships with that producer that they don’t want to rock the boat too much. It’s-

Craig: It’s tough. The thing is, I feel like you get to a point as a representative where you can call somebody and say, “We have a lot of business together. I’m asking you, please, this one went too far. We will continue to have lots of business together, but we have to do our jobs, and this is part of my job.” Those conversations happen all the time. At that point, that is when the person who’s been trained to get as much as possible for as little as possible says, “Okay, you got me.”

John: Other things that have worked for me in the past, is making sure you have a relationship with the studio executive independent from the producer. If I can talk to the studio executive and say, “Hey, I finish, and the producer wants all this stuff. Do you want me to do all this stuff?” Like, no, they honestly, generally, probably just want the script in their hands.

Craig: Of course. We did help things along in our last negotiation, because we won this thing that I’ve been crying about for so long, which is two steps for writers who are earning under a certain number. It doesn’t apply to because the studios make a point. If I pay Scott Frank $3 million to write a script, I really don’t want to get nickel-and-dimed on drafts. We’re paying somebody $250,000 for a draft; you can get 12 drafts out of them if you’re going to be a jerk about it.

Now, because we built that second step in, that’s guaranteed, the producer feels like we can get it in. It’s not over. It’s not like if everybody reads it and hates it, it’s not over. We have another draft.

John: Other things that can work. It’s recognizing that the opportunity cost of pitching on things that don’t go anyplace. That’s why I always ask, how real does this feel, or is this a fishing expedition? Are they just like they kind of have an idea, they have a book, but it’s not clear that they actually want to make this a movie. It’s not clear that anyone up the food chain even knows this thing really exists. Asking, do they actually own the IP? When you go in and pitch on a thing, and then you realize-

Craig: Incredible.

John: -wait, they don’t even own it yet. They’re just thinking about getting it.

Craig: They spring it on you real late. It’s happened to me a few times.

John: They’ve been trying to make my deal, and it was, “Oh no, we need to get the underlying rights first.” Come on

Craig: Wait. What? That is Hollywood flim flam for you.

John: My friend, Michelle, has a three-meeting rule, which I really respect, she and her writing partner will take three meetings on a project, but if there’s not a decision after three meetings, they’re done.

Craig: Oh God, yes.

John: Love it, great. They’ve done that since the start of their career.

Craig: It’s a great rule, because at some point, put up or shut up. It’s pretty obvious, like, are we dating or not?

John: We got a listener question that is on this topic. Drew help us out with what Nick wrote.

Drew: “In Steven Soderbergh’s recent interview in Variety about his canceled Star Wars movie, he says, “That was two and a half years of free work for me and Adam and writer Rebecca Blunt. What is happening here?”

Craig: [laughs]

Drew: “Has it become common practice for guild members to write years’ worth of drafts on spec for major IPS held by signatories? John and Craig have been tremendous advocates for writers getting paid. My understanding of the MBA is that unpaid writing like this shouldn’t be happening. Is Lucasfilm leveraging creatives’ desire to contribute to their franchise to eliminate development costs, or did Soderbergh convince a writer to engage in fan fiction on the hope that it would lead to a future payday? I’m hoping you might shed some light on what might be going on here and what the WGA’s role would be in such a situation.

John: I looked back at the original Variety article. Nick is inferring some stuff here that I don’t think is actually in the Variety article. I don’t know whether anybody was paid for anything at any point. The overall frustration that Soderbergh is expressing absolutely resonates for me. I want to talk about it because directors also have a ton of unpaid work that they’re going through. It’s all this trying to land the movie, trying to get the movie greenlit. A lot of that stuff is not paid, and they are doing months and months of work, in some cases, for things that don’t happen at all.

Craig: I don’t know the specific details, but I’m going off of Soderbergh’s quote here. Is this kosher per the MBA? Nick says, “My understanding is that unpaid writing like this shouldn’t be happening.” Correct. Unpaid writing like this shouldn’t be happening. As I said earlier, it is a nearly impossible standard to hit in the world, and sometimes it does bend to a writer’s benefit to bend that a little bit.

In this case, what does sometimes happen is there’s going to be a movie. There’s a big machine like Marvel or Star Wars or DC, who knows, and they say there’s going to be a movie, and the movie is going to be based on this thing. You come in as somebody like Soderbergh, and you’ve got a producer, and you’ve got a writer, and you guys pitch, and they’re like, “You guys even do the thing, but the higher-ups aren’t going to let us do the thing unless we know what the thing is, and that it fits in with these other things so da, da, da,” and so suddenly, you become– Maybe they’re even like, “It’s happening, we’ve just got to work out the rights,” something like that. Then one day, someone gets fired, or someone changes their mind, and that thing is not a thing anymore, and it’s gone.

It’s like you were trying to get this job, really, really assiduously, and then they just eliminated that office, and there is no job. That can be incredibly frustrating. I don’t know the specifics of what happens here. What I would say is, did Soderbergh convince a writer to engage in fan fiction on the hope it would lead to a future payday? No, I don’t think somebody like Steven Soderbergh just blindly engages in something like that. There must have been an understanding that then became undone. I don’t know the specifics, all I can say is that the person that I feel the most for is Rebecca Blunt because she’s identified as the writer.

John: For sure. Let’s answer some listener questions. We have one from Nicholas.

Drew: “I’m writing on behalf of a French Screenwriters Association. Each year, we award a trophy to a person who has significantly contributed to supporting and fostering emerging screenwriters. The name of this trophy is a schmuck.”

Craig: [laughs]

Drew: “A reference to the oft-quoted anecdote that Harry Warner referred to screenwriters as ‘Schmucks with Underwoods’.
Recently, one of our American members, who is Jewish, raised a concern that the use of the term schmuck in this context may carry anti-semitic implications. According to this concern, Warner may have used this term specifically toward Jewish writers, and therefore the expression, and by extension our trophy’s name, could be rooted in an anti-semitic attitude.

We’ve tried to research the historical background of the anecdote, but have not been able to find reliable sources clarifying whether the phrase was directed specifically at Jewish writers, or was instead a more general, if dismissive, remark about screenwriters.

Given both of your deep knowledge on Hollywood history and culture, we’re hoping you might have insight into the historical accuracy and context of this expression. Our intention has always been affectionate and ironic, and to highlight the often underappreciated position of writers in the industry. However, we want to ensure that we’re not perpetuating something potentially harmful or insensitive. Any guidance or perspective you could share would be greatly appreciated.”

Craig: As the Jew. [chuckles] It’s always a weird thing when you’re asked to make some sort of decision on behalf of your people because [laughs] I’m not the king of what is or is not anti-semitic. Schmuck, specifically, as a Yiddish term, means penis. It’s like saying dick.

John: Generally, it implies, in the sense of an idiot or a dummy.

Craig: A jerk, a nobody. My dad called me a schmuck many, many times. [laughs] Anybody on the road that wasn’t driving the way he wanted would be called a schmuck. Harry Warner was Jewish. I don’t think Harry Warner was saying ‘Schmucks with Underwoods’ because he was being anti-semitic, I think he was saying ‘Schmucks with Underwoods’ because that’s what a guy like that would have said. [laughter] I personally don’t agree that this term has anti-semitic implications. Anyone can be a schmuck.

More often than not, my parents would call non-Jewish people schmucks. I personally don’t see it. I think they’re using it as it should be used. It’s a tricky thing. It’s very kind that people are concerned and doing their diligence. I cannot render a final decision; all I can say is, I’m fine with it.

John: Related, and a little off to the side, it feels kind of improbable. I don’t use the word schmuck. I sort of know the word schmuck, but I’ve never used the word schmuck because I associated that as a– It’s not a word of my culture for me to use. For a French Screenwriter Association to use it feels a little bit weird to me. That’s the only vibe I get off of this.

Craig: If there weren’t the expression ‘Schmucks with Underwoods’, what I feel is that in a very sweet sort of way, they just didn’t really necessarily know how Jewish that term was. [laughs] They’re like, “This is a fun self-deprecating term that Harry Warner used to describe screenwriters, why don’t we?” I think it’s innocent, and I think it’s fine. If that phrase didn’t exist, that might be a little odd to just suddenly say that, but if you called somebody a schmuck, I would be pretty amused, actually. It’s fine. I’ll give you a pass. [laughs]

John: Give me a pass. Look at that. “Each year, we award a trophy to a person who has significantly contributed to the supporting and fostering of emerging screenwriters.” Actually, it’s more of a mensch, though.

Craig: Yes, that’s the thing. The one real problem I have is that schmucks are assholes, [laughs] so why would you– They’re misusing it. I would be okay if–

John: That’s my bit where I’m very concerned. I just feel like they could find a better term for it, honestly, like a French term for it. There’s got to be something that is specific to what they’re doing.

Craig: If they want to give it a little bit of an American Hollywood spin, mensch would be-

John: Mensch is a better word for it.

Craig: -a perfectly great word.

John: It describes what they’re trying to get to.

Craig: It’s also a Yiddish term. It’s a German word as well. Yes, a good guy. A schmuck is not really– You don’t want to win a schmuck.

John: It’s a weird thing. Just like I have no problem using the word mensch. I’ve actually used the word mensch because I know what it means, but it’s also a positive thing. Appropriating a positive word for a thing feels different than appropriating a negative word for something.

Craig: I think so. Yiddish as a language is dying anyway, so I’m all in favor of people– From my point of view, I wouldn’t even call it appropriation, just keep it alive. Let’s keep the spirit of that. It’s such an expressive language. My parents spoke it with my grandparents, and so I was raised listening to it. I don’t have it; it’s gone for me, it’s gone by pretty fast. To that extent, let’s keep the words going, but it’s just not– I don’t think it’s anti-semitic personally, I just think that it’s–

John: It’s a little off target.

Craig: It’s just off target in this case. Save it for the person that failed the screenwriting [laughs] should get the schmuck award.

Drew: Jane wrote in. “I am currently a development intern at a production company headed by a very successful A-list actor, and I hope to be a working screenwriter in the future. I’m happy to report I love my internship. I get paid, it’s in person, so I’m connecting with members of the company. I even get to pitch IP and ideas to the company’s president on a regular basis, and will be pitching to the actor at the end of the internship. I have an idea I think would really work for this company.

I floated the basic premise, and was met with a good amount of interest. However, some people have told me I shouldn’t just give this idea away, and I should write it myself. I love this idea. I’m invested in it, and I want to be as involved as humanly possible in it. I’m conflicted. If I go forward with this myself, I feel like most likely it becomes a sample for me. If I pitch it to the company, and let’s pretend, best-case scenario, it moves into development, would I likely get cut off there, or would I? What should I do? Should I write it? Pitch it? Both?”

John: Jane’s in a real dilemma there. I can feel what she’s at. The fact that she does want to be a screenwriter is important because she could theoretically write this herself, but she’s working as an intern at the company. It’s a good experience to learn how to pitch to the movie star, that feels good as well. I was talking to a colleague who works for an A-list actress, and had an idea, and he got it. He said, “Should we do this?” Like, “Yes.” They partnered up with another movie star, and they sold the idea, and it was great, and he’s now working.

It can work, and that would be a good experience for you to see how stuff happens. I doubt they’re going to just steal your idea, but it’s a question of what would your actual involvement be with the project if it were to move forward. What’s your instinct for Jane?

Craig: I’m always wondering who these people are. “Some people have told me that I shouldn’t just give this idea away.” No one’s giving anything away. There’s no giving away. I would say to Jane, it sounds like you’re so invested in this that you should write it. If you write it as an original screenplay, the next thing you can do is give it to this company to say, “Are you interested in this original screenplay I’ve written?” Now, if the deal that you’re under as an intern, you’ve got to check the fine print here is that they own the contents of your brain from wake up to go to sleep, then you’ve got an issue.

If you have it carved out so the things you work on during the day belong to them, and the things you work on at night belong to you, then I think you would say, “Hey, company President, I wrote a script. Read it.” If they like it, then they have a real decision to make. If they don’t, you have a script that you can sell to somebody else. Either way, no one’s giving anything away. I do worry a little bit about a pitch in the sense that they could– If it’s a pitch and nothing else, then they need a writer, and they may then say, “We’re not going to hire you to write this.”

John: I don’t think she should expect that she’s going to pitch it to the company and they’re going to say, “Oh, you should write it.” They’ll just say, like, “Great. Come up with a list of writers-

Craig: Exactly.

John: -to do this idea.” That is a reality there. The only other thing I would remind Jane is you have this good idea, which probably came into being because you were working with this actor, but you also have a lot of other really good ideas, too. This isn’t the only good idea. This idea is percolating at the top because you have an opportunity there with this actor. My instinct would probably be to pitch it and just to see how high up it goes, and see what happens with it, and just maybe let this one go a little bit, and just see what happens with it, because you’ll write many other things.

Craig: Feel so bad, she was like, “Should I write it, pitch it?” I’m like, “Write it,” and you’re like, “Pitch it.”

John: Yes, I think they’re both good choices, honestly.

Craig: They are. I think the most important thing, Jane, is to not worry about this notion of giving it away.

John: Yes.

Craig: I don’t know, people get real tight about this stuff early on. Everyone thinks they know stuff. Nobody knows.

John: Yes.

Craig: Somebody once said,-

John: Somebody once said.

Craig: -“Nobody knows anything.”

John: Yes, whoever that person was.

Craig: That was a gold man.

John: That was a gold man who said that. It’s time for one cool thing.

Craig: Woo-hoo.

John: Mine is a physical thing. It is a running belt. I’m about to run another half-marathon.

Craig: Congrats.

John: Usually, when I run, I keep my phone in my pocket, and it’s fine, it swings around a little bit, but it’s fine, I’m used to it, but on longer races, I also have to have gel packs for calories along the way, and there’s other stuff to hold on to. I got this running belt, which is a 4-inch wide piece of fabric that has slots in it that you can slide your phone in and slide the gel packs in. It actually is much better than keeping my phone in my pocket. I’ve really enjoyed running with it. It just keeps stuff centred on your body and stuff from moving around so much.

Craig: Good.

John: I liked it. It’s like a $30 little belt. It’s made my running life better. The FlipBelt Classic running belt, if you are a runner. There’s no adjustment to it. You have to actually measure it to see what’s the right sizes. It’s worked out really well for me.

Craig: Awesome. My one cool thing is, it’s fairly localized. It’s for those folks who are up here with me in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. You know I love an escape room.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: I also love a puzzle hunt, and we don’t get many of those around. There’s a group up here called Secret City, and they run a number of events. It’s a little bit of an improv theatre. In this one that I went to, it’s called The Wedding Party. You go to a wedding, and they serve you dinner at a restaurant, and you meet characters, and they interact with you, move around, and then there are puzzles.

John: Great.

Craig: I had such a great time. They were really good, fun, and engaging. The group that I was with, I don’t think they were used to professional puzzle hunt people.
[laughter]

John: They were destroying them.

Craig: The woman who ran it walked out at one point, [laughs] because she was like, “I just want to be clear, there’s another hour left,” and we’re like, “Yes.” She goes, “But an hour,” because we were basically done. We were like, “No, it’s cool. It’s totally cool. We’re having a great time.” We would talk to the actors, have fun, and interact. It was just a fun evening.
They have a number of events. I think the one that I went to, which was The Wedding Party, has been extended now through into possibly May. They have, I guess, another one that they run up here that I’m going to go to. If you’re up here in BC, check them out.

John: Drew, was I remembering correctly that you’re headed to a murder mystery tonight?

Drew: Tonight.

Craig: Oh, nice.

Drew: We all get roles. I forget my guy’s name, but yes.

Craig: Oh, you’ve already forgotten your guy’s name?

John: Well, he’s internalized it so much that it’s actually just a part of him now.

Drew: Yes.

Craig: Or what if it was like a memento, murder mystery party?

Drew: [unintelligible 00:53:24]

Craig: You have no idea who you are-

John: You have to figure out who you are.

Craig: -or if you killed somebody.

Drew: Yes, who am I?

John: Why am I even here?

Craig: Is there a company that runs it, or is it just your friends?

Drew: My friends have gone through a company. It’s in the Partiful, which is always just such a nightmare to–

Craig: Partiful suddenly is part of my life now. There was no Partiful, and now there’s all Partiful. Where did Partiful come from?

Drew: It costs money, too, doesn’t it? Partiful? To send out an invite on it?

Craig: I think it doesn’t. I think they’re just mining your data. I think it’s actually controversial because it’s like the Palantir people.

John: Oh, [unintelligible 00:53:57] [crosstalk]

Craig: What’s the other service?

John: Well, there’s Evite, which I’m used to.

Craig: Yes, [unintelligible 00:54:01]. Yes.

John: So then the other is Partiful. I’m like, “Where did this even come from? Was Evite falling down on the job?”

Craig: No. Apple has invites as well, but no one uses them.

John: No one uses them. Well, now we live in the Partiful era.

Craig: Tell us what you found, Drew.

Drew: It’s Eclipse 54, and I am playing Reggie Rich, the mysterious businessman. Reggie’s presence adds a touch of roughness to the venue.

John: All right.

Craig: I’m not sure about this casting. I got to be honest.

John: Drew is a coarse businessman, yes, it’s well cast.

Craig: I don’t like this casting, to be honest with you. [laughs] It’s the rough part. You’re going to have to work there.

Drew: You don’t think I can be rough?

John: This man went to Scottish– wait, what academy did you go to?

Drew: Yes, Royal Scottish Academy.

John: Royal Scottish Academy.

Drew: I’ve been jumped.

Craig: Right, exactly.

Drew: I haven’t been in fights. I’ve been jumped.

Craig: I’ve been beaten up. I’m rough.

Drew: I’ve been beaten up.

Craig: No, you’re a victim.
[laughter]

Drew: Yes.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt–

Craig: Victim.

John: -and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Hero.

John: Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You will find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. This Scriptnotes book is out and available wherever you buy books. Thank you for keeping and buying the books.

Craig: Oh, how’s that going?

John: Our numbers are still trucking along.

Craig: Okay.

John: That is really nice.

Craig: I think we wrote something that will stand the test of time.

John: I certainly hope so.

Craig: At least from a color point of view.

John: Yes, it’s bright. I hope it doesn’t fade in the sunlight. We’ll see.

Craig: I think the sun fades in the light of the book.

John: Yes, that’s what it is.

Craig: Yes.

John: You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You can find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts, hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find all those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week.

Craig: Yay.

John: You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on law enforcement and depictions on screen. Craig and Drew, thank you for a great episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Drew, help us out. We’ve got an email from Cooper setting us up.

Drew: Yes, Cooper writes, “I’m currently writing a script that features an FBI agent. Generally, I wouldn’t have an issue with writing a character who is competent and is somewhat respectable. My problem is that our current FBI is neither of those things due to a number of circumstances in the past year. My question is, how does one go about writing a job that isn’t just what it used to be, or a job that is perceived differently? Do I just write whatever best fits my story, or should I factor in reality a bit?”

John: This is a real thing.

Craig: Yes.

John: It reminds me a bit of the panic among screenwriters when cell phones became prevalent. [laughs] What do we do about this? At what point do we just all agree that everyone’s walking around with a cell phone? At what point do we all agree that federal law enforcement has become compromised and is a laughingstock, which must be incredibly upsetting to what I imagine are a lot of very respectable, very good, competent, thoughtful, caring law enforcement officers.

My gut is that you can absolutely write anybody to be competent and good and decent, but it probably makes sense to acknowledge that the agency they’re working for has changed, and it isn’t the same, and that there are problems if that is the way you want to go. It just feels like, for me at least, I would struggle to write a story now about an FBI agent without acknowledging that it is no longer Eliot Ness & Co.

Craig: Yes. Really, I think what Cooper is touching at is like you’re always trying to establish the reality of the world that you’re putting up on screen, and so you can absolutely write a story with FBI agents who are doing detailed, thoughtful, neutral work that is not politically motivated, who are not corrupt, but you’re going to have to establish the very setting of the movie. We’re going to have to meet these characters and understand how they’re working and what they’re working in and what the universe of the FBI is like in your specific world.

I’m thinking about a show I really love, The Diplomat on Netflix, which is just terrific. In that world, the people are conflicted, but they are all hyper-competent and they’re really good at their jobs in a way that it does not match up with the current federal administration. Yes, the show started before this administration was in office.

John: That helps.

Craig: It helps.

John: It helps.

Craig: It helps.

John: Yes.

Craig: We still have a memory of what that would be like. We still know what competence looks like, and that can absolutely still work. Some choices you can make is you could set this a few years back in time. You could make sure that the world feels enough different that it actually makes sense, but anybody who’s working with local law enforcement always had to deal with this because the idea of corrupt local police or misdeeds, that’s always been there and you’ve always had to make choices about how you’re going to portray this and how you’re going to establish that these are good cops versus the bad cops who we also know are out there and often it see on screen.

John: It provides you also a vector for conflict, which is a good thing for drama.

Craig: People that approach these things from, let’s call it charitably, the conservative side of things– I don’t know, Cooper, if you’ve ever watched any of the Dirty Harry films, the idea of the Dirty Harry films was these soft, liberal judges and bureaucrat chiefs of police were thwarting real cops from cleaning up the streets and kicking ass. That tension creates a situation where you have a hero who’s in direct conflict with his superiors and goes out and does the right thing and shoots people. That’s their point of view of what good is.

They never had a problem saying the mayor is a weak, lefty, and the judges are bad. I’m not sure why there wouldn’t be an opportunity here to say, “I’m an FBI agent who was trained under this guy in this manner. The person who’s running the FBI now is this guy.” That’s a problem. That’s an opportunity, I think, for drama.

John: Absolutely. Even if your story is not focused directly on that, like it’s FBI doing an investigation of something, that as a subtext and a threat could be really good. You actually don’t trust that the higher-ups are doing things for the right reasons. That’s great. Or that they’re undermining you. In our deep dive on Die Hard, when the FBI shows up, they are a problem more than they are a help. That is useful. That’s interesting.

Craig: Yes. There’s also an opportunity for a story that is specifically about somebody who comes from a tradition, and they are partnered with somebody new. Generally speaking, when that happens, we get an interesting story. The movie I’m thinking of now is Colors. Just recently died, Robert Duvall. And Sean Penn. Robert Duvall is the old guy, and Sean Penn’s the young guy. Sean Penn is a hothead. Sean Penn also can chase guys down on foot, and Robert Duvall has one more day to retirement, so you know what’s going to happen to him. There was interesting exchanges of wisdom, and then Training Day flipped that entirely around.

John: Of course, we have to talk about Training Day.

Craig: So great.

John: The idea of mismatched costs, but also that taken to the extreme in Training Day.

Craig: Well, so normally, you’ve got the old guy who is wise and he teaches the young, crazy rook to calm down, and this one, the old guy’s corrupt. The young guy is the Eagle Scout. You can play around with these things, but to me, the one thing I don’t think you can do right now is just pretend that everything is fine. [laughs] I mean, if you establish a fake administration, then the fake president in a fake world, and maybe it’s even set after the era of the madness that we’re currently in, maybe then, but I think probably you’d want to recognize it.

John: Yes, it’s also important to recognize that when we’re watching a movie or watching a TV show, we already know that we’re in a cinematic universe of things. Our assumptions about how things work in fictionalized crime things is different than how they work in the real world, when we have legal experts on. We had Ken White come on, talking through like, we have TV law versus actual law, and they are just different. I think audiences have different expectations about that, and so whatever you want to bring in from the real world to this is going to add great texture and flavor, but the Dick Wolf crime shows aren’t going to suddenly dismiss the whole FBI industry is corrupt because that’s the franchise that’s been established.

Craig: Yes, but it is a challenged one at this point.

John: It is a challenged one.

Craig: I think there’s legacy shows, but it’s harder to start a new one, I think.

John: Oh, I guess that’s fair.

Craig: Yes, it’s just until there’s a reckoning– A reckoning is a coming.

John: I agree with you.

Craig: Then maybe we’ll see some interesting things. It is, in its own way, fodder for drama.

John: Yes.

Craig: Just have to figure out how.

John: Yes. All right, thanks, guys.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Thanks.

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