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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 719 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, when is good enough, not enough? We’ll discuss how you decide whether a particular occasion calls for your very best work or whether you’re wasting your time. We’ll also answer listener questions on packaging, bleeping, and when you know you’ve got it, or you don’t. In our bonus segment for premium members, every year, I come into a new long list of things to do. We’ll talk through what I did last year and why, and my list for this new year.

Craig: So organized.

John: So organized. I try to be.

Craig: Yes. No, that’s you. I don’t remember the last time I made a New Year’s resolution.

John: We’ve talked about it. I used to have not resolutions but areas of interest. Archery would be my area of interest. I would do archery for a bit. I would do Austrian white wines. The thing we do now is, Mike and I make a list of 25 or 26 things that together we’re going to do over the course of the year. We do those because we’re efficient people who knock things off lists.

Craig: It’s terrifying.

John: I strongly recommend it for people. In the bonus segment, I want to talk through what those are because the key is achievable, doable things. Not like, “Do this thing more.” It’s like, “Do this thing twice.”

Craig: Right. Something that you feel like you can actually manage.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s good. Modest expectations.

John: We’ll also talk through a– I did a year-end wrap-up of the stuff I did, including the fact that I played, I think, 42 sessions of D&D.

Craig: Not enough.

John: Not enough.

Craig: No.

John: Never enough.

Craig: No.

John: No. Let’s get you some follow-up. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Tyler writes, “I believe the origin of bumping this is from older web forums, where threads that have most recently been replied to will appear on the front page, and threads without a reply will fall down and eventually be relegated to page two.”

John: I think Tyler is exactly right. That’s where it comes from.

Craig: I think that sounds right.

John: Yes. Basically, because only the top 10 posts are listed. You go into a thread, you bump it, and then it shows up as a new thing.

Craig: Yes. Once you reply to it, it gets bumped up.

John: Yes.

Craig: That makes sense.

John: Thanks, Tyler.

Craig: Good job.

John: Nick wrote about back issues.

Drew: Yes. We were talking about Craig’s back issues in episode 716. Nick says, “I’m curious if your recent back problem listener is okay on their feet for more than 15 minutes and could possibly use a standing desk. Has Craig experimented with a standing desk at all?”

John: I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with a standing desk.

Craig: I tried.

John: You tried?

Craig: Yes. It made it worse.

John: Oh, I’m sorry.

Craig: Well, because my problem is standing.

John: Oh.

Craig: I recently received a little bit of treatment, feeling better. The thing about back issues is that it’s one of those things where everybody has advice.

John: Oh, for sure.

Craig: Everybody. Everybody’s back is different. Everybody’s problem is different. It’s just part of growing up. You know what part of growing up is? Part of growing up is getting back problems, giving back problem advice, realizing it doesn’t matter or work, and continuing to have back problems. You have to get to the other side of the advice stage. That’s when you know you’re really getting old.

John: Yes. I use a standing desk. I like it. I try to move between sitting and standing over the course of the day. I will do unimportant stuff like emails and all that kind of stuff. I’ll just do all that standing up, which is just great. Then what’s nice is psychologically, then if I’m lowering the table and sitting down to actually do real writing work, it feels like a change of state.

Craig: [crosstalk] Like you’re locking in. My version of that is to walk. Walking makes my back feel better always. I’ll take a long walk. Walking is also good because that’s where I could figure out what it is that I exactly want to write. There’s something about the movement that is– My thing is shower, walk, something that gets me out of my brain and therefore into my brain, if that makes sense. Standing is uncomfortable.

There’s a lot of people in our production office that the standing desk is now considered a chair. It’s too easy. Now there are people with the treadmill desk. There are people with the bouncy ball, keep yourself balanced desk. I just want to slap everyone.

John: I think the bouncy ball thing largely went away. You don’t see that as much. Are you still seeing it in your offices?

Craig: As I walk down the hall towards the elevators, there’s one room that has a full Pilates reformer in it.

John: Incredible.

Craig: Yes. Now that may be some sort of punishment.

John: Yes. It does look like a rack. [crosstalk]

Craig: I don’t meet out punishment on my production, but I know that somebody surely does. That may be where the bad people go.

John: Aline Brosh McKenna famously had a walking desk for a while. She had the treadmill on her desk. I think that got incorporated into Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I think literally, they may have taken her standing desk and just moved it over to one of the chairs there.

Craig: It is both admirable and frightening. There is something too efficient.

John: There is. We have a treadmill in the gym. I will set it at a low speed and just do very unimportant, email-y work on my iPad. We have a little keyboard that’s sitting up there. I will do some stuff like that, but I don’t have it on my main desk.

Big follow-up here, so this would be more of a topic. On episode 716, we had Mike Makowsky on. One of the things he talked about was how much he wanted text blocks and screenplays to be exactly even on the left-hand and right margins.

Craig: Yes, which is startling because that’s a neurosis even I don’t have.

John: Several readers wrote in to say that they felt seen. I think we have a little more of a conversation about things we said in that episode.

Drew: Jordan in Australia writes, “I just wanted to say to Mike that he’s not alone. I have an almost overwhelming compulsion to make the lines look neat on the page. Like Mike, though, I don’t consider it a problem because it makes me focus on the exact function of each word and line rather than accepting something as good or close enough that I can leave it. If push comes to shove and I think the result is worse or that something really just can’t be changed, I’ll put up with widows and orphans. Otherwise, I like that this compulsion helps with focus and attention, especially given my ADHD.”

Craig: It strikes me that when it comes to mental behaviors, people feel a need to justify all of it as if it mattered. It’s like saying, “I have red hair.” Let me give you the reasons why I think it’s actually okay. You don’t need to because it’s there. It’s not changing. That’s what you are. You’re a redhead. This is how your brain works. Don’t even bother justifying it. Let’s say it’s not helpful. Let’s say it’s actually harmful. So what? That’s how your brain works. We’re not perfect.

John: Yes. The last word of this response was ADHD. I want to talk about the medicalization of behavior, which I think is an aspect of what we’re going to be talking about here today, too.

Craig: Yes.

John: Go for it. Chris in Germany.

Drew: “I was blown away by the part where Mike had to explain his writing OCD. I have the exact same experience when I write. To me, these even blocks of text provide some sense of comfort through stability and order. It’s more important to me that the single lines in a block are the same relative to each other. Blocks on a page can differ. I would rather incorporate an intentional mistake than have the consecutive lines at different lengths. This sometimes blocks me, and it surely always slows me down. Best practice is not to look at the screen while writing. I really wanted to let Mike know that he’s not alone here.”

John: Again, I want to be supportive and say, what works for you works for you. Also, when you say, “I would rather incorporate an intentional mistake,” that’s making me wonder whether it is actually really working for him. That’s the balance I’m trying to find here.

Craig: I don’t know why I didn’t mention this to Mike, but I wonder if, for Mike, Joran, and Chris, just going into alignment and setting it to the justified thing, where it automatically makes it all the same length.

John: Yes. I wonder if that might be– It’s not typical screenwriting, but it also–

Craig: No, but neither is this.

John: Neither is this.

Craig: You wouldn’t have to think about it so much. It would just do it automatically. I’m sure that is a setting, justified.

John: Justified, yes.

Craig: Justified. It’s interesting because we get a lot of acronyms for these things. People, again, they want to assign a problem to this. It’s ADHD, it’s OCD. I’m not saying that Joran doesn’t have ADHD or that Chris maybe doesn’t have OCD, but that’s not relevant. It’s not necessary to pathologize it, nor is it necessary to celebrate it. It just is.

John: Yes. You can acknowledge it without pathologizing it.

Craig: If you get to a place where you think, “I wish I weren’t doing this,” now we’ve got a thing. Now think about how to stop. If you’re not in that place and if you don’t know how to do this otherwise, I think I’ve mentioned on this show before, if I lost my hands, I probably would have to quit writing because I think through typing.

John: You think with your fingers.

Craig: That’s how I write, through typing. I can understand this limitation that people feel.

John: I want to just acknowledge the synchronicity, the rhyming between justify and justify. These writers want to justify their margin, but they also want to justify their actions.

Craig: That’s a theme.

John: That’s a theme.

Craig: That’s a theme.

John: Let’s wrap up with Olivia here.

Drew: “I sincerely enjoyed Episode 716. However, I did want to flag something that kept coming up. Being OCD was said at several points during the podcast when referring to the look of a screenplay page. As a writer with OCD, I feel an obligation to speak on this. OCD is a deeply debilitating mental illness without treatment. For someone with OCD, the idea of needing a script page to look a certain way would feel like a life and death decision, not just an aesthetic choice or process preference.

Also, there is so little accurate OCD representation in the media that I feel it is incredibly important for writers listening to be aware of how something like I’m so OCD or you’re so OCD can come off. Not trying to censor anyone, but I think it’s a conversation worth having.”

John: I want to first acknowledge where Olivia is right, is that per the DSM, OCD can be a debilitating, pervasive life or death situation. It can feel like it is a life-or-death situation. That’s not quite what Mike was describing there in the experience. I don’t want to diminish or trivialize a person who has a diagnosis of OCD, and that was never our intention behind this.

Craig: No, but nor would any reasonable person think so. I say this as somebody who has a kid with actual diagnosed OCD, medicated, and so on and so forth. OCD is a pretty broad diagnosis. For a lot of people, it’s the O that is far more common than the C. We think of compulsive behavior as a hallmark of OCD, but obsessive thinking, cycling thoughts, is just as prominent, if not more so. There are people that have very severe cases and people who have very mild cases.

It is a useful term to describe behaviors that we feel we are not necessarily in control over, or thoughts that are pervasive and unwanted, or cycling. There is no value. I say this as somebody who is deeply invested in promoting both the destigmatization of mental health issues and support for mentally ill people. I say this as a parent who’s gone through this. This doesn’t help. This whole thing of, “You’re not allowed to call yourself or your problem this, you have to be as sick as I am to call yourself that,” does not help.

There are people who have mild schizophrenia. It doesn’t help to tell them you’re not, or to even say, “Stop saying schizophrenic when you really mean splt–.” It doesn’t help.

John: It’s a whole different podcast to go into when it comes to the DSM and things that are in there. Whenever you talk about there being a spectrum of something that always creates an issue where resources are being directed towards people who have very mild occurrences of a thing versus severe occurrences of a thing, that’s way beyond the scope of this podcast. We are a podcast about words and language. I want to talk about the words and the language here because, really, what I think we’re getting into is that there’s a DSM definition of OCD, but there’s been semantic drift.

The meaning has changed and broadened, which is a very natural thing that happens in language. The word nostalgia used to mean PTSD. It used to mean–

Craig: The pain, algia, is pain.

John: Yes. That changed over time. Nostalgia doesn’t mean that same thing anymore. It’s understandable why the term OCD, which had a stricter clinical definition, has broadened to mean picky, fastidious, that kind of thing. It’s in that same space as that original idea, but it’s not that same original idea.

Craig: Exactly. I don’t think it would be helpful for somebody with clinical depression to hear someone go, “Oh my God, I woke up today, the weather was so bad. I was so depressed when I saw the weather outside.” It would be unhelpful for them to scold that person and say, “You’re not depressed. This is what depression is.” We all know. We actually know. We know the difference. The thought, I guess, is that somehow your validity as somebody suffering is being diminished or stolen, like stolen valor. It is not.

Nobody is diminishing anything by this. That’s why, by the way, you see what I just did? I used the phrase clinical depression. We figured out a way in language to discriminate and get it back. Clinical OCD might be a nice way to describe what you have if you have diagnosed, serious obsessive compulsive disorder, per the DSM, per your psychiatrist, maybe you’re on meds, as opposed to somebody who’s like, “I just get very OCD when I see a pillow out of place on the bed.”

Olivia, I hope you don’t think I’m being too hard on you here. This is important because I actually want people to feel free to share their understanding of their mental health without feeling like they have to hit some target that someone else is setting. I don’t think you would want somebody with even more severe OCD than you telling you, “You’re not really OCD.” That’s the problem. Anyway, I’m going to suggest the use of the word clinical.

John: Clinical is very helpful here. As we’re having this conversation, I’m realizing that over the course of these 15 years of doing this podcast, there have been terms in which we’ve been such sticklers on trying to defend, like begs the question, where we feel like, “Okay, we’re losing the actual meaning of begs the question by–”

Craig: I will never, ever, ever quit.

John: I hear that there is something inconsistent in our approach to certain terms that we’re trying to do that.

Craig: That’s just fun.

John: That’s just fun.

Craig: That’s just fun. Did you see BJ Novak? I don’t know who it was that he corrected. Maybe it was Andy Cohen. He was on a New Year’s Eve broadcast or something, and I think it was Andy Cohen, said something about there are going to be less rats in New York and [crosstalk].

John: He said fewer rats.

Craig: It’s just gorgeous.

John: It’s gorgeous.

Craig: Way to go, BJ.

John: Another term which occurred to me was that narcissist used to have an actual definition.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: If we can’t say narcissist– you could say clinical narcissist. Someone who has a definition of narcissist, so helpful for distinguishing between just behavior we find [unintelligible 00:15:02].

Craig: Now that I’m thinking about it, we do this with every single mental illness diagnosis. We call people schizophrenic when they’re not, depressed when they’re not, anxious when they’re not. PTSD is now thrown around wildly, wildly. “I went to a restaurant. Oh my God, I saw PTSD from that waiter. He brought me the wrong thing.” It is analogizing. It’s instantly analogizing, because it’s talking about extreme forms of everyday mental processing. Yes, narcissistic, histrionic, dramatic. I’m now struggling to think of one that we don’t use.

Drew: Hysterical.

John: Hysterical.

Craig: Hysterical. You’re really not supposed to use that one. All of it. Every single word.

John: We’ll put a link in the show notes, too. There’s a sociologist, Nick Haslam, who coined concept creep, which is basically how you have a concept that just the edges of it bleed out into ways that– Trauma is one of the things he talks about there, which had a definition, which now we understand it’s broadened.

Craig: [laughs] Every time someone says trauma, I now think of the Jamie Lee Curtis supercut of her saying trauma. Have you seen this?

John: I know. It’s incredible.

Craig: It’s incredible.

John: It’s from Halloween? Where was it from?

Craig: It was from Halloween. When she was doing the press tour for Halloween, she was talking about how her character had to deal with–

John: Such a choice to tip to you and the trauma.

Craig: Yes. She went, “Trauma,” and then it’s just her saying the word trauma in 80 different– It was the Madame Morrible Wicked Witch of its time. Do you know what that is?

John: No, I don’t know Madame Morrible Wicked Witch.

Craig: Oh my God, you know what this is.

John: Oh, yes. I’m sorry. Just incredible. Love it so much. Let’s get to our marquee topic here. We can turn away from formatting on the page to the actual words themselves because so often on our show, we’re talking about getting things just right and making sure everything’s perfect. We do the three-page challenges where we’re really obsessing about the word choices, how we’re seeing the world through the words you’re choosing to put on the page.

Craig, last week, you were talking about there’s times where you will hold off delivering something because something’s just not right. You know it’s not right, and you don’t want it out there in the world when it’s not right until it meets your goals and expectation. I think the expectation there could be that in a perfect world, everything you write would be flawless. You would give them a flawless version of everything. That goes from the senior shooting this afternoon to that email to your landlord, but it’s not a perfect world. There’s not a limited time.

In many cases, it just doesn’t matter whether it’s the perfect version or not. I want to just try to find a rubric for figuring out when is it worth perfecting a thing, to finalize a thing, to polish a thing, and when is good enough, and making those choices.

Craig: I’m going to use a word now for mental health.

John: Which is?

Craig: Triggered.

John: Oh, sure. Yes.

Craig: Which I am not. Extending the use of that word, I have perfectionist issues.

John: I think you do.

Craig: I struggle with this all the time. I do know the difference between there’s something fundamentally wrong with this, and this is in a place where it’s on the putting green. It’s going to get into the hole, but I actually want people now to look at this, to gather opinions and thoughts, because it’s generally what it’s going to be. I do know the difference between that, but I will struggle writing emails, texts. I can’t leave the broken word in there. It’s a problem for me.

John: I hear you. I want to go to your process here because you talked about how Jack, who works with you, she’s your accountability buddy. Basically, you’re sending her pages. My expectation is, you have a relationship where you can send her things knowing it’s not quite perfect, because it’s part of the process is her looking at it to make a thing better.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Same with Drew for me. It’s like, I will send stuff to Drew so he can take a look.

Craig: I won’t read the editorial commentary, but a few typos. Page six, you write in here twice in one sentence. Page nine, bottom. “Aileen about putting the bandage.” That doesn’t make any sense. Aileen. Bottom. She with two Es. Bottom, “Tracking the sound as rises up the–” That’s horrible.

John: Yes. She’s a safe person for you to share it with.

Craig: I don’t proofread for typos. It’s actually not bad for– It was about 16 pages.

John: Sure.

Craig: Actually, a typo here and there does not flip me out. For scripts, it’s more about a quality thing.

John: Yes. Example from my own life. My daughter’s in college, and so she’ll sometimes send me a link to an essay she’s written for her class. I’ll read through it, and it’ll be good. It’s solid. She’s gotten to be a really good writer. It’s fascinating to watch how much better a writer she is year after year after year. It’s a huge improvement. I’ll notice that, “Okay, you missed this argument, or that point didn’t really land, or that conclusion’s not entirely supported.” She’s like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” and I was like, “But does it actually matter? Because one person is going to be reading this essay.”

Her instructor’s going to be reading this essay, and no one’s ever going to read the essay again. At some point, you have to make a decision. Is it worth the extra hour of time to improve this essay on a thing you don’t care about that no one will ever actually see again, or should she be doing her work on the other nine assignments she has? Those are choices a person makes in their real life, and a person who was so perfectionist and obsessed about making every last little thing as perfect as it could be would drop other balls because they’re spending too much time on one thing.

Craig: That’s the real problem. There’s a livable, supportable, quasi-perfectionism because there is no perfectible you, as Dennis Palumbo says, where you value doing your best. I would put it under that category. Yes, if I can take another 30 minutes, and I have 30 minutes to make this better, I should. That’s a good value to have. If you find yourself incapable of letting something go to the detriment of other things, well, then you really aren’t involved in modest perfectionism. You’re just doing poorly because a bunch of things aren’t going to get done or aren’t going to get done well.

What is very hard for me, I will tell you what makes me panic the most, and I have explained this many times to the people I work with, and it is particularly an issue when I’m directing. If I feel like I don’t have a sufficient amount of time to do my best work, I then start to feel like I’m dying because the gap between what I can do and what I’m allowed to do is too big, and I feel sick. If I have the time I need, and it’s not an unlimited amount of time, hit my satisfaction thing, and I can’t explain why that is. Probably has to do with some trauma [chuckles].

John: Yes, but you also have 30 years of experience of knowing yourself, knowing your habits, knowing how your work gets done. That’s reasonable. I get that, and I feel that too. There’s times where I’m not panicking because I know I can actually do this in the time, and if the time suddenly becomes too short, then I do start to worry.

Craig: It is also interesting how if you know going into something, before you even start contemplating what you want to do, that there’s only this much time. That’s great.

John: Weekly assignments. We’ve definitely done that, where it’s like, “I know I can’t fix everything. I can move this from this to that.”

Craig: Then it’s just, “Hey, let’s do– Everything’s getting better. We’re just making it better as we go,” and everyone will be shocked by how much you can get done anyway. I don’t panic over those situations, but this is a hard thing to figure out. I wonder whether it’s, “Okay, is good enough good enough,” or is it really about learning how to manage and prioritize the time you have to deliver the quality you can?

John: Yes, that’s fair. Let’s talk through some– I call it a rubric, but basically some decision points you’re going to have about whether you’re giving everything you have to this thing or you don’t need to be doing that. Audience, public versus private. We just went through this with Jack because it’s a private audience. You’re not embarrassed by typos in anything you’re sending to Jack because that’s the relationship you have. She’s meant to be looking at that.

Craig: Exactly.

John: If you’re sharing it with one close friend, you may be a little more concerned about those typos, but you’re not going to obsess about them. If something is public, it really does represent you out there in the world. We’ve often talked about how this is the manifestation of you out there in that space, and you want to make sure that it’s the best version of that. That’s why we encourage people to put their work out there so people can read it and do stuff. At a certain point, if you have older stuff of yours that isn’t really you now, pull it away.

Craig: Yes, if you can, and if you want to. We’ve talked about the illusion of intentionality before, the presumption that everything we see on screen is there because it’s exactly what we wanted to be there, when in fact, half the time, it’s what we got. That can haunt you because if you do put something out and you just didn’t have enough time and it wasn’t quite what you wanted, no one will know or give a damn. They will assume that’s exactly what you wanted, and you will be judged by it, and it will last until the end of written history. [laughs]

John: One of the actors, when he had a rivalry with Connor Storrie, there’s videos that came up. He became famous very quickly.

Craig: I saw this video.

John: He was a kid. It was this young little kid who’s like, “I’m an actor boy, da, da, da. I’m going to be famous and all that stuff.” What I appreciate about him is that he’s like, “Yes, I could have taken him down, but I’ve learned to love that kid.”

Craig: That’s the most healthy thing of all. By the way, that video was adorable. Of all the videos that you could make as a– he seemed like what? Maybe he was 14 or something.

John: Yes, or even younger, maybe.

Craig: Yes, 12. Of all the videos you could make of yourself at 12 or 13, that was the least objectionable, most wholesome, cute, and correct prediction of what you might be when you grow up. Oh my God, I’ll tell you, that hockey show, now my wife is obsessed with the hockey show.

John: Of course.

Craig: Jessica is obsessed with the hockey show.

John: My one cool thing that’s a spoiler, let’s just say there’s a woman who goes through and does– She’s a cinematographer who does breakdowns of it, and it’s phenomenal.

Craig: This hockey show is–

John: It’s great.

Craig: I’m putting it on my list.

John: We talked about audience, public versus private. Next, I would say–

Craig: I’m just thinking about them listening to this, going, “Hockey show?”

John: Hockey show.

Craig: “Hockey show, Craig? There’s a name for it. It’s a phenomenon.”

John: The hockey show.

Craig: “Dude, we didn’t call your show Mushroom Show.” Sorry. What’s it called again? He did Rivalry.

John: Yes, exactly. It’s a hard thing to say.

Craig: Rivalry is a tough word.

John: It’s a hard word.

Craig: Rivalry.

John: English doesn’t do that a lot.

Craig: L to R is tough.

John: We talked about audience, public versus private. Next, I would say, what stage is it? Is it a proof of concept versus a final? One of the things I admire so much about Mike Birbiglia, and this is true of a lot of stand-up comics, is they will just test and try material all the time. He’s going out, and he’s doing a stand-up, he’s trying new jokes, he’s seeing how they work, he’s recording the show, and he’s hearing, “What did I do? What was the reaction?” That is so important.

He’s not afraid to try a joke that’s not really formed, so he can figure it out. Even today, we have video cameras up here because we are testing a proof of concept to see how we’re going to do this show on video, if we ever decided to do it on video. No one’s ever going to see this. This is just a proof of concept.

Craig: Great.

John: I love that.

Craig: I didn’t put my face on this morning.

John: You didn’t have hair and makeup this morning.

Craig: My grandmother used to say that. “I have put my face on.”

John: There’s a product we’re launching next month or two.

Craig: Cosmetic?

John: Exactly, a cosmetic product. This is for you.

Craig: It’s a concealer.

John: It’s a software thing we’re launching. In trying to figure out how to do this, we were really clear about what is the scope of the minimum viable product. What is the simplest version of this that is useful, that we can see, that we can test, because we know that there’s things we’re not going to understand until we actually have a thing that we can try.

Craig: It interacts with the people on the other end of the relationship.

John: Third criteria here is context. What is the expectation of the person getting the message, or on the other side of this thing? I would stack this up from lowest expectation to highest expectation. A text message, your expectations of perfection in a text message are not as high.

Craig: They’re incredibly high.

John: For you, they are. For an email, incredibly high.

Craig: Incredibly high.

John: A tweet or a social blog post.

Craig: I don’t do those anymore.

John: A script, much higher.

Craig: The highest.

John: I would say for a book, even higher, higher, higher, because the number of times we had maybe six different proofreaders of the book and different editors going through it, we still missed the Star Trek deck versus bridge, but we got rid of so many typos. People who have the galley copies, even after we went through a bunch of those things, we still found typos in those.

Craig: Those will be worth more.

John: Absolutely, collector’s items.

Craig: Yes.

John: I think as you go up this chain, unless you’re Craig, the expectations of perfection increase.

Craig: Don’t be like me.

John: Don’t be like you.

Craig: Don’t be like me. I do think about this sometimes, how it is a waste of time, but also it makes me feel good.

John: Yes, I get that. After we get through the criteria, I want to go through the pros and cons of maybe you should obsess a little bit. I don’t know. Obsess is a loaded word, but maybe you should focus in on a little–

Craig: No. We can use these words. I’m giving us permission.

John: Focus in on these things. What we’re reading off of the Workflowy has a very low expectation of polish. There’s just typos all over it, which is fine.

Craig: It’s pretty darn good, though. I have to say the Workflowy generally is really good.

John: Some of those words missing. No one’s going to read it other than we’re going to look at it.

Craig: Right. I never look at this and think, “Oh, John doesn’t care. It’s sloppy. Drew doesn’t know how to spell.” It does exactly what it’s supposed to do. It’s an outline.

John: It’s an outline.

Craig: It’s fine. I think this is a perfectly good way of doing things.

John: You just said, “Is it worth it?” That, I would say, is the cost-benefit analysis. If you were to refine and optimize this thing, is the value you would get out of that time and effort really worth it for doing the work? The flip of that is you might satisfy this. You might compromise if the expected outcome is lower than what you would have put into it. It’s basically like you’re spending mental money to do a thing or time to do a thing, and is it really worth it to try it?

Craig: One of the interesting things about our brains is that we apply values to these things that are actually disconnected from reality.

John: Yes, we do.

Craig: I think, “Okay, I look at an email, it’s a mess, it must be correct to a point that I decide, ‘Ah, this is good.'” Somebody else out there would look at it and say, “Oh, no, there’s 12 more layers of good that need to occur. To that person, my value system is broken, and also, I just don’t care enough. When I got to the point where I thought it was correct, I believe that I indeed had exhausted everything. I’d done everything I could to make it great, and neither I, nor the person who wrote the shabby email, nor the person who wrote the hyper-perfect email are correct.

It is all disconnected from any metaphysical value. It is just perception. It’s just what makes our minds go click happy. There are people whose minds never go click happy when they correct a typo, ever. Most people commenting on YouTube videos don’t seem to care.

John: Absolutely. Mashing keyboard, yes.

Craig: Yes. What’s the famous one? How is Babby Made? Do you know that one?

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: How is Babby Made? Here’s how babbies are made. I try to just keep it in the realm of either I feel good, or I don’t feel good. I don’t really understand why my feel-good is set where it is. I assume it’s some combination of just innate mannerisms and trauma. I’d love that.

John: There are times where I realize I have spent half an hour on this email that a person will spend 10 seconds reading.

Craig: Oh, yes. I don’t care because that time feels good. It feels good. Yes, there’s just something about it, but that’s why we’re writers.

John: That’s why we’re writers.

Craig: Honestly.

John: We shouldn’t put everything down in the trivial email category. On this show, I think we’re constantly talking about how important it is actually to perfect and polish the scripts that you’re doing to deliver. That’s why we obsess of the three-page challenges. Yet there are still things, even in the course of a 120-page script, that are probably not worth obsessing over and perfecting to a degree that there may not be any benefit to that tertiary character who appears in one scene.

Is that exactly the right name for them? Is it a name that we’re not even going to actually hear a person say aloud? We could spend another hour figuring out the better name for it, but is it going to improve the final product?

Craig: Things like that come down to, “All right, this is the tiniest pebble in my shoe. Do I need to unlace my shoe, take my shoe off, get it back on?” No, unless I’m about to walk a long time, in which case it’s going to make me insane. Sometimes a name is like a pebble. Then I’m on page 30, and that person comes back, and I’m like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m typing this stupid name again. I can’t. This name is not right. That’s not who they are.”

We can only do what we can do because what we do, as writers, creative artists who are building stuff out of nothing but words, is a mental exercise that is deformed and then beautifully reformed. It’s a mess in there. It’s a mess. If the biggest problem we have is justifying the margins, dwelling a little bit too long, I guess what I’m saying is, if it’s bothering you that it’s not good enough, fix it. If it’s not, don’t. I think that’s really what it comes down to.

John: I’m going to put an asterisk there because if a trivial thing is bothering you so much that you’re not getting work done, that you’re actually not going to be able to be a screenwriter, then there’s something to change there.

Craig: Then you need therapy. It’s not going to happen because you go, “I shouldn’t be bothered by this.” Yes, you shouldn’t be.

John: John’s the wrong name for this character.

Craig: Yes, but you are. What are you going to do?

John: Last criteria, I would say, which is closely related to cost-benefit, but stakes. How much does it actually matter? If it’s the best version, the worst version, does it matter at all? What is the upside of success? What is the cost of failure? For a lot of things, it’s incredibly low, and yet some emails actually are very high stakes. You understand why you’re putting all your effort into it. A text to my brother, it’s just like the stakes aren’t that high.

Craig: The stakes are not that high. I think sometimes of Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone, which is worth rewatching. It’s one of the greatest pieces of video that exists, as far as I’m concerned, because it is a living document of a moment that changed the world. It’s a presentation. Basically, it’s just a big PowerPoint, is really what it is. It’s a fancy PowerPoint, and it’s spot on. When he needs something to pop up, it pops up. It has been timed out. He has planned it out. He has his stuff memorized.

It is thought through down to the tiniest bit, and it works great. Then, if you would, after you watch that, watch the video of Elon Musk introducing the Cybertruck in which he insists that the glass is shatterproof and bulletproof, and has a guy throw a heavy weight at it, and it absolutely shatters the glass.

John: That is incredible.

Craig: Did they not try that first? It is so sloppy. When the stakes are high, perfect it.

John: Let’s talk in that general sense of over-optimization or over-satisficing. Satisficing, I’m using this being like, “It’s good enough.”

Craig: What is satisficing?

John: Satisficing, you never ever heard that term?

Craig: No.

John: Satisficing is basically choosing the first acceptable alternative.

Craig: Oh, it’s a blend of satisfy and suffice.

John: Oh, you hadn’t heard of satisficing?

Craig: No.

John: I think satisficing is a really good word. You do it all the time without realizing it. It’s like, “Which chips do you want?” “The first one that works, do.” I’m often doing that on a menu at a restaurant.

Craig: You’re satisficing.

John: I’m like, “That’s good enough. I’m going to be happy with it.” I might be happier because I didn’t spend a bunch of time worrying about the choice.

Craig: Got it. Satisficing, I like that.

John: I think there’s a danger to satisficing when you shouldn’t. Let’s talk about over-optimization first. This thing’s all what I’m thinking, but you can add to it. We said you might miss opportunities because you’re so busy futzing with something. Basically, you’re not doing other work. You’re missing out on other chances.

Craig: If you are in a spot where, think of the time you have, think of the goals, think of the stakes, plan it, you know you need a certain amount of time to do this, and this is really important, don’t eat into that time.

John: No.

Craig: If you have extra time and you want to sit there and–

John: Love it.

Craig: Great, go for it, but you got to know your time.

John: You may simply never finish it. Time may just extend out forever. You can also burn out on a project because I feel like you have a certain amount of time in which your brain is willing to commit itself to a project, and if you’re just stuck in the middle of it for too long, you can just burn out.

Craig: It’s true. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this on the show. Alec Berg and I were talking once. He was cleaning out his place when they were moving, and he found this box of these old scripts that were printed out from when he had just started in the business, so 1991. It was like he didn’t remember any of it. He was reading another him.

John: That’s great.

Craig: He read it, and his thought was, “This is not anywhere near as good as I am now. There’s a freedom to it. It is unburdened by the curse of knowledge, self-expectation, perfectionism, the echoes of failure.” Until you get burned, you don’t know what burned is.

John: There’s a self-defense you can write into your things because you know all the things that are coming, so you’re anticipatory doing stuff.

Craig: Yes, and because you know what it feels like to write something that wasn’t good enough, so you can’t let yourself do that. If you go too far down that road, then you can paralyze.

John: I think one of the real issues with over-optimization is you can get locked in on a bad idea. You might have written a scene so beautiful and so perfect that you can’t touch it again when a note comes that you actually do have to address. You wrote this thing for a location that you no longer have. It can be so tough because you’ve spent so much time and energy on it. You’re so invested in this one version of it.

Craig: Yes. I get caught in loops sometimes. Recently, I got stuck in a loop on something and wrote and then realized, “Okay, this doesn’t belong here. I’m moving it to a different place,” for an episode, in fact. I was lost in that loop for a while. There is a slight panic that kicks in of, “Uh-oh.”

It’s like driving across country. You have plenty of time. Let’s say I’m going to give you a week to drive across the country. On any given day, you can either drive all day or you can not.

Along the way, you have to sometimes experience those days where you pull over, and you don’t drive much. Then you just know on some other days, “Here we go, wake up, don’t stop.” That’s part of the sweet misery of what we do.

John: This last point with over-optimization, I’d say it’s really perfectionism in general. You may be trying to control things that are out of your control. I definitely see that with screenwriters. They will make something so flawless and perfect because they actually want this movie that’s in their head to exist in the world. You have to recognize that that’s not within the scope of your power. You’re doing everything you can to communicate what this vision is you have for the movie, but you cannot will it into existence just through the words you’re typing and through all the refining you’re doing there.

Craig: It’s absolutely true. There’s two mes. There’s the me that writes the script, who is fastidious and a perfectionist. Then, when I’m directing, at some point, I’ll go, “Why don’t we do this?” and then the script supervisor will say, “Just in the script.” Then I’ll say, “Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Actually, that would be better because I’d already–” but the me there, it’s like I didn’t write it. It’s a disconnection.

John: Director Craig is constantly compromising. There’s always shots that are on your shot list you’re never going to get to.

Craig: That’s so true. It’s so true.

John: I would say give writer Craig a little of that grace.

Craig: No, writer Craig is better than director Craig because writer Craig thought it all through. Director Craig needs to pay more attention, just like all directors do, to the script. That’s really what happens is that I end up thinking to myself, I’m doing the thing that would make me angry that directors would do, where they would focus on everything in front of them and forget about the bigger picture or all the details on the page.

John: Except that director Craig is dealing with not just what writer Craig delivered, but also the realities of what’s in front of the camera and behind the camera.

Craig: That is all true. That is all true. You know what? Maybe Craig should just give himself a break.

John: I think that’s what we’re coming down to.

Craig: All right.[00:39:38]

John: Let’s talk about the dangers of oversatisfying, because, in the initial example, I was talking about how–

Craig: Oversatisfying.

John: Sometimes it’s like, “That’s good enough.” I was talking about how an essay you’re writing for a class that you don’t care about, that you’re never going to read again, maybe it’s actually not worth perfecting. If you were to do that too much, that’s just laziness, basically. You might lose your sense of taste. You’re not used to seeing your best writing, so you might not always be able to hit your best writing. You might forget what your best writing even looks like.

Craig: You may also find yourself getting passed by people that are not faster than you. It’s just that you’re not running as fast as you can, and this will become an uncomfortable feeling. When I say passed, I don’t necessarily mean, oh, they’re going to make more money or something, but they’re suddenly achieving things that you wanted to achieve that you’re not because there is value in pursuing the best you can do. You won’t get there. Pursuing it as a value is a positive thing. If you have the time to make the essay better, even if it doesn’t matter, take the time to make it better. It will make you better.

John: I think that was one of the good things about blogging when I was doing it more often, is that I was basically refining and perfecting those arguments, and it’s learning how to think and how to express those ideas. Writing is exercise, and you’re building mental muscle strength to do that. We’ve also talked about how you might say like, “Oh, it’s private,” or “No one’s ever going to read this,” but you don’t really know that. Things will be out there in the world, and it’s still going to be potentially seen by somebody. I think you’ve stressed this in terms of your collaborations is you are setting an example for everyone else you’re working with. If they see that you’re delivering 75%, why should they give you 100%?

Craig: Oh, boy, is that a thing. I talk to people on the crew about this because they are always working on something. I work on a show. They work on shows. Some of them do say there is a thing where you are on a show, and you can just tell that the people who made it sort of care, then it’s a 70% vibe that they’re like, “It’s a job. Got to do it. I’m supposed to do it. Nobody really cares about the show, but we’re working.” Then you don’t necessarily– why beat yourself up? Why lay it all out there? It’s part of the culture of anything is, “How serious are we taking this?”

John: Now, let’s wrap this up with a conversation about vomit drafts because neither you or I are vomit draft people, but many of our listeners and also friends or colleagues of ours really believe in just like you’ve got to get something on the page first, and then we’ll have whatever you do to get something out, and then you can edit and refine it. I want to talk through the pros and cons and arguments for that, and why people may want to consider it, but also what our concerns were that– the pro arguments for the vomit draft were you just get the thing out as quickly as you possibly can. You don’t censor yourself. You don’t edit yourself. By suspending that internal critic, you’re actually just able to explore, to find out about stuff.

Some people really cannot see the movie until they can have a thing on the page that they can see. They make discoveries along the way. You can’t edit what doesn’t exist. A natural part of the editing process, sometimes that’s writing the whole thing. Kevin Williamson famously vomited-drafted Scream and just wrote it all in a fugue state.

Craig: Awesome.

John: It’s awesome. It’s great. The con arguments I would say is that I watch these videos where, if you’ve seen bricklayer videos or when you’re building something up from the base, if that first foundation isn’t strong and you’re trying to build something up, it gets wonky and crazy, and so it’s going to collapse and fall over. It can compound the fundamental flaws of something is that if you start writing without a plan, without trying to make sure every scene actually really works, it could just go 19 different ways haywire.

Craig: It’s hard for me to criticize people who do this because they must do it for a reason. It’s not how my mind works. I can certainly see the pluses and minuses of the not vomit draft. We’ve talked about a lot of the minuses. It is meticulous. It takes longer. You can find yourself mentally strangulated as you go. You can feel trapped. Sometimes you don’t finish.

John: No.

Craig: On the plus side, though, there is an enormous amount of intention and thought and cohesion. The thing about the vomit draft that scares me is what I would imagine to be just a general lack of cohesion. I’m not sure how you can vomit page 70 in a way that is reflected and made somehow inevitable and yet surprising based on what happened on page 20. It feels like it would be very much and then, and then, and then, and then, and very dialoguey or very actiony. There are dangers there that I can imagine, but I’m only imagining them because I’ve never done it, and I don’t know how to do it, and I’m never going to do it.

John: I’ll say, over the course of the podcast, we’ve talked with alternative strategies that I think are trying to do some of the things that a vomit draft does. When I don’t want to write a scene, I will write a different scene in the movie, but I’ll write a really good version of that, of a different scene in the movie, because I know what the scenes are in the movie.

Craig: Sure.

John: Katie Silverman, she’ll do basically a vomit draft, but with things that are not in the movie, she’ll just have the characters start talking so she can fully understand the characters and what the world feels like. That’s great. Maybe a thing people want to try independent of a vomit draft-

Craig: It’s a good exercise.

John: -is basically just getting stuff, words down on paper. I would say the other thing I noticed about vomit drafts is it’s so easy to fall in love with that first draft. The emotional attachment to the thing you did, and you have a sunk cost fallacy, but also you can fall in love with the temp music. You’ve all run into this, which is just like it’s working and it’s feeling good, and so you don’t want to change anything up.

Craig: Yes. What you do is you attach the feeling of success that you had as you were barfing to the barf, but other people just see barf. They don’t see or experience your feeling of purging and relief. That is important. That’s one positive thing that comes out of the meticulous plan draft is you don’t have that. You don’t get overattached to things. Everything is interrogated, examined, questioned, acid-tested, and so on.

John: I guess my final advice here is with vomit drafts and the good enough, not good enough, is if you’re struggling to get started, if you’re struggling with blank page anxiety, getting words on the page is probably a good first step for you, whether that becomes a full vomit draft or just like the roughest sketches of a scene. Alina often describes it as like walking into the ocean and letting the water get up to your ankles. It’s like, oh, suddenly you’re swimming.

Maybe vomit draft if you are often abandoning projects before you complete them, because I think sometimes we talk about burnout and that perfectionism burnout, like you just– the joy of completing a thing may be useful for you, and so the vomit draft may be the way to get there.

Craig: It’s worth trying, right? If one method isn’t working, try it. What’s the worst that can happen? You stop. It doesn’t work. You don’t get past page 3. I don’t know, but try things.

John: If you’ve tried vomit drafts and you’re not happy with them, I think the reason may be because you’re done with– the vomit draft, you can feel like, “Well, I’m done. I want to go on to the next thing.” You may have green pasture envy where it’s like, “Oh, I want to do this other thing instead.” You never actually go back and edit and finish that thing. That may be a reason why you actually need to scene by scene really do the best version of each of these scenes and really perfect a thing because then you’ll actually have the experience of what it feels like to have a really good script that you’re proud of.

Craig: Maybe people need to try both.

John: Yes. I’m surprised we got you there, Craig.

Craig: Yes. Give yourself a chance to see if– the whole concept of vomit draft is vomit. You’re not being held. It is vomit. Everybody knows this isn’t what we’re shooting. If you are maybe somebody that tends toward that too much, try the other method. Try meticulous planning.

John: I want to acknowledge that this is exactly counter to the advice that Scott Frank gave. It’s like, “Don’t move until you see it.”

Craig: That’s for me.

John: That’s for you.

Craig: That’s how I think. Don’t move until you see it. I know that that’s what works for me. Scott, God bless him. Scott’s way is the way that everybody must do it. I love that about Scott, but I am more interested, I suppose, in results because I know that great writers write differently. I’m pretty sure that– I know Scott and I don’t write the same way because he writes these very, very long drafts that he expects will be cut down.

John: There’s really not vomit drafts, but they’re more expansive than the form will actually allow.

Craig: They are unfettered by the restraints of the medium-

John: Yes, they are.

Craig: -which is awesome because it means that everybody can go through and say, “Okay, story, characters. This moment, this moment, this moment. Now, this is too big. We asked you to build a 12-seat plane. This is an incredible jumbo jet. How can we get all the best parts of the jumbo jet into the 12-seater?” and then he does. Point being, we all have our ways there. Find your way there. If your way there currently is not working, try a different way there.

John: Let’s answer some of your questions. We have one here from Alan.

Drew: ”Back in 2019, there was a huge fight between the WGA and the talent agencies over packaging. After everyone fired their agents, the agencies eventually signed an agreement that went into effect in June of 2022. Now, two and a half years later, has there been any real on-the-ground change, or have agencies found ways to work around the agreement and still offer packages to studios?”

John: Craig, I’m curious what you think about what has happened in two and a half years.

Craig: I don’t think that the agencies have found significant ways to work around the agreement. Here’s what happened. It definitely accelerated the shrinking of the number of agencies available to us, so conglomeration occurred.

John: Do you think that would have been different without the agency deal?

Craig: Yes.

John: Do you think there would have been more small agencies or what would–

Craig: Oh, I think ICM would still be there because what happens, once you took away a big part of what their income was, they were now exposed and vulnerable. We lost some diversity of agencies. CAA and WME arguably got more powerful. It’s almost like we were in a fight over what a beach should look like, and then a tsunami came, so it’s hard to tell.

John: There’s no counterfactual. We can’t know what the world would have been like if the agency campaign hadn’t happened. If agencies could still package the way they were packaging before, which we see, for newer listeners, we don’t understand, packaging is when you put together a writer with their script and a director and maybe some stars and sell that to a TV production company, sometimes a movie studio, but really it’s a TV thing. Agencies would do that, and then they would take a fee, and rather than charging their clients commission, they would take a percentage of the budget on every episode of a thing.

Craig: Which meant that they were essentially incentivized by the companies, not their own clients, and that was part of the problem.

John: Packaging still happens, but now they only get the commissions on their clients rather than a fee.

Craig: What we were hoping would happen might have happened, but shortly after that, the streaming wars accelerated dramatically. The massive television bubble began to burst, and huge tectonic changes occurred in our industry to the extent that I don’t know what this did because, like I said, it’s been tsunamied over by–

John: It wasn’t the biggest change in the industry by far.

Craig: No.

John: Much bigger things affected stuff, and so we can’t know quite what’s there. Also, the agencies themselves, we talk about CIA and WME, they entered into a lot of different spaces, and they were already starting to move into different things, representing sports, music, and other things, but just stuff that seems to have nothing to do with us. I think one of our concerns going into the campaign was that they weren’t prioritizing the actual needs of their clients, and the way they make their money isn’t off of us. That’s the big agency that is still kind of true. The money they’re making in the entertainment industry is off of us.

Craig: Yes.

John: That’s good.

Craig: That’s why they fight over clients tooth and nail. They would certainly argue that we are valuable to them.

John: I would say that as we started in the industry, the fighting over clients was a much bigger part of the story and drama of Hollywood, and it really isn’t a big deal now.

Craig: Well, because people don’t go anywhere because there’s fewer places to go.

John: There are fewer big places to go. It’s true.

Craig: When we started, there were CAA, UTA, ICM, William Morris, and there was Endeavor, and there was Gersh, which still is in Paradigm, and– what’s the artists and whatever? Anyway, and now it’s like there’s WME, CIA, UTA, then there’s a tier below, and then there’s nothing, and you don’t get moved around a lot because you don’t move– Even the agents don’t move around a lot anymore.

John: The other thing which changed, which had started before this, but certainly accelerated during it, is writers and directors and actors who just have managers who don’t have agents at all anymore, or who are also British people who have their UK agent who’s really up-prepping them in the US as well. I’ve seen that change happen.

Craig: Yes, the management thing is a big one, and management is worse. We were fighting the agencies over packaging. That’s all managers do. That is literally what they do. They exist to be producers on projects, which you can’t be as an agent, to not charge their clients commission, instead get all their money from the production. I don’t understand why–

John: As you’ve talked about, coming out of this, I signed a manager for the first time, and what’s been helpful as a highway manager is to have a person who can talk to anybody, who can call anybody because there’s no vested interest in their own agency. They have relationships that are different, which has been really, really helpful.

Craig: Yes, it really just comes down to who do they work for in the end.

John: Then they’ve been working for me.

Craig: That’s good.

John: The other thing which did change in the agency campaign, which is worth acknowledging, is that agencies now have to send every writer’s contract through to the guild, and so the guild has so much more information about every writer’s deal. To know how many weeks was this writer employed in this room, how many one-step writers have deals, that’s actually been helpful, even though, theoretically, all writers were supposed to send in–

Craig: We were supposed to per– yes. My question is, what are we able to do with all that data, exactly, other than look at it?

John: We can make choices in the negotiating cycle about what we’re going to do for things. The other thing we’ve done is WJA enforcement, contract enforcement, which is something I don’t know you like. We now know this writer had a guaranteed step and was not paid for this step. What happened here? We can actually proactively investigate these things.

Craig: I’d love to ask their lawyer, first and foremost, “Hey, why didn’t you do your job?”

John: Exactly.

Craig: That’s kind of crazy.

John: Yes.

Craig: I guess the long answer, short, Alan, for me is hard to tell what impact this has had. I think there have been positives and negatives. I do know that quite a few people were upset because, once this ended, and you could go back to your agent, their agent said, “No, we’re good. We don’t want you back.” I think a lot of those people were not being well-served by that agent to begin with, at that point, then.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I think they were just hearing from their long-distance girlfriend that it was over and that it was better because now they needed to find a representative that actually cared about them.

John: I think the overall goal of aligning incentives on a purely logical level happened, but what impact did that have on individual writers’ careers? Harder to say.

Craig: You know what? It just occurred to me that, maybe, the real value that we got out of that was that, regardless of what the companies thought of what we did, it appeared that we were committed to doing stuff, and that there was a unity there, and there was some sense of aggression. Now, did that ultimately matter? No, because then they said, “Fine, go on strike anyway,” and then we did. Maybe it was just even for our own internal sake that we thought, oh, we could do a thing and not fall apart, [unintelligible 00:58:19]

John: Then after that, we did the strike, and we did not fall apart.

Craig: We did not fall apart, yes.

John: Let’s answer one more question on bleeping. Moose has a question about bleeping.

Drew: Moose writes, “I’m an audio professional. I noticed that in episodes where someone drops a naughty word, you have the disclaimer at the beginning, and I’m wondering why you just don’t bleep out the offending words.”

John: How the sausage is made here, Craig and I don’t swear on the show if we can help it. We won’t–

Craig: I did today once.

John: Sometimes, if it’s a very easy lift, Matthew just snips it out, and you never notice it was there. Especially when we have guests on, and they swear, it’s just hard to take that stuff out. We want it to be authentic to what the experience was to have it in person.

Craig: We’re adults.

John: We’re adults. We’re making this podcast for adults, but also, your kids can be in the car, and so we’re just mindful of that. That’s why we put the little warning on, if there’s going to be some bad words.

Craig: Just culturally, it is so much different now than it used to be. When we were kids, saying the F-word was like, “Oh my God.” You would get sent to the principal. No one seems to give an F anymore. It’s like we have friends with younger kids.

It’s like language is not– because of the internet, I think, it’s just become less taboo. Context. There are words that we used to throw around that you wouldn’t get sent to the principal for, that now you do get sent to the principal for.

Also, context, if you’re using words in a sexual manner or something like that. Bleeping sounds stupid, mostly, is the answer.

John: I always notice bleeping. It’s not actually a big tradition of bleeping in podcasts. It’s not really a thing.

Craig: No, because we’re not on the air at CBS.

John: No, no.

Craig: It just doesn’t make much sense.

John: No. I agree. Let’s do our one cool thing. My one cool thing I mentioned earlier on, it’s a cinematographer. Her name is Valentina Vee. She is an L.A. or New York-based cinematographer and director. The thing she’s been doing recently is going through a show, in this case, Heated Rivalry, and talking about the specific choices that the director and cinematographer are making as they’re composing scenes. Things from blocking to locations to camera placement. Going through this, this is the sense I had while I was watching the show, but it’s really clear.

They have no coverage. There’s basically not a shot that they shot that’s not in the show, and so often, they’re basically just staying on one side. The camera’s never coming around to the other side, which is because they had an incredibly limited budget, and they had to maximize the value that they got out of that. These are directing choices, lighting choices, but fundamentally, they’re also writing choices.

That’s why I really encourage people to watch these videos that she does because, again, you’re seeing that the scenes are written in a way that they can be shot from one side, that it’s really about one character’s perspective. Therefore, it’s not important that we see the other people who are talking off the screen because it’s really about this one character’s reaction to what is being said.

Craig: One of my favorite things to do. I try very hard to cover things. I like options. I love an option, but as I talk about with my editors all the time, just because we have it doesn’t mean we have to use it. We don’t have to use any of it. We can just use one shot if we want, if it feels great, and we just want to stay there. Staying with somebody is terrific. Editing too much just because you have it, it just turns into ping pong, tucking head theater, and there’s no pace to it.

The question is, who do I want to be with right now, in this moment? Who do I want to be with? Who do I want to be looking at? If you know that you have limited time and limited coverage, get one shot right, and then just nab something fast just to give yourself some little hinge bit.

John: My suspicion is they didn’t even have time for [unintelligible 01:02:08]. In some cases, they’ve really boxed themselves in where they had no choice other than the master that they had, and it works really well.

Craig: When we’re shooting things in tight situations, there’s a shot that she does here where she has the two of them. They’re sitting in profile, sort of a mini master kind of thing, so we can see both of them. They’re looking at each other, and they are sitting against a mirror, which creates depth that isn’t there. If you put them against the wall, it’s a dead shot, but that creates depth. The problem is the mirror will also see the camera. Well, that’s an easy one for us. As long as they are not moving in front of the camera, you can paint it out, especially if the background sort of drops away.

If you have money in post to get rid of these things, getting the camera– I will tell you that because we’re a handheld show, the amount of times we have had to paint out one little bit of camera as it bobbed in because we really liked this shot, it’s just that as they were moving, A camera saw B, and then B goes, “Oh, shit,” and gets out of the way, but that’s okay.

John: It’s fine.

Craig: That’s okay. We do split screens. We do paint outs. We do blow-ups. There’s a billion ways to handle it. It’s more important to get the work in than it is to– and this is actually good enough, “Okay, do we have an eraser to erase this thing later? Then don’t worry about this. Just get this,” right?

John: Because the priority is, are you getting the performance or getting the shot overall? You can fix the other stuff.

Craig: Performance, shot, feeling. If I love it, if I feel something, if it’s making me cry, I don’t care if I can see the reflection of a crew person over there, I’ll get rid of it. One way or the other, I’ll get rid of it. It is so worth it. That is what people connect to. Obviously, people are connecting to Heated Rivalry, AKA the hockey show, in a profound way, and that means they did a great job with the time and resources they had.

John: What I like about this, she was not the GP on this show. She’s just breaking down shots she’s seeing from it, so she’s able to scribble on the screen and show where a camera was and stuff that was happening. It’s such a good example of a thing you can do in video that we just can’t do as well in audio because you were just describing a thing, but in a video, to actually draw and show is just so much more helpful. I just like that people are out there using the medium in ways that we don’t know how to use yet.

Craig: Yes. I think people are interested in the silly tricks. I think there’s probably a good video that I should do. After this season, I think what I’ll do is take a little time with one of my editors, Tim Good, and we’re going to put together a video called All the Tricks We Use because the tricks that you can use in editing are incredible and so helpful, and very helpful to know when you’re shooting because there are times where I will watch a take and think, with trick number seven, I can get rid of the flaw in this take because the rest of it was great.

John: Exactly.

Craig: Knowing what you can do is a big part of it.

John: It’s not all just VFX. An example that she points out is that there’s moments in the show where they just go to silhouette and where you’re not seeing actors’ faces, but it’s not important for the scene because it’s a physical comedy, but you don’t actually need to see the faces for it to work. By going to silhouette, there’s no crowd. The amount of extras they have is incredibly limited. They’re making shots so you wouldn’t see those people out there.

Craig: Yes. When you look at sports movies, always look in the stands, look in boxing, who’s out there. Boxing, in particular, it’s a ring that’s overlit and then a crowd that is underlit in total shadow because there’s no one there.

John: If the audio is creating the crowd.

Craig: When you watch actual boxing, the entire place is lit up like a Kmart. No one knows what a Kmart is. Walmart. It’s lit up like a Walmart. In movies about football and baseball, you’ll get a couple of select shots where they’ve either licensed the footage or they’ve done some CG people. Then it’s just 18 people at a time and in close-up.

John: The mastermarks are still good.

Craig: Yes. Everything. It’s all the product of many meetings.

John: We love it. Craig, what’s your one cool thing?

Craig: My one cool thing this week is a game, as it often is. This is for– well, I played it on iOS on my iPad. I’m a big fan of the Rusty Lake games. One of the things about those games that I love is how freaking weird they are, sometimes deeply disturbing.

John: They’re specifically weird, yes.

Craig: Yes, they’re very strange, surreal. I came across a game– there are a lot of knockoffs. I thought for a moment, “Oh, I think maybe this is going to be a Rusty Lake knockoff. I’ll play a Rusty Lake knockoff. I don’t care.” It was not a knockoff. The game is called Birth! It is made by an independent game designer named Madison Karrh. That’s K-A-R-R-H, which already I love. That’s because the spelling is gorgeous. What she’s done is made a fairly satisfying puzzle game. The puzzles are sometimes too easy, sometimes they’re tricky, but they’re beautiful-looking and so deeply weird. The entire thing is so deeply weird. When you get to the end of it, it’s also so sweet and satisfying. It’s art. It’s art. It’s a lovely game and also fun.

I run into a lot of these things. I’m just going to whisper about this because I don’t want the people that make these games to hear it, John.

John: All right.

Craig: There are like 5,000 games that you can get for your iPad that are about grief. They’re not really games. They’re just somebody talking about– it’s just a very obvious metaphor for grief. They’re games, and they’re not fun.

John: Same way that there are joke aways. There are things that have the structure of a joke, but they’re not actually funny because they’re like– you know.

Craig: Yes, they’re really just trading on sadness or whatever. This is a game.

John: Good.

Craig: It’s fun to play. She did a great job. Excellent work, Madison Karrh. Birth! Well worth playing.

John: Very nice. That is our show for this week. The description is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: I don’t think so.

John: Our show this week is by Eric Pearson. 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 like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast.

We have T-shirts, hoodies, and drinkwear. You’ll get those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers, especially the folks who’ve just signed up new for the holidays or new for 2026. Thank you. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on 26 for 26.

Craig, thanks for a perfect discussion of perfectionism and when good enough is good enough.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, in the outline here, I have a blog post I did called What I Did in 2025. I thought we might just review that first because I recognize that I’m not a person who remembers things. I don’t remember when things happened. Mike knows all that stuff. He can remember exactly what happened when and how things worked. I’ve been better at journaling this year, but I took a day and actually just went through what did I actually do in 2025? It was a lot.

This was the year I went to Egypt, Jordan, Dubai, and Mexico. We had the Big Fish 29-hour reading in New York City. We released Highland Pro. I got third place in Rachel Bloom’s Spelling Bee.

Craig: Pretty good.

John: It’s pretty good.

Craig: That’s a big deal.

John: We had two No Kings [unintelligible 01:10:43] tests, I did a half-marathon, went to Australia. I would say, overall, 2025 was a very shitty year for the world, but I had some good, fun things happen locally and personally, which was nice.

Craig: You say I never do this.

John: It’s the first time I’ve ever done this.

Craig: I just don’t look back. I mostly have feelings. I think about the feelings and moments and things, and there are these moments that stick out. I don’t really look back much. I’m all about right now and tomorrow.

John: I’m not generally a looking-back person, but I’m also a forward thinker. The second part of this conversation is, the last couple of years, Mike and I would do a 24 for 24, 25 for 25, 26 for 26, where we would basically share note and–

Craig: You know this is going to get tough. You see where this is going. This is going to be hard for you guys.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: The older you get, the more crap you have to do.

John: Yes. It’s a lot of stuff. This year, we had to find one extra thing, but it’s going to be a creep every year. It’s a fun thing. Basically, we have shared notes in Apple Notes. It’s like a checklist of things we mean to do over the course of the year.

Craig: I like that.

John: What’s different about this than a New Year’s resolution is they are specific things you want to do, and they’re not all laborious chores. We’ll go through some examples here. One of the things we need to do this year is sort and rationalize what we’re going to do with all our CDs and DVDs that we’ve not looked through in years. Do you still have all your DVDs and CDs?

Craig: No.

John: What did you do? You just got rid of them?

Craig: I have no idea where they are. It doesn’t matter. They’re gone. It’s gone. It’s over. They may exist somewhere, but I don’t know where.

John: Drew, do you have physical discs?

Drew: I have DVDs and Blu-rays. I have some CDs, but they’re just left over from when we bought CDs. I don’t even think I have the ability to listen to it, actually.

Craig: You can listen to it through your DVD player.

Drew: Probably.

Craig: I think so.

Drew: For a minute, my DVD player was broken, and I had a, “Do I just get rid of everything?”

Craig: I have a DVD player. I never use it.

John: For a while, we were playing Blu-rays through our old PlayStation, but then that gave up the ghost. Stewart gave our daughter some Blu-ray DVDs. She wanted to watch them. We didn’t have one, so we had to get a little cheap Blu-ray player, and then she didn’t remember to watch them.

Craig: Children.

John: Basically, we divided things into three categories; stuff around the home, stuff around L.A., and stuff that’s out of town [unintelligible 01:13:13] anywhere. We were revamping the room that we’re currently in, which is going to be our reserve recording studio. We already did the soundproofing. The wall behind you, Craig, looks crappy on camera because it’s just too blank and bare, so we’re going to introduce different stuff to that.

Craig: What are you going to do?

John: I’m not sure. We’re going to bring in somebody to help us figure that out.

Craig: You know I’m not going to be here, right?

John: No. When do you come back from–

Craig: Okay. My heart stopped for a second. I’m like, “Wait.”

John: While you’re gone, some of the time, there’ll be famous people who’ll come in. We’ll record some of that stuff.

Craig: Love famous people.

John: While you’re gone.

Craig: They’re famous for a reason, you know.

John: We’ll do three game nights. We love having people over for game nights.

Craig: Amazing.

John: You love game nights.

Craig: We love game nights.

John: We’ll do some pool parties. Around town, three restaurants in unfamiliar neighborhoods. Often, our food-related thing was three new cuisines, like ethnic cuisines, but we basically run out of ethnic cuisines. We got to Bangladeshi, and it’s like, “I think we’re good here.”

Craig: Near the end.

John: “We’re near the end.” Two escape rooms. I need to make it back to Catalina.

Craig: Sorry, you said two?

John: Two.

Craig: No, no, no, no, no.

John: Got to do more than two.

Craig: Got to do more than two.

John: We only did one escape room this entire year. We did the new one as– the downtown.

Craig: Here’s an extra one cool thing for you. Melissa and I did this with our friends Cle and Mia. There’s an escape room up in Santa Clarita.

John: I’ve heard. They have a–

Craig: It’s called Appleseed Avenue. Fantastic. Must do. Must.

John: Drew went with us to the one we did this last month. What was it called?

Drew: It was The Lost Cat?

John: It’s downtown. What I liked about it, the general concept is this old woman has lost her cat, and you find her cat.

Craig: Did it.

John: Did it. Good and solid.

Craig: It was cute.

John: Cute. Good time.

Craig: It was cute when the stuff fell down. That’s fun.

John: Love it. Then some out-of-town stuff. We’ll do another half-marathon. We’re going to visit one new country and then see some concerts and some shows. What I’m stressing here is that some stuff is work. We’re basically dealing with our CDs, DVDs, repainting the kitchen chairs, tuning the piano. Most of it is just like– inertia will just keep you on the couch and not doing a thing. Their challenge is for yourself to actually just get out and do your thing. It doesn’t feel like work. It scratches that check-off span of the list to actually like, “Okay, we’ve got to see a concert. What concert are we going to go see?”

Craig: I love doing nothing.

John: You love doing nothing.

Craig: Oh, my God.

John: You love playing a game. You love playing a little rest-your-leg game.

Craig: Doing puzzles, playing games. It’s just joy. That’s the thing. Follow your heart. I’ve never been a checklist person. I’ve never been somebody who’s like, “I should do blank.” If I hear the word should in front of something, I’m like, “Do I want to?”

John: You’ve got to recontextualize. “I want to do this thing. I want to remember that I want to do this thing.”

Craig: That’s the thing. Do I actually want to do this thing? I’ve really gotten it down to, I just do the things I want to do, and I don’t do the things I don’t want to do.

John: You prioritize D&D, which is nice.

Craig: Because I want to. That’s the beautiful part.

John: Looking at the blog post here, I misspoke in the main episode. We actually played 39 sessions of D&D because I did miss a few.

Craig: 39. Solid.

John: It’s a lot. Craig, you are going to be off shooting a new season of the show.

Craig: Yes.

John: What other, I don’t want to say goals, but what else do you envision for your 2026? What do you think would, at the end of 2026, just like, “Yes, that was a good year.”? What are some things that would have happened?

Craig: If I am alive at the end of 2026, I will feel great. This is going to be a difficult production because of the size of it and the things we have to do. It’s going to be tough, and the length of it. My goal is alive. I want to try and make sure that my blood sugar stays– my big task is keeping my blood sugar at a healthy number, which I’ve been able to do. I keep my eye on that, and I continue to reflect on some of my mental health pluses and minuses.

John: Sure.

Craig: I’m looking forward to working with the people that I have worked with before that I love, and some new people that I know I’m going to love that I’ve met, and I’m very excited about. Then there’s just the adventure aspect of it. It’s an adventure. That’s the thing. This list of doing stuff, I’m going to hike, stay up all night, see a forest fire, do this. There’s going to be 200 things that I’m going to do because of the show that’s like, “That’s my living.” When I say see a forest fire, we don’t actually have fire. I don’t know why I said that. We’re not lighting a forest on fire, don’t worry, but we are going to do some crazy stuff. That’s where all the living comes in.

That’s my big goal, and to keep playing D&D throughout it all because–

John: Absolutely. You’re starting a whole new campaign for it, so I’m excited.

Craig: Starting a whole new campaign. It keeps me sane. It’s my thing. It’s what I’m allowed to do for me. Everybody knows it. You got to carve out some stuff.

John: You’ve got to carve out some time.

Craig: You’ve got to carve out time.

John: Basically, be yourself. One of my nervous breakdown during my TV show is basically I existed only for the show, and I was stuck in this impossible place.

Craig: I exist almost entirely for the show, and then I carve out a little bit.

John: Nice. Craig, felicitations on this past year.

Craig: Likewise.

John: I hope it’s a great upcoming year.

Craig: I think it’s going to be a fine year for the two of us.

John: I hope so, too.

Craig: Drew, Happy New Year.

Drew: Happy New Year. I thought you were going to say, “Maybe not for you.”

Craig: What a horrible way to start 2026.

Drew: Good luck.

Craig: For Drew–

John: You’re fired.

Craig: Yes, you’re fired.

[laughter]

Drew: I knew it was coming. Thanks.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Links:

• Jamie Lee Curtis says “Trauma”
• Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology by Nick Haslam
• Young Connor Storrie on YouTube
• Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone
• Elon Musk announces the Cybertruck
• Valentina Vee on TikTok and Instagram
• Birth by Madison Karrh
• John’s What I Did in 2025
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: Okay. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 718 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, you may have heard us discuss industry euphemisms, but really, no worries if not. At the end of the day, we’re bumping this just in case you got buried. Whether you’re coming up for air after the holidays or just getting your ducks in a row, we want to be respectful of everyone’s time as we discuss stock phrases that are endemic to Hollywood. We’ll also run down the numbers on Scriptnotes, both the podcast and the book. We’ll answer listener questions, including what’s the deal with video podcasts?

Craig: What is the deal?

John: In our bonus segment for premium members, how do you deal with a difficult collaborator? We’ll talk about that. We have no experience. In theory, what would it be like to deal with a difficult collaborator, Craig? In theory, in theory.

Craig: No, it’s entirely theoretical.

John: It’s all entirely theoretical. This episode, we’re recording on December 14th, but it’s coming out enough later that there was news, but the news is going to be so outdated by the time we actually air this episode. Disney made a deal with OpenAI to license characters and give OpenAI $1 billion.

Craig: Yes, notice that.

John: Notice that. Paramount is now doing a hostile bid for Warner Bros. We don’t know how this is all going to sort out.

Craig: That won’t have changed by the time this episode comes out. That’s going to take a while, yes.

John: It’s going to take a while. Everything’s going to take a while.

Craig: Everything will take some time.

John: Yes, I’m not delighted by any of this news, frankly.

Craig: No. In general, we don’t want fewer entities that pay for our work, but it’s happening.

John: It’s happening. On the whole, I’m not excited by companies that distribute our product, making deals with AI companies to train models on our stuff. Don’t love that.

Craig: I really don’t like that. It’s interesting. I was reading about this. Disney, I think, probably is looking and saying, “Hey, people are going to be using this to take Iron Man and do stuff. We want to just get paid for it. What we’ll do is we’ll just let you have Iron Man.” It’s a little bit like the music industry saying to Spotify, “Okay, we’ll let you have it if you just give us $0.04 a track.” That feels like what’s going on here.

Now, one thing that I thought was amusing was Disney said, and OpenAI said, that there will be, of course, restrictions on the kinds of things you can do with their characters. No, there won’t. No, there won’t. People are going to get around that, and there’s going to be some pretty messed up Rule 34-type stuff out there. That’s just inevitable.

John: Inevitably, like the non-licensed versions, that stuff that’s not on Sora, there’s going to be wild stuff that’s happening there, too. I can understand if Disney wants to have some sort of walled garden where they can theoretically control a little bit of it all, but I just don’t think it’s great for the business at all. I think it’s too early in this process for people to start making these giant deals on their licensed characters. It’s the fact that OpenAI and these companies already stole a bunch of this stuff and adjusted it, and we’re spitting stuff out.

It’s complicated, and we won’t get into it today. Instead, we’ll do some actual follow-up on something we have a definitive answer on, which was way back in Episode 620, we talked about this producer named Carl Rinsch.

Craig: Oh, my God, Carl Rinsch. I remember this guy.

John: Yes. Basically, he was a filmmaker who had done other movies beforehand, and basically was making a movie for Netflix, and basically kept asking for more money and more money and more money. Sorry, it was a series, not a movie. We talked about this guy who was just like, they were now suing him for all this money they’d taken from Netflix without actually delivering a movie. Now, there was a verdict. Drew, talk us through what we learned.

Craig: Yes. I assume the verdict is true.

Drew Marquardt: He’s guilty-

Craig: Of course, he’s guilty. Of course.

Drew: -for scamming Netflix out of over $11 million over this series, and he faces up to 90 years behind bars.

Craig: Oh, my God. [laughs]

John: He won’t serve 90 years.

[laughter]

John: That’s crazy.

Craig: I don’t know how old this guy is, but he’s probably, what, 40 or something? 45?

Drew: Probably somewhere in there.

Craig: I just like the idea of this dude being that 90-year-old in prison, and people are like, “This guy’s been here forever. Why?”

John: He must have done something absolutely horrendous. He took a bunch of money from Netflix.

Craig: Yes, he just didn’t– he did not do–

John: He didn’t deliver.

Craig: He didn’t deliver on a series. [chuckles] What do we think he’s going to serve? Two years? One?

John: Yes, it’s tough. Trump can’t commute this because it is a civil suit.

Craig: Well, is this something that was on his radar? [laughs]

John: No, but things are often not on his radar. He’s often trying to pardon people he has no ability to pardon, so we’ll see. It’ll be much less than that. He did a bad thing. You should pay money if you did a bad thing.

Craig: The last time somebody with a name like Carl Rinsch was sentenced to 90 years, it was at the Nuremberg trials.

[laughter]

Craig: This guy’s got the most German name. Carl Rinsch.

John: Carl Rinsch.

Craig: Yes, Carl Rinsch. You shouldn’t have done that, Carl. I don’t know what to say. It’s not like Netflix is going to miss that money or anything, but you can’t do that.

John: You can’t do that. No, it’s bad. I guess the interesting angle on this story is every producer, every filmmaker is selling smoke for a long time. It’s that delusional ability to say, “Oh, no, this is really going to happen.” You respect that. That’s the chutzpah. That’s the ability to hustle and get things made. You cross a line at some point. Where is that line is an interesting thing to explore.

Craig: I think the general magic trick is to get somebody to give you money. All the tricks are there. Once the money comes, then if you are a producer, you have to then mush everybody together to get the next thing, to get the script, to get the green light. If you do nothing, which is not normal, [chuckles] then you go to prison, apparently, or give the money back. I don’t know.

John: Famously, the producers is about that. That’s the funny comedy version of this is this was not a comedy, apparently. You can imagine the comedy version of this.

Craig: Even the producers put a show on.

John: They did. They put on a show.

Craig: They just wanted it to be a failure. This guy didn’t even do that. He apparently–

John: He represented himself, which is always–

Craig: Oh, no.

John: That’s also the comedy.

Craig: Our good friend, Ken White, who is a former federal prosecutor, now a defense attorney, shows up on all sorts of podcasts and things.

John: He came on our show to talk through legal stuff.

Craig: Exactly. There are a couple of things that just make his eyes roll in the back of his head in anger. One of them is people representing themselves. His feeling is like 90% of the lawyers you get can barely represent you. [laughs] You need a good lawyer.

John: A doctor shouldn’t perform surgery on himself either.

Craig: No, no.

John: You hear stories of the doctor who was isolated in Antarctica that had to do surgery to himself. That’s why it’s so rare because there’s talented people around you who should do that.

Craig: This guy isn’t even a doctor. This is a patient doing surgery on himself. [chuckles] It’s just idiotic. Don’t do that. No pro se, please.

John: No. We have two bits of feedback and follow-up on the Scriptnotes book, including a mistake that we made that none of our many readers caught that made it through into the book. What did Anthony say?

Drew: Anthony said, “Loving the book, such a wonderful distillation of your show. This is such a silly quibble. I almost didn’t send it, but as a lifelong Trekkie, I couldn’t let it go. On page 32, in the section at the bottom titled, Does This Story Travel or Stay Put, you illustrate your point with several iconic sets around which several popular shows are anchored. For Star Trek, however, you call it the ‘deck’ when it should more accurately read the ‘bridge’ of the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek.”

Craig: Oh, yes. The Enterprise does have decks, but that space is the bridge.

John: It’s the bridge, absolutely.

Craig: Well, I don’t know about you, John, but I think it’s time to end it all. That is so embarrassing that we need to just–

John: We need to call back every issue-

Craig: Or die.

John: -or every volume that has been sold of the Scriptnotes book, and just bring it back.

Craig: Hey, second edition, right?

John: There will be a second edition at some point. We can probably fix that in the second edition. What I’ll say is that if you have the book in front of you, flip to page 32. Please carefully cross out the word “deck,” write in “bridge,” and then at least you fixed your one personal copy.

Craig: Anthony, I appreciate this. You’re absolutely right. The good news is people who love Star Trek are notoriously flexible. These things–

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Anthony is the nicest person in the world, by the way, because I feel like 90% of people would have just thrown the book across the room in anger. Thank you, Anthony, and we’re sorry.

John: It has sharp corners. It’s not that heavy, but it has sharp corners. You could have hurt somebody.

Craig: Oh, absolutely.

John: Another bit of follow-up from Charles.

Drew: “I heard Craig speculate that the new Scriptnotes book is maybe the only book that exists about how to write screenplays for movies or TV that is written by two people or a person who’s repeatedly done that job for decades. While he’s correct that most are by people who have never repeatedly held the job, there is a book on screenwriting written by not one, but two people who have repeatedly done the job for decades. Might I bring your attention to Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too! by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant.”

Craig: Absolutely right. Lennon and Garant are great.

John: Yes, they’re really lovely people.

Craig: That’s true. I forgot. I forgot. It’s a great book, though. That’s a really funny book, too. It’s different.

John: It’s a very different book.

Craig: It’s a very different book, but it’s very funny. Everything that–

John: It’s much more memoir-y than ours is.

Craig: Yes, but those guys are hysterical. Love those guys. That’s awesome.

John: Cool. All right. Let’s move on to our marquee topic. This was suggested by none other than Megana Rao.

Craig: Then it’s going to be good.

John: Our beloved producer from the past. The framing for this is sometimes in Hollywood, in this industry, you say a thing that covers over for what you actually want. It’s a euphemism or it’s a stock phrase that everyone knows the meaning of, but it gets away from saying the actual harder thing that you don’t want to say. Megana’s first suggestion for this was, “No worries if not,” which is a thing you say in an email which gives the other person out because it’s the end, so you don’t come across as too demanding.

Craig: It’s not passive-aggressive. It’s just–

John: It’s just submissive. It’s like a dog rolling over on your back.

Craig: It’s weasel-wording because “yes worries if not,” really. Yes worries. Why would I have asked you? “Yes worries if not,” it’s actually a very useful phrase if you’re asking somebody that works for you to not come off as too pushy about something. They understand if you’re asking for it and you do it. “No worries if not” is a nice way of just saying, “But I’m nice.” [chuckles]

John: I probably used versions of this for something with Drew saying, “This would be my preference, but if the other thing happened, that’s also okay.”

Craig: That is much clearer than this. This is, yes, “No worries if not” is, “I worry.” I immediately start worrying if someone tells me to not worry.

John: “No worries at all,” I think, is an Australian phrase that came over to California. The “no worries if not” probably is a morphed version of that, which is a specialized version. Drew, I proposed this to you on Thursday or Friday, and then you came up with a whole list of– I think you crowdsourced from your friends, a whole list of these industry terms.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: Drew, if you could read us the term, and then we’ll have a little discussion about what it actually really means and what the use of it is.

Drew: We’re playing phone tag.

John: Yes. Sometimes you’re just actually calling what it is. Basically, we keep going back and forth, but also there’s sometimes a little bit of a password. I feel like, I think you’re dodging me or there’s a reason why we’re not connecting here. Because we’re playing phone tag, I’m now just going to tell you in an email what it is I actually want.

Craig: I only use we’re playing phone tag so that the other person knows that I called them back because sometimes I just wonder, okay, I get a call from somebody, I miss it. I call them back, they miss it. They call me the next day, I miss it. Now, I’m like, “Did they know, or is this a second call because somebody didn’t tell them?”

John: Sometimes you forget like, “Did I initiate this? Did they initiate this? Did you already have your answer?”

Craig: I just want them to know I was trying. That’s all. I tried.

John: Next up.

Drew: “Bumping this.” These first ones are for emails, so “bumping this.”

Craig: “Bumping this.”

John: I had to do a “bumping this” this week when I’ve not gotten a response back on a thing, and I do need a response, and so, like, “Hey, bumping this because I need to know this thing.”

Craig: Bump has become this multi-purpose word. It wasn’t around when I started, but then somewhere along the line, this “bumped me” became a thing in notes, like meaning I was reading, and then, suddenly, I was jarred and did not like something or did not understand something. It bumped me. Then “bumping this” also became– I think it might come from programming or something, like bumping something.

John: Like push and pop. It’s like if we’re at the top of the stack.

Craig: Exactly. You’re bumping the stack. This then became like, “I’m bumping this,” and I will get bumping this– I receive bumps constantly like just, “Remember the thing?” It’s actually a nice way of saying, “You never answered my question.”

John: Which is related to the next euphemism here.

Drew: “In case this got buried.”

[laughter]

John: There’s a little more passive-aggressive about that. It’s like, “Here’s the thing you didn’t see.” Actually, though, just today, Craig and I, you had an exchange. You’d send a long email with stuff for the next D&D campaign. Had I actually read the email fully and carefully, I wouldn’t have made the mistake that I made.

Craig: You know what? It got buried. [laughs] No, but that’s why “in case this got buried” is definitely passive-aggressive. That is just saying, “Oh, I’m sure you have so many emails, but–”

John: What’s fascinating about it is it’s passive-aggressive, but it’s also giving them an out.

Craig: That’s the passive part.

John: That is the passive part, yes.

Craig: Yes, but it’s aggressive.

John: Yes.

Drew: “Got caught in my outbox.”

Craig: Oh, please. I’ve never heard that one. If I ever do, I’ll be like, “Oh, please.”

John: This has happened to me once or twice in real life where it’s like, I see a draft that I actually just never sent. I did reply to them, and I realized like, “Oh, no, it actually never went through because it’s just how stuff got threaded.”

Craig: I would believe, I guess, if somebody phrased it as, “I literally never hit send.” It’s been the emails behind a window, another thing. I would get that “caught in my outbox” sounds a little fishy.

Drew: “Coming up for air” after Sundance, holidays, whatever.

Craig: Yes, “coming up for air.” I use that one constantly. Constantly. “I’ll be coming up for air.” When did that start? I don’t even know.

John: I don’t know. I’m sure we could do a Google Ngram search for when stuff actually started appearing in texts. It’s related to a concept of submarining for me, which is submarining where you just immerse yourself so completely in a project, in a relationship, or whatever. It’s just like you just disappeared off the face of the earth. You do come back up for like, “Oh, wow, the rest of the world is still out there. I haven’t dealt with all these things.”

Craig: Yes, there are these times where you are plunged into some process. Sometimes it’s production, but sometimes you’re doing promotion stuff or you’re writing a draft. You have to just focus on that thing, but you tell somebody, “At this time, I’ll be coming up for air, and then we can sit down. It’s just not a great time now because I’m stuck doing all this stuff.” That’s a perfectly fine euphemism. It’s not even a euphemism.

John: It’s a stock phrase. It’s a thingy.

Craig: Yes, it’s a stock phrase, yes.

John: I remember, I think back when I was in Stark. I was interning for somebody, and another friend was interning someplace. We’re talking about this filmmaker who said, “Oh, I won’t be able to do any of that stuff because I’ll be doing award season promotion stuff.” I’m like, “Really? You really think you’re going to be busy doing that?”

Craig: It’s presumptuous.

John: It’s presumptuous, yes. That filmmaker was actually correct, and I just had no sense of, like, “Oh, you’re going to lose multiple weeks just doing that promotional stuff.”

Craig: It’s insane. It’s a job. It’s a job. Oh, boy. I can’t say that I enjoy the job, but I’m not supposed to. The actors, I think, are better at it. Also, just more people want to talk to them because they’re actors, and it’s fun, and they have more practice with it. It does blow my mind how busy it is. I am often reminded by the women that I work with that it is busier for them because these events, like hair and makeup, which I always– There’s a lovely woman named Sue, who does my makeup for these things. That means just take the massive shine off his bald head and try and help his eye bags a little. It’s hours in makeup, hours in hair sometimes for the women–

John: For these women, not for you.

Craig: Correct.

John: You’re not spending hours to make that up.

Craig: No, and I have no hair.

John: Exactly. Makes life easy.

Craig: Yes, so they’re waking up early, and then there’s four hours of this stuff. Then they go to do the event, then they got to take it all off. It is a job. It’s nuts.

Drew: “Just needed to get ducks in a row on our side.”

John: “Here’s why you have not heard back from us. We know we need to respond to this thing, but we have not responded to this thing. We’re acknowledging that it’s taken a while.” Likely, in my experience, it’s just like there’s a higher-level person. There’s a boss who hadn’t read it. The lower people knew what their opinion was, but they couldn’t actually say that until the higher-level person did this. I just turned in a project last week, which I know I will not hear anything back from until after New Year’s, which is great and normal, but it’s all waiting on the big boss to read it.

Craig: I will typically hear people say, “Just give us a few weeks to get our ducks in a row.” “Our ducks in a row” means get the sign-offs from the people that need to sign off. I don’t know why “ducks in a row” is the euphemism we use, but it’s better than saying, “Just give me a few weeks. I’m not powerful enough to say yes.”

Drew: This next one’s a very assistant one. When you’re sending avails out, you say, “Let me know if any of these don’t work, and I’ll see what I can open up.”

John: I love that embedded in there, Drew used the word “avails,” which is, I think, a specific LA term as well, which is availability. It’s like when are there openings in a person’s schedule. Craig’s avails are very limited. Drew is always checking with Craig’s assistant for when he’s available to do things. I get busier at times, too, and so my availabilities are limited.

Specifically, the phrase that you’re putting out here, “Let me know if any of these avails don’t work. I’ll see what I can open up.” What are you really covering for when you say that?

Drew: It’s basically, “My boss has more free time than I’m telling you that they do, but I’m just giving you limited windows to make us seem busy.”

Craig: Yes, there are these three moments that work for next week or literally any other moment, yes.

John: Sometimes you open with misleading specificity, like, “How about 3:30 on Wednesday?” It turns out, really, the whole day is free.

Craig: This also may be code for, “My boss is busy. These are the times he is available, but your boss is more powerful than my boss, and he will move stuff for you.” It’s a nice way of indicating, “Okay.” I like this whole quiet assistant code. It’s interesting.

Drew: Along those lines, “Something came up that won’t be able to move.”

Craig: Oh, yes. No, that’s a a court case, probably.

[laughter]

John: Also, it’s vague enough. It’s like, “Oh, my God, is it the person having surgery?”

Craig: I went to the personal immediately. I’m like, “Okay, this is not work stuff.” That’s the end of that. Won’t be able to move. Okay, that’s not happening there. Oh, this next one.

Drew: “We’re waiting to hear what the team thought.”

Craig: I’ll tell you what the team thought. The team thought, “No.”

John: Drew has written down here, “Slow motion pass,” and that’s what it is. It’s just like, “We’re passing, but,” duh-duh-duh.

Craig: “We’re waiting to hear what the team thought.” Either you have no idea because you’re so low on the totem pole, and that means that they don’t care what you think, or you’re pretty high up on the totem pole and you just want to blame your team for passing. Either way, it’s not good.

Drew: “Let’s keep in touch in the context of a pass.”

Craig: Oh, no.

John: It’s no.

Craig: We can still be friends.

John: Yes, absolutely. We don’t hate you. It’s just that it’s not for us.

Drew: “It’s not quite right for us at the moment.”

Craig: I love the “quite.” “It’s not quite right for us at the moment.”

John: We all know what it means. Again, it’s a kind pass.

Craig: That means no.

John: Yes. Rarely are you going to hear a harsh pass where they hated it. They’re never going to say that. Your reps are never going to tell you that. Sometimes the real answer is like, “No, absolutely not.”

Craig: They didn’t like it. They didn’t like it. They didn’t like it. The end.

Drew: Or, “They didn’t spark to it.”

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, they didn’t spark to it. Just the spark. Ding.

John: Here’s one that I added. “We’re looking for noisy projects.” Have you heard “noisy” is a good term?

Craig: I have heard noisy, yes.

John: Craig, tell me about what noisy means to you.

Craig: Noisy means something that gets people buzzing either in town or in the trades or people in social media like, “Zzzz.” KPop Demon Hunters was incredibly noisy. There are also things that get announced as development projects that are noisy. Then often what happens is years go by and the noise never turns into anything. They like stuff that gets people chattering.

John: Yes. The chatter doesn’t have to be entirely positive. It can get people upset, and that can also create some noise. Just anything that feels a little provocative or not safe and down the middle of the road is good. We’re recording this before Wuthering Heights has come out. My anticipation is it’s a noisy title. Whether people like it or hate it, it will get attention because of just the noise around it, which can be really nice.

Craig: Yes, yes, yes.

John: Drew, help us out.

Drew: “We’re not the right place for it.”

[laughter]

John: What I like about this is, “Basically, that’s actually a pretty good idea, but we just can’t do it.” I think it’s sometimes a nice thing to say, which is not really accurate. Sometimes it’s actually true. It’s just like, yes, that’s a movie that someone else could make, but it’s not for us.

Craig: Really, that’s like saying to somebody that asks you out, “I’m not the right person for you,” meaning, “I’m not right.” They don’t like it. There are so many ways of saying, “I don’t like it.”

John: Yes, but if you’re pitching an A24 movie to Imagine, that’s the–

Craig: Okay, but you won’t even get through the door, right?

John: This is real talk here. When I will go out with a project, like there was a Mattel project that I was attached to, and so we would make our list of, like, “Here are the places that seem like a good fit.” A lot of other places would want it because they wanted to be in businesses with me, which is lovely and flattering. If I end up pitching these places, it’s like, “You really aren’t going to do this movie.” It was just wasting people’s time. That’s why I wish we’re not the right place for it. It was more obvious at the start.

Craig: If somebody is like, “Look, I know you’re pitching something that is a Mattel thing. We don’t make things like that, but we want to hear the pitch anyway.” They really can’t then say after, “We like it. It’s just we’re not the right place for it.” No shit. We all said that, but it’s more like when they are the right place for it. [chuckles]

John: I think a 2026 goal for me, which maybe based on other stuff that I’m working on, but it’s just to be a little bit more brutal about like, “No, I’m not even going to do that meeting on that Zoom because there’s no point to it.”

Craig: There’s no point.

John: There’s no point.

Craig: There’s no point. Then this next one.

Drew: “They liked it. They just didn’t connect with it.”

Craig: Yes, they didn’t like it at all. [laughs]

John: They didn’t like it, no.

Craig: “I like it. It’s just that I don’t like it.”

John: I also hear like, “I wanted to like it, but I didn’t.”

Craig: They always want to like it.

Drew: “It didn’t fully land for us.”

Craig: Right. If a plane doesn’t fully land, that means it crashes in a fireball. [laughs] It didn’t fully land.

Drew: “We’re looking for something camera-ready.”

Craig: Oh, please. No, you’re not. Nobody knows what that is. Get out of here.

John: You know what camera-ready is? It’s a script that’s already written. It’s not a pitch.

Craig: You’re looking for something camera-ready. It’s a script, a budget, a schedule, a cast, a crew. I mean, please. “We’re looking for something camera-ready.” Yes. Oh, God. Dumb.

Drew: “Well-told.”

Craig: Oh, well-told.

John: Well-told. Oh, my God. I’ve gotten a couple of well-tolds. I just want to just turn off the Zoom-

Craig: -and commit seppuku. Well-told is what they say after you pitch them something. They don’t want it, and they were bored. They say, “Well-told.” You did a good job putting all those sentences in the air with your mouth full. “We don’t like them, but well-told.”

John: To me, that is like you just saw your friend’s play and it was awful. It’s like, “You were up there on stage. Wow. It was great to see you up there on that stage. Well-told.”

Craig: Well-told. Oh, yes, like, “You did it. You did it. Yes, well-told.” Oh, this next one is– I don’t know. This next one is– yes, it’s bad.

John: It’s bad. It’s ambiguous. It’s not always bad, but let’s–

Craig: It’s mostly bad.

Drew: “Let’s revisit after the holidays.”

Craig: Yes. Which holiday? Christmas 2000-and-never? That’s just like if you want something, and here’s what happens. All this stuff gets put in context once you do something that people want. Suddenly, there’s nothing that could be faster. They were like, “Well, there are three people that want this. They want it now. They want it two minutes ago. They don’t want to wait until tomorrow. Here’s an offer. It’s on the table right now, and if you turn it down, it’s gone forever.” It’s never, “We really want this. Let’s just not do anything about it for a while.”

John: The situation where it’s not a pass, where it’s like if you’re talking with your reps about a project to take out or stuff like that, like, “Let’s revisit after the holidays,” yes, that makes sense. Going out after director, that’s a thing that’s an absolutely valid thing because you don’t want to approach people generally this week in December. It’s just like everyone’s busy with other stuff.

Craig: Yes, and just fair.

John: Yes.

Drew: “I’ll defer to the team.”

Craig: What does that mean? What does that mean?

John: What does it mean, Drew?

Drew: You have a disagreement about a thing, but you don’t care enough to fight about it. You’ll let other people make the decisions.

Craig: Oh, “I’ll defer to the team.”

John: Yes, but the fact that you’re actually saying it out loud means that you are stating that you have a disagreement with it. It’s sometimes a useful piece of information, but yes. I haven’t heard it yet. Now, my ears will be open for it.

Craig: Yes, for team deferral.

Drew: “I want to be respectful of everyone’s time.”

Craig: [laughs] That means–

John: I’ve said this on Zooms, too, where it’s like, “This is going on a little long. We need to be done here.”

Craig: Yes, “I want to be respectful of my time.”

John: Yes, and often you’re saying that because there’s people who are on the East Coast or in London, and it’s 2:00 in the morning. It’s like, “Let’s just be done.”

Craig: Or not, or everyone’s in Los Angeles, and this is boring, and it’s too much. The phone version, well, yes, because that feels like a Zoom thing. The phone version that blew my mind the first time I heard it was, “Well, I’m going to let you go.” Well, I’m going to let you go. “I know you have been dying to get up this phone call. I’m going to let you get off the phone. Really, you weren’t dying to get up this phone call. I am. I’m hitting eject.” It blew my mind. I was like, “Oh, thank you for this lovely gift.”

John: My friend Erin Gibson will make fun of me because I have this thing where we’ll go to lunch. At a certain point, “Okay. Well, this was great.” She’s like, “Wow, you just stopped the lunch.” It was like, I’m done. I’m just trying to acknowledge the fact that this lunch is over, and we don’t need to keep dragging it out for another 15 minutes to think about it. This was great, and I’m stopping it.

Craig: I think the problem, if I may, is the tense. “This was great,” as in I unilaterally decided it ended before I said that statement. You get no participation in it. [chuckles]

John: Craig, correct me. How would you end the lunch?

Craig: I would say “has been” instead of “was.” “This has been lovely.”

John: Realistically, I was doing it. The constant presence of–

Craig: Sometimes I like to go, “Okay, I’ve had the best time. What are you doing next? What are you doing next today? Tell me what you’re doing next,” and then you–

John: Thinking for the future.

Craig: Obviously, talking about what’s coming right after this lunch gets everybody generally motivated to GTFO. What you do is nothing compared to what our friend Derek does.

John: Tell me.

Craig: Let’s say Melissa and I are out to dinner with Derek and Christy. It’s never the wrong point. It’s a point where he would just go, “Okay, I’m done. We’re going. Let’s go. Christy, we’re going.”

[laughter]

Craig: We’ve been at their house where like a bunch of people, like 10 people, and then Derek will go, “Okay, it’s over.” [chuckles] Christy is always like, “Derek. Derek.” He goes, “What? They’ve been here forever. It’s over.”

[laughter]

Craig: It’s actually awesome because we all know that he just is going to pull the plug, and that’s that.

John: I respect that. A little candor, a little honesty there.

Drew: I prefer the clean break.

Craig: Yes, it’s the opposite of the Irish goodbye.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: Oh, I have the best Irish goodbye. You know my ghost strategy?

John: Tell me.

Craig: I love to ghost. That’s my favorite thing. I’m at a party. In my mind, I’m like, “It’s time. It’s time for the ghosting.” I’ll start moving towards the door. I’m hoping that, at some point, and usually do, somebody’s like, “Are you leaving?” Then I go, “No, I don’t. I’m not Irish goodbying. I’m heading to the restroom, but I’ll be right back,” then I go.

John: They’re worried about you. “Craig, he said he wasn’t leaving, so something’s wrong.”

Craig: I say I am not doing it, so then if they don’t see me, they’re like, “Well, no, he didn’t leave. He said specifically he wasn’t going to do that. He’s somewhere.”

Drew: Diabolical.

Craig: Yes, but I’m gone. You know where I am? In my bed.
[laughter]

John: No, Craig actually does. He says that, and then he goes to the bathroom. He locks the door on the bathroom and then closes it. It seems like he’s locked in the bathroom. Everyone’s like, “What’s happened?” Meanwhile, there’s a line forming.

Craig: Yes. No, I lock the door, climb out the window. There’s not enough bathroom windows to climb out of. That is the air duct of– yes, there’s not supportive vents, and there are not bathroom windows to climb out of. What a shame.

John: It’s tough. Let’s get back to our passes here.

Craig: All right.

Drew: “A project’s too small.”

Craig: That’s crazy, but sure. I get it on some point.

John: I get it, yes.

Craig: Then you probably wouldn’t be pitching to a place where the project would be too small.

Drew: The next few seem to be from spec pilots or something, so like, “Not enough of a hook.”

Craig: Okay. Just the idea’s not grabby. All right.

John: Not catchy.

Drew: “Needs more of an engine.”

John: It’s boring. The story doesn’t go anyplace. It’s just like you’re stuck in one gear.

Craig: You’re not going to be able to write 20 episodes of this. You’re going to write two and then run out of stuff.

John: Yes.

Drew: “Too slice of life.”

Craig: What the hell does that mean?

John: I think it’s not story-driven in the sense of like there’s not a compelling thing that’s moving you along. It’s a hangout.

Craig: This is fascinating to me. That implies that there have been a lot of people writing stuff that has been two slice of life-y. I’m curious why. Is it a generational thing, where a certain cohort enjoys a slice-of-life story?

John: I wonder.

Craig: I don’t recall this being a thing.

John: I’ve never seen that as a note.

Craig: Yes, exactly.

Drew: I have a feeling probably a lot of stuff that’s geared towards younger people tends to be 20-somethings hanging out. Maybe that’s a nice way to say nothing’s happening.

Craig: I think maybe they should look at a little movie called Go, where things happened. You could argue that After Hours is a slice-of-life movie, but it’s tense. Stuff happens. It’s not just like doopity-doop. There were, but I will say there were some slice of life-y. Reality Bites was slice of life-y back in the day. The attraction of the movie was, “Look, it seems legitimate for people your age, right?”

John: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, yes.

Craig: Fast Times was actually quite slice of life-y. That’s true. That’s true.

John: Listen, comedy is on television like Friends.

Craig: Well, sitcoms are slice of life.

John: Everybody Loves Raymond, slice of life.

Craig: Yes, because it’s just the situation happens that week. That’s all. It’s the same. There have been slice-of-life movies that are good. I guess maybe the problem is it’s a pretty narrow target to hit. You’re Cameron Crowe. Yes, I could see you hitting that.

John: Indies tend to go more towards the slice of life, where it’s just a little small.

Craig: Sometimes, that can drift into self-indulgent or boring. That’s a nice way of saying this was bad.

John: You have one thing here as studio speak.

Drew: Yes. Aline’s assistant gave me this one because they tend to go out with very female-centered projects, and they will get the note back that the studios are looking for more “male-entry points,” which means–

John: I love this as a term. Incredible.

Craig: I need to talk to my wife about the male-entry points. This is the worst–

John: I just talked about Heated Rivalry, which was full of male-entry points.

[laughter]

Craig: That’s right. By the way, ever since you talked about Heated Rivalry, it’s one of those things where you buy a car, and then you see that car.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: It’s been everywhere.

John: Everywhere.

Craig: Suddenly, on all the conglomeration sites I go to with news, it’s like– and then there’s this specific thing of why women are obsessed. Straight women are obsessed with this show. I started reading about it, but you were the first to mention those male-entry points.

John: Thank you. I’m flattered. I snuck in there because it was about to blow up as a meme.

Craig: Well, listen, gay culture is always right there in front of everything. Male-entry points on that show, yes, apparently, very important, but they’re important for all men.

[laughter]

Craig: It’s not just gay men, straight men. We’re all looking for entry points. This is the most horrible phrase possible for what it actually is intended to mean, which is, Drew?

Drew: That we want more male characters so that men will watch.

Craig: Just say that male-entry points, you’re taking something that’s already a little bit, “Eh,” and making it so much more, “Ugh.” Just say, “Yes.”

John: More dudes.

Craig: “We want our stuff to appeal to both genders equally. This feels a little lopsided.” That’s fine. That’s a perfectly fine thing to say because audiences have demographics. Male-entry points? Oh, yes.

John: It also feels like Netflix thinking about, “What are we going to put on the tile on Netflix as you’re scrolling through it?” As a gay man, my tiles on Netflix look entirely different than your tiles just because if there’s one hot guy in the show, if it’s the 19th character, that’s who will show up on my tile.

Craig: [laughs] I have to look and see. Do you want to see what shows up on mine? Because I don’t watch Netflix that often, so I’m going to it right now.

John: We can share screens and see. I rarely see Netflix on my computer, so let’s see if it actually holds up right.

Craig: Okay. Let’s see. All right. This is fascinating. Actually, I have cool tiles. I’ll share the screen here.

John: Excited?

Craig: Yes, so this is actually like a–

John: That feels pretty normal, yes.

Craig: It’s very normcore.

John: Listen, Schitt’s Creek has Annie as the lead character rather than–

Craig: Oh, so they do stuff like that even though–

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: Oh, interesting. Interesting. Okay.

John: Any situation where you’re not seeing maybe the main star but a supporting person is interesting.

Craig: Right, because they’re like, “You’ll like this pretty lady.” Oh, that’s interesting. This is not a bad collection. Well, they’ve got Man vs. Baby with Rowan Atkinson. I guess I would probably like that. [chuckles] They probably would like these things. Maybe I should watch more of these things. All right, so that was mine. Let’s take a look at yours.

John: All right. Let me share my screen here.

Craig: Your collection of hot guys. Oh, this is not that different from–

John: It’s not that different. We have the same tile for The Diplomat.

Craig: For Man on the Inside and Nobody Wants This and Wednesday. You have the baking show. Oh, but your Frankenstein tile is different. Your Frankenstein tile, I think there’s some hot guys in the extras here. [chuckles] Mine just had the monster. [chuckles] You have Rowan Atkinson also, but you have KPop Demon Hunters. I got to say, it’s not–

John: It’s not radically different.

Craig: It’s very, very similar. It’s very similar.

John: Nothing that’s showing up here, but there have definitely been times where it’s like, “Well, that’s absurd that they’re showing me that as the tile for this movie that person is barely in.” Now, there’s nothing that I’ve been scrolling through here that says like, “Oh, well, this is clearly just hot men.” What have we learned in our analysis of our discussion of stock phrases in Hollywood? Why do we have them? What good do they serve?

Craig: Well, they are illuminating about our business because I think in other businesses, people are far more curt and direct because we have a lot of personalities and because it is a little bit of a, “I don’t want to date you now, but if you get hot next year, I might want to date you then.” Everybody is shining everybody on. Nobody wants to say, “No, no, no.” They just want to be careful.

John: Yes, we’re a freelance business. You’re constantly looking for your next job, looking for the next thing. You’re constantly dating, and so you don’t want to preclude any opportunities. You’re trying to maintain relationships while also getting stuff done.

Craig: There’s a guy who is a partner at a prominent production company that will not be named. There was something that I had pitched them many years ago. Oh, no, sorry, I hadn’t pitched them. It was a script I’d written that I didn’t even know they got. This guy loved it, but wasn’t the right for us, but loved it. Years later, there was something I was doing that he wanted. He was like, “Remember, I loved that script.” I was like, “The one that you didn’t give me any money for?” That’s the thing. It’s like everyone’s always hedging their bets.

Nobody wants to be mean to anybody. That person could be your boss tomorrow. That’s how Hollywood works. Everyone’s careful, which can be frustrating at times because sometimes you just want the truth.

John: It’s not the extreme cliche of a Japanese culture, which they will never tell you no. It’s not that at all. You do have to learn what the things really mean. There’s an idiomatic quality to it. If you are coming into this from a foreign language or you’re neurodivergent, you may have a bit of a learning curve figuring out what’s actually really happening here. You may need to ask some people like, “Wait, what does that really mean?” Because you could make wrong assumptions.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. That’s a great point about neurodivergence because Hollywood has a lot of not neurodivergent people. Particularly in the area of producers and executives, those people often have outstanding social skills. They are really sharp and instinctive. They are slippery.

John: Yes. They’re also sometimes really good at managing up. You see, how does that person have their job? Because they seem actually terrible at everything I see them do. They’re really good at managing their bosses and understanding what their bosses want to hear and they can deliver that.

Craig: There is, I’ve always said, one of the great unheralded skills in Hollywood is the skill of not being fired. There are people that I think, literally, their only skill is they know how to not get fired. They’re still there. It is a thing. If you aren’t somebody that’s particularly well-attuned to subtleties and all those things, then, yes, you can be very quickly confused by or outclassed by these people in these meetings.

I’m thinking of one screenwriter we both know in particular who’s incredible, amazing, a legend, and so on the spectrum. I have seen him in meetings. I’m cringing. I’m like, “Oh, my God.” I just want to go over there and help because he does not have meeting skills at all.

John: That’s the case where you’re going to need to find reps and other trusted people who can actually help you interpret and really understand what’s going on, versus me at my point in my career, when I get on a phone call with my reps or even just emails with my reps, I can be very honest about, like, “That felt like a pass. That’s this.” I’m ahead of even where they’re at because I just know how things fit together. I know that this project feels great right now, and it’s going to get really bumpy in about a month when this thing happens. I know we’re not hearing back from this because of these other things, and that just comes with time and experience.

Craig: You will get better at it over time, no question.

John: All right, let’s talk about some numbers. I was listening to a podcast called Search Engine, which, Craig, you don’t listen to podcasts, but Search Engine is a really fun podcast that explores different topics. A fun thing they do for their premium subscribers is they do an annual meeting, kind of like how you have a shareholder’s annual meeting. They talk through this stuff. They have a Zoom, and they have a Q&A, but they make a presentation about how the year went, how things are going. Maybe in a future year, we’ll do that.

I thought on the episode today, we might talk through some of the numbers behind Scriptnotes, both the podcast and the book because I’m a big believer in transparency, letting people see how stuff actually works. Craig, we just passed 15 million downloads all time for Scriptnotes, which is absurd.

Craig: Wow, that’s crazy.

John: That’s crazy. 15 years?

Craig: It took us a long time, [chuckles] but still, that’s insane. 15 million downloads, wow.

John: 1.6 million downloads in 2025. We average 25,000 to 30,000 listeners per episode. Of those, between 2,000 and 3,000 are premium members who are paying money.

Craig: That’s information that I didn’t know. I don’t think that’s a lot compared to these big podcasts and everything. It’s just a lot in an absolute sense.

John: I remember many, many years ago, we were trying to understand our numbers. It was like, we’re Bon Jovi of podcasts. We’re filling a stadium. That’s kind of true, but it’s also–

Craig: It’s a small arena.

John: It’s a small arena.

Craig: Yes, it’s an arena, but you know what? Madison Square Garden, right? I think you got 30,000 people, you can fill MSG. It’s pretty good. It’s important to remember that there are a lot of people listening to it. That’s good. It reminds me to say fewer stupid things.

John: Our most-listened episode of the year was 673, Structure and How to Enjoy a Movie, which was just a crap episode, which is great.

Craig: I like that stuff.

John: Our all-time highest episode is the one with Christopher Nolan.

Craig: Of course.

John: Which was only about double the typical numbers of– It wasn’t like a giant spike outside of everything else. We have 4,500 premium subscribers. Those are the people who are paying us.

Craig: That’s great. Thank you to all of those people. That’s awesome.

John: Which is great. January is always our biggest month for premium subscribers, so thank you again for people who do it.

Craig: Oh, because it’s a Christmas gift?

John: It’s a Christmas gift to themselves or other people who bought it for them, which is awesome. Craig, you’ll remember that I think, last year, we were harping on people like, “Don’t do monthly. Do annually because it saves you so much money.” We bumped up the monthly to nudge people to do the annuals, and they did, which is great.

Craig: Great.

John: Everyone knows we zero out the budget every year. We’re not a nonprofit technically, but we’re just a corporation that deliberately does not want to make any money. We’re an LLC.

Craig: We’re a for-profit company that hates profit.

John: That’s what it is. At some point, we could probably do a B-corporation where we’re not–

Craig: We could convert to a 501(c)(3) kind of thing, right?

John: Yes. We talked about that with the lawyer people, and it’s like the amount of paperwork involved to do that is just–

Craig: We don’t receive a lot of tax-deductible stuff. It’s more that we just give it away when we hit the end of the year.

John: Before we started recording, we talked about how we’re giving away money that’s left over at the end of the year. We’re going to be supporting Pay Up Hollywood and their annual survey, and also Entertainment Community Fund, which we’ve often supported over the years. They help out with basically everyone in the entertainment industry, not just Hollywood, but also Broadway and other artists, musicians who need help. This last year, of course, we had the fires, and they were involved in helping people recover from the fires.

Craig: That’s great.

John: Everyone throughout. I’ve actually toured their buildings here in Hollywood. They have low-income housing for artists, and it’s a great organization.

Craig: Yes, this makes me feel good. I do want people to know because when we say 4,500 premium subscribers, they are paying us. Of course, just so people understand, we use that money to pay for our staff and to make the show. When there is money left over, and there is, we donate it to good causes.

John: Yes, which is nice. We also had a book this year. Our book, we hit the USA Today best-sellers chart, which is certainly not a given.

Craig: Okay, but I do love how we hit it, though. It’s perfect. It is not the top 10.

John: No. USA Today lists the top 150 titles each week.

Craig: 150. We came in at?

John: 149.

Craig: Boom.

John: 149, baby.

Craig: Suck it, 150.

John: The USA Today list is basically all books. Kids books, and because it was December, a ton of Christmas books are on that thing. We came in above the most recent Harry Potter Christmas book. Excited about that. We came in below the D&D Player’s Handbook, which felt so wonderful and so appropriate and correct.

Craig: Never want to overdo that.

John: One of the other big titles of the week that we came out was Olivia Nuzzi, the journalist, had a book about American Canto, which was the RFK Jr. stuff. We beat her.

Craig: Oh, really?

John: Yes. She sold 1,200 copies, and we sold 3,129 copies our opening week. We crushed that book. It was a good reminder that just because something is in the news, it doesn’t mean it’s actually selling any books.

Craig: Listen, this book business is tough. I always felt this about the book that we’ve done here is the kind of thing that just will hopefully be an evergreen and it just, over time, people– Not because we want to make money, because we don’t. It’s because I think it’s helpful. I think the book will help people. I do.

John: I think it will. Of the 3,129, the vast majority are the hardcovers, 2,400 of those, 300 e-books, 350 audio books. These are just the North American numbers. It’ll be a long time before we hear the UK numbers and the other places that we’ve sold. It’s a great start. You were on the email chain with the publishers. They’re happy with the start of this. It’s not like the runaway greatest hit bestseller of all time.

Craig: It was not going to be. [chuckles]

John: It’s a super strong launch for this book. We’re on a track to earn back our advance at some point. Around 13,000 copies sold. We’ll have earned back the money that they already paid us. Drew, we have some books that they’ve sent us that are currently under your desk. I want to make a pitch for what to do with those books because, obviously, we want people to buy books for themselves, which is great. There’s also probably a lot of school libraries, community libraries that also need books who don’t have the money to buy these books.

If you are a person who runs a local library, a school library, probably junior high school, or I don’t think a grade school library is going to be appropriate for our book, write to Drew, ask@johnaugust.com. Let us know what your library is. Provide some proof that you actually are this person who is responsible for obtaining books to these libraries. We’ll see if we can send you one of these books that we have here in the office because–

Craig: I honestly feel like if somebody takes the time to pretend to be a library, I think they’ve earned a book.

[laughter]

Craig: That’s kind of cool, yes.

John: We can send them to US libraries. Because of tariffs and customs and everything else, it’s going to be crazy if we try to send this overseas. For stuff here in the United States, we can send them to libraries because this is a book that I would have gotten out of my school library if I had been there.

Craig: Sure, of course. Cool.

John: Craig, any feelings about the numbers, any surprises, anything that you’re still sorting through?

Craig: I don’t know anything about the book business, so I don’t know what any of this means. I do think eventually we’ll earn our advance back. [chuckles]

John: Yes, we will.

Craig: Which is just, you know, otherwise I’ll feel bad.

John: Which is really rare, honestly, for a book to earn its advance back.

Craig: Then why did they make– Then, I don’t understand.

John: Here’s the math behind things, and I think this is the general stuff. I’m pretty sure our contract is similar. There’s the list price of the book, so that it’s $32 for the Scriptnotes’s book. Of that list price, we get $3.20. We get 10% of the first 5,000 copies. The next 5,000 copies we get at 12%. After that, we get at 15%. It’s that $3.20 that we’re earning on that story now that has been paid off our advance.

Craig: That’s the recoupable part. They’re going to make money is the point.

John: The publisher is still making money.

Craig: They’re making money.

John: They’re making money.

Craig: Got it.

John: The bookstores are making money, too.

Craig: Yes, good. Then I’m happy. I just want everybody to be happy.

John: An interesting thing about our book, it was something like 50% of our sales were Amazon, but a lot of them were not Amazon, which I think is also great too. Just the people buying through other places, including local bookstores. We’re excited about that.

Craig: Great.

John: If you still want a signed copy, there’s a place you can order called Premier. Drew, help me out here.

Drew: Yes, Premier Collectibles. I can put the link in the show notes.

John: Premier Collectibles has ones that Craig and I signed. If you’re in Los Angeles, you can also just go to Larchmont. Chevalier’s Books has a few left that we’ve signed on the day of our live show. They’re there if you want signed copies from me and Craig. Let’s answer some questions. Let’s start with this first one about video podcasts.

Drew: Keeping an Ear Out writes, “My question’s about the explosion of video podcasts. I heard that this terminology took off because studios wanted to make videos without signing contracts with IATSE. Is that true? More largely, what’s going on with the guilds in podcasting? Do any guilds cover digital content, and for what kind of labor?”

John: A couple of things. First off, there’s now a term called “audio podcast,” which we always thought of like podcast, of course, it’s audio, and then a video podcast is a separate thing, but now you actually have to distinguish it. Currently, Scriptnotes is an audio podcast. We may do some video stuff down the road. You look at some of these podcasts with video podcasts, and they’re not that different than a lot of talk shows would be or a lot of other broadcast shows. Now, Netflix is buying some of The Ringer’s shows and moving them over to Netflix.

Video podcasts are in this interesting space where it’s like just TV, and so why shouldn’t it have the same kind of rules as TV? I can tell you that some of this stuff is already being covered by the guilds. The Pod Save America podcasts are covered by the Writers Guild East. Whenever there’s a new market, you’ve got to figure out how are we going to handle it or treat it because you don’t want to come in with a heavy hammer and smash everything down before there’s even a viable economic model.

You also don’t want it to mutate into this thing that replaces what you’re actually really doing, or that existing programs get reclassified as being video podcasts. Rather than talk shows or things where we already have Appendix A protections for. We’re going to see what comes in this space.

Craig: Yes, I’m not sure what’s going on with IATSE here. I don’t quite understand how they go about organizing and doing things. The WGA, for instance, in this case, they have an organizing department. The point of the organizing department is to go to podcasts that are prominent. I think somebody said once, the Writers Guild looks to represent anyone who writes things that move on a screen. This moves on a screen. Let’s organize these shows. We can create contracts. The Writers Guild is not about coming in and saying, “Yes, you have a podcast, and you employ a writer. You have to sign the same terms that we sign with Apple and Paramount.”

John: Jimmy Fallon Show.

Craig: Yes. We have the ability to create separate agreements. We do. We also have an agreement with news writers. We have an agreement with daytime writers and all that. I think, yes, this is something that the Writers Guild could certainly do. IATSE can absolutely shut stuff down if they want. I don’t know if you can get around IATSE. At some point, they’ll come for you. When they come, they do have a hammer, a big hammer. Nobody wants to mess with that.

John: Really, you look at a show like Last Week Tonight, John Oliver’s show, which is terrific and great. It has a big writing staff and big production staff. They are able to create an amazing show every week. You compare it to some of the video podcasts, which are also creating a show every week. They may not be quite to the same scale, but they do similar things. This question of, shouldn’t they be treated the same, is correct. Also, the business model behind it is different. That’s why you need to make a separate way of thinking about the deal.

Craig: Yes. We look at the delivery system compared to the work itself. Is this being delivered through television? Is it being delivered through theatrical? Is it being delivered through the internet? Is it being delivered through– Everything can get its own thing. The Guild is not ignorant of the differences. I think, in a case like this, this is a good area for the– I don’t know what the Guild’s organizing department has been doing lately, but this would be an interesting spot to go.

John: This is the thing that the Guild’s organizing department is going to be focusing on. The East already started. We also talked about verticals a few minutes ago. That’s another thing, which is the Guild’s are now looking at how we’re treating those. WGA is, SAG is, thinking about how are we handling this thing? Because, clearly, we can’t just apply normal TV terms to it because there’s not enough money there for that to actually make sense, but you want to have some protections. You want to have ways that this area can grow, but also that people can make a living at it. Let’s answer one more question from Nicole.

Drew: “I have a couple projects that my reps are reluctant to send out anywhere because I created each of them with another person. Their argument is that they’re trying to sell me as an individual, and if I want to partner with someone, then they need to be able to sell us as a true writing partnership with our own joint samples and shared career track, and I need to commit to that forever. This isn’t really something I’m interested in, and my partners on these projects aren’t either. I’m not doing this willy-nilly.

In one instance, my TV concept is about a person with a disability, so it felt important that I develop it with a friend with a disability who’s also a TV writer with credits. Are my reps right, and it’s not worth trying to sell projects as a one-off partnership? Am I never allowed to work with my friends? Is there something I can do to make these one-off partnerships more appealing to my reps or to execs, and what’s the best way to proceed here?”

Craig: I think your reps are right.

John: I think your reps are right.

Craig: Look, these things aren’t dead. If you don’t want to have your career work as a team, and you want a solo career or the ability to join up with anyone at any time, you need to create your own career first. If you sell something as yourself, it goes well, you can always go back to the people that have paid you and said, “By the way, I’ve written a script with this other person. Take a look at it,” and they will. Okay, but first, you got to get going as yourself, and I’m guessing, based on this question, that you’re not necessarily at that place yet.

John: Yes. Nicole already has reps, which is great. I’m reading this letter saying that they signed you as an individual, and now they’re trying– You have this thing you wrote with somebody else. Like, “I don’t know what to do with this because we’ve been trying to sell you as an individual, and now we take this thing out, it just becomes weird and difficult.” I get it. Remember, reps want to be able to sell you to people and then give a consistent story about, “This is what she writes, this is the kind of thing she’s referring for. This is the kind of show they’re trying to staff her on.”

It’s confusing if they’re now trying to sell a thing which is written with somebody else.

Craig: Because then you are going to want to sell something by yourself, and people will ask, “We don’t know if Nicole’s good by herself.” It could have been the other one.

John: It’s the same with writing samples. If they read this thing that you guys wrote together, they’re like, “But did she really write it?”

Craig: Exactly.

John: Craig and I both know writing teams who’ve split apart, and they need to start writing something separately that is just their work, so people can read it as just their work.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: All right, let’s do our one cool thing. My one cool thing is a Substack written by the artist Charli XCX.

Craig: [sings] I don’t care. I love it.

John: Exactly. Craig, I’m impressed you know Charli XCX.

Craig: Of course. How dare you?

John: I am so sorry.

Craig: I barely. What I just did is pretty much the sum total of my Charli XCX.

John: Charli XCX of Brat. She did the music for the upcoming Wuthering Heights.

Craig: Brat Summer.

John: Brat Summer. Smart artist. She has a Substack, which is just her writing about the things that are on her mind. I just feel like more famous people should do it because it’s a chance to have it unfiltered, like, “This is exactly what I think, I don’t have to go through a journalist to put it out there.” Yes, it could be a blog. A Substack is just a common format for this kind of newsletter. I dig her for doing it. I think it’s a smart approach for this because it’s just an unfiltered, “This is what I think about, that one we’ll link to, is the death of cool.”

It’s like her opinion on how much she values cool in a way that is felt a little, I don’t know, she’s ambivalent about it, but also willing to acknowledge that, like, “Yes, I really care about being cool.” I really like that she’s actually just taking the form and just writing in it.

Craig: It’s blogging, right? This is sort of–

John: Yes, you and I both started as bloggers.

Craig: It’s like a very early 2000s thing that people are doing now. This is a new thing. [laughs]

John: This is a new thing?

Craig: No, it is not. It is an old thing, but this is very bloggy. I’m looking at it. It’s like, the blog is back, basically.

John: The blog is back.

Craig: Which is good. It means–

John: It’s not a visual medium. It’s not–

Craig: It’s words.

John: It’s just words.

Craig: Thank God.

John: Give her credit. She gets to string together words that communicate what she wants to say, which is nice. I don’t know. It gets more of us reading things versus just scrolling Instagram. I’ll take it.

Craig: Yes. Complete thoughts with nuanced arguments.

John: Yes.

Craig: Twitter just killed blogs. It just killed it. Now it’s back because Twitter died.

John: I’m glad for that.

Craig: Yes, yes. Dead bird.

John: Dead bird.

Craig: All right, well, that’s a good one. That’s a good one.

John: What are you looking for, Craig?

Craig: Oh, baby.

John: I see the trailer here, and I’m excited. I didn’t know about it, so [crosstalk]

Craig: At the Game Awards, which were held just a few days ago, the Game Awards are an interesting award ceremony because it’s like, I would say, 50% awards, 50% trailers and announcements. It’s like if the Oscars weren’t run by the Academy but rather just by all the studios. [laughter] The thing is, that’s why it’s an awesome award show, because really, it’s like the Super Bowl, where it’s like, “Okay, the game’s great, but show me the ads.” There was a trailer for the new game coming from Larian Studios. Larian Studios, which made our beloved Baldur’s Gate 3.

They had a prior franchise to Baldur’s Gate 3 called Divinity, and in fact, Baldur’s Gate 3 is built on the Divinity platform. They’ve announced essentially what looks to be a reboot-ish start, but not like going back to the start of a new story, but like with a different level of polish and accomplishment because of technology. The trailer is insane. Now it is not a game play trailer. It is very clearly like a very highly rendered cinematic sequence.

John: [crosstalk]

Craig: I’m going to tell you.

John: It’s giving Wicker Man, it’s giving–

Craig: It goes so crazy. [chuckles] I loved it. I loved it, and it was disturbing and beautiful and ugly and gross and amazing. I cannot wait to play Divinity, and I suspect I’m going to have to wait for some time. This was the first time that they announced that this is what they were doing. They’re saying it’s going to be bigger than Baldur’s Gate 3 in terms of the amount of content, which is mind-boggling to me.

John: Absurd. Will we ever get Grand Theft Auto, or will they keep kicking the can?

Craig: Oh, of course.

John: They’ll keep kicking the can.

Craig: No. I think they’re married to September 26th. They’re saying November 19th, 2026. I think they have to hit that. They have to. They can’t miss Christmas. They’re going to–

John: It’s true, it’s Christmas.

Craig: They have to.

John: This is very helpful.

Craig: In my mind, they are saying November 19th because they probably feel like they could absolutely be done by July. I mean, like, at this point. Either way, by the way, they could release it on the worst release date of the year, and it doesn’t matter.

John: Oh, yes. It doesn’t matter.

Craig: It will make $14 trillion.

John: It will break the internet.

Craig: It is going to break everything, including me. We should be well-wrapped in terms of shooting by then.

John: You’re going to just submarine into some GTA?

Craig: No. I have to do quite a bit of post-production, but still, honestly, yes.

John: AI can do it by then.

Craig: Oh God, how dare you? I can hear my editors screaming at you right now.

John: Oh my gosh. That’s the worst. That does look like an incredible trailer, so I’m excited to–

Craig: To tuck in and enjoy it fully.

John: Such smart people. We wanted to have the Larian folks on the show at some point to talk through the-

Craig: I would love to.

John: -storytelling of that. We’ll see if we can find time to get them on.

Craig: I would love that.

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

You’ll also find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. People have been sending through their book purchases on Instagram, so Drew reposts those when we see them on the stories. It’s great to see the book showing up in all different places. Craig, I don’t know if I’ve talked about how the book in the UK is a little bit narrower and embossed and shiny.

Craig: Yes.

John: It looks nice.

Craig: People in England deserve something nice.

John: They do. They need to have their own special kind of thing.

Craig: As well as Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland. I think I covered them all.

John: All the Commonwealth countries basically get the UK version. Oh, so Canada gets our version. We have t-shirts, and hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find there’s a Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the e-mail you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to our 4,000 or so premium subscribers. You are superstars. Make it possible for us to do this each and every week. Get signed up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Difficult Collaborators. Craig, Drew, thank you so much for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, we have a question from a writer abroad.

Drew: “How do you tell when a difficult collaboration is simply part of learning this industry and when it’s crossed over into something harmful to your creative spirit? How do you move forward without letting an experience like this make you smaller?”

Craig: Oh, dear.

John: Oh, dear. We’ve talked about this on many episodes, particularly about the mentor relationship or people who are like just bad behavior, or producers who are not even predatory, but just they’re crossing lines consistently. We’ll say this is a little different than the mentorship because this is a collaboration. This is somebody you’re supposed to be working with on a regular basis. I’ve had difficult collaborations where filmmakers, directors, who just like, “We just work at very different speeds.” Some of them have ended up being fruitful, and we got through it.

Some of them ended up badly. It’s a tough thing. I know, Craig, you started off with a writing partner. You and I both now write alone. I feel like I’m not a great creative roommate as a writer. The times I’ve tried to write with other people, I’m just a little controlling and demanding. Sometimes I’m the difficult collaborator, but in general, like, what are some things you’ve learned over the last 30 years doing this about collaboration and that instinct of like, “Oh, this is not working well?”

Craig: Collaboration with a director or a collaboration with a producer or a collaborator is different than collaboration with a writer. That is a very specific thing. I don’t know what the nature of this collaboration is that the writer’s asking about, but we can talk about, yes, I have had moments where I’ve written with other people that I enjoyed. I enjoyed writing with Todd Phillips. That was fun. Mostly, I just want to write by myself alone, to the extent that even though we do have a writer’s room for The Last of Us, I write the scripts. That’s just how I like to do it.

I know that, and I think if you know that about yourself, then it’s incumbent upon you to then avoid situations where you find yourself not being able to do that. When you are in a situation that you can’t avoid, the difficult collaboration comes in two flavors. One flavor is like what you were describing. I move at a different speed. Creatively, I think differently. We don’t agree on tone or all those things. That’s solvable by just one person saying, “I’m going to do it this way, the end.” Or you muddle through with this mush, and it just doesn’t work.

That’s a per-project thing. There’s really nothing you can do about that. That’s just, I’m tall, you’re short, that’s that. The ones that have really messed me up a little bit, and I feel like this is maybe what our questioner is wondering about, are the ones where it’s more of a personal problem. Where there is something that’s upsetting you as you work with somebody. You have a meeting, you work on something, you go home, and you don’t feel good. That’s a tougher one. The writer says, “Harmful to your creative spirit, how do you move forward without letting an experience like this make you smaller?”

There are times in this business where it will be harmful to your creative spirit. It will make you feel smaller. You will struggle with that. Maybe the value of those moments is just, “Okay, I just had the measles. I’m not going to get measles again. Not for a long, long time.” There is a difficult immunization that occurs through infection. It’s hard to recognize certain flavors of trouble until you’ve experienced the trouble.

John: Let’s talk about power. Because a lot of times, what’s really coming down here is who has the relative power in the relationship. In cases where you are a staff writer hired on in a writing room, and there’s a showrunner, and that showrunner has power. That showrunner is also making all the decisions. You can say, “It’s a difficult collaboration.” Yes, it is a form of collaboration, but you are really working for the showrunner. It’s understandable why you might feel frustrated. You might feel like this is difficult. You might not be having a good time in that space.

In terms of the creative process, ultimately, that showrunner is going to be making those decisions, and you have to give yourself some grace of, like, “I don’t have power or control in a lot of these things. That’s just what it is.” I was scrolling through Reddit screenwriting earlier this week, and this writer was complaining that there was a staff writer on a show, and they turned in their script. They didn’t give a lot of notes and feedback on it. The next time they saw the script, it had been really vastly rewritten, and they felt like, “Oh my God, this is so awful.” That’s the nature of the process that you’re in right now.

Craig: That’s normal.

John: That’s normal. Sometimes understanding what normal is, is part of that. Power could also be where you’re much more powerful than the other person you’re collaborating with, which has been some of my situation where I have tried to write with other people, where it’s just like, it wasn’t difficult from my side, but I’m sure it stuck with the other person because it’s like, I would just do whatever I was going to do. Where I suspect this person may be coming from, it’s like, they’re at a similar level here. It’s not clear who’s actually driving the car.

That’s one of the real frustrations, where it’s just like, you both are trying to pilot this thing, and you’re just disagreeing on how to do it, where you’re going. It’s sort of the couple’s therapy of it all, is figuring out how do we get this to work?

Craig: If the primary issue is this person has strong opinions about creatively why something should be this way, and you have opinions about why it should be the other way, in those circumstances, I try to default to the other person’s side, in the sense of like, “Okay, you feel strongly about this. Let’s dig into why, because you may convince me.” I want to be convinced. The whole point of a creative partnership is we are more than the sum of our parts. If I can understand where you’re going with this, maybe we’ll agree, and then we work in sync, or I learned something from you.

That’s potentially valuable. If they have the same attitude toward you, this could be quite fruitful. If they don’t, now you’re crossing into the other issue, which is the issue of personality. It can be incredibly difficult when the personality is such that it’s hard to describe in any other way than when you finish a session, you feel angry. You feel quietly resentful. You feel unheard. You feel insecure. You feel whatever it is that you feel. It may not be the other person’s fault. It may just be the symptom of a mismatch that you’re not meant to be collaborating with this person.
Sometimes, this is something that I still try and work on, is the toxic positivity thing of, like, sometimes in an effort to make something work. In the past, I have been in situations in the past, not recent past, but where I was to go along to get along, and the work suffered.

John: A mutual friend of ours had a very difficult collaboration on a project they were working on. I was hearing the backstory of what was going on behind the scenes, and I was full of sympathy. It’s like you’re both parents of this child, and you want the child to succeed. Sometimes, in those difficult marriages, you do have to suppress some of your instincts to just run away because you both want this child to succeed. It’s finding ways to acknowledge the actual frustration of this moment that you’re in and this contentious relationship.

Also, for the good of the kid, not letting it erupt and damage everything else until you can get through it. Then you can go your separate ways and be honest about what you loved about the experience and what was actually not great about the experience.

Craig: There have been times where it does feel like, okay, after every session, there’s some sort of personal discussion that needs to happen. That is sometimes unavoidable because of the nature of who we are. We are creative people. We’re weird. Our minds are doing this weird thing. It’s unlikely that your weirdness and another person’s weirdness will mesh so beautifully that, A, the work is better when you’re together, and B, you aren’t having personal issues of any kind with the person. Now, writing partnerships that work like that lasts. Thinking of like Harry Elfont and Deb Kaplan, or these people.

John: Dan and Dave.

Craig: Dan and Dave.

John: Benioff and Weiss. They will argue to death about a lot of things, but they’re still all writing together.

Craig: Right. It’s not possible that one of them walks away every single time, going, “I feel bad. I feel resentful. I feel angry. I feel unheard,” whatever it is. Their arguing is good arguing. It’s productive arguing. It’s not personal. Or even if it is personal, it’s personal in a way that’s like brothers, but we are secure enough in our love for each other that tomorrow we’ll be fine. I remember Johann Renck, and I had this thing of, like, because we loved each other, and we would fight all the time. It was such great fights. Very early on, we were like, “Let’s agree to agree.

If we fight, let’s fight. When we get to the end of the fight, we agree.” If you’re like, “Okay, you know what, I’m going with your way,” you don’t go with my way, and then walk away like, “I’m not doing that, actually,” or, “I’m angry.” You’re like, “Oh, okay. You know what? We’re doing it your way.” It worked. I think it worked because we loved each other and because we also had faith that the other person was persuadable. It’s when you feel like you’re in a deal where somebody’s not working in good faith with you that you lose confidence that, really, maybe this can function in a way that is fair and reasonable.

John: A perfect example from my own life was my very first TV show that I created and executive-produced. It was called D.C. It was for the WB Network. It was a partnership, a collaboration between me and Dick Wolf of Law & Order. Anyone should have been able to say, “Oh, this is not going to work. This is going to be disastrously bad.” It was. It wasn’t a good collaboration because of the power imbalance. He was so powerful, and I was the creative person trying to do all this stuff, but also didn’t know what I was doing that it was awful.

I ended up getting fired off the show and having a nervous breakdown. It was bad on almost all the fronts. The reason I bring it up, though, is in time as I pull back out, it just feels like a war that he and I were both in. I have no animosity to him. It was a bad idea for us to be collaborating on this project.

Craig: Mismatch.

John: We never actually made peace. We never spoke after I was fired.

Craig: You don’t need to.

John: We’re both fine. We’re both doing just fine.

Craig: It’s not like your paths are going to cross again. You’re not making procedurals for Dick Wolf. That is a mismatch. That can happen. I’ve been in mismatches. I’ve been in mismatches, and you muddle through. The thing about running a show is you cannot be in a mismatch. You will die. If there is a mismatch, it will express itself. You just won’t be able to make a show. Scott Frank often says, “Good process, good result, bad process, bad result.” It’s not always the case, but I do think if you don’t have some sort of healthy partnership, it’s hard to make something at all.

It’s hard enough even if you have a good one. I didn’t know you back then, but if I did and you were like, “Hey, I’m going to be making a show. I’m going to be running a show for the first time, and it’s for Dick Wolf.” I would have said, “Amazing,” but in my mind, I would have said, “Oh, no.” [laughter]

John: “Oh, no. That feels fraught.” Over the years, I’ve remet writers who are working on Law & Order in those same offices, and they’re like, “I used to just hide in my office because you and Dick would be shouting down the hall at each other.” Can you imagine me shouting in a hallway, Craig? That’s where I was at during that time.

Craig: No, sir. I can imagine you finding a janitor’s closet and crying in there. [laughs] That’s what I would do.

John: There was some of that, too.

Craig: That’s what I would do. I don’t shout down the hallway either. Our friend Derek, who made all the Chicago Fire and all those, he has some great Dick Wolf stories. They’re not bad stories, by the way. I don’t want to imply that he is, but he’s a big personality.

John: He had some power in that situation.

Craig: Derek actually is a great– I could say that is a match. The stories are fun. Dick Wolf is a fun character in his stories, but he’s certainly larger than life. There’s no question about that. Larger than life.

John: Wrapping all this up, you’re going to have situations where you have difficult collaborators. When you have choices about your collaborators, like Craig does in terms of hiring department heads, you’re focusing on the people who it’s going to be a fit. It’s going to be a marriage, and you can make that work. Other times, you’re going to be assigned. It’s like a roommate that’s assigned to you, and you’ve got to make it work and get through the semester. Then learn what you’ve learned.

Craig: Yes. One of the interesting things about being, what you said, in power, when you have power, then you are in a million collaborations, and you do have the ability to end them or continue them, promote them. That is also a tricky thing to recognize there’s something wrong and end it. It’s hard. We’ll call that a good problem to have, I suppose. For our person who’s writing in, I would say you are experiencing something that John and I have both experienced multiple times. The hope is that each time it happens, you at least learn, “Okay, that is a flavor I do not like. I don’t like that flavor of ice cream. Let’s not get pistachio. Oh, let’s not get French vanilla. I don’t like that one either.”

John: You recognize the patterns. You recognize off at first, being like, “The vibe is wrong, and I should trust my instinct there.”

Craig: Trust your instincts. It’s so hard because everyone else has no interest in your instincts. You just got to trust your instincts and trust them in defiance of whatever looks right on paper is nonsense. It doesn’t matter. I’ve talked a lot about when we chose a composer for Chernobyl, and Jóhann Jóhannsson died. We had to replace this incredible composer because he died. We went with Hildur Guðnadóttir, who had scored Sicario 2, and that’s it, but had been working with him and was like his protégé.

There were a lot of composers who– and on paper, she was the least qualified and the weirdest possible choice, but our instinct was that we loved her. Sometimes you just got to go by instinct and let go of what looks good on paper.

John: Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Drew: Thanks.

Links:

• How Disney’s OpenAI Deal Changes Everything by Steven Zeitchik and Julian Sancton for The Hollywood Reporter
• Guilty! Director Who Scammed Netflix Out Of Millions Faces Decades Behind Bars by Dominic Patten for Deadline
• Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too! by Robert Ben Garant & Thomas Lennon
• Down to Puck: Why Women Are Going Wild for ‘Heated Rivalry’ by Seth Abramovitch for The Hollywood Reporter
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