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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 630 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome Celine Song, a playwright, screenwriter, and director, whose movie Past Lives is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.

We will talk about that movie, but also getting staffed on a TV show, raising financing, making your first feature in two different countries. But before that, staffing on a TV show, deciding between film school versus playwriting school. We’ll answer some listener questions. It’s a great conversation. And in a bonus conversation for premium members, Celine and I discuss Zoom and other online performances, including her staging of The Seagull on Sims 4. But first, Drew, we have some follow-up. We have the best listeners in the world, and they came through this week.

Drew Marquardt: We had a lot of people write in about examples of the Tiffany problem, which we talked about last week.

John: The Tiffany problem, that’s where Tiffany is actually an old name, so people used to be called Tiffany, but if you use that name now, people think that just seems weird, a period film should not have a character named Tiffany.

Drew: There’s quite a few examples. Courtney wrote in, “As a birdwatcher, one Tiffany problem I know of is the call of a bald eagle. Most Americans associate a bald eagle’s call with soaring, almost echoing screech, not pretty per se, but definitely powerful and approaching majestic. Here’s an example. (bird screech) But that’s actually the sound of a red-tailed hawk. An accurate bald eagle sound is almost painfully high-pitched and typically kind of chippy, like a yapping dog.” (eagle call)

John: Wow. That is really, really different. We’ll put a link into the YouTube videos of those two, because when you see the bald eagle doing its thing, it’s like, that’s not a graceful way of making a sound.

Drew: No, not at all.

John: A perfect example of a Tiffany problem, because if you put in the real thing, people would laugh. It just doesn’t sound right. We associate the bald eagle sounding a particular way, even though it’s not the situation. Unless you’re going to call it out, I think you’d go with the wrong version. What else do we have for Tiffany problems?

Drew: Michael in Astoria writes, “My favorite reference for the Tiffany problem is Deadwood and its infamous use of profanity. When researching, David Milch discovered that while historic analogs for his character did in fact swear freely, they would use archaic profanity that is comical to modern ears, would’ve had all the characters sounding like Yosemite Sam if they’d insisted on historical accuracy. So rather than provoke unwanted laughter in the audience, he opted for modern profanity that was accurate to the spirit of how the curse words were intended, but which the characters would not have actually used.”

John: Again, a problem where historical accuracy and specificity could’ve worked against you, and so you made the choice to have everyone dropping F bombs all the time. I get it. It does change our perception of how people spoke in that time, but they just don’t have any other real, good Western examples of profanity, so it felt real to me.

Drew: Although now I’m curious what those weird swears were.

John: I want to hear what all those words were.

Drew: Kate writes, “I used to be a children’s book editor, and I once edited a book of short stories set during the First World War. One author wrote a story set at a girls’ school, and she included a scene in which one girl wrote a note to another reading, ‘See you at,’ like the at sign, ‘break.’ And I queried this use of the at symbol. And the author assured me that the at symbol had been in use since at least the 1500s. It was used that way in the early 20th century. I told her that didn’t matter; it would seem anachronistic to a reader anyway.”

John: I grew up knowing that that symbol meant at or that we used it to mean at, although I think it also could mean to or at for a quantity at a certain amount at a certain price. I remember seeing it on typewriters, but of course we didn’t really use it everyday use until there were email addresses and ultimately handles for things. I agree with Kate here. At feels strange historically. I think it could bum for some people, even though it’s accurate.

Drew: Phillip writes, “Recently, my mom mentioned rewatching her favorite film, The American President, and how it occurred to her how much paper the people in the White House are shown using. This is accurate to the time it was shot. But it was shocking to her how much digitization has changed office work.”

John: Yes, I think if you look at older things… I remember looking at broadcast news. They have to use these tapes. They’re literally carrying tapes around.

Drew: Oh my god.

John: It seems impossible. Older movies are going to have paper in them. We talked about all the kazoos in Maestro, which is basically like, yes, people would’ve been smoking a lot in that time, but it’s just distracting, because there’s just so much of it. This mention of The American President, I have to take a little sidebar to talk about, Rob Reiner was on Love It or Leave It, this other podcast I listen to, and was talking about how Aaron Sorkin’s script for The American President was like 350 pages. It was some crazy, crazy long script. Sorkin later apologized for the script being so long, but apparently, a lot of the stuff that got pulled out of the script for The American President became The West Wing. So maybe that’s an argument for writing long sometimes.

Drew: I love The American President. It’s nice and tight.

John: Nice and tight. It was not nice and tight to begin with. Examples of the Tiffany problem. What else do we have for follow-up?

Drew: We had some listeners write in about different foreign courts, because we were talking about Anatomy of a Fall. Anonymous writes in to say, “I’ll share what I know of a Russian courtroom, which will probably come as no surprise to anyone who’s read stories of people charged and quickly convicted in Russia.

“Back when adoptions there were allowed, you had to go to court to get yours approved. In our region, even with the foot-high stack of stamped, embossed, certified, and Apostille documents testifying to every aspect of your interest and ability to adopt and raise the child, there was still no guarantee you would get approved. And why? The room setup gives a clue.

“While the judge presides over the court from a familiar front-and-center raised platform, what’s completely freaky is that when you walk in, you see that the entire left of the room is taken up by a prison cell made up of heavy iron bars on all four sides and the top. This is where the defendant stands during the trial, though thankfully not prospective adoptive parents. We get hard, wooden benches.

“When I asked why, it was explained that contrary to our legal principles of innocent until proven guilty, in Russia when someone is charged, it’s assumed they’re guilty and you must prove your innocence from jail. I looked it up later, and legally, this is in fact not true. But as they say in Sleepless in Seattle, it sure feels and looks true.”

John: This is an example of just the courtroom setup. Imagine that there was a scene taking place in a Russian courtroom. If, in the script, you did not actually describe what things are like, we would default to our American expectations of a courtroom, and they would be wrong. It would be a very different feel from what we actually would see in the film. This feels crucial information for a screenwriter to know if you’re going with this kind of scene. Similarly, in Anatomy of a Fall, if you didn’t know what that French courtroom was set up like and would just default to an American thing, you would be just incredibly wrong.

Drew: David in Australia writes, “I want to share my experience sitting on a jury in Australia. The biggest disappointment for me was that the jury was removed from the court any time there were matters of law to discuss. Whenever a lawyer would overstep or they needed to discuss precedent in certain areas of the case, the jury wasn’t privy to this information. The public galley could stay and listen during these moments, but the Australian system seems to think that this would taint the jurors. I guess it’s probably better than having a judge tell the jury, ‘Disregard everything you just heard,’ because let’s be honest, no one’s disregarding that stuff.”

John: I’ve been on one jury trial, and there were situations where I felt like the matters of law went to the judge’s chamber, so rather than us leaving, the judge and the counsel leaves to talk in his chamber. But yeah, it again is a structural thing. You do need to know what the differences are in a different country, because otherwise you could get this wrong in a way that would hurt your story. Let’s wrap up with, I see Lewant has a thing from the Netherlands.

Drew: To your point about defaulting to the American style, Lewant says, “A one-panel comic from a Dutch newspaper says, ‘Fulk and Zuk spend most of their student days watching TV.’ And this judge says, ‘Will you please stop referring to the stenographer as members of the jury?’ The joke is that the Dutch court system does not have a jury system, yet most of us personally witness it through U.S. media.”

John: Exactly. If you’re in one of these countries, and you’re expecting a jury trial, and there is no jury, that is very different. Again, if you’re writing a scene that is taking place in a foreign courtroom, don’t rely on your American expectations of how things are supposed to work, because it could be very, very wrong. Drew, thank you for the follow-up.

Now, let’s welcome on our guest. Celine Song is a playwright, screenwriter, and director, whose movie Past Lives is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Celine, welcome.

Celine Song: Thank you. Hi, hi. So happy to be here.

John: We’re so happy to have you here. I really want to talk to you, of all the folks out there on awards season, because I think your experience feels probably the most relevant to a lot of our listeners, who are aspiring filmmakers, because not only is this your first feature, but you’ve made it internationally. It’s complicated between two countries. It’s a very personal story that you could’ve done as a book or as a play, but to do it as a movie felt like the right choice.

We had Lulu Wang on a couple years ago to talk about The Farewell. It felt like she was telling a story that only she could direct, and so same like you only would make sense for you to direct this. It just felt so relevant to a lot of our listeners.

I’m so excited to talk to you about not just your movie, but also the process of getting to the point where you could make that movie. Could we start back at the beginning? What is your experience or history with storytelling and with filmmaking? Where did that start for you?

Celine: To me, I went to grad school for playwriting. Then I stayed in playwriting. I was a playwright for 10 years, including my years in grad school. I was doing a lot of plays in New York City, off-Broadway. I wrote on a TV show as a staff writer, Wheel of Time. That was the first for-screen writing that I’ve done. I think it really was writing the script for Past Lives, and it really was the script that did the work of getting itself made. But I’ve been a dramatist for a lot longer. I feel like that would be the right word for it. I’ve been a dramatic storyteller.

John: Can we wind all the way back though? Because I’m really curious when you were aware of stories being told on screen. What got you to the point of, “Oh.” Because before you decided, “I’m going to go to school to learn this,” you had to think, “This is a thing that’s interesting to me.” What are those original sparks? Were there things you were seeing? Were there plays you were seeing? How did it all start?

Celine: I think when I was very young – I was like seven – I wrote a poem about a spider eating a butterfly. The poem was about how it is sad that the spider is eating the butterfly, and the butterfly is getting eaten, but what can you do about it? Because spider is really hungry. Spider has to eat. I think that really is my first foray into writing really more than anything. I really do think about that as my first piece of work, because I think that there’s something about that, what that poem is about, that I think lives in me pretty fundamentally. For example, there not ever being any villains.

John: I want to get into that with Past Lives, because it’s a story without villains. I think you said in an interview the only villains are time and circumstance. It’s fate that’s made this thing not be possible in a certain way.

Celine: Time and space.

John: Of course, your characters are able to overcome some of that because of the wonders of technology and Skype, but there’s limits to how much that can happen. But still staying on your trajectory there, you’ve written a poem. You can write a story with characters. But why go into playwriting, why go into filmmaking ultimately, rather than becoming a poet or a novelist? What was the trajectory there? At this point, were you in Korea when you were writing that story? Had you already come over to Canada? What was your history there?

Celine: I wrote the poem in Korea, in Korean. Then when I turned, I think, 13 is when I moved to Canada. I was ESL, so I was learning English. I think that was a main thing that I was doing, and keeping up with schoolwork while being ESL. Eventually though, I took Latin in school, and I became a part of Classics Club.

In Ontario, where I grew up, Ontario, Canada, there is a classics conference. There they actually have a play competition, where you write a play and you get to put it on. There’s also a filmmaking competition, both of which I wrote and directed something for. Mind you, I was still a little ESL. But I wrote a movie and directed it, and then I wrote a play and directed it. This was high school. I think that those were some of the ways that I was just doing it sometimes, doing it any opportunity I could get.

But when I went to college, I went to university for psychology, and I minored in philosophy. I think that for a while there, I thought that I was going to be a psychologist. But I never made it, because in my final year as a psychology student, I wrote two plays for the short play festival that was happening at my university. I was like, “I think I just have to write fictional things, write dramatic things.” Then I think that after that, I started applying to grad school, and I decided to go to school for theater.

John: We have a lot of listeners who are ESL, who either they’re living in the States but grew up ESL, or they’re living internationally and they’re debating between writing in their own native language and writing in English. At what point were you deciding, “I’m going to focus on English,” or, “I’m going to use the two of them.” At what point did you feel like the artistic work needed to incorporate both or one thing? What was your process there?

Celine: I think that to me, it really has to do with who the audience is. I think that if I am making something for a Korean-speaking audience, then I would probably write it in Korean. But I think because my audience that I had moved to New York City to be a part of the community for is an English-speaking audience, so I was writing in English. I think it was very much about, how do I tell the story in a way that the audience is going to come meet it? Who’s going to fill the seats? I think that really was the impetus behind it.

I think something that is very difficult about being ESL is actually less the not knowing English of it, but the lack of confidence, or the way that it is harder to hold onto the confidence, especially as a writer. To be a professional writer, the professional writer means that you are the expert, you’re the chosen expert, or you’re the expert in a community for communication and being able to use language and being able to experiment with language, all of those things.

The ESL, it is, of course, a bit of a chip on your shoulder about, “Yeah, but it’s not my native language, so how good can I be?” That’s of course something that is coming from everyone around you, who when they find out that you’re ESL – or in my situation, I have a light accent for being an immigrant – and all of those things, there is a way in which you are questioned or underestimated by people who English is a native language. But some of that, I think that of course becomes a little bit internalized. So you walk around feeling like, “If I’m ESL, how good can I be?”

But I think that something that really shifted that for me and really gave me such confidence is that, actually, I have a handle on two languages. When I think about the language of English, being able to look at it objectively or think about it objectively or from the outsider perspective, even a little bit, gives me actually more control. It actually gives me a deeper understanding of how English as a language works.

There was a really amazing feeling that I had working on a play where I was like, actually, I am in the engine of the English language, because it didn’t come naturally to me. I didn’t just show up and then English was there for me. I actually had to learn the parts of it. In that way, I can be better at it than a native speaker.

In the meantime, I also have the context of an entirely different language that works completely differently structurally, that gives me the depths of knowledge around language, generally, that it makes me actually a better mechanic in general of any kind of language too. Also, I know what the alternative is. I’m like, “There isn’t a word for it in English, and there is a word for it in Korean.”

What an amazing thing that just the way that I think about the world, the way that I think about character, story, can be just a little bit bigger, because I speak more than one language. I think that that was such a big turning point for my life as ESL. I hope that moment and that feeling of confidence comes to all your listeners who are ESL as well.

John: What I hear you saying is to avoid that tendency to apologize or to step back from the fact that you’re not a native speaker and lean into the fact that because you had to learn it, you actually recognize some things about the language, and you recognize what’s beyond the edges of what’s possible in normal English.

Celine: Yeah, and also specificity. When I’m choosing a word, I can be more specific with it, because it’s not how I have always thought about that word. I can be really specific with it.

John: I grew up in English, but then I had Spanish very early on. Spanish was my first process of learning a language and actually learning, oh, there are verbs, there are nouns, there are adjectives. I actually had to learn all this structural stuff that comes with the language. Getting that in the third grade was really early for me, but it was incredibly helpful to recognize, oh, we must have these same things in English and probably every other language too, and just give you a systematic sense of like, languages will do very different things, but they’ll still have the same concepts behind how they are organizing themselves. It made me just more curious about English, because I could see where the roots of things were. You saw how things grew together and grew apart over time.

Celine: Exactly, yeah.

John: Now, I want to talk to you about writing in English and writing in Korean, because obviously in Past Lives, characters can speak Korean, and we will subtitle it, which is great, because that’s a convention of film is that we can subtitle things. But if you’re doing a play work with Korean characters, subtitling is much more difficult. I haven’t seen your play Endlings, but in that play, are the characters speaking English and speaking Korean? How do you approach that for the stage?

Celine: They speak English. I think that something that I really found is the way that Past Lives is a script that’s written is bilingually. I would write what I wanted the character to say in Korean, and underneath, I would translate it in the way that I saw the subtitles. And of course, I knew that the subtitles is a part of the story.

For example, there’s a scene in the film where the character Hae Sung, who only speaks Korean, the character Arthur, who only speaks English, they meet each other for the very first time. If this movie was about a traditional love triangle, they would start being angry with each other. Because this is an unconventional love triangle, what happens is that Hae Sung and Arthur, they look at each other, and then the first thing that they do is Arthur says hello in Korean, in bad Korean, and Hae Sung says hello in English to Arthur, and in bad English. I

n that way, you’re seeing that these two characters are trying to speak in the other person’s language, and really choosing to speak in a language that is not comfortable for themselves. I think in that way, the movie is fundamentally a bilingual story. It’s actually about bilingualism. It’s about the way that the main character, Nora, holds two parts of herself that are in different languages and different cultures. I think in that way, I knew it needed to be written bilingually, and I am bilingual myself, so that is what I wanted to do.

Then when it came to subtitling the film, I wanted the subtitles to be a part of the picture. It’s part of the visual language of it. When the subtitles show up or the subtitles don’t was something that I wanted to be really specific about, because some part of the language has to remain a mystery, because it is about the mystery of not speaking the other person’s language or not speaking the language of the person that you’re in a marriage with, even. It had to work that way.

John: Obviously, in the childhood sections that are set in Korea, or if you’re with Hae Sung and his friends who are speaking Korean, it’s more conventionally subtitled. You’ve written English lines. You know exactly what they need to be. But it feels more traditional in the New York sections, where there are characters who wouldn’t be able to speak with each other. You’ve been much more cinematic in terms of recognizing the communication gaps between them.

Celine: Of course. Of course, some of the translation is not meant for direct accuracy. It is sometimes rewritten to express the feeling that I need it to be. I think that sometimes it’s like, the metaphor, the poetry of it in English is not going to translate to Korean and vice versa. I think that those are the things that I wanted to be deep in it with, because that’s really what the script was about, and it’s what the movie’s about.

John: Now, before you could go off and make this movie, you actually had another credit. You’re working on Wheel of Time, the Amazon series. I’m really curious, what else were you writing that got you staffed on Wheel of Time? That was your first staffing job. Could you talk us through that? Because a lot of our listeners are probably thinking about, it seems impossible to be staffed on an American show like that. What was your process getting there?

Celine: I think I just wrote a pilot. I wrote a pilot as a spec pilot. It was about professional poker players. It was just there as a sample. It was a traditional three-act with commercial breaks, kind of like a hardcore TV pilot. But the thing is, I know that this is something the showrunner of Wheel of Time, Rafe, and I talked about as the reason why Rafe hired me, which is that Rafe doesn’t play poker, but when he read my pilot, he understood poker, if not the game itself, but what poker is at its heart. Even if you don’t know the mechanic of poker, you understood why poker is fun.

That is a skillset as a writer that he was looking for, because of course, Wheel of Time is a very intricate and deep, with magical systems, fantasy show. You need a writer who is able to translate just a wall of meaning kind of story and to find something that even somebody who’s not familiar with the world can love. I think that that’s why he loved the pilot and that’s why he hired me for it. Also, I am a TV writer who had read Wheel of Time before. I think that was another part that I think was really great.

John: I realize I’m falling into a trap that so often happens in interviews where you assume that every step was deliberate and planned, so that you wrote this pilot so you could get staffed on Wheel of Time. That wouldn’t be the case at all. You’ve gone and got your degree in playwriting, right, as a graduate degree?

Celine: Mm-hmm.

John: But what were those years in between? What were you trying to do that caused you to make the choices you did, to write the plays you did, to write this as a pilot? When did you get your first representation? What was that process like? Because it wasn’t overnight.

Celine: No, of course not. I think that if it is overnight, I think that you pay for it being overnight somewhere else in your career. Does that make sense?

John: Yeah.

Celine: I think that’s a very real thing. But it was certainly not overnight. I graduated from my MFA program for playwriting, and then I didn’t have representation. For many years, I think I really didn’t have anything except for my plays that were getting done in smaller spaces or off-off-Broadway, or if you’re lucky, a little bit of something at off-Broadway. So much of it is about just walking around with your play and submitting your play and hanging out with other playwrights and complaining about how no one’s doing our play. I think so much of it is about working in theater and living in theater.

John: Were you teaching? What else were you doing? What other jobs were you-

Celine: I would have a day job, or it would just be like getting by on things. I had a play that was getting done in Omaha, that got done in Chicago. Sometimes those checks would come in, and that would be really great. But it’s a check for like $500, which at the time was like, “Okay, now I can pay rent.” But it is like that.

I think that in 2017 – I’d been out of school for, I guess at that point, three years – is when I got my agent. I got my agent through, there’s this program at the public theater called Emerging Writers Group. Only people without agents can apply to that program. I went there, and at the end of the two-year program, they set you up on a few dates with agents. One of the agents that I went on a date with is my theater agent now as well. He’s at CAA. Of course, because of the nature of the agent that CAA is, they have many other departments besides theater.

I met my theater agent, and then he helped me get a team together. Then I told them that I would like to staff on something or something. Meanwhile, I was talking to my current film agent. I was telling her about, I’ve been thinking about this movie, Past Lives. I think it’s happening a little bit like that. It really is the work of my agents, who both got me the staff writing gig for Wheel of Time, because they’re the ones who put my poker pilot on Rafe’s desk.

John: Before we jump on to getting Past Lives made, just a moment on Wheel of Time, because that would be a situation where you’re writing in a room. You have a bunch of other writers around you. In what ways was it similar or different to what your experience was as a playwright? Because you were apparently in a playwrights community, so you had some folks around you, but this had to have been different.

Celine: Oh, completely different. But also, I think that the thing that carries us through all of it, through every medium, is our understanding and authorship of characters, story, what we need when it comes to performance. Everything that we know about what is going to work about the script is going to be the thing that carries us through all of it: story and character. That’s it. In that way, it’s not different, because all day in a writers’ room, we’re just talking about story and character. That’s what I was doing in theater. That’s what I was doing on the set of Past Lives too.

The way that it is different is that – especially for a show like Wheel of Time, where the fans of the books themselves is the audience. They’re the primary audience. They’re the ones that we are showing up for – it’s an amazing giving kind of a process. I found it to be a very giving process, where it’s like, “I would like it to be like this.” It’s like, no, no, no, these characters exist. These characters are also dealing with already existing beyond my own personal imagination. They exist in the audience’s imagination, and then of course it all begins with the imagination of the book itself. I think that some of it is about serving the characters or serving the story, which is not necessarily how I think about writing a play, for example.

I think that’s part of it, and also working with other writers on story and character. There’s always something to learn from any writer. My whole writers’ room, I learned so much from every single writer that I worked with there, because the way that I think about story is going to be different than the way they think about story. We may go my way or their way, but either way, it’s all going to be this amazing learning process of me learning how she thinks about the story this way and I think about the story this way. What an amazing thing that there is a different way to think about the same story. I think in that way, I learned so much from it. I don’t know. It was amazing.

John: Now, with Past Lives, you’ve now written a script. You have shown it to your reps. You’re talking about, “I think this is a movie I want to get made.” From those initial conversations, was it, “This is a thing I’ve written for myself to direct.” Was that always part of the framing of it?

Celine: I think that I really wanted to direct, and I really wanted them to see me as the director for it. But I think that it’s a script being written bilingually, and myself being bilingual, or it being such a personal story that is inspired by an autobiographical moment, all of these things were great reasons for them to let me be the director. I think that I was just also making an argument with the script itself, because the script was very much a pitch document for how I imagined this movie to get made. It wasn’t just a script for its own sake. It was very much a description of what I imagined the movie to be. I think these were all things that I was stacking up so that they would really seriously consider letting me direct it. Of course, when I got to, I was so happy.

John: It’s hard to imagine someone reading the script and then meeting you, and it’s like, “Oh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” or, “She doesn’t know what this is.” Clearly, it was very close to your personal experience. Let’s talk about the process of going out and trying to find producers, trying to find money, what that was like. You have this script, but you also have yourself. Was there a reel? Was there anything else you were showing to convince people this is the vision for the movie?

Celine: There was no reel. There was no deck. It really was just a script. I think it was a script and a conversation. I think that’s the truth of it, because my studio, A24, they read the script, and they felt the things that the audiences are feeling now about the movie at the end. They cried for the same reasons that the audiences are crying about Past Lives now. I think that they were moved by it genuinely. Then it wasn’t a long process from going from there to getting the movie green-lit.

John: To bring the movie into A24, was there a producer? Was Killer Films already attached to it, or did that come later on? Was it CAA who was taking it to A24, or was there other producers brought on first?

Celine: CAA’s bringing it to A24 first, because I always knew that, especially if I wanted to direct it, they’re the ones who take the risk.

John: That felt like the right studio for it, for sure.

Celine: They’re the right studio, because they’re the ones who take the risk on first-time filmmakers. They’ll just go for it that way. I think that we always knew that we wanted to end up there. I feel like that’s one of the first conversations. I feel like when we were there, when I’m talking to them, I think that so much of it is about instilling confidence in them that I can do it.

Besides that, the thing that really opened the door, and the thing I think that, especially because this is a podcast about writing, I feel like something I want to for sure say is that the script is the thing that bursts through every door for me. This movie was going to get made because of the script, and that’s it. I didn’t have to tell them what I could do by making a reel or a short film or anything. Those things were not necessary, because the script was a movie that they wanted to make.

Then from there, even beyond that, from the producers to department heads, every single person who worked in the movie, the thing they were coming to make this movie with me for is not me or my reel, because they’re coming to this project because of the script. Usually, I could tell who was right for the project by how they felt about the script, because of course, when I was talking to my production designer, I knew she was the right person right away, because we just started talking to each other about the script. I knew that this was the right person, because I knew that she understood the script.

It’s an amazing way to also, in a way, learn if this is the right person for the project, which is, did they understand the script? Did they feel the script? Did they feel connected to the script? If they did, they were going to work on the movie. The script was the center of gravity. All I had to do was to remember that even when I didn’t know how to make the movie, because my first movie, and I don’t know how to read a call sheet, even then, I just knew that as long as I hold the key to the script, as long as I’m the expert on the script that I wrote, I’m the ultimate authority on the project.

John: A thing we’ve talked about on the podcast a lot is that the script has to serve so many functions these days. Christopher Nolan was actually on the podcast recently talking about the same thing, which is that even at his level, the script is still the sales document. It’s not just the blueprint, but it’s also embodying the feeling of what this movie’s going to feel like. And that is not only getting the studio involved – A24 in your case – but also all your collaborators, just making sure that they recognize how they can fit into this vision of what you’re trying to do.

When we were meeting with crew for Big Fish or for Charlie’s Angels, those are very different scripts, but do they connect to the vision of it? Because if they don’t connect to the vision of it, they’re not going to be the right person for it. If they don’t get the style, the feel of it, they’re not going to be the right fit, and that’s okay.

Celine: Of course.

John: It’s recognizing that some relationships are meant to work in that thing, and some relationships aren’t. Sometimes you find issues where a person is fantastic; they’re just not the right person for this specific role, this specific part in a production. Sometimes longtime collaborators will split up on a thing, because it’s just not the right fit for both of them.

Celine: I think that’s right about it being the sales document, but I also think about it as the first line of defense too, as in what the project is and how well it’s going to go or what’s going to work about it is going to be all in there. Part of the vision for a thing is coming out of that.

The vision for it, it’s like, I can make as many mood boards as I want. If the story and character and dialog, what the performance needs to be, if those things are not there, there’s no amount of mood boarding that’s going to get any director through anything. I feel like a part of the reason I know that is because I’ve been a writer for the longest part of my life. I also know that so much of it is coming from, that’s the first step towards the vision for it. It is going to completely dictate the vision for it, especially if I am the one who’s directing it. I think you’re right; it also is about collaborators. Maybe it’s just not right for them to work on it, even though they are longtime collaborators and all of that.

But I also think that it’s like, the director is the person who is the passionate core of the whole thing, the writer director, because the script is the center of gravity. And then, of course, all around it, part of how it should work is that the fire that you have, the fire that the script communicates – because that’s how it is. I know that there’s a fire in me that I’m communicating through the script. When they read the script, when they encounter the script, the people who might work on the movie, either it’s going to set them on fire, or they’re not going to understand why it is on fire. Then what you’re hoping for is everybody showing up burning to make this make this movie with you. I think in that way the document has to be damn flammable.

John: Exactly. Now, Celine, when you wrote this script though, this flammable script, you had not been through the process of casting and location scouting and directing and editing, all that stuff. You’ve now gone through all this process. As you’re looking at the writing you’re doing now and the writing going forward, how much do you think the experience of having been through this will influence the words on the page and the script you’re writing going forward?

Celine: Completely. Everything that one does is built on the things that one has done before. I think in that way, without question. I do think that there are parts of going through the whole process that I had done before. For example, casting, I had done before, because I was in theater.

Editing, I realized, I had done before, because editing is such a fundamental part of writing. Editing is something that is happening all the time. Of course, in the editing of a film, you’re also editing it visually on top of it just being text or it just being the way that a performance is going. It’s a funny thing, because those parts, I had no fear or problem around, because this is a thing that I knew how to do.

Editing I knew how to do and casting I knew how to do. Being on set, I did not know how to do. Location scouting, some parts of it, I know what it is, because at the very least, I knew when it wasn’t right, and I knew when it was right. In that way I knew. But now, when I go on location scout, will I actually be able to look at it through the eyes of someone who actually has to go and shoot it? Absolutely. There are parts of prep that I think I just feel so much more equipped for because of it. The writing of it, of course, has always been the way it’s always been. The writing of it is the same.

I do think that I am more efficient though in my second script, my script after Past Lives, because I think that I can already imagine myself sitting in the edit and being like, “Did I need to shoot that scene?” What’s amazing is now that I know what kind of resources are put into shooting a scene, it means in the case of our film, which is, of course, shot in New York, it’s about parking 20 trucks in New York City and bringing hundreds of people around New York City. The work of that, the pain of that, the effort of that, the collective, beautiful effort, the stakes that are involved in shooting a scene I think really does inform the way that I write now, as in when I write a scene, it’s always like, “Is this absolutely the scene that has to be in the film?” The answer has to always be yes, because otherwise, you’re going to be sitting in the editing, it’s like, “Look at the half a million dollars just-”

John: Burning there, yeah.

Celine: “… on the editing room floor.”

John: I made a bunch of movies before I directed my first one. I knew a lot about production and post-production and how it all fit together and worked. But by the time I was writing my first thing that I’m going to direct, I could understand what the constraints were and use those constraints in a really helpful way, to recognize, okay, these locations are going to be onerous unless I make decisions that makes it much more feasible to shoot in these locations.

Recognizing what’s hard and what’s easy in production can really help you out when it comes to making the choices in the script. That’s why we always, on this podcast, encourage people to crew up on a film, experiment, just go out there and learn how actual things get made, because it will help you figure out, in your own writing, how to prioritize if stuff is actually going to work and not get so stuck on things that may end up on the cutting room floor.

Celine: Yeah, totally.

John: We have two listener questions I think you would be a perfect person to help out with here. Drew, can you help us out?

Drew: Nikolai in Denmark writes, “I would love nothing more than to find a writing job in Los Angeles. However, I’m currently an undergraduate student studying literature in Copenhagen, and there’s 5,000 miles and two years of school before even buying a plane ticket to LA is feasible. I was wondering if you think going to a top screenwriting program in LA could be a path towards finding a job, any job, right out of college and starting a career that way.”

Celine: I think that the moving to LA of it feels pretty necessary if you want to make movies in LA. My favorite part of moving to New York City to go to school in New York is also finding the community there, because I didn’t have a community at all in New York City. When I got to go there, I got to meet my classmates, which was a built-in community that comes with the school. They themselves had communities of their own that they could share with me. In that way, I could walk into New York City with the community built in, and one that is expanding. In that way, it was a really rewarding process.

The thing that I don’t think that a MFA program necessarily does for you is make you a better writer, because I think that you walk in as a writer you are, and then you become a better writer by writing a lot in a low-stakes way, which is something amazing about these writing programs. What’s amazing is that you can keep writing and sharing it with peers and keep failing and being bad and all of those things, without there being any professional stakes or any kind of financial stakes, except for, of course, the tuition fee. That’s a stake. But as long as that’s figured out, I think you are able to fail outside of the view of anybody who is in the industry or anything for a really long time. I think through that, you become a better writer.

Of course, one can find mentorship in the professors, who have gone through the industry and the life as an artist for far longer than you have, or far deeper than you have, at least. They’re able to provide such mentorship or a sense of how to navigate certain things. These are some of the things that really work about it.

Now, if you think that you’re going to move to LA and go to school there and then you’re going to have a career outside of it when you come out of it, I think, unfortunately, that is not a guarantee, to say the least. You still got to do it yourself. Every single part of this is something that you have to do yourself. No one else can do it for you, not even the grad school program that you’re paying a lot of money to go to.

John: Celine, you and I both have MFAs. No one has ever asked to see our MFA.

Celine: Oh my god. Why would they? I wouldn’t ask to see my MFA.

John: A huge plus one on everything you said. I think it’s such good advice, that you’re going to find a community and some mentorship, and those are all good things about a film program. The downside, of course, is the cost. What is probably useful for Nikolai to be thinking about is that getting into one of these programs is a way to get his visa and get him to the U.S. and get him here for two years. That’s worth a lot, so that’s really a lot of what you’re going to be spending your money on.

If you decide to do it, Nikolai, I would just say make sure you’re really approaching this as this is your mission, this is your job. You’re coming here to do a thing, because you’re only going to get out of one of these programs as much as you put in. Really be looking at it like, “I’m full speed going ahead.” If you don’t think you’re quite ready for it right after undergrad, then take a year, just grow up a little bit, so that way you would actually come to a program, you’re ready to kick ass in it. Drew, another question from Jacob here.

Drew: Jacob writes, “My writing partner and I just finished writing the pilot for a comedy show we’re developing. We’ve begun inviting our writer and actor friends to join us for a table read, so that we can hear our script out loud and hopefully get some honest feedback. My writing partner and I are in disagreement. Do we share the script ahead of time for our writer and actor friends, or do we have them read it blind?”

John: Celine, what’s your instinct on table reads? Because you probably do this in theater as well.

Celine: Theater is just all table reads. Theater is just reading after reading after reading. I actually have trouble really seeing the script that I’ve written, whether it’s a play or a screenplay, unless I’ve heard it out loud in a little room full of my friends.

My answer to this question is I think that they should read it blind, as though they are your audience, because how good the performance is in the reading is not helpful. In fact, I really don’t personally ever invite actors to the reading of my first draft, because actors can make the script sound a lot better than it is. We love actors, and we rely on them so much, but I think sometimes what happens is the actors are also auditioning for the role when they’re reading it. Sometimes that’s undue pressure on the script.

I think the performance part of it is not necessarily valuable for a script, because what you would need from that reading is objectivity. What you need from that reading is the way that the story and the writing itself is hitting the first very small group of audience. I usually invite fellow writers or people who are not in the industry or something, but are able to read on sight.

I’m sure you can go through your list of friends, and you can find a funny list there. But I think it’s usually somebody whose main job is not being an actor and somebody who’s able to read on sight and is able to be clear in their reading, but does not have high stakes when they show up, and will talk to you, like a very first audience member, and who’s not going to be weird or mean about anything, who’s not going to be strange about it, but who’s going to be a wonderful vibe on top of everything. I think that once you find some of those people, I think they’re the folks who have to read it.

But I don’t think you should show it in advance, because you just want to see the way that the script is hitting them live, because that’s where you’re going to learn if the script is working. If the joke doesn’t hit, you don’t want to wonder if the reason why the joke didn’t hit is because they already read the joke and they already laughed about it. You want to see if the joke actually isn’t hitting the audience or that it is actually hitting the audience.

John: Mike Birbiglia, when he is doing one of his movies, he will bring over a group of friends, and with pizza. I think he’s very deliberately, like what you say, lowering the stakes. No one is auditioning for a part. They’re just reading through the script and getting a sense of does this feel like it’s working. They can have constructive conversations. Agreed, Celine; if you bring an actress to do that, they can sell something that doesn’t really quite work. There’s that feeling that they’re auditioning for stuff, and that can just be really tough, so I think really smart advice here.

It’s time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend something to our audience that they should check out, something useful or fun. Mine is something I just find myself using all the time. I don’t think I’ve talked about it on the podcast before. It’s called Shottr. It’s an app for the Macintosh which basically just takes screenshots.

So often, there’s something on your screen that you want to take a shot of and send to somebody or remember. You have the built-in screenshotting stuff in the Mac, but then it just saves it as some randomly named file. This is an app that you hit the keyboard command, take your little screenshot, and then you can just do stuff with it. You can mark it up. You can annotate it. You can put little arrows, like, “This is the problem.” It just makes life so much easier and handier. A quick little utility. I think it’s five bucks. Called Shottr. It’s S-H-O-T-T-R dot-CC is the URL for it. Check it out if you’re on Macintosh and you take some screenshots. Celine, do you have anything to recommend?

Celine: Yes. Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s what I recommend.

John: Oh my god, it’s so amazing. We talk about it on the podcast all the time. Tell us, Celine, who are you playing as your hero, and what’s your experience in it?

Celine: I am a custom character. Her name is Faunta. Part of it is that I just treat it as a story mode dating sim a little bit.

John: 100 percent, because you’re trying to connect with all the different characters in the game.

Celine: Exactly. I think you can play it however you want. It’s one of the most in-depth storytelling, I don’t even know what to call it, storytelling thing that I’ve ever experienced.

John: Isn’t it just so well written? I’m flabbergasted how well it’s put together.

Celine: It’s beautifully written. I’m fully invested in the characters. I’m fully invested in the story. Of course it has so many things that are usually just fantasy things, like the magic. It’s because it’s so foundational to the fantasy genre, the Dungeons and Dragons of it anyway. I think that those things are all there, but I think even beyond that, I just feel so immersed in it. I really do think that these characters are living and walking around in that way. I don’t know. I’m just so moved by it. I’m obsessed with it. I play it all the time.

I think that as a storytelling thing, I’m just, you’re right, flabbergasted. I’m just totally blown away by how good it is, and how I’ll just get into a story, and I’ll be so in it, and it’ll be so complex. The characters are all responding to it in an unbelievably sophisticated way.

John: Then to recognize how many branching decisions they had to plan for, because is that character even still alive at this point? Has Astarion ever met this character? It’s wild.

Celine: Of course. The consequence is real. There are real consequences to the story. It’s not like, however you play, you’re going to all end up here. No, you may not end up there. You may have a completely different situation. Now, you cannot deal with this character that way anymore because of what you’ve done last chapter. I don’t know. I’m just so into it. My TikTok algorithm is all Baldur’s Gate right now. Anyway, it’s so good.

John: The YouTube algorithm keeps sending me videos of like, here’s the interactions you missed or when Minthara becomes a zombie. It’s all the different wild things that could happen because of choices character make.

Celine: Of course.

John: Just that sense of agency that it gives you as the protagonist, whatever your hero is in it is just really remarkable.

Celine: It’s really remarkable, yeah.

John: Basically, we have a podcast now where we talk about how good Baldur’s Gate 3 is, but it’s true. It’s really, really good.

Celine: It’s true. It is really, really good. Game of the year.

John: What’s also really, really good is Past Lives, your film. Congratulations on it. Congratulations on your nominations. It’s such a delight to see. I remember my first experience with Past Lives was I was on a long international flight, and the woman next to me was watching Past Lives. I wasn’t even sure what it was. I could see Greta Lee and just some movie there. She must’ve watched it like three times on the flight. I’m like, why are you watching this movie again and again and again? I waited and watched it in a proper non-airplane environment. But it really is so well done, so congratulations on everything you’ve achieved so far.

Celine: Thank you so much.

John: I can’t wait to see what you do next.

Celine: Thank you. It’s in movie theaters again.

John: That’s exciting.

Celine: So amazing.

John: People can see it.

Celine: So exciting.

John: That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on The Seagull staged in Sims 4. Celine Song, absolute pleasure having you on the show.

Celine: Thanks for having me.

[Bonus Segment]

John: When I saw this in your bio, I knew I had to talk to you about this. You staged a version of The Seagull, the classic play, but you staged it inside Sims 4 and streamed it on Twitch; is that right?

Celine: Mm-hmm.

John: Talk to us about your impetus behind doing that. I also would just love to talk about this notion of theater kind of things that happen online. Tell us about how this came to be.

Celine: It was just really during COVID. The theater that I had a play, Endlings, done at, because of COVID, had shut down prematurely. We had two weeks of previews, we had opening night and then we got to do one more performance, and then the play got shut down. I was, of course, so heartbroken.

Then I think the theater was, because it is so much about people gathering and it’s about live performance, that I think there were questions about what theater community can be doing at this moment to make theater. I think that New York Theater Workshop, which is the theater that did Endlings, they asked me if I want to do anything in the virtual space, whether a Zoom play or whatever. They were like, “Whatever you want to do, we’ll do it. We’ll do a production of it, whatever it may be.”

I really just thought at that moment, it’s like, “I’ve been watching a lot of live performance, actually,” and a lot of live performances in the video game streaming world, where all of these characters and personalities, they were streaming video games. It’s a funny durational performance in a way, because they’re streaming for like six hours playing Overwatch or something. I was watching a lot of it. In fact, there is all the joys of a live performance in that. There’s something about it where there’s the spontaneity in it. There is a bit of like, we know what we’re going to do, but it also is a little bit unknown, we don’t actually know what’s going to happen, feeling of it.

I think that at that moment, I was like, “What if I was to stage a play in a video game?” Then a thought I had was, because The Sims is, I’ve always felt, so Chekhovian, because The Sims is about life as it is, and the difficulty of life as it is, and the pain of living as it is. Those are things that are fundamental to a Chekhov play. My favorite Chekhov play is The Seagull. It really was that the New York Theater Workshop called me, and then I think on that phone call I came up with the idea. I was like, “What if I stage a play in The Sims? It should be a Chekhov play, maybe The Seagull.” I think that’s really the process for it.

Then of course, what I really loved is that when I was doing the play, the two completely different communities came together. Then of course, there was community that had a relationship to both sides, which is the people who are theater goers, who never watch video game streaming, who don’t have a relationship to video games, and video game players and video game stream watchers, who don’t actually know anything about the classic play. Then there were those of us who were in the middle of that Venn diagram, where we are in a circle that contains both of those communities. We were like, “We know video games. We play Sims. We grew up on Sims. That’s part of our community. But also, we know what Chekhov is.” I think that all three groups of people came together.

I staged a play for two nights. I think each performance, quote unquote, was four hours each, and it happened over two nights. It started from me basically casting and costuming the characters to going through all four acts of the play.

John: That’s great. I remember during the pandemic, my daughter was in high school at the time, and she was involved with theater. Their plays got knocked to being Zoom plays. One of them was more traditional. One of them was just chaos. It was interesting to be able to experience this as a live event – a sort of live event. My mom could watch it from Colorado. People could participate in something in a way that wasn’t traditional. And yet I do feel like I associated so strongly with the pandemic and being trapped in that place that it’s hard for me to vision them trying to do that kind of thing now. And yet there was something really amazing about that new form being out there.

What do you see as things you took from that or things you’ve seen since then that we could keep doing, bringing weird communities together, or finding new ways to stage either classic things or storytelling that is meant to be streamed live, versus a classic either filmed or stage entertainment? What do you think is still entertainment in that space?

Celine: The ancient way of storytelling, which is just the setup, the revelation, introducing a character, you see the rise and fall of that character, there is certain things about storytelling that is fundamental in the bones of it. It’s always going to be, no matter in what form and no matter in what generation, is going to just work, because as a story, that just works. I think it’s about remembering that part while we are adapting and navigating the new realities, the new ways of watching things, the new ways of hearing stories, new ways of telling stories.

I think that even through all of that, what I find over and over again is that there are stories that endure, and these are the stories that have existed forever. We know that cavemen told these stories. To know that those stories are still going to be the same stories that is going to move us, that’s going to mean something to us, I think that it is to hold these two contradictory thoughts themselves. I don’t think we can stop progress or the way the technology is coming in or the way that storytelling as a form is changing all the time. I don’t think it’s possible for… It’s like trying to stop the ocean with your hand.

But I know that even through all of that, what I’ve learned, and what I’ve also learned through telling the story that is Past Lives, and to tell it globally, and to tell it to every generation, it is always that every step of the way, what works about the Past Lives story is one that would’ve worked on the cavemen too. I think it’s that. It sounds contradictory, but I know it’s not, the feeling that it’s both. It is that it is eternally traditional and conventional and ancient and that it is brand new. It’s always changing. It’s always different.

John: On this thread of classic stories or ancient stories or retold in different ways, I want to acknowledge that Sleep No More is closing in New York. Sleep No More as an experiential place, where the story was happening around you, and yet you weren’t always seeing all parts of it. In some ways is like Baldur’s Gate, in which you’re not going to catch all the threads. There’s no way to actually see all the different possible branches of it. I do think there’s room for experimentation. There’s room to try new things.

Some of our listeners who are probably so focused on, “I want to staff on a TV show,” or, “I want to go make a movie,” should not discount the possibility that there could be some fascinating way to tell a story that’s not part of those traditional buckets, and do that if it’s interesting to them, because they are more likely to find that new thing than an established filmmaker is to do it. They have the freedom and the access and the membership in a community that might be able to help them find a new way to tell a story.

Celine: Of course. Also, the truth is that everybody’s looking for the thing that worked before. I think some of it is about how we break through the risk-averseness of the industry.

John: Celine, absolute pleasure talking with you about this as well.

Celine: So fun. Thank you so much.

Links:

• Celine Song on IMDb and Instagram
• Past Lives
• The Seagull on The Sims 4
• The Wheel of Time
• A real bald eagle call vs a red-tailed hawk
• Deadwood and The American President
• Shottr
• Baldur’s Gate 3
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Nico Mansy (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](https://johnaugust.com/2024/the-fandom-menace).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 628 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, Craig and I will discuss how things get cool, then hot, then terrible. We’ll have listener questions and a ton of follow-up, including about secret projects and alternative screenplay formats, something that Craig is always into talking about.

**Craig:** I’m into it.

**John:** In our bonus segment for premium members, we will look at various fandoms and do our best to absolutely enrage them.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** Oh, no. That’s why we put it behind the paywall. If you want to be angry with you, you gotta pay us some money.

**Craig:** Pay $5 to watch us get beat into a pulp. Fun.

**John:** Craig, we missed you last week. Aline was on, and we discussed How Would This Be a Movie. We had some new topics for How Would This Be a Movies. Also, this week, I was looking through the chapter on picking which movie to write, for the Scriptnotes book. I mentioned, oh, a bunch of our previous How Would This Be a Movies have become movies. I had Drew get on the case to figure out how many of those that we discussed actually did become movies. The number is shocking. Drew’s going to help us out, talking through the things that became movies, the things that became documentaries, and the things that are in development right now. Drew.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Talk us through how many of these projects have actually been made since we discussed them.

**Drew Marquardt:** Twelve of these have actually been made as narrative feature films.

**Craig:** Jeez. Wow.

**Drew:** Or series.

**John:** Also, Craig, you start to realize, man, we’ve been doing this for 10 years, so some of them I knew, like The 15:17 to Paris, which is about those Americans who prevented the terrorist attack. That was a Clint Eastwood movie. I knew that happened. Zola we talked about at the Austin Film Festival. That became a movie. Do you remember The Hatton Garden Job, which was the old men-

**Craig:** The old guys, yeah.

**John:** Yeah, the heist. Two of those happened.

**Craig:** They made two of those?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I like that. You’re making the movie, and someone’s like, “We’ve gotta beat the other The Hatton Garden Job movie.” Oh, business.

**John:** Business, business. But Drew, talk us through some of the other things we had in How Would This Be a Movie.

**Drew:** There was also The Act, which was the Dee Dee Blanchard and Gypsy-Rose Blanchard.

**John:** She just got out of prison, right? I didn’t really follow that story closely.

**Craig:** Yeah. Apparently, our daughters’ generation is obsessed with Gypsy-Rose and her impending freedom, or freedom. She’s become a cult hero among the children, because she murdered someone or whatever.

**John:** What else we got, Drew?

**Drew:** There’s also The Mandela Effect, which was just the idea that we had talked about, but they made into a feature. There’s Stolen By My Mother: the Kamiyah Mobley Story, which was the young woman who discovered she was kidnapped as a baby by the woman she thought was her mom.

**Craig:** I don’t even remember that one.

**John:** I don’t remember that one at all.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Drew:** There’s the Danish series The Investigation, which is about Kim Wall’s murder.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** It’s a submarine murder. That’s right.

**Drew:** Six Triple Eight, which is in post-production right now, but Tyler Perry directed it. It’s about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, which was the predominantly Black battalion of women during World War II in the Army Corps.

**John:** I do remember that. I remember thinking, “Is there enough of a story there?” It was a part of history I didn’t know existed. We’ll see if there’s a story there.

**Drew:** We have How to Murder Your Husband, which was about the woman who wrote the book How to Murder Your Husband and then murdered her husband.

**Craig:** Oh, murder lady. Come on.

**John:** It’s a great title, so that’s why it needed to happen.

**Craig:** How to murder your husband, step 1: don’t write a thing about how to murder your husband. Jeez.

**John:** It could actually go on endlessly, because if you make a movie called How to Murder Your Husband, everyone’s going to suspect you of murdering your husband. It’s perfect.

**Craig:** Now I’m rooting for that person to murder their husband. What else did we do?

**Drew:** Death Saved My Life they made into a Lifetime movie, which is the wife who showed up at her own funeral, because her husband had her killed but not well.

**Craig:** Oh, man.

**John:** Death Saved My Life, I guess that’s a good title. It’s a good Lifetime title. It’s a good book title, so sure, I’ll get that.

**Craig:** I’m with them.

**Drew:** There’s Dumb Money, which came out last year.

**John:** We talked about that. It’s about the GameStop situation and story. Not at all surprised that happened.

**Craig:** No, considering that I personally received multiple calls from multiple companies about it.

**John:** As did I.

**Craig:** I was like, “Okay, apparently they’re making this thing.”

**John:** Craig, you and I should’ve both taken the job for different companies and just raced to see which one-

**Craig:** Wow. Just go head to head in the theaters.

**Drew:** Then finally, Holiday Road, which I think might’ve been a TV movie, but that was the 13 stranded strangers who all rent a van together when they can’t get a flight.

**Craig:** Here’s my question. Of all of these, how was our batting average on predicting whether or not they would be made?

**John:** That could be good follow-up for Drew, because I don’t think you went through and looked at that. Drew, maybe for next week, can you take a look at, of those movies, how many did we say, okay, that’s definitely going to happen?

**Drew:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Similarly, were there any where we were like, “Never in a million years will anyone make this.”

**John:** That’s what I’m excited to see. We’ll put it on the blog so people can see which of these movies happened and which one didn’t. But you also found 10 things that are in development, including-

**Craig:** Jeez.

**John:** … one about Jim Obergefell, the Hulk Hogan Gawker lawsuit, Dr. James Barry, who was a gender-fluid Victorian doctor, which I remember we thought was really interesting, and apparently is Rachel Weisz. Feels like the perfect casting for that.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** There’s the PTA mom for drug dealing. You May Want to Marry My Husband. These Witchsy founders who formed a fake male co-founder.

**Drew:** Brie Larson got that one.

**Craig:** Oh, nice.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** McDonald’s Monopoly.

**Craig:** That one is a great one.

**John:** The Scottish hip-hop hoax. Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. There’s a bunch of those things. That was also a thing that came to me a couple times. There probably will be a Sam Bankman-Fried movie. I think it’s tough. I think the relative lack of success of Dumb Money is going to very much hurt the Sam Bankman-Fried movie, but we’ll see.

**Craig:** They’re going to make it anyway.

**John:** George Santos, there’s at least one movie. That’s right, we talked about that, the George Santos movie, the one that Frank Rich is doing.

**Craig:** All I need to know is Frank Rich. I’m in. That’s great. This is pretty remarkable. Similarly, I’m interested to see if any of these we thought were not even worthy of development. The conceited question is, hey, are people listening to us and then just rushing out to get this done? But I suspect not. I suspect there is an industry of assistants that are doing nothing but Buzzfeed-style collating whatever buzzy news item of the day is and putting it in front of people, and then there’s just a general race to get rights and make a thing. It is amazing how many of these are getting made.

**John:** I was just surprised at the total numbers here. We’ll also include in the blog post the ones that were made as documentaries, because I think a thing we often talked about is, is the best version of this a fictionalized version, or do we just want to see the documentary series that tracks that, which in some cases may be more compelling.

**Craig:** That’s very interesting. Good to know that we’re not just wildly off, at least with the things we’re considering. I root for all movies.

**John:** Root for movies and TV series. Some more follow-up. We talked two episodes ago about accurate but distracting, so things that, if you put them in your script, they might be actually accurate to what happens in real life, but would be distracting to the viewer or to the reader. We have some follow-up from that.

**Drew:** Richard in Boston writes, “There’s an example of this that historical fiction writers have to deal with called the Tiffany Problem. It was coined by fantasy writer Joe Walton. The Tiffany Problem describes the tension between historical fact and the average, everyday person’s idea of history. If you’re reading a book that takes place in medieval times, you’ll have trouble believing that a character’s name could be Tiffany, even though Tiffany is actually a medieval name that goes back to the 12th century. But in our modern perception of the medieval world, Tiffany just doesn’t fit. Even though authors might research carefully and want to include historically accurate information in their book, like a medieval character named Tiffany, a popular audience likely won’t buy it.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Totally tracks. I love that as a name for that phenomenon.

**Craig:** That really does track. I would absolutely be stopped in my tracks if there was a scene in a medieval story and Tiffany shows up. That would just seem anachronistic. That’s a great example. I guess in the end, it really doesn’t… There’s no victory in saying afterwards, “No no no, Tiffany was a name,” because people are like, “I guess now that I know, that’s interesting, but in the meantime, it screwed up my enjoyment of this story.” Tiffany. All right. I like that.

**John:** Now, I don’t want to get Drew’s mailbox overflowing with stuff, but if you are a listener who has another example of something that really does match the Tiffany Problem, which is basically something that is historically accurate or accurate to true life but is distracting if you were to encounter it, I’d love more examples of that, because it feels like Tiffany’s great, but I think we can find more ways that this manifests.

A thing I’ve talked about on the show a lot is that when I want a bedtime book, I love a book that is really interesting and completely forgettable, that you can read, and the minute you set the book down, you don’t think about it, so you can fall back asleep. I’ve been reading some books on counterfactual history, basically like, what if this thing happened in a certain way.

**Craig:** Alternative history, yeah.

**John:** Love it. One of the stories I wasn’t familiar with was Arminius, who’s also known as Hermann, who’s the German barbarian chief who drove back the Romans at a certain time. In reading this account of Arminius, “That’s a fascinating movie. I’m surprised no one has made a movie about that. Let me Google and see why no one has made a movie about it.” It turns out there’s two seasons of a Netflix show that is specifically about that. There’s just too much-

**Craig:** Netflix.

**John:** … Netflix.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** There’s just too much Netflix.

**Craig:** It’s almost like Netflix has become like Google, but instead of getting a search result, you get a series.

**John:** Yes, exactly.

**Craig:** It’s insane.

**John:** I looked at the trailer. It looked great. I’m like, “Great. Someone has already made the thing I was thinking about making.” Congratulations. I will say I’ve not watched a frame of the actual series. They shot it in Latin and in German, which feels great.

**Craig:** Whoa. That’s impressive.

**John:** Kudos to them. Kudos to everybody involved in making Barbarians, which I may watch at some point, I may not watch at some point. But I know it’s out there, and I know that I, John August, don’t have to write it. That sometimes is the greatest relief.

**Craig:** Apparently, we don’t have to write anything, because Netflix did it.

**John:** Another thing I don’t have to write is the Harry Potter series.

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** Episode 623, I talked about a project. This is when we were talking about bake-offs. I talked about a project that had come into my orbit, and they asked, “Hey, would you want to adapt this very popular piece of IP.” I’m sure, Craig, you were guessing it was Harry Potter. We can now reveal it was Harry Potter. They’re doing a Harry Potter series for HBO Max or Max. Deadline posted a story about who the finalists were who are going through the process. I wish them all well. They did find people who have good, proper credits. I do wish them well. I do think it’s just a very hard road ahead for them.

**Craig:** I have no inside information on this. I work at HBO, but no one has ever talked to me about Harry Potter. I don’t know what it is. It seems like it’s about adapting the books. That was what I initially thought. But then they’re saying in this article, “We’ve heard that the group of writers were commissioned by Max.” First of all, that’s cool that they’re paying them.

**John:** Yeah, they’re paying somebody.

**Craig:** “To create pitches for a series reflecting their take on the IP.” Now, I guess my question is – and this is my dum-dum question – what take? I thought that the idea was, we’re going to take each book and adapt it fully over a season, because those books are big. When they were adapted into movies, very successfully, of course they had to do quite a bit of compacting. I guess maybe there’s more to it than that. I don’t know. I’m fascinated by this.

I would be terrified to be one of these people. They’re way braver than I am. There’s something very scary about knowing that there’s somebody somewhere else doing what you were doing, to try and do what you’re doing, and maybe will do what you do instead of you. It’s scary. But I do think on the plus side, they’re being paid, so that’s actually quite good. On the downside, I could also see where this becomes this cottage industry, where you’re paying people to do these pitches, but you’re not paying that much. The thing about pitching a season is you have to do quite a bit of work.

**John:** Oh god, so much.

**Craig:** That’s definitely an imposing prospect. I guess for something that is as huge as Harry Potter is – and it is – it’s almost as close as you can get to a guaranteed success, as far as I can tell. I can see why it is like this, because I assume also that these people will have to meet with JK Rowling and get along with her, because she’s always part of it.

**John:** If you look at the attempts to expand the franchise beyond those books, they’ve not succeeded. They’ve succeeded in physical spaces. I feel like the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, tremendous success, those things, but the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them have had diminishing returns. Hardcore Harry Potter fans are not as enamored with those as with the original books, of course. It looks like, based on this article – and we don’t know the inside truth here – is that some of these takes may be moving outside of the books, some of them may be more faithful adaptations of the books.

**Craig:** I don’t know. Those movies, I guess they did well enough for them to make more. They ran into some trouble, because Johnny Depp suddenly was in a situation. They may have not been the size of the original Harry Potter films, but I think they were doing okay. The Harry Potter play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is a phenomenon, our friend Jack Thorne being the primary playwright there. Well, the playwright. I guess, technically, Jack wrote the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child from an original story by him, JK Rowling, and John Tiffany. Tiffany. Then the Harry Potter video game was an enormous hit.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** In the world of video games, there are some enormous hits. When they are enormous, they dwarf what we do. That was one of them.

**John:** I guess I should restate that they’ve had a hard time expanding it out as a filmed franchise, but this is maybe possible, going to happen. For folks who are looking at, oh, what is a popular book series that did not get a good treatment, Percy Jackson. The movies were not a big success. The new series on Disney Plus is terrific. For folks who are curious about that, really worth watching. I thought it was just a very smart adaptation, much more faithful to the books. My daughter, who grew up reading those books, loved it. They really are quite enjoyable. It was well cast. So difficult to get great performances from young actors, and this succeeded in it.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** It’d recommend it for people.

**Craig:** Great. We wish those folks the best of luck. I don’t know if they’ll want to do this, but when it’s all done and the winner of, what is it, the tri-cup wizard, the tri-wizard tournament, whoever wins the big cup that actually turns out to be a Horcrux or, no, a Portkey, it would be great to have them on our show, just to talk about the process, if they’re willing.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** It’s fascinating to me. I get it, but also, it makes me nervous.

**John:** It does. Also, I think you have to look at are you going with people who are familiar with the movie series or new folks. That’s a challenging [crosstalk 16:09].

**Craig:** I could be wildly off here, but I suspect that the Harry Potter books are transgenerational, that people who read them as children are now reading them to their children, that they aren’t going anywhere ever.

**John:** I don’t know that to be the case. I feel like there’s been such a backlash against JK Rowling that I wonder if that’s still the case.

**Craig:** There is a backlash against JK Rowling on Twitter and social media, no question. I don’t think that that has translated into the actual audience and how they interact with the stories and the characters. I will cite the video game again, because when the video game came out, that was thick in the middle-

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** … of JK Rowling and her controversies. People were really angry about the game and angry at the game, and yet it sold a gazillion copies. There is a disconnect, I think, between… There’s a topic. One day we should probably jump on the third rail, John, and discuss the notion of separating the art from the artist, because this comes up all the time.

**John:** For sure. Noted for future discussion is how we separate those things. We’ll find some other good examples of what do you do with problematic people who also make art.

**Craig:** Roald Dahl.

**John:** Roald Dahl, Joss Whedon. It’s tough. There’s that tendency to retroactively discount the thing that they were able to make and do, because we now believe that they’re terrible people.

**Craig:** There’s also this weird phenomenon of feeling guilty about enjoying something. Roald Dahl said a lot of really antisemitic stuff. Not mildly. Very. I love Roald Dahl books. I do. I love them. I really enjoy the Wes Anderson Henry Sugar adaptation. I feel like I’m a little like, “Should I?” Then I’m like, “I really like the stories.”

**John:** Let’s talk about some UK writing credits. In 625, I think we were answering a listener question about UK credits, and we said we know they work differently. Tom wrote in with some follow-up about that.

**Drew:** Tom is the chair of the Writers Guild of Great Britain Film Committee, which is the WGGB. He writes, “Per the question from the British writer, I thought that you and indeed he would be interested to know that the WGGB and the Producers Alliance of Cinema and Television, or PACT, negotiated the screenwriting credits agreement way back in 1974. This agreement is referenced in the 1992 basic screenwriting agreement between our two organizations. Both these agreements are in the process of being updated, as we seek to bake in some of the gains secured in last year’s WGA strike, so thank you for that. We operate under a different labor framework in the UK, so these agreements are only advisory. Specific clauses can be negotiated out, though obviously we discourage that. Most screen credits are agreed in consultation between the producers and the writers in question. However, the Writers Guild of Great Britain does arbitrate on small number of credit disputes every year, following similar guidance to that used by the WGA.”

**John:** That’s great. It’s good to have some answers there.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is not surprising. The Writers Guild of America has a very legalistic system to arbitrate and assign credits. It is contractually the sole arbiter and sole authority of credit assignation. Other places, there’s that big bus-sized loophole that you can drive through, which is advisory or in consultation between producers and writers. It is not as strong of a system, presuming one agrees that the Writers Guild has the best interest of writers at heart, which I think it does. It’s just that when you are deciding what credits should be, there are sometimes winners and losers, and people that don’t get the credit are upset. But it’s good to know that there’s something. But I’m not surprised to see that it is not the ironclad structure that we have here in the U.S.

**John:** Absolutely. All these things come down to power. In the U.S., the Writers Guild has the power to basically force this system upon the makers of film and television. But the Producers Guild, for example, does not have that degree of power. But they have been able to negotiate and cajole and get people to take their PGA credits seriously, so that now when you see a PGA after a producer’s name, you can recognize, oh, that’s the person who did really more of the producing job, and it’s just not a person whose name showed up for various contractual reasons.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. I am a member of the PGA. I don’t put the PGA thing after my name, only because it just feels a little bit like a odd degree I earned in college or something.

**John:** But if you were producing a feature film, you might be more inclined to use it, I suspect.

**Craig:** Ultimately, I don’t think people at home care, but what the PGA does do is leverage its agreement with the Academies to determine who is eligible to win awards. That is actually quite a bit of interesting power that they’ve garnered for themselves. I think ultimately serves as their most relevant function. When the Oscars are coming, and Best Picture is announced, producers will go up to accept the Best Picture. Those producers have been vetted by the PGA. This works for the Emmys as well. We get a questionnaire, and they ask me, “What did these people do? Just tell us what they did.” And I do, and then they make their decisions.

**John:** More follow-up in Episode 626. We talked about the Nobel Prize and the Ig Nobel Prize, which I knew was a thing, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. Matt wrote in with some more specificity here.

**Drew:** Matt says, “The Ig Nobel Prize already exists, and they celebrated their 33rd First Annual Ceremony in 2023, based on offbeat yet real science. The prizes are often presented by true Nobel laureates.” Matt says, “I personally appreciate their method of preventing long acceptance speeches, where an eight-year-old girl marches on stage to tell the recipients to, ‘Please stop. I’m bored,’ while the audience throws paper airplanes at the stage.”

**Craig:** That is very reminiscent of what happened at this year’s Emmys, where Anthony Anderson, the host, brought his mom. When people talked too long, they put a camera on his mom with a mic, and she just told the people to stop. I gotta tell you, it only really happened once. After that one time, I think everybody was terrified of Anthony Anderson’s mom.

I think she should be at all of these award shows. There’s really no excuse for it. They tell you very clearly you have 45 seconds, which is actually a lot of time. Some people go up there and just don’t seem to… They think, “Oh, but not really.” No, really. We’re in show business. We all understand that there’s timing. It’s remarkable to me that people just don’t do that. In any case, Anthony Anderson’s mom or an eight-year-old girl marching on stage, either way, yes, genius. Much better than the playoff music.

**John:** Craig, I did not watch any of the award shows so far this year. You attended many of them.

**Craig:** You missed it.

**John:** Give us a quick review.

**Craig:** I lost.

**John:** How was it for you?

**Craig:** I lost. I lost.

**John:** You lost and you lost and lost and lost and lost.

**Craig:** I lost. I lost. And then I lost.

**John:** But your show won many awards that were not part of the main telecast, which is great.

**Craig:** Yes, we did. We won eight Emmy Awards, which is one shy, I believe, of the record for most for a first-season show. That was terrific. I would have probably felt a bit more glum about constantly losing all the big awards, had it not been that I was losing to Jesse Armstrong and Succession. He is such a lovely, wonderful guy. Have we not had him on the show?

**John:** No, we’ve never had him on the show. We should get him on the show.

**Craig:** Oh, good lord. Let’s fix that. He’s wonderful and so smart and so deserving. Also, there’s a nice thing about certainty going into these awards shows, where you don’t really have to worry. I didn’t write speeches, for instance. You go and enjoy that, and it’s actually quite nice. I have a few friends there that are also up for other awards. Quinta Brunson, who we love, won an Emmy, which was wonderful to see. You do get to see a lot of people that you’ve come to like and enjoy.

I made a shorter night of all those things, just because the strikes had that weird impact of jamming four awards things into the course of 10 days. Oh, god, man, I walked out of one of those things. I’m like, “This thing was 4 hours long, and I feel more tired than I do shooting for 12 hours.” I didn’t do anything. I just sat there. It’s oddly exhausting.

**John:** Now, everything has got jammed up, tied together, but the alternative is it gets dragged out over the course of weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks, which wouldn’t have been great either.

**Craig:** That would be worse. It was a way, at least, for people to go. Everybody’s schedules, once the strikes ended, everybody accelerated into work. Maybe not so much the actors, because there’s a bit of a lag time for them, but certainly writers and producers are working on things.

There will be awards shows coming up. We were very nicely nominated for the aforementioned PGA award. Going to be difficult for me to get down there and lose again, because I’m going to be shooting. I will have to lose in absentia. It was good to get it all done in this crazy pressure cooker 10 days, because it was Golden Globes, and then it was AFI, and then it was Critics Choice, and then it was Emmys, all boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and the Oscars are right around the corner.

**John:** Yeah, crazy. Last bit of follow-up is another Arlo Finch. Karen Finch wrote in and said, “Would you believe my dog is Arlo Finch? He’s nine, so technically, I named him first.” This dog is gorgeous.

**Craig:** Look at this little boy.

**John:** Oh my god, such a good dog.

**Craig:** What a cutie. He’s got his little toy.

**John:** His toy.

**Craig:** It’s so funny. My younger dog, Bonnie, she loves toys. But my older dog, Cookie, no interest in toys. Bonnie, when you come home, she sees you, and then she immediately runs away from you, gets a toy, and runs and brings it over to you, like, look, I have a toy. It always looks like this, just ripped up and gummy and dirty. Aw, look at this little boy, Arlo Finch.

**John:** It makes sense. Karen Finch, obviously her last name was already Finch. Arlo does feel like one of those names that probably starts in dogs and then goes to kids. Basically, it’s a fun name for an animal, and then you hear that name a lot and you start applying it to kids. It makes sense. Cooper was probably the same situation. I know there are a lot of Cooper dogs, and then you started having Cooper kids.

**Craig:** Cooper kids. Maybe Craig. It’s possible. Used to be a Scottish dog name. Craig!

**John:** You know that dog names tend to be two syllables, so you can yell out for them and they come back. Craig doesn’t work well as a dog name. Arlo does.

**Craig:** There’s Spike, Butch. I’m always thinking of the cartoon dogs. You’re right. Fido. Who names their dog Fido anymore?

**John:** It’s a good name though.

**Craig:** It’s a good one.

**John:** Craig, a thing we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast, probably from the very start, is that the screenplay format is well established. We’ve been used to it since the days of Casablanca. It’s 12-point Courier. The margins are a certain place. The dialog works a certain way. Character names are above stuff. As the Oscar nominations came out, we always try to make sure that we have all of the Oscar-nominated screenplays available on Weekend Read. That’s Drew’s responsibility, so Drew has been a hero to getting this all to make sure they look fantastic in Weekend Read.

We’ve got all of them except for one, which is Anatomy of a Fall, which is a fantastic script, a fantastic movie. It is not going to be possible to format that in Weekend Read, because it is bizarre. We’ll put a link in the show notes to how it looks. But I also pulled out some screenshots here.

It looks to be maybe in Times Roman, I’m guessing. It’s some sort of serif font. There are scene headers. It’s “8 – Chalet, Extérieur,” “Interior plus exterior/day.” We see that kind of stuff. It’s all in French, but you can totally tell what’s happening there. There are letters for A in parentheses, talking through the scene description. It is in the present tense, like the way we’d expect this to be. There are photos. There are photos of what the chalet looks like. Dialog is blocked over to the right in a way, with the character name above it but not centered. It’s just different. Craig, how are you feeling as you look at this?

**Craig:** I love it. I love this. This is going to start happening more and more. For screenplays that are speculative – and I don’t mean just spec screenplays that people are writing without money being paid; I mean even things in development, that are not necessarily automatically going to be produced – perhaps this would be too much or unnecessary.

But if you are writing for production, what I love about this is how many questions it answers for people, because, look, I’m in prep right now. People that work on movies, to produce the movies, all the department heads, they don’t read these scripts the way people that are gatekeeping at festivals or development executives read them. They’re reading them as instruction sets for what they’re supposed to do. The more information they can have, the clearer it becomes, and the fewer questions the filmmakers have to answer, because answering questions becomes the bane of your existence in prep. You have to do it. That’s sort of the point. But the fewer questions that are floating out there, the happier your day is.

This is brilliant looking at this. It answers so many things. It makes so many things clear. You’re going to end up drawing these things anyway. You’re going to end up taking photos of these things anyway. For a movie like Anatomy of a Fall, which is so specific about a space and what occurred in the space and the relative position of the window to the attic to the downstairs to the outside, this makes complete sense. It’s very easy to read. I have no problem with this whatsoever. None.

**John:** It does French things too, where they tend not to put extra blank lines between paragraphs, which is something I would choose to do. Looking on page 15, for example, there’s a sketch of how this attic space works and which windows open and which ones don’t. Just super helpful for anyone reading the script to get a sense of what the actual plan is here. We’ll try to get Justine on the podcast to talk through this, because I’m really curious-

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous.

**John:** … how early in the process did she know this was the house, this is how it’s all going to work. The other thing, which we always talk about, are alt lines and how you handle that. For this tidbit here, Sandra, in parentheses, “taking time to reflect or think about it,” she answers, “Not always, but often, yes, because of the wood dust.” And then, in parentheses beneath it, “Alt: often, yes, because of the wood dust. Alt: I think so, yes, because of the wood dust.” Here, those alts are there, already in the script there as a plan. Great. It feels very useful for production to know this is the situation, this is what we’re getting into, this is how we’re going to be doing it.

**Craig:** It’s a perfectly good thing to do. At some point, very early on, when you enter production, or let’s say you’ve been green-lit and now you’re in prep, as a writer you are confronted with how unromantic everyone is about creating it. You know the parable of the blind men and the elephant. The makeup people see makeup. The hair people see hair. The clothing people see clothing. The production designer sees spaces, materials, construction. They aren’t necessarily plugged into your grand, romantic, artistic dream. They’re just trying to make it happen. It’s so practical. This kind of work is incredibly practical, including listing the alts, because then your actors are aware. You can have that discussion. You can decide on the day, “Do we want that other line? Which of these do you prefer?” It’s all very practical.

I’m in complete support of it. I think the screenplay format that we use is a perfectly fine format for people to read and decide, “Would I want to invest in this? Would I want to see this happen?” It is not a useful document for, “How do we make this happen?” It’s just not. This is very clever, very well done.

**John:** Also, if we do get her on the show, I want to talk about decisions of when to be in French, when to be in English, because if you’re reading this document, you basically have to be able to speak both French and English to parse it and understand what’s happening there. It’s a French script with just really mostly English dialog in it. It’s just such a fascinating hybrid form.

**Craig:** Yeah, which reflects the reality of the film, where it’s taking place in France, and yet one character is often answering questions that are posed in French in English.

**John:** It’s delightful. Here’s the other thing is, we talked about the Tiffany Problem, like it’s realistic, but would you believe it. As an American, you’re watching these courtroom sequences, you’re like, “Wait, there’s no possible way you’re allowed to do that.” Of course, but no, it’s France, and you can do things that way. The way that the prosecutor behaves, it’s like, “How is that possible? Is she always on the witness stand, and she can just stand up and talk whenever?” It’s wild.

**Craig:** It is wild. I think a lot of people have that natural, like, “Did they just invent this to make the courtrooms seem more interesting?” The answer is no. Then following that, there was quite a discourse of, “What is wrong with France?” The way they conduct a trial just feels bad. It feels bad.

**John:** It feels incredibly unfair to the defendant.

**Craig:** It really does. In a country where there is a history of just chopping people’s heads off for political expressions, it does seem a little like, oh, I don’t like this feeling. But then we know in, for instance, the case in Italy with Amanda Knox, the way other countries investigate, prosecute, pursue, charge, and judge is not like we do. It’s interesting.

**John:** I would love to hear from international listeners, because they must see so much of the American courtroom process, because it’s in all our movies, it’s in all of our TV shows. How much does that color their expectation about how stuff should work in their own legal systems? They must have some expectation it’s going to work similarly, and it clearly doesn’t.

**Craig:** The other interesting thing about the constant presentation of the American justice system is that typically, for the purposes of drama, the stories that we tell are of falsely accused people or people who are guilty in the letter of the law but not in the spirit of the law. That’s what’s exciting to us. But there are times where we do tell stories of people who are guilty. The question is are they guilty or not.

The aforementioned Jack Thorne wrote a terrific miniseries that was centered around an actor who was accused of sexually assaulting people. It became a courtroom drama where you were rooting for guilt. That’s an interesting concept we don’t often see. But even though a lot of American lawyers… If we had Ken White on, for instance, he would run down how inaccurate and stupid American courtroom dramas are. It does at least give you a sense of our process and form, which is way more rigorous than apparently France, which is like, this is a free-for-all. This is kind of exciting though.

**John:** For our main topic, I want to talk a little bit about fandom and the dynamics of fandom. The jumping-off point was a blog post I read, which turned out was all from 2015, so it’s a little dated there. But I really liked how he laid out how subcultures become fandoms become these bigger things and tend to ultimately implode or get warped. This is a post by David Chapman. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it. He talks through that generally the dynamic you see is that there is a scene where you have some creators who are doing a new thing. It could be a musical new thing. It could be an artistic new thing. Some sort of cultural product that they’re making which feels new. That then attracts fanatics, who are people who are not making the things themselves, but are so into it and want to follow it and follow those creators. Both these creators and the fandoms are geeks, in the sense that they are deeply, deeply into it. This is more than just a weird hobby. It’s becoming an actual subculture.

Once that gets up to a certain critical mass, you have what he calls MOPs, members of the public, who are attracted to it and start to enjoy it, but they’re not on the inside. They get kind of geeky about it, but they’re not actual hardcore fans. They’re like tourists coming to the thing. Sometimes there’s in-grouping and out-grouping, where these new people you label as posers, because they’re not true believers, they’re not really part of it.

But what I found so fascinating is he also charts it through to generally you get a place where there are sociopaths who become attracted to this movement, this thing that’s more than a scene. It’s become a subculture. They adopt some aspects of it, and ultimately the drive either is for money or to do some other kind of nefarious purpose.

I thought it was just an interesting dynamic. It’s very easy to chart this to the rise of the hippie movement. It feels accurate to a lot of the ways we see things begin, blossom, grow, and fall apart.

**Craig:** This is an interesting dissection of the phenomenon of phenomena and how things catch fire and become a social exercise. There are certain presumptions baked into this that I think are worth questioning.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** For instance, is it better to be a fanatic than to be a casual enjoyer? One of the things I think about as a person that does create things is what do I want my audience to be. If I had a wish, how would I want them to be reacting and interacting with the work I make.

I don’t think I have a great desire for people to be fanatics, per se. What I want is for people to enjoy. I want them to take from it what I intended to give. The fandom itself is separate from what I want. I just want people to watch it and feel things that I hope they feel and think about things that I want them to consider. I am not doing this so that people tattoo it on themselves or go to every show and get signatures and autographs and things like that, but people do. I understand that, because I’ve tattooed myself, so I get that.

I do question the premise that one kind of fandom, there’s a pure, truer fandom than another. I wonder if most creators are really just trying to appeal to what this author refers to as MOPs, members of the public.

**John:** I think that’s a great distinction. Also, maybe we can talk about it both in the terms of the things we write and make, so Last of Us for you, or Chernobyl, versus what we’re doing right now, which is that we have fans of Scriptnotes, who are listening to this podcast that we’re making, and to what degree do we feel like we need to engage with that community that forms around, because we made a thing that the community is around it, or that we want to distance ourselves or not really think about and worry about that.

The answer is different for different things. I think with Scriptnotes, we do engage our community to a pretty significant degree, not a degree to which a YouTuber or a Vine star back in the day might’ve. But we’re answering their questions. We’re meeting them at live shows. Some of them are paying us $5 a month. There is a sense that we are attempting to service that community to some degree by also doing a thing that we want to do, which is different than what you’re doing with Last of Us, which is you’re trying to make the thing, and you recognize that there is a role to which you need to go out and promote the thing and go to Brazil to do a fan launch of the thing, and yet you’re still trying to maintain some boundaries around your exposure to that community.

**Craig:** Because the goal ultimately is the point. The goal of making things is hopefully for people to see it and appreciate it. When I say people, I mean as many as possible. I don’t think anyone makes a show or writes a book or writes a song so that very few people will listen to it.

There’s this thing that happens when something is new – this author refers to it as the new thing – where the first people to appreciate it feel a kind of ownership. They feel special, because they fought their way to it. They found it when it wasn’t promoted to them, when no one told them about it. They had a pure experience with it. Then other people don’t, in their minds. Other people are promoted to. Their friends tell them.

In reality, I’m not sure it matters, because let’s say I’ve never heard of a thing. I remember somebody… I think it was Shannon Woodward. Yeah, it was Shannon. I was having lunch with her or something. She’s like, “Have you seen Stranger Things?” I said, “No,” because you know me. I don’t watch stuff. She’s like, “There’s this girl who plays this little girl who’s just a phenomenal… She’s just doing this stuff that’s just mind-blowing to me as an actor.” I was like, “That’s a pretty good recommendation. I’ll check it out.” Then I watched it, and I was like, “Wow. Millie Bobby Brown is really good at this. The Duffer brothers are really good at this. This is great.” Is my appreciation less valuable because I was told, as opposed to somebody who’s just flipping through the 4,000 shows on Netflix, lands on something, and goes, “Yes, this. I have unearthed it.” I don’t know.

**John:** I think we often have the experience of being champions of a thing that we want other people to see. Our One Cool Things are like, “Hey, take a look at this thing that you may not have otherwise been aware of.” That signaling thing is important. We’re using some of our cache and our authority, to whatever degree we have it, to say this is a thing that is worth your attention. We sometimes seek out people who can recommend good things to us. A lot of the blogs I follow are basically like, I like that person’s taste, and so if they are recommending something to me, I will click through that link, because they don’t steer me wrong, which is absolutely great and true.

I think what’s different though is that the difference between a recommendation and something that becomes a fandom is a fandom requires some kind of organization. Interesting that a lot of times, fandom, it is self-organizing. It’s not the creator who’s going out there and creating that community and organizing that community. They’re just making their thing. That community is creating its own rules and its own structure around it. The relationship between that fan organization and that creator can be great. It can be toxic. It can be problematic. That’s a real challenge.

**Craig:** Yeah. What this guy is describing is fandom protecting itself, which actually has nothing to do with the art. It’s only about the community that’s built around the art, which I understand. When you find a community, it’s important to you. As we all know, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, belonging is the most important of the non-fundamental needs like food, shelter. You find belonging, especially if you are someone who struggles with belonging. Let’s say you’re on the spectrum. You’re on the autism spectrum. It’s hard for you to find belonging in the real-world space, but you connect with other people who have a similar struggle, over your shared joy of this new thing. You get really deep into it. Then your community is now something different and important from the art itself.

What this is talking about is how to protect that, because what happens as things become more popular is a lot of people enter the community that maybe you don’t think have the same depth of connection to the work that you do, or some people – and in this article they’re described just fully on as sociopaths – enter the community for purely exploitative reasons, to sell things, to get attention for themselves. And then they can, quote unquote, ruin the culture, the subculture.

The truth is all of this analysis does matter to a lot of people, because most people are fans, not creators. But for those of us who make things, I think it’s important to appreciate fans, to appreciate early fans, rabid fans, passionate fans, and the community they build up, while also maintaining that what we do is meant for anyone who enjoys it. Anyone. There is nothing exclusive about what we do. There is, however, apparently something exclusive about the people that begin that first community.

**John:** This is a thing I was holding back for maybe a future How Would This Be a Movie, but I think it’s actually good to bring up right now. There’s an article by Sarah Viren which ran in the New York Times this past week. It’s looking at this woman whose sister was murdered when she was a kid. Fifty years have passed. It’s a cold case. But this woman said, “Listen, I feel a calling from God. I need to figure out who killed my sister in this brutal way 50 years ago.” She goes to a true-crime con thing and meets these podcasters who had done similar kinds of things, and starts working with them about, “How are we going to try to solve this? How are we going to group-source this?” The podcasters have a plan. They’re going to build up a Facebook group. They’re going to get people involved in working through this. They start putting together episodes. They’re making some progress. The police agree to reopen the case. Things are proceeding.

But ultimately, this woman starts to have frustrations with these podcasters, feeling like they violated some confidences that she had shared with them, and doesn’t go on this one Zoom. And essentially, this whole community turns against her, the actual person who is the instigator of all this, the one whose sister actually died. I found that to be fascinating too, because who’s the creator in this situation? Is it the podcasters who did organize this group, or is it her? And who is the victim in this situation?

True crime fandom is a thing. In this case, it’s a community that was formed around this one murder, and the only thing they have in common is that there’s a curiosity about this, but they’re not making the thing. They’re just contributing. The sense of online communities in particular can be incredibly toxic, because you’re not doing it to someone’s face.

**Craig:** It’s also a question of what is it that you are obsessed with. Here’s a woman who’s obsessed with who killed her sister. That is a fact, and that is a crime. That’s somebody that she loved and cared for. The fandom is obsessed with a podcast, so now they are interested in what is an act of creation. It’s a show.

If you care mostly about the show, I always think of this as the Skyler problem. Skyler White on Breaking Bad. Anna Gunn is an incredible actor and portrayed Walter White’s wife beautifully and had to carry the burden of a very difficult part. There was this thing where the Breaking Bad fandom just started to hate her, hate both Anna Gunn and Skyler White. Why? Because Skyler’s character was in direct opposite to Walter and his stuff. If she finds out what he is doing, she’s going to be angry and make him stop. When she does find out what he’s doing, she is upset. She becomes sort of a co-conspirator, and then eventually just no more. But her character was a threat to the existence of the show. If Skyler wins, Walter White stops making meth, and there’s no more show. What the audience cared about was that the show would keep going, and so they started to hate a character. I find that fascinating.

I think in this case, I could definitely see where if the woman whose sister was a victim became uncomfortable with the show and was threatening the continuation of the show, the community gets angry at her, because they don’t care about her and her justice. They care about the show. And that is where fandom gets a little squiggly, when you’re dealing with stuff that isn’t purely fictional, but rather a presentation of truth.

**John:** Absolutely. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to continue this conversation and talk about different fandoms and the degree to which it feels like the creators have some control over that and the degree to which the creators are being held captive to their fandoms, which I think is a challenging situation, which happens far too often. Let’s answer some listener questions. Drew, what you got for us?

**Drew:** Brent writes, “My understanding is that if a stage musical is adapted into a film, the songwriter retains copyright, and the songs are licensed to the film. But how does ownership and authorship work with original songs written for an original musical film? Are they considered separate from the screenplay? Is the lyricist considered a co-writer of the script by the WGA? And how is that songwriter typically contracted?

**John:** Here’s a question I could actually answer, because I have-

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** … much experience with this. First, Brett’s assumption that a stage musical adapted into a film, yes, and so that the lyricist composer of the original Broadway or stage production, they own the copyright on those songs, and so those are licensed as part of the package to make the movie. The Mean Girls movie, Jeff Richmond, who wrote the songs for that – and I don’t remember who the lyricist was – those songs were licensed for the movie, pretty straightforward.

When you write an original song for a movie, and so if you’re Billie Eilish to do for Barbie, they come to you and they say, “Hey, would you write this song for this movie?” You write it. It’s phenomenal. There’s a separate contract for that. It is licensed to be in the movie. It’s relatively clean. It’s similar to how it would’ve worked the other way around, like if the song had previously existed.

What gets to be complicated is when you are writing stuff that is fundamentally integrated into the movie. For Corpse Bride or for Frankenweenie and for Big Fish, I wrote songs into the script that became part of the movie. Those, I was not contracted separately. They were just part of the script. They were folded into my writing fee for writing the movie. But those songs, which also Danny Elfman then did the music for, also exist separately, and so I am paid separately for those, for royalties and for all the other music-y things that songwriters get paid for. I get separate checks for each of those things. When it plays in Norway, I get 13 cents, and those checks accumulate separately, by different accounting systems, so ASCAP or BMI.

**Craig:** Yep, I’ve done the same. That’s how it works. You do retain authorship of those songs. I have the distinct honor of receiving checks from ASCAP every now and then for a song called Douchebag of the Year in Superhero Movie, which how many people can boast that, John? Very few.

**John:** It’s nice.

**Craig:** I wrote a rap song for Scary Movie 3, and I get royalties for writing the lyrics. Your outline is exactly correct. Authorship of lyrics and authorship of music will always generate royalties through ASCAP and BMI, and not only if they’re played just on their own, but also if they’re played in the movie. It is an interesting hybrid there, but generally speaking, you do retain more rights and more financial interest with songs than you do with, say, a work for hire as a script, because in that case, you’re really relying on the WGA formula for residuals and nothing else.

**John:** One other question embedded in here. Is the lyricist considered a co-writer of the script by the WGA?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Generally, no. It’s a thing we’ve talked about with Rachel Bloom a couple times is that writing the songs for things like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she’s often writing actual story material. She’s writing everything that happens in the song. It’s like she’s not just writing dialog, but she’s writing a whole sequence. You could imagine there could be scenarios in which the songs are so much of what the actual story is that it crosses into situations where it really should be considered literary material that goes into WGA arbitrations. Maybe that’s happened in the past, but classically, no, it’s not considered literary material in that same way.

**Craig:** Generally, no. If you’re dealing with something that is a recitative, where everything is sung, for instance, Les Mis, then certainly, I think the Writers Guild has the ability, through its pre-arbitration structure and participating writer investigations, to say, “Hey, look, even though this is in a lyric format, it is dialog. It is screenplay material. It is literary material.” We have the ability to be flexible on that front and to pose the questions and ask them. It’s another reason why the WGA’s sole authority is important, because it can, as an institution, allow for some flexibility and exclusions and exceptions. There are ways for it to actually account for unique properties like that.

**John:** Next question.

**Drew:** Kaylan in Alaska writes, “Are there best practices to follow as to not break up scenes or dialog in an annoying way? I specifically mean when a scene begins at the bottom of a page, and only one line of scene description fits, or when dialog gets broken between two pages in a way that feels like it might break up the reading of the line. My brain really wants that soothing feeling of a scene starting at the top of a page.”

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what my brain wants, Kaylan. My brain is trying to anagram and Kaylan and Alaska together. There’s so many overlapping letters. I love it. Best practices are what you feel good with, what makes you happy. Most people reading, my opinion, don’t care. For me as a writer, I care so much. I don’t like splitting up dialog across pages. If I can mitigate that, I do, because, I don’t know, I don’t like it. It just feels bad. If you can avoid ending a scene with a single line of action that’s on the subsequent page and then start a new scene, yeah, do it. Avoid it. It’s actually not that hard to do. As long as you don’t get into a situation where you’re actually hurting things to make it look better on the page, you’re fine. My brain wants that soothing feeling as well, and there’s nothing wrong with a little self-soothing there as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Here’s one situation where screenwriting software, from Final Draft to Fade In to Highland, all the legitimate applications, are going to be doing some of this work for you. What they will all do is they will not let you start a scene at the very bottom of a page. They’ll push that scene header to the next page. If there’s a single line on the next page, they’ll pull stuff across, so that you don’t have a little orphan or a widow there happening. Some of that stuff happens automatically.

What Craig is describing is generally the last looks before you’re printing or turning in a script to somebody, is just going through it one last time and seeing are there any really weird breaks that I want to fix here, and seeing if there’s way you could pull stuff, push it down or pull it across, so you don’t get those weirdos there. I used to be much more of a freak about it. I just don’t let it stress me out too much. I will look for situations where that’s actually confusing because it broke that way.

The other thing you don’t appreciate until you actually have to build the software to do it, most of these apps will also break at the sentence, rather than breaking at the end of the line. If dialog has to break across a page, they will create the break, add a period, rather than just having the line taper off, which is just helpful. It just makes it much easier to read.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**Drew:** Not Too Happy writes, “I wrote a script in 2014 that became my calling card for many years. It performed well on The Black List site, found producers, went to all the agencies, got offered to a bunch of different actresses and directors, and spent years almost getting made. Then a few weeks ago, I saw a Deadline announcement that a very famous actor is set to produce and star in a movie with the exact same plot. Normally, that would be an oh well, what are you going to do? But in this case, that actor was sent my script in 2015, along with an official offer of a million dollars to play the lead. This all went through their reps at the time, from reputable producers on my end, above board, blah blah blah. Now, I’m not accusing anyone of knowingly stealing anything, but I can’t help but feeling like I’m being ripped off. My manager offered a, ‘That sucks,’ and my lawyer advises a wait-and-see approach. I’d rather not. Do I have any recourse, and what would you do?”

**John:** Not Too Happy provided some context here which Craig and I can take a look at, but we’re not going to discuss on the show.

**Craig:** It is quite the context. It is certainly relevant. Not Too Happy, I get why you’re not too happy. Your manager actually here is giving you the proper answer, which is that sucks. Your lawyer advising a wait-and-see approach, that’s the lawyer’s version of, “We’re not doing anything.” Here’s why.

Unfortunately – and we’ve talked about this quite a few times on the show – premises, plots, these are not really intellectual property. They fall under the general heading of ideas. Let’s say I write a script, and it’s about two guys who discover that they’ve grown up separately, but actually, turns out that they’re brothers, and in fact, they’re weirdly twins. They’re fraternal twins. But one of them is really short, and one of them is tall and super strong. They don’t look anything alike. Okay. That’s Twins. That’s cool. What I just described, anyone can write a movie like that.

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:58:50].

**Craig:** I could sit down, I could write another movie today with a different title that is the exact same plot, and it is not legally actionable, because unless you get into unique expression in fixed form, there’s no infringement there. If you get a copy of the script that this star is going to be making, and they have taken chunks of your action description or runs of dialog that are non-generic, okay, that’s just straight up copyright infringement. They won’t.

**John:** They won’t.

**Craig:** Unfortunately, this is one of those things where we can’t even say that the person went, “Oh, you know what? I love this idea, but I just don’t like the script. Can somebody else do this idea?” Maybe that’s what happened, which by the way, that’s not stealing either. Is it ethical? No. But is it criminal? No. You can’t steal something that isn’t property. And unfortunately, concepts and ideas and general plot lines, not property.

**John:** We don’t know the backstory on how this actor came to do this project, which is apparently moving forward. My hunch though is someone else had basically the same idea and wrote it up, and the actor said, “Oh yeah, I’ve always wanted to do something that’s in that space,” and said yes to that thing. I suspect that the second writer really did come up with that idea on their own, because it’s a good idea, but it’s also an idea that a lot of people could have, honestly. They wrote their own thing. This star attached themselves to it. If you cannot show that there is a connection between that second writer having exposure to your script and having decided, “I’m going to do this thing that’s basically the same premise,” there’s no case to be made here.

Your manager and your lawyer are saying the right thing. The lawyer saying, “Let’s wait and see,” is also saying you don’t know this thing’s ever even going to happen. If this thing actually goes in production and it clearly looks like there is an infringement case to be made here, that’s the time when she would raise her hand and do something.

**Craig:** There almost certainly won’t be. Let’s also dig in a little bit on Not Too Happy here. When you said, “That actor,” the one that’s now said to produce and star in the movie, “was sent my script in 2015,” so almost a decade ago, “along with an official offer of a million dollars to play the lead,” now, that sounds impressive. But the fact is, actors of a certain level are constantly getting stuff submitted with an official offer of whatever their quote is, or maybe their quote is less than that. They might not have even read it.

Listen. I get offered things where someone says, “Here’s something. We’ve bought a book, and we want you to write this,” and blah blah blah. I’m like, “No, I’m not interested.” I just tell my agent, “It doesn’t sound for me. No, thank you.” Then four years later, someone that I’m really fascinated by starts talking to me about that book or a different book on the same topic, and now suddenly I am interested, because there’s just a different context to it. Did I do something wrong? No. I changed my mind, or I wasn’t in the same place, or something was more attractive to me about this other version of it.

The point being, what I think you need to do is let yourself off the hook of feeling like you’ve been screwed, because that’s a terrible feeling to walk around with. I don’t think you’ve been legally screwed. If you were somewhat ethically screwed with, let’s look at the bright side. You had an idea that other people thought was worth making. Now, what you need to do for the next step, Not Too Happy, is to write a script of an idea that people like, that is so good they want to make that script. That’s ultimately what separates the steadily working writers from folks who are trying to be steadily working writers. Good idea and undeniable execution, as opposed to good idea, decent execution.

It’s not fun to hear. By the way, your script may have been amazing. But in this case, it sounds like, by your own admission, it went to all the agencies, lots of different actresses and directors, and it just ultimately wasn’t compelling in and of itself to get that next level going.

As John says, in this case, I’m looking at this article that talks about this. There are articles like this every five minutes. “So-and-so is attached to produce some blah da blah such and such,” and then it never happens. Who knows?

**John:** Who knows? Let’s try one more question, Drew. Let’s do Will here.

**Drew:** Will writes, “Before Christmas, I reached out to the representation of a character actor I had in mind for my script. Today they got back to me asking about financing. How do I answer them saying I don’t have financing without scaring them off?”

**John:** That’s going to be the first question you’re going to get back. It’s good we bring this up, because any time you’re reaching out to a specific actor, who’d be the character actor who’s exactly perfect for this, the reps are doing their job. They’re saying, “Okay, is there any money here?” The answer is, “There’s no money here. These are the producers that I want to approach. This is my plan going forward.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Look. Character actors really should be asking about this. Basically, what the reps are saying is, are you offering us a job, or are you asking us to attach a name? Will, you’re referring to an independent film. There’s a long, glorious tradition of independent films trying to get financing using the actor’s name to help them get financing. The financing is like, “Do you have an actor attached?” Everybody’s basically in a catch-22.

But attaching yourself to a script ultimately isn’t much of a commitment. No actor’s going to say, “Yes, I’m attaching myself to your unfinanced project, and also I’m clearing the decks for these months, and I will take no other jobs for those months.” That’s not a thing.

How do I answer them? Honestly. You answer them honestly. You say, “We are looking for financing. We honestly feel that we will have a much better chance of getting financing if we can say that this actor is attached and happy to play this part, should all of the other things that need to happen line up, like schedule, payment, etc.” If they’re like, “Yeah, no, we don’t actually want to attach ourselves to this without financing,” what you just heard is “no.” And that’s just life.

**John:** Yeah. Is there a future situation where somehow you’re able to find financing, and you come back to that actor, and suddenly they’re interested? Yes, that could happen too. Don’t bank on it, but that’s possible too. You’ve burned nothing to do this. Being honest is the right approach.

Whoever the reps are for this character actor, this is a chance for them to be more in a lead role. That’s exciting for them. There may be ways that you can spin this as helpful. They may also know people who are, relationships that that actor has with producers or something. There may be some way that it could be helpful. So be honest and open to what they’re saying next.

**Craig:** These reps, we don’t know, they may have been yelled at by their client two weeks earlier, saying, “Stop sending me stuff that isn’t financed and isn’t, quote unquote, ‘real.'” Because here’s the thing. They gotta read all this stuff. They gotta read all of it. They gotta get excited by it. And then they do, and someone’s like, “Great. We actually have no money. We’ll talk to you in a year.” Then they’re like, “Why did I go through all that?”

**John:** The same thing happens for writers, of course, is that you get approached, like, “There’s this book,” blah blah blah. It’s like, that’s fantastic. Some cases I’m willing to engage, and I’ll at least try to set this up someplace. Other places, no. If there’s actually a home for this, then I’ll talk about this, but I’m not going to spend three months of my life trying to get this thing set up.

**Craig:** Or, god forbid, help you get the rights, by saying, “I’ll adapt it.” Hell no.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Get your own rights. Otherwise, what do I need you for? Do you know what I mean? I’ll just go get the rights then.

**John:** Yoink. Cool. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book that I read over the Christmas holidays. For whatever reason, I plow through books during the holidays. I had three this time. One of them I really enjoyed was Going Zero by Anthony McCarten.

So the premise of this is – it’s fiction – there is a joint program between the CIA and a Facebook kind of organization. What they’re trying to do is to be able to track people who fall off the grid, who disappear, and to see how quickly we can find those people, prevent terrorist attacks and other nefarious things. To test this system, they are going to recruit, I believe it’s 10 people, and basically say, “We’re going to tell you one day that you have to go zero. You have to disappear, fall off the grid. If you can stay hidden for 30 days, we’ll give you $3 million.” It’s a good premise. The story’s alternating between the people who are trying to hide and the people who are looking for them. So that’s that cat-and-mouse game.

**Craig:** That’s cool.

**John:** Naturally, there are complications that ensue. I read this as a pure, clean, looking for a good read, and of course, as a person who makes film and television, I’m like, “I know how to adapt this.” But I deliberately did not look up the credits of the person who wrote the book until I was finished. I looked him up. Anthony McCarten is actually a very successful, very produced screenwriter, who I ended up emailing him, and he has his own plans for the book. So I’m excited to see what’s going to happen next to it. But if you are into a fun, breezy thriller to read, I recommend Going Zero by Anthony McCarten. If you read it now, then you can also see what becomes of it. It’s sort of a how would this become a property down the road.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Good recommendation. My One Cool Thing is full-on nepo baby.

**John:** This is your incredibly successful father who gave you your career. That’s what you’re talking about. You are the nepo baby.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m the nepo baby. My father was an incredibly successful social studies teacher in the New York City public school system.

**John:** Without him, you would not have been able to find Chernobyl.

**Craig:** He taught American history, so actually, I didn’t even have that. No. I speak of my youngest child, Jessica Mazin, who is currently attending school at Berklee College of Music in Boston. John’s daughter is also there in school in Boston. She is a budding songwriter and has written some really good songs. She’s written stuff that actually got…

There’s a song she wrote – talk about fandom – that was based on a book series on Wattpad, which I know you’re familiar with, because you also have a daughter. Wattpad’s basically a fanfiction conglomeration site, as far as I can tell. There was this incredibly popular series there. She wrote a song based on characters and things from the series, and it actually got, I don’t know, millions of listens on Spotify. It’s pretty remarkable. She got paid money. She got over a million listens to that. In a nepo daddy way, I also had her sing a cover of a Depeche Mode song for The Last of Us. But I did so because I think she’s awesome.

**John:** She’s really good.

**Craig:** I actually think she’s great. It’s an interesting thing of creating a person who creates things, and then I listen to the things they’ve created, and it’s like this weird echo of creation. She’s written a song called The Devil. She wrote the lyrics and the music, and she performs it, and then her friend Henry Dearborn, who’s an also very talented young guy, produced it and helped add instrumentation and mix and all that. I think it’s really good.

**John:** Yeah, I agree. I listened to it.

**Craig:** That is a really good song. It’s super catchy. I think the lyrics are really intriguing. I’m making Jessica and her song The Devil my One Cool Thing. It is on Spotify. I think you’ll enjoy it. I actually think you’ll like it. It goes down easy, and it’s got a good chorus. She’s just very good. I actually think she’s really, really good.

**John:** We’ll start playing the song now. It’ll become our outro for this episode. One thing I think is so interesting about Spotify is there’s obviously so many criticisms with Spotify, but the fact that Jessica is on Spotify the same way that Beyonce and Taylor Swift are on Spotify, or Girl in Red, it equals things out in ways that are really fascinating and unprecedented, so that’s nice. The fact that people could discover her – my daughter discovers music all the time on Spotify – is exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is. I’m very proud of her. I’m proud of how independent she is from me. She doesn’t do what I do. She doesn’t ask me for help. She doesn’t ask my opinion. What happens is it just appears, and then I listen to it like anyone else. I think maybe that’s what I’m most proud of is that she doesn’t give a sweet damn what I think. I like it. I love it, actually, honestly, anyway.

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

**Craig:** Woo woo!

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Jessica Mazin. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. Our list of outros is getting a little bit sparse, so we’d love some more outros coming in here. Ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on creators and fandom. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Craig. Continuing our conversation about fans and creators, I have a list here in the Workflowy of different kinds of fandoms. I want to think about what is the relationship between them and their creators and the people who own the underlying material behind this.

I’ll start with Formula One, because last year I went to my first Formula One race. I just didn’t realize what a giant community that is, just the money they mint doing that. It’s interesting, because I feel like with Formula One, they’d already had fans, but then the Netflix show really drew up a whole bunch of new fans, including my daughter, to it. Where’s the center of fandom for it? Is it the individual teams? Is it the organization that puts on the races? Is it the Netflix show? It feels like it’s one of those in-between things, and it’s hard to say who’s in control of it.

**Craig:** It’s a bit scary, actually, how fandom as a business can get larger than the core business. This satellite business that grows around it. It is remarkable. One thing that I think really big artists have become very good at is getting ahead of it. BTS, for instance, that group is also its own fandom industry. They got ahead of it. They control it. They run it. Yes, there are obviously a lot of independents that grow up around it, but they’ve created so much of it. It was baked in from the jump, whereas some of the boy bands that we remember from the ’90s, for instance, were just selling records and selling tour tickets and merch, which we used to call merchandise. Merch, it’s like IP. That was like backstage talk that was slightly cynical, and now it’s front stage talk for everyone.

The business now, I think, is such that creators are starting to get more of a handle on it. I would imagine Taylor Swift at some point woke up one day and said, “Why are other people making more money off of me than me?” Because that actually probably doesn’t feel great. It feels a little exploitative, and yet it’s all about the energy of people that are in love with what you do.

**John:** I’d be curious what Jessica’s relationship is like with her fans at this point, because she has enough people who are listening to her music, who are curious about her next thing that’s going to be happening, that they feel some investment in her. They’re rooting for her. They discovered her early on. Maybe Berklee School of Music is the perfect place for her to learn some of this. How should she be thinking about that? To what degree does she need to start thinking about her mailing list, how she’s communicating with the people who are her truest fans?

**Craig:** I think in a healthy way, like any young artist, she’s mostly concerned about getting better, about creating work, getting better, learning. She’s got some gigs now. Berklee’s amazing about how they facilitate this. She’s going to start getting paid to perform live. But she definitely does have the Generation Z TikTok conversation with people who like what she does.

I have a feeling that fandom is a hockey stick chart, where there’s a little bit, there’s a little bit, and then something happens, and then boom, it just explodes. Even in the article we were discussing where the guy was talking about the fanatics, the fanatics aren’t the first people in. There’s always other people that are in first, and then there’s that moment that happens where there’s a big upswing, and then it becomes a real thing. I think she’s got her head on in the right place. There are obviously a lot of people for whom the fandom is the point. Those people tend to head more off into the influencer zone as opposed to trying to create things.

Taylor Swift is a wonderful example of somebody that clearly was about creating art, and it became enormously popular, and now there is an industry. But she didn’t start for that. I’ve never read an interview with her or seen her talk and thought to myself, oh, this was all calculated. No, she’s just a really good artist that people love.

**John:** Yes. I will note Taylor Swift has her challenges with her community as well, like the Gaylor Swift, the people who are obsessed that she’s actually lesbian and that all these songs have coded meanings in them.

**Craig:** Gaylor Swift.

**John:** How does she both refute that without driving those people away in a way that makes them feel unseen and unheard? It’s so challenging, because she’s an artist trying to tell stories, and people, false stories, they’re going to derive their own meaning from them, which is exactly the point. And yet when there’s a community that is obsessed with picking everything apart to discover a secret, hidden meaning behind things, it’s tough.

**Craig:** It is. It would be fascinating to talk with her about this, although we never will, because she now exists on Mount Olympus. But when we start out as artists, we are looking for the outliers, the people who will love what we do, because most people are going to ignore new things. We’re looking for somebody – ideally somebody with some influence –to love what we do. That one special person, even if they’re just 1% of the people that have been listening, helped spread the word, and now lots of people listen. But then, once it gets really big – and Taylor Swift operates on a massive scale – then what you’re dealing with are outlier problems.

Let’s say 99.9% of your fans are healthy people who just love your music, which I think is probably the case for Taylor. That .1% is the problem. They’re the people who are driving an enormous amount of discourse online, who are agitated, aggressive, angry, possessive, parasocial. Those are also the people that are showing up at your house, trying to climb over the wall, sending you weird messages, stalking. The outlier becomes the problem. I think sometimes in our culture, we mistake the outlier discussion for the mainstream discussion when it’s not.

Gaylor Swift is a fascinating concept. I suspect the great majority of Taylor Swift fans are just enjoying the music and are not at that level of, “I need you to like who I want you to like,” which is just I think part of an outlier behavior.

**John:** One of the other books I read over the holidays was Taylor Lorenz’s book Extremely Online, which tracks creators and fandoms and the rise of internet creator culture. It goes back from vloggers and mommy bloggers and the rise and fall of those. But one of the most fascinating sections is on Vine, because Vine was never meant to be what Vine became. You had these young men, some women, but mostly young men, who became extremely famous for doing little Vines, but also just became famous for being famous, in the way that Paris Hilton’s famously famous for being famous. People need to figure out, how do we monetize that? How do we exploit that? They would have these mall tours where they’d put together these Vine stars to perform, kind of. There was teenage girls who were their fans. They really weren’t part of the community.

It was a strange fit, particularly because the platform that they were on, Vine, did not like them. It did not want them around. That tension between the space you’re in and what you’re trying to do can be a real factor as well. It’s a thing we see again and again with studios and their stars and filmmakers and the need to do press and publicity but also feel constrained by it. It’s tough.

**Craig:** It is. It is. It is an interesting concept, the notion of a platform that you intend the platform to be used one way, it ends up being used another way. OnlyFans comes to mind.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** I don’t know, but I assume that OnlyFans began as a thing of like, hey, this is where people can talk to their fans, because they’re songwriters or they’re visual artists or whatever it is, and this is a way for them to get paid for what they do by the people that love them. From what I understand, John…

**John:** That’s not really where it is right now. I think OnlyFans may have known that sex work was going to be part of it from the start. But there’s wholesome versions of that as well that are just not as successful.

**Craig:** OnlyFans I guess was uncomfortable enough with the fact that it had become a platform for sex work that they said no more sex on OnlyFans, and everyone went, then what the hell are you for? It’s like if McDonald’s was like, “We didn’t mean to sell chicken nuggets. We were hamburgers. No more chicken nuggets,” and everyone lost their minds. Then OnlyFans was like, “Okay, I guess this is what we are now.”

**John:** Credit card processing with anything involving sex work is also incredibly complicated. Let’s wind back to Star Trek. We think of Star Trek was designed to be a delightful show about space travel, wagon to the stars. It did sell toys. It had its own stuff that it was doing, its own merch. But fan culture around Star Trek became its own industry. Suddenly, there’s actors who appeared on one episode now being booked for fan conventions. It’s self-sustained in a way that was important and made it possible ultimately for the renaissance of Star Trek and for the movies and for everything else to have happened after the fact. It was necessary for those fans to exist, and yet they’ve always been in a bit of a strange relationship with the owners and creators of Star Trek.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a pretty famous sketch on Saturday Night Live. William Shatner was the guest host. The sketch was him at a Star Trek convention where people are asking him questions, and he finally just broke down and told them all to get a life. This was very funny to the people in the audience there in the studio, whatever it is, 8A. But a lot of people in the fan community were upset. They were hurt.

Listen. A lot of people – and we’ve mentioned this before – who join these communities struggle to find other communities. Here was somebody basically making fun of them for that specific struggle. They weren’t just there as part of the Trekker community because of how much they love Star Trek. It’s because of also how much they loved and were loved by people who loved Star Trek, as opposed to everywhere else in their lives, where maybe they were being discounted or put down. For the objects, the center of the wheel to behave towards them the way that the jocks at high school behaved had to have been pretty hurtful.

There are certain genres that do tend to appeal more to people who do struggle with, we’ll call non-virtual communities. I think it’s important for people to be aware of that and to be kind, because I have another daughter, who’s on the autism spectrum, and we talk all the time about her special interests and the things that she’s super into and how she finds community with other people that love it, and it’s important to her.

**John:** A community that’s growing very quickly – I’d really be curious what the subculture’s like two or three years from now – is pickleball.

**Craig:** Pickleball.

**John:** The number of people who tried to recruit me to play pickleball is somewhat astonishing. It’s also interesting to watch the fights that are happening in communities about the conversion of normal tennis courts to pickleball courts and, of course, the noise that pickleball creates.

**Craig:** Fricking noise. Yeah, pickleball really came out of nowhere there. Wow. You’re absolutely right. Now, pickleball is an interesting one, because unlike most fandoms we discuss, which are driven by the young, pickleball is driven by the old. Old people – and I don’t say that with any stink on it, because I’m getting there, man. Let’s call them older people. Older people are tough. They’re organized. They have money. They know how systems work.

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** Fans of a new rap star who comes on the scene, fans of that rap star generally aren’t going to be also serving on city councils or know how hearings work, but the pickleball fans do. They’re lawyers. They’re doctors. They’re heads of the PTAs. Now it becomes interesting. Watch out for the pickleball people. They’ll get you.

**John:** It’s good stuff. The last thing I want to distinguish between is there’s fandom, and there’s also collectors. Watching what’s happening right now with Stanley cups. Have you been tracking that at all?

**Craig:** I sure have. I live in Canada now.

**John:** Just the obsession with these collectible cups. It’s great that you love them, but no one needs 30 of them. That’s the difference between, are you entering into it because you want to be part of a community that collects these novelty cups, or are you doing it because you see a market for it, and that sense of really what is the angle. Are you seeing this in a capitalist sense, like the crypto bros were? Crypto bros saw this as a way to make a bunch of money, but also they had that missionary zeal, like we’re going to convert the world over to this thing. We all know how Stanley cup collecting will end up. It’s going to end up with a bunch of these things in landfills.

**Craig:** This is the bust and boom of these things. When I was a kid in high school, my friends and I would go down to Point Pleasant in New Jersey, which is on the shore, and it had a big boardwalk. The boardwalk had rides and restaurants and lots of little stands that would sell things. Every summer, there was a stand that was selling the new hot ticket toy. It was different every summer. The rabidity was consistent. It was just the thing that people were obsessed with that changed.

When I was really young, my sister, like many young girls, was pulled into the Cabbage Patch doll craze. I have the distinct memory of being in a Toys R Us in Brooklyn, watching adults fighting, almost physically, as Toys R Us employees pulled out a large shipping box of Cabbage Patch dolls, because of the insanity of it.

Humans are not good at valuing things. We’re notoriously irrational about it. Forced scarcity or this belief that something is valuable will drive our behavior. I think Bill Maher once famously said if you put a velvet rope in front of a toxic waste dump in LA, people will start lining up. There’s just something wrong with our brains.

I will say – and I’m not boasting here, this is just dumb luck of my brain – I don’t understand collecting. I’ve never collected anything. I don’t see the point of it. It just seems like a pointless accruing. I don’t quite know what it means. But I do recognize I’m alone, or, not alone; I’m rare, I guess.

**John:** I have some cool vintage typewriters, but I have them because they’re individually cool. But I don’t know anything about them. I don’t know anything about the community. It’s not part of anything. I guess what I’m trying to distinguish between is there’s people who collect and enter into a community about those collections, and it does enter into a fandom situation, and then there’s people who are just there to make a buck and don’t actually care about it, which I guess does tie into the whole poser issue of fandom is who are the true believers and who are the follow-ons who are trying to exploit it. It is a good moment for me to remind everybody to buy your Scriptnotes T-shirts on Cotton Bureau, especially the limited editions, which will only be sold for periods of time, because-

**Craig:** So rare.

**John:** When those drop, sometimes it’s only 100 of them that were done.

**Craig:** When they drop. If you’re a real Scriptnotes fan, not a poser, if you’re real. The ultimate posers are the people that sell stuff. Those are the posers. Hasbro.

**John:** There were times out on the picket line where I’d see a Scriptnotes shirt that I’d never seen out in the wild. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, I need to photograph that, because that is a true fan who has that,” or has the Courier Prime shirt, which we only made for a short period of time.

**Craig:** Or maybe that was the brother of a true fan who stopped being a true fan and just left that T-shirt behind when they moved.

**John:** No, I don’t believe it.

**Craig:** I’m so much more cynical.

**John:** When I asked that person who was wearing that very distinct shirt, also, “How’d you get that so crisp?” he’s like, “Oh, I never put it in the dryer. I always hand-dry it.”

**Craig:** Wow. It gives me a little bit of anxiety.

**John:** It’s true fandom for me. Craig, I’ll always be a fan of yours.

**Craig:** Aw, John. I’m a fan of yours too. You know what? Let’s just do this podcast until one of us just drops dead on our desk.

**John:** That’s what we’ll do.

**Craig:** And hopefully during a podcast. It’ll make a great bonus segment.

**John:** You have to hear that thump.

**Craig:** Yeah, just a thump. And then like, “Oh, okay. That’s Scriptnotes for you.”

**John:** That’s why we turn the Zoom off, so you can’t see when one of us drops. You have to listen for it. Thanks, Drew.

**Drew:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Tiffany Problem](https://dmnes.wordpress.com/2020/08/05/the-tiffany-problem/)
* [‘Harry Potter’ TV Series Zeroes In On Premise As Selected Writers Pitch Their Ideas To Max](https://deadline.com/2024/01/harry-potter-tv-series-premise-writers-set-max-1235798159/)
* [WGGB Screenwriting Credits Agreement](https://writersguild.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screenwriting_credits_agreement.pdf)
* [Ig Nobel Prize – “Please stop, I’m Bored”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAnVNXaa5oA)
* [Anatomy of a Fall – Screenplay](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Anatomy-Of-A-Fall-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Podcasters Took Up Her Sister’s Murder Investigation. Then They Turned on Her](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/magazine/murder-podcast-debbie-williamson.html) by Sarah Viren for the New York Times
* [Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution](https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths) by David Chapman
* [Going Zero by Anthony McCarten](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/going-zero-anthony-mccarten?variant=40641169686562)
* [The Devil by Jessica Mazin](https://open.spotify.com/track/6mgwrkmCQMfxRj810BOlvB?si=ed91e62ef4cc43e4) on Spotify
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jessica Mazin ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/628standardV2.mp3).