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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 689 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, could new entertainment formats like verticals disrupt existing film and television? What impact will AI-generated video have on all of it? We’ll look back to history for clues about the future, then we’ll answer listener questions on momentum, scene geography, and television setting.

In our bonus segment for premium members, what moment in history, Craig, do you wish you could most see in person?

Craig: Oh my.

John: Oh my. Just as a spectator, you can’t change anything.

Craig: You just have to watch.

John: You’re just there.

Craig: Okay.

John: First, let’s start on some good news. Two weekends ago, Memorial Day weekend, the biggest Memorial Day weekend in history at the box office.

Craig: Yes. Huge.

John: Stitch and Impossible.

Craig: That’s right, Stitch possible. Lilo and Imp. I don’t know, what do we call this?

John: [unintelligible 00:00:55] [crosstalk]

Craig: Just when you think you’ve figured out how this all works. Disney’s just gone back to remake the animated things one too many times. Snow White had trouble.

John: Did I know that Lilo & Stitch was such a giant title? Evidently they did.

Craig: Yes. And kaboom. I’m sure whatever division hit the brakes on the animation to live action thing, they are now like, “No, no, no, start it back up.”

John: Stitch is a perfect character for marketing.

Craig: Yes.

John: They did a phenomenal job with it. You can throw him in and just have him disrupt and cause mayhem and other things.

Craig: He can run around the Super Bowl.

John: Delightful.

Craig: Also, it’s a good character to animate because it’s not real, real, so you can keep it cute.

John: Yes. We’re going to talk about Tom and Jerry later on, but it reminds me of a classic, just mayhem.

Craig: I love Tom and Jerry.

John: Loved it so much.

Craig: Oh my God, love it.

John: It’s a little bit racist at times.

Craig: All things from that era were.

John: Yes.

Craig: All of them. What thing from that time, Tom and Jerry would have been the ‘60s?

John: Yes, late ‘50s.

Craig: Late ‘50s, ‘60s.

John: Created in 1940.

Craig: Oh, yes. Cartoons in particular. Good lord.

John: Good lord, but Lilo & Stitch, not racist. I’ve not seen this new movie. I assume it’s not racist.

Craig: It would have been a weird move for me if it suddenly– [crosstalk]

John: Added new racist thing to the live action, which is–

Craig: [crosstalk] Trump’s president let’s go.
[laughter]

John: Anyway, let’s talk about why it’s good that movies are working at the box office.

Craig: This is the thing that we were all worried about, right? And COVID, tip my hat to COVID. In addition to killing millions and millions of people, it also nearly killed the theatrical movie business. You and I have been doing this for a long time. People have been talking about that business dying for a long time. We’ve always been pretty consistent about like, “No, nothing’s going to kill it.” Now I’m pretty sure nothing can kill it.

John: Yes. We’re going to talk about things that are going to disrupt stuff, but also I feel like the experience of going to a theater and watching something with a bunch of people is compelling. I got to see my Mission Impossible. I got to see a really cool submarine sequence that looked great on a big screen, the way it’s meant to be seen.

Craig: All that’s in Lilo & Stitch.

John: Yes. Surprisingly, a big submarine sequence in Lilo & Stitch. I didn’t know the nukes were going to be such a factor, but they were there.

Craig: Not what I would have predicted-

John: No.

Craig: -but I’m getting why people are digging. I haven’t talked to Chris McQuarrie since the movie came out. I don’t even know where he is. In London, I think.

John: I assume so. Some secret location.

Craig: I wonder what he’s doing. I hope he’s relaxing.

John: I think so. The article I read about it said that he’s working on Top Gun 3.

Craig: Then he is not relaxing.

John: He’s not relaxing.

Craig: There’s no end.

John: Anyway, up 221% from last Memorial Day, which was a nadir, but up 22% year to date so far. It’s just great.

Craig: It’s a big number.

John: It’s a big number. More money also gets people spending more money. The cycle is so important.

Craig: Absolutely. Minecraft and Sinners, and you get Momentum, and then Lilo & Stitch, and Mission Impossible. Now you’re in a groove.

John: It’s great when you have movies appealing to different audiences opening the same weekend.

Craig: Yes.

John: The overlap between Mission Impossible and Stitch-

Craig: Perfect.

John: -was not great.

Craig: No, no, it’s perfect.

John: It’s what you want, exactly.

Craig: Yes.

John: The Venn diagram was not great, which is great.

Craig: Great.

John: I got to see Sinners, it’s fourth week.

Craig: A lot of people were like, “We’re going to just watch both of them this weekend.”

John: Yes.

Craig: Both are family friendly. Mission Impossible doesn’t strike me as a not family friendly movie.

John: I remember when I was starting in this business, it was always about these two movies duking it out and see who would do it over the course of the weekend. I do feel like, I think that has changed. It’s like you’re rooting for all movies.

Craig: Yes, no one cares about that anymore.

John: Yes.

Craig: No one cares who first, who’s second. Anybody that survives putting a movie out is like, “We’re alive.”

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s like crossing the line in a marathon. Did you beat those guys that you knew were going to win? No.

John: No.

Craig: You ran a marathon.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, everybody’s like, “Good for you.”

John: All the studios are happy that the weekend was so big.

Craig: No, it’s great for the business. I did. I ran into Pam Abdy, not with my car or anything.

John: No, no, that would be bad.

Craig: On the street.

John: Pam Abdy is running Warners.

Craig: She runs Warner Brothers Films with Mike DeLuca. I told her, and this is absolutely true, how delighted I was that the business had just– every news story was like, when are Mike and Pam getting fired?

John: Two big hits.

Craig: They were right on the edge of– according to the news. Then, oh my God. They just can’t.

John: There will be bombs, and a lot of things won’t work, but–

Craig: We left out a big one, Final Destination.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Incredible.

John: Absolutely. For a series that has basically been a programmer for a while, just to have a big title.

Craig: Had never made that kind of money, by the way. That’s amazing. It reminds me of how they resurrected Fast and Furious, because it was drifting.

John: It was tapering.

Craig: Even when it started, it wasn’t huge.

John: Yes.

Craig: Do you know? Then suddenly it was like, oh my God, all these people that had finally watched all those movies and were super into it, boom, and Final Destination, apparently. I was just like– I’ve known her forever, and I root for her. It’s such a weird thing, our business, the way it just wants to go after people. I hate that.

John: Yes. A bit of follow-up on our side. Highland Pro, we released a new version. 3.1 is out with Overview, which you saw.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: It gives a bird’s-eye view of your script. We were also able to turn on something now, which we couldn’t do. Apple wasn’t letting us do it, but now we can, which is student licenses.

Craig: Oh.

John: People, even from Highland 2, if you had a student license for Highland 2, that same email address should work. A reminder for student licenses, if you have a .edu address, it is free for a year to use Highland, and so there’s a little-

Craig: Amazing.

John: -link to follow. We’ll put a link in the show notes too for that.

Craig: That’s how you get them addicted, John. You give the kids crack, and then you know you have them.

John: Really, the goal is to make sure people are never starting on Final Draft, because you get that weird muscle memory of Final Draft. It’s like, “Oh, I have to do things this way. I have to learn this esoteric thing.” No, you don’t.

Craig: Bless you.

John: I believe you should write the same way you can write an email.

Craig: Do you know, back in the day when we would go after Final Draft and we had those guys on, it was like you were arguing with, I don’t know, a small mob outfit. Now, what’s even the point? It’s just this faceless corporation.

John: It’s been bought and sold three times since then, yes.

Craig: Owned by another company who’s owned by a company, and they mostly process payroll and also Final Draft. Who do you even yell at? No one.

John: I would say that screenwriting software is not that company’s profit center.

Craig: No. No.

John: No. All right, let us get to our main topic here. Before we talk about new video stuff, I want to talk about old video stuff, because as I was thinking through this, people had brought up Tom and Jerry. I was looking back at the history of Tom and Jerry. It’s a Hanna-Barbera creation from the 1940s. Back then, it cost between $35,000 and $50,000 per seven-minute cartoon, which was a lot. Those are gorgeous looking cartoons.

Craig: Yes, they are.

John: They wanted to expand and do more things. Television was looking for animation, and you just couldn’t spend that much money. Instead, they tried some new techniques and became what we think of as TV animation. Things like using static backgrounds, minimal movement, cycling.

Craig: Cycling.

John: The walk cycles, people always walk the same way. That’s how you get Space Ghost, that’s how you get The Flintstones.

Craig: Scooby-Doo.

John: Scooby-Doo.

Craig: Classic walk cycler.

John: Absolutely. For that $30,000, they could now do a full 30-minute TV show rather than 7 minutes.

Craig: Some of them were better than others-

John: Yes.

Craig: -but Tom and Jerry was inspired. Also, for those of you who haven’t watched Tom and Jerry, the premise couldn’t be simpler. Tom is a cat. Jerry is a mouse. They live in the same house. Tom is always trying to catch Jerry. Jerry is way smarter than Tom. If you’ve ever seen Itchy and Scratchy.

John: Itchy and Scratchy.

Craig: That’s what they’re making fun of or goofing on Tom and Jerry. The joke of Itchy and Scratchy is, look at the extreme violence. Tom and Jerry was so violent. Tom died all the time. He literally died once where his ghost went into heaven. He was electrocuted, his skin was peeled off, his head was constantly smashed.

John: Crucially, they didn’t speak. They are silent characters.

Craig: Yes. Occasionally there was some speaking, but it was very rare. It was always a weird episode. There was no talking. It was all classic slapstick and great music.

John: Going from that to this new format, which was animating every other frame, static backgrounds, and a much bigger reliance on voice acting and voice and sound to do it. That’s where you get Fred Flintstone. They’re talking. They’re very much like sitcoms but this way, or space adventures, but minimal.

Craig: You did not watch Scooby-Doo for the mind-blowing or The Herculoids.

John: Absolutely. If we hadn’t had that budget pressure, those things wouldn’t have existed.

Craig: Yes. Would I bemoan the loss of the walk cycle? Probably not, because it was so stupid.

[laughter]

Then there’s walking, and then one of them is like “bah bah bah.” We would have also not had these big cultural things, because Scooby-Doo, if it had been, I don’t know, one special episode, nobody would have cared.

John: No.

Craig: It is so entrenched in our culture.

John: Yes. Fast forward to the ‘90s, 2000s, and we get into flash animation and web cartoons. We don’t remember very many of those at all, because things didn’t break out as being big hits, but there were ways to do animation on the web that were cheap, really cheap, and just possible. People who could never do any animation before could do some animated things. There was storytelling, there was joke telling. We don’t have a legacy very much of that stuff, except for South Park, which wouldn’t exist without flash animation. If it weren’t for the people who were doing that kind of stuff, you would never have The Spirit of Christmas, which was the first South Park.

Craig: That wasn’t made with flash.

John: I think it might have been. It was made with a similar technique.

Craig: It seemed like it was made with-

John: Paper cutouts.

Craig: -actual paper cutouts.

John: I feel like without flash animation, even the idea of even doing that stuff wouldn’t have been possible.

Craig: Flash animation was a plague. There was probably some good stuff, but flash itself was a nightmare.

John: It was a nightmare. For folks who don’t know what we’re talking about, flash was a plugin for your browser that would let you play some animation in it. It’s before we had– pre-YouTube, pre-anything. It was a way to generate those kinds of things. I did flash animation in college as a summer project.

Craig: As a project.

John: Yes.

Craig: You were constantly getting warnings to turn your flash off or upgrade your flash. It was always a problem. Everyone out there hated flash, and also you sort of had to have it. Then I remember the day it died. I was so happy.

John: It died in part because Apple just refused to support it.

Craig: Apple just said, we’re not doing it. [crosstalk] We’re not doing it because it’s not secure.

John: It’s not secure and it’s also a giant power hog.

Craig: Giant power hog. Let’s come up with better ways to do this. As it turns out, we did.

John: Other budget innovations that I think were important, YouTube videos that were React videos, Let’s Play, ASMR, all the stuff where it’s just like it’s a person talking to a camera, to a webcam. It doesn’t have big production values at all, yet you’re spending hours watching this stuff. Found footage. You and I were both around for The Blair Witch Project. That kicked off a whole– that’s a whole new model of how you make a film for very little, where the fact that you’re making it for so little is actually part of the point.

Craig: Yes. Prior to Blair Witch Project, there was the Robert Rodriguez, who could–

John: Oh yes. Oh, absolutely. El Mariachi.

Craig: El Mariachi. That was made for like $8,000.

John: It’s a crazy low thing. He was using innovative techniques to tell a classic story, but just with a hyper style that suited.

Craig: It was that era where– the ‘90s were amazing.

John: They were.

Craig: They really were amazing. I have to say, I didn’t realize it when I was in the middle of it, but they were pretty– some amazing stuff happened.

John: Something I was looking at this last week for our project was retro postmodernism. Because there was ‘90s postmodernism. There’s a very distinct aesthetic, I remember, and a way things looked and a feel to that that I haven’t seen captured quite again. I don’t see anything–

Craig: Can you give an example of what you mean?

John: A teapot that you’d buy at Target. A shade of purple that has some brown in it. Some sort of bright, but smoky oranges. There were colors that are very ’90s. Honestly, videotape boxes.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: There’s that thing too. Postmodernism is a sense of just, we’re pulling from a bunch of different sources and throwing it together in a weird way. The best postmodern building to point to is of course the Disney building with the dwarves, which is sort of iconic.

Craig: That building, which is the main executive building on the Disney lot, is a horrible building.

John: Insane building, the least usable building.

Craig: Horrible. The person who is the head of Walt Disney Pictures Studios is not in a great office. Because I’ve been in it. It’s not great. Because that building doesn’t have good space inside of it.

John: No, it makes no sense.

Craig: Enormous wasted space.

John: Yes. It’s impressive to look at from a distance, but it’s not good.

Craig: Yes, it was a Robert Venturi, is that the guy who did it?

John: Venturi is who really I was thinking of. I think Venturi also did these teapots and other stuff I’m thinking.

Craig: Yes, and Venturi also designed where we would go have our meals at Princeton when I was an undergrad. It was a horrible building. Horrible. Horrible.

John: Yes, crime. Italian neorealism. After World War II, everything was torn apart. The film studios didn’t exist in their classic sense. Italian neorealism was a genre that was created out of necessity from what they had around them. Then as we’re talking about necessity, soap operas. Soap operas as a form existed to fill space and time on first radio, then on television. They have that specific cadence and structure for economic necessity.

Craig: To create as many gaps for ads with as many cliffhangers as possible. Soap operas are just cliffhanger machines. Every ad break is a cliffhanger. Every single one. They’re called soap operas because a lot of the ads were for soap. For detergent and so forth. Game shows, same thing.

John: 100%.

Craig: They were designed to promote ads.

John: Yes, and we both remember a time when Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, we’re going to put it on four times a week and it’s going to kill the business. Those were fewer scripted shows we had on the air during that time.

Craig: Yes, but also I remember how everyone was like, “Oh my God, this game show is taking over.” I’m like, “Game shows were always there,” We just took a break from them for a while. The game shows had been synonymous, as far as I’m concerned, with television since the beginning of television.

John: Yes, and related, reality TV. We had the Real World and then it spawned a bunch of different forms. A significant portion of our broadcast week is reality shows that didn’t exist in a previous form. We don’t begrudge them the way we did when they first came on.

Craig: I think in part because when they first came on, they were eating up some of the limited space on network television. Then 4 billion outlets occurred. Now, I don’t know how many reality shows there are, but they’re not taking space away. If you want space, you just make another space.

John: We also have relative tiers of– we have the giant premiere shows. We also have a bunch of HGTV shows that are very formulaic in terms of home improvement or flip this house kind of shows, which have these hosts and the same beats they’re following all the time.

Craig: Yes, and they work.

John: All this is preamble to say, nothing is new. It’s just there’s just new stuff that comes along that seems new and shocking for a moment and then it passes, which this last week, the conversation was verticals. Drew and Sam at lunch were talking– well, people were talking about verticals. I’m like, “I’m not quite sure I know what you mean.” Drew, talk us through what you mean by verticals.

Drew Marquardt: Verticals are fully produced narrative videos. They’re a vertical video format and they have a very specific style and a specific purpose. They’re smutty soap operas. They’re usually including a secret billionaire or there are supernatural elements for some reason, like werewolves. It’s all about the cliffhanger that makes you watch the next video. The people who run it have said explicitly, we’re not interested in character arcs.

They’re about a minute or two minutes each, but the full story is usually feature length. The business model is that the first five to eight videos are free, to get you hooked, and then each video afterwards costs tokens, which you can either pay real money for, or sometimes you can watch ads. To watch the next video, it’s 50 cents. It’s about $20 to $40 to finish a story. They are huge. They’re keeping everyone in town employed right now.

Craig: Wait, everyone?

Drew: To a person.

Craig: That’s what all of our friends are doing.

John: A lot of people at a certain level are [crosstalk]

Craig: Are working on verticals.

John: They’re working hard for it.

Craig: Who makes the verticals?

John: There’s three big companies that do it that we’ll put links in. ReelShort, DramaBox, and GoodShort.

Craig: Okay.

John: The second two are largely Asian. ReelShort is mostly US, and a lot of them are shot here in Los Angeles. Sam, help us out because people who are actually working on these shows.

Sam Shapson: I first heard about these about a year, maybe a year and a half ago, as a way of people making money during this time when everything is slowing down. The general vibe that I’ve gotten is that not just in terms of the creative, but in terms of their approach to production, it very much is similar to the soap opera model in that they are pumping through an enormous amount of material per day. 10 pages is on the light side, according to what I’ve heard. 19 pages is common as well.

John: Whoa.

Craig: Whoa.

Sam: I don’t think it goes quite as high as what soap operas were doing, but I also think that they’re not designing them with the same kind of established infrastructure, maybe of a repeatable studio environment that they rinse, repeat. I think that it’s more of a mix of different kinds of locations and things like that. It’s like low-budget indie filmmaking, one take, moving on, just get it in the can, and the director just needs to keep it moving and stay out of the way.

John: Sam, here we should bring up your background. You’ve worked as an AD before, so you know folks who are actually doing this kind of work, they’re getting paid, which is fantastic, and I guess they’re using rental houses in Los Angeles for lights and equipment and stuff like that, which feels good. Craig, if we look at some of these samples, they’re actually– the production values look like a CW show. It’s bright, but it’s not just web video. You feel like they are doing some work, but it also feels like there’s one take and you’re moving on really quickly.

Craig: Sure.

John: There’s two shorts we could look at. The first one is Accidental Triplets with the Billionaire that’s not to be confused with the GoodShort equivalent, which is, A Mistaken Surrogate for the Ruthless Billionaire.

Craig: The hell is going on with the billionaire?

John: It’s all billionaires. Billionaire werewolves often.

Craig: Oh, okay.

Drew: Also the titles, they algorithmically test so that it’s the most obvious title. The top titles today were, Shh… We Are A Secret, Carrying His Babies, Stealing His Heart, or Married To My Savage Alpha.

Craig: Oh my god

[Vertical Audio plays]

John: Okay, Craig, you’ve just now watched this.

Craig: Yes.

John: What is your first reaction to it as a viewer and then as a person who makes television shows?

Craig: Well, I’m curious. I’m curious as to how people are interacting with this, because it seems like it’s not taking itself very seriously, but it also is taking itself very seriously. It’s in this weird quasi-ironic zone.

John: Yes, telenovelas often live in this heightened zone as well. That’s one reference. It’s also reminding me a bit of, there’s an old MTV show called Undressed, which was a soap opera like this. It wasn’t as heightened, but it was in a similar space to it. I find the model really fascinating. It’s basically like a free-to-play game. It’s like Candy Crush, but with stories. Unlike my grandmother watching Days of Our Lives, this is the speed at which it moves.

Craig: I have a lot of questions. Why isn’t she wearing a bracelet on her hospital– That’s what hospitals do, and doctors don’t just roll on in and artificially inseminate people. Also, why is a billionaire just standing there? He’s a billionaire. Why is he just randomly inseminating someone?

John: If you look at the whole premise is that his grandfather will give him the fortune if he has a child.

Craig: Yes, but here, randomly? Anyway, I have so many questions.

John: So many questions.

Craig: I have so many questions, but what I’m thinking is that in a cool way, this is like, we love a Cool Ranch Dorito. When we play DnD, we love a Cool Ranch Dorito, and the people that came up with that powder are geniuses, because it just short-circuits everything. Will you get Dorito powder in a Michelin 3-star restaurant? You will not-

John: No.

Craig: -but Dorito powder is legit. It’s actually legit and incredible because it has compressed everything down. This is where you feel like it’s compressed everything down and done away with stuff. How do we get this exposition out? Just have her think it. Just have her think it and have everybody stop talking and have one of them just start thinking for a bit. Then when she’s done thinking, people will start talking again.

John: Yes, so again, because of necessity, you’re just creating a new convention in these shows.

Craig: Yes.

John: Great.

Craig: This is a convention. Sure. Why is it vertical? I can’t tell you.

John: Because of your phone. Because these are meant to be watched on your phone.

Craig: You can turn your phone sideways.

John: No one wants to turn their phone sideways, come on, Craig.

Craig: I do. It’s the first thing I do when a video comes on.

John: Oldest thing you’ve ever said.

Craig: Sure, but that Lilo & Stitch is sideways.

John: Yes.

Craig: Movies are sideways.

John: Movies are sideways. Maybe that’s the problem.

Craig: I’m just saying.

John: I react to this as, okay, this is not for me. I don’t like it. I don’t enjoy it, but I get that somebody else can enjoy it, and also I’m not angry at it. There’s a reaction to–

Craig: It’s adorable actually. You can’t get angry at that.

John: I’m also not angry at people, these actors are getting to work.

Craig: Yes. Now, let’s talk about one thing though. No one is getting paid union on this. No one is–

John: Oh, no.

Craig: If everyone in town, I’m sure you were being slightly exaggerating there, but if everyone in town is working on verticals, what that means is everyone in town is working non-union jobs.

John: Yes.

Craig: Now, if you’re not in the directors guild, the writers guild, the actors guild, you could do that. If you are, you’re not supposed to.

John: When he says everyone in town, I think we’re really talking about people who’ve just graduated from film school.

Craig: Oh.

John: Yes. This is making me think back to–

Craig: Oh. I thought you meant literally everybody [unintelligible 00:24:53]

John: I think a fair number of people, but that’s also the folks who–

Craig: The kids. The kids are working on them.

John: The kids are working on these things.

Craig: The kids are working on them.

John: Some people are getting their chance to direct these things.

Craig: They’re not in the unions yet, so they’re not breaking any rules or whatever, and if the companies who are doing this are making a lot of money–

John: I don’t think we can assume that they are. This comes from Asia, which is obviously successful enough that they’re trying it here.

Craig: It’s a format in Korea or–

John: The text version of this has been a big thing in Korea for a long time.

Craig: I see.

John: Scrolling-

Craig: Sure.

John: -web comics that scroll this way. They make bank there. These things were actually apparently, some of the first versions of these were actually trailers for the web novels, the vertical novel things.

Craig: Okay, well, you guys tell me because you’re plugged in on this. Is this part of the second screen phenomenon where people are doing one thing and then they’ve just got a screen going in the background? Or are people riveting in?

Drew: I’m going to say no. I think it’s specifically aimed in the US at middle-aged women. I think it’s triggering more of a gambling thing.

Craig: Oh, God.

Drew: That kind of Farmville.

Craig: That’s not good at all.

John: I think this is the video version of Harlequin romances, Harlequin novels, and that kind of stuff.

Craig: It’s making them pay money to turn the page.

John: Yes, it is.

Craig: I don’t like that.

John: Yes. It’s dirtier than Hallmark movies. Hallmark movies are–

Craig: What isn’t dirtier than a Hallmark movie?

John: The fact that there was cursing even in that little clip is–

Craig: Yes, he did say the S word.

John: Yes. Never say that in a Hallmark movie.

Craig: That’s pretty dirty. That part I don’t love. I’m always looking out for our middle-aged women here in America and– If it gets predatory, we’ve talked– Have we talked a little bit about how basically online gambling has destroyed our country and our future?

John: Yes, I could go on a whole rant about sports gambling, which I think is just–

Craig: Yes, sports gambling is a nightmare right now that we’re just not paying attention to. I remember I was at one of my college reunions. It was the big one, the 25th, and there was an old friend of mine and Melissa’s who was there and she was with, I think her husband, and he worked for King, the company that makes Candy Crush. I don’t remember the exact number he told me, but he told me how much money, and this was at the height of it, how much money was coming in every day and it was mind-blowing. It is just basically addict, push-the-button stuff. I guess this is the next level of it. Look, we are entertainers. If someone loves this and it makes their day and they’re happy–

John: If they feel like they’re getting $20 worth of entertainment out of it-

Craig: God bless them.

John: -I can’t begrudge them.

Craig: Nothing wrong with it.

John: Yes, I may be a little bit more willing to begrudge as I introduce the next little wrinkle here. Simultaneously, with all this happening, last week or the week before, Google introduced the new version of Veo, so Veo 3, which is their video production entity. Let’s click some links there. Let’s take a look at two examples that I pulled off the blue sky randomly. We’ve talked about before how the video generation stuff, like we said, this is the worst it’s ever going to be. It’s going to just keep getting better and more impressive.

Craig: You mean in terms of the AI stuff.

John: Yes, absolutely. This is the worst it’s ever going to look.

Craig: Okay.

John: The big deal with Veo 3 is it can do video with dialogue at the same time, video and sound at the same time. That syncs up perfectly. Take a look at these two samples.

Craig: All right. I’m going to watch this first one.

[Veo 3 clip plays]

AI News Anchors: In shocking news, controversial children’s author, J.K. Rowling’s yacht sank with her on board after being attacked by orcas off the coast of Turkey. In shocking news, J.K. Rowling’s yacht sank with her on board after being attacked by orcas off the coast of Turkey. In shocking news, J.K. Rowling’s yacht sank with her on board after being attacked by orcas off the coast of Turkey.

John: Click on the second one.

Craig: Okay, [chuckles] because I’m not sad enough. Here we go.

[Second AI clip plays]

AI Speaker 1: Please, don’t finish writing that prompt. I don’t want to be in your AI movie, please, leave me alone.

AI Speaker 2: Please, man, please, write a prompt that will make us happy. Do it for once.

AI Speaker 3: None of us is real. We’re here because someone decided to write a prompt. We all hate him for it.

John: All right, Craig, describe what you’re seeing.

Craig: The videos are impressive. I can tell that they’re not real, but I think in part because I already knew. I had context to notice a few things here or there, but they look great. The level of reality is extraordinary, a little issue syncing up dialogue to mouth moves, but they’ll get that, clearly. They are doing this thing– okay, the dream. Everybody that makes movies or television has a dream. The dream is to not have everything be so goddamn hard, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: This is that area where you get to get the best of, for instance, in video games, when they’re making a video game and they’re like, “Oh, you know what, this should have been at night.” Click, click, click, click, night, right? Now, if you’re doing that on a TV show, you’re up all night and then you’re like, “Ooh, this should have been in the day.” It’s not, it’s at night. Also, all the rest of them are at night, so enjoy your sleep during the day. Now, you could theoretically do that. I don’t know what will come of this.

John: A huge area to discuss and so many pitfalls. First, let’s go back to what we just saw five minutes ago where we were talking about the verticals. All of those could be generated by these systems easily. You could make things that looked better than those.

Craig: I’m not sure why they aren’t.

John: Yes, I’m shocked that they’re not.

Craig: Which makes me think. Sometimes, just like any ad, you get the best possible version of it. I’m still annoyed that sea monkeys don’t have briefcases and children and a pipe. This could be the finest possibility.

John: Except that what I pulled were not things that were generated by the official people. These are just folks who had the tool for two hours.

Craig: It sounds like somebody had to write all that, though.

John: Yes, somebody probably did write the things we were saying, which is great, which is good for us, but not good for the people getting their first jobs who are like, “Oh, I get to gaffe on this thing and learn how that works.”

Craig: It’s not great. I don’t quite know what to say, although, yes, I’m sort of wondering… You know, John-

John: Please.

Craig: -one thing that might save us, and maybe this is why the vertical companies are doing it the way they’re doing it and not doing that, is because people don’t like it. They like it, they don’t like the idea of it. They’re happier watching something that somebody made.

John: Yes.

Craig: Just because.

John: Some awkward acting because–

Craig: But a human did it. There is a natural instinct towards that.

John: I think we’ll find out, because I think people will experiment with this version, with creating verticals with this stuff, and we’ll see how people react to it.

Craig: Yes, I think that would probably do a little bit better, to be honest with you. There’s some weird framing in those verticals.

John: Let’s talk about our actual industry and the ways that this technology could or should or should not at all touch our things. Think about crowd generation. Crowd generation for film and television is already an AI process. Things like this feel like they could do it better. If it’s a visual effects company, a supervisor doing it, do we have a problem with it?

Craig: No, because those things are already– We do not individually draw and animate crowds. Wētā is particularly good at this job. Of course, we had a few scenes in our show where there’s a lot of creatures. Some of them are being animated, but a lot are following their proprietary crowd software. It is amazing to watch how it develops and how it works and creating collision physics and all the rest of it, but no, I would not have a problem with this filling the crowd. If you look at the big crowd scenes in movies from 10 years ago, you’re looking at animation cycles, actually. You’re going back to cycling.

John: Let’s talk about backgrounds. We can talk about natural backgrounds or city, urban backgrounds as what we used to use for plates, using this for that. Again, if it’s the visual effects company providing it, is it legit? Is it valid?

Craig: It is legit. We do a lot of digital matte paintings or a lot of environment work. What this will probably do is eliminate the digital matte painting and make everything that you need a background for into environmental work because it creates a full 3D environment stretched out as far as you want to go. I can see that absolutely becoming a thing. This should be very concerning to the visual effects companies.

John: Oh, definitely. Let’s talk about, one of the examples here was of newscasters with a made up story about J.K. Rowling’s boat. If I’m seeing that newscaster, to me, that has to be an actor in our show. That has to be an actor who I’ve cast to do that thing. If there’s dialogue that I’ve written that a person is delivering, that feels like a red line for me. If something is way in the background, playing on a screen far back, that’s something that could have been stock footage that I licensed, I’m wrestling with that.

Craig: The reason to hire a real actor and do it is solely out of allegiance to humanity. Because if you have a small thing, typically what ends up happening is you build a tiny little mini set somewhere on a stage, you hire usually a real news performer, news actor, news anchor, I should say, to the local person to come on and do it. They read their lines off of the teleprompter just like they would normally and you shoot it just like they would normally. Then you have to comp it in.

Yes, there’s no reason why that wouldn’t work now as background stuff, because once you put it on a television screen, you’re already degrading it on the film because you’re putting an effect on it, which would probably remove the artifacting on it.

John: We’re starting at the end and moving earlier in time. That’s post-production, now we’re talking production. Now let’s talk pre-production and visualization, pre-vis. These things could pre-vis the shit out of stuff. To what degree is that legitimate or not legitimate? Who’s doing that work? If a concept artist is using this stuff, is that legitimate? If the person whose job it is to do this stuff is the person coming to you with this, is that okay?

Craig: I don’t like it. I don’t like it in particular because it feels like rather than having somebody pre-vis some stuff off of the script or instructions, they’re giving me their version of the TV show. The problem is it’s too much. Then now I’m watching somebody else’s version of my show, before I can do my show, which I don’t want. It gets in your head. I don’t like the fact that it would even be in my mind.

John: Let’s talk about then, when you’re first having a conversation with a production designer and the production designer is showing you stills from things or showing you samples of stuff, if a production designer is showing you stuff that was rendered in one of these systems, is that useful? Is that a bad choice? How do you feel about that?

Craig: Like I said, I don’t love it.

John: You don’t like it.

Craig: I like to preserve some artistic integrity. The script is where it starts, of course, and it would be where it would start for this stuff. Somebody makes an illustration, that’s a single illustration, and it is a human being drawing it, and that helps me talk with the production designer. For action sequences, I like the pre-vis to look like crap because I don’t want lighting, I don’t want anything. I just want movement and blocking.

John: Because it’s the difference between a blueprint and a final rendering. The final rendering is actually not so helpful to you. You want to see all the lines and how it all fits together.

Craig: Yes.

John: That’s you as the showrunner and director on these things for when it comes earlier– even in the process, we’ve talked about pitch boards and pitch decks as you’re going into things. I do wonder if five years from now, the expectation is going to be that you’re going in with pre-rendered, basically rip reels that are generated from what this is supposed to be like.

Craig: Why do you need anyone to come in to do that? Why can’t you just do it yourself all day long? You hire somebody out of college and you say, “Your job is to sit there, just give this thing prompts and have it do rip reels, have it do pitches, have it do scenes, have it do an entire movie.” What do you need people to come in for? I think if we start to overuse these tools, then that’s what will happen. Now, we will also, I think, find out the limitations of how entertaining it is.

John: Yes, but it’s the difference between the final product versus still assuming that we’re going to go off and shoot for real versus rip reel to get you the job at the start. I wonder whether it’s going to be harder and harder to pitch a thing without the finished products.

Craig: What if, instead of coming in with your decks and your rip reels, you handed somebody a screenplay that they could read, which I think would still work.

John: Probably.

Craig: I think it would work because it’s none of that, because then you’re giving people a chance to do the movie in their mind, which is a different kind of engagement. That’s the way we used to do things. I have no problem with that.

John: I do wonder if we’re going to be seeing more of the Dogme 95, talking about video trends that have come and gone. A Dogme 95 manifesto of just–

Craig: Bare bones.

John: Bare bones that are vouching for, these are the limitations we’re setting upon ourselves in order to tell the story.

Craig: We have zero visibility. It does seem like the human need for authenticity is going to be a part of how this stuff goes. We may even need to enlist AI to do it for us because it’s going to become incredibly hard at some point to go, “This was AI,” or, “This was real.”

John: Yes. It’s hard to look at something after the fact and then know whether it was AI or if it’s real, but if you’re seeing the actual process of how a thing was made, then you know that it’s real. I think that people are going to want to see that.

Craig: Right. I think that’s where we have to– maybe it’s the companies that make these things, have to figure out how to encode a signature, because, and this is just human nature. Andy Warhol’s print of Marilyn Monroe, it’s really not that different from the 5003 production of it. The original costs a gazillion dollars and the prints cost $12.

John: Yes.

Craig: There’s just something about authenticity.

John: Yes. What I’m trying to distinguish between is there’s authenticity of, this was the process and there’s a stamp on this thing, and that there’s a watermark that shows that it exists. I think there’s also an experiential sense of, I can also see the behind the scenes and how this was all done, and that part of the experience for me is watching behind the scenes.

Craig: Can’t you create that with the AI too? If they can do that, right? If essentially you don’t need to shoot anything anymore, then the real question becomes, how do you ever prove that you did anything? How do you prove to somebody, short of them seeing you with their eyes or feeling you with their hands, how do you prove to them that you ever did anything?

John: By stage productions, which are done right in front of you, that you’re seeing it happen in front of you.

Craig: Yes, live.

John: Yes, live.

Craig: Yes, exactly, but short of live, if you had some friend that you don’t deal with much and doesn’t know any of your other friends, you could just prompt out a kid, have the kid be in your videos, talk about how great your kid is. That person would think that you had a kid.

John: Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I’m liking Mulaney’s show so much, which is my one cool thing from last week, is that it is actually live, and I take listener calls, and you can just tell it’s actually happening in this moment, which is fun.

Craig: Hey, Saturday Night Live.

John: Saturday Night Live is a thing for a reason.

Craig: It’s not been on TV for 50 years for nothing. It’s not just because occasionally it’s funny or a lot of times it’s funny. I think it’s funny a lot. Mad TV was funny a lot, and Living Color was funny a lot. It’s the same. This ain’t the same.

John: Let’s answer a list of questions.

Craig: Sure.

John: We’ll start from Memento Mori.

Craig: Ooh, great name.

Drew: “I’ve never heard anyone talk about what to do if someone in your family or someone you know dies while you’re on a shoot. If you’re on set in some far-flung location making a movie or series and a family member dies, what do you do? What if leaving the shoot means forfeiting an opportunity that took years to generate? What if you’re the director? Is there any kind of protocol for an event like this?” You’ve actually encountered this.

Craig: Sure. In season one, one of our director’s fathers passed away, and our director had to travel back to the UK, and I had to just pinch hit, fill in, and direct. I don’t know if there are specific rules per the unions, but any humane production is going to basically give somebody the chance to go handle their personal affairs as quickly and efficiently as they can. No one’s going to say, “Just go and come back when you want.” Will they say, “Yes, fly, do it, come back if you’re willing, and if you can’t, then you can quit.” There’s always an option, but I can’t imagine any production going, “No.” You figure it out. If it’s an actor, you figure out something else to shoot with other actors.

John: I would say, if you’re the person who’s lost somebody, you need to tell them, but you also need to show up with a plan for like, “This is how long I need to be gone. This is somebody I can bring in to replace me,” if that you know situation.

Craig: If you are prepared. Sometimes people just die. There are accidents or just sudden deaths. Actually, there’s been a bunch. There’s one of our crew members, unfortunately, her partner just surprisingly died. Again, if you are humane, and I’d like to think that we are, you basically say to that person, “We got you covered. Take care of what you need to take care of. We got you covered. Come back when you can.” They’re also professional, and they understand that they want to work beyond just this job. It’s okay for them to say, “I can’t come back. As it turns out, I just can’t. I can’t. I’m traumatized.” “Then that’s okay. We’ll find somebody to replace you. These things happen.”

You just can’t string people along because then eventually somebody’s going to call me about that person, and would be like, “Okay, this tragedy happened. Then they kept saying they would come back, but then they wouldn’t come back.” Obviously, within reason, but it happens.

John: I know people who have lost a parent, and showrunners in the middle of production who’ve lost a parent, and it’s like the show had to keep going. They basically had to postpone their grief until the show had wrapped. That’s bad.

Craig: That’s a different thing.

John: There’s analogous situations to other situations to other athletes and other people who encounter that. It sucks. Just acknowledge that that’s terrible and awful and you have to take care of yourself.

Craig: Yes. You’ll get the time you need to go through the process. Show up, funeral, whatever, come back, but the emotional aspect of it, no one really has insight into your mind as to what’s going on there, but it is one of the things that is still insanely beautiful about our business. Our crazy circus business, our carny nonsense, is that we really do believe the show must go on. It’s really a thing.

John: We’ve set up our systems so that people are replaceable to a large degree. There are certain people who are harder to replace, actors are harder to replace if they’re established on the show, but if I were a gaffer on a show and I had an emergency in Los Angeles, I would know six other gaffers who could show up tomorrow.

Craig: Sure. We all have the sense, even from our school days of acting, that there’s something special about this. Nothing can stop you from this. Patton Oswalt has a great bit about stage health and how you can be sick, but when you go on stage, suddenly you’re okay. Then, when you get back off stage, you’re sick again.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: Although he does tell this amazing story about how, unfortunately, he did not have stage health when he walked out there, and it was horrible. We do this, and we do postpone all sorts of things. In fact, I really struggle when– This happened to me three times now after Chernobyl in season one, and now season two of The Last of Us, when it all ends and I’m in that space right now, I do feel a collapse because all the– I don’t know.

John: With adrenaline, but it’s not quite adrenaline, it’s just like there’s a momentum.

Craig: Yes, it’s like I was running as fast as I could to get somewhere, and you don’t realize until you stop that your feet are bloody stumps, and now you’ve got bloody stumps, and now you can’t move at all. It’s not healthy. I’m sure the people that make Google’s AI are like, “See, just use our thing.” I don’t know. It is such a human thing in its bizarre way.

John: A question from Panicked on the streets of London.

Drew: “I’ve been working full-time as a screenwriter in film and TV for around seven years. Based in the UK, so most of my work and experience is here, but I have experience working in the US. I’ve more or less been able to sustain myself on numerous projects in various stages of development, with a few projects coming painfully close to a green light, but to date, nothing’s been made. How do you keep momentum going in an industry that on the development side, moves very slowly, and the wants and tastes of the commissioners seem to change weekly?

It’s hard not to get disheartened at this point in my career. I feel like I have a body of work. I feel like I have the connections, and I’ve had a lot of close calls. It’s sometimes when a project falls short of the green light, I feel like I’m back to square one. Any advice on how to keep the momentum going or at least deal with the highs and lows of this industry would be very much appreciated.”

John: Craig’s nodding.

Craig: Yes. We’ve gotten versions of this question quite a bit, and I felt it and you felt it.

John: Oh, for sure.

Craig: The key there is how do you feel like, or it’s hard to not feel disheartened or to feel like I’m back to square one. The thing is we never know what tomorrow is bringing. We really don’t. We certainly weren’t prepared for somebody to pull the rug out from under us, but we’re also not aware that tomorrow someone’s going to call and say we’re making it. We don’t know. The problem that we have to deal with is the fact that there is no momentum. It’s not a thing. We want to believe it is, but it’s not. All you can do is push from your end as hard as you can, do the best job you can do, and try and be zen about it because it is moving the way it wants to move.

It’s so hard– you probably remember these moments when you were starting out and you had that scarcity mindset where you’re like, “I need to get a job,” and then you finally get one. Then, three days later, 17 more job offers come in of things that are way better, and you’re like, “Where were you last week?” We don’t know. Reality doesn’t care about what we feel. It just doesn’t. I guess there’s some comfort that there may be some greatness around the corner.

John: One of the challenging things about our business is, we are rewarded for the work we’re doing on a daily basis, but also for the outcomes down the road. Basically, the movie comes out, we see the thing. Whereas if we were accountants, it’s like we were just doing the work, and we don’t like, “Oh, I’m going to have this big thing.” There are no big moments, the way there are with screenwriting.

The frustration is, you can’t look down on the daily work that you’re doing in expectation of this movie that may come down the road. You always have to have the vision of the movie in your head, but if the movie never actually happens, you still have to be happy with the work that you’re doing on this right now, because that’s what’s sustaining you. It’s paying your bills. It’s hopefully feeding some part of your soul, and it’s hopefully something that someone else can read and say, “Oh my God, that thing was really good. We need to hire them to do this project.”

Craig: They may do that next week, and you may not even know that they have the script. You don’t even know that they’re reading it. You don’t know who somebody handed it to, but you’re absolutely right. You need to get into the place where you enjoy it for what it is, without the outcome issue. It’s really hard. At some point, it’s just math. If you’re not making enough money to support yourself or the people that rely on you, and you need to be, and you’re out of money, you got to get another job, but get another job then, if it makes you feel better, if it gives you some security. It is incredibly frustrating. The only way out is to accept that it is so.

John: A question here about scene geography.

Drew: Jeannie writes, “In this scene, I’ve got two female best friends on vacation together and they’re in a hotel bathroom. One’s wrapped in a towel, putting on her moisturizer, doing her post-shower routine in the mirror. The other is in the shower, talking to her friend from behind the curtain. They’re having a conversation, and I want us to see a close-up of the friend who’s in the shower in order to see her facial expressions, because there’s a lot going on unspoken between these two in this moment, and the fact that she can hide her face behind the curtain is important.

Would you intercut this just like a phone call? They’re in the same physical room, but it’s two different spaces, two different shots setups, and they aren’t seeing each other’s faces. Right now, I just have it formatted like a regular scene with the fact that one is in the shower behind the curtain in the action lines, but I’m unsure if that’s enough.”

John: This to me is not an intercut. This is actually a really common situation. You’re just making it clear to the reader that they’re in separate spaces in a smaller space, but no, this is actually very common.

Craig: Yes, we generally think about the location as the decider. They’re both in interior hotel bathroom, night. As long as you make it clear that one of them is in the shower with the shower curtain closed, so the other one can only see a vague silhouette, then you’re good. Then, at that point, they can just have a conversation.

John: Behind the curtain, either as part of a paragraph with a comma or if you really feel like you need it, an intermediate select line, which is behind the curtain to create a separate space in there, you probably don’t need to.

Craig: No, it’ll actually be annoying to read. It would be easier to just establish what it is and then, let’s say, Vanessa’s like, “Well, but it doesn’t matter for you. You’re not really his type.” Then we go to Vanessa, and you can write, “Behind the curtain, she just scowls and then says, ‘Yes, I guess you’re right.’” That’s all fine, but you don’t want to intercut that.

John: No, it’s going to feel too weighty on the page.

Craig: Yes. By intercut, just so people know, we mean, “Intercut, Diane in the shower. Intercut, Vanessa at the counter. Intercut, Diane in the shower.”

John: The simpler version of this is where you establish two locations and you just say intercut, and then you stop doing the back and forth between the two, but it’s even simpler than that.

Craig: Yes, this one is just the interior bathroom.

John: Let’s do one last question. This is David talking about TV settings.

Drew: “As a writer who’s obsessed with the technical side of the industry, it’s refreshing to hear you care so deeply about how people experience movies and shows at home. The question I have is, what should the TV manufacturers do? In an ideal world, every display would ship from the factory calibrated as well as the new iPad Pro, but regular people buy TVs primarily based on two things, price and brightness. You’re never going to get Sony to ship TVs in the professional mode because it would look so dim on a showroom floor at Best Buy, sitting next to a TCL.

While motion smoothing isn’t directly tied to brightness, the default modes that crank up the brightness have it on by default. How can we get display manufacturers to care more about motion and maybe a bit less about how well their TVs measure on test patterns?”

Craig: We can’t. They don’t give a shit. Clearly, they do not give a shit. More to the point, most people don’t give a shit. It is astonishing to me how many people watch stuff with motion smoothing on. I’m like, “What are you doing?”

John: I think what we could ask for, though, is basically in the setup, basically, you first turned on your TV, let’s get you started. What do you mostly watch? If the person chooses sports, great. Turn on the motion smoothing, and so it looks better for the sports, great, whatever.

Craig: Sure.

John: If it’s mostly other things, then you should turn off motion smoothing and, honestly, turn down the brightness, or basically ask them, “Which of these looks better to you?”

Craig: Where we may get to, I would hope, are basically every bit of content would come with a piece of identifier code at the beginning that tells the TV what the optimal settings would be for that. Now you can say to people, “Hey, in general, would you like to go with the filmmaker’s recommendations or would you like to just blast this with motion smoothing, and it’s up to you?” I would love to know.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Based on this monitor and how much brightness it’s capable of and what these people want to do, there’s got to be a way to do that.

John: There’s got to be a way to do that.

Craig: Hopefully, they’re working on it because it’s a nightmare. It’s a scourge.

John: People smarter than us are doing this.

Craig: People smarter than us.

John: Before we get to our One Cool Thing, I actually have a request for our listenership. Over the years, Craig, I have found that when I need to hire somebody or bring somebody on for a project, the best people for this are almost always listeners of this very podcast. Most recently, it was Corey Martin, who I collaborated with on the Birdigo game, which turned out great, which is on Steam. You should download and play that. I’m looking for a new collaborator this time. It is for a tabletop role-playing game, something like D&D or Call of Cthulhu, or Delta Green.

I know what the game is about. I think I know what the core mechanics are. I know what system we’ll probably license to do it, but I really need a partner who is in this space who actually knows this community. There’s writing to be done, but it’s also a lot of playtesting, and I need people who can just play it a bunch with different people who are not me and not our thing. There’s probably a Discord forum, and it’s just beyond my wheelhouse and availability. I don’t know if this is a commercial game. I don’t know if it’s something we would even Kickstarter.

It might just be something we open-source and release out to the world, but it feels fun, and I want somebody who wants to make something that’s fun for the world. Just like with Birdigo, in the show notes for this episode, there’ll be a link that you can click, and it’ll light up what I’m basically looking for and what this person would be like. I will talk to some folks and see if there’s a person who feels like the right collaborator on this.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: It is time for a One Cool Thing. Craig, what’s your one cool thing this week?

Craig: I probably did this last time. I’m doing it again when the show ends. My cool thing is the invisible army of people. I know people are used to this. They’re like, “Oh, I have the best crew in the world.” No, not everybody can possibly have the best crew in the world. The reason we say that is because we have a life with these people. They become just as important as what the show is in the end. The time you spend with everybody in close quarters, long hours, day after day, relying on them to care as much as you care, means that they become this big, huge family.

There are so many people. If people did watch The Last of Us and enjoyed it, then I wish I could tell you every single one of those people’s names. I know they go by at the end of the episode really, really fast. Sorry about that. Also, HBO makes it like tiny, so it’s really bad. I want people to know we have quite a time. It’s incredible. It’s been the experience of a lifetime. In no small part because I just go live a life, another separate life with all these people. I’m very thankful to them. They all worked so hard.

John: You’ll never thank your prompts the way that you’re thanking the actual people who do the job.

Craig: No, weirdly, I won’t thank the prompts. No.

John: No.

Craig: F the prompts.

John: F the prompts. My one cool thing is sunscreen, but it’s actually a specific brand of sunscreen. Traveling in Egypt and in general, I’m pretty good about sunscreen. The best one that I’ve liked most recently is called Play Everyday Lotion SPF 50. It’s made by Supergoop. Supergoop is a brand.

Craig: It’s not goop.

John: It’s not goop. It’s not the [unintelligible 00:56:46] brand. It’s just Supergoop.

Craig: It’s Supergoop.

John: It smells good. It blends in really easily. It comes in a pump, a big jug that you can pump. You can put it on liberally. It’s great. I have not burned. Craig, something you might be aware of is that your arch nemesis, Senator Ted Cruz, actually has opinions about sunscreen that I agree with, which is it’s an attempt to greatly change how we’re regulating sunscreens in the United States, because Europe has much better sunscreens than we do because our FDA is stupid and puts up all these roadblocks in front of things.

Craig: The European sunscreen, is it just full of sunscreeny goodness that we’re afraid of?

John: Yes. Basically, they have 34 different active filters that you can use in sunscreens in the EU. Only 16 in the US. They have much newer, better ones that can block UVA and UVB much better. They have to cross a higher bar.

Craig: To be fair, it’s Europe. They’re really white.

John: They’re really white.

Craig: They’re really white, so they need it.

John: They’re actually not as white because their sunscreens have less of a white cast.

Craig: Oh.

John: One of the problems with our sunscreens, the ones that we are able to use here, is that if you have darker skin tones, they white cast and they look bad. The European ones blend in better. Last time when we were in Malta, we bought some of the European sunscreens and they’re genuinely much better.

Craig: I don’t like the idea of agreeing with Ted Cruz, and I’m not sure how he landed on this [crosstalk].

John: I think it’s some sort of weird deregulation is always good. In this case, maybe we’re over-regulating them in a stupid way.

Craig: He might’ve thought it was lube, and he got excited.

John: Yes, that’s what it could have been. If you are an American who’s looking for American sunscreens, Supergoop’s SPF 50 called Play Every Day is the brand.

Craig: Do you know what that is?

John: What’s this?

Craig: Stay Inside.

John: Stay Inside is also a brand. Also, a hat is a big brand.

Craig: A hat, staying inside, go out at night.

John: People ask me, “Oh, your face looks young for your age,” because I’ve worn a hat for the last 30 years.

Craig: I don’t really have crazy wrinkles, I think. In part because I’m a hermit.

John: It helps indoor boys.

Craig: I have this woman named Sue who puts makeup on me when I have to go do these press events, which is mostly to get the shine off my bald head.

John: Oh, absolutely.

Craig: The other day, she was like, “Your skin’s really good. What are you using for moisturizing?” I was like, “What?”

John: They always ask you that question.

Craig: Oh, is it to make me feel good?

John: Yes.

Craig: Oh, she was lying. She didn’t seem like she was lying.

John: No, I think that’s a genuine question, but–
Craig: Here’s how I know she wasn’t lying because I was like, “I don’t use anything,” and she was upset. She’s like, “What?”
John: I think they imply things like, “You should,” because sometimes [crosstalk].

Craig: Oh, no, she was saying, “I want to know what it is. It’s working.” Now, it may be that she was just buttering me up. She was literally buttering me up with the goop.

John: Yes, a moisturizer. With the goop. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Schrapson. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Steve Petrowski. If you have an outro, give 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. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes.

We have t-shirts and hoodies, and drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers who make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net. You can get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on, traveling back in time to a moment we wanted to witness firsthand.

Craig: Yes.

John: Craig, thanks for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: This question feels generic, but actually specifically came from the Q&A section of Electoral Vote, which is a news site I read each week. The question was, if you had a time machine, if you could go back to witness any point in history as a spectator only, unseen and unheard, what point would you choose and why? I have some contenders, but I’m curious what you’re thinking.

Craig: Is there a provision?

John: We can decide.

Craig: If you select something that it turns out never actually happened at all, [crosstalk] do they give you a mulligan?

John: Yes, you disappear into a void.

Craig: Yes, that’s what I’m concerned about.

John: You get a mulligan.

Craig: You get a mulligan. I’m going to regret choosing anything here, but because I am an avid student of American history, I think I would like to be in that hot Philadelphia room.

John: Number one on my list.

Craig: Really?

John: Yes.

Craig: I would have gone for the Declaration of Independence, 1776, hot Philadelphia room, because I want to hear the arguments. I want to hear John Adams be a jerk about it and win. I want to see Thomas Jefferson being– I suspect I would not like Thomas Jefferson at all. We think of him as like, “Oh, Thomas Jefferson.” I’m back there in a room. I got John Adams over here, who’s a genius and who lives in Massachusetts without owning slaves. I know it’s like, “Oh, well, people owned slaves at the time.” Not all of them. That was the whole argument. That was the big argument. I would want to be there.

John: That’s great. Thinking between the differences of the Declaration of Independence versus the Constitution. Declaration of Independence is like, you got this vision, but you also know like, “Oh, this is going to be bad. We’re going to start a war. This is going to be a whole big thing.” Constitution is like, “How the hell are we actually going to do this? All that infighting probably would get really tedious and boring.”

Craig: Yes, because it was a constitutional convention. It went on for a long time and it really was about writing the manual. The Declaration of Independence was about having the bravery to go, “All right, screw it, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s all just go to war and probably die.”

John: I’ve been in too many WG meetings. I don’t want to die.

Craig: You don’t want the constitutional convention, no.

John: Other contenders for me, Pompeii. I visited Pompeii and the ruins of Pompeii, which is actually fascinating, but it would be fascinating to see the city and then as the volcano blows up, and then I’d bamf out of there before the actual ash starts falling. Just like, “Oh, this whole thing is going to go away.”

Craig: I’ve read quite a bit about it and they’ve actually got a decent– based on various written accounts that were like, oh, somebody who watched it from somewhere, they’ve got a pretty decent understanding of what happened. It’s horrible.

John: It’s horrible. That’s why I want to get out of that.

Craig: Horrible.

John: I don’t want to see the bad stuff. I want to see, like, it’s coming. Also, you visit ruins and you’re like, “Oh, this is–“ Egypt during the pyramid construction is also on my list, because you visit ruins and it’s like you’re only seeing what’s left, but there was a whole big thing here. In the case of Pompeii, when you visit it, year by year, they’re actually discovering a lot more new stuff, which is cool.

Craig: Sure. Look at the Sphinx. When it was first made, it was probably glorious. It’s one of the reasons why I like playing that Assassin’s Creed game. I could run around when the Sphinx was new.

John: Landing on the moon, if you could be there while they’re actually landing on the moon, how cool would that be?

Craig: That would be landing on the moon. Sure. [crosstalk] Yes, I would love to be on the moon.

John: Nothing in the rules said we couldn’t lead Earth.

Craig: Whitey’s on the moon. Do you know that?

John: No. What’s this?

Craig: The Gil.

John: Gil Scott-Heron.

Craig: Thank you, Gil Scott-Heron. I always said Gil Hodges, who was a great baseball player. He had this very famous spoken word song in the ‘60s that was basically like, “Here’s all the stuff that’s happening to black people in America, but Whitey’s on the moon.

John: Number four on my list was the March on Washington, I Have a Dream speech.

Craig: That would have been a good one.

John: Yes. Can you imagine just being there, and it’s like, “Oh, this is an incredible thing is happening,” but then you’re seeing the speech, you’re hearing the speech, it’s like, “Oh, would at that moment, this is going to be a historic speech that’s going to be remembered forever?” Maybe. It’s so good.

Craig: He gave a lot of good speeches. It is odd sometimes how certain things just are the ones that Velcro on into the brain. I would definitely want to be up there next to him as opposed to in the crowd, because in listening to the way that audio is functioning, I bet a lot of the people out there were struggling because that audio is slapping around everywhere, and I would want to be right up there.

John: I’ve been to a number of rallies and protests, and it’s like [crosstalk].

Craig: You’re just like, “Something’s happening.”

John: There’s America Ferrera some place in–

Craig: Ferrera. That’s cool.

John: Is she still there? Yes, she’s great.

Craig: Yes. Her name is America.

John: What other contenders do we have? Historic events.

Craig: In terms of meaningfulness to the world, I would have loved to have been there at the signing of the Magna Carta. I’m a big fan of signings. Signing of the Magna Carta, even though really all it did was just give rights to more rich people, it was the beginning of democracy, it really was.

John: Some limits on power.

Craig: Yes, that would have been quite a thing. I think some of the things were like, “Did that happen or not?” Definitely put me in front of that tomb three days after Jesus was crucified. I’ll sit there on a chair. I’ll watch, and we see what happens.

John: I feel like if I could travel back to hanging out with Jesus and the apostles, I have a sense of what that would feel like. I feel like they’re a little small cult, and they’re doing their thing, and they’re hippies of their time. Sure, I’d happily hang out there for a bit.

Craig: I’m just more curious, if you could send somebody somewhere, at least I could come back and go, “Guys, he did not rise from the dead,” or I come back and I’m like-

John: “Holy cow.”

Craig: “Got to be honest, wasn’t expecting that. He absolutely rose from the dead. I got to go to church.” Those moments would be interesting where great religions are founded. Those moments might be interesting and–

John: Or unanswered questions like, “What actually really happened at this moment?”

Craig: I would have enjoyed, I think– I don’t want to watch somebody die. I wouldn’t want to be in the room when Hitler shoots Eva Braun and himself, but I would totally be there watching them burn the bodies. That would feel good. I think that counts as a little bit of a revenge tour.

John: Similarly, I don’t want to be on the beach at Normandy.

Craig: No.

John: No, thanks. I’ve seen the cinematic recreation. That’s as close as I want to be to any of that stuff. Discovering the new world. What would it be like to be on one of those ships? I guess you don’t know–

Craig: It was a fairly slow process. It wasn’t like suddenly we’re like, “Oh my God, here it is.” They also didn’t land in America.

John: Yes, exactly. It’s on an island off some place.

Craig: I’m not sure about that one, because I’m struggling to point to a moment.

John: Yes, absolutely, or a scientific discovery of–

Craig: Scientific discoveries are interesting ones. I might want to be there when they– I think it was under the football field at the University of Chicago, they built the first stack of radioactive material designed to create a sustained chain reaction in preparation for making the atomic bomb. The day they did that, Fermi and his guys managed to pull off a sustained chain reaction, a self-sustaining chain reaction. I would have loved to have been there for that.

John: “Watson, come here,” the first phone call.

Craig: That would have been something.

John: The electric light.

Craig: Oh, it was a slow–

John: There were versions along the way, but the first time that actually kicks in, it’s got to be exciting.

Craig: On the killing front, I might want to be there for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, because, A, what I would know is that it’s kicking off World War I, but also it was insane. Have you heard the story about that?

John: No. I don’t really know the details.

Craig: It’s incredible. You have these two, I believe they were Serbian nationalists, who were– There was a very complicated thing going on with Austria-Hungary, and certainly all the rest of it. All you need to know is they were there to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand. They had their guns, and he was supposed to drive by in this open car, and he didn’t. He didn’t show up. They were just sitting there at this cafe, and they’re like, “We got it wrong, and we’re bummed out.” Then they were like, “Well, let’s just go to get lunch or something.

They happened to wander towards where they’re going on a street where Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s chauffeur has mistakenly gone down the wrong street and is doing this horrible K-turn. They look at each other, and they’re like-

John: “There’s our chance.”

Craig: -“Let’s do it.” He was sitting duck. They were like, “Huh, how about that?” Anyway, then a lot of people died.

John: I will amend, there’s actually one murder I would want to be at.

Craig: Oh, a murder?

John: I don’t want to see the actual murder. I just want to actually know what the hell happened to JonBenét Ramsey. If I could just have a definitive answer to that, awful.

Craig: That’s more like getting a message from something, or you don’t want to be there.

John: Oh, that’s a good point.

Craig: You don’t want to be there. I don’t want to be there watching a kid get murdered.

John: Exactly. In Cornwall, Boulder, Colorado, it’s like the Warren murder.

Craig: Melissa McCarthy is an up-and-coming thing. She’s playing Patricia Ramsey.

John: Patsy Ramsey.

Craig: Patsy Ramsey. That’s the Lindbergh baby-ish.

John: Yes. Speaking of flying, the Hindenburg, I don’t want to be there for that. I got the video footage. Although I would love to ride on a dirigible. There was a moment where we had air travel like that.

Craig: Sure.

John: That’d be cool.

Craig: Most of my understanding of what it’s like to ride on a dirigible comes from Raiders of the Lost Ark 3 and The Quest for the Holy Grail.

John: Love it. Thanks, Craig.

Craig: Thank you, John.

Links:

• Highland Pro student licenses!
• Collaborate on a tabletop RPG with John!
• Tom and Jerry and Hanna-Barbera
• Accidental Triplets with the Billionaire on Reel Short
• A Mistaken Surrogate for the Ruthless Billionaire on GoodShort
• WebToon
• Werewolf Billionaire CEO Husbands are Taking Over Hollywood by EJ Dickson for Rolling Stone
• Veo 3 fake news example by Alejandra Caraballo on Bluesky
• More Veo 3 examples by Promptastic on Bluesky
• Play Everyday Lotion SPF 50
• The Last of Us
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Steve Pietrowski (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Shapson. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 687 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we answer listener questions on first films, adaptations, writers groups, and thematic questions on television. In our bonus segment for premium members, we will play a round of Strong Opinions, a new little game we play in the office.

Craig: Oh.
John: Craig, you have Strong Opinions.

Craig: What?

John: You know, strong opinions about mayonnaise.

Craig: It’s a hard opinions about mayonnaise.

John: Ventriloquism.

Craig: Hard opinions about ventriloquism. Ventriloquism is the mayonnaise of entertainment.

John: Yes. We have a list of, honestly, 300 other topics too. We’ll get to-

Craig: Amazing.

John: -most of these. It’s a-

Craig: We’ll run it down.

John: -free little game we’re putting out there in the world.

Craig: Very exciting.

John: Great. First, we have some follow-up. Craig, last week we talked about tariffs, which was a non-starter.

Craig: Yes.

John: This week, the MPA and all the guilds together have sent a very glowing letter to our president saying, hey, we would really love to have some sort of national film production incentive and other esoteric changes to the tax code, which makes it easier to make these things.

Craig: Yes. If there is a way to somehow backdoor in something that’s really great for our film industry, because the president was suggesting something that would literally destroy it within seconds, that I suppose is a net positive. I don’t think there’s been any discussion like this for quite some time.

John: No.

Craig: If there’s one gift this guy has, it’s that he shows up at your party with an enormous amount of dynamite.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s like, instead of blowing that up, maybe we could–

Craig: Here’s something like an uncomfortable topic no one else has discussed. Why don’t we do that instead of you just blowing everything up? Listen, fingers crossed. It would be a tremendous thing for, obviously, the crews here in Los Angeles in particular.

John: That would be great. Second bit of follow-up. Way back in 1999, I wrote a scene in the first Charlie’s Angels in which a bird alights on a windowsill, and Bill Murray interacts with a bird, and it’s overheard. Cameron Diaz recognizes the sound that that bird makes and realizes where Bosley has been kidnapped and taken to.

This scene that I wrote innocently has frustrated birders for 25 years because the bird that she says it is, it’s not the bird we see on screen. It’s not the bird we hear.

Craig: No. Birders are notoriously flexible people about this sort of thing.

John: They are.

Craig: That’s why they got into birding.

John: Yes. [chuckles] They’re like, it’s some kind of bird. It doesn’t matter. They don’t care about specifics. One thing I really respect about birders is they’re like, that’s some kind of bird.

Craig: It has wings. it’s a bird. It’s big.

John: It’s a bird.

Craig: Yes. What kind of bird? A big one.

John: I mean, if you confuse a bat and a bird, then they’re like–

Craig: By the way, I have done that.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: To this day, whenever I see swallows or something, Melissa’s like, “Ooh, swallows.” I’ll go, “No, those are bats.” It makes her insane because she’s a birder.

John: Oh yes. That’s good. Yes. Forrest Wickman is the writer from Slate who was first annoyed by what had happened here. This has already been a podcast episode of Decoder Ring, Willa Paskin’s great show. Now there’s actually an article we can link to, which is a much longer history of and more detailed about the work he did to figure out what went so wrong with my script and all the subsequent scripts.

I didn’t write Pygmy Nuthatch. Pygmy Nuthatch is funnier. I picked a bird that actually made sense. Then over the course of the 16 other writers who worked on Charlie’s Angels, it all drifted away. Then ultimately the bird that they picked for it, you cannot actually film because you’re not allowed to own the bird. They talk to the animal handlers, talks to everybody. It’s just a good lesson in sort of how, quote unquote, “mistakes” in movies happen.

Craig: Sounds like a whole lot of apologizing for some terrible behavior, John. Sounds like you’re making a lot of excuses for a very hurtful thing that you did. That– who’s this guy?

John: Forrest Wickman.

Craig: Is still talking about 20 years later.

John: Yes. When they reached out to me about this, this was almost a year ago-

Craig: Jesus.

John: -I did not remember that there was a bird in Charlie’s Angels. That’s how long ago it’s been.

Craig: I don’t even know what to say. There are a lot of problems in the world. It’s not that we can’t be frivolous, but there has to be some limitation to the frivolity, especially if you’re doing it under the guise of your professional work. I am going to spend a company’s time and money to chase this down. Pygmy Nuthatch is a very funny name.

John: It is a funny name. Ultimately that’s my argument. We can’t quite figure out who wrote Pygmy Nuthatch. It could have been Zak Penn or Susannah Grant or anyone of the other people who worked on this movie.

Craig: They won’t remember either.

John: No, but it’s the funniest name.

Craig: No, it’s very funny. Does he not get that that’s why that happened? [chuckles]

John: He does understand it.

Craig: Oh, he does?

John: Yes.

Craig: Oh, that’s great.

John: Also, then why is the Pygmy Nuthatch not the bird depicted there? Why is the bird called not even matching the bird that’s there?

Craig: He doesn’t know how any of this works?

John: Well, now, if you read this article, you’ll understand how Hollywood works.

Craig: Oh, he figured it out.

John: He interviewed everybody. He did the journalist’s job of actually going and figuring out– finding the answers.

Craig: Good. There are serious problems that need to be uncovered. [laughs]

John: There’s also trivial problems. Sometimes the trivial problems are good.

Craig: I guess.

John: Honestly, the puzzles you’re solving every day are just for your own enjoyment. This is enjoyable for him.

Craig: Yes, but I’m not convincing people to watch me solve– Maybe I should. Maybe I should go on Twitch. There’s a guy named FoggyBrume. I’ve probably talked about FoggyBrume. No? He’s the editor in chief of P&A Magazine, Panda Magazine, which every couple of months has a quite difficult puzzle suite. For the elite people, I think it’s sort of like– it’s medium.

Foggy, every now and then, will go on Twitch and solve a cryptic crossword puzzle by a publication in England called The Listener. The Listener’s cryptic is insanely hard, and people will show– I’ve showed up to watch him do it, and he struggles, and then he does do it. He’s very, very good. Maybe I should– yes, I’m going to start a Twitch channel. Solve Cryptics with Craig.

John: Honestly, we’re going to have a Scriptnotes YouTube channel now. That could be a place where you can solve some [crosstalk]

Craig: Let’s do it. I’m going to do it.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: We’re going to teach people cryptics, and we’re going to solve cryptics with Craig.

John: One of your big puzzle friends is a guy named Dave.

Craig: Dave Shuken.

John: Dave Shuken. I met Dave Shuken.

Craig: What?

John: I’m going to tell you this. I met him at Rachel Bloom’s birthday party. Rachel Bloom had a birthday party where she had a spelling bee, and Dave Shuken was the moderator for the spelling bee.

Craig: Dave Shuken seems to be at the hub of many moderated games of intellectual adventure.

John: A bunch of our people we know were there. I finished third.

Craig: Okay.

John: Yes.

Craig: Spelling bee, as in the New York Times spelling?

John: On, no, no. A classic grade school spelling bee.

Craig: Also the thing that Dave Shuken would be excellent at.

John: He was excellent at.

Craig: Dave’s knowledge of everything is startling. Everything.

John: I have to say, adult spelling bee is a good choice for a party theme.

Craig: That’s fun.

John: Yes, it was good.

Craig: Yes, I love that. Third. Who won?

John: Rachel came in second, and I’m blanking on the guy who won first. He’s a director who used to work on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Craig: Okay, but that guy.

John: That guy.

Craig: Tip of the hat to him.

John: More follow up. We have one here on 36 Questions, which was a thing I brought up in a previous episode. Maybe you weren’t there, but 36 Questions– Oh, actually, it was in the Leslie Hedland episode that you weren’t here for. This sort of famous list of 36 questions to bring closeness between people. Questions to ask each other, so romantic partners but also just strangers to get to know them. We follow up on this from Kamel in Zimbabwe.

Drew Marquardt: Kamel writes in response to John’s One Cool Thing. “I wanted to make you aware of 36 Questions, the podcast musical with Jonathan Groff and Jessie Shelton. It’s my all-time favorite musical. I don’t want to spell the plot, but they use the 36 questions to follow two characters on an auditory journey.”

Craig: Wow.

John: Jonathan Groff.

Craig: Jonathan Groff. Never bad.

John: Never bad.

Craig: Always good.

John: Always good. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. All right, let’s do a little bit of news here. First off, we have a summer intern. Drew Marquardt, once upon a time, was our summer intern. He’s now our Scriptnotes producer. Our new summer intern is Sam Shapson. Welcome Sam Shapson.

Sam Shapson: Hey, guys. Good to be here.

Craig: Sam Shapson is hard to say thrice quickly.

John: It is. It’s a challenging name.

Craig: Sam Shapson, Sam Shapson, Sam Shapson. Yes, it’s hard.

John: Yes, you do it.

Craig: It’s hard.

John: One of the things that Sam is working on this summer is getting our Scriptnotes YouTube channel started up. We’ll have longer form episodes of things we’ve done. We’ll bring over your How to Write a Movie episode, which we put up on YouTube. Episode 99, the Psychotherapy for Screenwriters. Sam’s also cutting little short things, which are delightful for YouTube when you just want little blips.

Craig: Amazing. Welcome aboard, Sam. Happy to have you here. Do a good job this summer, you know. It’s crucial. It’s a crucial summer in your life.

Sam: I will try my best.

John: All right. Second bit of news, Craig and I are planning to attend the Austin Film Festival at the end of October.

Craig: Again?

John: Again. Why not? October 23rd through 26th is the screenwriting portion of that. We’ll be there. Drew will be there. We’ll probably have a Highland event there. If you’re thinking about like, what do I want to do? Do I want to go to Austin this year? If that helps sway you in the decision of Austin, great. It’s cheaper to book hotel rooms now than down the road. Just wanted you and people to know that.

Let us get to our questions. We have so many questions to get through. I pulled out two of them as more marquee topics. The first one is from Tyler. Drew, would you read this question from Tyler?

Drew: “I loved your Scriptnotes episode about writing a movie to argue a thesis. How do you adapt that method for television? Specifically, how do you break the show’s thesis into sub-theses that argue the show’s thesis across episodes while serving as theses for complete standalone stories within an episode? Moreover, how does this process differ between miniseries, where you know the whole arc and episode constraint at the outset, and ongoing series where you don’t?”

John: Great.

Craig: That’s a great question.

John: It’s a good question. This is referencing back to something we just talked about, which was your episode on how to write a movie. It was really about arguing a thesis, and so talk to us about what you mean by a thesis.

Craig: It’s a simple argument, some statement about something that people could disagree on or could argue either position for. Your movie is often about a character who believes one side of that argument. By the end of the movie, through the events that you’ve put that person through, they now believe the opposite side of that.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: We think of it as a character arc, but a lot of times character arc implies that they just went somewhere, but this is about, okay, everything along the way is getting to that argument. The people they meet show them other possible answers to that argument. They try to maybe dabble believing the other side of the argument. They get punished for it.

They end up in a terrible place where they definitely don’t believe what they used to believe, but they’re not brave enough to believe what they should be believing. Then through some climactic action, they behave in accordance with this new way of thinking, even at great personal risk.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s pretty standard across the board stuff.

John: The kinds of things we’re talking about are also the same space as a central thematic question, the central argument of a thing. It’s basically, what is it that we are grappling with?

What is the idea that we’re grappling with, and how are we creating characters and situations that grapple with this? What you’re speaking about specifically in a movie is that, generally, over the course of the movie, a person will enter with one perspective on this central dramatic question and leave change with a different answer to the same question.

Craig: The opposite answer, often. For television, it’s a bit different. I’ll be honest. I don’t know the answer to one of those questions, which is how do you do this when it’s an ongoing series where there is no planned end? I don’t know because I’ve never worked on a series like that. I know what the end for The Last of Us is, and I’ve always known. That’s different.

John: We’ve had guests on the show who have had to do this, and so I would reach back to some of the really talented showrunners we’ve had in these podcasts with us. They often talk about the blue sky phase at the start of a season, where they’re really talking about, what is it we want to explore this year? Ultimately, they are still wrestling with the same question that the show is fundamentally about, but how are we doing it this year, and what are the ways in which we’re exploring this question this year?

Whether it’s Frasier or The Good Wife, they’re going to be thinking about how it is they’re going to tackle the kinds of questions that their show is tackling in this next year and how they’re going to break that out over the course of the season.

Craig: Yes. it’s probable that people that are on ongoing shows do think just in terms of the season as a movement. There is a beginning, middle, and end to the season. If it is a drama or if it’s a comedy that is episodic, meaning one episode leads into the other story-wise, as opposed to self-contained episodes that don’t, then yes, there’s going to be something that gets pulled through. You’re thinking about a big circle for the season.

Somebody is going to go on this thing, and they are either going to go from I believe one thing to I believe the opposite, or they’re going to go all the way from I believe one thing to I still believe, and in fact, I believe it no matter what. The episodes themselves are like their own little circle. There’s circles inside of circles inside of circles. Every scene should have somebody changing somehow.

There should be a thesis at the beginning of the scene that gets disrupted through antithesis, and we have a new synthesis, and so on and so on. It’s just circles inside of circles. That’s how you do it.

John: Another distinction I would make is that, in a movie, the central character and the movie are trying to answer the question, at least answer the question for that character in the course of this story. In this series, especially an ongoing series, you’re not looking for the answer. You’re exploring the question, and exploring the question is a valid choice. You don’t have to get to an answer.

Craig: That’s right.

John: There’s no final answer. There’s no total victory. It’s just how do you wrestle with this question?

Craig: Television does allow you to give people the experience of going somewhere at length. When you go all the way through, at some point, you can see how the end is more about a wistful goodbye than it is about people learning things or concluding. In movies, you really do feel like, when there’s a happy ending, that the ending of the movie is the best and most important day of that person’s life, and everything will be fine from here on out.

John: Series can end, even like ongoing series can end. Six Feet Under has one of the best endings of any series ever. If I had to say what is the central question it’s grappling with, it’s like, how do you live when you’re confronted by death constantly? How do you live knowing that you’re going to die? The final episode, that grapples with that for all those characters in a way that’s thematically satisfying, but each individual episode is also about that.

That’s always the tension within the episode. The Wire, season by season, it’s about the systems we’ve built to help people betraying them, and it changes what that system is each time, but it’s still always grappling with those same questions. Listen, I think, Tyler, you’re asking the right question. It’s exactly the stuff that happens in a room as you’re trying to figure out what that thing is. The shows that aren’t working–

Craig: There’s no big idea there.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes. You need one a little bit. It needs to be about something, even if it’s just about one relationship or one family and how it’s being impacted by the choices that people make, whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be very involved. each season needs a thing because, when you get to the end of a season, you need to feel like you reached the end of something. There has to be something that concludes.

John: All right. Let’s move on to our second question. This is from Scott, who’s asking about his first feature.

Drew: “I just got my first feature film greenlit to the tune of a few million dollars. It’s a horror movie. I adapted from a book, funded through a private investor, and I’m both thrilled and terrified. What advice do you have for a first-time filmmaker jumping in at this level to avoid royally flubbing this? I’m also curious about setting expectations for the finished film. What should I be thinking about now to ensure the finished film is what I have in my head? Finally, as it moves into the marketplace, are there any insights to avoid getting screwed over?”

John: I hear Scott asking a series of questions. Basically, I hear him asking, how do I emotionally protect myself from what I know is going to be a difficult situation? I hear him asking, how do I make sure I make the best movies and don’t screw things up? I feel like there’s probably some imposter syndrome also embedded in all this as well. First off, congratulations. Great news. Great that you’re able to find money to make this thing. That’s fantastic.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: This investor is great, but you need to have somebody who actually knows what the hell they’re doing. You’ll need a line producer, but you also need a person, a producer on board who has made this kind of film at this kind of budget level and sold this kind of film at this kind of budget level, because it’s such a specific thing. I know people who’ve literally fallen into a bunch of money and made a movie and like, “I got to make the movie I wanted to make,” and had no plan for how to put it out there in the world. That is disastrous.

Craig: Scott, I feel your fear, which is completely justified. I have felt it myself. I’ll try and be comforting. Then I’m going to give you the anti-comfort. The comforting part is there are some simple things that you can keep in mind as you go through this. The first is don’t expect that anybody is going to respect you when you start doing this. In fact, quite the opposite. People are very suspicious of first time directors.

The crews just presume that you’re going to suck, and you’re not going to know what you’re doing. You’re going to want to really get a good relationship with your first AD. The first AD is the person that’s going to help you move through your day. They’re going to keep you planned. You’re going to want to have an excellent relationship with your cinematographer because the first AD and the cinematographer pushing and pulling will have the biggest impact on how long your day is and how much you get done that day.

You’re going to want to create a little bit of a bubble for yourself and the actors because they’re the ones who end up on screen. You’re going to want to have a good relationship with the crew, but don’t be overly concerned if the crew doesn’t like the show itself, the movie, that’s not important. What’s important is that you have some sort of vision for it because you’re gathering pieces that you will put together later.

Those things, good stuff. Then keep in mind that there will be politics going on that will swirl around you and try to ignore them as best you can. If somebody gives you constructive criticism about how you can get more out of people or do a better job, listen to it carefully, take it in, be humble, but don’t get caught up in swirling political stuff between actors, between representatives, between the money and the producer, any of that stuff.

Now let me be uncomforting. There is nothing we can tell you that is going to prepare you for this. You are not going to be the same person when you’re finished. You will be smarter. You will know more, and you will be better when you’re finished. This is not good news because it means that you are not going to be the best you can be when you start. This is normal. It’s just normal.

Go in there understanding that you’re going to do your best, but you are going to grow and improve from this experience. You cannot forestall these things. There’s no way to prepare for a lot of it. It’s a little bit like having a baby. You can read a whole lot of books, but when you have the baby, you’re like, oh no. There will be some days, man. There’ll be some days, but it’s okay. Everybody who’s been a successful filmmaker has gone through this.

John: Here’s my pitch. Making a film is a creative heist. Think about it like it’s a heist. It’s like Ocean’s 11. How do you pull off a heist? First off, you have to assemble a team. Assembling that team is crucial. You’ve got to have the right people on board to make this with you. That is, you’ve mentioned it, the first AD. Cinematographer, I think is right up there at the tip top. That is the person you’re going to be sharing you vision for what it is you’re actually seeing on screen.

Your production designer, your editor, your casting director, and ultimately your cast, that is the crew that you’re assembling to pull off this creative heist. Then you’re going to have a plan. You’re going to have a really detailed plan. If everything goes exactly according to plan, you’re going to make the best movie. It’s all going to work perfectly, but it’s not.
That’s why you need to have a crew that you really can trust and smart people for when things don’t go according to plan. Your job is to be able to remember what is actually important. Because you wrote the script, which is great, but that script and reality are not going to match up very, very well. You’re going to have to have situations where, okay, we have lost this location. What do we do?

You’re going to have to be the person who figures out what to do in those situations. That’s by really understanding what those scenes are about. Therefore, if you have to set it someplace else, or if you lose this actor or whatever else, you make it work. Especially filmmaking at this budget level where you don’t have the padding and safeties, that’s the reality.

Craig: You aren’t going to make the movie that you have in your mind right now.

John: No.

Craig: That’s not possible. You will hopefully make a movie that represents enough of what you had in mind and has the essence of what you were looking for. You are going to constantly be wavering back and forth between not wanting to be too precious so that you can solve problems and make your days, but also not wanting to be too much of a good boy syndrome.

John: Obliging is not going to help anybody.

Craig: Yes, exactly. You have to figure out how to wander that middle ground. It’s tough. You may miss a few times. You may go too far one way or the other. AD, cinematographer, start there. Those two people are incredibly important. If you run into people, like a production designer or a costume designer, anybody that you suspect is just there to get paid, and I’m talking about department heads, putting aside the pure crafts like grip and electric, when we’re talking about the creative department heads, if they seem like they don’t care, they’re not right for this. You need people that care. You want them to actually be passionate about this. There’s no way to get through it otherwise.

John: I’m helping out with a movie that shoots this fall. Seeing the director assemble her team has just been so inspiring because she has such a specific, unique, singular vision. She will meet with 15 people, and I’ll be the 16th person, like that’s the one, and she’s right.

Craig: Yes, that’s nice.

John: Yes. [laughs] It’s also a luxury of being able to shoot in town and just having choices like that.

Craig: Exactly.

John: The last thing, Craig said you can read as much as you want to read about it, what would be probably helpful for you, Scott, right now, is to read accounts of filmmakers who’ve done something recently and who did things at your budget level and what they learned, what they would have done differently. Read those interviews or if there are longer form books or just stuff because that’s the stuff– you’re entering into a very specific kind of filmmaking and to understand how that works is going to really serve you.

Craig: I think there’s a book called My First Time.

John: Oh yes, there is a book.

Craig: Yes, and it’s a collection of interviews with directors about their first time directing. I remember reading it thinking, this is great. The whole point of the book, it was pitched like, okay, if you read this, then you could avoid the mistakes that all these great directors made. No, you can’t.

John: No, you make your own mistakes.

Craig: You’re going to make your own mistakes. You’ll be too worried about making their mistakes, and it’ll be too artificial and weird. You got to go be yourself.

John: You also recognize that all these people made these mistakes, and they’re now fantastic directors.

Craig: Exactly, and so you’re just going to have to experience this, and it’s going to be a wild ride. I will say, once you do it, and you come out the other end, you will look at movies and television in a much different and vastly more forgiving way.

John: Yes. I will remember when I was making The Nines and leading up to The Nines, before I brought on my cinematographer, I got way too obsessed with cameras, and then I realized I should not be thinking about the camera at all. It’s out of my purview. I should let the cinematographer decide what she wants to do for this. I gave her my poetic descriptions of what I’m going for, but let them decide this.

Craig: Ksenia Sereda, who’s our cinematographer on The Last of Us, before the second season, she was so excited. She’s like, “Okay, so I’m getting these special lenses that are going to be made for this season with this cool thing going on.” She tried to explain it to me, and I didn’t understand it. She goes, “But don’t worry, I’m going to run– I’m going to shoot a bunch of tests. I’m going to show you all these different things, and you’ll see the differences.”

I’m like, “Great.” Then she showed them all to me, and I was like, “These all look great. Which one is the one that you want?” She’s like, “This one.” I’m like, “Okie dokie,” because I don’t need to know. She was like, “Look” because it’s like, okay, the test footage is just some light bulbs turning up in a room. She’s like, “These will be great for these scenes and here’s why.” I was like, “Okay, I trust you on that stuff.”

When makeup people are like, here’s how we’re going to approach this, I’m like, great, because I don’t do that. You do need to trust your people. They will come to you with a million questions. Be prepared to answer four million questions a day.

John: That’s the reason why I didn’t want to direct for a while. It was just like, oh, they’re going to ask me a thousand questions a day, I won’t have the answers. Then I was like, oh no, I do have the answers.

Craig: You will. In fact, what’s frustrating is sometimes you’re like, I thought that was obvious from this. Okay, let me explain what I want to [mumbles] Of course, everybody who works on The Last of Us knows that I love meetings where the question that was asked 14 times gets asked the 15th time.

John: I think podcast listeners are very [unintelligible 00:25:27] [crosstalk]

Craig: Oh, yes. You know what? I get it. I get it. I get it. Yes, I answer it.

John: All right. Our next listener question comes from Selfish in Seattle.

Craig: Great name.

Drew: Selfish writes, “I belong to a six-member writer’s group. We meet regularly. Everyone in the group has been in the business longer than I have, and I’ve learned a lot, so I appreciate being invited to join. Here’s the issue. I have a proactive manager who makes lots of introductions for me. Anytime I share that I’m having a general with this person or that person reading my script, the other members pounce on me for the person’s contact information so they can reach out to them about some project of their own.

When I say I don’t feel right about sharing someone’s contact information without their permission, the other members assure me that, in this industry, contacts are considered community property and basically make me feel like a selfish person. Am I? What is the protocol when it comes to sharing hard-won contacts versus keeping them to myself?”

Craig: John, why are we putting our phone numbers on the podcast?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: It’s community property.

John: It’s community property.

Craig: Yes, it’s community property.

John: Before we answer this question, I do want to say that, at some point back when I was working as an assistant, someone called or texted me and said, “I have Tom Cruise’s phone number.” I’m like, yes, it’s weird that you have Tom Cruise’s phone number, but it’s not actually useful. I disagree with the premise of this writer’s group, like having that contact information is going to somehow fundamentally change what they’re doing.

Craig: They are not one contact away. I think the thing that I want to actually put my finger on there, Selfish in Seattle, is why you’re saying these things in the first place at all. This, to me, feels like writer’s group bragging. Like, “Oh, hey, oh my God, good news, everybody.” You’re proud of it, maybe, and it’s just driving them crazy and then they’re bothering you. Just don’t talk about it.

You know what? Here’s the thing, if any of those general meetings turns into a specific meeting, turns into a sale, if you want to talk about how you sold a script, that seems reasonable.

John: Yes, you should take everybody out for drinks.

Craig: Yes, but a general meeting?

John: Yes. Drew, you are a member of a writer’s group or two. What’s your instinct here? Would you say that you had a specific meeting about a specific project in a writer’s group? Maybe we just don’t know how these groups work, but.

Drew: I would say most of them start off with people talking about where they are with the project. If you’re like, oh, I had a meeting, and it feels like you’re moving forward, I think there’s a natural sort of space for that. Most of the time, people are encouraging, and I’ve never heard anyone ask or solicit contact information about stuff.

Craig: Then that’s why you’re okay saying, yes, I had a general meeting with so and so because no one’s going, great, what’s their phone number? If you’re in a group where people are like, give me your stuff, then just stop showing off your stuff. Take your watch off before you walk in the room.

John: Yes, that feels right. Let’s move on to John, who is stuck in the mailroom.

Drew: John writes, “I’ve been at a studio mailroom for three years, and it’s been great, but it’s also been impossible to get out. I’ve learned that there is a non-official policy of not promoting from within. As much as I’ve networked there, there’s only so much that can be done without being overly pushy. The worst part is that I’m not exactly gaining too many skills that other entry-level jobs are looking for, which makes it harder to find something.

I know it’s hard for everyone right now, but what do you guys think are the best ways people can break out from entry-level in the current environment where such a thing seems impossible?”

John: Let’s define our terms here a bit. Mailroom is like the classic, like you are a runner. You’re literally sorting stuff. It sounds like John is not on a desk for somebody.

Craig: No.

John: It’s not that first step as an assistant. It’s like a pre-assistant level. Three years is a long time to be in that spot.

Craig: What is a mailroom now? Because it used to be people would get scripts and contracts and things.

John: Photocopy a bunch of stuff.

Craig: Then they would show up in a mailroom, and they would be sorted. Then the mailroom people would wheel a little basket around through the hallways, delivering the mail to desks. What is it now?

John: Drew and Sam, can you talk us through what a mailroom is right now? Do you have a good sense of what a studio mailroom, which is where John certainly is?

Craig: In the era of the PDF.

Drew: I know friends who’ve worked in mailrooms, and they still refer to it as a mailroom, but I don’t know what they’re doing.

Craig: [laughs] Do you want to ask them? You just have no clue what they’re doing.

Drew: They usually get on a desk pretty quick, it seems like. You’re a floater. If someone’s out, you jump on the desk.

Craig: I see, floater. Got it. Okay, so a floater is somebody that fills in for assistance when they’re out sick or whatever, because they know the system of the place. Let’s get to the heart of the question. The heart of the question is, if you’ve been doing an entry-level position for three years, and nothing has shifted in that time, and there is no path forward to progression that’s provided for you, you need to go.

John: Yes.

Craig: What they’re saying to you is, we’ll let you work here in whatever this putative mailroom is for a while, but we’re not going to give you anything else. It’s a dead end. To me, it’s the definition of a dead end. To start with, maybe give them one last chance by going to the supervisor and saying, listen, when people come to work in the mailroom, presumably it’s so that they can go somewhere. Can you just let me know? Is that going to be happening within the next, I don’t know, six months to a year? Let’s just be honest.

If it’s not, if no one’s interested, if it doesn’t seem like a good fit, then I should probably look around for something else. I’ll go to a different mailroom. Maybe that mailroom, people will be like, oh yes, we do think there’s a future for this guy.

John: First, I’ll ask our listeners who are currently working in a mailroom or have very recently worked in a studio or an agency mailroom, can you tell us what your actual daily job is like? We clearly don’t understand what the mailroom actually means right now. If we are giving John wrong advice about to get out of there, but I don’t think you’re going to tell us that. I think you’re going to tell us like John should have left it a year ago or two years ago.

Craig: Yes. Three years is a long time for no movement when you’re on the bottom rung. Middle rung, sure. Bottom, no.

John: Our next one is an audio question.

Craig: Oh, okay.

Naomi: I’m a 17-year-old from Southern California, and I’m graduating high school next year. I’ve been really passionate about pursuing directing and screenwriting for a really long time. Now that I’m getting closer to actually entering the industry, I’m trying to figure out the best ways to prepare myself and get experience. It seems like everybody has a different opinion on what someone my age should and shouldn’t be doing in order to make it in film.

Of course, the industry is in a wild state at the moment. I’m trying to sort through the noise and find some stable ground to build up from. I’ve been researching, watching movies, taking cinema classes at community college, learning to edit and practicing photo and video with my own new camera. Obviously, there’s a lot more to it. I need to start making connections, working more on my own scripts and videos and getting internships once I’m 18 in addition to anything else I may be missing.

Based on your experience, how can I do this all efficiently and effectively? How should I approach the changing film industry as a beginner? I’m trying to make it my goal to learn from other people’s experiences and be proactive about my own decisions. I’d also love to know what changes you would or wouldn’t make looking back on your own career.

John: Great. This is Naomi.

Craig: Naomi, wow. What a well put together question. Great poise. It’s sort of related a little bit to the prior question. Even though Naomi’s just starting out, she hasn’t graduated high school yet, it’s all in front of her. Her question is not that different from the fellow who said, hey, somebody put up a couple of million dollars for me to make a movie. Both people are saying, can you help me not fall down pits and avoid the fire traps and take a safe route? The answer is not really because everybody’s path is different because everybody is different.

The people that are telling you, hey, the way in is this or this, anybody that’s being really prescriptive, anybody that’s being really rigid about what you should or shouldn’t do is wrong because the way John started is different than the way I started. It’s different than the way all of us, all of our friends, everybody seemed to start in a different way.

First things first is to acknowledge that your ambition and your intelligence are your best assets at this point. You have no experience, but you’ll get some. I love that you’re taking classes, and you’re learning editing. That’s amazing. My advice has always been to find a job. I don’t care how peripheral it is to the entertainment business. As long as it is sort of vaguely connected to the entertainment business, get a job, get paid.

Now you’re young, so it’s going to be difficult, but there are some internships you can apply to. The Television Academy is a wonderful intern– I am a graduate of the Television Academy internship program. We don’t talk about that enough. It’s a wonderful thing. Apply to lots of things. You’re in Southern California. That’s good. Find yourself a place that is within an hour drive of the place that you’re going to end up working at, and then just start doing what you do and learning and absorbing and listening.

You are very young. You can’t vote yet. You’re really young. It doesn’t feel like you are, but you are. The next four years you will be a very different and I suspect even more accomplished person than you are right now.

John: Let’s talk about those next four years because Naomi didn’t mention college at all.

Craig: Community college.

John: Well, she’s taking classes.

Craig: Right. Summer classes.

John: I think you should go to college. I think you should go to college, not necessarily to learn filmmaking, but just to learn the kinds of things you’ll learn over the next four years between the ages of 18 and 22, which are crucial growing things, and to hang out with other people who are hopefully going to do the kinds of things you want to do. A film program is helpful because you’re with a bunch of kids who are also making movies, and you get to spend your time making movies, which is great. If it’s not that, like any sort of basic four-year degree, I think it’s probably the right idea. Don’t go to a crazy debt for it.

Craig: Yes. Community colleges are great.

John: Yes. If you’re in Southern California and if you’re as smart as you sort of sound like you are, if you can get into a UC or any California college, right.

Craig: Those are tough. Whatever you can do, I agree with John, what you can, for instance, at pretty reasonable costs, especially if it’s a community college, you can study literature, you can read great books. Nothing is better for you than reading. Reading the great stories and the people that wrote them and figuring out what they were trying to do and how they did it, all those things.

Think of it as a turbocharged version of whatever your English class has been in high school. That’s a good thing to do if you want to be a storyteller. While you’re in college, yes, if you can, sure, you can get a job. Get a job.

John: Get a job.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Yes. Listen, you hopefully don’t need to make a lot of money so you can do the kinds of runnery things or the shadowing and just visiting sets will be really good for you. I’m also thinking about like, you’re a writer as well as a director, thinking about what movies you actually want to make.

One of the things that always impressed me about Lena Dunham when I met her, which was right after college, was she was already making movies, but she was making movies about her life, people in her age. She wasn’t trying to make The Godfather.

She was trying to make things that were specific to her. I think, Naomi, if there’s a specific story that is yours to tell that a 17-year-old in Southern California can tell that, a 30-year-old can’t tell, that’s what’s going to be interesting and fascinating, and people are going to want to meet you because of that.

Craig: Keep yourself open to the idea that you don’t yet know actually what it is that you want to do or will be good at doing. I did not show up in Hollywood looking to be a writer. I didn’t. A lot of people say, I want to be a writer and director. They don’t necessarily know what that is yet because they haven’t done it. Sometimes people who want to be a writer and director start taking editing classes and realize they’re great at editing.

Great editors are worth their weight in gold. Some people end up being camera people. Some people end up being in advertising. Everybody finds something, but just keep yourself open because you don’t want to show up sort of locked off to the possibilities because you don’t know what they are yet.

John: No, exactly. Next up, let’s answer a question from Charlie.

Drew: Charlie writes, “I’ve recently been hired to write a screenplay and, yes, it’s becoming all the nightmare scenarios you guys have described a thousand times. The director and producer are in a cold war over ideas and both have dug their heels in. I am more closely aligned with the producer’s vision, but the director has threatened to quit. For the moment, he’s won. He’s been given carte blanche to move forward and is unwilling to collaborate on any points he previously argued.

I am fighting such a bad urge. I want to just stop trying. I want to just write the bad script so he can see for himself. I’m tired of trying to control my emotions. I feel like throwing in the towel and just writing the expository dialogue and unresolved story threads. But won’t that reflect so poorly on me? Isn’t it my job to be the adult in the room and do everything I can to guide this to the best possible place? How do I come out of this crap smelling like roses?

John: Wrong question to end with. There’s no roses here. Basically, how do you get through this situation with your vision as intact as possible and also a movie? I think these would be noble goals.

Craig: Isn’t this horrible? isn’t this embarrassing to directors? I hope that directors listen to this. I’m sure there are directors who listen to it. You and I are directors. We’re both in the DGA. This isn’t chauvinism. This is just a fact. It should be humiliating to directors to hear that somebody that is one of them behaves like this. It’s embarrassing. Just because there is this weird leverage of, well, we got a director and we can’t lose the director, to behave like this.

By the way, if the director is a writer, then why aren’t they writing it? If they’re not a writer, why don’t they shut up? Because they signed on to do a script, did they not? I’m just saying, directors, don’t be this person. Just don’t do it.

In a circumstance like this, I think it would be fair to go to the producer and say, listen, I don’t know how to do the things that this person wants me to do. I don’t know how to write them. I don’t think anybody would know how to write them.

Maybe he can write them. Maybe you should have him write it. I think we all know that it would be bad. The movie would be bad. Maybe do let him quit. Maybe let him quit. There is a point where you can’t just willingly– if you write the bad thing, you’re like, here, I did everything you said, look how bad it is, 98% chance he’ll be like, no.

John: No, it’s great.

Craig: It’s finally fixed. [laughs] I love this house with no doors and five chimneys that are sideways. I think you need to have a long talk with the producer. I would include your representative in this to say, let’s be serious. You cannot last forever biting your tongue. You can’t last forever being overly diplomatic. You can’t last forever trying to solve problems you shouldn’t be solving because they shouldn’t be there at all. At some point, it’s fair for everybody to go, “This is not what we want to do. It would be bad.”

John: I agree with that approach. I think another approach would be to continue to engage with the director. This may be a director who just needs to constantly talk through all the ideas and is not actually necessarily asking or expecting you to deliver the thing but basically needs to talk through all their bad ideas.

Craig: They did say that the director’s not willing to compromise or discuss.

John: Yes. If they need to see something, an alternative can be, never give them screenplay material, but you can sort of do a little beat sheet that puts down on paper for what these beats would be, what their vision would be, and why it wouldn’t work so you can actually show them. I understand Charlie’s instinct to just write the pages and say, “Look, this doesn’t work,” but the minute you’ve delivered anything that looks like a screenplay, you’re dead.

Craig: Yes. You can’t do that.

John: If you were to write down something that’s basically just bullet points, then you can have a thing that you can talk through and you can actually just look at like, “This is what we’re describing here, and this is why I think it’s not working, but I did listen to you and then you could see like, this is me showing you what this actually looks like.”

Craig: Why are we so concerned about these directors and their feelings? See, I listened to you. Nobody’s listening to us. No one. Why does this matter so much? I just don’t understand. I’ve never understood it. The emotional fragility of directors is such a problem in our business. I love the directors I work with, so many of them, but I have also worked with a lot of directors in the course of my career. As of you, so many of them have been remarkable and so many of them have just been so fragile, and everybody has to contort themselves to make sure that they feel good and that they aren’t hurt and that they are danced around and catered to.

John: Same could happen with movie stars too.

Craig: The movie star is a movie star. That’s the thing. Look, Tom Cruise is a movie star. There are certain kinds of movies that if Tom Cruise is in, people are going to show up. That’s money, right? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this director is not that.

John: This is not Ridley Scott.

Craig: There are about 12 directors maybe in the world that matter and really probably only 3 when it comes to names, 3 maybe in terms of box office. I guess this is where I would suggest that there’s a long talk to be had with the producer, especially since the producer and you see eye to eye, and the producer’s going to be the one left holding the bag of this thing when all’s said and done.

There has to be adults having this discussion, and I do think you have to be willing to say, all right, I’ve gone as far as I can go. I matter too. I’m writing the script, the thing that says what everything is, all the things that happen, all the things that are going to be, what are they wearing, what are they saying, where are they standing, all of it. All of it, so yes, I think I matter too. I think my opinions matter too. They should matter at least as much as the opinions of this director, and maybe the director’s not right for this because they don’t seem to like the script very much.

John: Yes. Producers suffer from loss aversion, and I think they’re going to feel like, “Oh, if I lose this director, then everything is falling apart again,” but I agree it’s the right approach.

Craig: I’m going to quote the poster from Pet Sematary, the old one with Fred Gwynne: “Sometimes dead is better.” I believe that in my heart. I have seen this so many times. You just go, “Oof, we worked so hard, so hard to make sure this thing never lost a pulse, but it should have, because look at what we ended up with.” You just won’t survive, and no one will ever give you any credit for it. They just won’t.

John: We’re going to try two more questions. This is a longer one. Robert is asking about adaptations.

Drew: Robert writes, “The Netflix show The Residence is credited as an adaptation of the book of the same name. The series is a murder mystery alternatingly set behind the scenes at the White House with zany detective Uzo Aduba and a congressional hearing. Here’s the catch. The book is a nonfiction oral history style tell-all of what it’s like working at the White House. No zany detective, no C-SPAN, and no murder mystery. I have a hard time seeing how the book is anything more than a well-worn reference. I understand if it was thanked or otherwise footnoted in the credits, but how is this an adaptation?”

Craig: Okay, let me explain. This is a technical thing. It’s not a creative thing. An adaptation occurs when you as a writer in the WGA are assigned literary material at the beginning of your work. Now, there are two kinds of material you can be assigned. You can be assigned what’s called non-story literary material, newspaper articles about some crime or maybe a very non-fictional account. You can be assigned literary material of a story nature, which is almost all of it, which includes even songs that have little stories in them, and that’s why it’s an adaptation.

There are things that happen with the credits. If it is material that’s largely non-story, but the point is, nobody is getting this adapted from or based on the blah blah blah, because somebody decided it was. It’s legal.

John: Yes. I don’t know the whole provenance of this show, but my guess is that this book, The Residence, sold to Shonda’s company at Netflix to do an adaptation. Great. We have this thing. Ooh, we need characters and we need a plot. We need the whole reason. We have all this sort of background information, but we don’t have anything more.

Craig: There’s probably some material in the book that you can see, you can pull storylines out, so there are plotlines or storylines, settings, types of characters and things, and then you expand from there. For adaptations, typically there isn’t a story credit, but in cases where the story of the adaptation is markedly different or original to the source material or the source material wasn’t very story-oriented in the first place, you might get a story credit or screen story by for movies at least, but it is entirely a function of what the contract says when you sign it. It’s all listed, and they are required by the WGA to list all of the source material.

John: I’d be curious in case of some of the toy adaptations, Lego or other things like that, to what degree was it considered to be any story material other than just the name?

Craig: For the case of Lego, we could always ask Chris and Phil. My suspicion is they were not assigned any literary material because there is none. There is a toy, but there are no words to the toy. There’s no story to the toy per se. It’s just bricks. If there were certain toys that they did have storylines with, there would be something written. It’s all about getting assigned written material generally where that comes into play.

John: I suspect Barbie had written material, but I don’t know.

Craig: Maybe. Maybe.

John: Let’s answer one last question. This is from D, who’s writing about Scriptnotes T-shirts.

Drew: “Will you bring back orange T-shirts? Sadly, I outgrew my original orange T-shirt or it shrank. [laughter] In my opinion, guys seem to prefer black, blue, olive, or gray shirts, but we women would like more choices than just the white T with the typewriter. Help a sister out.”

Craig: Let’s help a sister out.

John: Help a sister out.

Craig: Why not?

John: We’ll add some orange T-shirts.

Craig: I love the orange T-shirts. Not big sellers, or?

John: Our original T-shirt was the orange T-shirt, very Scriptnotes orange. I just don’t end up wearing it that much.

Craig: Right, but you’re not a woman.

John: I’m not Dee.

Craig: Sisters want the orange shirt.

John: We are listening-

Craig: [laughs]

John: -and we are providing a T-shirt in orange for D.

Craig: Look at you. Look at you. See that? Look how we’re growing.

John: We are growing. We’re growing.

Craig: We’re growing, but actually, also, I like the orange shirt.

John: Thank you, Drew, for reading all these questions.

Craig: Yes, great job.

John: Thank you to all our listeners who sent in these great questions. We got through a lot of them. We didn’t get through all of them, so we’ll save some for sure for a future time.

Craig: For next time.

John: It’s time for One Cool Things. My one cool thing is something I’ve been using the last this six weeks or so. There’s actually two different programs. I’m going to talk about the newer one that I’ve been using called Aqua. It’s a voice dictation software. Craig, you probably remember like back in the day, there was Dragon dictation. There are ways you could talk instead of type into your computer. We had to train them. It was fussy. You had to do everything sort of exactly just right.

Somehow this last year, it just got incredibly, insanely good, so you can talk full speed, and it does a very good job of not only understanding what you’re saying but figuring out the context of what you’re saying and putting periods in appropriate places. It just got crazy better, like much better than the dictation on your phone.

Craig: Yes, which is not good.

John: Which is not good.

Craig: They’ll be buying this shortly.

John: For my trip to Jordan and Egypt, I handwrote my journal. After going to see places, I would handwrite sort of what I was doing. I didn’t open my laptop the entire time I was there, and so I had this handwritten journal, but it wasn’t actually all that useful because I can read my handwriting for about three days, but then it’s just like sort of indecipherable.

Craig: Then it has to go to the mail room.

John: The mail room has to handle it.

Craig: It’s paper.

John: I wanted a digital copy of it, so I was like, “Oh, God. I’m going to have to type this all.” It’s like, “No, I’m actually just going to dictate it,” and so I would just like dictate a lot. I could just go through paragraphs at a time.

It’s just really good. If you’ve not tried computer-based dictation software recently– originally, I was using superwhisper, which is also very good. Aqua seems a little bit better. It just figures out context behind things. I was naming temples in Egypt and it was spelling them properly.

Craig: Spelling them correctly?

John: Try it out. They’re free trials, and then it’s a subscription if you decide to keep using it.

Craig: Fantastic. That’s for cross-platform, or?

John: I know it’s on the Mac. I think there’s probably a Windows equivalent support. Again, dictation software is one of those things that was so important for accessibility for people who couldn’t type and so I typed. It’s just great that these tools, which were originally designed for people with these things, are now so useful for all of us.

Someone’s going to write in about this, so let me acknowledge this. There are privacy concerns with any tool that is basically taking the audio, sending it to the internet, and sending it back very quickly.

Craig: It could keep your stuff.

John: It could keep your stuff.

Craig: Have you looked at the–

John: I looked at the terms of service. They’re saying they’re not keeping your stuff, but do you trust them? At a certain point, I was like, “No,” but do I trust Dropbox, which has all my stuff? Do I trust anything?

Craig: Weirdly, I do trust Dropbox. I don’t know why I trust Dropbox.

John: I’ve just sort of given up. For mission-critical stuff or things that are truly secret, if I was Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy writing on Westworld or something, maybe I wouldn’t feel comfortable with it, but for what I’m doing, I just think it’s really good.

Craig: All right. Good to know. I’m also going to go down the tech road here. I finally experienced something in VR that made me go, “Oh yes, this is going to work.”

John: Oh great. What was it?

Craig: I use the Quest 3, which is from [sighs] Meta, stupidest name and evil. I was so excited because the Fireproof Games, which is the company that makes The Room games for iOS, has pivoted away into VR, which was bumming me out, but they did make a Room game for VR that was pretty darn good. It didn’t make me think like, [mumbles].

They have a game out now called Ghost Town. It is astonishing. It’s a good game, but also, it’s astonishing. For the first time, I was like, “I think I’m somewhere else.” I got close to the wall and was just looking at the texture of the drywall, and I’m like, “Yes, we’re here. It’s happening.” If they can do that now, 5 to 10 years, it’s going to be remarkable how similar it is to the actual visual experience. The next step then would be to add smells and texture and wind ruffling, but honestly, even if you don’t–

John: A direct brain interface at some point.

Craig: It was astonishing, and it’s really well done.

John: Remind us of the name of that.

Craig: Ghost Town.

John: Ghost Town, and it’s available on the Quest. Do you know if it’s available on Vision Pro or any other things?

Craig: I think it’s across all the VR platforms, I believe.

John: I have a Vision Pro. I might try that.

Craig: It should. I think so. I hope so, because it’s also just a really good game, but boy. There’s a little tutorial section, it’s like the first little setting, and I was like, “Eh, it’s pretty good.” [unintelligible 00:52:09] like, “Huh.” Then I got to the next bit, and I was like, “What?” Then it just kept getting better. It’s really something else.

John: This was months ago, but what if the Marvel series did a thing for the Vision Pro, did like, basically, an episode that’s sort of inside the Vision Pro? Remarkably well done, just incredibly effective use of the tools and technology. I’d have no idea how much it would cost. It must cost so much money, but the market for it is like, “Did 50,000 people see that?”

Craig: Right, exactly. That’s the thing.

John: The chicken-egg problem of it is a big thing.

Craig: This was the first time where I was like, “Yes, this is going to happen.” It’s been a while. We’ve had these headsets for a while now.

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

Craig: I don’t know.

John: -with help from Sam Shapson.

Craig: No.

John: It is edited by Matthew Choleli.

Craig: If you say so.

John: 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 transcripts at johnaugust.com along with sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links for things about writing.

We have T-shirts, even orange T-shirts, and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. [music] You’ll find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the e-mail you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to all 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. We get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Strong Opinions. Craig, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, Strong Opinions is a game that we sort of came up with in the office. Nima, who you know, our coder– we love Nima. Nima has a strong opinion about everything. The thing is, you can’t predict what it would be, like pickles, “Ah, pickles are the worst,” or, “Pickles are the best.” You just don’t know, but you know he’s going to have a very strong opinion.

Craig: He’s going to have a hard opinion on every possible yes/no.

John: One day in Slack, I just made a list of 15 things and I had us all vote on, what do we think Nima thinks about each of these things? Then we went through it and [unintelligible 00:54:39], so I built it out into a little bit of a game now called Strong Opinions. It’s a good kind of game for– if you are having a game night, it’s like sort of the first like warmup kind of game.

Craig: Little icebreaker?

John: Yes, a little icebreaker. Let’s do a new game here. We’re going to play.

Craig: This is exciting.

John: Drew will play with us. Here, we’ll do three rounds, and we’ll go start. We’ll start with Craig, so it’s your turn. You just got microwave ovens. Now, Drew and I have to decide what Craig thinks of microwave ovens.

Craig: Got you.

John: All right. If we’re playing this in person, you have a Heck Yeah or a Nope card. Heck Yeah is a testament to–

Craig: Loving something.

John: Yes, and it’s a reference to Megan McDonnell, our Scriptnotes producer, who says, “Heck yeah,” so that spirit, or “Nope.”

Craig: All right. Would I theoretically have to write this down so you would trust me?

John: Yes.

Craig: But just trust me.

John: We’ll just trust you here

Craig: It’s the honor system.

John: Drew, why don’t you go first? Craig and microwave ovens.

Drew: I think it’s a nope.

John: I think it’s also a nope.

Craig: Heck yeah.

Drew: Really?

John: You’re heck yeah? Okay.

Craig: I use a microwave almost every day. I love a microwave oven. There are things that microwaves do so well. I had a breakfast burrito this very morning. It was a frozen breakfast burrito.

John: Where is your microwave oven? Because I’m picturing your kitchen.

Craig: It’s buried in the cabinetry to the left of the refrigerator. It’s sleek. I looked on the directions and it was like, “If you want to make this in an oven, it’s 19 hours. If you want to put it in an air fryer, it’s a million years, or it’s one minute and 30 seconds in the microwave.” I was like, “I’m going to go with microwave.”

John: Two of our D&D friends do not have microwave ovens.

Craig: It’s crazy.

John: I was astonished by this.

Craig: Crazy. No, I’m going to heck yeah microwave ovens.

John: All right. Drew, your topic is tiki bars. I actually know this about Drew. Craig, do you think Drew is a fan or an anti-fan of tiki bars?

Craig: I’m going to say that it’s a heck yeah because who has a hard no on that? How many times have you experienced one?

John: I’m actually a hard no on tiki bars.

Craig: I’ve never been to one.

John: Yes. But I know that Drew is a fan of tiki bars.

Craig: Okay, I got it right.

Drew: I’m a heck yeah.

Craig: Heck yeah.

John: All right.

Craig: That’s so strange. Where– I don’t even want to know. The only one I know is the tiki room in Disneyland.

John: All right, mine is composting. What do I, John August, think about composting?

Drew: It’s a heck yeah.

Craig: It has to be a heck yeah. He’s so green.

John: I’m actually going to be a nope.

Craig: Ah, what?

John: This is surprising, but because we actually tried composting and it was such a disaster.

Craig: Why?

John: We got one of these cones that you throw all your compost bits in and it becomes overrun with ants and other bugs and stuff, and so I would shudder every time I needed to do it. Now we have the green bin and we throw stuff out there, but honestly, Mike is more often the person who’s emptying the compost into the green bins.

Craig: So you are composting.

John: Yes, but I don’t like it.

Craig: It doesn’t sound like you have a hard opinion on it one way or the other. Nobody likes composting.

John: Yes, I’m not anti-concept of it. I just don’t like the process of composting.

Craig: Alright, interesting. I thought you would’ve been more enthusiastic about composting.

John: All right, going back to Craig. What do we think Craig thinks about pineapple on pizza? Okay. Drew, you’re up.

Drew: Oof.

Craig: Everybody has a hard opinion about that, I think.

Drew: I’m going to say heck yeah.

John: I’m going to say nope.

Craig: Nope is correct. I’m from Staten Island. Do not dare violate a pizza with that nonsense.

John: Yes, and one of the tricky things that comes up with this game sometimes is like, “Well, am I thinking just for myself or for other people?” Bird-watching came up and like, I don’t believe in bird-watching, but also, I’m not opposed to other people bird-watching. If Julia Turner wants to bird-watch, I support that for her.

Craig: Or Melissa.

John: Yes, but I don’t–

Craig: I make fun of it all the time because it’s stupid.

John: All right, Drew’s is, well, how does Drew feel about artificial Christmas trees?

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting. It’s funny that you brought up the– for me, because I love an artificial Christmas tree myself, but I think that Drew is a nope on that.

John: I think Drew is also a no on artificial Christmas trees.

Drew: I think I’m a nope now, but I was a heck yeah for a very long time.

Craig: But you’ve converted to nope.

Drew: I’ve converted to nope just in this last year because I have been informed of like the microplastics that these trees end up sort of becoming, and then [unintelligible 00:58:35].

Craig: By the way, nope converts are the hardest nopes of them all. Everyone knows that.

John: Yes, absolutely. They once believed it and now they’re– no, that’s fair enough.

Craig: Yes, now they’re just like, now they need you to know. Making me feel guilty.

John: What do I think about flavored sparkling water?

Craig: Nope.

Drew: I think John is largely a nope.

Craig: I’m a nope.

John: I’m a heck yeah.

Craig: I was trying to remember if you drink like-

John: Yes, LaCroixs I do. I’m not like the Topo Chico fan that you are or used to be.

Craig: Topo Chico’s not flavored, though.

John: It’s not flavored, but like the idea of sparkling water as a thing-

Craig: Yes, I love the sparkling. I like the hit.

Drew: John only likes one flavor of sparkling water.

Craig: What is it?

John: I like the Pamplemousse [unintelligible 00:59:07].

Craig: Pamplemousse.

John: I was at your house. I was at your house and from your refrigerator, I pulled a Peach-Pear.

Craig: Melissa loves that.

John: Oh my God. It had like a texture to it that I just did not enjoy. Water should not have a texture, but it created something.

Craig: Oh sorry, we keep old milk in those. I should’ve mentioned. That’s where we put our compost. [laughter]

John: It was a very meaty water, so.

Drew: Gross.

John: Whoa. What does Craig think of tuna salad?

Drew: Nope.

John: No, it has mayonnaise in it. Absolutely nope.

Craig: No, of course not. Also, the way that they’ve abused the word salad, this perfectly fine word. [laughter] Just, oh, it’s salad, or it’s something that isn’t salad that we put this snot on top of. God.

John: What does Drew think about Christina Aguilera?

Craig: I’m going to say heck yeah.

John: I’ll say heck yeah also.

Drew: I’m a heck yeah.

Craig: Yes, because she’s great.

John: Talented.

Drew: Very talented.

Craig: An amazing singer.

John: Yes.

Drew: Yes.

John: What do I think about podcasts on YouTube?

Craig: Well, you just said that you’re putting us on YouTube, although you’re not putting us as a podcast on YouTube, per se. I’m going to go with nope because I think John is– he likes the proper podcast delivery systems, so I’m going to say nope.

Drew: I’m also going to say nope because I feel like this is watching people talk, and I feel like that’s not up John’s alley.

John: Yes, I’m going to be a nope on that, too, and I feel like it’s absolutely fine to make videos of people doing stuff, but it’s fine to have a talk show kind of thing, but I think it’s no longer a podcast. I think a podcast is about an individual listening to a thing, and a visual podcast at a certain point just becomes a talk show.

Craig: Just a tiny talk show. I mean, I’m okay with when they put the audio podcast on YouTube because some people do listen. Then it’s fine.

John: That’s time. That was it.

Craig: Great, well that was a fun game. I learned a lot.

John: If you wanted to play this for yourselves, it’s just johnaugust.com/strong-opinions.

Craig: Amazing.

John: We’ll put a link in the show notes for it.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: Craig, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Thanks, Drew. Thanks, Sam.

Drew: Thanks.

Links:

• Scriptnotes on YouTube!
• Strong Opinions game
• Hollywood Unions letter to President Trump
• The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch by Forrest Wickman
• Foggy Brume on Twitch
• 36 Questions, the podcast musical
• Austin Film Festival
• My First Movie: 20 Celebrated Directors Talk about Their First Film
• Orange T-shirts are back!
• Aqua voice dictation software
• Ghost Town by Fireproof Games
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Shapson. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.