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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 listen to episode 664 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you handle the anxiety of uncertainty? At times in life, particularly in this industry, you’re waiting around for an answer that’s going to have a direct impact on you. We’ll talk through strategies for navigating those situations. Then Craig, do you want to feel old? The president of production at New Line is 27. That guy at Fox, one person 28. Paramount Studio chief is 31, and by the time he’s 35, he’ll be the chairman of Disney. Craig, does that surprise you?

Craig: It doesn’t surprise me. It delights me because the odds that all of those people have been listening to Scriptnotes for the last 10 years is pretty high. I’ve always said this gig is our best job insurance.

John: Well Craig, unfortunately, we have traveled back in time secretly because that was actually true in the ‘80s and ‘90s, because all those people are well-known names you recognize, like Jeffrey Katzenberg or Mike De Luca, those folks were all running these studios when they were in their 20s and early 30s, and they’re no longer doing that. Now, Hollywood is run by folks in their 50s, 60s, 70s.

Craig: Basically, nothing changed. Those people that came along– You know John, when we started in the ‘90s, it did feel like there was– maybe it’s generational, there was this group of 20 somethings coming and going.

John: That was my Stark class coming into the industry.

Craig: “Everybody get out of our way. We’re taking this,” and then we did. We haven’t apparently let it go.

John: We have certainly not. We want to talk about the impact of that generation and how it influences what gets made and who gets to make it. We’ll also ask the question, Craig, is development wage theft?

Craig: Oh, well, strictly speaking those aren’t wages at all because it’s unemployment.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: It’s an independent contracting.

John: It is, yes.

Craig: It is technically.

John: We will talk through those and answer some listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, which aspects of pandemic life are we still practicing in 2024?

Craig: That’s some thought.

John: First, we have some actual news. We have some events coming up. We have our live show December 6th at Dynasty Typewriter here in Los Angeles. Tickets are now on sale for everyone.

Craig: That’s great. Now, we don’t have guests to yet announce.

John: Not yet announce. We have one who’s confirmed, who’s fantastic. I’m very excited about that. We’ll match folks in who will be great and equally fantastic.

Craig: We’ve never failed to get great guests. Even when we had trouble, we were going to have the-

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: -Larry Kasdan on and then he was not feeling well, so we just threw in some Jason Bateman and some Benioff and Weiss. We can do things like that.

John: We can do things. So I’m excited for our live show and excited for our guests. I’m also doing a second little event on November 22nd 6:30 PM in Village Well in Culver City. This game we make, Alpha Birds, they’re having a night which is just playing Alpha Birds. We’ll be there.

Craig: Oh, cool.

John: Folks can have a drink and play some Alpha Birds. We’ll show you how to play it.

Craig: I love a game store.

John: Game stores are good. Game stores with a liquor license, even better.

Craig: I was confused there, but if they can afford that, amazing.

John: That’s good stuff. You’ll find links in the show notes to both of those events if you are in Los Angeles and want to come to those. Now, Craig, we are recording this episode on a weekend. Drew is not here, so it’s just the two of us.

Craig: Finally.

John: We have no supervision.

Craig: We can just do whatever we want instead of mommy yelling at us.

John: This episode will come out on Tuesday, which in the United States is election day. We’re not going to talk about the election, but I do want to talk about anxiety as a general phenomenon because independent of what day or what’s happening in the world, there are moments, especially as a screenwriter or someone working in this industry where you are waiting around for an answer to come or something to happen.

It could be that you’ve turned in a scripture waiting for notes, you are waiting for the results of a medical procedure, and sometimes those are worse than the actual news itself, is the anxiety that builds up about waiting around for that. I just want to talk through some general strategies you’ve learned over the years and things I’ve found to be useful.

Craig: Sure. You put your finger on one of the biggest challenges we have as human beings, and that’s uncertainty. We really struggle with it. What we try to do, I think instinctively is solve it. There’s a problem. I’m scared of blank. It always starts with fear. I’m scared of blank. How do I solve that? Maybe if I just ruminate and perseverate, and think it through and seek reassurance, which is our number one strategy, then I can make the fear go away. In fact, reassurance seeking really is just pointless. It’s not going to change the reality of what happens.

John: I think let’s look at it from a point of view of screenwriters, because as screenwriters, we are problem solvers. We see situations out there in the world. We’ve created these situations for our characters or in our scripts, and we are looking for what those solutions are. We talk about it on the podcast, sometimes you just need to stop and think and actually work through it and figure out what that is. That is true and useful in fictional worlds in which we’re creating where we can change all the rules. But in this real world, we can’t change those rules.

I think, Craig, one thing you’re saying is, we are trying to solve a problem that we cannot solve by accepting that there’s not a solution to the problem that is in our control is a crucial first step.

Craig: It’s hard, because you’re right. We are used to being in complete control of the narrative. We can go around and change things and do whatever we want. We are all of us living inside a reality that we narrative eyes, but it is not a narrative, and we just don’t know. The things that we don’t know, we don’t know are vast. You and I have been in positions before where we may see people worrying about something that we are making. It hasn’t come out yet, but they’re worrying.

They’re worrying because they care, which is a good sign. It’s better than them not caring, but sometimes they will express their fear in statements of certainty because they’re looking for certainty. It is sometimes easier for them to say, “You know what? This is going to be bad and I’m going to hate it. I’m not going to watch it. I’m not going to care,” because the alternative was just to sit in my uncertainty for months and months and months is intolerable. But what we know on our side of things is, “Hey, we actually made something good. Wish we could show it to you right now to calm you down. Can’t, but we will.”

I think sometimes that’s how things work with politics. All we see is what we’re shown, but we don’t know. We don’t know what they know.

John: Absolutely. Pulling it back to more our industry, we are waiting for an answer sometimes from a decision maker, and that decision maker is also facing uncertainty. That decision maker is like, “Am I making the right choice? Am I not making the right choice? What is the safest course? What is the most likely course that is not going to result in a disaster?”

Recognizing sometimes from their point of view, they don’t know either. It can be frustrating, but also reassuring that we’re all feeling our way around in this situation.

Craig: We want to believe that the people that control things are supremely confident, and they’re not, nor are they perfect, nor may they even be confident in what they are doing. And they may also be struggling with those problems that we don’t know about. They may want to say yes. The problem is they’ve been told they’re not allowed to say yes currently because they’re in a fight with somebody over something they just said yes to. How that all functions and flows is really hard to comprehend, so don’t. Don’t bother. The waiting, in and of itself, disappears as waiting if we just stop waiting. Don’t wait. Just move on with your life.

John: Let’s talk about the moving on of it all, because there’s the moving on you can do with the actual situation you’re faced with. With the project that you’re waiting for an answer from this one person, it’s worth interrogating. Like, “Am I actually waiting for this person? Does that yes or no really matter, or could I be doing something else that’s useful and productive on this? Am I waiting for this person to give me a thumbs up or thumbs down, or should I be showing this to other people, because that may be the smartest thing to do, or should I just be working on that next project?” And that is often really the best choice.

Craig: You can’t go wrong doing more work.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s generally speaking a win-win. I think that agents and managers who listen to this are probably very familiar with the feeling of a client calling saying, “Why aren’t we doing anything?” The answer is there’s nothing to do, but that’s not a great answer to give a client because, A, they’re looking for reassurance, reassurance through action. The notion that we are in control of things, if only we did A, B, or C. Also, it’s not an easy thing to say to a client that right now you have no utility to them. This is something that I think representatives struggle with a lot of times.

They know there’s nothing to do, or they know that maybe there will be something to do, but in a month. The stuff again that we don’t know, what we don’t know is that five days from now, somebody’s going to mention this to somebody, who’s going to mention it to somebody, who’s going to mention it to Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks is going to say, “What? Let me read that,” and reads it and says, “I want to do this.” Then everything changes. We have no way of seeing any of that because it’s in the future. It hasn’t occurred yet, nor is it predictable.

We have to unfortunately accept that we are only in control of what goes on the page, and very little else.

John: For sure. What I don’t want anyone to take from this conversation is the sense of that you have no agency, you have no control, you have no ability to make decisions yourself. You absolutely do. If you are getting no answer from an agent or a manager over a period of time, and they seem to be doing nothing, and you write in a letter saying, “My agent or manager seems to be doing nothing,” that is a concern. Then you should bring up that concern and consider looking for new representation. That’s a story as old as this time.

What we’re I think trying to stress is that, it’s worth asking, what is the roadblock? When you find out what that roadblock is, you realize there’s nothing I can do about that roadblock. I have a project right now that we should be going out to the town with, but there’s a roadblock based on the rights holder that has to be resolved, and there’s nothing I can do to force that to happen more quickly.

Craig: Exactly. There is nothing you can do. The people that work for you, you do have control over. You pay your agent. You pay your manager. That is an enormous amount of control. If they’re not fulfilling what you think is a service that you’re paying for, then you fire them and you find somebody else, but the people that we’re asking money from, and I don’t know if you’ve– I think you must have experienced this, as time goes on, we get more and more comfortable with the practice of submitting something and then literally forgetting you submitted because there’s something else to do.

When you get called about that thing, it is a pleasant surprise, but if you have kept yourself moving, if you get a call that’s an unpleasant surprise, well, let’s now talk about what else we can do there, or do we just end it? Either way, I’m moving forward. I’ve already been moving forward. What I haven’t been doing is sitting by the phone, chewing my fingernails.

John: Yes, for sure. There’s a general framework in terms of thinking about what’s on your side, your circle of control. What are the things you can actually control versus your circle of concern? There are things in the world that you are concerned about. You have strong opinions about things you want to see happen in a certain way, the health of your family, the environment, our general political system, those are issues that are well within your circle of concern, but they’re not necessarily in your circle of control.

There’s not a thing you can do specifically to solve that problem. So it’s worth interrogating, well, what are these small actions I can take that will advance that goal? That’s great because that will make you feel that you have some utility and some agency in that cause. Tomorrow, I am phone banking. Phone banking is like, “Listen, I might talk to three people and nudge them on, but that’s great.” It’s going to make me feel better and could potentially be helpful in a swing state. It’s recognizing that there’s limits to what I can do. There’s no more big checks I could write that would actually have an impact.

Craig: Yes. And I think often of the lesson that our grandparents must have faced when they lived through a war, which you and I have not lived through, not on the scale of World War I, World War II. We were barely alive for Vietnam. We weren’t around for Korea. The wars that followed, the engagement by United States forces were so limited compared to those. No drafts. There has been a draft since Vietnam war.

John: We had 9/11 and it was the closest we had to be an assault on us.

Craig: 9/11 actually, in and of itself, is a pretty interesting lesson in uncertainty because if someone had said two weeks earlier, something horrible was going to happen on United States soil and we’re counting down and you all know what it is, that would have been a horrible two weeks. But the fact is, the act itself would have been no different. Anticipation and uncertainty, in and of themselves, are a kind of torment. We are capable of withstanding a lot of it, more than we think, but part of withstanding it is recognizing for what it is, something over which we have no control.

John: Let’s talk about why we worry and why anxiety exists because I think it is a useful evolutionary function. We have it. Other mammals have it. Clearly, other things, too. Can be stressed out about the future. As humans, we have a much stronger vision of the future. We can narrativize these things and catastrophize these things, but in some ways, that helps protect us and helps keep us alive. The challenge is, it was designed to keep us away from predators. It was not designed to deal with weird nebulous existential threats.

Craig: Yes. We have a system in place neurologically that keeps us alert and creates a state of vigilance. Vigilance, on some level, is important. If you cut yourself and then just ignore it, your arm’s going to get infected. Gangrene will sit in. You’ll either die or lose your arm. If you get a sense that your spouse is spending a whole lot of time with someone else, you may want to investigate that. There are reasons for vigilance, but hypervigilance over your life is toxic. I know this because I’ve literally had to deal with this in therapy.

The notion of over-vigilance in the sense that if you do not provide Ryan Reynolds style maximum effort to self-examination and the state of your career, your life, whatever it may be, it’s all going to fall apart. Problematic. Not helpful. Doesn’t actually keep you any safer. Just blows those circuits out and you end up spending all of your time scared.

John: I think it’s worth thinking about, how do we put some limits on the time and space we’re allowing ourselves to worry or letting ourselves worry at places and then also not worry about places. Things I do for myself is I basically will not look at social media on my phone after 8:00 PM just because I know that I recognize that creates a pattern of a doom loop that it’s hard for me to break out of.

Rachel Bloom in her special on Netflix, she talks about the huge grief she was going through and the fear about her daughter, and her daughter just being born right at the start of the pandemic and losing Adam Schlesinger, her therapist would say, “Have a room in your house where you can go and cry and cry in that room, and give yourself that space, but then leave that room and leave all that anxiety in that room,” which is a useful way of thinking about it. Just actually put that in a place and recognize that that’s the place for that, but don’t let it infest the rest of your world.

Craig: Yes, you need a chance to feel what you’re feeling. You can’t beat anxiety by yelling at it, but putting it in perspective, which is what that sounds like is what you need to do. Part of it is just recognizing what it is. It’s a bunch of feelings that are happening, like having to cough. If you have to cough, cough. Get it out. But while you’re coughing, don’t think I’m dying because I’m coughing or I’ll never stop coughing. I guess my life is now coughing. It’s not how it works.

John: It’s also worth recognizing that sometimes you feel a physical thing and then you reverse engineer that to say this is anxiety. Last night, I was like, “Oh my God, my anxiety is off the charts.” It was like, “Oh, no, I’m actually just cold.” I haven’t turned on the heat in the house. I’m actually shivering because of that. That’s actually what’s doing it. It felt the same as my anxiety felt. I put on a sweater.

Craig: My version of that is sometimes I get that butterfly in the stomach feeling, jittery, and I presume immediately that there’s a reason I’m scared. What is the reason? Why am I scared? I’m not scared. I’m experiencing a physical symptom of fear because some adrenaline is squirting out errantly. Happens to me all the time. I’ve come to notice there are moments where something suddenly triggers “fear” in me that is nothing, like looking at a tree and I suddenly, “Something’s wrong.” I’ve come to understand, “No, nothing’s wrong.” Something hormonal in my body just went blah.

I don’t have a good alarm system. My alarm system is broken. In fact, and I don’t know if this is true for you, since we both suffer from anxiety, where I excel is when there really is trouble. In those instances, I am incredibly calm, clear, direct, problem-oriented, no panic, nothing. It’s the tree, or I don’t know, something, a smell that just suddenly makes me think, “Oh, no, I’m dying.”

John: It’s more like, how could I have possibly said that thing to that person 20 minutes ago?

Craig: Or 20 years ago.

John: Yes.

Craig: Oh, absolutely. Listen, we also have shame loops on our heads and all that stuff. It’s just, we have to deal with it. When we’re talking about writers, people who their brains are attuned to imagination and whose brains are attuned to finding horrible things, that’s what we do with our imaginations. Horrible psychological things, emotional things, incidental things, then, yes, surprise, we don’t feel so good sometimes when we have to fill a space of unknown with potentials.

Yes, people are sitting around right now, thinking, “Well, if the person that I don’t want to be president is president, I am imagining the following horrible things happening.” Our imagination in that fear is not particularly useful. What is useful is just good old-fashioned dispassionate planning. Preparing, helping, strategizing.

John: Yes, for sure. Last little things I’ll say. If you do find yourself in that doom spiral loop, some tricks to get out of it, and you can google other ones too but things that I found are useful, literally dunking your head in ice water, sounds crazy, but it kicks off this primal, like that. I don’t know. That sounded like drowning, but there’s some primal thing it takes off. It’s like it can snap that for a second. I will listen to my political podcast while I’m running because it doesn’t have the same valance when you’re running.

Just things that you can do to make sure that you are inoculating yourself as best you can from those ups and those downs.

Craig: I’m not surprised that that’s the experience you have when you’re running because perhaps the single most effective anxiety breaker is oxygen. We stop breathing. And as you experience a minor hypoxia, the panic will increase because your brain is also designed to have you panic if it thinks you’re drowning. So as stupid as it is, deep breathing works 100% of the time. It is so frustrating that that is the case. While you’re doing it, it’s not working until suddenly, it’s worked, and it’ll be a minute maybe.

John: Yes, or someone tells you to drink a glass of water and that’s the stupidest thing ever and yet it still, it does help.

Craig: There are these things because what we’re experiencing is a simple mistake in the wiring. We don’t like thinking that we’re that dumb of a machine, but we are. We are that dumb of a meat machine.

John: Yes, for sure. All right, let’s move on to our next topic here. This is inspired by an article by Mia Galuppo, writing for The Hollywood Reporter. Her article is titled The Big Squeeze: Why Everyone in Hollywood Feels Stuck, but what’s really about is this sense, as we were talking about in the lead up here, is that when we were entering the industry, it felt like there were a lot of young people, a little older than us, but our age, who were suddenly running the town, they’re presidents of production, they’re heads of studios, they were doing all those jobs.

Over the years, we talk about the ladder and we talk about the importance of making sure those lower rungs of the ladder are actually available for people who are entering the industry, but I don’t think we talk enough about like, “Well, the upper rungs of the ladder.” If people are just staying on the ladder, there ends up being no place to climb to. When we see executives who are now turning 70, running those jobs, the people who used to be 35 in those positions are now in their 50s and 60s. It creates this log jam where there’s not a space for the folks who should be climbing to climb to.

Craig: Well, there is a space, the space is the same. That was always there. The space is I’m going to kick this old man out and take over. That’s why CAA exists. Four agents said, “We’re leaving William Morris, screw this old man. We’re starting our own place. We’re taking all these clients with us and now CAA is the biggest agency in the world.” I think after it bought ICM, it’s at least maybe endeavors, I don’t know, but they’re up there. Point being, they were called the Young Turks.

John: They were.

Craig: They are all not young. One of the things I’m wondering about is the state of ambition. Along with ambition is its opposite, which is, I guess I would call despair or helplessness. The sense that what you’re trying to get is impossible to get, but you’re trying to break into an impervious vault. Sometimes I wonder if it is generational, because when you and I started, our ambition was to be something in the entertainment business. What we didn’t have was the distraction of everyone else’s life on 24/7 in a reality show.

We did not have any need nor ability to document our lives for other people to see what other people were doing. There are so many distractions, and in a way, I think also– Are you familiar–? We talked about this with Rebel Wilson, Tall Poppy syndrome.

John: Oh, for sure.

Craig: Tall poppy syndrome, I think grows pretty well in social media. The sense that, “Oh, someone’s getting too good or too fast, or they’re too ambitious or whatever, let’s knock them down.” That becomes an ingrained feeling you have when you enter a business like, “Oh, we should all just sort of be leveled out here.” Whereas when you and I started, it was a law of the jungle.

John: Yes, for sure. Thinking back to when I was entering the industry, it felt like it was musical chairs and there were actually just plenty of chairs. There was space for everybody was entered into the industry as things were expanding and more opportunities were opening up, television was expanding. The boundaries between film and television were collapsing. There was opportunities to do new things. I do feel like that time is also happening now in terms of whatever you want to say about YouTube or sort of all the creator-generated videos, which is a whole sort side industry that’s there and it’s actually successful.

What is different about the industry now versus when you and I started though, is even though the big corporations had boards of directors, and they were publicly traded companies, they weren’t publicly traded companies in the same way. Disney was not as big as it was. Warner’s Discovery was not as big as it was, and there wasn’t the expectation that the people who were at the helm of those companies had to be titans of industry for Wall Street.

Craig: Right. The ladder ended at a certain spot, and that spot was movie mogul, I’m in charge of the studio. And now, you’re absolutely right. I think when Sony came in and bought Colombia, it was the beginning of something, although Gulf Western Oil had bought Paramount, but still, when you read about the creation of The Godfather and Charlie Bluhdorn, who’s going back and forth from East Coast to Hollywood and trying to broker peace between all these people and Bob Evans and everybody, yes.

It definitely had a little bit less of, I’m trying to run for president of this nation-sized corporation, but still, we make more television now than we ever did before. I think where the squeeze happened is mostly in the area of producing. When we started, there were 4 million producers and all of them had a deal somewhere because the way the business worked was there were five executives who couldn’t handle everything, and then there were 100 producers on the lot.

All of them shoved into some space with an assistant and a creative executive, all of them absorbing massive amounts of money and almost all of them worthless. That is an area where contraction occurred and did eliminate a lot of pads for people to excel because a lot of people went to those useless places, clearly out shunned the people that had hired them and went on to bigger and better things.

John: Now, a person who enters the industry saying, “I want to make movies.” If they’re not there to be a writer director, if they’re there to be because they want to be a producer or they want to be a studio executive, I think that’s a very different and very frustrating path ahead for them versus my Stark class, when we came out of there, that was technically a producer’s program. We had four people who really became producers quite quickly, others who became agents. There was just a sense of like, we are going to take over this part of the town, and it’s so much harder now.

Yes, there’s other paths. There’s independent film, there’s ways to make things that are exciting. You’re not entering into the classic system to make a thing.

Craig: Yes, I think the rise of management companies has largely replaced the massive tide of questionably valuable production companies. Now, managers are producers as well, and there are more of them than ever. Managers seem to want to take on writers sooner than agencies would. If you wanted to be a manager, I suppose that there are a lot of find your way onto a desk, work your way, but I talk to agents at all the agencies, and when I’m talking to senior agents or partners and things, there is a theme. It’s not from all of them, but it’s from some of them.

The theme is, we’re worried, well, let’s go back to anxiety about the future, because the people who are coming in don’t seem to have the same insatiable hunger for success that we had. We’re not sure there’s any way to succeed in Hollywood if it’s not with an insatiable hunger. You can’t half-hunger your way to success in Hollywood.

John: I think I hear that sometimes with a sense that a generation wants permission to do a thing. They’re always looking for approval, rather than just like, “Screw you, I’m going to do this thing anyway.” I was watching Saturday Night, which is the Jason Reitman movie about the creation of the first episode of Saturday Night Live. What is notable about that is that everyone in that story is in their 20s.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: Which is absurd. It seems really crazy now that you would trust a person in their early 20s with this big swath of television live, and it’s a big risk. The movie pauses that there was a calculation behind that, that made sense. I do think that the equivalent person now is not trying to do that on NBC. They’re doing something completely different on a YouTube or whatever. I was talking to two friends this week who I ended up connecting, one of whom works in this YouTube space and works with a bunch of creators and they can just make anything. They can do anything.

They have money and they’re successful and they can do stuff. He’s like, “Oh, I need to hire a showrunner for something.” I’m like, “Okay, well, tell me what that means.” He was describing this thing. It’s like, “Okay, that’s not actually a showrunner. I think you want a non-writing producer who can godfather and sort of be a creative liaison.” It’s like, “Oh, yes, okay then, that’s what it is.” I talked to my friend who is probably the right person for that, but it comes out of the classic studio system.

I had to warn both of them, make sure you actually are figuring out what your common language is, because I don’t think you’re using the same terms for nearly anything. I do wonder if it’s going to be a really parallel thing that’s going to rise up and we’ll have to figure out how it fits back in.

Craig: Well, and it might not.

John: Yes, it might not.

Craig: Of course, you and I don’t need to figure it out. Other people do, but there is a question of what is it that people do want? The insatiable hunger people have reasonably, I think, drifted to a place where their hunger will pay off quicker and perhaps more. I don’t know if it will stay as steady as some Hollywood success can stay. If you really can find your way into this business, prove that you have great value, you will have length. It’s hard because a lot of people who I think are worthy just can’t get to that place where they’re able to Velcro on.

In YouTube, yes, I think it’s a little trendy. So people light up and sometimes they explode because of bad behavior. We see that quite a bit. Sometimes people just start laughing at them. You started as something, you became a discovery, you became super-hot, you were an incredible trend, and then the memes began, and now, you’re a joke. That cycle is going to have to happen a few times for people to start to question whether or not it’s worth it.

The amount of money that can be made does seem to make it worth it but there is something about the legitimacy of what we do in Hollywood. The world still takes it more seriously. There’s no question about that.

John: You look at like the success of a Mr. Beast and what he’s able to do and you have the spotlight on you and so you as an individual are such a focus, but he’s both like the star and the Jeffrey Katzenberg of this studio that he is built. There’s something very great about that and something that an only person in their 20s is able to do. That’s notable. It’s a question of like, is that sustainable, is it repeatable for other people?

Craig: Right now, he’s in some trouble. This does seem to happen quite a bit and I’m not surprised because people are in their 20s. This often happens to them in Hollywood as well.

Mike De Luca is a very interesting story, because in his 20s, he was suddenly boom running something and then there was some scandal and there was a bit of an explosion and he crashed to Earth and then got himself well, did the work. It was decades. Now, he’s-

John: Running a studio.

Craig: -one of the people that runs Warner Brothers. That can happen. There are also some really tough stories out there, Maloney and other guys like that. Was Maloney, who died?

John: Jay Moloney?

Craig: Jay Moloney, just superstar agents. Don Simpson, superstar producer went kaboom and that was that.

John: I don’t think we have a great takeaway for this segment other than to recognize that the individuals who would’ve been the executives in Hollywood just I think recognize that there wasn’t a space for them there and they found other industries, they found other points to do it. I think tech took a lot of them.

Craig: Tech did take a lot of them. I do think still there are people in our industry who are in their 20s who are perhaps a little over-intimidated. Because of the size of our business, they feel like it’s impossible to slash and burn your way to the top. It’s not. Somebody has to. I recommend ambition. I recommend thinking big. It’s the only way it’s going to work. When you have a system where everyone gets comfortable with 32-year-old assistants, that system is broken.

John: Agreed. Let’s talk about this next article. This is from Elaine Low writing for The Ankler. The provocative headline is Development is Wage Theft. Let’s talk about what we mean by development. Development is I am bringing in a writer and talking with them about this project that we want to do together. It might be developing it internally and then we’re going to go out and take it on the town and pitch it or it’s a project that we’re developing internally to the studio. We own a book and we are going to figure out a way to develop it into a TV series, into a movie. That’s classically development.
Development can be paid. Development largely classically was paid where there was a sense of, “Okay, we are going to go through multiple drafts on this thing and get it to a place where you can fill it into director.” There’s a lot of unpaid development, which happens because you’re figuring out what is this thing we’re then going to pitch up to my bosses to other people.

This article is really focusing on the collapse of the traditional TV cycle, where we announce these are the fall shows, and then in the spring, we go through a cycle, where we have people write a bunch of pilots, and then we shoot some of the pilots and we go through. With that all collapsing, the time spent in development on stuff has just escalated beyond the normal boundaries of how much time writers are supposed to be working on things.

Craig: There are so many different aspects of development. Let’s talk about the pre-sale development. Is pre-sale development wage theft? No. Because you are creating intellectual property yourself. Nobody gets paid to imagine dream or write anything. They get paid when they license it for a publication or they get paid when they transfer copyright to somebody. That’s how that works. There are no wages to steal there. Nobody is entitled to be paid while they think of maybe something that could be a book.

When it comes to development underemployment, now the company owns the copyright and now you are going through drafts of things. In movies, we’ve always had this issue because we were paid for a draft. We used to be paid for two, then they started saying, “We’re just going to guarantee you one.” Then you would do a gazillion drafts before you turn that draft in mostly for one of these useless producers. All of whom were terrified that if this movie didn’t get made, they were never going to get paid anything themselves.

In certain cases, when people weren’t paid very much, when you broke it out over the course of weeks, they were dipping below WGA minimum. And we’ve been struggling with that since as long as you and I have been in this business. It helped a little bit. Something that I’d been pushing since 2004 when I was on the board, and now, if you are near a certain amount, you get a guaranteed second step, which is helping. Television suffered a far more serious situation where the advent of mini rooms, which is the stupidest name to describe what that is– I’m going to stop calling them mini rooms.

Let’s call them development rooms. Let’s call them pre-green light rooms. The network or streamer is saying, “We’re going to pay you. We own this idea now. We’re not sure if we’re going to make it. You guys go work on it for eight weeks and then we’ll decide if we’re going to make it. At that point, we’ll probably fire seven of you. The one of you that’s left will write this thing.” Is that wage theft? Not necessarily. It’s wage limitation. It’s a lack of job security.

But that one person who’s left over now may have so much time to work on stuff under one aspect of, yes, it can turn into wage theft, but what the Writers Guild needs to figure out — and this is where we are complicit — is how to solve the problem of writers being paid like producers because we don’t have any control over that. And for the longest time and continuing, networks and streamers say, “We’re going to pay you Writers Guild minimums or roughly minimums to make sure you get healthcare and pension. The rest of all the money we pay you will be as a producer.” That’s the wild west.

Writers and agents have generally liked it because it means they didn’t have to pay as many dues. While you and I were paying 1.5% of every dollar we made on movies, people who are making $50 million a year, were paying less than dues. We still have this problem. We’re complicit. I don’t know the answer to this.

John: We talk about mini rooms and how they divvy up the labor in ways that it is so frustrating. The other problem is just time. Classically in television, because there was a cycle, you knew when you were done and you just don’t know when you’re done now in television because we’re developing this thing, but we don’t think it’s quite ready yet, or it’s not the right time to go to this thing, so you’re just being strung along for a long time on a project in ways that is familiar to feature writers, but is new to TV writers.

These TV writers are like, “I have this thing that looks like it’s maybe going to happen, but is it going to happen? Should I try to staff on another show? What should I do?” It’s creating these impossible situations where you’re trying to figure out like, “I want to be available to actually run my show, should the opportunity come up. But I don’t know whether this is going to happen.” Year-round development makes that much trickier. There’s generally not a clock on these things. It doesn’t stop at a certain point.

Craig: No. The season still exists for network television because network television is reliant on ads and that’s when the ad cycles new cars come out in the fall and all that. But the vast majority of streaming is not on any kind of calendar. There is no predictability. The Writers Guild has done some good work in helping writers not get trapped by exclusivity where you say, I’m going to be exclusive to this thing for as long as it gets developed and then the development phase stretches out in an insane way and you’re sitting around doing nothing but you can’t go anywhere else.

John: You’re not contractually barred from doing that thing, but there’s a soft way that you’re stuck to a thing.

Craig: We’re trying to work on that. I think also, the business representatives aren’t stupid. They are trying to make money, too. What I think is going to start happening is a little bit like when you get on a Southwest flight from Burbank to Las Vegas and they get on the thing and say, “Oh, we have overbooked this flight. We’re going to need two people to volunteer to get the F off this flight.” We’re going to overbook people. It’s inevitable. We’re going to overbook people because this is the behavior it is, because they’ve created that situation.

If you are successful enough to be, to have multiple people interested in you, that’s what’s just going to happen. You’re going to have to double-book stuff. I don’t know how else to get around it. They’re going to have to deal with it. If you are, however, a writer that is psychologically reliant on the notion of a cycle, well, it’s over. Welcome to the world that you and I lived in and continue to live in, which is there is no cycle, there is no calendar. There is a constant entrepreneurialism that is required.

John: It’s a hustle. Let’s answer some listener questions. The first one comes from a person you and I both know, but we’re not going to use their name. M writes, “My writing partner and I were sent a feature script by a producer we’ve worked with before. He has his producer set up at Studio A and is looking for a rewrite. Now, what he doesn’t know is that about 10 years ago, my writing partner and I, wrote a script for Studio B with virtually the same premise. It’s not the most original premise. We know of another project out there with the same basic idea. Our scripted Studio B is dead, as far as we know. In fact, the division it was written for no longer exists.

If we were to get this rewrite job at Studio A, I imagine that we’ll be borrowing certain themes, ideas, and jokes that we used in our old script for Studio B. Are there any legal issues we could face doing that? Should we inform Studio A about the situation? If so, can we wait until after we get the job? Any thoughts, Craig, would be appreciated.

Craig: Well, it is something that should be disclosed. If you do it after you get the job, you can still get in trouble because everybody’s contract very clearly states that you warrant this work is wholly original that you’re going to do. It is important, yes, to disclose it. I don’t think it would be anything anyone will be scared of, but the studio and business affairs would need to take a look at that other script to make sure that in the new script, you’re not taking anything that is intellectual property from that first one. If it’s possible to go and buy that one from the defunct or whatever the inherited company is, that might be one way to get around this.

Personally, I think it needs to be disclosed because the worst possible situation would be to get all the way to a movie about to come out, and whoever does own that script, they’re just waiting. If they see this happen, they don’t do anything. They wait. They’re waiting for the moment of maximum leverage, which will be three weeks before your movie comes out, and then they will file an injunction, and now everyone’s in trouble. And Studio A is going to have to pay a ton of money to Studio B to shut them up and let the movie come out, and then you will be blamed.

John: I think, Craig, you’re envisioning a scenario which you’re taking stuff from the other thing. You’re recognizing that there’s things that are going to be naturally lifted from that first script into that second script. I think I’m seeing this in a different way. It’s like, we wrote a baseball movie for Studio A and now they’re hiring us to write a baseball movie for Studio B, do I need to disclose I’ve ever written a baseball movie before? No, I don’t think so.

Craig: Well, yes, if it’s that broad, of course, no. I wrote a comedy for this [unintelligible 00:42:16], I can write a comedy for you, a sports baseball movie, I could write 12 baseball movies. Ron Shelton has written dozens of sports movies, but this sounds a little more specific. The thing that made me nervous was when they said jokes. When you’re talking about stuff that is a unique expression in fixed form, you’re now talking about material that is copyrighted, and then you do have a problem.

Furthermore, people don’t need to have an airtight case to sue, they just need a good enough reason to sue. I would be concerned enough to just say, “Actually, we want to be fully forward about this. We did this, we can’t use any of that. What we can do, however, are things that aren’t copyrighted, theme, ideas, of course.” Personally, I would disclose it. I don’t know who their lawyer is, but if your lawyer says, “No, don’t disclose it.” They’re their lawyer, they know better than I do, but I would.

John: The reality is, as Craig says, you can get sued for any reason.

Craig: Sure.

John: Ron Shelton could get sued if there’s someone saying like, “This baseball movie you wrote for us is too much like the baseball movie you wrote for somebody,” or something like that. It can happen. It’s not likely to happen.

Craig: Every time something happens that’s successful, somebody sues somebody. That’s inevitable, but most of the time, 99% of the time, it’s just dumb phishing expositions that get chucked out of court. You and I have reported so many times on these things. Not once, not once has anybody won one of these things, but that’s different than a studio suing a studio. That’s a very different thing. When studios sue studios, they have a case.

John: They do.

Craig: And that means there’s going to be some sort of settlement, and the closer it is to that moment where you are going to suffer tremendous financial loss if your movie cannot actually be shown in theaters on the weekend you’ve booked, you’re going to pay.

John: Can you think of any examples where a studio has sued another studio over –?

Craig: I don’t remember a specific case of a major studio suing a major studio openly. I think there have been situations where major studios have called major studios and said, “We’re going to sue you, let’s start talking about this before we file an injunction, and so forth.” But Major studios have sued small studios repeatedly, repeatedly.

It’s because smaller studios, and when I say– I’m not talking about independent studios making art films like A24, I’m talking about, for lack of a better term, schlockmeisters, who are selling rip-offs anyway.

Well, you can rip off to a point, and then when you get into that area of intellectual property, that’s when they come up for you and that’s what they get you, and they typically win.

John: Let’s try one more question here. This is from Michelle. She’s writing, “I would love to hear more about the pros and cons of the cost-plus model and how it’s calculated. I’ve heard general discussions about the lack of residuals, but I don’t understand how the math maths. Is it more money upfront? Does this help shows with modest viewership, but hurt big hits? If Netflix takes the risk on whether it will be a big hit, is it helpful to the average show or new writers? Does this affect writers differently from actors? It sounds like the industry was hoping that Netflix would change its model, but didn’t. What does someone like Shonda do?”

Craig: Well, Shonda is certainly in a different situation because Shonda is getting paid an enormous amount of money just to be there at all. The cost-plus model basically says, “We’re going to give you the amount of money required to make the show, and then we’re going to give you a certain amount on top of that to put in your pocket, and that’s the last time we’re going to pay you.”

Cost-plus models is– a lot of general contractors will use this. They come to say, “Okay, here’s the budget for your renovations. It’s going to cost $300,000. We’re going to charge you $350,000 and you’re never going to see a penny more. Then that’s it. Unless you change something significantly, that’s what we’re going to be.” Rather than coming to you in the middle and going, “The price of wood just went up.” The problem with the cost-plus model is that it limits the upside dramatically, and it’s particularly punishing on those runaway hits.

The question is, is cost-plus good for us? Well, if Netflix wants to do it, then the answer is no. If a corporation is really dead set on imposing a financial model on artists, then it’s not good for artists. Otherwise, why would they want to do it? Of course, it’s beneficial for them. Of course, in the long run, they’ve run the math and they know they’re going to save money. It’s the question of gambling.

Like, “Okay, we can let everybody play these slot machines and pay one person a million dollars every week when they hit a jackpot. Or we can let everyone play these slot machines to guarantee that almost all of them will walk away making $10 and we win.” Cost-plus is not anything that anybody in the creative community wants. The agents don’t want it, the managers, nobody wants it, except for people who are thinking to themselves, “This is going to be a loser.” Then, sure. Like, “I think this is bad. We got away with it. We’ll take whatever the–”

John: Yes. It has perverse incentives, so there’s no incentive to make something amazing because the success on the streamer does not reward you. It can reward you with future projects down the road, it’s only your own reputation that’s going to succeed or fail because of it. That’s the basic complaint against this cost-plus model.

Now, when Netflix is first starting out, I can understand why people would take those deals and why it makes those deals because we didn’t know what is success. We have no idea what success is. Is that backend going to be meaningful at all? Those first couple of years, I get why we’re going to overpay people basically and do it that way.

Craig: Yes. We did– I’m not sure how it’s working out so far, but the writer’s guild in the wake of the strike and then the contract that ensued did get some kind of method for success-based payments in streaming. They’re hard to hit. The success has to be really big. My guess is we probably haven’t even started to generate enough data to see how that’s working out.

John: I think also by breaking through that seal, it also means that superstar actors and directors, and other folks can start to get paid some backend that’s independent of residuals based on a huge success.

Craig: What Netflix has started to do is create a sports-style model of free agency where what you do is reward people that are creating things that are very popular with an enormous amount of money just here. Like boom, here, Shonda, boom, here. Ryan Murphy, boom, here, Rian Johnson, boom. Then everybody else is just kind of, it doesn’t matter whether you do well or not, that individual project, whatever money they make from that, they take that money.

Then you’re just waiting around for them to go, “Okay, we’ve decided now you’re so valuable to us, we’re going to give you this big dump truck of money here. Boom.” That is not helpful for most people and it doesn’t seem like it’s sustainable anyway. I think Netflix has probably left the era of that kind of payment. I don’t think we’re going to be seeing the billion-dollar deals or the $500 million deals anymore from them. I don’t think they can sustain that. I think they know that.

Then the question is, how do we maybe start breaking through more on that cost-plus thing? What it comes down to is basically whether or not other streamers can effectively compete to the level that they have the financial security to lure people back. HBO has made an investment in me. That’s great, but Max is not the size of Netflix. They can’t do that with 12 other people. That’s where it’s gotten interesting. I don’t know how this will all work out other than to say that agents seem to always win in the long run. Let’s see if they can beat Netflix. I don’t know.

John: It is time for our one cool things. I have two cool things this week.

Craig: Okay.

John: First off, Craig, do you like Tower Defense games? Do you know the genre Tower Defense?

Craig: I do, and I don’t.

John: The general idea of Tower Defense is that you are trying to protect some area, generally the center of your map and there are invaders. You’re trying to set up obstacles in their way and towers that will shoot them down before they–

Craig: Very anxiety based.

John: Yes, anxiety based. I’m playing a new one called Isle of Arrows, which is not actually brand new, but it’s new to me. It’s roguelike in the sense that after every round, you have cards, you can draw it and you can set like, “Okay, now I can set a path. I can set a tower.” You’re really constrained in how you can do it. It’s also roguelike in the sense of this is too hard, so you’re like, “Why can’t I win?” Then you realize, oh, that’s actually–

Craig: That’s the point.

John: That’s the point, is you get better. You accumulate better cards along the way. I’m enjoying that a lot. The other thing I’m enjoying a lot is this book by Tony Tulathimutte called Rejection. It’s a collection of four or five short stories all on a theme of a character who has a worldview and about how the world should treat them, and they are wrong. It pays off in great ways. It reminded me of our conversation last week at the live show. We were talking with Rachel Kondo about how the ideal short story has that sense of surprise and inevitability. These stories are delightfully that.

Craig: Oh, I love that.

John: It’s really fun. It’s described as a comedy and it’s like the stories are you win so much that it’s almost not a comedy, but they are very well done.

Craig: Cringe comedy.

John: Cringe comedy, yes.

Craig: Cringe comedy.

John: Yes.

Craig: My one cool thing this week is a documentary series, I believe there are four, I don’t know, say five episodes, possibly six. It’s on aforementioned Netflix and it is called Mr. McMahon.

John: I don’t know, what is this?

Craig: Mr. McMahon is the documentary about Vince McMahon, the Impresario of Professional Wrestling WWF, WWE, all its various names.

John: Let’s get ready to rumble. The trademark phrase.

Craig: Well, let’s get ready to rumble. Yes, some of that was in boxing and in UFC, which they ended up buying. I’m guessing you didn’t watch much professional wrestling.

John: I did not. Yes, of course.

Craig: Like Hulk Hogan and all that nonsense. Enormous business. Huge. What it is a study in is a– well, I’m just going to go out on a limp here. He seems like a sociopath. What he locked into for the first time made me go, “I think now I understand the whole Trump thing.” Obviously not in support of Trump, but rather trying to figure out why. Why is everybody falling for this? Vince McMahon lays out this remarkable point of view that entertainment and engagement with people comes down to causing real emotion in them. Disgust, hatred, rejection, betrayal, those work just as well, if not better, than positive emotions.

In fact, what he did was, as his business was being challenged by another wrestling organization, he began to create himself as a character in WWF called Mr. McMahon who was a villain. Did everything he could to make people hate him. The more they hated him, the more intuit they got. And it is pretty startling to watch how brilliant and terrifying he is. The context for the whole thing is that all the interviews with him and all the interviews with everybody else occurred before, I believe it was February of this year, when Vince McMahon, it was revealed that he’s under investigation for sex trafficking.

The specific allegations are horrendous. Horrendous. This, by the way, not the first time that he had been accused of sexual assault or coercing employees or anything. This was like the 19th time. These allegations are so lurid and barf-worthy, and you realize, okay, actually, he is a villain. Man, he encapsulated something about American culture and how to get people to get into you that is so horrifying and insightful. Well worth watching. You don’t need to know anything about wrestling to watch it. It’s a slow-motion horror movie.

John: Maybe not this week, but another week after.

Craig: Yes. Let’s see maybe if next week’s–

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Troy. This week it came from Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We get so many great outros, but we always love more. Please send them through. ask@johnaugust is also where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. You can find links there for our live show, which is December 6th, and for this Alpha Birds play thing that we’re doing in Culver City.

It’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and such. They’re great. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments. The one we’re about to record on things we learned during the pandemic that we are still doing. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Okay, Craig. There was a point as the pandemic was descending where everything changed. We started staying at home, and we’re no longer staying at home. We were out socializing. We were seeing folks at the Austin Film Festival. I want to talk about the things that changed and stuck, and things that we’re still doing post pandemic. I’ll start with Zoom. Zoom was not a thing we were using before. You and I were Skyping before.

Craig: Oh, yes. Stupid Skype. Zoom, a conspiracy minded person might imagine that the Zoom Corporation invented and released COVID-19 into the wild because it came along right around when we needed it. Prior to that, video conferencing existed. No one liked it. No one.

John: No one.

Craig: No one used it. It’s a little bit like the way no one really likes calling each other on the phone. That’s the way video conferencing was. Then suddenly, Zoom came along and that’s all we did all the time with everyone. I don’t know what it was about Zoom, but that’s what happened.

John: Before the pandemic, there were a couple of WJ meetings where I had to call in to it. It was this system called BlueJeans, the absolute worst.

Craig: I remember BlueJean, yes.

John: All just like audio conference calls, which were absolutely the worst. There was something about Zoom, which just, it all worked. You could actually have conversations that were real-time because you could see people’s faces. You could not talk over them. I’ve never met Tina Fey, but I met her on Zoom in the first week of the Pandemic.

Craig: Obviously, we played D&D on Zoom. One of the things that happened in the Pandemic was we went from a difficult to schedule once a month D&D game to a regular weekly D&D game.

John: It was great.

Craig: Awesome, and we still, because so many of us are scattered around. Maybe I’m off in Canada working on the show or somebody’s somewhere else on vacation. A lot of times we still Zoom, and that works. So I think, yes.

John: We also moved over to Roll20, a virtual tabletop. Rather than looking at a physical map, we are all looking at maps on our screens. Even now that we’re back in-person playing, we’re still looking at Roll20 because it’s just better.

Craig: It’s just better. We all sit there in the same room together, but with our laptops. That is much better. That has changed. And of course, working from home, which I think a lot of businesses now are really struggling with. Somebody told me– I won’t say which company or what department, I’ll just say somebody said that there’s a department in their company, and a big one, where no one really came back. Everybody was like, “We like working at home.”

This person said that department just doesn’t function because there is no cohesion whatsoever. No one knows what anyone’s doing, but everybody suspects that the other person’s doing nothing. The only work that happens are meetings, which is just vaporous nonsense. Nothing actually gets done because you’re not sitting in the room looking across at somebody saying, “I am disappointed in this, make this better.” I understand why companies are saying, “Hey, sorry, you got to come in.”

John: Megan, when she was working for me as my assistant and as the Scriptnotes producer, she came in every day. Then during the pandemic, of course, she was not coming in, so she was on Zoom. Then as Drew got hired on to work this job, we realized it’s actually better that he is not here every day. Drew’s like three days a week and other things are on Zoom because the rest of the team is all on Zoom. Recognizing that when some people are in person in a room and some people are on Zoom, that’s a mess.

Craig: That’s the worst. We really try and avoid that. For instance, in prep and production, we’ll have some big meetings. The big production meeting, there’s like 50 people there. Seven of them are remote because they’re scouting or they’re off doing whatever. Well, 19 people get into a boardroom and then the seven people are on a big screen there. That’s the only way to get it done. Is just, what we can’t do is have everybody in their own office on Zoom or two people together sharing. None of that works. It is impressive how video conferencing was a zero, and now it’s just this accepted part of life.

John: Another thing that changed a lot was Keynote for me. Keynote or any slide decks because I wasn’t doing those at all before, I knew what Keynote was. I could do it if I needed to. I’d done some talks with Keynote, but the idea of building something in Keynote to show something for a pitch or for a meeting, which is now going to be on Zoom, was suddenly so useful and practical. Not for every meeting or every pitch do I need to do something, but for a lot of them I was, and so I was going out pitching around town with a Keynote.

This project, I’m doing. This video game, I’m working on, the proposal for the proof of concept, this is what the game is. I built that out as a deck. It was super useful. Then yesterday, I needed to show something about the scoring mechanism, what that was. It’s like, oh, it makes much more sense for me to do that in a Keynote than to try to type it out because I can actually visually show that thing. Pre-pandemic, I wasn’t doing that and now I feel like it’s maybe 5% of my job, but a significant portion of my job is building and running a Keynote.

Craig: I think it’s a great way for people, we’ve talked about this before, who may not necessarily communicate best in a steady verbal flow, but rather communicate better in an organized fashion connected to slides in a deck. If you are the person that just loves to do the talking, do the talking. Don’t be afraid. “Where’s your deck? We’re not going to hire a room without a deck.” Now, if you’re awesome, then believe me, it’ll be fine. The existence of that and the delivery mechanism, is harder to do, I imagine in person. To sit there and turn your laptop around. It may be awkward. On Zoom you just hear like, “So I’m going to go ahead and share my screen.”

John: Here’s what I always say. It’s like people now who like, listen to this podcast who are in meetings with like, “So I’m going to share my screen now.” When I do that, you’re going to get small. Just make sure if you have a question, just speak up because I can–

Craig: You’re going to get small. We’re used to all of that now.

The thing about the pandemic that didn’t stick around, I think really is a sense of paranoia in public. Which is different than a reasonable concern about yourself. If you have a compromised immune system or you think maybe you have been sick, or you live with somebody who really can’t afford to get ill, most normal people aren’t going to give you a hard time. Yes, they’re idiots in fricking Mississippi, like “get your mask off.” Most people are like, you get on a plane, there’s one or two people wearing masks. No one gives them crap but most people don’t.

John: Yes. Mike and I are sometimes there’s one or two people on a plane with a mask, and the calculation I do is like, how much would it suck to get sick at that destination? What is my risk tolerance here? I will tend to do it in a crowded airport when I’m on the plane. Once the plane is actually up and running and the air filters are going, I feel pretty good taking my mask off. What I do notice is that if I’m feeling sick, I will default to going for a test just because I don’t want to spread it around or be the problem.

Craig: I think testing for COVID is something that is permanent now. Whereas nobody ever tested to see if they had a cold. Occasionally, you would test to confirm that you had the flu, but really only when Tamiflu came around. Prior to that, it didn’t matter. You’re sick. Probably the flu, nothing you can do. Rest and drink lots of fluids.

John: Now that there actually are solutions to some of these diseases, that’s what made a difference.

Craig: Then it’s worth testing. But for COVID, first thing you do, and it’s this strange thing where you don’t feel good and then you take a test, and it’s not COVID, and you’re like, “Awesome.” No, not necessarily. You’re still sick.

John: I got a shitty goal. It was a hassle to get through.

Craig: You’re going to make other people sick if they’re not aware. That strange COVID exception still exists. Testing still exists.

John: If there’s a person you’ve only talked to on Zoom, have you met them?

Craig: There is a person I’ve only talked to on Zoom.

John: Would you say that you’ve met them and you know them?

Craig: I know them very well. I’m thinking particularly of Mark Halpin, who is one of the best puzzle constructors on the planet. He lives in Kentucky, just south of the Indiana border. He teaches, I believe, theatric production design or stage design at the University of Cincinnati, I want to say. He’s a genius. I have been on a gazillion Zooms with him as our puzzle crew. Either works on puzzles together, works on puzzles he’s created that he’s just watching us, or we had a crew that played a lot of Codenames a lot of Decrypto together. I feel like I know him very well and I have not met him in person. It’s been many years.

John: There’re executives who I’ve been on a project with like two years, never met him in person.

Craig: Well that’s a delight.

John: It’s how it goes though sometimes. I think I’m okay with that in a way that I wouldn’t be okay with that on a phone call. Here’s the other thing I would say is like, when people will have a four-person phone call, why is this not a Zoom? That drives me crazy.

Craig: There are some people that still want to do the conference call.

John: Yes. I think about Zoom, it’s like you’re going to a destination. It’s like you’re going into a room and everyone’s going to be in that room at a certain point in time versus like, a call is like, someone’s joining the call.

Craig: Because it’s–

John: Be in a middle conversation.

Craig: No one knows when to speak. Two people start talking once then stop, then start together again, then stop.

John: “Now you go.”

Craig: Then there’s always one person who’s somewhere noisy and doesn’t understand how to mute their phone. It’s just like– and I’ve always hated conference calls. They always just seemed awful. Zooms feel so easy. If you’re somewhere where you don’t want to be seen, just turn your camera off.

John: Totally. The last thing I’ll say is that correlates to that is there’s definitely been situations where this Zoom could have been not just an email, like a text message. It was literally like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe we scheduled this thing because you had 30 seconds of information to give me.”

Craig: It could have been an email.

John: At least I didn’t have to drive to Disney for it.

Craig: At least you didn’t. Can you remember driving in traffic? Didn’t know necessarily there’s two ways to get to Disney. I’m going to pick this one. I think, oh, picked wrong.

John: You picked wrong.

Craig: Oh my God, this is horrible. Get there. Then someone’s 20 minutes late, then you sit down, then they say something and you’re like, what? No, this. They’re like, “Oh, great. Okay. Meeting over,” and then oh my God.

John: I’m trying to think, have I been on every studio lot since the pandemic? Have I been on Sony’s lot? I’m not sure.

Craig: I’ve been on Sony’s lot. I don’t think I’ve been on the Fox lot since the pandemic. I’ve definitely been on Universal and Warner Brothers.

John: I’ve been to Fox.

Craig: Oh, and Disney. I’ve been in Disney. No Fox. I haven’t been to Fox. It’s weird. What is Fox lot?

John: Fox is Fox.

Craig: Is it?

John: It was Ghosty before the pandemic.

Craig: Yes. I don’t actually know what goes on on the Fox lot anymore. I know that they still make the Apes movies. The Simpsons folks are there. I think the Family Guy people are there.

John: Have you been to the Amazon MGM offices?

Craig: Not yet. No.

John: The absolute craziest places I’ve been because like there’s not– so it’s the old Culver lots, so it’s Gone With the Windy kind of lot. They have some old bungalow buildings, but they also have these big modern things. The meeting I went there for, I parked in this garage. Sure, fine. Whatever. They’re like, “Okay, go to this thing. There’s a bungalow.” I check in an outdoor place, then check in an indoor place in the bungalow, and they’re like, oh, someone will come and get you.

This was a scenario where I’m the only person in this room, but there’s a security guard who’s sitting there. She’s with a little iPad and I think I cough, but like, not in a COVID way. Just clear my throat cough. She takes out a bottle of Lysol and sprays the air around her.

Craig: That may be about her.

John: That may be about her.

Craig: It can’t possibly be policy at MGM.

John: I don’t think it was a policy at MGM, but then a person comes to get me and then takes me into one of the crazy glass buildings. Then up through a magical elevator. It was weird.

Craig: Yes, I do remember going at some point, but I don’t know if it’s still the MGM offices or not. I remember it was in a glass skyscraper building.

John: It felt Amazon in a way where it was a very secure fire doors.

Craig: Yes. Somewhat sterile.

John: Yes.

Craig: The HBO offices — tragedy. I’m just going to go — listen. I don’t care. I don’t think I go to those offices very often, so I can’t imagine that I’m going to get in trouble for this. We’ll find out. The old HBO offices were in this Warren in a building in Santa Monica.

John: I remember that.

Craig: You couldn’t find anything. An assistant always had to guide you to the bathroom. There was like, “And here’s a map to find your way back.” It was the hallways and there were, but, but. Had a little bit of character. People had offices with doors that could close.

John: Nice.

Craig: There were meeting rooms. Now, they’re in this monstrosity in Culver City. It is an open plan. It is the most open plan I’ve ever seen in my life. Most people are in cubicles. Then the people that have earned offices, it’s basically all the doors are glass, all the walls are glass. They can all look into each other’s eyes all the time.

John: Classic UTA, yes.

Craig: Horrible, UTA-ish. If you want to make a phone call and you don’t have an office, they have little booths that you can go into. It’s almost like they should just call it a dignity booth, which is meaning you have no dignity. Now, everybody knows you’re on a phone call and you’re sitting in there in this weird booth, which again is a glass door, I think. It’s just horrible. I don’t know why opaque doors, they’re important. Sometimes you need to close a door.

John: Yes. Blow your nose, yes, whatever.

Craig: I don’t know. I’ve only been there a couple of times because normally, Zoom, phone calls. It’s a weird place.

John: Yes. I went in for a meeting with Range, the management company that’s out in Santa Monica. It reminded me of a super, super, super high-end airport lounge. This is cool. This is nice but it was like an airport lounge. Everyone was just on laptops around.

Craig: It’s horrible.

John: I’m like, okay.

Craig: It’s horrible.

John: I had a meeting in one conference room.

Craig: I hate it. If I had a business that required lots of employees and a big office space, I would do the normal thing. Just normal. What’s wrong with that? Just here in office, close the door. Yes, there would be some people do work in cubicles. I understand the need for that space. But yeah, it wouldn’t be like this horror show of like this forced, “Oh, yes, we don’t have walls here.” Yes, we do.

John: Yes. You wonder why people don’t want to go back to work.

Craig: Exactly. I don’t want to go back to work because it’s creepy. Because I’m never alone. Because I don’t have a moment to close my door and cry.

John: Sometimes you need to cry.

Craig: I see people crying in their cars all the time in LA. Have you noticed it?

John: I haven’t noticed that much. I can believe it, but I haven’t actually seen it.

Craig: The car has become the place people can cry because they can’t cry at work anymore.

John: Yes.

Craig: So sad.

John: It’s a very emotional episode.

Craig: Yes.

John: All right. Thanks, Craig.

Craig: Thank you, John.

Links:

• Scriptnotes LIVE! December 6th at Dynasty Typewriter
• AlphaBirds Game Night at Village Well
• The Big Squeeze: Why Everyone in Hollywood Feels Stuck by Mia Gallupo for the Hollywood Reporter
• ‘Development is Wage Theft’: Pilot Season Death Morphs Into Year-Round Hell by Elaine Low for The Ankler
• Isle of Arrows
• Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
• Mr. McMahon on Netflix
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with special help this week from Chris Csont and Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is episode 661 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, why is screenwriting, both the craft and the profession, so difficult? Why are the people who were really good in school not necessarily good at screenwriting?

Craig: Nerds.

John: We’ll take a look at what’s weird about screenwriting and why skills in other areas don’t always translate well. Then it’s another round of the three-page challenge where we look at submissions from our listeners and give our honest feedback. In our bonus segment for premium members, how do you talk about movies and series without spoiling them? We’ll offer our tips and tricks and suggestions.

Craig: We are five episodes away from 666.

John: Now, Craig, let’s talk about this because Drew brought this up. We need to think of something for episode 666, the number of the beast.

Craig: It’s almost going to line up with Halloween. It won’t but it’s close.

John: It won’t. It’s close-ish.

Craig: I feel like we should have Megana on because, A, it’s spooky season, B, 666, it feels like she would have input.

John: Yeah. Should we focus on devil and possession movies?

Craig: That’s a great idea, actually. The Exorcist is one of my favorite movies.

John: Let’s do it.

Craig: Yes. I am not a horror movie aficionado. I like a good horror movie, but I’m not somebody that subscribed to Fangoria when I was a kid and saw all those slasher films like the ‘80s. So Drew, you remember the ‘80s.

Drew Marquardt: Oh, yeah.

Craig: John and I would walk into a video store, not Blockbuster, didn’t exist yet.

John: Our local video store.

Craig: Local video store. There would be a wall, just a solid wall of videotapes of nothing but movies where people slashed each other with blades. They all had great names like I Dismember Mama. There were like twelve Prom Nights. I never saw any of them. Wasn’t necessarily my thing, but The Exorcist had a profound impact on me. I do think it’s an incredible film and well worth discussing.

John: Yes, let’s do it. I haven’t seen The Exorcist probably since it came out. Honestly, I think most of my experience with The Exorcist has been while my parents were out, I would be watching it on TV and get so scared that I have to change the channel.

Craig: That’s correct. The other film that we should probably take a look at is a movie that, and I’m going to get in so much trouble, but it’s too late at this point, right, for me, is The Omen. Because The Omen came out somewhat contemporaneously with The Exorcist, not inspired by, but it existed in part because of The Exorcist. The Omen is the film that made a big deal about 666. I think The Omen is an inferior film to The Exorcist. It would be interesting to compare and contrast.

John: Sure.

Craig: There are some wonderful things in The Omen. It’s still better than most movies that try and do possession stuff now, but not as good as The Exorcist. The Exorcist also, and we’ll get there at episode 666, is a fantastic example of a film that is in a genre where almost every movie is bad and somehow they were great. That’s fascinating to me.

John: Yeah. There’s lots of examples of police procedurals or we’ve got to find the killer movies. Then there’s Silence of the Lambs, which is just like such a cut above–

Craig: Something else, right? It’s not doing anything necessarily overtly different. It’s worth digging into what they do subtly that does make it better.

John: Fantastic. This discussion of the video store we used to go to, it’s reminding me of a conversation I had this last week with my reps. We were talking about how the business was overall. We’re saying like, “Okay, well, streaming has never come back to what it was before. There’s never going to be as many deals as there were.” They were referring back to, oh, but we’re now never going to get back to the era of made-for-home video and the ability to make a zillion movies because you knew you could make a profit off of them on home video.

Craig: Unless something happens. That’s the thing.

John: Unless something happens. It totally could happen.

Craig: Yes. I don’t think anybody saw home video on the horizon in the ‘60s, for instance. Maybe some engineers at early Sony and their Betamax experiments, they were thinking, “Oh, maybe.”

I always think of that moment in Men in Black where Tommy Lee Jones shows Will Smith how the aliens have figured out how to make a tiny CD and that he’s going to have to buy the White Album all over again. The entertainment business is really good at figuring out ways to get us to buy the same thing we already own over and over and over. Some new format, some new thing. It’s almost inevitable. We all figured like, “Oh, streaming, I guess, one day would be–“ We just didn’t realize how fast and how intense it would be.

John: I think we all assumed that, okay, well, this is going to kill home video because you’ll just stream stuff. We didn’t realize there’d be a made-for-streaming boom that would change the industry, but then it would contract again and leave a lot of people– there’d be a musical chairs quality of it.

Craig: We had a bubble. I think that’s fair to say. What did Landgraf call peak television, peak TV? 600 and some odd, maybe 666? It was possibly 666 streaming television series. That’s obviously the work of Satan. What it’s back down to, I think a lot of people are thinking is some abnormally small number. I suspect we still have more television shows available now than we did, say, in the ‘90s. It was networks and some basic cable.

John: In addition to things that were made for streaming, we have things that were made for international audiences, made for global audiences that are available now. We’re watching series that are in English or other languages from other places too. There’s a lot more content still.

Craig: There is. There’s a ton of stuff. The contraction, I think the absolute number of television shows is it’s not something that’s going to make anyone feel better if they were employed within that bubble. I don’t think they’re going to sit there and go, “Well, but there’s still a few more than there were in the ‘90s.” It’s not exactly a relief. Contraction is difficult, even if it follows expansion.

John: Talking with my reps this week, we had a dinner. I’ve got a sampling of what they’re experiencing because you and I, we all have our own experiences and our friends we’re talking to. Reps, they’re making a bunch of deals all the time. I was asking them what’s happening? They say there are a lot of deals being made and pilots are selling, and stuff is selling, and pitches are selling, but there’s not flow. There’s a lot of one-off things that are happening and it’s busy, but not in a regular way and it’s not a predictable way. You can’t say, “Oh, this is how it’s building up to this thing.” The machine is shuddering.

Craig: It’s trying to figure itself out.

John: Which feels accurate.

Craig: That’s right. We have one predominant streaming service that is very successful at what they do, which is obviously Netflix. There’s Apple, who I don’t think care necessarily because they have more money than most nations. There’s Amazon, who I think presents their streaming service probably as some loss leader to make money off of their core business.

John: They want to make a lot of movies.

Craig: They do. I’m thinking about what your representative said about the flow.

Amazon and Apple probably aren’t going to create this rhythmic vacuum that you need to fill. Obviously, Netflix has that machinery. How Max and Peacock and Disney Plus function, am I missing one? Hulu? Hulu is Disney Plus. Paramount is Peacock?

John: No, Paramount is Paramount.

Craig: Oh, they’re their own?

John: Paramount CBS.

Craig: Paramount Plus. Paramount CBS. Right. Of course. How could I have possibly confused these? All of them, I think, are still trying to figure out how much, how frequently.

John: What’s the right number?

Craig: What’s the right number? What’s the right rhythm? That makes complete sense to me.

John: On the feature side, what I was hearing from them is that studio sides are saying the covers are bare for right now. There’s not the next thing to put into production. Summer 2026 is going to be super jam-packed, every weekend is full, which is great. Good problems to have.

Craig: The strike.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: That’s bottom line, right? It’s going to happen. It’s a really interesting thing. When I talk to people, what I often hear is, “We need stuff, but it’s hard for us–“ This is them talking about their own internal process as buyers. It’s not as easy as it used to be to get your bosses to agree to buy something.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: So you are responsible if you’re on a certain level at one of these places. I’ve talked to people, streamers and everywhere, and they’ll say, “I need to get five shows on the air next year. I don’t have them. I can’t get them to pay for the things I want. I can get them to pay an insane amount of money, but only when the algorithm says that it fits their thing. But I know that we already have those–“

It’s almost like we have a bunch of people making a lot of food on the street, and we have a bunch of hungry people driving around, and there’s somebody next to the hungry people going, “No, just keep going, or try something else, or go somewhere else.” I can see why it’s difficult. Yes, the machine is not functioning particularly efficiently right now.

John: It’s like a dating app where the algorithm is wrong and swiping one way or another way. You’re not matching up with the interested parties.

Craig: Yes. Yes. That’s actually a great idea for a dating app, where if you swipe right or left, it has to go through an intermediary who considers whether or not you’ve made the right choice.

John: Yes. I like that.

Craig: Maybe changes it.

John: Yes. Maybe you designate a friend who is actually a serious concierge there who’s like, “No, I don’t think that we want this.”

Craig: “Actually, you really should give this person a shot. It’s a bad pick, I know. Give them a shot.” I think that might be nice.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Let’s get into that.

John: You don’t do app development, but my company does do app development. This is my segue into saying that we’re actually hiring a new person. One thing I’ve learned over doing 12 years of this podcast is our audience are the best, smartest people in the world. If we need to hire somebody for somebody, this podcast is the first place to start. That’s how we found the person who fixed our WordPress plugins, the video game that we’re doing. Let’s do this.

We are hiring a person to do marketing for us, for Highland, Weekend Read, Bronson Watermarker, Writer Emergency Pack, AlphaBirds, and we need somebody who’s more of a manager than a creative. Somebody who can oversee Instagram ad campaigns, app store search optimizations, really be able to tell us what’s working and what’s not, because it’s not in our skill set. We need somebody who just does this stuff that we don’t do especially well.

Craig: Where in the world will you find somebody that knows anything about social media optimization, SEO?

John: SEO.

Craig: Yes, I’m going to guess 89% of our audience is like, “I can do that. I’m already doing that.”

John: We should stress, you probably already are doing this. We don’t want somebody who’s like, “I could learn something.” No, you need to show that you actually have done this.

Craig: Some experience here.

John: Oh, we’re pretty flexible on what the position looks like. It could be part-time or full-time. It could be fully remote. It could be a Los Angeles person. You’re probably based in the US, but if we could hire you or contract with you overseas, this may be doable. Crucially, we need somebody who already knows and is in the Mac and iOS ecosystem, because that’s what we make. You need to be part of that space. You need to know what you’re doing here in this.

Craig: You need to be good.

John: You need to be good.

Craig: Do a good job.

John: We’re going to put up a link in the show notes to a webpage that talks through what we’re looking for. If you are that person or you know that person, take a look at that. If you are the candidate, submit your stuff.

Craig: This is exciting. Does the job pay $850,000 a year?

John: It does not. It pays an amount commensurate to what the job is.

Craig: That’s fair. That sounds fair. Yes.

John: We have some follow-up. Last week, we talked about Moneyball.

Craig: Moneyball.

John: It was such a good episode. Everyone completely agreed with everything we said on the show. There was no feedback whatsoever, right?

Drew: No, my inbox has turned into an AM radio call-in show.

Craig: That’s weird. Do sports fans have any opinions?

Drew: Oh, yeah. I get stats on Johnny Damon and his–

Craig: Johnny Damon. Great. Let’s have the Johnny Damon argument. I want to.

John: Craig, you were wrong about baseball. For one thing, there is a clock because now there’s a pitch clock.

Craig: Let’s talk about the pitch clock. We actually got that note from, I believe it was a scout with the Tampa Bay Rays organization, which is awesome. I stand quasi-corrected. One of the rules changes that I referred to, I referred to a bunch of rules changes in that episode. One of them, most importantly, is the pitch clock, which makes the game go faster. The word clock there, I think would better be described as timer.

It’s a little bit like the shot clock in basketball. You have a certain amount of time to do something, or there is a, in basketball, the foul or turnover, or in baseball, it’s a strike, or it’s a ball, depending on which side of the– but the game itself has no timer. You can have an at-bat that lasts one pitch long. You can have an at-bat that lasts zero pitches long. If there’s a guy at the plate and there’s a man on first, there’s two outs, and the pitcher picks that guy off first base, inning over, man at home didn’t swing, got no pitches.
You can have an at-bat that lasts 18 pitches, all within the confines of pitch clocks.

So yes, there is a small element of a timer, but the game itself, no one can tell you at the beginning of a baseball game how long that game will last. Everyone can tell you how long a football game will be in terms of game time play, or a hockey game, or a basketball game.

John: The larger point, in terms of being a clock and not being a clock, most sports are frantic. There’s just a lot of activity suddenly all at once. Baseball, yes, there are bursts of activity, but most of it is very open and people can take their time to do a thing.

Craig: Absolutely, and innings last as long as they last, and there are nine of them. In football, a series of downs, you can have possession of a football and you keep getting a new first down, that’s great, but the clock keeps getting eaten up.

John: Yes, so unless you’re able to stop the clock by doing the thing, yes.

Craig: You can stop, but when you stop the clock, there’s no more playing, right? Then everybody talks, and then they get back and then the clock restarts. While that is a good point from the scout that there is now an element of time, where there used to be no element of time– the only element of time that there used to be in baseball was, if there’s a visit to the mound, let’s say the pitcher is in trouble or there’s a situation that requires discussion, either the pitching coach or the manager would go out to the mound, bring in the infielders, and they would all have a huddle on the mound and chat.

The umpire, at some point, will mosey on over and go, “All right guys, it’s enough. We got to go get back to playing baseball,” When? Uhh when he feels like it. Like, “Ah, it’s enough.” That’s the only thing I remember prior to the pitch clock.

John: All right, more follow-up, we talked about residuals in 658 and the fact that they are now digitally depositable.

Drew: E&A writes, “While I appreciate the greater efficiency of having residuals be direct deposit, I would like to stand up for the joys of the home-delivered paper residual. It is always a cheery surprise, a bright spot in the day, the flash of green among the mailers, the happy announcement to the household, the ritual chant of, “Big money, big money, big money,” and finally, the reveal of a quantity which may range wildly, but which is always better than nothing.

Additionally, there’s the hopefully fond memories evoked by the source of the residuals, gratitude for the achievements of the WGA in securing these residuals, and sometimes even a sense of abundance in the universe. So until paper cuts or affluence dim our delight in the little green envelopes, this house will never direct deposit our residuals.”

John: I’m completely in agreement with E&A. I loved the green envelopes, and I loved opening them and I loved having– predict how big a check would be. I would say, “Oh, it’s from Sony,” and he would nail it within 1%. He was so good at it. It’s great. It just feels like found money.

Craig: A weird carnival skill.

John: It’s like, “I don’t deserve this, but it came and it’s great.” For the last three years, four years, they’ve all been going to my business manager anyway, so I haven’t seen them.

Craig: Yeah, I completely salute this person and the love of the green envelope and the excitement of that. No question. Partly it’s also just a function of age because I started getting green envelopes, I don’t know, in 1997? Yeah, after a while, you’re like, “Here’s another green envelope again.”

John: Here’s a proposal. The green envelopes are inefficient because those checks get lost and sometimes, they did get lost. It’s a good reason not to send them to people’s houses. Maybe we still do the green envelopes and inside it says like, “This is how much we just direct deposited for you.” Then you still get the feel, the joy of it, but you don’t have to deal with the check.

Craig: Sure. If they could maybe do that, that’d be great. What if there was an email that said– the subject header was, “Green envelope.”? You’re like, “Okay, when I open this email–“ Then there’s a bunch of texts just in case your email program gives you a little– no, it skips it. Then you open it and you scroll and there’s the number. That would be fine.

John: A little joy.

Craig: Yes. Why not?

John: All right, well, I’m going to propose that to the WGA. More about capitalizing off of a short what we talked about in episode 658.

Drew: Erin writes, I want to build on the excellent advice you gave Michael in episode 658 in which he asked what’s next after a short film he wrote won an Oscar qualifying award. If he wants to capitalize on the success, I would encourage Michael to write a feature version of his short film. Even if his short wasn’t initially meant to be blown out into a feature, there will be something, a theme, a character, what have you, that will make for a compelling feature script and he already has an award-winning short as a proof of concept.

The first question I’m asked when somebody sees and likes my short is, do you have a feature script? My answer is always yes, and because I always have a draft ready before attending any festival, it’s led to my scripts being read by reps and producers. I guarantee the director and/or producers are being asked this question, so he should also reach out to them to let them know he’s getting started on the feature so when they’re inevitably asked, “Is there a feature script?” they can reply, yes, Michael is working on it right now.

Craig: If you can. Not every short is expandable into a feature. I imagine many aren’t.

John: I think it’s good advice in general. Even if you can’t take this exact concept, something that’s in that space feels right because they like the short, they want something that’s like that but is a feature. That all tracks and makes a lot of sense.

Craig: Whiplash.

John: Yes, 100%.

Craig: It’s the theory of Whiplash, worked for Damien Chazelle, could work for you at home. I think that makes sense.

John: Totally makes sense. More on how to be a script coordinator. We’ve talked a lot on the show about the value of script coordinators.

Drew: Joshua Gilbert writes, I’m a long-time listener and a mid-level TV writer. Prior to staffing, I did all the writer’s office assistant jobs, writer’s PA, showrunner’s assistant, writer’s assistant, and script coordinator, the gig I did the most. As such, it occurred to me that if a YouTube video can teach someone to fix their sink, they can learn to script coordinate the same way.

So I created a two and a half hour training video in eight sections that gives step-by-step instructions for taking a script from first draft to shooting draft.

Craig: That’s interesting. Two and a half hours? There’s really two and a half hours of stuff to say?

John: There was two and a half hours of stuff to do to explain about how to do Roll20. You and I put those videos together.

Craig: That was extraordinarily efficient. Roll20, especially the old Roll20, they’ve streamlined it, was so unuser-friendly.

Listen, it may be that he’s just very patient in his explanations. Ally Chang, who’s our script coordinator on Blast Bus, I walked her through it. It was only about 30 minutes.

John: You’re approaching script coordinating from one point of view. You’re also a single showrunner who’s doing stuff and a single writer. People who are on more complicated shows, I think it probably is more complicated stuff. You’re integrating multiple things from different writers.

Craig: Yes. I could see that. There’s a little more traffic.

John: I’ve watched through it, too. He leaves no stone unturned.

Craig: Okay, so it’s an incredibly thorough, too. Thank God. I was just hoping that you weren’t like, “I watch it and–“ No, okay, if it’s super-duper thorough, then great. Look, either way, I just like complaining about things. He put it on there for free. It’s a free class. One more reason to not go to film school.

John: Yeah, film school doesn’t teach you how to be a script writer, though, either. It’s one of those– just someone shows you.

Craig: Yes, but that’s one of the jobs that we have.

John: It’s a job. It’s a job. It’s actually a union cover job.

Craig: Film school just teaches you the job that no one has to give you. Just why? Anyway.

John: All right, last bit of follow-up here is from Lori, and she’s talking about, Craig, you use this word calculating a lot. “You need to stop calculating.” You actually use it in a Scriptnotes book. A little follow-up on this.

Drew: Yes, she says, “What exactly does Craig mean by that? Does he mean that writers shouldn’t have a strategy or pursue a set of goals other than writing good screenplays? If so, how do those good screenplays ever get into the hands of someone who can do something with them?”

Craig: Here’s what I mean. Calculating means figuring out how to game the system. What do people want? What does the market want? If I did this and this and this, then maybe this and this and this. There’s so much effort that you can put into that kind of thinking. “Everybody knows that if you write a such and such story that they want it, they don’t want these unless there’s a this in it. I’m going to do that.” That’s calculating. Not calculating is writing something that you love, that you believe in, that is personal to you, that nobody else could do, or that just expresses your unique creative talent and then putting it out in the world. Then other people work on the calculating part.

In fact, part of our jobs as individual writers in our careers is to resist all of their calculations when their calculations go against what is the beating heart of the work. Otherwise it will turn into crap, which happened to me repeatedly in my career because I didn’t understand that part of my job was to defend against their calculation. I thought in a somewhat humble way, all these calculations must have value. These people are paid for these calculations and the emperor has no clothes.

It’s not about being strategy-less. You write something great, then you’re like, “I wrote this, and I need Renée Zellweger to be in it. It was designed out of my heart for Renée Zellweger. I need to get this to Renée Zellweger somehow.” That’s not calculation. That’s just makes sense. That’s creative desire. Saying, “I wrote this for Renée Zellweger, but what I’m hearing maybe is that Sabrina Carpenter is looking to do something in a movie like this. If I just change the age and change the this and make it more Sabrina Carpenter, then get it to the person that I know who knows her friend, then da-da-da–“ What have you done? No offense to Sabrina Carpenter. If you write something for Sabrina Carpenter, truly–

John: Yes, fantastic, love that. All right–

Craig: I know who Sabrina Carpenter is.

John: I was going to say, nicely done. Weirdly, a Sabrina Carpenter, Renée Zellweger axis, it’s clear. There’s a vector that connects the two.

Craig: I actually am proud of what I just did. I really am. It would have been a very old guy thing to be like, “No, instead I’m going to make it for Reese Witherspoon.” Eh, contemporary, doesn’t work. It wouldn’t have worked. It would not have been as cogent of a point.

John: I like this. This discussion of calculating actually ties in very well to our main topic today, which is about screenwriting being a poorly defined problem. This verbiage I’m taking from this blog post by Adam Mastroianni, which is about why smart people aren’t happier. I think it also really resonates with last week’s episode where we’re talking about how we measure and quantify talent.

In this blog post, he’s talking about how it’s not just physical attributes that we try to measure and quantify. We do it with intelligence too. If you Google the smartest people in the world, you’re going to find physicists, and mathematicians, computer scientists, chess masters.

Craig: Donald Trump by his own admission.

John: 100%. You’re going to do that because if accomplished things that you can point to and say like, oh, it was your intelligence that did that. You can measure that. But a couple of weeks ago, I went to this event with Hillary Clinton who spoke and, Jesus, that is a very smart woman.

Craig: Just a little.

John: Her intelligence is not quantifiable in that way. She didn’t invent a thing. She didn’t solve some mathematical problem. She ran the state department.

Craig: She ran the state department of the United States of America.

John: Not a small thing. The things that I would say, if I could point to her intelligence, she can take a question and then pull it into its parts and come up with, on the fly, this seven-minute answer that goes from the personal to the political to everything. That’s experience. And it’s honestly the difference between what we’d say in D&D terms is intelligence and wisdom. She has the ability to take this whole thing and pull it apart.

Really what it comes down to, and this is from this blog post, is that we tend to value and aim towards these well-defined problems. A well-defined problem– he defines in four things.

That there is a stable relationship between the variables. You can see how everything connects. There’s no disagreement about whether the problems are problems or if they’ve already been solved. There are clear boundaries. There’s a finite amount of relevant information and possible actions. And the problems are repeatable. So the details might change, but the process for solving the problems does not.

Craig: Science.

John: Science is exactly that. It’s the scientific method.

Craig: The results needing to be robust, repeatable. What a joy it would be to work in something where you could actually go, “The answer to this question is yes.” That would be lovely.

John: A lot of us, and I suspect you were as well, Craig, we were good at doing those well-defined problems. All standardized tests, the ACTs, the SATs, they were those things. We were rewarded for that. We’re told we are smart because we’re good at these things. Unfortunately, the career we’ve chosen to go into does not reward that thinking at all.

Craig: It does not.

John: We’re dealing with these really undefinable things. We don’t even know what the edges of this is. What do they really want from here? How am I supposed to do this thing? Am I making the right choice to go, “Should I move to Los Angeles?”? These are not questions with single answers. Many of the questions we get from our listeners are grappling with this. When we say, “Don’t be so calculating,” I feel like so often we see people trying to take these difficult situations and boil them down to well-defined problems.

Craig: Yes, because it’s comforting. You probably remember in math class, there was somebody that was sitting next to you who was struggling with a process. Let’s say quadratic equations.

John: Do you remember the first time your teacher did the quadratic formula or showed how you discover the quadratic formula? There’s no way you end up with such a messy formula. It’s so ugly.

Craig: And so beautiful.

John: Beautiful. It works but it looks so awful.

Craig: We are used to science boiling things down to elegance. E = mc² is so absurdly elegant. It seems like a joke. Most things are not that perfect. The Pythagorean theorem is so gorgeously a² + b² = c². But there was always a kid that didn’t understand the concepts and would turn to you at some point and go, “Just tell me what to do. Okay, so now what do I do? Then what do I do? Then what do I do?”

Meaning, break this down like I’m a computer, code it for me, so that I don’t have to understand what I’m doing. I just follow steps, which are certain. Therefore, I can’t get lost. It’s not actually a bad way to teach certain people certain things that they are struggling to grasp conceptually. However, if they need that, it’s probably not really worth it for them because ultimately, they’re not actually learning anything. They’re merely just obeying steps.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: What we have here in our business is a very– there’s an analytic way of doing things, and then there’s synthesizing things. We have to synthesize stuff. We have to make things out of nothing. It’s art, so it’s all objective, subjective at the same time. There are things that just we all agree on, then there are things that we cannot agree on, and then there are things that we find out most people agree on. There are things that no one agrees on, except 10 years later, they do.

Nobody can really teach this. Yes. What we’re taught is how to analyze, which is fair, and what we can test is analysis and memory. There is this concept, when we were learning about the SAT analogies, we were taught about this thing called the triangular non-relationship, which is that this– and these two things are only related because they both relate to something else, but they don’t directly relate to each other. I think that for people that are good in school and good at SATs, and also are good at screenwriting, those two things are not connected to each other, they’re connected back to one thing, which is a certain mind.

John: Yes, absolutely. Let’s think through some of the stuff that we’re dealing with as screenwriters that are these poorly defined problems and that we’re constantly grappling with.

What is this movie about? This movie I’m writing, what is it about? No, what is it really about? We know it’s not actually about the thing on the surface, it’s actually really about something else.

Who is this character? How do I show that to the audience?

What does this moment look like from the character’s point of view and from all the other characters in that scene’s point of view?

What do they say next and why?

What is the right title for this movie?

Am I using the word “being” too much?

How is this movie I’m writing different from every other movie ever made?

But how is it similar enough to a genre that people can relate to what the hell it actually is?

Then, completely independent of what’s happening on the page, the actual career of being a screenwriter is, how do I describe this thing to an executive? Who should I pitch this to? Should I be focusing on Sabrina Carpenter or Renée Zellweger? When should I send the follow-up email? Should I send the follow-up email?

I see this with my own daughter. She’s a sophomore now, and super smart, so good at so many things. She’s texting me, and it’s not about schoolwork, it’s about, what should I put in this box on this form for this internship I’m applying for? They ask me, “What is your desired hourly salary?” She says, “Should I put 15?” I’m like, “I think 20?” but there’s no answer here. I don’t even know what comes out of this. You’re nodding, because this is exactly what– you do it too.

Craig: We occasionally get these. It’s funny, Jessica is so independent and so much a force of nature. She reminds me so much of me when I was her age. Just all these things that a lot of people consider difficult that she’s just doing. But kinda had a little bit of a meltdown over figuring out how to pay the utility bill for her apartment.

John: We’re on the same page. We got a bill for power, but with some from the previous tenant, and it’s like, “What do you do?”

Craig: Actually, as it turns out, nobody likes doing that stuff. Everybody has to learn. I remember this as great, but it wasn’t great. It was stupid, but I still remember because this is one funny bit where Mike Myers on Saturday Night Live played a character maybe only once called Middle-Aged Man. He’s a superhero. He’s asked, “What are your powers?” He goes, “I can’t fly and I don’t have super strength, but I can explain what escrow is.”

These are the things that you sort of accrue. When you are in your 20s, you’re like, “What do I do with a utility–“ Those are all learnable things. That list of stuff that you put there. The other one that came to mind was, what is the tone of this? Also what is tone? What are we even talking about? These things are only defined by a strange passion and a confidence that comes from feeling good about it. It is all about feeling. When you look at people who are composing, why that note? Why not this note?

Feels wrong, feels right. For us, we have no choice but to actually find some genuine feeling. That feeling then we have to convert into some explanation to either get people to resonate with our same feeling and feel it or get them to hear a rationality that allows them to go along with it.

But for everybody else in our business, that area of what is it and I’m going to feel it and I know what’s wrong and what’s right allows for so much chicanery, charlatanism, fraud, confidence masquerading as knowledge, just bad faith, baloney, gaslighting, because it’s not science. Because I can’t just go, “Stop. Everything you just said is provably wrong and has been proven wrong.” Can’t do it.

John: Of course, we’re talking about this in a context of there’s now more data than ever and more data being used against us about the choices that we’re making. As we’re pitching to Netflix, they will say our metrics show that we need to have– we cannot show a dog in the first three minutes of the show or else, or there’s all this stuff. They have data. They can show that scientifically this is true, but of course, that doesn’t have anything to do with the actual feeling of what it is.

I love to contrast that development process to a film festival where they’re buying a film at a film festival. In that case, they’re emotionally responding to the thing they saw and it’s like, “Oh, this works for these reasons.” We want this movie and we are going to put this on our streamer.

Craig: I think our business has shifted, especially the feature business, very much in favor of that vibe in a way, there is more humility on the side of the buyers because they’ve almost finally admitted they have no idea. Therefore, instead of the old method, which is really– if you want to talk about something that changed our business, the old method of making movies was have a bunch of writers come in, hear pitches, buy scripts, have ten things in development that one of them eventually will be worthy of a green light and be made.

That’s gone away. Now it’s more like, hey, we’ve shown up with a script already, an actor, a director. Everything is here and we also have a budget. All you have to do now is just flip a lever, but all the components are in place. We basically cook the meal for you. It’s a frozen TV dinner. Just put it in the microwave, right? As opposed to, we would like to cook you a meal. We’re going to go gather ingredients. We can discuss if you want chicken or fish, right? And they like that.

John: The episode that Marielle Heller was on that you weren’t able to come for, we were talking–

Craig: Passive aggressive.

John: Sorry. It was a good episode.

Craig: I bet. Jeez.

John: We were talking through this new research study that showed that almost none of the movies that are greenlit came out of studio development.

Craig: Exactly. Which was all you and I knew. All we knew was studio development. In fact, the thing that we would complain about in the ‘90s was studio development and development hell and how we all knew we were going there and getting paid something and then we were just going to be strung out for a while and eventually it probably would just die on the vine like everything else.

John: We were getting paid during that time, which was important.

Craig: Important that we were getting paid. Now what has gone away is all of the money being spread around, but there is a little more certainty. It used to be, if you made a deal, there’s a 5% or 10% chance they would make your movie. Now it’s like we’re making a deal, it’s kind of a green light.

I remember the first time this happened to me, it was at Universal, and I think it was maybe Identity Thief where I came in to pitch the rewrite because it was a page 1 rewrite. There was a pre-existing script. There were two pre-existing scripts, I believe.

I came in with Jason Bateman and Scott Stuber and normally you would go in a pitch meeting, you would pitch to the head of the studio. Everyone was in that room, from Peter Kramer, who’s the president of production, but then Donna Langley also, and then Adam Fogelson?

John: Sure. That feels right.

Craig: Is that right?

John: Yes.

Craig: The guy that was the top of it. I’m like, “What the hell is going on?” When I walked out, I remember I was like, “Why are all these people in a pitch meeting?” He goes, “That was a green light meeting. The deal is if we’re going to pay you to write this, we’re making the movie.” That blew my mind. That was the first time I’d ever experienced that where that’s the deal now. Either no development or make movie. That in a way expresses humility on their end, I think. We don’t know. If you bring us all this stuff, fine.

John: What can we take from this is that, listen, I think there’s going to be moments where you’re going to have this instinct to reduce these difficult problems, these poorly defined problems, and you’re going to try to find edges of things that you can clean up and solve. I see people doing that with the obsession over like, “Oh, I need to get rid of all the widows and orphans in my script.”

Craig: Control.

John: Control. You’re trying to exert control over a thing that fundamentally doesn’t want control. You’re going to submit to a bunch of film festivals and screenwriting competitions so you can get scores and so you can be graded the same way you were graded when you were–

Craig: People love grades.

John: Yes. I miss them. Listen–

Craig: It’s validation.

John: I’m 30 years out of college but I miss that validation.

Craig: Absolutely. It’s validation. When I do see a lot of people on social media saying, “Congratulations to me. I was a semi-finalist,” and blah blah blah, I’m like, “I’m so sorry. It’s actually not relevant at all because there’s somebody who didn’t make it past the first round who has written something much better.” The people who judge these things don’t know either. Nobody in that world knows because the people that are at the highest level of our business also don’t know. They are constantly being surprised. Everybody agrees that this kind of movie doesn’t work until somebody makes one that does. Listen, if there was one genre we knew would not work, it would be to adapt a video game. That was the law. That’s the thing.

John: Two good series.

Craig: There you go. Superhero movies were just dead in the water forever. Musicals keep coming and going. I think Wicked is going to bring them back. Westerns disappear. Probably they’ll come back. That’s the joke. That’s the big joke. So why calculate? Just follow your heart.

John: Absolutely. All right, let’s take a look at some pages from our listeners. For folks who are new here, every once in a while we do a three-page challenge where we invite our listeners to submit three pages from something they’ve written, generally the first three pages. We give our honest feedback.

As a reminder, people want us to be reading this stuff. They’re soliciting this feedback. If we’re mean at any point or harsh, they asked for this.

Craig: That’s a weird phrase. They permitted this.

John: They permitted this. We’ll say that. If you would like to read along on these pages, you can follow the links in the show notes and click through. There’s PDFs for those. You can take a look and maybe stop this podcast, read first, and then listen to what we’re going to say about them. Let us start with Flunge-

Craig: Flunge.

John: -by J Wheeler White.

Craig: I apologize. If you guys hear a page flipping, it’s because I like a physical page.

John: Likes a physical page.

Craig: Forgive me.

John: Drew, for folks who are not able to look at the pages, can you give us a quick summary?

Drew: “In the middle of a fencing match, with seven seconds left on the clock, 17-year-old, Will Stetson, ignores all the onlookers and focuses on his opponent, Alexander. They stare each other down. We then cut to six months earlier where Will is elbowed in his high school wrestling match and starts punching his opponent in the face. Coach Vargas tries to hold him back, but when his opponent calls him a psycho, Will lunges at him and crashes into the scorer’s table. Later, in a school hallway, Coach Vargas kicks Will off the wrestling team. Will punches a locker. Outside the gym, a Mercedes pulls up in front of Will, driven by Alina, another teenager who is currently very angry.”

John: All right. Let’s start with this title page. I love this title page.

Craig: Flunge. Yes. It’s got a nice graphically designed title with negative space fencer in the middle.

John: Absolutely. Craig, do you know what a flunge is?

Craig: I absolutely do not know what a flunge is. A flying lunge?

John: Close to a flying lunge. It’s a combination of a flèche and a lunge. Flèche is where you’re racing up to your opponent, you’re running up to the opponent.

Craig: Oh.

John: The illustration in there is actually what a flunge would be.

Craig: It’s a flunge.

John: It’s a daring stab forward.

Craig: Flunge is going to be changed. That title is not going to last.

John: No.

Craig: Just going to be honest.

John: It looks great.

Craig: It’s fun for now.

John: Fun for now. Page 1 opens with, “Time left on clock, 7 seconds, score 14-14.” I think this is crucial information. I like having it here. I’m wondering how it’s going to be shown on screen. I don’t need it to be shown on screen on the page in a certain way, but I was wondering about that. I like that it’s 14-14. That you know that this match has been going on a while. You know that you’re near the end of this.

This setup reminds me of Challengers, and I don’t know how this is all going to be structured, but I feel like we’re going to be moving back and forth into this this match, which I’m excited to see. It may not be a true Stuart Special where we start at one point and then flashback in time. I think it is a back and forth.

Craig: This does feel like a Stewart Special, though.

John: Well, it’s a Stewart Special in the sense that it started at a time, and we can catch up to this.

Craig: Only because he’s a wrestler and then he becomes a fence– I doubt we’re going to go back and forth. I could be wrong. Also, it’s a television show.

John: Oh, a television show. Pilot, yes.

Craig: It’s possible, but I agree with you, the setup felt really exciting. First of all, I got excited by fencing because– listen, at this point just show me something, and fencing is fun. It’s swordplay and it’s exciting.

John: I had fencing in a movie that didn’t shoot, which I was really sad about.

Craig: Oh, you had a fencing movie?

John: I had a fencing movie.

Craig: Ugh. Do you want to sue this guy? John, that’s what people do.

John: Yes, absolutely. I had fencing in my movie.

Craig: This guy stole your idea.

John: Yes.

Craig: Jesus.

John: I’ll say that if there’s a contract lens that plays an important role in this movie, I’ve won. I’ve won the lawsuit.

Craig: You’ve won the lawsuit. It’s an interesting thing. We have a guy– this is how it opens. “William Stetson, 17, catches his breath. He’s in a full electric saber kit.” I assume that means that-

John: He’s wired up.

Craig: -fencing outfit. “Fencing mask pulled up, a single curl of light hair glued by sweat to his forehead.” Just be aware, that’s the kind of thing that they’re going to have a meeting about, and it’s going to probably look stupid. Maybe just say sweaty.

John: Yes.

Craig: “His eyes, consumed by a deep indecipherable fervor locked with his opponent’s, Alexander Sasha Su, 18.” Now, why do they both have their masks up? Is that a thing that people do?

John: Yes, between parries.

Craig: This is exciting to see on page, but just want to think ahead here. This is J Wheeler White, which is a fantastic comic book name, by the way. J Wheeler White, he owns a newspaper in Gotham, not in New York. They’re just staring at each other. If you’re staring at somebody, and they’re staring at you, the two of you are in a staring contest, that just feels a little weird.

If you’re staring at this guy, and he’s drinking some Gatorade, or doing something, and then he turns and sees you, and expresses something back, whether it’s hatred, jealousy, I’m going to get you, you lost, whatever it is, that creates a moment. I think, here, what’s happened is, they’re just staring at each other, which feels a bit odd.

John: I get that. Again, the reason why I would say Challengers is challenged. Have you seen Challengers?

Craig: I have.

John: Challengers is all stares across on that between people-

Craig: It is.

John: -doing stuff. I love it for that. In this first page, fans, teammates, former opponents, uppercase those. Those are other groups of people that we’re going to see. There’s a thing that J Wheeler White does where it’s a word then a single dash rather than a double dash. It’s consistent. It’s fine. It’s not what I would do.

Craig: I don’t do it either, but it doesn’t matter. I get it.

John: It’s consistent.

Craig: It’s consistent. As long as it’s consistent. It would be nice to know how big. It says hundreds of fans. Hundreds of people– that’s another thing you learn when you’re making stuff is, hundreds of people look like 12 people. Thousands of people look like hundreds of people.

John: I need a sense of– is this State Championships? What is this? That would tell us.

Craig: Olympics. State Championship. Is this a gymnasium? Is this Madison Square Garden? Just give me a general sense of the space. I think it would be helpful. What I really enjoyed was how this just flung us — flunged us — into a different thing, but this is way easier to do on page than it is to do– because the problem is match-cutting from eyes, especially when there’s a mask, even though it’s pulled up, it’s going to be visible. Eyes to eyes of a person that’s in motion, wrestling, it’s just not possible.

John: It’s not possible. There’ll be a sound pre-lap, there’ll be a thing, and then you just have to cut into it.

Craig: Exactly, so probably not– it’s exciting to read, but this is something that I actually think is fine, but later you’re going to have to fix it.

John: Absolutely. It’ll be on a foot and a step will go forward and you’ll realize you’re going to do a different space. There’ll be different ways to get there.

Craig: Exactly.

John: I’m loving everything on page 1 and on page 2. I thought the actual descriptions of what goes wrong in the match, and how it builds, I believed. It felt visceral and it’s funny.

Craig: Yes. I think the only thing that I would suggest here for this, because the point of this wrestling match is Will goes too far, right? He goes too far. He’s wrestling a guy, and he chokes him in a way that’s illegal, and ruins stuff.

John: He chokes him and then he starts beating him.

Craig: Well, because the guy fights back. Then he fights back again. It’s all precipitated by the fact that he’s choking this guy out, which is not legal in high school, or anywhere. That’s fine, but what I needed was something leaning into it. I think part of my issue was it just starts with this guy killing someone. That’s what he’s doing basically. How did we get to that? If you start leaning on someone’s throat– this is just logic stuff, and it’s important for tone. You’re in high school, you start choking this guy out.

Nobody says it– they’ll run in there and pull you off. You can’t kill somebody, and why would you think you could? The problem is this guy goes too far. I need to see him going too far, not already too far. Something leading into it would have been helpful.

John: Yep, agreed. Page 3, the one thing I want to scratch out here is mic drop. Vargas, the coach, says, “You smell like an f-ing litter box.” Mic drop. We don’t need the mic drop, he walks off. And at the bottom of page 3, we’re introduced to Alina Matero, 17, dark hair, clean girl aesthetic, currently very pissed off. That’s all we know about her. I liked that as the next thing we’re seeing.

Craig: I like that she seems rich. I’m guessing that he’s not. I don’t know what their relationship is, but she seems like she’s already heard about the wrestling situation. Again, tone. Page 3, Vargas, his coach says, “We were all watching Stetson,” which I think you need a comma there because it seems like we’re all watching Stetson. “We were all watching, Stetson,” that’s Will, “and good thing too, or that kid would be in an ambulance right now. Incorrect.

They watched him choke that kid out until that kid punched him to get him off of him. They didn’t do anything. And then, good thing you don’t know him.” I don’t know him either, and just because he goes to New Trier, I’m guessing that’s the school for rich kids?

John: Yes.

Craig: It doesn’t justify murder. This is so important. I need to understand why Will was trying to “kill” this kid. Why he was suddenly so vicious and so relentless that he would injure this kid and possibly render him unconscious.

John: Yeah so, thinking about that moment, if you switch it around and Will was the one who felt like he was threatened, or he was getting choked, and that he was the first person who blew up, and it was ambiguous whether the referee should have stepped in, that could have made sense.

Craig: This scene is broad. For me. This is what happens. The coach goes, “You did a dumb thing.” Will says, “No, I didn’t.” He says, “Yes, you did. You’re fired. You’re off the team.” “You can’t do that. Darn it.” Everybody deserves to be a character. Everybody deserves to be interesting. How does this really go down in life? I don’t think it’s like this. I don’t.

I think there is a possibility that as a coach you sit down with this kid– and there’s a scene where he says, “Just walk me through what happened. I want to understand why this happened.” Let Will explain. Just keep asking questions so that we start to understand Will, how his mind works, what the real problem was, and we’ll feel like maybe this coach is sympathetic, understanding, and the coach will listen to him, hear, get to the truth, and then say, “So you’re off the team. Sorry. Based on everything I understand, I appreciate it, I get it. You can’t be on a wrestling team.”

John: I hear you, and that is a version of the scene. I think there’s a way to keep the energy up the way that this scene currently does, but just with a little bit more finesse.

Craig: Actually, that was my problem.

John: That the energy was still too high?

Craig: Yes. We started with this exciting, flunging match, and then we go into an equally exciting and violent wrestling match, both of which it’s feeling like at fever pitch tempo, and then we get into this quick argument. The movie is going so fast, I felt like it’s a television show, it’s a pilot, you can breathe. If you look at Breaking Bad, everybody uses it as a great example because it is a wonderful pilot episode. It starts with, blah! And then it’s like, hmm.

John: It’s quiet. Yes.

Craig: It’s quiet.

John: There’s a description on page 3 that I did like. “Will tries to make himself big, arms out to his side, chest forward, steps to his coach, Vargas sighs.” That does a lot.

Craig: It does. Again, it’s a tone question. Will seems like an idiot here because you can’t big-guy your coach. What are you going to do? Beat him up. The coach isn’t buying it, but then I feel like, why would Will think that the coach would buy it and why is Will do–

John: I believe that’s a dumb high school character move.

Craig: To me, dumb high school characters are different to coaches that control their fate. Those are the people they don’t do this to. Those are the people that they get all solemn with because those are their father figures that they have daddy issues. Again, that’s part of what I’m saying here to J Will writers. The character right now of Will and the character of Vargas is angry coach, angry kid. I think we need to go a bit deeper in that, even in one page.

John: Great. Again, these are not well-defined problems.

Craig: No.

John: They’re all opinions and how it feels.

Craig: That’s right.

John: Before we move on, Drew, can you tell us the logline for what the actual–

Craig: For Flunge.

John: For Flunge.

Drew: “After being kicked off the team for one too many violent outbursts, a high school wrestler reluctantly joins the fencing team to keep his scholarship, unearthing a preternatural talent that may redefine the course of his life. An anime-inspired live-action sports drama series.”

John: Great. I don’t know that it’s a series. I think it’s a movie, but I’m curious–

Craig: It feels like a movie to me.

John: Feels like a movie to me. It feel like there’s a beginning, middle, and end, there’s a victory, there’s a thing.

Craig: It’s a classic. It’s like– What was that movie where Matthew Modine is a hockey player and then he becomes an ice skater? What was that one called? Look it up. It’s such a great idea. He was a hockey player who was like this, undisciplined, got kicked off, whatever personal problems, and gets stuck being paired up with an ice skater for figure skating.

John: It’s not Matthew Modine. It’s somebody who’s like Matthew Modine.

Craig: Oh, it is?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s not Matthew Modine?

John: Oh, shoot.

Craig: Who was that?

John: He looks like Steve Gutenberg, but it’s not Steve Gutenberg. We’ll find it.

Craig: That’s why we need our search engine optimization person.

John: Hey, can you tell me about a movie where a hockey player then becomes a figure skater? He gets partnered with a woman who’s a figure skater.

AI: The movie is The Cutting Edge. It’s a romantic comedy from 1992 where a former hockey player teams up with a figure skater.

John: Who were the stars of that movie?

AI: The stars of The Cutting Edge are D.B. Sweeney, who plays the former hockey player, and Moira Kelly, who plays the figure skater.

Craig: D.B. Sweeney. D.B. Sweeney and Matthew Modine were odd– My guess is that they bumped into each other at a bunch of auditions back in the day.

John: 100%. Absolutely.

Craig: What a great idea. Anyway, this reminds me in a way of like, okay, an athlete has to transition from one thing to another. It’s actually been quite a few of these. It’s not merely The Cutting Edge. Although what a great title and D.B. Sweeney. Anyway, I agree with the feels feature. What are we doing in Season 3, episode 7 for this? That’s my question, but meh.

John: Let’s move on to our next one. This is Cows by John and Mark DiStefano.

Drew: “In a bar for cows, Callie, a black and white spotted cow, and Wade, a bro-y bull, sit drinking milk. While Wade tells her wild stories about his recent trip to Moodrid, Callie stares at the bartender Jade who is also a cow, they’re all cows. They’re joined by Astrid, a Highland cow who makes fun of Wade from making his trip to Europe with his entire personality. They give Astrid a hard time because her new boyfriend is on a reality dating show, Udderly Single. Astrid wants to throw a watch party for the show, and Wade offers to organize it.”

John: This is an animated, televised, or it’s a pilot for an animated series. Let’s get into it. For what it is, it’s a good version of what it is, but I also think it’s not the pilot episode, or it’s not the first scene of what this should be. This is a Zootopia situation where these are anthropomorphic animals doing a thing. While this conversation tracks, it basically feels like it’s maybe a Friends-like sitcom, but with a lot of cow puns thrown in. It’s probably not the best way to setting up this world for me.

Craig: Yes. What I was struck by primarily was how mundane this conversation is. If you took away the fact that they’re cows, this is a pretty boring scene, unfortunately, because it’s just banter. It’s mild banter, it’s quippy. I don’t believe any of these people. The things that they’re saying to each other feels very canned, Disney television canned conversation. It doesn’t feel real. I have no idea who I’m supposed to be following here.

John: Yes. I don’t know who the central character is. I don’t really understand what the relationship is between the three of them. They’re all there.

Craig: They’re just talking. They’re just talking about something. There’s a lot of page time dedicated to the discussion of where he went to Moodrid and they’re like, “You’ve told us already.” This is not a good use of the first three pages of anything.

John: It’s just one scene also, it’s just like one continuous scene. There’s not a lot of story is happening here.

Craig: It says “Interior bar.” Now these are cows, so we’re in a cow world. “Bulls and cows mingle, dance on two legs”– I don’t know how that works. I’m just thinking about physics. I guess they’re just animated people but they’re cows. It would be nice if they made that clear– “And swill large quantities of milk. Callie sits on a bar stool next to Wade. This bar, where is it?

John: The scale of things also would feel strange.

Craig: What is the scale? What is the decor? What is the music? It says they’re dancing. To what? Can you help me feel like I understand where I am? Because all they’ve done really is, this just feels like a scene from the middle of a middle-grade sitcom where people are talking. Not an introduction to a new world where it’s about cows.

John: Yes, exactly. Here’s where I think writing the scene is useful for you. It’s like this might be a chance to say, “What does it even feel like to have these characters talking to each other? If you just do this as an exercise, it’s like let’s have a conversation where they’re talking. You get some sense of what their voices are. I can’t tell you individually what the three different cows’ voices are. You get a sense of what their banter feels like and what the kinds of cow-related jokes and puns you’re going to be throwing in here a lot would feel like. As an exploratory, let’s crank out some pages. Great, but it’s not the first three pages of this pilot.

Craig: No. If for instance, your hero is a cow named Vanessa and Vanessa works at this bar. Vanessa has to go from the kitchen, around past the bar, past the dance floor, over to cross a few booths, get to somebody, it’s bottle service, or she’s bringing them whatever grass tenders and whatever they eat. As she’s walking by, she’s catching snippets of conversation.

These things are only valuable as background snippets. I don’t buy that we would want to focus our camera and our attention on them because it won’t hold our camera and our attention. What I would understand is, okay, I’m meeting somebody. She’s tired, she’s cranky. Oh, but she has to be nice to these people. Maybe she knows somebody who’s like, “Oh my God, when are you getting off? We have to get out of here and we need to talk about this thing.” She’s like, “Yes, I will. I promise.” Then someone’s like, “Hey, blah, blah, blah, give me a, blah–“ whatever, it didn’t make a scene. This isn’t a scene, this is just people– We’re just like, talking.

John: All that said, there’s nothing objectionable or wrong on these pages. Everything flows right, and it has the jokoid feeling that feels–

Craig: You said jokoid.

John: Jokoid.

Craig: That’s a problem.

John: Yes.

Craig: That is a problem.

John: It’s a problem, but what I’m saying is you don’t look at these pages and they’re like, “Oh, this is incompetent.” It’s not that.

Craig: No.

John: I feel like these brothers– I assume they’re brothers-

Craig: Yes.

John: -they can do this. This just wasn’t a very good example of the top of their craft.

Craig: Yes. I think they need to raise the bar a little bit on themselves because it’s in the form of. By the way, when I started, the very first stuff I wrote was exactly like this. It was exactly like this. It was in the form of, but it wasn’t. That’s part of the normal progress. Somebody needs to go, “Okay, it’s in the form of, so that’s good news.” You actually have internalized rhythm and general– like the idea of how to get information out without reading it off of note cards.

Now we have to think bigger, think better, and be more creative. Just always ask yourself, is the job to do the stuff I’ve seen, or is the job to do something that’s better, or different, or just truer to me that feels like it’s something that came out of me and not an imitation.

John: Drew, what was the logline for this?

Drew: “An ambitious cow and her cattle friends navigate careers and relationships in the cow-centric city of Bovine.”

John: Okay. So it’s either Friends or Sex in the City, and there’s actually a pretty wide range between the two of those.

Craig: Then I would love to– I actually don’t know the answer to this, but what was the first scene of Friends? What happened?

John: The first time in the scene of Friends is at Central Perk and Rachel is fleeing from her marriage. She shows up in a wedding dress.

Craig: Okay. There you go.

John: That’s a scene.

Craig: That’s a scene, there’s a situation, it’s on. That’s not happening here.

John: No, it’s not.

Craig: It’s not enough to say, “And they’re cows.” That’s the other thing. You can’t just say Friends, but they’re cows. What about cows? Look, I’ve written a movie about sheep, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m obsessed with the things that make sheep sheep, but also make the individual sheep different from each other. What can sheep do that we can’t, and what can’t sheep do that we can? Why cows? What is that getting me other than, “Ha, ha, ha, they’re cows?” It’s got to be more.

Actually, that’s almost something that needs to happen in these first three pages, too. That a burden that Friends didn’t have was, why humans?

I need to know why cows.

John: The audience demands a certain amount of world-building and rule-setting in cow Friends that they’re not expecting in a friends-Friends.

Craig: And justification, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: What do we get, because they’re cows?

John: Let’s move on to our final three-page challenge. This is Never Die Alone by Yeong-Jay Lee.

Drew: A storm rolls in over a barge on Lake Superior. On the deck, men dig through their cargo of coal and pull out a gaunt young man with a neck tattoo. They chain him to an iron ball and push him overboard. We follow the body down to the bottom where the iron ball crashes through a sunken colonial boat, releasing a glowing sapphire, The Eye, which begins to float to the surface. Behind it, we see hundreds of bodies on the lake bed.

In the neighboring Sault Ste. Marie, a shabby car pulls up to a trailer home. Inside, Adam Withers, 17, asks his mom, Sarah, 37, if he can go and hang out with the new girl, Jenny. Sarah’s reluctant and sets a curfew for 12:00. Adam admits he’s lost his phone, which upsets Sarah, but she still lets him go. When he’s gone, Sarah returns to her phone call and cigarette.

Craig: You left out the fact that it’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

John: What’s this?

Craig: Gordon Lightfoot.

John: Gordon Lightfoot, right.

Craig: One of my favorites of all time. Love Gordon Lightfoot. One of my favorite Canadians. Never met him.

Drew: This is my neck of the woods.

Craig: He’s a genius, though.

John: Let’s start with the title page. I’d love to see contact information and a date. Just useful. People can find you.

Craig: Or at a minimum contact information.

John: I circled a lot of things here, and I want to talk just a little bit about stuff that got me tripped up on this first page. “I barge traversing the Stygian Lake in pouring rain.”

Craig: Stygian.

John: See, I didn’t even know how to pronounce that word. It’s a thing I’ve seen, and never actually pronounced it out loud.

Craig: The Stygian decks.

John: Yes, we’ll need the word Stygian. It’s dark.

Craig: It’s a bit ornate for this.

John: Also, because you’re saying barge, I know it’s the River Styx. Wait, so are we on a barge of the dead? I didn’t know if we were going to shore or away from shore, it’s traversing. I didn’t know where we were at, which becomes important because it’s clear that they’re headed away from shore because they’re going to dump this body.

Next two sentences, “A few men wearing raincoats pace the deck as the barge slows to a stop. Lights from a town dot the horizon. They unfasten a large tarp–“ Wait, they unfasten, the lights unfasten? It’s the men. This is one of those little small things where we’re reaching back, what is this pronoun referring to?

Craig: Yes. In the prior sense, we have a little bit of an issue here, too. Yeong-Jay, I think, you don’t have to use your full vocabulary-

John: No.

Craig: -which is impressive. When you say, “Lights from a town dot the horizon,” the way I just read that makes sense. What we read is, “Lights from a town dot the horizon.” Town dot. It just doesn’t work. You don’t need that so much. Lights dot the horizon or the distant lights of a town are seen on the horizon, if you want. Horizon isn’t a great word for night. We don’t really see the horizon at night. We just see lights in the distance. We don’t know if it’s the horizon.

More importantly, information. “Two dig through the coal.” You just want to say two– Again, what? Two? “Two dig” is not a strange one, T-W-O dig. “Two dig through the coal to reveal a face buried within. They extract a gaunt young man from the pile. He bears a neck tattoo, “Beloved.”

John: Is he already dead or not, important?

Craig: That’s my problem. I couldn’t tell if they were murdering a guy or they were just dumping a corpse. I think it’s a corpse. I hope it’s a corpse.

John: He’s unconscious, he’s not protesting.

Craig: Generally, we don’t describe corpses as gaunt young men. We say-

John: The body of a gaunt young man.

Craig: -they extract the body of a– Exactly. It’s important information because I just presume they were killing him.

John: Now, what happens after this is they are going to attach to the body, this heavyweight, it’s going to sink down, and they were going to follow this down. In an unlikely way, but in a way, that is very elaborate, it’s going to crash through the sunken thing and let loose this stuff. It felt like an opening title sequence. It felt very heightened in a way. It’s like, okay, is this whole thing super heightened? Great. If it is, but then the scene after this is not heightened. This is a very plain scene that made me wonder.

Craig: I’ve seen this transition before where you see something insane happen, and then we cut to many years later, which I assume this is many years later.

John: Oh, no, I thought it was the same time, but we don’t know. It’s end of music cue on page 2, but then we’re in a kitchen, and–

Craig: I don’t know what time. I need to know if this was earlier or later. I don’t know if this was the 1960s or ‘70s. When you play The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it implies– When was that? The ‘70s? ‘70s. It implies that’s the timeline, even though this body doesn’t crash into the Edmund Fitzgerald, he crashes into an early colonial trading vessel.

Now, I will say that what happens here is awesome. The problem is it’s overwritten. I got lost in all the words. I’m just going to read it. “The iron ball carries him, the corpse, through the sundered wooden hull and into the captain’s quarters festooned with the trappings–” Two things. “Of a wealthy and worldly trader. The ball crashes into an ornate glass cabinet, scattering the antique curiosities within. Among them, a black leather coffer–” a lot of people won’t know what that is, “Imprinted with a cross. As it tumbles through the water, it unlatches–” I’m not sure–

John: What is it? Is it the ball we’ve been following or is it this coffer?

Craig: It’s probably the coffer, but opens, I think, would be fine there. “And The Eye drifts free. It is not an impossible sapphire–“ It is not an impossible sapphire. It is a sapphire “Glowing uncannily in the darkness.” I have a problem. Until that thing comes out, how the hell am I seeing any of the rest of this? I’m in the bottom of a lake at night.

Now, you may think, “Oh, magic light.” If you then do a light trick here, that’s part of the problem. Just like, “How do we actually do this?” Then it says, “It,” meaning the sapphire, “Floats toward the surface. As it rises, pull back to reveal hundreds of bodies scattered across the lake bed.” That’s cool. That’s a cool image to see all those bodies. Do they move?

John: Yes.

Craig: Does one of them twitch? Does something happen to make me go, “This was worth watching all that?” This is actually exciting stuff. It feels very Pirates of the Caribbean or Caribbean if you will. It’s your choice, but it’s overwritten, so actually I got lost.

John: Yes, I got lost, too. Now, I was missing a cut, too, at the end of this thing because we’re about to go to Sault Ste. Marie night, but it wasn’t clear that this was that we were leaving this sequence and going to a new thing. That’s where I thought I needed a transition.

Craig: Looking at it, I think maybe it’s not. That’s why I’m so confused because it says “Exterior Lake Superior – Night,” and then you’re right, it goes “Exterior Sault Ste. Marie – Night.” Maybe it’s at the same time. I generally don’t think that in the early 2000s, guys on boats who find buried bodies in coal, which is a weird thing to have on a boat in the 2000s, would just dump the body. It feels more like something that happens in the 1800s. Something feels– I’m confused.

John: I’m confused about times, too. We have two scene headers back to back that are both exteriors Sault Ste. Marie. Don’t do that. You need to–

Craig: Yes, that’s problematic for everybody.

John: Then we’re ultimately getting into this kitchen of a trailer home. We’re meeting Adam and Sarah, who’s apparently his mother. They’re speaking with a distinctive Yooper accent.

Yooper accent, for our international listeners, is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and it is a Finnish-Canadian thing. Just imagine it has a Finnish quality to it and the oo’s are different.

Craig: That’s why it’s Sault Ste. Marie?

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s just wrong. You’re just abusing the French language. Sorry, U.P.

John: Adam asks, “Can I go out with Jenny?” He’s 17 and he’s asking a can question, which is, sure possible, but I didn’t understand the relationship based on this can–

Craig: He’s 17 years old.

John: “I’m going out with Jenny.”

Craig: Yes, thank you. You have a driver’s license. Good. What is going on here? Why are you asking your mommy if you can go out?

John: Is she on a sex line? What is she doing? We don’t know. You’re setting up that we should be curious, and I actually need to have a little bit more information because at this point, I don’t know if she’s just customer service.

Craig: I think she’s in a meeting is my guest. I like that you were like, “Is she a sex worker on the phone?”

John: It’s night, though.

Craig: Oh, it’s night. There’s also a fawn drinking from the lake at night.

John: We don’t know if this is the same night where this body was thrown over or if it’s 20 years later.

Craig: We don’t know. Also, how late at night is this?

John: Yes, no idea.

Craig: I don’t–

John: We need this information. We know it’s before midnight because he has to be back by 12:00.

Craig: Right. Oh, yes, also 17, I guess, maybe.

John: He’s lost his phone. I don’t know.

Craig: You’ve lost your phone. What year is it again?

John: We don’t know what year it is. It’s an early 2000s Fleetwood trailer home, but it could be an old– Is it a brand new– 2000?

Craig: That’s right. We don’t know what year it is. If, for instance, it was back in the Nokia days, yes, you’d lose your phone and whatever. It’s fine.

John: It doesn’t matter much.

Craig: It doesn’t matter. I need to know. That said, look, Yeong Jay, this actually feels like there’s something awesome happening here. I love stuff like this. I love the use of the Edmund Fitzgerald. You’ve given us moments that feel like they’re from the 1800s, moments that feel like they’re from the ‘70s, moments that feel like they’re from the 2000s. We don’t know what’s going on. Pull back on the adjectives, there’s just a lot. Maybe if the other things were clearer, they would be more enjoyable, but when you have something awesome happening, let it be awesome. You don’t need to put as much ketchup on it.

John: Agreed. Drew, can you tell us the summary of what happens in this?

Craig: Never Die Alone.

Drew: “A despondent boy seeking a new lease on life discovers an eye of necromancy that grants him dominion over the dead and plunges him into a battle for his soul.”

Craig: A Necromancy of Thay. Obviously, he’s going to become a red wizard. Listen, necromantic magic is very powerful, as we both know. There’s a lot of great spells to use there. A couple of interesting cantrips. Chill Touch.

John: Toll the Dead.

Craig: Toll the Dead. Classics.

John: Classic.

Craig: Nerd.

John: It’s a–

Craig: But I like stuff like this. I see it’s a movie?

Drew: It didn’t say but I’m–

Craig: The idea of a teenager becoming a zombie lord is awesome.

John: Sure.

Craig: That could be awesome but who’s the villain? We need a little bit more of a sense of just read that again. It said what happens to him after–

Drew: “A despondent boy seeking a new lease on life, discovers an eye of necromancy that grants him dominion over the dead and plunges him into a battle for his soul.”

Craig: The last bit is the problem. Plunges him with whom? That’s the most important thing to know from that logline. Plunges him into a battle with a mysterious visitor for his soul, with Satan, with the spirit of his own grandfather, whatever it is. That just sounds existential, which feels boring. I think this could be cool.

John: Yes, it could be cool.

Craig: Yeong-Jay got a good vocabulary, I’ll give you that.

John: All right. I want to thank our three entrants into the three-page challenge this week.

Craig: Brave people.

John: Brave people. Thanks to everyone else who sent in your pages. If you would like to send in your pages, you go to johnaaugust.com/threepage, all typed out. There’s a little form there that you read through and click, and then you attach your PDF to it. If you’re a premium member, we will often send out a little email saying, “Hey, we’re about to do a three-page challenge, and we’re looking for things in a certain space,” and so that’s a benefit if you’re a premium member.

We really want to thank everyone who applied because you guys are heroes and let’s talk about the actual words on the page.

All right, let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, my one cool thing is a movie I watched over the weekend called Strange Darling, and it is terrific. It is written and directed by JT Mollner. Everyone says– Which is true, that the less you know going into it, the better because it’s full of surprises, which is great.

That said, you need to know that it’s bloody because if you don’t like a bloody movie, you’re not going to want to watch that. Also, you’ll know from the very start that it’s in six chapters, but the chapters are not in order. What I think is so good about watching this as a screenwriter is you recognize, “Oh, that’s right. A story is told by the way the audience receives it and the order the audience receives it, not chronologically.”

The choice to put the chapters in this order is an incredibly important screenwriting decision, and you could not reverse it out of this. The story doesn’t work if it’s told chronologically. It’s such a great example of knowing what your audience is thinking and then being able to subvert those expectations by–

Craig: Putting things–

John: Putting things back.

Craig: Being intentional. That sounds awesome.

John: Intentionality.

Craig: I also have a movie.

John: Please.

Craig: My winkle thing. I think it’s a A24 movie, possibly, called My Old Ass.

John: Oh, yes. I think people love it.

Craig: It’s lovely. It was written and directed by Megan Park, Canadian. In my list of Canadians, it’s going to be hard again, to get past Gordon Lightfoot, but she has moved up the list. What I really like about it, it’s a comedy, but it’s like a weepy comedy. It’s a coming-of-age story. It’s very simple. It is simple, short. It’s a formula without being a formula, which I love. It follows the stuff about the formula that connects to us on a deep level, which is why the formula became the formula, without just feeling like it’s walking along a similar path.

It does its own thing. It felt to me incredibly current. It was easy for us when we watched John Hughes’ movies in the ‘80s to go, “Oh, this older person gets us. He’s generally speaking, in our world.” This felt like that for 20-somethings now. It just felt correct, felt true. It stars Maisy Stella, who was fantastic. She’s opposite two people. One is Aubrey Plaza-

John: Iconic.

Craig: -who was great. One is this guy, Percy Hynes White, who I wasn’t familiar with, but I think he was in Wednesday, and I think he was briefly canceled and then got uncanceled. I thought he was spectacular. The two of them together, I just thought it was just fascinating. It was really, really well done. There’s a high concept at it that they treat as low concept as possible. There’s no spoiler here, it’s in the trailers. I guess she’s 22 or whatever she is in the movie?

Drew: She’s 19.

Craig: 19. It’s all the same to me, I’m 53, it doesn’t matter. 19 years old. She’s about to leave home. She lives in Canada, which took me a while to figure out, but Maisy Stella is from Canada. She takes mushrooms with her friends, has a psychedelic experience, but the psychedelic experience is merely that her 39-year-old self shows up and just has a conversation with her, and starts telling her things. That high concept is played as low concept as possible. It’s almost like they saw a looper and went, “We could be even less invested in the who cares how this worksness of it,” which I thought was really smart. It was just very beautifully done, well written. Really well written.

John: Yes, I love that.

Craig: Also, well directed. I really appreciate directors who don’t make me look at how they’re directing so damn much and just let the story lead us and just get out of the way. It’s like invisible directing, my favorite kind.

John: That’s great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilleli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you’re an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which is lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great, you’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. Craig, thanks so much.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, so I was just describing this movie that I like so much, Strange Darling, and I didn’t want to spoil anything about it. So I wanted, in our bonus segment here, talk through how we discuss and convince people to see movies or talk about movies without ruining what’s actually in them. For example, I saw the new Joker movie, and there’s things I really liked about it, but things that I think didn’t work about it. It’s tough to discuss those things without revealing big stuff that happens in it.

Craig: For starters, I think, we overestimate our ability to convince people to do anything.

John: True.

Craig: We get excited about, I’m going to convince you to see this because I liked it. I see that you’re not leaning in hard enough. Let me give you another bit, or let me tell you that something happens that completely flips you out. When you get there, you’re going to be so happy. Then maybe you won’t because that’s how that goes. So I think we start to tread towards spoilers when we’re worried the people are going to do what we want them to do.

The easiest version would be to say, you’re describing this movie and you’re like, “You should see it. I think you would love it. If you don’t, I’m sorry. I think you’re going to love it. You just look in them like stuff happens that you will like.”

John: I also feel like anything that shows up in the trailers or shows up in the first three minutes of the movie, that’s–

Craig: Fair game.

John: Yes, it’s completely fair game.

Craig: Like My Old Ass. There’s not this moment– Obviously, in the movie, it’s like, “What? Who? You? What? What do you mean?” The characters can experience that. We all know from the trailers that’s what this thing is about, so that’s fine for us because it’s in the first, 10 minutes of the movie. It’s all the stuff that happens after. Yes, there is something big that happens that if I mentioned it or even refer to it obliquely, would be a massive spoiler. Even saying there’s a massive spoiler in a way is a spoiler.

John: That is one of the challenges, too. That’s what I was running into with Strange Darling, it’s like, if I say things about the performances or the surprising things in the performances, as you start to watch the movie, then you start looking for, “Oh, when is this surprising revelation going to happen?”

Craig: I had this wonderful experience– I think I might’ve mentioned on the show, of showing Bella Ramsey The Matrix. Not only had she not seen it, she knew nothing about it. That was so glorious. I was like, “So you’ve never–“ She’s like, “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know anything about it.” I’m like, “I’m going to tell you nothing. Let’s just watch.”

And the delight– And it was experiencing it again in the best possible way, as opposed to, ”Oh yes, The Matrix, man, it’s going to blow your mind. It’s got this mind-blowing thing in the middle, it’s going to freak you out.” Then everything’s going to be, “Don’t worry, you won’t know what’s going on, you’ll be confused, but then you won’t be–“ None of that, just go ahead.

John: My experience with this recently was showing my daughter Too Many Cooks. It was fun watching it with her, because it was like, “Oh, okay, I sot of get it.” Then in the end it was like, “I did not like that,” because it goes to this incredibly dark place.

Craig: You shouldn’t like it, you should appreciate it.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Exactly. Sometimes you just want people to have the same experience you had, but by telling them anything about your experience, you’re ruining their chance of having that experience that you had. It’s hard.

John: There’s a movie that I’m talking about doing a remake of, and so I described it to Drew, but I had Drew watch it. I was talking through, “Oh, these are moments that I think are really good, but there’s something coming out that you haven’t hit yet that’s actually a really good version of this scene and this moment.” It’s that balance between you want to provide a framework for why it is you’re liking this thing, even if the movie is not necessarily great. What the potentials are there, and still not spoil the experience of actually getting there.

Craig: Then burdening the person with pleasing you. I just want them to watch something, I don’t need them to turn to me and go, “Oh, you were right, that is awesome.” I don’t want them thinking about me at all, just watch it. I always say to people, “Listen, I love this, you may not.” I say, “If you feel, as you’re going through, “Okay, I’ve seen enough of this, I get what’s going on.” Just stop. It’s fine, just bail out.

Drew: What do you do if, so I feel like I’m at a lot of parties or get-togethers where maybe one or two people haven’t seen a movie, but then like, you brought up My Old Ass, and there’s a thing I want to talk to you about, but John hasn’t seen it, so I don’t want to– Do you just say like, “Oh my God [beep].”

Craig: No, don’t say that.

Drew: Okay.

Craig: Also, just be patient. You’d be like, “Okay, at some point, when it’s just the two of us here,”–

John: Absolutely, when he goes off to get a beer then we’re going to talk about this.

Craig: Yes, I just want to talk real fast about this. I don’t want to pull you away from them or anything like that, but if you love it and you want to have that moment where you love something with somebody together, just be patient. If you do the thing, what happens is, I think people resent it. They resent it because they feel like, “You know what? Then I’m not going to see it, actually.” Fine, you love it so much that you need to talk about it, I don’t want it.

John: I listen to Slate Culture Gabfest, and on that show, they will often do a segment about a movie, but then if they need to, as their bonus segment, they’ll do like, “This is the spoiler part of this stuff, and then we’re going to talk about all this stuff.” That’s also another good approach. It’s just like, there’s the conversation you have going into it, and then the expectation that behind a paywall or behind a little divider curtain, “Here’s where we’ll talk about the other stuff.”

The same thing could be true for online posting. It’s like you put it in a place that is spoiler forum or you use the spoiler tag on things so that people don’t see the stuff that they don’t want to see.

Craig: So much easier in that format. Spoiler tag is great. Sometimes I’m looking for something about, let’s say, it was Baldur’s Gate 3, and I’m like, “Okay, I know this thing is supposed to be here, I can’t find it. Let me go and see what the answer is.” Then it’ll go on Reddit and someone will be like, “Oh, here it is.”

Then there’s all this other discussion, and people are really actually pretty decent about spoilers. Then you’re like, “I don’t actually want to know that, so I won’t click on that. I won’t click the fog of war there and reveal it.”

John: Yes, which is crucial. And the fog of war is actually the right, I think, metaphor for that. Because in fog of war, in gaming terms, is that as you pass through a space, you expose the stuff around you, and therefore you can start to see those things. Going in, you’re not supposed to know what the geography of a place is.

Craig: Right, sometimes there are movies where I’m like, “Look, I have no interest in seeing that movie. It’s not my genre, it’s not my thing.” People are talking about it, it’s annoying. I’m just going to go see what it is so that I don’t have to be annoyed and walk away from people. As if I’m going to see that movie one day, I know I’m not.

John: Mike’s thing is he’ll just like, “I will look up the Wikipedia article on it and just read it because I know I’m never going to see that movie, but I’ll know what actually happens.”

Craig: At least, I just don’t have to walk away from people. Sometimes people say, “Do you care if I spoil it?” I’m like, “Absolutely not. Just spoil away.” Never going to see it. I think the real problem is when we’re trying to convince people to do something that maybe they don’t want to do. It’s like we make a trailer that gives away too much with our mouths.

John: Yes. And I’m sure you’re constantly grappling with that on your show. It’s like in your ideal world you would love for everyone to come in completely clean and not have a sense of what– I haven’t watched the trailer for your show because I don’t want to know anything about how it’s going to be this season.

Craig: You don’t get hard information but you definitely learn things. It’s an interesting thing, adapting something that exists.

John: Yes, that’s true.

Craig: I don’t worry so much about the spoiler stuff because, to me, if you’re not in for the journey and the interesting things we do in a different format, then if you’re just watching it to find out the– It’s not Lost, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: I don’t need to know what happens. What is the island? There is none of that for us really. It’s not about that. It is why I had the nuclear reactor blow up instantly in Chernobyl because I’m like, spoiler, it blows up. Let’s just get that out of the way. It blowed up.

John: Yes, absolutely. Cool, thanks.

Craig: Thanks.

Links:

• Quote-Unquote Marketing Director – Apply Here!
• Veteran Script Coordinator on YouTube
• Why aren’t smart people happier? by Adam Mastroianni
• Middle Aged Man – SNL
• FLUNGE by J Wheeler White, COWS by John and Mark DiStefano, and NEVER DIE ALONE by Yeong-Jay Lee
• The Cutting Edge
• Strange Darling
• My Old Ass
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to Episode 659 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Often, in film and television, our protagonists are facing economic hardship. Today on the show, what if your hero’s problem is too much money? We’ll look at three stories in the news about excessive fame and fortune and ask, how would this be a movie? This week, we have a ringer to help us answer this question. Mari Heller is a writer and director whose credits include Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Her new film is Nightbitch, which just debuted at Toronto. Welcome back, Mari.

Mari Heller: Yay, thanks, John. I’m so glad to be here.

John: In addition to all of your writing and directing credits, you also played MacGruber’s mom. Craig would be really upset if we did not acknowledge that you are officially canonically MacGruber’s mom.

Mari: I was expecting you were going to say Queen’s Gambit, but I like that it went to MacGruber’s mom. I appreciate it.

John: Queen’s Gambit, sure, a meaningful, dramatic role, but come on.

Mari: The most important role of my lifetime. Not the mother to my own children, but the mother to MacGruber on the MacGruber TV show on Peacock.

John: Yes, everyone can see that there today. We’re going to talk through, probably not very much MacGruber, but we’re going to talk through Nightbitch. We’re going to talk through, how would these be movies? In a bonus segment for premium members, I would love to talk film festivals because I think maybe all of your movies have gone through film festivals. Is that right?

Mari: Yes, all of them have.

John: I want to talk about film festivals, both for when you’re trying to sell a movie originally, but when you’re also trying to launch a movie into the world and what writers and directors need to think about when their movies are playing at film festivals.

Mari: That’s a good topic. I like that.

John: Yes, great. I try.

Before we get to any of that, Drew, we have actual Scriptnotes news.

Drew Marquardt: That’s right, we do. You, Craig, and I will be headed to Austin for the Austin Film Festival at the end of October. We’re going to be really busy.

John: We are going to be so, so busy. Currently, on the books, we have four official events. We have a live Scriptnotes show and a separate three-page challenge. I’m going to be doing a panel on video games and graphic novels with Jordan Mechner. Plus, there’ll be a special 25th anniversary screening of Go with a Q&A afterwards led by Matt Selman of The Simpsons fame.

Drew: Oh, that sounds great.

John: Yes, I’m really excited for all of those. If you’re going to go to Austin and you already have your festival pass, you should be able to attend all of these for free just with your pass. There’s one more thing. We are planning an afternoon event in Austin, probably on Thursday the 24th, for the launch of the next version of Highland. This one is open to everybody, but we do need you to RSVP so we can figure out the logistics and how big a space we need and other stuff. So if you are interested in coming to that, Drew, how should they get on a list?

Drew: I will put a link in the show notes for the RSVP and you can just go through there.

John: Thank you, Drew. Now, let’s get on to the other news. We’ll start with this article by Matt Belloni and Puck about Hollywood’s 10% problem. He’s referring to a study that came out a couple of weeks ago that only one-tenth of the 500-plus movies that were either released or scheduled for release by the major studios and streamers between ’22 and 2026 actually came from an internal development slate.

The movies that development executives are theoretically working on at studios, very few of those actually are the movies that they’re releasing. Often, as screenwriters, we’re thinking like, “Oh, I’m going to go off with this open writing assignment that’s at a studio,” or they have this internal idea or they’re buying a spec script. And really, very few of those movies are actually getting made.

Mari: Yes.

John: It’s funny that Disney has not created an original live-action movie franchise since National Treasure 20 years ago, so two decades for that. It feels like so much of the theoretical work that we’re doing as writers does not ever actually make it to the big screen. Did this feel true to you, Mari?

Mari: Feels true to me in my limited experience. I’m sure it does for you too. When I was starting out and had first gotten an agent based on a spec script that I wrote with a writing partner, we were constantly going out for assignment jobs. We were constantly answering every call and getting– our first paid jobs were all things that never got made. I started to see a journey where I was an employed screenwriter with nothing ever getting made, where I wrote a made-for-TV movie for Disney for YA audience.

I wrote a number of pilots that sold for the networks when it was still more of the pilot game. I was like, “Okay, this is great. I’m getting health insurance and I’m making enough money to live.” But at some point, I want actors to say these words. The purpose of writing these scripts is that I want somebody to say them out loud and for it to get recorded and maybe even somebody sees it. I started to see a situation where development hell just becomes your experience of Hollywood. That’s all you get to do is just develop, develop, develop, but nothing actually gets made.

John: Absolutely. To slice apart these numbers a little bit more. Obviously, some open writing assignments are based on studio IP. That’s probably not quite what this is here, but that it’s sense of, “I have this original idea that I’m going to take out on the town and sell as a pitch or sell as a spec script.” Very few of those are getting made, at least at the majors. Now, this study omitted A24 and Neon. Some places are also making more originals. That also probably is undercounting genre movies that are getting made. There are horror things that are at certain price points.

Mari: Horror, it’s like the exception to every rule, right?

John: Yes.

Mari: In terms of theater audiences and how they get made and how much money they make.

John: Yes. You and I were both in the same situation where, listen, I was lucky to get some movies made, but I had a lot of movies that did not get made. I know so many writers who were in the guild for years and had no credits to show for all the hard work they’ve done. I think that partially pushes people towards television where at least like, “Hey, my name is on a screen at least. The work I’m doing is being said by actors,” like you’re saying, and it’s actually out there in the world.

The other part of this study, which I thought was interesting, is there’s charts. Listen, I don’t know that we can actually verify all the data that’s in there, but they talk about how many of these movies that are greenlit really came with so many elements attached. It was almost greenlit by the time the studio bought them. They had director attachments. They had progress to production built into the thing. The studio couldn’t help but make these movies. It wasn’t that the hard work of development executives brought this thing to fruition. That’s frustrating. It also feels like it was always true in this industry that most stuff has some other aspect to it. Increasingly, everything has to be completely safe before they’ll even consider greenlighting it.

Mari: Well, I think it’s a minor miracle when anything gets made. I think it takes so many things coming together at the right time and so many pieces have to line up. Sometimes having a lot of different attachments to something, I know I do that as a filmmaker, is I try to make sure that by the time I’m trying to get something greenlit, it’s an impossible thing to say no to because everything’s already moving.

The train is already going and all of these actors have slated this into their schedule or we got this tax incentive or whatever it may be. It’s putting enough pieces together so that you feel like you can push the thing over the finish line and actually get it shot because it’s just so easy for– particularly movies is what I know more, but it’s so easy for a movie to fall apart. There’s eight million ways that it can fall apart and there’s only one way it can get made.

John: Well, let’s jump ahead, though, and talk about Nightbitch because I want to talk about this as a movie and how this came to be because this is your fourth feature film as a director?

Mari: Yes.

John: Great. You’re a known quantity. Everyone knows you know what you’re doing here, but my understanding is like this wasn’t a thing where you went to them. Instead, they came to you. Is that accurate?

Mari: Sort of. This movie is based on an incredible novel called Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. It was her first novel, but it was a splashy-enough novel that it got on the radar of a lot of people. It was acquired by Annapurna, Sue Naegle, who was working at Annapurna at the time. Amy Adams and her company and Stacy O’Neil together both read the book and decided to option it.

John: That’s great.

Mari: So the book was optioned before I came on board, but it hadn’t even been published yet. It was one of those situations where it was an early manuscript and it had enough buzz to it that people started reading it. Amy Adams and Sue were the ones who said, “Let’s try and send this to Mari.” I hadn’t worked with Amy before, but she knew my work. She sent it to me.

Really, nothing had been done. All that had been done is it had been optioned. It was like, “Who knows if this is a movie? If anyone could make it into a movie, we think you could.” She sent me the book and I read it and came on board really early.

John: Let’s break down some of the parts of that because I think some people outside of the industry might not know who these players are and how they all fit together. Annapurna is an independent motion picture-producing entity and Sue Naegle was running it at that point. Sue Naegle was my former TV agent. Sue Naegle is fantastic. I love her to death. And it’s not surprising that they read this book when it was in manuscript because most books that sell in Hollywood sell very early on, way before they come out. Every Friday, I get this email that has summaries of all the different agencies that are covering all the different books like, “These are the books that people are talking about.”

Mari: There’s whole departments at the agencies, literary departments who cover all the books that are coming out, especially the ones that have a lot of buzz.

John: Beyond that, there are book scouts out of New York who are looking for those things. Individual producers might have their own book scouts who are hunting those things. They have bandits who try to find, “These are the areas of literature that we’re most focused on.”

Mari: Right.

John: When Yoder’s book came out and got the buzz and attention it did, it’s maybe not so surprising because the people who are the early barometers of what’s going to be cool had already read it and said, “This is going to be interesting.”

Mari: Right. I think what’s surprising about it is that it was her first novel. I think often, it’s a novel from a known entity that comes out that gets bought up quite so early. I think it was very exciting.

John: Amy Adams had read this book. Annapurna read this book. They decided together to work together to option this book. Then they need to find a filmmaker, a writer. Ideally, a writer-director. They came to you. What are those initial conversations like? Are you both feeling each other out in terms of like, “Is this a movie?” What are those conversations like?

Mari: My first initial conversations, and I can say this in this type of situation and podcast and I wouldn’t say it necessarily to everybody, but is I’m often looking for– I don’t want to get involved in projects that are so far along that I’m just being brought on as a director for hire. I really want to be able to make something my own. I want to be able to come with a vision and make something from the ground up. The fact that the first conversation I had with Amy after I read the book and I was totally moved by the book, I found it really impressive. It spoke to me in a really emotional way. I was postpartum. I was about six months postpartum on having my second kid. It was very personal in the moment that I read it.

John: What year would this have been? Is this 2020? When is this?

Mari: 2021. My daughter was born in 2020 and it was post-pandemic-ish, but still pandemic vibes around town. I was very isolated. I had moved out of the city. I was living in the woods, raising two kids. This book really spoke to me.

John: Actually, we know that you were isolated, living in the woods, because there was an episode we did of Scriptnotes where we asked a bunch of our previous guests, “Hey, during the pandemic, what the hell are you doing?” You were generous enough to tell us about moving out of the city and being in the woods and homeschooling your kids in New York with a group of other people. You’re just making it work.

Mari: You have such a good memory. Maybe you are a robot. You remember something from so many years ago on Scriptnotes. Yes, we were in a pod with another family. We were splitting up the homeschooling duties. We were each trying to get time for our creative work, which was so difficult at the time. That’s when this book got sent to me, not too long after that, once my daughter was born, and I was really home with her. Actually, Jorma was off prepping the MacGruber TV show.

He was away and I was home alone with two kids for the first time. The book, it spoke to me on an emotional level. Then when I spoke to Amy about it, it was great that she basically said to me, “I have no idea if this can be a movie or not and I don’t really know what it should be, but I would trust you to figure it out.” That was exactly what I needed to hear to also know, “Okay, this isn’t a train that’s already moving that already has everything figured out.” I get a lot of creative latitude to make my decisions.

John: Let’s talk about the decisions you’re making here because I haven’t read the book, so I’ve just seen your movie, which is fantastic, and everyone should see. Just so we don’t forget, when does it come out?

Mari: It doesn’t come out till December 6th. We’re doing the festival circuit right now. We just did TIFF. We’ll be at festivals all over, from the Hamptons to London to Middleburg and throughout the fall, and then it’ll come out in theaters on December 6th.

John: You said the book speaks to you, but what is your initial instinct about how to adapt this thing and to find your way into it?

Mari: It’s like a big internal monologue of somebody who is living as a newly stay-at-home mom and is isolated, has moved out of the city, is living in the suburbs with her son. Her husband travels for work a lot and she’s losing her mind. It wasn’t immediately clear how I would adapt it or what the form would be exactly, but I knew that the themes were something I had been wanting to explore for a while.

I’d been wanting to write a movie about motherhood and bodies and women’s aging bodies for a while. I had been toying with a number of ideas along those same themes. This just gave me enough excitement. I don’t know. I was so excited about what the book made me feel that I just was like, “I’ll figure it out.” I embarked on my adaptation without having a totally clear plan of how I was going to adapt it.

One of the first things that I realized was the central question of the book, or at least when I read the book, in my mind was, “Oh, God, have I made a horrible decision by becoming a mother? Did I screw my whole life up?” That felt like it was the central question that I was going to explore, and then that gave me some framework for what I wanted to focus on because the book has a lot more storylines and plot that happen where there’s a pyramid scheme with all the other mothers.

There’s a number of other storylines, but it became clear like, “No, this is a story about long-term relationships and parenthood and motherhood.” My central question that I want to be exploring and thinking about is, has this woman made a huge mistake by becoming a mother? Then really early on, that gave me the ending of the movie, which is not too much of a spoiler, but there’s a birth at the ending of the movie. I thought that’s the way to answer the central question is by seeing a birth. That’s something that wasn’t in the book.

John: The character’s journey gets her to a place where the idea of being a mother is not an affront to her. She comes to embrace both what she needs as a person and motherhood and able to find a unification of these two different sides of herself.

Mari: Exactly, a unification of the rage and all of the untethered parts of her that have felt like motherhood broke her apart and is able to bring them back together. If you think about that time in the world coming right out of the pandemic and I was pregnant during the pandemic and I remember I had one of my really good friends said to me, “Having a baby is the ultimate act of optimism,” and I thought, “God, that’s true.” I wasn’t feeling very optimistic about the world in that moment, and yet I was embarking on this journey of optimism by having another child. Yes, the end of the movie speaks to that choice and how you make that choice even when it doesn’t always feel like the clearest answer.

John: I want to go back to the question of, “Is this even a movie?” Because if you think about the internal monologue aspect of the book and you’re able to stage some of this as voiceover that’s directed to the audience, it could be a stage monologue. It could be what the Constitution means to me. It could be a thing where it’s ready to deliver to the audience, except that then you wouldn’t have the actual child in front of you.

I think one of the things I need to ask you a question about is, “How the hell did you get this performance out of the twins, I guess?” I’ve never seen young people on screen so much like such young people who have to actually do the thing you need them to do so that the scene could happen. As a writer who knew that they needed to direct this movie, I would never have put such young people in so many scenes, and you did. Talk to me about both the decision as a writer to, “I’m going to try this,” and as the director who actually had to pull this off. What was that process?

Mari: Well, first, I’ll say, thinking about whether this should just be a stage monologue or whether this was something that I wanted to be more of an experiential film where you get to put yourself in the shoes of a parent of a very young child and really feel what it feels like to be that person, I thought a lot about Diary and that this piece feels like a companion piece to The Diary of a Teenage Girl because it is a very subjective movie.

The attempt is to really place you squarely in the shoes of a person who’s in the middle of a major life transformation and she’s sleep-deprived. Every day feels like the same as the day before. Things are blending into each other. She doesn’t remember when she last changed her shirt or when she last took a shower or when she ate anything but Mac and cheese and fried hash browns.

That got exciting for me to think about creating a totally subjective world, where we’re trying to give an audience an experience of what it feels like because I realized, “Oh, friends of mine who haven’t had kids or family members who haven’t had kids, they have no idea how insane I felt and how this experience of being a first-time parent with a very little kid stuck at home, how much you do lose your mind.”

That became the fun thing about thinking about it as a film and why it is more than just a monologue. Then, yes, I have a big pet peeve about kids in movies who look like little Hollywood actor kids who don’t act like kids because I feel like it’s so deceiving. I don’t know about your kid, but my kids are wild. I had a little boy first. He always had so much energy.

He was up at 5:00 in the morning running crazy right away, even from the time he was really little. Just not a kid that you would have seen on screen. Not a kid who’s just quietly sitting in the corner while the grownups have conversations. Somebody who’s climbing on your head and it’s a very interactive physical life that I embarked on with him. So I really wanted to find kids who weren’t really actors and were really kids who would play.

John: Well, how old are these twins? Because when you say they’re not really actors, to what degree are they even aware of what they’re doing or they’re just having fun?

Mari: They were two when I cast them. They turned three on our camera test day. We found them through a twin forum on Facebook. We were out plastering with twin forums to find twins who could come. Then the way that I cast them was I just hung out for days at parks. I had twins come in batches basically to come and meet with me and I just played with them for hours on end until I found the twins who I felt really could play and pretend and were down to play these different games with me, and yet were also good listeners in their own way even if they had a lot of energy and wildness and spunk and humor, but also could listen and take direction and understand pretend.

These two boys, Arleigh and Emmett, they were just the perfect twins. I feel so lucky that I cast them because it could have gone really poorly. They gave one of the best toddler performances in a movie, as you said. They really are very realistic. We made the environment really fun for them, I think. They loved coming to set. They knew everybody’s names. They knew where to put the microphone. They got really into the mechanics of filmmaking. We let them check out the camera. We let them check out the props. They understood everything about what we were doing and what everyone’s job was. We made everything a game. So I think they had a really good time.

John: I’m doing this animated movie right now. One of the first conversations I had with the director was, “To what degree is this camera looking into a world versus the world that’s being projected onto the screen?” They’re really fundamentally different aspects. One of the things I think you do so nicely is that balance between the camera feels like it’s just documenting a thing that’s happening in front of you.

You feel like the kid is just actually a natural kid and Amy Adams is a good actor. She’s just rolling with it, which totally works. Also, the subjective reality is you’re pushing things at the screen that are not necessarily just the camera documenting a moment. When we’re in her point of view, it is a subjective experience. We’re shoving things at the audience rather than we’re supposed to believe that this is really what’s happening in front of the lens.

Mari: Right. It’s that tricky balance of having it feel not staged. You do want to feel like the kid is just a kid who’s acting like a kid. Between the editing and the framing and the ways in which there’s repetition, you realize it’s actually all very carefully planned. There was the trick of needing the kid to be able to say certain lines that scenes needed in order for the scene to actually progress the way I had written it.

There were certain scenes I wrote very much knowing we will improv whatever the kid ends up saying. They’re walking down the street hand-in-hand. “What do you want to talk about? That leaf up there or a truck rolling by or whatever it is? It doesn’t matter what you say. We’ll find something great in whatever your conversation is as long as it’s not about the cameraman.”

Then there were other scenes where I knew, “No, I need a really specific thing. I need you to ride on your mom’s back, tell her to play horsey with you, and then tell her that she’s got fuzzy hair coming out of her back.” We figured out games for how to do this. A lot of times, it was call and response. I would do a game of like, “Ready. Repeat after me. Say poo.” “Poo.” “Go.” “Go.” “Moo.” “Moo.” “Ruff.” “Ruff.” “Ah.” “Ah,” or get rhythmic games going, and then you say, “Mama fuzzy.” “Mama fuzzy.” “Louder. Mama fuzzy,” or whatever.

However it was, it was getting this to be something that was fun and playful for them, but sometimes it was trickier than others. I’d have a plan for how we were going to make something into a game for the kid. They would not be in the mood to do that thing that I was thinking of, or I’m thinking of this one scene where Amy thinks she’s lost her son at the playground. When she finds him, she runs for him. We had him sitting on this grass. I think this was day one or two, so he had just met Amy.

I had him sitting on the grass and I said, “Okay, and then she’s going to run up to you.” Well, he didn’t know as soon as I said action, she was going to be screaming, crying, running up to him. He turned around and saw this woman who he had just met really the day before screaming at him. He stood up and started running away, a very natural response. We realized, “Oh right, we need to figure out a way to make this game. Okay, you’re playing hide-and-go-seek. You count to 10. Even when she screams and runs for you, you can’t get up until you get to 10,” something like that.

John: In addition to all the challenges of these very young actors, you put a bunch of dogs in your movie. These are another classic rookie mistake, putting dogs in your movie. Dogs at this point, there are trainers. There’s ways to do it. How much of the dog action we’re seeing are, “This is what the lens saw,” versus you had to go in and post and move dogs around to make this all work?

Mari: Most of it is totally practical. There’s a tiny bit of adjustment in post when it comes to, “Oh, this one dog was misbehaving,” so we moved them over here or whatever. Actually, what we really did was we worked with really great trainers who spent a lot of time casting and training the dogs for the very specific behavior that we wanted in the movie. I wrote scenes and action for dogs having no real basis on how dogs behave.

Because the dogs are supposed to be a little bit magical and non-realistic in the movie, the things that I needed them to do were not necessarily things that dogs would do. Things like bowing to another dog. I had read things about wolves and how they’ll sometimes show their neck to another dog, so I would take things from research like that and put them into the script, but then we had to actually get dogs to do those things. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t work.

John: In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we had to train hundreds of squirrels to pick up nuts and shake them and then put them in the right places. Each time you see a squirrel, they’re trained for that one specific thing, and then you’ll never see that squirrel again. It’s all unique stuff.

Mari: We needed a squirrel to just run up a tree for this. I remember as I was going through my budget at one point, it was going to be $13,000 to train a squirrel. I was like, “But the squirrel doesn’t do something that a squirrel wouldn’t do. It just needs to run up a tree.” I was like, “No, we’re not doing this. I can’t pay $13,000 to train a squirrel.” We took that out of the budget and we just wandered around the park until we found a squirrel and filmed a squirrel.

John: I want to wrap up by talking about tone because you mentioned that the dogs were somewhat magical. One of the things that is so fascinating about your film but also unsettling is it always feels like it’s just about to tip into a different genre. Music-wise, we’re often getting close to horror moments at times. It feels like it’s a horror movie that doesn’t ever fully get to the horror thing.

Obviously, there’s a whole tradition of body horror that’s part of this. The experience of being a woman of that age and motherhood is a body horror story, and yet it’s also a comedy. There’s funny moments. There’s moments of marital strife that are appropriate in other movies. How did you think about the tonal shifts and how did you communicate them? Were there discussions both on the script stage and on the set about, “Where are we at here?”

Mari: Well, a lot of what I thought about was when reading the book, the mother does turn into a dog, but it’s not like The Fly or other transformation movies where that metamorphosis is painful or horrifying. If anything, it’s cathartic and euphoric. There was this whole element of body horror and the metaphor being as you enter into perimenopause and you go to look in the mirror and, “Oh, God, what’s that weird hair sprouting out here? What new wrinkles do I have?” and all the ways in which we look at our own bodies as we age and we think, “Who is that? I don’t even recognize myself,” taking that to a sort of extreme level.

That has a level of horror to it and just gore and grossness. We get some really great groans when we see this movie in big theaters as you can imagine. There’s some really nasty stuff. When it came to the actual transformation, it was really important that the transformation itself didn’t feel painful or horrible, but it felt euphoric. That was our guiding force. We did always want to be dancing on that edge.

I definitely think there’s a misconception if anybody goes into this movie thinking it’s a horror movie. I think it’s more of a psychological drama with a lot of comedy, more than anything in the horror realm. We played with horror tricks. We played with visual styles that tip their hat to the more horror genre, whether it’s like she’s walking down a hallway and we’re doing the push-pull visual styles or music as well. Ultimately, it’s really a story about motherhood and transformation. I don’t know. The things I got more interested in were less of the full horror parts of it and the more parts that made me laugh.

John: Well, let’s put Nightbitch to the side for a second because everyone will get a chance to see that and they should and think about some other movies down the road. Someone might be coming to you, Mari Heller, to say, “Hey, how about this article to adapt into your next thing?”

You have three choices here. We’re going to start with one that’s not even an article. This is the first time on Scriptnotes where we’re actually just going to a Threads post. Not even a Twitter post, a Threads post.

This is a post by Bo Predko. I have no idea who Bo Predko is, if it’s a real person or if it’s some other corporate entity. This is so short. We’ll actually just read this all aloud. Let me read the setup and then you can read the bullet points here.

All right, so it starts, “You’re 23 years old dating Leonardo DiCaprio in LA. Private parties, yachts, jets, signing NDAs every month. You’re 100% sure Leo loves you because he let you touch his Oscar. Let’s be real. You’ll be forgotten in two years. Here’s what to do when you’re dating a celebrity.” All right, help us out.

Mari: Number one, keep the contacts you make in a separate list. Number two, network like a shark at high-end parties. Number three, leverage the relationship to collaborate with luxury brands. Number four, save and invest the money from the lifestyle perks. Number five, eyes will be on you. Grow your social media following. Number six, read every paper you sign. Number seven, learn from Leo’s work ethic and use it to fuel your own goals. Number eight, stay out of unnecessary drama and keep things private.

John: All right. Mari, you and I both know famous people. This is not unfamiliar territory to us and it’s not unfamiliar as a setup for a movie in a way. We’ve seen other stories like a normie dating a celebrity and what that looks like and feels like, and yet I like that it’s an inversion of what we normally expect where the wide-eyed, young, doe-eyed girl falls in love with this guy and has her heart broken and learns a valuable lesson. Assuming that you know this going in and here’s how you’re going to plan for it.

Mari: Right, and not just plan for it, here’s how you’re going to abuse the system that would abuse you.

John: Yes, which I thought was exciting. Let’s think about this as, how would this be a movie? If this came towards you, what is your instinct? Where do you start? Are you thinking about who this young woman is? Are you thinking about the situation? What’s interesting about this to you?

Mari: I guess what’s interesting is the way that younger generations are approaching everything with a savviness that maybe I didn’t grow up with and playing the game. Everything about this scares me a little bit, to be honest. The idea of using a romantic relationship for your personal gain, it’s just so dirty and gross, but I also see the humor in it, especially using somebody like Leonardo DiCaprio because he so famously dates young women and drops them quickly.

I think in all of the comments below, so many people were commenting on how young this person would be, who he’s dating. It’s a funny subverting, I guess, a subversion of the expectation, like you’re saying, especially if it could be a misdirect, maybe. Maybe there’s a way that you start off really believing that this person is a bit of a dupe and that they’re in this situation having no idea what they’re doing. Then you start to realize, you could uncover it like The Usual Suspects or whatever and realize that they’ve been manipulating it the entire way.

John: Absolutely.

Mari: Everything’s been a plan.

John: There’s a Taylor Swift song, Mastermind, where she reveals like, “Oh no, you thought this was an accidental thing, but actually, I planned this whole thing the whole time through.” It also made me think about All About Eve because in that, you have the young assistant who, of course, takes over the role. What’s different is that in something like All About Eve, the assumption is like, “Oh, I want to be an actress. I want to be you. I have this other skill, which I’m going to be able to manifest by getting close to you.”

Here, and I think this is a generational difference that you’re pointing to, is that it’s not just about, “This is how I’m going to become the famous actor or whatever.” It’s like because we have this role of influencer and just like a person who’s able to monetize their fame, the goal is, “I need to become famous and get the brand deals, and that’s what I’m going to do. I want to become like Kylie Jenner. I don’t need to be Charlize Theron.”

Mari: Right. It could be fun if you did a movie like this that has the Being John Malkovich thing where the celebrity is in on it, in on the joke of it all, enough that they’re willing to use their own real name like if Leonardo DiCaprio would do this movie, let’s say it was a movie, as himself, right? It could be poking fun at his own celebrity and expectations of him as a celebrity. There could be something fun about that.

John: Well, if you think about Seth Rogen’s This Is the End, and you look at that as an example. They’re all playing themselves like highly characterized versions of themselves. There’s something really interesting and clever about that.

Let’s talk about the inversions of this because right now, this is a young woman dating Leonardo DiCaprio. What is the version of this where she’s famous and he’s the guy who gets swept up in there?

Mari: It’s not as fun.

John: It’s not as fun.

Mari: It’s just not as fun.

John: No.

Mari: It’s the person you always assume is going to be the victim, which in a scenario like this where the man has all the power and the age and all the influence and the fame and all the money and the woman is in the more subversive role and then she turns out to be the one who’s actually controlling everything, that could be really fun.

John: I guess because of the setup and because it’s supposed to be Leonardo DiCaprio and there’s this history of him dating for two years at most and then discarding, the idea that there’s an expiration date on the relationship is built in, but it doesn’t always happen that way. Matt Damon’s wife was a normie and I think that’s still going fine. There are famous people who marry normal people and it’s not always a Ben Affleck or a J.Lo.

Mari: I just love how comfortable you are with saying “normie.” That’s really making me laugh.

John: We know other people who aren’t Leonardo DiCaprio level but who work in the industry and who are comparatively famous, who are married to non-famous people. That can work. It’s just it has to be–

Mari: In fact, I think I see those relationships and I tend to believe in them the most, especially people who’ve been together since before they got anything. Often, if somebody has a really cool spouse, it can make me like them more.

John: 100%. Someone who does have a cool spouse, at least a very devoted spouse, is Palmer Luckey. This is an article by Jeremy Stern writing for Tablet Magazine. He’s talking about Palmer Luckey, who is an inventor, clearly brilliant, clearly some things about him that are challenging for people around him. He created Oculus Rift. He sold that to Facebook for $2.7 billion, then got fired by Mark Zuckerberg after he made this $10,000 donation to this pro-Trump troll group that was dedicated to “shitposting” in real life.

He tried to build this nonprofit that was about prisons. Ultimately, he founded Anduril Industries, this defense technology startup. It makes autonomous weapon systems. It’s now valued at $14 billion. It’s not just Mark Zuckerberg creating Facebook. There’s a two-step thing here. He’s able to rise and fall and rise again in ways that are really interesting. He’s married to or still with his high school sweetheart.

Mari: Except for they didn’t go to high school, they were both homeschooled.

John: Exactly right. The homeschool of it all feels relevant and appropriate. This comes in your direction. What parts of this are interesting to you? Where do you think a movie exists here? What are even the boundaries or the edges of the story you might want to tell on this?

Mari: Well, that’s the issue. The story is fascinating. Fascinating and overwhelming. I got tired just reading this story because there are so many twists and turns. I think the question comes down to, what type of story are we telling? What are we meant to feel about this person? Are they a hero in this story? Are they a tragic character? Are they somebody that we’re rooting for or are they somebody who we’re vilifying? Also, what are you saying? I couldn’t even feel through reading this article what the takeaway is.

What am I meant to feel about this person and what he’s done in the world? Yes, his brain is impressive. Yes, what he’s accomplished is impressive. I love somebody who’s been in this long relationship with somebody for so long through all these ups and downs. He has a thing in the article where he talks about how other people in the tech industry are all trying to keep all options open at the same time. He likes to pick a path and stick with it. There’s something about that ethos, which is really fascinating. But god, I would not know where to begin with this. What did you feel?

John: Listen, you could do the cradle to present day with him and rise up through the homeschool, but that’s going to be too much. It’s not going to be interesting. I think the instinct of, do a Social Network, where you’re focusing on one aspect of that person’s career and take that and you’re fictionalizing and fudging what you need to fudge to create the version of the character who makes sense for the course of your two-hour movie feels right, but it actually just misses so much.

Because if you’re talking about the sale of Oculus to Facebook, eh, that’s actually not– he’s getting fired is interesting. Maybe he’s getting fired from Facebook is the starting point and then having to build back up. It feels like that second founder story and the revenge story. Again, like you, I don’t know if he’s the hero of the story or if he’s an anti-hero that we’re following through the story. I don’t know where we want the audience to sit with our relationship with him.

Mari: No, and I don’t know what the ending is. I don’t know where you’re taking it to because Social Network, it’s all around the court case, right?

John: Yes.

Mari: What would be the framework that you were taking this person’s life through? It feels like the story is not over yet.

John: That’s really a part of the problem is that because of the court case, you could have a resolution of the court case. Even though Zuckerberg is still making a new story, it feels like that’s the resolution here. I don’t know what the resolution is at this point. We also need to talk about how challenging it is to make a movie about a living person. You’ve made two biopics.

Mari: Sort of three.

John: All right, so can you ever forgive me? Are those people alive at this point?

Mari: No, everybody’s dead.

John: Great, so that’s helpful for you.

Mari: Ooh. That’s the best-case scenario. I hate to say that.

John: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Fred Rogers was still alive as you were making this?

Mari: No, he passed away. His wife was still alive. A lot of the people who we were putting on screen were still alive, but he was not alive.

John: What’s the third biopic?

Mari: Well, it’s not exactly a biopic, but The Diary of a Teenage Girl is based on Phoebe, who wrote the book. It’s based on her real life and real people in her life, including her mom and her mom’s boyfriend. It wasn’t a biopic, but it was still based on people’s real lives. I actually cringe at the idea of calling any of the movies biopics because they aren’t cradle-to-grave stories and I don’t love biopics in general, but they are based on real people.

John: Yes. Where I come out with Palmer Luckey and Tell Me How You’re Feeling is that I think there’s so many things that are fascinating here, but I don’t think this article or any story about him specifically right now at this moment makes sense to do.

Mari: No.

John: If you could make this with his permission, I don’t see that working out very well. If you make this without his permission, he feels like a person who could be litigious and you could be in for some real situations there.

Mari: I could see like an organization on the right, somebody within the Trump world wanting to make a biopic of him as a hero for the right because the contribution he made was to a Trump troll account. Then eventually so many of the other people in the tech world ended up coming out for Trump and he feels like he was the one who started that. I don’t know. I wonder, it would almost be like a propaganda film.

John: Yes. I could also see if someone tried to do that, I could see him pushing it back against that too because I think he believes himself to be outside of those systems completely.

What I do think is maybe useful about this is to think about this as a kind of character and think about it as a template for sort of like an interesting character to build a new fictional character off of.

Mari: I think you’re right. He’s like an archetype that we don’t see very often and it makes you realize, my husband always says he finds it interesting when I adapt books because things don’t follow a certain way that they’re meant to go. Books take narrative in different directions or characters are more complex than they would be otherwise.

I think there’s something about him that’s sort of contradictory, like the fact that he is in this long-term marriage and has chosen to become a parent. It’s not what you would expect, but it gives you permission to look at a character and think, oh, you can make weird choices.

John: Yes. Agreed. I think he’s fascinating. I think people should read the article and think about him as a character, but I don’t feel like people are going to rush out and like, I want to make the Palmer Luckey movie. I just don’t see that working out well.

Mari: I can’t tell. Somebody might. It would not be me.

John: Look at Succession. You’re not going to make a movie or a series about the Murdochs, but what you can do is take some of the framework and some of the area around them and make a fictionalized story, and that may be the best approach here.

Mari: I miss Succession so much.

John: I miss it so much. It’s so good.

Mari: It’s so good.

John: It’s so good. All right, let’s wrap this up with sort of the opposite of Succession, which is How to Give Away a Fortune. This is by Joshua Jaffa writing for the New Yorker.

This is really fascinating. I’d sort of heard about little pieces of this before, but this is the first encapsulation where this is all together. It centers around Marlene Englehorn, who’s this Austrian heiress. Her family is incredibly wealthy because of a pharmaceutical fortune and her focus is like, I don’t believe I should have this fortune. I want to give away this fortune, but I want to give it away in a way that actually most benefits society.

And so to do this, I’m going to recruit a bunch of Austrians, 50 Austrians who are representative of our country and have them come together over the course of weekends to make decisions about how this $500 billion, this big chunk of money is going to be distributed to the world. I thought it was cool and ambitious and felt naive at times. There were lots of things that were interesting about it. I was trying to think like, could this be a movie? Would this be a movie? If this were a movie, who would you even center it on?

Obviously Marlene Englehorn is one choice, but the story actually puts a lot of its time in Emma, who’s this 80-year-old retiree who gets this letter recruiting her, which sort of feels like the Golden Ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, come to this thing and we’re going to do this thing. She doesn’t even believe it at first, but then she participates in it. Marielle, what’s your instinct here? Is there a movie here? If so, how would you start?

Mari: What I think is so interesting about it is it plays on something culturally that we as Americans, I think, feel is very foreign to us, which is this idea that we’re such a capitalist society. I didn’t even really realize how much that’s baked into our everyday life until I spent time in Berlin. I was talking to an American acquaintance who had moved to Berlin, and he was somebody I knew from my days of making theater, and he was working as a theater artist in Berlin.

He was saying, yeah, the thing about having a job here or about Berlin in general is nobody’s going to get very rich, but nobody’s going to be very poor. We’re all working and making a good living wage, and doctors and theater artists make somewhere around the same amount of money. We all have jobs, and we all have health care, and education is free, and the quality of life is really good, and nobody’s going to be too rich, but nobody’s going to be hurting too much, or not nobody, but in general, it’s just much more socialistic in that way. We’re operating from a very different perspective.

Then he pointed something out to me, which was he was like, have you noticed that when you talk to people here in Berlin, the first question is never, what do you do? It made me realize how much we’re focused on just wealth and career and what we do and how we make money and all of these things in our country. That I found it really liberating and beautiful to think about a society that was really thinking about wealth distribution in different ways. Berlin had capped rental increases at that point as a city because they just didn’t want housing to become unaffordable.

All of these things that the society in itself was supporting a more socialist view of the world, and somewhere it jived with me from an ethical point of view where I just thought, “God, we’re an unethical country.” That makes so much sense. Even just reading this, I felt the same feeling of like, “Could you do this? Could you change the whole way we perceive money and capitalism in such a jarring way?” There’s something fun about it.

John: There’s something fun about it. I like that. You could look at Marlene Englehorn as being sort of the antithesis of an Ayn Rand character, basically, not believing that any individual is worth more than society, therefore, she should not be worth more than everybody else around her. There’s something really noble about that. One thing that the article has to do a lot of work to explain is that, well, how did this family become so wealthy in a country that is not to have such great disparities? It’s because of sort of inherited wealth and sort of the way that inherited wealth becomes this perpetual cycle that’s very hard to break out of.

As a story purpose, I’m not sure who the antagonist is in a way, I’m not sure like what the–

Mari: I wonder if from a story point of view, if it’s the type of story that starts out with this great idea and great intentions, and then as soon as you get into the nitty gritty of it, things go really wrong and you can’t– she sort of, like you said, has a little bit of a naivete about what this would do for people’s lives that is probably coming from a privileged position where she actually really doesn’t understand what people who haven’t grown up how she did need or want, the sort of rich person, “I’m the hero of my own story” narrative vibe. Then maybe she could actually come to a point where she actually has to grow and change also in some other way, I don’t know.

John: Yes, we were talking about Succession before, it feels like she’s almost like the Siobhan’s character in Succession if she actually believed the things she sort of professed to believe in Succession, and then she sort of keeps getting pulled back in. The other thing that reminded me of was The Good Place and that it was a chance for have characters wrestling about like what is good and right in society, like how do we do this thing?

Because the probably most interesting parts of the story, which I think is probably a better documentary than a feature film, is about sort of like, well, how are we going to prioritize these choices that we’re making as a society and as a subset of society who gets to make some of these choices? It comes down to at the end, I’ll spoil a little bit, is that they have a slush fund at the end where they have like these stickers, they can just apply their stickers that are each worth like $50,000 to different projects and it’s like they’re putting my posters around.

Mari: Very Succession.

John: Yes, which is absurd, but also you get it. There’s a certain point you’re throwing money at things.

Mari: Yes, it does feel like it’s a fun way to explore some bigger ethical questions, and you would almost want like economists and ethicists to come in and weigh in on all of the like pitfalls that you couldn’t anticipate. If you were fictionalizing this and narrativizing it, like what’s the most extreme thing that could happen in this situation?

John: Let’s do a recap of our three How Would this Would Be a Movies.

I think the surprise for me is like the one that’s probably closest to a movie is the Thread thread of Dating a Celebrity because How To Give Away A Fortune is so interesting, but it’s probably a documentary, it’s probably not really suited for a two-hour theatrical experience. Palmer Luckey, I don’t think we want to tell his specific story over the course of this time. We’d like him as a template, but I could imagine several different kinds of movies that are based on essentially this list of advice for dating a celebrity.

Mari: Yes. When I first read it, I didn’t think it would be a movie, but as we talked about it, I got convinced.

John: As we drop this podcast, you and I both be racing to get our versions of this story down and get them sold off there.

Mari: I’m going to call Leonardo DiCaprio right now.

John: Right now. Appian Way, we’re going to get in there and make that movie.

Let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a blog post by Teresa Justino called, You Get To Be Fulfilled Now. She’s talking about how as writers, often we need day jobs to sort of get through and pay our bills and pay our rent. Often we think of those as survival jobs and she wants to recast those as what she calls thrival jobs, which are jobs you can thrive in even while you’re making a living to do your thing.

She says, “I love thrival because I believe it’s possible to find a job outside your chosen field that nonetheless contributes to your ultimate goals, supports you financially, and provides some sort of joy, fulfillment, and purpose. In other words, a job that allows you to thrive rather than just survive.” She talks about what that was like for her, but I think that’s a nice framework for us to be thinking about what we’re doing in terms of the work we do that is not the work we aspire to do. It applies to writers, directors, actors, everybody.

Mari: It reminds me of some advice you guys gave on the podcast a few weeks ago, I think, to somebody who was asking whether they should take a certain job within the industry even though they felt, I can’t remember what their hesitation was, and I loved that both of you were like, take the job, make the money, do the thing you need to do, and we need to all, not that you’re saying, “Oh, you just have to pay dues and we all have to pay dues,” but there is this sort of, I think, thing within Hollywood where people sort of believe somehow they’re just going to get handed their dream job out of the blue.

It just never has happened from what I can tell in the world. I agree, I feel like working in restaurants for 15 years and all of the different jobs I’ve done where I was a hard worker and I was good at multitasking and I learned lots of skills that helped me be a director and that everybody who I worked with recognized that I was a hard worker. There were times that I felt like that would be what I did for the rest of my life, and oh no, I want to do something else. But I was still going to give my all to jobs. I was still going to work hard and be the person I want to be in the world.

John: I think I always talk about with my early jobs, my sort of survivaly thrival jobs, is it was helpful for me to have a job that I didn’t hate, but I didn’t love, and that I could leave with enough brainpower left in me that I could still go home and write. That’s the balance, and there’s some, I do see sometimes people who will take a job that is so overwhelming that they don’t have anything left in the tank, and that’s not going to be the right choice. It made more sense to take a job, like waiting tables is physically exhausting, but it’s not using that same creative spark that you would otherwise be spending.

Mari: It’s true. My main thrival jobs of my life were all waiting tables and working as a camp counselor or for a daycare and taking care of children. That was much more exhausting on an emotional level than was waiting tables.

John: Yes, I can see it. What do you have to recommend for our listeners?

Mari: My one cool thing is a book that I just started reading that’s beautiful by my friend Priyanka Mattoo, and it’s called Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones. It’s a memoir, and it’s funny and relatable and just gorgeously written, and I recommend everybody reading it. She’s just a beautiful writer, and it’s a series of essays, and I think it will just warm your heart and make you feel less alone, which is what I think the goal of all art is.

John: Fantastic, Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones.

Mari: Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, which is also just such a great title, right?

John: I love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, it’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

It’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware now. They’re all great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become our premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on film festivals. Mari Heller, an absolute damn delight having you back on the show.

Mari: It’s so nice to be back, like coming home.

John: Check out Nightbitch, which is going to be coming out in December and many festivals before then, right?

Mari: Yes, please come and see it.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, we just mentioned film festivals. Let’s talk about film festivals. Nightbitch debuted at TIFF, but this was not your first experience at film festivals. Was the first time you were there with a movie, was that Diary of a Teenage Girl?

Mari: Yes, so Diary premiered at Sundance and that was a very specific and special experience because the movie had been supported by the Sundance Labs, a place you and I both know and love. Sundance had been, sort of my creative home in that way because I had developed both at the Writer’s Lab and the Director’s Lab. Then I got to premiere the movie at the Sundance Film Festival.

John: That’s amazing. So in that case, you want people to see your movie, but you want them to buy your movie, right? Because it hadn’t been sold yet?

Mari: Absolutely, it had not been sold yet.

John: There’s a lot of pressure there.

Mari: It sold at Sundance back when that still happened, which from what I can understand, movies don’t really sell at film festivals the way they used to.

Mari: Probably a topic for a bigger discussion, but like a lot of times, there’s been a lot of screenings ahead of time so people know what they’re going to buy or they premiere there and it’s weeks or months later that the actual sale happens.

Mari: That seems like it happens more often now, yes.

John: The case of, Diary of a Teenage Girl, there was that excitement of like, oh my gosh, there’s like two in the morning and the offers are going back and forth. That’s so cool and exciting.

Mari: That’s exactly what happened, which blew my mind that it played out in that way. What we did at the time was I took a lot of meetings before the movie premiered with a number of companies. I got to know the players and sort of people who were maybe going to be interested in the movie before they had seen the movie.

Then once the movie premiered, we were in that exact game of trying to sell the movie. Then three weeks later, I went to Berlinale with the movie to try to sell it to foreign markets. We had our foreign sales agent and I did a million meetings there and worked on basically selling off different territories to the movie too.

John: Good. I had two Sundance experiences. My first one was with Go and Go was a premiere at Sundance, but we already were sold. Columbia owned the movie everywhere in the world. This was just a happy premiere situation, like getting hype for the story and it was great. The second time was with The Nines and The Nines was not sold anywhere. We had that, the big screening, but really the purpose there was to find a buyer for the movie.

Like you, we had some conversations ahead of time. They hadn’t seen the movie, but they’d sort of knew who we were. We enlisted both a film sales agent and a film publicity agent who were there to make sure all the right people were coming to the screening. Of course, they don’t actually come to the screening because they’re getting busy with other stuff, so they have to come to a later screening or we’re burning a DVD for them so they can watch it in their hotel room. It’s so stressful to try to sell a movie at a film festival.

Mari: It is so stressful. At the time, I had just had a kid. He was five weeks old. I was at the film festival with a five week old baby and trying to understand the sort of ins and outs of selling this movie. UTA was representing the movie and having all of these meetings. It was, yes, it was very stressful and exciting. I’m glad I had that experience, but man, it was stressful. None of my other film festival experiences have been like that.

John: Let’s talk about the happier situation generally of a film festival where you are there to premiere your film, to debut it, to talk about it, but you don’t have to actually sell it. Something like A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood or Nightbitch, what do you go in with? Who has seen it before? Let’s talk about Nightbitch. Who had seen the movie before it debuted at TIFF? The programmers at TIFF, somebody had seen it, right?

Mari: Yes, so we had actually shown the movie to the programmers at TIFF the year before, before the strikes happened, because the plan was to premiere then. They were so passionate about loving the movie that they basically said, if you need to hold it for a year, we’ll hold a spot for you for next year, which was so kind and wonderful. So yes, programmers see the movie early. We had tested the movie. We had shown the movie to test audiences.

We had done some sort of tastemaker screen, or no, not tastemakers, not the right– toe-dip screenings, as they call them, where you sort of show them to journalists who will never cover the movie, but you get a sort of sense of how people might review the movie. We had done all of those preliminary screenings, and then, of course, I had shown the movie to everybody I had, no, in my house or living room or screening room or whatever, and done a million friends and family screenings. Because we weren’t selling the movie, the movie was already with Searchlight. It wasn’t the same situation where we needed to meet with people ahead of time in order to have them see the movie.

John: Let’s talk about the actual experience, then, of the premiere screenings. Was it at nighttime? Was it 7 PM, were you at one of the sort of marches?

Mari: It was 9.30 on Saturday night, which was a pretty key time, but late for me.

John: As a parent, yes.

Mari: Yes, I started that day at 8 AM doing my tech check of the DCP and checking all the theater stuff and showing up to make sure everything was going to sound and look great, and then I got into my glam, which is a wonderful thing, but, exhausting, too, and did pictures and press all day, and then the movie didn’t play until 9:30 at night.

It was really fun, though, because we were in a huge theater, this gorgeous theater that sat almost 2,000 people, and it felt like it was the hot ticket, Everybody wanted to see the movie, and I was getting calls and texts from everyone, “I can’t get into your movie, do you have any extra tickets, blah, blah, blah.” It just had this feeling, this energy, which I think that’s the best part about film festivals, is this energy of being together communally, watching movies, and people getting excited about something and hearing about something.

John: Because it’s in a big theater they’re not on their phone doing anything else, they’re actually just focused on the screen for once.

Mari: People are there because they love movies. People are geeking out over movies which is such a fun place to be, it’s always scary to show your movie to an audience no matter what but you feel like you’re watching with a ton of people who love movies and love watching movies and there’s just an energy that you can’t replicate. I remember Jorma talking about MacGruber premiered at South by Southwest and he was like, I’ll never have a better screening than that in my life. That was the most exciting, best audience reaction I could ever have.

John: Yes, Go’s premiere was also, it was at nighttime at Sundance. It was a great big party. My movie, The Nines, we had like the great big premiere, but like it went well, but like that’s by far the biggest house that’s ever going to see the movie. That probably is true for Nightbitch as well. You’re going to have a theatrical release, but this is the only one time you’re going to have that many people looking at their eyeballs directed towards your film at one place.

Mari: I sit in the audience and watch the movie at these film festivals because of that exact reason, because it’s so satisfying and fun to watch that many people watch your movie. I know a lot of filmmakers who can’t, who can’t sit there while it plays, and it just feels too much or actors who feel like it’s just too much to sit there while everybody watches the movie.

I think even when I was sitting there, this was only now two weekends ago, sitting there with the audience watching Nightbitch premiere, I was, as it was happening, doing that thing of being like, remember this, remember this feeling, remember that laugh, this feels so good, it’s never going to feel like this again.

John: It’s not your last festival, so let’s talk about that, because it’s not just, because this is really the start of awards season, and TIFF sort of kicks off awards season, part of the goal of doing this is to sort of get that first initial buzz started about sort of the things people might say like, “Oh, this should be on our list for picture, for screenplay, for Amy Adams, for other things.” All those things, those conversations are going to start happening, and you keep those conversations happening by going to different festivals. What does the runway look like ahead of you?

Mari: Yes, I’m so lucky that I can talk about this with as much experience as I’ve already had, because I had two years in a row, 2018 and 2019, where for Can you Ever Forgive Me, and A Beautiful Day, I did a very similar trajectory of film festival to film festival to film festival and press. An awards campaign, essentially. I am a little more prepared, I guess, this time around for all of that. I will be going to the London Film Festival, the Middleburg Film Festival, the Savannah Film Festival, the Chicago Film Festival, Hampton’s Film Festival.

I would be doing even more if my husband wasn’t off making a movie in Finland right now, and I wasn’t also solo parenting. I’m going to do as many as I can, and I have called on all the grandparents to help because it’s going to be quite a fall. Once you do the initial film festival, the rest of them don’t feel nearly as terrifying. They are a little bit more fun. You start to get your talking points down.

We all went to TIFF, the cast, me, the author of the book, the producers. Often what then ends up happening is we sort of split up and we each cover different territories when it comes to the film festivals. you become less– you’re more alone doing the next sections of it, so a few of us will go to London but I think like when I go I don’t know to Middleburg it may just be me I might be the only one really there representing the film, there to answer questions and do the press around it so it doesn’t have the same energy as the first time when everybody comes together and gets to celebrate.

John: The Nines went to Venice Film Festival it was like, “Oh what movies did at Venice?” I’m like, I saw nothing. I was there. That’s the other irony.

Mari: I saw nothing at Toronto either, no. I’ve never seen anything at a film festival when I’m there for a film. You’re working the whole time. Going to Sundance when I haven’t had a movie there is one of my favorite experiences because getting to see three movies a day or whatever you might be able to sneak your way into is such a cool experience. No, when you’re there with your own movie, you don’t see anything.

John: Yes, you’re in work mode. Mari, congratulations on the film you’ve made so far, on the festival so far, and all the festivals ahead.

Mari: Thank you.

John: Thank you for talking us through this.

Mari: My pleasure.

Links:

• Nightbitch | Official Trailer
• Marielle Heller
• Highland Pro Austin launch party – sign up here!
• MacGruber on Peacock
• Hollywood’s 10 Percent Problem by Matt Belloni at Puck
• Dating a Celebrity – Thread by bo.predko
• American Vulcan by Jeremy Stern for Tablet
• How to Give Away a Fortune by Joshua Yaffa for The New Yorker
• You Get to Be Fulfilled Now by Teresa Jusino
• Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones by Priyanka Mattoo
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.