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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/entrances-and-exits).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hey, Yankee fans. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 550 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you move characters in and out of a scene? Do you even need to? It’s a very technical, crafty, words on the page topic, the kind we haven’t done in a while, because we haven’t had Craig for a while. We’ll also have listener questions on bad behavior by producers, managers, and even good friends.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, do we want to live forever? We’ll discuss longevity and the possibility of never dying. First, Craig, we got two pieces of Craig-centric follow-up for you.

**Craig:** Oh, all right.

**John:** This one goes all the way back to your Q and A episode, which I’m sure you don’t remember. There was a guy who wanted you to convince him to drop out of film school. Megana, we got an update from him, don’t we?

**Megana Rao:** Yes, so Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School wrote back in, and he said, “Thank you so much for answering my question on Episode 544. The first thing I want to do is apologize to Craig. Everything you said made sense, and I couldn’t have agreed with your thoughts more, but unfortunately, I just can’t bring myself to drop out. Given my situation, dropping out would force me to step my part-time work up to full-time and find a new place to live. However, while this would be difficult to do, it would still probably result in a boatload of money saved and give me far more time to work on my writing. The real problem is I just can’t stand the idea of everyone in my life looking at me like I’m an idiot. Dropping out of college, especially when I’m this close to finishing, isn’t going to make sense to anyone around me. While I know Craig might be on my side, it won’t really sway the opinions of my family or friends. It’s not like I have some concrete thing I’m dropping out for to point people towards. Being in school makes it look like you’re working toward something. While in this business, that might not really be the case, people on the outside aren’t going to understand that. I wish I could be the kind of person that didn’t care about this and just did what I knew was right, but there’s something inside of me that just won’t let me.”

**John:** Craig, I listened to that episode, and I thought your advice was my advice. I would encourage him to drop out.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what, Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School. I don’t want you to beat yourself up too much, but do me a favor. Don’t make this a final decision, because I’m not sure everyone in your life is going to look at you like an idiot. In fact, I’m pretty sure that everyone in your life is going to spend about seven seconds on this and then move on with the rest of themselves, because that’s who they’re thinking about all the time. I just don’t know why people will really get that worked up. Your friends are going to get that worked up over it? Really? Because honestly, I didn’t really care whether my friends graduated from college or not. That’s not what I valued about them. Yes, being in school makes it look like you’re working toward something. That’s how they get you. That’s what you’re paying for, an illusion, which you now realize, I think, is an illusion.

I also notice that you said, “Given my situation, dropping out would force me to step my part-time work up to full-time.” Yes. This is okay. Here’s the thing. I think you’re scared, and I get that you’re scared, but take a moment. Don’t necessarily think of this as a final decision. It’s okay if you stay in college. I won’t be angry.

**John:** One additional thing this makes me think of is this theory that you have 4,000 weeks in your life. Basically, if you live to 80 years old, you’re going to have essentially 4,000 weeks to spend. If Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School decides to drop out of film school, he’s really basically taking that chunk of time and deciding to do something different with it. I think it’s his time alone. It’s not his friends’ time. It’s not his family’s time. It’s really how does he want to spend that time. If it’s at school, great, but if it’s not in school, that’s also fine.

**Craig:** You get once, one trip. It’s okay if you finish. Go ahead. I’ll tell you, what’s waiting for you on the other side is a lot of other things that your family or friends may not get. This seems like maybe time to start worrying about that, or at least worrying about it but facing it anyway, because nobody really gets what we’re doing over here in this business. Most people in this business aren’t in this business. They try and be in the business, and they fail. Everybody’s going to be looking at you. You’re going to have to face it at some point.

**John:** Megana, we have more crucial Craig follow-up here.

**Megana:** Yes. Andy in New York asks, “I Googled Craig Mazin orthotics to find the name of the product that Craig mentioned as his One Cool Thing in Episode 492, and he said as he unboxed and deployed them that they felt like other insoles he’d used, but that over time he’d see how they worked and report back, which he did a week later but not since then. I’m wondering, what is the long-term verdict now that a year has passed? Are they still holding up and supportive? I’m a runner with high arches and developing a murderous heel problem that some store-bought Dr. Scholl’s type inserts are helping a little with, but I need something more substantial.”

**Craig:** I’m glad that you checked in on this, Andy. They held up. The sneakers that I generally wear right now are pretty supportive for my flat feet. I have the opposite problem that you have. I don’t use them with these, but I will slip them into boots. I will slip them into dress shoes and things. They absolutely work. They are, as far as I can tell, the exact same damn thing that we were paying way too much money for when we went to the orthotic foot podiatrist. I think actually that that’s what they were doing there. You would go to the podiatrist and you would step on something and they would take a thing of it and send it off to some factory. These guys were like, we’ll just give you the box of foam and you can do it yourself, go to the same factory.” The answer is, Andy, yes, I think they are worth giving a shot. They do seem to me like they are pretty much exactly what you would get if you went to a doctor.

**John:** Nice. All right, Craig, it has been way too long since we’ve had you here so we can do a craft episode. I really want to focus in on entrances and exits. I thought we might start with an iconic entrance into a scene. This is from an independent film called The Room. It finds one character coming onto this rooftop and meeting his friend Mark and initiating conversation. Let’s take a listen.

**Johnny:** I did not hit her. It’s not true. It’s bullshit. I did not hit her. I did not. Oh hi, Mark.

**Mark:** Oh hey, Johnny. What’s up?

**Johnny:** I have a problem with Lisa. She said that I hit her.

**Mark:** What? Did you?

**Johnny:** No, it’s not true. Don’t even ask. What’s new with you?

**Mark:** I’m just sitting up here thinking. I got a question for you.

**Johnny:** Yeah?

**Mark:** You think girls like to cheat like guys do?

**Johnny:** What makes you say that?

**Mark:** I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m just thinking.

**Johnny:** I don’t have to worry about that because Lisa is loyal to me.

**Mark:** Yeah, man, you never know. People are very strange these days.

**John:** Craig, there’s so much to unpack here.

**Craig:** There is not.

**John:** It really is a remarkable occasion. Even the most perfectly performed version of this scene has some real issues in terms of characters coming onto the scene. Let’s talk about entrances. Let’s talk about exits.

**Craig:** Oh hi, John.

**John:** Hi, John.

**Craig:** Oh hi, John.

**John:** I’m going to monologue to myself for a second. Then I’m going to notice that you’re there. Then I’m going to start the conversation.

**Craig:** “I did not hit her. I did not.” On a roof?

**John:** On a roof.

**Craig:** On a roof.

**John:** I’m going to throw this football to nobody on a rooftop.

**Craig:** First, I’m going to throw my water bottle on the ground, and then, “Oh hi, Mark.” Entrances and exits are extraordinarily important, and to me, afford you a possibility to find the spine of your scene, the structural aspect. We’re not necessarily talking about all the lovely little bits and bobs that happen through relationship and dialog and thoughts and unspoken feelings, but rather the structure of it all, what does it look like, where are we, what’s the pace and the tempo. One of the things that I think about when I’m directing scenes is entrances and exits and how they occur, from whose perspective, why are people entering, what kind of energy do they have when they’re entering, where are they going, where are they leaving. Entrances and exits will take more time to shoot if you’re doing them properly. Bringing people in and out of spaces matters. Let’s dig in to how we can help shape those moments on the page so that when they get to the screen, they don’t look like what we just saw.

**John:** Let’s go into the history of entrances and exits, because obviously, originally, before there were motion pictures, there were staged plays. Characters need to enter into a scene. You look through Shakespeare’s plays, characters enter and they exit, and that’s great. It’s fine. People are coming in from the weekends or you are lifting the curtain to reveal people already in the scene. Through the wonder of film and television, we can just be in the middle of a scene. We can cut to the middle of a scene, and we don’t need to have characters enter and exit, except sometimes it’s incredibly helpful.

I want to talk about how we make those decisions as writers. I think Craig makes an important point, is as a director you are also making some decisions about shooting those entrances, shooting those exits, making sure you have choices and options. You can be thinking about does the camera find the character there, is the character already there. You’re going to be making those choices from the start. A lot of it is about POV within the scene and also from the audience’s perspective, who is important. A character that we follow coming into a scene, we are with them. We know that they are the person we are centered upon. If we’re just in a scene where a bunch of characters are there, we may not know who is the person who’s our point of view. It may only be when we follow one of those characters out of that scene we realize, oh, this person now is carrying our point of view.

**Craig:** You can obviously make a handoff of POV, where you start with one person’s POV and then it turns to another. The camera just now picks up a new person. Typically, that’s probably not going to happen in a very typical way. Somebody enters a space and ideally, they enter with purpose. This is the most important thing. Obviously, this clip from The Room is really funny because the dialog is ridiculous and the acting is terrible. Underneath the ridiculous dialog and the bad acting, there is a root cause. The root cause is purposelessness. There is no reason for this man to be entering and walking out onto that roof. None. He just does it, because the movie needed him to be on the roof.

While we may think of this as the domain of movies like The Room, I actually see this in writing all the time from people. People just enter. They walk into a space purposelessly, and then something happens. I refuse to do this. Everybody who’s going into a space has a purpose. It doesn’t need to be earth-shattering. Sometimes it’s I can’t find my keys. There needs to be a reason you walk into a room. If you walk into a room without a reason and then something happens, without ever understanding why they don’t like it, the audience will not like it the way you want them to.

**John:** 100%. I see this on the page a lot too. I see it in some of our Three Page Challenges. I see it in scripts written by newer writers, where they are constantly having people enter into spaces. Let’s talk about some of the reasons why you might want to have a character enter a space, which I think are sometimes more limited than you’d imagine. Obviously, you’re saying there’s a purpose to it. Obviously, the character has to have a purpose. You as a writer may also want to give them a purpose, because you need that entrance to show geography, to establish geography. It gives you a chance to move from one space into another space and give a layout of what this space is going to be like.

You might have a character enter the scene because you want to build tension, build tension with the other people who are in there, or because in this new space is going to be some danger, some peril, some immediate attention that’s going to be happening. Show that character entering, as I said before, because you want to establish that this next scene is happening from their POV and that you make it clear that this is the central character I want you to be following as this next scene happens. All that only happens if you need to have a character walking in, because you always have the choice to just start the scene with the characters already in it. You could start with just a line of dialog. Characters don’t need to physically walk in in most cases.

**Craig:** That’s really where you can expose that you’re missing something, because if you do imagine starting the scene with somebody already there, you probably start feeling a bit ill as you’re writing it. What are they doing? Because there’s supposed to be a whole scene that happens. There are these meta requirements. I need a scene where Mark listens to whatever the Room guy’s name was, where the Room guy tells Mark about his troubles with his girlfriend that he did not hit. Fine, okay, I need that. Great, that’s what I need as a writer. Now, the characters are not accountable to my needs. They have to present as human beings with their own needs and their own purposes. They don’t need to be there unless I can see them on screen going, oh my god, there’s only one person who could possibly understand the position I’m in. Then maybe I can see it. If you imagine them just starting on the roof together in their weird chairs, it would be a very awkward beginning, because there’s really no reason for them to be there.

One of the things that we have to think about when we are writing is drawing a line between the fact that we need people somewhere and that they don’t know that. You can come up with almost anything. It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering. It doesn’t have to be even impactful as a character. If I needed to get Room guy on the roof, he’s angry, he walks into a bathroom, he tries to splash some water on his face, and no water comes out. He slams his hand on the sink, “Dammit, nothing’s going right today. My girlfriend’s-”

**John:** “I did not hit her.”

**Craig:** “She’s falsely accused me of domestic violence, and also the plumbing is not working. I have to go to the roof and check the water tower,” blah. Then he goes to the roof and he’s like, “Bah!” Then he’s slamming on it. He’s like, “Mah, mah.” Then Mark is like, “Hey, Johnny.” He’s like, “What? Oh hi, Mark.” I understand why he’s there. Now, Mark is going to have to explain why he’s there. That’s the first question. The first thing that should be out of this dude’s mouth is not, “I did not hit her. I did not,” but they need reasons. It could be mundane. It could be anything. It just has to be compelling is the most important thing.

**John:** Let’s talk about if you wanted to remove the entrance of a character. You want to actually start the scene with the two characters talking. How do we do that? It comes from the scene before that. Basically, are you leaving the prior scene with enough of a slant, with enough forward energy that we can come into that next scene understanding what it is that they’re doing? This could be an intervening scene. Basically, when we see those two characters there, do we understand what each of them wants, what their motivation is, and what this conversation or this moment could be about? That’s really what we’re asking. That’s why you don’t have to have characters enter into every scene, as long as we understand what they’re doing there, which is why Mark is on the roof, why Room guy has come up onto the roof. Then it’s fine. We can do it. Otherwise, you’re going to probably need to show some connective tissue to get us up into that space, because otherwise it won’t make sense why we got there.

**Craig:** Roofs are challenging, because people generally aren’t on them. Now, if they were, say, at a restaurant, then you could start it in media res, meaning, for those of you who have saved money and not gone to film school, right in the middle of stuff. Right in the middle of the action, you just cut into the two of them are sitting there at a table, halfway through lunch. One of them is shoving salad into his mouth, and the other one’s like, “I don’t know, I didn’t hit her, and she’s saying that I hit her.” The other one’s like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” because we understand as human beings, I don’t need to see them enter the restaurant, be seated and all that. That’s okay if the place requires it.

Now, there are places where you must enter. New places. You must enter a new place. When I say new place, I don’t mean a new place like a new restaurant. I mean a new place of significance in your story. You don’t want to just start with people in the middle of, for instance, a basement in a house, where they went looking for a murder victim, and they find bones. They should enter the house. They should look for the basement. They should walk down. It should feel creepy.

**John:** Let’s talk about why you want someone to enter into that basement. You probably want to establish some geography so we know, how do I get from where I am to where I get out, because that could become very important, and also just to establish what is this place. If you just show us this dark room, we don’t know where we are. That’s why it’s so helpful to have a character lead us from a place we do know into this place we don’t know.

**Craig:** Yes. Here’s a little fun technique I use sometimes. I guess I’ll call it the reverse entrance. You do start in a space someone has not entered. They’re already there. We don’t know what it is. We are confused. They have a moment. Then when they exit, we go, oh, that was a basement, or oh, that was a fake thing or whatever. I guess the best example of the reverse exit are all the simulation scenes where something’s happening and then the lights come on. It’s like, you weren’t really in an airplane. It was a simulation. That’s a reverse exit. You can try these things. You just have to give people signposts as you do it.

**John:** Now let’s talk about exits, because so often the standard of screenplay advice is basically get out of the scene quicker. Getting out of the scene quicker often means leaving before the characters are leaving the scene. If you think about how movies generally work, if you and I were having a conversation, we wouldn’t get to the crucial point and then just one of us just leave and physically walk out of the room. Craig and I sometimes, that would happen. Instead, we would keep talking. We don’t want to keep talking. We want to get to the next thing, and so we just cut to the next thing.

There are times though where you may want to show that exit. We talked about that at the start. You may want to hand off POV from one character to another character. You might want to really just make it clear that the scene has ended, that there’s not going to be an ongoing continuation of the dialog, of the conflict that we saw, that it really has ended and one character has left and headed in the direction that’s taking us to the next part of the story. I would suspect that, Craig, even in the scenes you’re working on right now, the scenes you’re shooting, you probably anticipate characters exiting, that you’ll make choices ultimately though in post about whether you’re going to show the exit or not show the exit.

**Craig:** I try and write that in. I try and plan that on the page. If there are two people in a scene or more, the reason to show somebody exiting at the end is to then put the camera on the face of the person who is remaining, so that I understand how they feel about what this person just said. Walking away from somebody indicates finality. It’s a pretty good way of saying you have a choice to make, figure it out, I’m going to walk away from you now, or perhaps it’s I’m leaving you. If somebody is breaking up with you, they should definitely exit the room. That would be a weird… Sometimes on soap operas they’ll do that, where someone’s like, “We’re through,” and then they just cut to the other person’s face, but the other person never leaves, just to save time. If the point is I’m leaving you, leave.

If I want to see how somebody feels by what that other person has said, and they’ve essentially left them in a space where they could go different ways, sometimes, sure, it’s interesting to watch them leave, because their leaving is meaningful to the people who are left behind. If it’s not, then it’s not necessary. Then you absolutely can just end on someone’s face, considering what’s happening. If you are alone in a scene and you leave, the only real reason that I would ever need to see someone leave alone is if something then changed after they left. They’re playing with their puppy, and then they’re like, “Oh my god, I wish you could talk.” Then they leave, and then the puppy’s like, “If you only knew.” Yeah, sure, but otherwise-

**John:** That’s going to be a really unusual situation.

**Craig:** Very, very rare.

**John:** Let’s take a look through some of our own scripts about some moments where we’ve had characters enter and why we scripted them in to have characters enter into scenes, because I think it would be sometimes better to actually look at things on the page. I’ll start with a little snippet from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I’ll just read this aloud. “The front door swings open, revealing Charlie’s father, a lanky, hardworking man in his late 30s, who manages to be grateful for his blessings, however slight they are. ‘Evening, Bucket.’ ‘Hi, Dad.’ Mother says, ‘The soup’s almost ready. I don’t suppose there’s anything extra to put?’ Off her husband’s look, there’s clearly no more food coming. Ever chipper, Mother says, ‘Well, nothing goes better with cabbage than cabbage.'”

This is an example of a scene that’s been happening, and a new character enters into the scene. Father Buckets could’ve already been in the scene, but it’d be very hard to shift our focus to Father Bucket’s if he was already in the scene. Having him come in the door changes what this moment is about and lets him drive the next little bit of conversation. Bringing a new character into an existing scene is a classic example of why you’d have to show the entrance of the character.

**Craig:** Also, sometimes somebody needs to share information with the audience. In this case, there’s information that you are putting out there through some nicely done exposition. The information you’re putting out there is that they’re extremely poor and short on food to the point where there’s no protein to put in their cabbage soup. I say protein because somewhere along the line restaurants started saying protein. They used to just say meat. Then they switched over to protein.

**John:** It can be tofu.

**Craig:** I guess I’m going to go with that, as if Father Bucket was ever going to say, “Oh no, no, I’ve brought tofu.” That’d be kind of amazing actually, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, if he just brought home tofu. You need people to know that. The problem is, if Dad is already there, why would she just suddenly say, “Hey, by the way, now, even though you’ve been here this whole time, I have a question for you.” Because he enters, it allows Mom to ask a question that’s been on her mind. It gives us a chance to have some natural exposition, as opposed to some weird, forced exposition.

**John:** Indeed. Let’s take a look at a little snippet from Chernobyl. Do you want to read this aloud for us?

**Craig:** Sure. “Brazhnik, 20s, enters the control room in a panic. ‘There’s a fire in the turbine hall. Something blew up.’ Dyatlov pauses, lost in thought. His face is unreadable. Agonizing seconds tick by. Then he turns coldly to Akimov.”

**John:** You made the choice to have Brazhnik enter into the scene. Again, it’s an ongoing scene, and a new character enters with new information. That’s crucial. I can imagine a version of the scene where Brazhnik looks at some sort of terminal thing or he gets a call and he says this, but it makes much more sense to have a new character enter into the scene to let us know this.

**Craig:** This was about keeping a sense of panic. People running in and saying things, and that person looks confused, tells us a lot, more so than if someone looked at a monitor and goes like, “Uh-oh, there’s a fire in the turbine hall.” People can go, okay, I guess that’s a fact, but I get to see somebody’s face. I get to see how someone reacts to somebody running into the room, which is interesting. I also get a sense that there’s a world beyond this room that is very different than what’s happening in the room. There’s a lot of information that can happen, but only happens if somebody new can enter and disrupt the conversation that exists.

**John:** Also giving us a sense of geography. We know how do I get into and out of this room, which becomes important. You’re establishing a new character, Brazhnik. This is the first time we’re seeing him.

**Craig:** And the last, as it turned out.

**John:** It gives a moment to put a spotlight on this character, which would’ve been hard if they were all already in the room milling about. A very classic thing.

**Craig:** There was an interesting thing where he runs through and says this. Dyatlov makes a decision. Brazhnik is like, “What do we do about the fire?” Dyatlov says, “Call the fire brigade.” Then Dyatlov walks out, leaving him. This guy came in figuring something would happen, and then somebody walks out and makes an exit, sort of like your entrance changed nothing, my friend, goodbye. Entrance and exit there doing almost all of the work.

**John:** Lastly, lets take a look at a clip from The Nines. This is Melissa McCarthy’s character, Margaret. It’s the first time we’re seeing her. She’s in a police station. It’s again one of those, I guess we could call it a reverse entrance, where we’re not really quite sure why we’re here or who these people are until the second character comes in, which is Gary, played by Ryan Reynolds. “Margaret says, ‘He’s coming. I’ll call you back later.’ She hangs up, wrapping the earpiece around her phone. We reveal Gary being escorted through the glass doors by a polo-shirted parole officer. Margaret moves to intercept them, offering a hand. She says, ‘Hi, Margaret, I work for Lola.’ Gary, ‘I know.’ She says to the parole officer, ‘We need to go out the back.'” We’ve established a new character and that she is going to be interfacing with him and actually has some authority over the situation here. She could tell a parole officer what they’re going to be doing. Again, I’m using the entrance here to allow me to establish this character without getting a full proper introduction and then changed POVs when we finally see this character we’ve already established in the film come out.

**Craig:** In the How to Write a Movie episode, we talk about these different axes of action. One of them is internal, and one of them is interpersonal. Exits and entrances give you a chance to blend both, which is a nice thing. If you think about how we go throughout our day, much of our day is spent with ourselves thinking. We’re in our own heads. Then there’s parts of our day where we get out of our own heads. We have an interaction. The entrance and exit forces somebody out of their internal state.

When Margaret’s on the phone, technically she’s interacting with somebody, but in fact it feels internal, because we’re just looking at her. We’re in her head. We’re thinking about things. She hangs up. In the space between her hanging up and Gary suddenly appearing, there’s this brief moment where she’s in her head, and then boop, you got to get out. That helps actors. It gives them things to do. It gives them changes, which they love. It allows Margaret to move. It says, “Margaret moves to intercept them.” She’s got purpose. She’s driven by the fact that he has entered, as opposed to him just being there and her saying, “Hi, my name’s Margaret. I work for Lola. We need to go out the back.” She wouldn’t feel like much of a person. She has life and existence because she exists prior to his appearance.

**John:** All through these examples the actors who play these characters can know what their motivations are. They know what they’re trying to do in the scene, which I think is so crucial. I think the entrances and exits are helping them there figure out what it is they’re trying to accomplish next, because when you’re on the set as the writer or the director, and they’re coming up to you, it’s like what am I trying to do, here it’s on the page. You can see what it is they’re trying to accomplish in these small moments. Great. Craig, it’s a pleasure to get to do another craft little segment with you here, but we have a ton of listener questions stacked up, so maybe we’ll try to get through some of these listener questions.

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s go.

**John:** Megana Rao, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Can I ask a question about the thing you guys just talked about?

**Craig:** Wait.

**John:** Please, please.

**Craig:** Wait, hold on, so you’re just going to jump the queue, Megana, and put your question first? Fine.

**Megana:** You’re right, you’re right. Fine, we can go-

**Craig:** No, put yours first. I need to know.

**John:** Please do this.

**Craig:** Do it.

**Megana:** This topic came out of a discussion where John was saying that one of the things he’s learned as he’s grown as a writer is to avoid writing characters into scenes where they don’t have anything to do. In a project that I’m working on, I have a few scenes where it’s about a girls cross-country team, and so they’re traveling. They’re on a bus. They’re in locker rooms together. The dialog is mostly between one or two teammates. Occasionally someone will jump into the action of a scene by interjecting. That feels true to just flitting in and out of conversations and jumping in. I guess I’m reluctant to block or stage it too much, because I don’t want to over-describe and make it difficult for the reader to follow. That feels like a more directorial thing for me. I’m curious if you think it’s easier for the audience and the medium if I show these characters physically moving in and out of a space more. Does that make sense?

**John:** It does. The scene you’re describing is on a bus, you said?

**Megana:** Or let’s just say it’s in a locker room.

**John:** Obviously, we talked before on this show about how in a bigger space you’re going to still have smaller spaces, and you’re going to have groups of people together. People can move between those groups if that’s helpful. I think finding a way to describe this place versus that place, this larger space is going to be your friend. If you need to have one of the characters move from one group to another group, that’s great. You try not to make it too complicated on the page, and really just focus on probably just the dialog, the conversation between those people, and not have it be a big thing. If it was on a bus or in a locker room, up with Cheryl and Sandy, then back with Robin and Kennedy, as they’re talking, their things. You can move back and forth between them. It can be pretty natural. Craig, any more thoughts for Megana there?

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t worry too much about this sort of thing. If you have a couple of people talking and then you just needed one chime-in line from somebody, just say so-and-so passes through frame, tosses this line out, and then they’re gone. You actually use the frame as your exclusive aspect. In this way, we’re not staring. We don’t have to look at the people not doing something. They can go not do something outside of the frame of what we’re looking at. Then what I try and think about is geography and where two people might be and why other people aren’t right next to them, listening to them. If other people are right next to them, listening to them, then they are doing something. They’re listening and they’re reacting and they’re feeling. If you want one of them to vaguely overhear, drop a little thing, you can also just hear them start the line from across the room, and then the camera cuts and shows them across the way. They have been listening, ha ha. Lots of ways to do it. Is it a comedy?

**Megana:** It has comedic moments, but I wouldn’t say it’s a comedy.

**Craig:** Little more leeway in comedies, but honestly if there’s a vaguely comic moment, that gives you more leeway. Even if there isn’t, just think of the frame of what you’re showing the audience as the space. And any character that’s not in the frame, you’re not accountable for in that moment. If you want to bring them in, you can. You can always bring them in just by having them enter.

**John:** Craig, I have a question for you. Because you’ve been doing this show and directing things or working with other directors, if you have a character exiting the scene and probably exiting frame, if they’re exiting on the right, what is your expectation about where in the frame that character will enter the next time we see them? Is that a thing that’s top of your mind or just whatever works works?

**Craig:** No, unless we’re continuing with them. If they exit right, and then immediately the next cut is them entering, then I would want them, if they exit right… Actually, it really doesn’t matter.

**John:** You could make both things work.

**Craig:** Yeah, a new space affords you a new line of action. Certainly, if there are things in between, then nobody cares who entered right or left. If you’re doing a scene in an airplane, for instance, and somebody exits, heading towards the back of the plane, and the next time you see them they enter the front of the plane, if it’s really close, if it’s only one short scene in between, people might go, wait, she went towards the back of the plane. If you’re walking out of a restaurant and you head out left, and the next shot is you enter your house, you can enter it from any direction you want.

**John:** I was thinking about this, because I just went back and re-watched the pilot to Lost, which holds up incredibly well. In Lost they’re constantly trekking across the island. In my head, I think about them heading one direction when they’re going to the island, one direction when they’re headed back from the island. I don’t think it really matters that much. There are a lot of sequences on the plane where they’re heading up towards the cockpit or back to the back. In those cases, I think even within inter-cutting scenes, you need to keep them moving in the same direction across the frame. We establish a mental geography of where… If a character’s heading this direction, they’re going to the front, if they’re going this direction, to the back. It’s really a situational, based on the kind of thing you’re shooting.

**Craig:** I feel like if it vaguely makes sense, then it’s pretty good. I’m way more concerned about the continuity in the moment.

**John:** Great. Let’s get to some listener questions. We have a whole bunch of them backed up here. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Yes. Wynn wrote in and asked, “Podcasts are large profit centers. Your decision to remain unsponsored is admirable and appreciated. Could you please enlighten us on the details of this decision? Thank you for this wonderful resource you’ve created. I for one would not stop listening if Casper Mattresses began paying you six figures.”

**Craig:** Do the mattress people pay six figures?

**John:** I don’t think they necessarily do. A lot of podcasts have ads. Podcasts make money off ads. There’s nothing wrong with having ads in your podcast. Craig and I just didn’t want to do it, because even reading stuff on the air, that would be fine, Craig would have a fun time with it, but getting the ads, getting all the stuff together, even when you have a service that’s giving the stuff for you, it’s a hassle. Life is too short, and we just didn’t want to have the hassle. Plus, our members are paying us the five bucks a month for the Premium stuff, and that is paying for Megana and for Matthew, so we’re good. This is not a profit-making endeavor for us.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s what it comes down to for me. I just like the fact that I’m not accountable to anybody. We spend so much time in Hollywood being accountable to the people that are spending the money, paying us, paying for the production. You hope that you can find people who are responsible and nice and humane and have taste. For this podcast, we can do or say anything we want. We are beholden to no one other than each other and Megana. That’s the way I like it. I don’t want somebody from a mattress company calling me and saying that they don’t think I should be telling people to stop going to college. Not that the mattress people would care, but still.

**John:** I think the mattress-college connection is really under-explored.

**Craig:** Also, honestly, I think every podcast has ads except for us. At this point now it’s just become a matter of principle. We’re the only ones left. We’re PBS. I like it that way. John and I are fortunate enough to have careers that work. We don’t need the money, and so the hell with the mattresses.

**John:** I love it. Megana, what else do you have for us?

**Megana:** Typing While Mortified writes, “I just discovered that my manager has been sending his scripts, unsolicited, to companies I’m either currently working with or with whom I recently met to discuss other projects. When I say that he’s sending his scripts, I don’t mean his other clients’ scripts. I mean his scripts that he’s written himself and is hoping these companies will produce. To be clear, these are not connections my manager previously had. They came about through me. I had no idea he was doing this or that he even had aspirations of being a writer. I only found out because one of the companies reached out personally to let me know and asked me to get him to stop.

“The burning embarrassment I feel for myself, and to be honest, even more so for him, is probably a strong indicator that it’s time to cut this guy loose. However, being that he’s had a successful decades-long career as a manager and represents several legitimate writers, whereas I’m in the early stages of my career, I thought I’d turn to the pros for confirmation. This is absurd, right? Or at least a major conflict of interest? It doesn’t feel like there’s a way to salvage this. We’re also right in the middle of negotiating a sale. In the past he’s worked closely with my lawyer to hammer out deals. If I fire this guy, should I wait until this deal’s wrapped up, or is this a situation where no representation is better than his representation?”

**John:** Oh my god, I’m mortified for you. I think you need to get rid of this manager. I think you should let your lawyer finish this up. I also think you should talk with this manager’s other clients who are more established and just make sure that they know that this is happening, that he’s doing this, because this is just not acceptable, what he’s doing. It’s just gross and icky and wrong. Unethical, yeah, I guess, but also just icky. It just makes me feel really uncomfortable, as it makes you feel uncomfortable.

**Craig:** Managers, I swear to God. This is the kind of crap that doesn’t happen with agents, because agents don’t want to be writers. They want to be agents. It’s nice and clean. Agent represents you to try and get work, negotiates deals. Deal negotiated. Doesn’t produce your work. Doesn’t send in his or her own script like a pathetic, sweaty idiot. Your manager stinks. I don’t care who these other clients are. Their manager stinks. It’s pathetic. It’s not absurd. It’s pathetic. It would be a conflict of interest if anybody had any interest in what he’s doing, but it doesn’t sound like they do. It’s just lame. I would fire him now.

**John:** It’s lame.

**Craig:** Just get rid of him now. It’s lame. Get rid of him, because you don’t need him to hammer out the deal. Trust me, he’s not hammering out anything. The lawyer will do the details of the deal, and you don’t need to wait until the deal’s wrapped up. Furthermore, managers are not like agents where they get paid their money on commission for sale. They’re being paid money on commission to manage. There’s this concept of on the wheel, off the wheel. They are on the wheel when they are managing you. They are off the wheel when they are not. If they are not going to be managing you through the process of writing this, I don’t see why they should get 10% of it at all. I think you should fire them now. Save yourself 10%. Get an agent. Get an agent or an actual agency, and get out of this manager crap. I swear to God, more of these ding-dongs are out there just…

**John:** I agree. Get yourself an agent. I think you should have high hopes of getting an agent, because you just made a sale. Agents want people who are working, who are selling things. I think you’ll be able to get an actual proper agent. You don’t need this manager. Questionable whether you need a manager at all. You need somebody better than this person representing you, so get rid of them. Craig, I don’t think you and I have ever talked about The Player, the great Michael Tolkin movie The Player. I’m remembering a moment in The Player where Tim Robbins’s character opens a door, and you see he actually has a screenplay of his own that he’s wrote, that he’s never actually taken out any place. It got me thinking about, we haven’t discussed executives who write, because there are some of them. Some of them are okay, but it’s just a weird thing.

**Craig:** It’s rare. There are certainly executives that thought about being writers and ended up being executives. There was one executive at the erstwhile, the old version of Fox, who was infamous for inserting his own dialog into things. Pretty rare though. I’ve actually never worked with an executive that wrote. Toby Emmerich, who runs Warner Brothers, was a screenwriter, then became an executive, so he went in the other direction. I think in The Player, that’s a nice indication. I love that movie. It’s the most writer revenge movie of all time. Of course, the evil studio executive secretly wants to be a writer but can’t. That’s pretty classic.

**John:** James Schamus is probably one of the best, most acclaimed executives who also is a writer on his own.

**Craig:** Yeah, he’s the one guy that does that.

**John:** Megana, who else do we have here?

**Megana:** AJ from LA writes, “Frequently when I tell someone about what I’m writing, I’ll get the response, ‘Oh, that sounds like blank.’ My issue isn’t that I am worried about being original, but that it stops a conversation dead if I’ve not seen the show or movie they’re referencing. The conversation then shifts to this thing they just saw, and I get defensive trying to identify how my script is different from a show I haven’t even seen yet. To defend against this, I’ll just default to saying the genre of the thing I’m working on. This feels like a wasted opportunity to potentially get someone interested in what I’m writing. I do live in LA with industry friends. Do you have any tips for how to talk enthusiastically about what I’m writing without making it an invitation for people to tell me what it reminds them of? Do you still have to grapple with the originality police, or is this something that is a non-issue with professional writers?”

**Craig:** That’s a really good question. I like that question.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** AJ, here’s what I would recommend. It’s okay when they say, “What are you writing?” to say, “It’s a such-and-such story, but ultimately what it’s really about is this woman and her relationship with this guy. Here’s what the story’s really about. It’s about da da da da da.” Get into character, relationship, theme, the purpose, the function, because the truth is everything sounds like something. If all you do is tell them, “It’s a story about a bank heist that takes place on the moon,” they’re going to be like, “Oh yeah, there’s 14 of those.”

“It takes place in space, and it’s set against a bank heist, but here’s what it’s really about. It’s about a man who got divorced and he’s trying to get back with his daughter,” and da da da da da and blah blah. That’s where all of your passion’s going to be anyway. If your passion’s only about the bank heist and the moon, then I think people are going to get a bit sleepy anyway. Talk about the characters. Talk about the relationship. Talk about the theme. Talk about the heart of it. Talk about the stuff that makes you excited. Don’t worry if they say it sounds like something else. You be like, “Yeah, plot-wise, probably a lot of overlap, but here’s what is original about what I’m doing.”

**John:** I completely agree. I’ll say things like, “I’m writing a thriller about trust and these two characters who can’t trust each other but are forced to deal with each other in order to solve the situation,” which sounds vague and hand-wavy, but if they’re curious then I can get into more specific details. What I try not to do is the heist on the moon or something that just feels like such an obvious type previous that they’re going to compare it to other things or it’s really clear it’s the next version of this thing. It’s Speed on a dirigible.

**Craig:** I’d watch it.

**John:** It’s called Slow. I also get, AJ, you’re working in this town, and you do have those conversations. It’s important to be able to have those conversations and bounce things off. People can sometimes be helpful. You want to be able to talk about what you’re writing, but I think Craig’s instinct is right. Talk about what it is that’s exciting to you about the thing that you’re writing, not just the trailer of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. AJ, it’s okay to agree with them. You say, for instance, you start getting defensive trying to identify your script as different. Don’t be defensive. Embrace it. Just be like, “It’s similar, except it’s completely different. Here’s how it’s completely different.” Just talk about the stuff that makes you excited. There’s no difference, by the way, between the position that you’re in and the position that John or I are in. If someone asked me what I’m working on right now, I’ll say, “Post-apocalyptic pandemic. Hang on.” I’m okay with them going, “Oh for God’s sakes, another one?” I’m like, “Hang on. That part is not what it’s about. This is what it’s about.” Then I talk to them about what it’s about to me. Then they start to lean forward. Embrace that your project is both original and not original at all. That’s the nature of what we do.

**John:** You’re making a piece of filmed entertainment that’s going to be about 100 minutes long. There’s nothing original about that at all.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** People have been making those things for 100 years.

**Craig:** Exactly. It’s got scenes in it? What? That other thing that I saw had scenes.

**John:** Is there a horse? I said no horse movies. Megana, what else do you have for us?

**Megana:** Em asks, “I’m working on a script that centers around sexual assault. Due to the subject matter, I have a problem I need to resolve. I need a trigger warning. I never show the assault, but I do include other scenes that are traumatic in its aftermath. I need to warn readers in advance. Have you ever included a trigger warning in anything you’ve written? What did it look like? Currently, I’m planning to use a statistic on the first page. Do you think that that would suffice? The statistic is below, and it’s upsetting but tonally consistent with the story I’m telling. I’m not comfortable handing the script to readers without a warning, and this is currently my best idea.”

**John:** The statistic they have listed here is that, “In a study of college age men, 84.9% said they had no intention to rape a woman. Of those same men, 17.8% said they would force a woman into sexual intercourse.” That was the statistic they’re thinking about putting. Craig, I think we’ve talked about trigger warnings before, but not in terms of on a screenplay. What’s your instinct for Em here?

**Craig:** I think it’s fair for you to just put a little page between the title page and the beginning of the script that says this script is about sexual assault and contains scenes of sexual assault. That’s it. I wouldn’t use the phrase trigger warning. I would just simply consider it a disclosure. Just disclose it. That’s all. Then leave it be. I don’t think the statistic is going to help. I think the statistic might feel more like when somebody puts a quote from Oscar Wilde on the front page to steal some drama from something. I would just be very plain and very simple, like you said. You want people to know that there are scenes that are about sexual assault. Actually, it looks like it says you don’t actually show the assault in the script. Just say the script centers around sexual assault and those themes are discussed. Anyone who doesn’t want to read a script that involves sexual assault will go, “Oh, okay,” and then move on to the next script. Other people will say, “Got it, I will now continue.” Just real simple. That’s what I would do.

**John:** We’ve talked about it on the show before. There’s been some scientific studies of are warnings helpful or are warnings triggering in and of themselves? There’s genuine debate about that. I think what Craig is proposing is probably the best answer, because it’s similar to what people are now used to in terms of if you’re watching a show that has flashing lights that could trigger epilepsy, that’s there. There’ll be an M warning for this episode contains episodes of sexual violence. I think those are reasonable steps to take and let people make smart choices about what things they’re going to consume or not consume. Putting it there after the title page, before the script starts, in a very plain way, is probably the right choice for you right now in 2022.

**Craig:** Look, we could get into a whole debate where we ask questions like, do I not mention the fact that my script has murders in it? If it’s a script where there’s a scene that takes place in war, should I put a mention there about war in case a veteran is reading it and they have PTSD. Everybody has something. Drama is constantly circling around violence and destruction, because it’s drama. It’s about our mortal selves and about pain. To the extent that drama is therapeutic, it requires difficult subjects. I guess I would just say follow your instinct. Seems like your instinct is to say something, so say it as plainly as you can say it. That’s my advice.

**John:** Absolutely. That’s why I added the in 2022. I just feel like in this moment we’re in right now, I see these kinds of things being done for this. That’s why I’m not going to put something like, “Just so everyone knows, there’s a scene of murder in this.” That just doesn’t feel natural. I would do it for something like this, just because that’s pretty common, and I think it’s considered helpful. Cool. Great. Let’s get on to our One Cool Things. It’s been a minute, and I was expecting this would be your One Cool Thing, so I did not poach it from you.

**Craig:** You sensed it that it was on the way.

**John:** It feels like a very Craig Mazin…

**Craig:** Oh my god, so Craig Mazin. I appreciate that you know me so well. My One Cool Thing this week is a game for iOS, maybe for Android, I don’t care, called Knotwords, that’s K-N-O-T, Knotwords, by I think at least one of the same guys that does Flip Flop Solitaire, Zach Gage, I believe.

**John:** Yeah, Zach Gage.

**Craig:** It’s a brilliant little concept, very easy to do at first, and then becomes extraordinarily difficult as you proceed, but very rewarding. I guess the way I can say it is that you have a little crisscross crossword, not a standard crossword where it’s one solid square, but one of those crisscrossy ones where there’s lots of gaps. What they’ve done is they’ve basically highlighted a region. That region isn’t always… In fact, it rarely is covering the entire word. It’s usually covering half of one word, a little bit of another. They’ll tell you, these are the letters that have to be in that region. You’re applying logic and word skills and solving.

I’ve gotten into the tricky ones now. They start to give you limitations, like okay, in this row there can be no more than two vowels. It starts getting really, really crunchy. I’m in the tricky version now. I’ve run into one where I’ve been working on it for a day. It’s great. I really love it. I can always go back over to the cas ones to just proceed if I’m feeling like spending some time. Strongly recommend. It is free, although I suspect that occasionally there will be more packs and things that you can buy. It’s available at the app store and Google Play and Steam, Knotwords.

**John:** Knotwords. Craig, I think you missed… One of my One Cool Things in the past was Redactle. Do you play Redactle?

**Craig:** You know what? I’ve looked at people’s Redactle reports. It just seems like a whole lot.

**John:** It can be a whole lot. It can be really fun. It can be half an hour’s worth of work, which is a little too much for a daily puzzle, but always fun to do. My One Cool Thing this week is the Arts District here in Los Angeles. I was just out last night with friends to see two galleries shows and a dinner downtown. It was great. The Arts District, for people who don’t know Los Angeles, or people who live in Los Angeles who’ve never been down there, it’s Downtown, south of Dodger Stadium, east of what you think of as the main part of Downtown. You’re east of the skyscrapers. Lots of galleries, lots of cool spaces, restaurants. I guess my closest thing I would compare it to would be Tribeca, Tribeca when it was becoming Tribeca. Really encourage people to go down there and see stuff.

I saw exhibits at Night Gallery, Hauser and Wirth. We had cocktails at Death and Company, dinner at Manueal. Just really great stuff down in that area. Los Angeles is so huge you can forget that there are just pockets of the neighborhood that you’ve never seen before. I would encourage people to get out and see more of Los Angeles, but also check out the Arts District next time they’re in that part of Los Angeles.

**Craig:** I like the LA Factory Kitchen down there. It’s a good restaurant. I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten there.

**John:** I have not. I would say now that almost all the restaurants are back open and a ton of new restaurants have opened up, it’s a really exciting time just to be going out to dinner in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** What a time to be alive.

**John:** Fantastic. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, edited by Matthew Chilleli. Our outro this week is by Owen Danoff. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes from this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links with things about writing. We just hit Episode 100 of Inneresting and switched over to Substack, so there’s some good new stuff there you can check out. We have T-shirts, they’re great, and hoodies too. You can 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 how Craig is going to live forever. Craig, so good to have you back.

**Craig:** It’s great to be back.

**John:** Hooray.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, help us out here, because I think this all comes from a listener question that was sent in to us.

**Megana:** Yes. Neil wrote in and asked, “With the longevity movement gaining speed with each new breakthrough, no doubt consequentially in our lifetime, what do you and Craig think about living forever? Is extending life ad infinitum a good thing or is the planet more of a timeshare, and we should eventually move on and make room for the next generations?”

**John:** Craig, how long do you want to live?

**Craig:** I would like to live forever. I feel like the way to live forever is not in this meat suit. I think about this all the time. If you could copy a brain, which theoretically is possible, not with the technology we have now, but let’s say eventually they’re like, “Oh my god, we’ve figured it out. We can totally copy your brain.” If they copied my brain, do I have a split consciousness? Probably not. It would just be two of me with their own consciousness, so in that case I die, so it doesn’t really work, because I’m only this one. Then I have to go to the Futurama, put my brain in a floating jar, which I would be totally fine with.

**John:** I’d be fine with that too. People are down on floating brains in jars.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** I think it’s great, love it. Ethical questions, no. What you’re describing in terms of just digitizing your brain, it’s basically the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror. Great, I’m all for it. I’m happy to live forever in a digital version of myself. It would hopefully be a pretty good version of what I can do. I’m great with that. I’m not so scared of the implications of immortality. I come from a family that tends to live a long time. My great-grandma lived to 100 and was coherent all the way through there. I’d like to live to 100 and be fully functional. I want to live long enough to hit that singularity moment where I can just be transferred into just software. That’s good.

**Craig:** It would be nice. Floating brain software, whatever it is, the thing is I just don’t want to live forever as some shriveled old… Inevitably, everybody ends up looking like a prune or a walnut. Then they get confused and then they die. I don’t want to do any of that. I’m going to. Let’s be honest. It’s going to happen. I would totally live forever. I got lots to do. I’m learning all the time. I just think life is interesting. I like what I do. I make things. It’s fun.

**John:** A related conversation though is about retirement. People are always like, “Oh, when are you going to retire?” I’m like, “I don’t intend to retire.” Craig, do you intend to retire?

**Craig:** What’s going to happen is we’re going to get retired.

**John:** That’s really what happens.

**Craig:** At some point people are like, “You’re bad, because you’re out of touch.” Everybody gets out of touch sooner or later. If you don’t get out of touch, now you’re just that creepy old guy that refuses to be out of touch and talks about liking music that he doesn’t be listening to. Everyone’s rolling their eyes and like, “Beat it, old man.” I think what’ll happen is I’ll just eventually beat it, old man. I can see myself drifting into a nice emeritus sort of thing where everybody’s like, “He’s old. We’ll just talk to him about stuff. He can give us advice. Then we’ll go and do stuff.”

**John:** Craig, you’re going to be an amazing character actor when you’re 90. That’s going to be fun.

**Craig:** I’ll be the new Carl Reiner.

**John:** That’s what you’re going to be. Megana, do you want to live forever?

**Megana:** The brain in the jar thing sounds really appealing, because I feel like even currently as writers, our bodies probably get in the way of… As an art form, we’re not really using our bodies. They’re mostly just to get the stuff from our brain onto the page, whereas, I don’t know, a dancer, an actor might have a harder time with that. I already feel like I’m just a brain in this not optimized meat sack.

**John:** Let’s talk about the brain in the jar thing, because an article I read recently, if I can find a link I’ll put it in the show notes, was talking about we think about, oh, we can stick the brain in the jar and we forget that the brain is actually just there to regulate our bodies. A brain without a body is a weird thing. Without its normal inputs it’s going to be interesting to see what we’re like if we don’t have our bodies around us. Yet it’s not hard for us to think about ourselves as being fully digital, because so much of my day I just feel like I’m interacting with people on Twitter, I’m interacting with Megana on Slack. I’m not interacting with a physical person, so interacting with a digital person doesn’t seem that strange to me. The people who work for me who I have not really seen in person, and they’re just a reputation on Zoom, that could all be faked.

**Craig:** John, all the people you’re talking about have a lot of experience working with a digital presence: you. That’s the most robot thing I’ve ever heard you… Megana’s not… She’s an avatar on Slack. Boop.

**John:** Sometimes.

**Craig:** Boop.

**Megana:** I’m constantly wanting to be in the office more. Just so we’re clear on that, I like being in John’s physical presence.

**John:** That’s so nice, and Lambert’s physical presence, an amazing dog you get to hang out with.

**Craig:** Lambert.

**Megana:** That’s true.

**John:** Lambert.

**Craig:** Lambert’s great.

**John:** Lambert’s great. I think I would miss dogs if I were to be a brain in a jar or a digital version. I’d need to have some sort of digital dog to hang out with. What would a vacation be like if you’re a brain in a jar? It does change your nature, because would it just be work all the time?

**Craig:** You’re in VR spaces where you would have a regular body, and you would have a dog that you could play with and feel and touch, because the jar fluid can interact with your brain. Obviously it’s connected somehow to something. I think it sounds great, honestly, as long as it’s not Facebook. If I’m stuck in their stupid thing, then just break the jar and smash my brain. I just can’t.

**John:** That would be the equivalent of just being an old person in a wheelchair who has to watch Fox News all day. Basically, they wheel you up to the TV, and you’re just trapped there to watch Fox TV now. No, thank you.

**Craig:** I’m stuck in a world where there’s just constantly… My third cousin is screaming nonsense at me. I just can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I just won’t, so just kill me.

**John:** What we’re describing is a crucial difference between brain in a jar versus a person in a coma or someone who’s trapped in a body, has a consciousness, but can’t actually communicate. It’s ability to get input and actually do meaningful work and communicate it outward. That’s the thing that we’re making sure we get, as long as inputs and outputs work.

**Craig:** We don’t want locked-in syndrome. If everybody is connected and we’re all… By the way, that may be where we are right now, just to be clear.

**John:** A simulation, by the way.

**Megana:** Oh, gosh.

**Craig:** We are in a simulation, no question about that, but perhaps right now we are brains in jars. Part of the deal of the brain in the jar is you just don’t remember when you weren’t. All the memories are piped in to start with. Then we are in VR space.

**John:** Really that siren you just heard outside was some sort of signal from the simulation, like there’s some disruption and now they’re fixing the disruption?

**Craig:** Or it was just that routine. It just runs every 20 minutes. Send the ambulance.

**John:** For some reason your simulation does a lot of Grand Theft Auto outside your apartment.

**Craig:** I do love Grand Theft Auto.

**John:** So good. Craig, six weeks I’ve not been able to talk to you about Elden Ring. Are you still enjoying Elden Ring? Are you playing Elden Ring anymore?

**Craig:** I turned away. I was in the mid-70s level-wise.

**John:** That’s about where I am.

**Craig:** I was getting to some cool places. Then I just realized this is it, this is all it’s ever going to be. It’s beautiful, and I’ll probably find some more beautiful places, but I still have no idea what the hell I’m really doing any of this for.

**John:** There’s fingers at the Roundtable Hold.

**Craig:** What is that? What’s happening? Why are those ladies constantly looking at my fingers? What is that?

**John:** They just love fingers.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what those trees are about. I don’t know why there are a lot of animated teacups or jars. There are animated jars. I don’t know why.

**John:** They’re brains in jars is really what it is. It felt so good to finally kill that golden knight who’s at the very start, to finally be powerful enough to kill [crosstalk 01:02:34].

**Craig:** I killed that guy too. That was actually probably the moment where I was like, “I think I’m done.” I was like, “I killed that guy. What’s the point?” I’m basically done.

**John:** Living forever is just about playing Elden Ring until you actually solve it, until you actually discover what the meaning of Elden Ring is, and then you die.

**Craig:** What is going on there? It’s so weird. Then I got MLB: The Show and 2022 and I’ve just been playing baseball. That’s what I’ve been doing. There are some good games on the horizon. I’m excited for what’s coming. I enjoyed my time with Elden Ring. It was very satisfying. I got some good kills in there. I was killed in spectacular ways. I’ve seen enough. I’m good.

**John:** Good. Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** Thanks, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks, friends.

**Craig:** See ya.

**John:** Bye.

**Megana:** Bye.

Links:

Links:

* [The Room – “Oh hi Mark” clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aekfPU0SwNw&t=68s)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 543: 20 Questions with John, Transcript](https://johnaugust.com/2022/scriptnotes-episode-543-20-questions-with-john-transcript)
* [Los Angeles Arts District](https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2019-12-28/four-hours-staying-present-in-the-arts-district): [Hauser + Wirth](https://www.hauserwirth.com/locations/10069-hauser-wirth-los-angeles/), [Night Gallery](https://www.nightgallery.ca/), [Death + Company](https://www.deathandcompany.com/dcdtla/), [Manuela](https://www.manuela-la.com/)
* [Knotwords Game](https://noodlecake.com/games/knotwords/)
* [Upstep Orthotics](https://www.upstep.com/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Owen Danoff ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/550standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/good-energy).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 547 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting screenwriters.

Today on the show, we live on a planet experiencing climate change, yet the stories we tell tend to ignore this uncomfortable fact. We’ll look at ways writers can address that with two of the folks behind a new campaign to put some good energy out there. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll talk about how you ask for money, be that for making a movie or for launching a campaign to save the planet.

First, producer Megana Rao is here, and we have some follow-up to get through. Megana, what stuff has come in through the mailbox that we need to address on this podcast?

**Megana Rao:** Tony wrote in regarding Episode 545, the nuclear episode. He recommended this great film about Stanislav Petrov, The Man Who Saved the World. I’ll include a link in the show notes.

**John:** This had come up as like, oh, someone should make a movie about Stanislav Petrov, who’s the Russian who did not start a nuclear war. I said on the thing, “We don’t do movies about people who didn’t do things.”

**Megana:** Exactly.

**John:** Who stood in the way of things. I looked through the trailer of it, because it says, oh, all these famous people are in this. Wow. How did I never hear about this? It’s a documentary that has reenactment footage in it. It’s a hybrid in between, but it’s not a full-on normal feature.

**Megana:** Scripted, exactly.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes for that. What else have we got?

**Megana:** In Episode 530, Jack Thorne introduced us to the 1in4 Coalition, which is an organization that focuses on accommodations for disabilities in the UK entertainment industry.

**John:** That’s right. He was talking to us about simple things like bathrooms that are accessible for everybody and making sure that there’s a person on set whose responsibility it is to really focus on making sure that people can do their jobs and that there’s nothing holding them back because of accessibility issues. They’ve made some good progress in the UK based on his speeches and other people doing work on the ground.

**Megana:** Absolutely. Then the Inevitable Foundation, which is the American equivalent of that 1in4 Coalition, just released an accommodations report this week. They created a calculator to look at the cost of what it would actually cost production to have X percentage of disabled people on their sets or in their writers room. One of their missions is that they want to close the disability gap between real life and film and television, because disabled people make up over 20% of the population, but represent less than 1% of writers behind the screen. They mostly focus on mid-level screenwriters. In this project they looked at two budgets. One was for a 24-week writers room. They looked at the cost if there were 25% disabled writers versus 100% disabled writers. Then they looked at a 20-week budget for a 10-episode show and then did the same thing and calculated the cost there.

**John:** Great. We’ll put a link in the show notes and to the report, and also to this Hollywood Reporter article which does a good job of walking through it. This is Richie Siegel and Marisa, who you and I had actually spoken with before, because I did a little thing with them for the Inevitable Foundation.

One of the things that’s interesting is they’re putting some real numbers on what those costs would be, because I think sometimes you’re scared to walk into those conversations. It’s like, “Oh my god, it’s going to be so expensive.” What I like about the report is they’re focusing on some of the really small things. It could just be adjustable chairs for different height people. That is a simple thing. Some things are more expensive like ASL interpreters for a thing. Also, it scales differently with how many people need that thing on your set. If you need an ASL interpreter for one person, that can scale up to more than that one person. It helps the whole production when you have that stuff figured out in advance. Some of the costs really weren’t that big. I think the percentage cost for those writer rooms, it was sometimes 1% to 12%, but it wasn’t a crazy, crazy number. Compared to the things we spend money on in Hollywood, it was not a huge number.

**Megana:** Totally. They break down all of the costs in this really easy-to-read way that feels so obvious, like some of the things that they’re asking for are $4. It also brings up that I think when you are someone who is lower level on a production or it’s your first day at work, you’re like, “Who do I ask for these things?” It can be so uncomfortable to ask for really small things that might make going to the bathroom easier.

**John:** That’s what I think Jack Thorne was really emphasizing, I think, in their report. They were talking about having trained disability coordinator people, so that you know there’s a person you can go to to ask for that thing, so you’re not the person who has to go ask the producer for the thing. You can go to the specific person, just the same way we have a COVID testing coordinator and we have intimacy coordinators. There’s a person whose job it is to really think about that for the production, and so it doesn’t fall on the line producer or some other job.

**Megana:** In the report they survey 35 artists, writers, directors, showrunners, actors, and the combined projects that those people have worked on are 600 productions. Something that I was so struck by is that productions are spending money on accommodations to make things more accessible, but it seems like the people that they’re trying to help are being left out of those conversations. In one example, the production had hired an ASL interpreter, but this person actually didn’t-

**John:** They learned ASL on YouTube. They were not actually qualified to be doing the job that they were trying to do.

**Megana:** Someone had Celiac’s disease and someone gave them a gluten-filled doughnut and lied to them about it. I was so surprised by, and I guess it makes sense, that it seems like the discomfort around dealing with people who are differently abled is preventing any sort of communication from happening, whereas it’s very normal for us to now ask, “Do you have any dietary restrictions?” I think it’s just a new way of framing how we approach people and set expectations before going into things.

**John:** That’s actually a good segue to framing expectations about how we are going to be working on sets and telling our stories as we transition to talking about climate. Maybe we’ll introduce our guests for this week. First, I’m going to introduce Anna Jane Joyner. She has been working for over 15 years in climate communication strategy and campaigning. Her work has been featured in Rolling Stone, Glamor, MTV, the Associated Press, New York Times, and more. Most recently, Anna Jane is the founder and director of Good Energy, which has released a playbook for how film and TV can welcome feature storylines on climate issues. Welcome, Anna Jane.

**Anna Jane Joyner:** Thank you so much for having me.

**John:** An absolute pleasure to be here. I saw you first at a presentation that happened this last week where you’re rolling out this big playbook, which is a big, giant event at the Academy Theater. I want to get into how this all came to be and where you’re at. Where are you at at this very moment? Just this past week, are you on a high? Are you trying to get your energy back? How are you feeling?

**Anna Jane:** Yeah, a combination. We’ve been working on the overall project for about three years, but on the playbook itself for a year. It was a whirlwind year. It felt very surreal to see it actually come to life and be out there in the world and have this great reception, both at the event at the Academy Museum, but also a lot of press around it and just general excitement, so definitely on a cloud.

**John:** We’re going to be putting a link so people can read it, but I really want to talk through some of the workable ideas from it on this podcast. To help us out with that, Quinn Emmett is a screenwriter, investor, father of three small humans. He also created Important, Not Important: Science for People Who Give A Shit, which is both a podcast and a newsletter. It covers science news, from climate to COVID, heat to hunger, agriculture to AI ethics. Quinn Emmett, I can’t believe you’re finally on the show. Welcome.

**Quinn Emmett:** I know. I was wondering how many times my wife would make the cut before I did. Then every time I think about that, I think you should just keep having my wife on the show probably.

**John:** Quinn’s wife is Dana Fox Emmett, who is one of my favorite humans in the world. I got to see her married off to you at a great celebration in Virginia many years ago.

**Quinn:** So long ago. So long ago. Thank you for having me. You are a mentor to me. I’m delighted to be here and to help Anna Jane any way I can.

**John:** The hook for this episode really is that this thing has just come out. Can you tell us what the playbook is, Anna Jane?

**Anna Jane:** It’s a playbook for screenwriting in the age of climate change, which is really just an array of both inspiration and information. It has all the classic things you would think of, information on impacts, the science, solutions, but all of it ties back to story itself, in screenwriting in particular. Then it has a lot of fun sections on characters and a cheat sheet, a lot on climate psychology, because obviously that’s very related to character development. It’s really just an array of both great information and tips, but also a lot of just inspiration and ideas that we hope people steal.

**John:** Now when Quinn first described it to me, I was expecting it to be a book or a pdf, some sort of physical printed document. While there is a small version of that, it’s mostly a website. If you go to goodenergystories.com, you’ll see all the stuff that you have built out. It’s a very elaborate array of… I think it’s designed so you can just fall into it and spend hours inside it, looking through stuff. Quinn, you’ve been writing about climate issues for all these years for Important, Not Important. How’d you get involved with it, and what was the hook for you?

**Quinn:** Time is a flat circle, and I don’t remember much. I don’t remember how I got roped into this/inserted myself, but I have been aware and so impressed by Anna Jane’s journey over the past decade and all the contributions she’s made to the movement, from her personal story to her greater effect in climate communications. I got into this because I was screenwriting, and mostly sci-fi and tech and things like that. I devised this fire hose of, hey, what’s the latest in science and tech and medicine and things like that. I realized a lot of my friends weren’t seeing that same news, folks who were interested in it. They were getting their news from Facebook, which turns out, not so great for everyone. That’s just what it’s been. It’s been this journey of, hey, how do I help people keep up with these things, but do something about it?

What Anna Jane was working on was such a bizarre intersection of my two jobs, which was it’s very difficult to keep up with what’s happening with this stuff to truly try and understand it, to decipher disinformation from what really matters, and if at all possible, to guess where we’re going, but more importantly, to really identify with the folks who were already being affected, whether by choice or not, and the folks that are working, as I like to say, on the front lines of the future, to do something about this, whether through mitigation or adaptation. There’s a million different ways. That’s people and stories and characters and struggles. Anna Jane said, “We need to build something so that the folks in Hollywood who have a hard enough time making movies and TV and all that can find ways to build the most important story of our time into the most prolific storytelling mediums of our time. I feel like what you built is just an incredible version of that.

**John:** Quinn, you’re trying to distinguish between news, which is information and facts, it’s a kind of storytelling, but it’s not the kind of storytelling that involves characters. Anna Jane, we often do a segment on this show called How Would This Be A Movie. Imagining you as a protagonist who’s building this organization, what is your character origin story? What gets you into doing this kind of work for 15 years?

**Anna Jane:** It’s a journey. I grew up in a conservative, evangelical community. My dad is a megachurch pastor, so definitely not who most people think of becoming a climate activist and communications guru. I went to UNC Chapel Hill, and I took environmental science, because it was supposed to be the easy science class, and learned about climate change. For me, the actual entry point was mountaintop removal coal mining, which is this kind of coal mining where they blow the tops off of mountains in Appalachia. I grew up in western North Carolina in the mountains, and then on the summers on the gulf coast of Alabama. That hit me in a very visceral, emotional, personal way just imagining the mountains near me being blown up and those communities being impacted. That’s what really got me into working on coal and environmental activism and climate.

A few years later, when I was the campaign director for a regional nonprofit in North Carolina, I was approached by Years of Living Dangerously, which is a Showtime documentary series on climate. They wanted to follow me trying to convince my dad that climate change is real for a year. We had a celebrity cohost, Ian Somerhalder. We spent a year trying to convince my dad, by introducing him to faith leaders who are climate leaders, but also some of the best climate scientists in the world. I intellectually understood the climate crisis and how severe it was, but when I did that, I was like, “Okay, I really need to read up on all of this and really immerse myself in the latest climate news.”

I was just listening to a TED Talk by David Roberts, who’s an amazing journalist. He just went through it in such a simple way, the climate crisis and the impacts. It just hit me. I just had this moment, I remember, where I was driving, where I really emotionally understood what we were up against, and from that moment on, knew that there was never anything else I could do. Also, working on Years of Living Dangerously introduced me to just the power of cinematic storytelling and the fact that we don’t have enough of it. That is what really turned me more. I was also passionate about climate stories. Growing up in religion is a masterclass in storytelling, so I knew the power of it. That’s what really got me into TV and film and thinking about how to portray it on screen.

**John:** Thinking about you as a protagonist, we always talk about a protagonist has to leave home and go on a journey and be transformed in this. Was it that speech that was the transforming moment or was it the first class that transformed you? What are the moments along the way that made you feel like, oh, this is what I meant to do, this is what scares me, maybe this is the cave I fear to enter that I must enter? What were those moments?

**Anna Jane:** That was definitely a big one, David Roberts. It showed you, if we’re at two degrees, this is the world, and six degrees, and just in this powerful, simple way, and that just showed how terrifying it was, frankly. It was a bet that somebody on Twitter had waged at him that he couldn’t talk about climate change in 11 minutes or explain it in 11 minutes. At the end he just said, “Your job, anyone who knows this, is to make the impossible possible. That is what we are up against. That’s all of our roles.” I really took that to heart. There’s that car moment listening to a TED Talk.

Then I would say the other piece is, so about six years ago I was working in New York for a company that was a B corporation, had a nonprofit climate arm, and we had a creative agency in-house. I got to do a bunch of my own documentaries and short films and work with a really amazing creative team. I decided to move back to the Gulf Coast of Alabama, which is where my mom’s family’s from. I had this romantic idea of, I’m going to move back to this place that my family’s been for five generations, that’s very sacred to me, that’s beautiful. It’s right on the water and is also on the front lines of climate change. My little town of 500 people is a peninsula, and it’s been called one of the most vulnerable places in the country to climate.

When I got down there, I was not anticipating the real trauma and stress of living on the front lines of climate changes. It’s now six months a year of hurricane season. It’s just every couple weeks, one of these starts forming, and you just have to stop everything you’re doing and prepare. It’s traumatic. It’s also morally complex, because you’re praying that it doesn’t hit you, but that means that it hits somebody else. Being down on the Gulf Coast has certainly brought climate home to me in a very, very personal way. I already had a lot of emotions and feelings about it, but it certainly upped that experience of just really profound grief and anxiety about how this is already impacting us.

**John:** Let’s talk about the emotions, because you said grief and anxiety, but also it sounds like this initial TED Talk was fear. Basically, they’re showing there’s a monster there and we have to fight this monster, yet the storytelling can’t only be about fear and grief and anxiety. There has to be positive things to talk about there as well, and hope and optimism and courage. As you’re trying to develop this playbook for people to be telling the stories in the space, how do you find those other emotions? I feel like the movies we’ve seen have always been about just doom. How do you key into those other things?

**Anna Jane:** I think you’re right. The tropes that we do see are the apocalypse and doom, or they’re a character who’s shaming another character about their plastic straws or SUV or what you, or they’re ecoterrorists. There’s a lot of those too. We would love to see some more versions of climate stories, which is really the purpose of the playbook is to expand that, and then you have possibilities. I have two feelings about it.

Dr. Britt Wray, who’s an expert on climate psychology and mental health, has this great line of thinking or quote that grief and anxiety isn’t inherently bad and hope isn’t inherently good. Grief and anxiety are pointing you toward something. She says this: climate, it’s not a pathology to feel anxiety about it. There’s a reason we feel anxiety about it. If you can really process that and turn towards doing something that this anxiety is pointing you towards doing, that is a really amazing transformation. Seeing characters go through that and really reckon with their difficult emotions around climate can very much not only help the writer process their own difficult emotions, but the audience as well. I really love those stories where the emotions show up and it’s hard and you see how people work through them and reckon with them. That’s a form of finding courage. A lot of great stories are that dark night and then you come out of it and then you find courage to go up against the impossible odds. I think that that’s huge.

Dr. Kate Marvel, who’s a climate scientist and was one of our advisors and wrote the climate science section. She’s also a beautiful essayist and storyteller. She has this great quote that we need courage, not hope to fight climate change. Re-framing it that way for me was just so powerful, because there are moments where it’s hard to find hope. It is a really big challenge. Even just what we’re already seeing with Hurricane Ida when it hit New Orleans last years, I just cried for two days. The Gulf Coast is going to change. There’s nothing we can do. For me, it’s more about finding courage, like how do we face this thing, which is such a lot of what stories are about. Everything from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings to the Jesus story is about going up against really big odds. I do think you can find hope. There’s definitely still hope. We can still avoid the apocalypse outcome for our children. No matter what direction we’re going toward scientifically, we can build a society that can actually take care of each other, so that as we’re going through these impacts and transformations of our physical world, we can still take care of each other.

**John:** Now, obviously, the actual changes need to happen. There are some individual changes, but there’s more societal changes, political changes. Those are the wheels that need to turn. You’re focusing on what Hollywood’s role is and what the storytelling can be. I want to take a moment to think back about what impact has Hollywood actually had over the years in social issues, and to what degree is it just reflecting things or to what degree is it actually moving the needle. At our meeting we were talking through trying to brainstorm what are examples of situations where Hollywood and film and TV actually did have an impact. One of the things I was thinking about was smoking. People used to smoke on screen. You just don’t see smoking on screen. Smoking numbers have gone down. I think that is related. I think there’s less smoking and it’s not perceived as being cool anymore. That’s an example.

A negative example, we see the CSI effect. Because everyone watches CSI shows, in which there’s perfect crime forensics, the expectation for juries is that there should be perfect crime forensics. It should be fast and easy, and there should be DNA tests for everything. It should be easy and infallible. There’s definitely an impact that Hollywood can have in terms of what Americans think is normal. I think you’re trying to move the needle in terms of what Americans are thinking about in terms of climate.

**Anna Jane:** Absolutely.

**John:** Quinn, help me think through some of these other examples of bigger issues. Designated drivers, that’s a thing that I think I see in movies a lot now and in TV shows. It’s not okay to be driving drunk. That’s one. Other examples that you can think of?

**Quinn:** You guys have covered… I don’t remember, it was sometime in the last 100 episodes. You talked about the portrayal of dark government and those sort of things and realizing, hey, it might not be okay to keep showing these sort of things with how little we trust institutions these days, for better or worse.

Also, the goal of this isn’t to put the onus completely on Hollywood. I think one of the things Anna Jane and I talked about a lot is it was really important, in the language and the tone and the vernacular, to not say, “You’re not doing a good enough job.” It was important for us to say, “We need you. You’re the best in the world at this. If there’s anything you can get out of this, if one line prompts you to include one line in your movie or TV or you have an entire show, entire movie, entire series you want to bring out of this, that’s great too,” because as Anna Jane was alluding to, 30,000 feet to come on down.

In the past 15 years or so, as we’ve scaled up solar and wind and batteries and things like that, we’ve actually gotten rid of a lot of the worst-case scenarios with these eight degrees of warming, seven, six, five, four. Just this week there’s a big article in Nature saying if every government fulfilled just their current pledges, which to be clear, aren’t that great, we can keep it under two degrees. Of course, that’s a big ask. That’s actually enormous. Every tenth of a degree really does matter. When you ask the question, okay, what is it going to require for those governments to do that, it’s going to require the kitchen sink, just like defeating smoking wasn’t just not showing people smoking on TV and movies anymore. It was the warning labels we put onto the packages. It was all the lawsuits. It was all those things. It was banning it in restaurants and all these different places.

The answer, and where I work a lot, is people saying, okay, this is all great, but what can I do? The best answer to that, usually, whether it’s COVID or climate or whatever it might be, is what can you do, John? What is the intersection of your interests and your skills, and then I’ll give you 70 different ways that are very measurable where you can have an impact. What Hollywood screenwriters, or if you live in the UK, wherever it might be, Bollywood, wherever it might be, what you do is so impactful and has such reach and can have such exponential impact. Any publicity is good publicity. Look what happened with Don’t Look Up. That matters so much.

Again, the onus isn’t you’re not doing well enough. It’s we need you because you do this one thing so well, while people like Kate Marvel, who’s again an incredible essayist but also one of our most impactful atmospheric scientists, all of these people are going to make a difference, and the impact that screenwriters can have, and showrunners and story editors and people who work below the line to build these worlds that writers imagine. Everyone can have such a substantial impact. If we can provide a tool for people to answer that question of what can I do, then that’s the least we can do. It just will help move the needle so much. The answer is we’ve made a lot of progress, and we can make so much more, but we need everybody on board.

**John:** Let’s focus on some of the smaller things and bigger things in terms of what screenwriters and TV writers can do to show impact of climate change and solutions to climate change on screen. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the page we’re talking through. This is Climate Solutions On-Screen. Anna Jane, can you talk us through just some of the simple things? Then we can also get into the bigger things. I know Norman Lear is involved in this organization as well. I think what he did with The Jeffersons, which was portraying a successful Black family on screen, and putting it in everyone’s living rooms, did have an impact. There could be as big a thing about a climate-centered series like Scott Burns is doing, or we also had Gloria Calderon Kellett on the show to talk about One Day At A Time and how she did little small things on the show, like if they’re on the roof, they’re going to show some solar panels. There’s bigger things and smaller things. Can you give us a sense, from this playbook of these smaller things that we could be looking at for our characters in existing shows or movies?

**Anna Jane:** Definitely. Lynn and Norman Lear have been great champions of seeing more climate on screen. You’re exactly right. We talk about it as a spectrum. On the smaller things are almost more the set dressing. If you’re showing a roof, show solar panels on it. If you have a kitchen scene, show an electric stove, not a gas stove. If you have a car scene, have an EV. When on set, don’t have single-use plastic in your scenes. Have a water bottle. Those are just the really easy things that almost any production could do.

**John:** Those are things you’re not even really acknowledging in the course of the scene. It’s just normal to see that there.

**Anna Jane:** We know that that works, because it’s worked with smoking and it’s worked with other issues and it normalizes these behaviors and makes them sexy, depending on the context. Of course, that’s what we want. We want to make these things really desirable and sexy. Then I think from there it’s talking about it just in passing. You’re seeing that show up more, just in shows where it’s an ongoing story that isn’t about climate, but the character brings it up in passing conversation. We know that that is powerful, because again, it normalizes talking about it.

There’s this really strange dynamic that’s happening in the country where now according to Yale’s most recent research, 75% of American adults are concerned about climate change, everything from cautious to deeply alarmed. The deeply alarmed is now the biggest American audience of all the audiences they study. It’s a really small percentage of people who ever talk about it in their normal, day-to-day lives. It’s creating this sensation of feeling very isolated and also like you’re being gaslit by the world, which how the characters in Don’t Look Up felt, like there’s a meteor headed towards us and nobody seems to care. We also consistently, according to research, underestimate how much those around us care about it. We think that we care more than the other people around us, but that’s not true.

Just having it come up in passing conversation for a character that you’re already attached to and a story that you’re already attached to is really, really powerful. Then I think we see the more in-depth engagements with shows like Years and Years, where it’s not focused on climate, but it’s a consistent theme that impacts the family and the story because it’s set in the future.

**John:** Let’s go back and take a look at that middle ground thing where it’s not just set dressing, but it’s coming up in conversation, because I think the classic example you go back to in terms of one character makes a comment and that changes the whole industry is Merlot. In the movie Sideways, Paul Giamatti has his tirade against Merlot, and it actually has a demonstrable impact on Merlot sales for decades afterwards. It literally changed what grapes are planted in California based on the result of that movie and people not buying Merlot. If you have characters you care about, who you believe would be saying this thing, but are voicing a concern about this thing or that thing or a preference of this over that, that could have a real impact if it’s the right show, the right message, the right timing of it. It’s being judicious when you’re doing that.

**Anna Jane:** It’s huge. Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, another amazing climate scientist, says that the number one thing that anyone can do about it is talk about it, is really being honest about the fact that this is impacting our lives and our psychology and our mental health and our physical environment. Having your characters do that I think also is just an honest portrayal of the world we’re living in now. If these characters were out there in the real world, it would be impacting their lives, and they would be thinking about it. Also, just for the impact on the audience, it really does a lot to normalize people’s own concerns and courage and thinking about it and saying it’s okay to be worried. These characters are also worried.

**John:** Choices in transportation feel like a really natural way to do that, because the choice of whether to get that bigger car, to get the smaller car, or to not get a car and use public transportation, those are things that are moments we can see on screen where characters are making choices. We can think about like, oh, what choice would I make if I were in that situation. You might make a different choice. Just because you see a bunch of big trucks around you, you might be the person who doesn’t get the big truck because of something that you saw on screen or a choice that someone else made that was different, because of a show you saw or a movie you saw.

**Quinn:** Going from the ground level back up, there’s some fascinating research that says the single most influential lever for why someone might get solar panels is whether their neighbor has them. That’s been measured a thousand times. We know that the biggest levers to pull, no question, are elections, legislation, and candidates who might be able to win races, that will vote for that sort of legislation that pulls a lever. We also know that that really doesn’t usually happen until it’s swelled from the ground up, until social norms have been changed, so when there’s been a paradigm shift.

If TV is like the friends that are in your living room every week or you’re binging them or whatever it might be or these big impactful movies, if we’re able to show those things more and more, whether it’s solar panels or a smaller car or it’s water issues or whatever it might be, that’s going to help build that. That’s going to help build it up to the point where it’s really tough for the folks who are in charge, who are able to have the biggest impact to ignore. Again, there’s a million different roles that people can play. When you ask, what can I do, it’s the same thing.

I reread Anne Lamott’s book Bird By Bird recently, which I love and I’ve dogeared a thousand times. It’s just these wonderful character questions like what do they dream about and what are they scared of and all this. It’s the same thing, just looking at your characters and going, “What can they do? How can they get involved in some way, whether it’s subtle or not?” The more you see that, the more you go, “That’s a job I didn’t know existed.”

**Anna Jane:** I think the way that we talk about it in the playbook is a climate lens, which is also just another generative, creative opportunity, thinking through how would this be impacting my story world, and my characters can open up all these new possibilities around plot and character development. I think that that’s exactly right. It’s just thinking through, if this character was alive in our world today, what would they be dreaming about, and how might they be engaging or thinking about this. Then I think Gloria Calderon Kellett at the event did such a good job of showing what that looks like in her show, where it’s a sitcom. It’s not about climate change, but one of the characters is really passionate about social justice issues. It was very natural to have that character dress up as Greta Thunberg for Halloween. There were some great jokes. It was funny. It totally worked for their characters and their story.

Then also talked to Scott Z. Burns, who just created an Apple Plus show that will come out I think next year, that’s heavily focused on climate. His co-showrunner and writer Dorothy Fortenberry has this great line that if climate isn’t in your story, then it’s science fiction. I think that that’s going to continue to be the case. In 10 years, if your characters aren’t acknowledging climate, it’s going to feel so outdated, because that is just going to increasingly impact our real lives and our real world.

**Quinn:** Now when I watch any show that is about an oncoming pandemic or something, or I see medical situations where people aren’t wearing masks, I’m like, “Put on your mask!” It feels really crazy. I love love love the show Station Eleven, but it started to be filmed before our pandemic. We see all these medical situations, and there’s a pandemic coming. I’m like, “Where are your masks?” It does feel like some sort of weird alt timeline universe that people are not acknowledging what we all know to be true.

**Anna Jane:** That was one of my favorite shows recently, because obviously it’s not a climate show but it does show how do these characters find beauty and joy in the midst of pretty harrowing circumstances. I think we need a lot more stories about that, around climate. That stuff can’t go away, as things continue to get more intense. We’re humans. We need stories. We need art. We need joy and beauty. Also, on the flip side, I was like, “This is set 15 years in the future. There’s a lot of climate change happening. They just don’t talk about it.” It would be so easy to just have thrown a little bit in there to acknowledge that their world is very changed.

**John:** We’d be focusing on the little things we can do or how the characters talk about it. Let’s zoom back out. There’s a page in your playbook called the Cheat sheet, which is bigger, broader things to be thinking about. One of the big frameworks you have for it is the climate crisis is here now. I think so often we talk about it as the day after tomorrow. We’re always jumping ahead 10 years like, “Oh, this is how bad it’s going to be,” and not acknowledging what you’re experiencing on the Gulf Coast, which is that it’s happening to you every day. There’s constant problems. The wolf’s not at the door. The wolf’s in the house. We have to deal with the wolf that’s in front of us.

Let’s talk through some of the other things in this cheat sheet, because there are things you might skip past but I think are important for us to be looking at. One of them is your idea of no shame, because I think so often it’s easy to think about, oh, they’re saying that, but then they’re also flying someplace, so they’re hypocrites. You have a quote there from Bill McKibben that says, “Everyone’s a climate hypocrite. The hypocrisy is the price of admission in this battle.” You to be doing this, you had to fly here to Los Angeles to do this presentation. You have an impact as well. That doesn’t negate the good that you’re doing.

**Anna Jane:** Yeah, it’s really huge. I think it’s actually an intentional narrative that’s been seeded by the fossil fuel industry, who very much understands the power of storytelling. They commissioned a movie glorifying oil in the 1950s. It’s intentional. BP actually coined the term carbon footprint, and it was very much to put the onus of guilt and shame on the individual instead of the systemic problems, the fossil fuel industry, the governments that are allowing this to happen.

I think that when we do shame each other over flying, plastic straws, what have you… In the Deep South some people need trucks. EV trucks haven’t become affordable. Shame is a very good emotion for shutting you down. It doesn’t provide a psychological mindset for moving into a place of agency and action. That’s a very intentional thing that was done by the fossil fuel industry. I encourage people not to play into that. It’s easy to fall into. It also tends to set up the character who does care as the nag, like a lot of the annoying neighbor bitching at you about your recycling. We want to show characters who care who you like, or you don’t like, but they’re somebody who’s fascinating and not just bitching at you, ideally.

**John:** I think one of the other tropes and expectations we get to is that character, that nag, is a white person who is going after you. One of the things that I see you doing in this is that you’re trying to really center Black and indigenous people in this conversation. You had Reverend Lennox Yearwood Jr., and one of the lines he said that I thought was so smartly crafted was, “From the front line to the fence line,” and really focusing on communities that are impacted by these things and centering them in the solution to it, and not just the victim of the problem.

**Anna Jane:** It’s huge. I think it’s very in line with a lot of representation and diversity conversations already happening in Hollywood. When it comes to climate, historically marginalized communities, largely BIPOC, are the ones who are near the fossil fuel industries that are poisoning air and water, Cancer Alley in Louisiana, largely Black communities. They’re also in the front lines. We see Standing Rock and all kinds of pipeline fights and fights against different fossil fuel infrastructure led by Black and indigenous leaders. It’s really important when we’re telling climate stories, those people are leading on the stories that they’re in.

**John:** There’s not a white savior who comes in-

**Anna Jane:** Exactly.

**John:** …just to solve the problem for them.

**Anna Jane:** They’re a part of the actual storytelling process, because they are largely the ones who are experiencing it first and worst.

**John:** Let’s try to wrap this up with some action steps, because this feels very much like a Quinn newsletter thing, like here’s what you can do. Obviously, any of our listeners can go to the climate playbook right now. It’s goodenergystories.com, and take a look at those things. What are some steps that you’d like people to take this week, this month, in terms of if you were a showrunner working on a show, what are some practical things they could do to start having these conversations in the room? What would you like them to do?

**Anna Jane:** Certainly reading it, but also sharing it with your writers and making sure that other people have access to it and are aware of it. We’re definitely trying to distribute it far and wide. The more that folks can do that, the better. We’re also offering workshops, and we’re happy to come into writers rooms and bring it to life off the page. Happy to do that. Definitely reach out to me if you’re interested in that. It’s like climate change, just talking about it, sharing it.

**John:** Great. How will you know if what you’re doing is successful. How will you know whether this good energy playbook has had the impact that you want to have? I know you have people involved who are data folks. Will you have a sense of whether this has worked?

**Anna Jane:** Yeah. We worked with USC’s Media Impact Project to study how often climate and any adjacent conversation is showing up in TV and film. It’s 2.8% between 2016 and 2020 showed up in scripted entertainment. We are going to continue measuring that to see how it’s going up. That was before Don’t Look Up. I’m curious how much that impacted audiences. Just looking, definitely going to study how does this change over time, and not only just the frequency, but how are the stories showing up. What are the narratives that are showing up?

**John:** Small sidebar. You don’t have to weigh in on this. I fully respect Don’t Look Up, and I’m so happy Don’t Look Up happened, but I do worry that it’s going to feel like that’s how you make a climate change movie. I don’t know that you’re going to have the impact you’re going to have, because I do worry that those people involved telling that story has just made it feel like it’s a Hollywood movie about this thing that’s really… It’s a metaphor. The meteor’s a metaphor for something else. I don’t know that it’s going to connect the dots in the ways that it all could. I’m happy that movie exists, but I think we could do so much more granular work to actually get some stuff happening.

**Anna Jane:** On Don’t Look Up, I do think that it opened a lot of doors by having a successful movie that was a metaphor, also for climate explicitly. They were very clear about that. Definitely want to see climate show up more in non-analogies, in real ways. One of the movies that I just loved that did that was First Reformed. I just re-watched it, because we do a bunch of case studies in the playbook. It’s just so beautifully written. I just feel like anyone who says that you can’t write climate without being preachy or didactic or boring or too technical, that movie just to me completely debunks that, because it’s just gorgeously written. That’s a lot of faith and climate intersections too, which I always find fascinating. I really love that one. It’s dark, but it ends on this moment of possibility and expansiveness. I really love those stories, where it’s helping you to befriend uncertainty but also letting you imagine something that happens.

**Quinn:** I always try to take the perspective of we’ll take whatever we can get here. One of the things I tried to emphasize as Anna and her team constructed this incredible tool, is we always have to remember how difficult it is for anyone at any stage in their career in Hollywood to get anything made. I watch my wife, who is the most hardworking, incredible human, and about as successful as it gets, struggle to get things made. One of our goals was literally anything you can get out of this, great, we’ll take it, because that 3% number can only go up. If you skim one page and you grab one thing, that’s something else, and that starts to change that social norm. We’ll take whatever we can get. Don’t Look Up felt the same way, whether it’s something more fantastical like Beasts of the Southern Wild about the Gulf Coast or it’s First Reformed or whatever it might be, the movie about the big forest fire last year.

**John:** Angelina Jolie?

**Quinn:** Yes. The point is, if you think there’s a limited number of stories to tell, you are just incredibly off base, because the folks that are already being affected by this have such a wide, beautiful variety of lived experiences who have stories to tell, who are already contributing, because their answer to what can I do is, it’s what I have to do. I have to make sure that my frontline community is getting the money or is electrifying buildings or whatever it might be. We’ll take any of these stories, because all of them make a difference.

**John:** They do. The other thing I would just stress is that you don’t necessarily have to announce your intentions. You don’t have to say, “Oh, we’re going to put a climate change story into this episode.” No, just do those little, small things. The network, or the studio, they’re not even necessarily going to notice that you did it. You’re making choices for your story that are the right choices, but also help tell the message.

**Quinn:** This’ll date me. It doesn’t need to say, “A very special episode of Parks and Rec.” We don’t need that. Just make it part of the world, and people will identify with it so much more.

**Anna Jane:** I really love it when it shows up very authentically. I think that’s really powerful. I do think people love the drama of my story, like the climate activist goes up against climate denier megachurch pastor father. All of us have fascinating stories. All of us are experiencing this in unique ways. There are literally billions of climate stories, because every single person in this world is affected, and every person to come will be affected.

**John:** Cool. It has come time for our One Cool Things, where we share something with our audience. I’ll start off. I’m going to start with Redactle, which is a new daily game, in the tradition of Wordle, because now there has to be a daily everything, a place you go to. Redactle is really tough. What it does is it takes an article on Wikipedia, one of the top 10,000 articles, so not something super obscure, but then it redacts almost all the worlds. Then you plug in words to uncover what it is. You have to figure out what is this actual article about. It’s really hard, but really challenging. If you’re a puzzley kind of person, you’re just trying to figure out what this could possibly be. I spent about a half an hour yesterday trying to figure out what an inclined plane article was, also known as a ramp. It’s rewarding. You do feel that sense of accomplishment when you actually have uncovered the thing. Redactle will be my One Cool Thing for this week. Quinn, why don’t you go next. What do you have for yours?

**Quinn:** I’m going to cheat. My One Cool Thing is my wife.

**John:** Aw.

**Quinn:** Besides just being an incredible human on her own, I was privileged enough to choose to do this work. She has been supportive in 10,000 different ways, including there’s really no way to get into this work without having some dark moments, even if you’re as privileged as I am. I deal with air pollution a lot less, now that I left California. I don’t want for clean water and food and things like that. The scope of it and what’s here and what’s coming can be very difficult. She’s found me under a blanket on the couch some nights, going, “Oh boy.” She’s the most incredible human alive. On the other hand, if you want to laugh with everything that’s going on, her new movie is fantastic. It’s a blast. It’s a throwback. It’s a delight.

**John:** That would be The Lost City. You have to actually name the movie.

**Quinn:** Yeah, The Lost City.

**John:** The Lost City.

**Quinn:** Yeah, that’s helpful. Sorry. It’s been so long. We’re so in it. Lost City, Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum. He takes off his pants. I don’t know what else to tell you.

**John:** Good stuff. Anna Jane, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

**Anna Jane:** I’m going to go with Russian Doll Season 2.

**John:** I’m excited to watch it. Are you enjoying it?

**Anna Jane:** I loved it. I binged it. It was my treat after launch. We launched on Tuesday. I was bringing on Wednesday. I’m like, “The universe gave me Russian Doll Season 2 as a gift.” The first season was really profoundly moving to me.

**John:** I watched it twice.

**Anna Jane:** I think I watched if four times. Just personally, I was going through stuff that it really helped with. On a global scale, working on climate can feel like you’re in this crazy death loop and like you’re going a little crazy, especially the first 10 years. Now everybody else is waking up too, which is great. This season goes back into her story. She is working through trauma from her family and history. I have a lot to do with that as well. I hear rumors that if they get a next season they might jump into the future. If you want to talk about climate, reach out to me. That show has just been profoundly life-changing for me.

**John:** Fantastic. Great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Jade Carta. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Anna Jane, are you on Twitter? Are you a Twitter person?

**Anna Jane:** I am. I’m @annajanejoyner.

**John:** Fantastic. We can also follow, is it @goodenergy?

**Anna Jane:** It’s @goodenergystory.

**John:** @goodenergystory. You can follow their Twitter account as well. Quinn Emmett, you are on Twitter? I don’t remember now.

**Quinn:** I am, yeah. Yes, when I’m not dealing with my children. It’s @quinnemmett.

**John:** Fantastic. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. While you’re signing up for newsletters, you should also sign up for Quinn’s newsletter and podcast. Quinn, plug away.

**Quinn:** You can find that newsletter at newsletter.importantnotimportant.com. You can find the podcast there as well. It’s weekly. It’s free. I don’t know. A lot of folks find some value in it.

**John:** Of course, goodenergystories.com is the place where you can get the playbook and find all that information there. If you would like a T-shirt, we have T-shirts. They are great. They’re available at Cotton Bureau. We have hoodies like the one I’m wearing. They’re very comfortable. Are you wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt at this moment, Quinn?

**Quinn:** No, I should’ve. That was a real mistake, because I have a closet full of them.

**John:** Yes, we all have our closets full. 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 asking people for money. Anna Jane and Quinn, thank you so much for coming on the show.

**Quinn:** Thanks, John.

**Anna Jane:** It’s been such a pleasure. Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Anna Jane, to do this work, you had a vision, you had a goal, but again, we talk about you as a protagonist. At some point you, to enact this vision, had to get people to give you money to do this thing. Can you talk to me about how you approach people and say, “Hey, would you give me money to do this thing, this vision that I have for this organization?”

**Anna Jane:** I would say I’m still learning the art form, but I have been pretty successful with this particular project. I basically had the idea after consulting on Madam Secretary, on a storyline that was loosely based off of my story, but was like, why aren’t we seeing this show up more, and just started a personal… It really came from a very personal passion. I love TV and film. I’ve been a book nerd since I was little. It was very much like you follow your personal passion, and that opens up doors. I just started talking to as many writers as possible to figure out how we could help, what was going on.

From there, I went to the Sierra Club, who was my first climate home. I’ve worked with them off and on over the years a lot. I was like, “I think this is an opportunity that nobody seems to be looking at.” I think just the uniqueness and the fact that it intersected with what felt like we were craving more and more, that certainly opened up doors. The art of going out and dancing in front of billionaires to get money for work that you care about, I just… I think stories are powerful. We worked with a story scientist as an advisor, and just learning with him about the psychological reasons that stories impact you so much more than facts or data and can lead to action as a result of that. Not only was it just a vision for something that was missing, we really did the deep work of making the case from a just practical, psychological space that was really needed.

**John:** Vision is great, but at some point you are probably writing things. You can talk to us about writing podcasts. Talk to us about what you were writing and meeting with and slides. What was the work from, “Okay, we have this vague vision.” You went to the Sierra Club. With Sierra Club, did you go in and have a meeting? Did you have a pitch deck? Did you have a written document? What were you going into them with? When did you have the name Good Energy? How does all that stuff come together?

**Anna Jane:** That was in the spring of 2019. They were fairly easy, just because I already had a relationship with them. They could pretty quickly see the vision. Certainly in working with Bloomberg Philanthropies, who was our next big partner that came on, we had to be really intentional about piloting. That’s what we did with the Sierra Club was we talked to so many writers. We did two events. We really made the case that there was an opening for this and there was an appetite for it, but also practical things. Our creative director is a magician. All of our materials, including our pitch deck-

**John:** Your materials look great.

**Anna Jane:** It’s beautiful. I think we just created… It wasn’t just a vision. It was how we packaged it. We’ve tried, and some things didn’t work, and we learned from it and we tried again. Definitely when you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before, there’s a lot of trial and error. Certainly, I think not only leaning into the vision and getting evidence, scientific evidence and also just qualitative evidence based on interests, but also really packaging it in a super beautiful way.

**John:** Sierra Club is seed money to get you started and do some little small events that are test of concept, proof of concept for a thing. Then you’re going to Bloomberg. Also I see you have Annenberg. You had that USC connection, because they could do some researchy stuff for you. It feels like there’s places out there that want to do things, that they want someone to come to them saying, “This is how we do the thing.” Is that what your function is?

**Anna Jane:** Yeah, I definitely think people, including foundations, have this esoteric, like storytelling matters, but doing research on other organizations who do this… Define American was a huge inspiration for us.

**John:** I don’t know what that is.

**Anna Jane:** Sorry. It’s very similar. They do story consulting for immigration storylines. They’ve done research on the impact. It’s very significant. Looking at other organizations who do similar things, adopting it for climate, and showing that there’s this very practical model really helped. We took this esoteric vision and we brought it down to what does this actually look like.

**John:** Talk to us about going into a Bloomberg, going into a big foundation. How do you get the first meeting? What’s the process for going in there to ask for money? Do you know what dollars you’re asking for when you go into those things where you’re just saying, “Hey, please be a partner.” What’s that like?

**Anna Jane:** I want to acknowledge that there’s a lot of privilege inherent in this. I had been working in the climate space for a long time and I had a reputable name. I’d done work that had done well before. I just knew a lot of people. I met the woman at Bloomberg, Lindsay Firestone, who’s been just pivotal not only for getting us money, but also just helping us really think through the model and grow it. Bloomberg is very data-driven. That is their thing. We really had to show that we could measure this, we could measure the impact, in addition to presenting the vision and really the practical steps for what this could look like. That continues. We’re getting better and better at it. We’re getting more evidence. We’re getting more data that shows that this is possible to do. It’s like Hollywood. A lot of it is relationships. That has to be combined with something, a really solid idea, and that’s packaged very well.

**John:** Now, as I went to this event, I noticed that there were a bunch of other organizations that were part of it. Bloomberg is obviously writing big checks, but you clearly partnered with a bunch of other organizations who are doing related things. Are they advisors? When did those people come on board with the process?

**Anna Jane:** Absolutely. Our other big funder is Walton Family Foundation and Doc Society. Then we have a bunch of great funders at smaller levels. Our network of partners is so critical for just bringing diversity of voices and a lot of stories. A lot of these organizations work with people on the ground. A lot of them work with BIPOC communities, so access to character inspirations and stories. Hip Hop Caucus is one of our partners who does incredible work not only on climate justice, but also on racial justice. They’ve worked with a lot of musicians in the hip-hop community. They really get the impact of culture work. Now they’re doing more and more storytelling work as well.

Then Center for Cultural Power is our anchor partner. They’ve done a lot of amazing work at the intersection of art and story and climate, but also gender justice and racial justice. They’ve just been pivotal. They were editors on the playbook, advisors. Then the Sierra Club. CA Foundation, the Writers Guild East has really helped us. Both of those organizations really helped us think through the audience. What really helped too is that my two co-writers on the playbook were TV writers, or are TV writers. That’s Carmiel Banasky and Rae Binstock. We not only were connecting with advisors who were writers the entire process, we actually brought in writers to help us craft it. That was hugely important. Writers Guild East also just really helped us think through.

**John:** Just going back to the writing again, so when we say writing, are you guys writing in Microsoft Word? Are these Google Docs? How are you putting together this very complicated site? How are you gathering all of this material and making sure it all feels like it has a consistent editorial voice?

**Anna Jane:** It was a herculean effort. It was a huge Google Doc that we were inputting into. We had a ton of guest writers. We also brought in Kate Marvel. One of my favorite sections is we worked with a consultant to Marvel’s world-building empire, and then also climate scientist Dr. Pete Kalmus. They really took the science and worked to project what these two worlds that we’re heading towards, one or the other or somewhere in between, would look like. We follow a character who’s born today and grows up in the best-case scenario, which is honest. It’s still harrowing. It does get worse. There’s nothing we can do to avoid that. It’s a lot better than the scenario we’re headed towards right now, which is more three degrees. You get to see what do these two different worlds look like at 2050 and then towards the end of the century. We brought in just a lot of amazing guest writers and also worked with TV… It was really intentional and important to us that the tone was… Fun is a weird word when it’s coming to climate, but there are moments of humor in there.

**John:** It’s inviting and it’s engaging. You’re not screaming as you’re going through it.

**Anna Jane:** Not too technical. We wanted it to be very accessible to storytellers and writers. It was important to us that the writing was really good, because our audience was writers. We also worked with a really amazing copywriter. We were intentional the entire time about making sure the writing was really solid.

**John:** Quinn, you got cut out of that whole segment. Anything you want to say?

**Quinn:** That’s the way it should be. Are you kidding me? I’m just a paperweight here.

**Anna Jane:** Quinn was an amazing advisor throughout the entire process.

**Quinn:** Anna’s amazing. Every time I read something new, it was just like, oh man. It’s incredible. My whole goal was just trying to always come back to the measurable outcome, which was is this section designed so that a screenwriter can easily and understandably get something practical out of it. It wasn’t, hey, let’s write 100 pages on all the climate science. That’s not going to be as helpful. It was always with that goal in mind. What’s out there is just so helpful. Again, it’s one of those things that seems so obvious once you have it. It’s because of course, this is a tool for these people to use. It just didn’t exist.

**John:** When you see it at the final product, of course that’s how it was going to be, and then you don’t see all the process that got you to that point. At what point did you know it was a website and not a printed thing?

**Anna Jane:** I have to shout out the Walton Family Foundation who made that possible, as well as the research. Originally, we only had funding for a pdf version. When we got maybe a third of the way in, we were just like, “This has to be a website.” Also, we talked to over 100 TV and film writers to inform the playbook and just realized through those conversations that it would be way more accessible on a website, so we shifted maybe four months in and were like, “We’ve got to figure this out.” We raised more money so that we can make it a website.

**John:** Great. Again, thank you very much for coming on the show and talking through this whole plan, and especially that’s how we raise money to make these things happen.

**Quinn:** Absolutely.

**Anna Jane:** It’s an art form. Still learning.

**Quinn:** Thanks for having us, John.

**John:** Cool. Thanks.

**Anna Jane:** Thank you so much.

Links:

* [Stanislav Petrov, The Man Who Saved the World](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2277106/) Documentary
* [Download The Cost of Accommodations Report](https://inevitable.foundation/cost-of-accommodations/download) from the Inevitable Foundation and read more on [The Hollywood Reporter](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/the-inevitable-foundation-disability-accommodations-cost-study-movies-tv-1235131680/?_hsenc=p2ANqtz–L2n-kjr_qiSGqFieZri6yrMikpnCpb_V7he_SrT2rQcnerEPKQAfUJHYpZkE3lJxquHEz)
* [Good Energy Stories Playbook](https://www.goodenergystories.com/playbook)
* [David Robert Ted Talk on Climate Change](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ktYbVwr90)
* [Years of Living Dangerously Clip with Anna and her Dad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0d09DIv8vY)
* [Subscribe to Important, Not Important](https://www.importantnotimportant.com/)
* [Dana Fox](https://twitter.com/inthehenhouse) on Twitter and checkout [The Lost City](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfKO9rYDmE8) Movie
* [Russian Doll Season 2](https://www.netflix.com/title/80211627?source=35)
* [Redactle Game](https://www.redactle.com/#)
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Anna Jane Joyner](https://twitter.com/annajanejoyner) on Twitter
* [Quinn Emmett](https://twitter.com/quinnemmett) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jade Carda ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/547standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 548 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, films may have returned to theaters, but many of them are still being made exclusively for streamers. We’ll talk about the pros and cons of going straight to streaming, with the writers of two upcoming films.

First off, we have the writing team of Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, whose credits include How I Met Your Mother, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Most Likely To Murder, Pretty Smart, and the upcoming Chip ’n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, debuting later this month on Disney Plus. Dan and Doug, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show.

Doug Mand: Thank you.

Dan Gregor: Excited to be here. Thank you for having us in your upstairs backroom.

John: Which of you is Chip and which of you is Dale?

Dan: I guess I was accused of being Dale. We did early recordings for temp voice. I was Dale and Doug was-

Doug: Chip.

Dan: We got dropped very quickly.

Doug: Emotionally, because it is a movie about friendship and partnership.

Dan: Through long-term Hollywood careers.

John: The people actually playing your roles in the movie, they’re newcomers, right? They’re no one you’ve ever heard of.

Dan: Nobody you’ve ever heard of. The character inspired by me is played by a young upstart named Andy Samberg.

Doug: The character inspired by me is a little whippersnapper named John Mulaney, who we all have high hopes for, but you never know in this business.

John: Things could turn on a dime.

Doug: Oh my gosh. We’re pulling for him though.

John: We are so excited to welcome our very own Aline Brosh McKenna, who’s recording… You’re going to be in the editing room for your upcoming Netflix feature, but now I see a library behind you, so you’re back at home, correct, Aline?

Aline Brosh McKenna: Indeed. We turned in a cut yesterday. We’re getting towards the end.

John: This would be a cut of Your Place Or Mine, her feature for Netflix. We’re so excited to see it. Do we have a release date for your film yet?

Aline: We do not.

John: Soon. I want soon.

Aline: It’s up to the folks who decide those sorts of things.

John: On this podcast we’re going to be discussing movies made for streamers and the uncertainty of when do our movies come out. We’ll also talk in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members about getting work done when you have a newborn, because Doug and Dan, you both have really young kids. I want to talk to you about that and the strategies you’re employing for actually getting things done when you have a small, screaming infant in your house.

Doug: Work a lot less.

Dan: Whoop, sorry, Premium.

John: A very short segment. First, we have some follow-up. Megana, can you help us out with some follow-up from previous episodes?

Megana Rao: In Episode 545 we spoke with Elizabeth Meriwether and Liz Hannah about How Would This Be A Movie. One of our topics was MacKenzie Scott. We talked about what a limited series about MacKenzie Scott would be like. Teresa tweeted at us, saying, “FYI, there is a TV comedy inspired by MacKenzie Scott, sort of, coming out on Apple TV Plus. It’s a Matthew Hubbard, Alan Yang show, and it stars Maya Rudolph.”

John: The combination of these people, Aline and I know. Maya Rudolph is incredibly funny. This would be inspired by MacKenzie Scott, but not really… Doug, I see a puzzled look on your face.

Doug: That’s just my resting face, but yeah, go ahead.

John: MacKenzie Scott was Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife who’s now giving away all this money. I looked at the show description for this new show. “Rudolph will star as Molly, a woman whose seemingly perfect life is upended when her husband leaves her with nothing but $87 billion.”

Doug: That’s great. That’s a very funny line.

John: That’s a good premise. When people talk about how do you write a good log line, that’s it. That’s a [crosstalk 00:03:25].

Doug: That’s a great log line. That’s fantastic.

Dan: That sounds great.

John: Kudos to Matthew Hubbard and Alan Yang for a very funny log line. May the show live up to it.

Dan: I think it’s really smart. I was listening to that episode, and I also was like, don’t get caught up in all the nonsense of how they met and their relationship. I just want to see-

Doug: Get right to it.

Dan: What’s it like to be a regular lady with $87 billion?

Doug: I don’t need the first episode to be like, “We met and it was all so great and he was just a regular guy.” I don’t care.

Dan: It’s really a funny premise.

Doug: Go spend that money. Let’s get to Brewster’s millions.

John: We like it. Now, Megana, you and I had a Bonus Segment a couple weeks back talking about murder houses and murder house architecture. We got some follow-up from Penelope about this.

Megana: Penelope from Melbourne said, “I was listening to your segment on murder house architecture, and it made me think of Tom Anderson’s brilliant essay film, Los Angeles Plays Itself, released in 2003. He explores in detail why modernist architecture is so often used as the headquarters of villains in movies and TV. It’s such a great documentary, well worth a look if you haven’t seen it yet.”

John: We’ll look at the trailer. I’ll link to the trailer in the show notes. I really liked this. It did really strike to me, if you see a modernist house in a movie, it’s almost always the villain who lives there. Even Charlie’s Angels, the villain lives in the Chemosphere, the most haunted modernist house of all time. In this trailer, I was looking, even LA Confidential, which I think of as being such a period movie, it was a period movie in a modernist era, and the bad guys live there.

Dan: Did you see Westworld?

John: Oh yeah.

Dan: It’s the deep future, and they mostly take place in the Old West. Still, when they ever leave, the villains are still living in the exact same evil modernist houses.

John: Frank Lloyd Wright’s-

Doug: Exactly.

John: …[inaudible 00:05:09] house.

Dan: Exactly. It’s 2030000 and we can’t ever have our mean people live anywhere but Frank Lloyd Wright.

Doug: It was wild that when CAA moved, also they moved to what looks like a large spaceship that’s ready to be sent off into the atmosphere.

Dan: Into the core of the earth.

Doug: There is an evil feeling when you roll in there. I love the CAA. It was just so perfect, it felt villainous, just their new location.

John: Now, Aline, in your film, do you have your characters living in modernist architecture or more traditional? Your film is set in Los Angeles, correct?

Aline: It is set in New York and Los Angeles. We have a little spin on that trope, which is that the person who needs to explore emotional growth lives in a rather modern, arid environment. The person who also needs to experience emotional growth but is a little bit more female, for starters, lives in a more cluttered, craftsman-y, Echo Park, not modern home. I guess I’m using those tropes as well, in a different format.

John: We love it. Last bit of follow-up. We had something from Adam in Brighton, England. Megana, help us out.

Megana: Adam wrote in and said, “On your last episode, I think it was Liz Hannah who said that six-episode seasons struggle to make a profit. As someone who often feels that shows are stretched too thin, I’ve long wondered if the problem is driven by business needs. Do you have any insight that you could share?

John: I have no insight, but we have a lot of people who have made a lot of TV here. Dan, help us out. Talk to us about shorter seasons and the economics and why you don’t see really short seasons.

Dan: The thing that seems pretty clear is that it’s amortized costs. If you have to build a set, all of a sudden that set for a couple episodes is very expensive, but if you’re doing it for a bunch of episodes, it’s expensive. Same thing with basically all of your contracts. Doug had a show that was a 10-episode order. I’m sure you had a sense of what… What would happen if you pushed it more or less?

Doug: I listened to that episode as well. I was like, “Oh, that is interesting,” because I had not had the six-episode discussion. Once you’re up and running, it’s a lot less money to do it, especially a show like Pretty Smart, which was a multi-cam, so the set’s built and you have everything in place. That’s the most I know about it. I didn’t know about the model for six to eight episodes, six episodes being a cutoff. I did not know about that. Neither of us have ever pitched something that would be that long.

John: Aline, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend obviously was… You were 13 episodes and then even longer I think at some times. What was the decision process for like… Originally you were a Showtime show, and then you went to CBS. How did the number of episodes factor into the budget?

Aline: They told us how many episodes to make. It was not our choice. We made 2 18-episode seasons and 2 13-episode seasons. It was based on the network studio and their needs. We ended up making 62 episodes. That would’ve been maybe five, six episodes of streaming or cable. We just made them in the overlapping network system, where everything was happening at the same time. We weren’t able to separate out the phases of production. That made it especially taxing and complicated, but it also allowed us to compress a lot of stuff into a relatively short amount of time.

John: You were able to do 18 episodes of a season within just a course of a calendar year, which as opposed to some of these limited series streaming things, it’s dragged out over 2 years just to do 6 or 8 episodes which is allotted.

Aline: I Love Lucy did 50.

Dan: A season?

Aline: Something like that.

Dan: Oh my god. How I Met Your Mother was a 22, 24, 25 one year, a season kind of show. They were talking about the creative problem of all that, which is you have these middles of the season where you’re like, “We’ve just got to keep these characters in a stasis for a chunk of time so that we can keep our plot endgame primed for where we wanted to go at the end.” You just don’t want to burn out. One of the things we learned on those shows was, man, every meaningful plot point is so priceless. You just don’t want to over-dole them out too quickly, because you really need them to last. The short episode orders are a joy for like, “No, just do it, do it, do it.” That’s why it’s great.

John: Now, Aline, also, you have a TV development deal. In shows that you’re developing, how early on in the conversation do you know how many episodes they want the show to be? If you’re setting up a pilot, do they already have a discussion of like, “Okay, this needs to be at least eight episodes. It needs to be at least 10.” When does that conversation happen?

Aline: That’s interesting. We have a couple pilots that are moving down the highway at some degree of velocity. We haven’t totally nailed it down yet. I think it might also have to do, at this point, with actors and how much time they want off and need off, and the idea now that actors really do go back and forth between not just TV and film, but multiple TV series, and so setting it up so that the actors… If you get a very famous actor and they have a specific number of episodes that they do or don’t want to do, I imagine that that would factor into it.

I’m interested in the idea, from a crafty point, of how much story you eat, because sometimes you can feel that deliberate slowing of the story eating, because creators don’t want to burn too much, because if you burn too much, you get into soap territory very quickly. One of the mini-series I have most admired recently, and by admired I mean was obsessed with, The Dropout. In The Dropout they eat a tremendous amount of story in the pilot. At the end of that pilot, you think, my god, I have been through so much already. I admire that, because it’s giving you the amount of story that you might get in a movie really at that point. Then I think we’ve all gotten to the place where we are accustomed to those episodes, which as Dan said, are between Episodes 4 and 7, where it seems like we’re going to do a flashback episode about the first time this person learned how to use a payphone. That’s going to be the whole episode.

John: We’ve been talking about TV, but I really want to focus on features this time, because you guys are both in the middle of making features for screenwriters. We’ll start with Doug and Dan. Chip ‘n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, this was obviously a passion project from a very young age. You always dreamed of making a Chip ‘n’ Dale.

Doug: It actually was. It was my favorite cartoon. I have drawings from my childhood that my parents dug up of me cosplaying the Rescue Rangers in different outfits.

John: That’s amazing. Rescue Rangers is not even something that’s on my radar at all. It was very specific. You were just the right age for the Rescue Rangers to be a thing.

Doug: It’s an old, mid-old millennial kind of niche. All of those cartoons aired on the Disney afternoon, which was right when you’d come home from school. They were on repeat. You’d see these episodes hundreds of times, and so you memorized them.

John: It wasn’t the kind of IP where it was like everyone in the world was like, “Oh my god, we have to make a Rescue Rangers movie.”

Dan: That’s why they came to us.

Doug: Exactly.

John: When did they come to you, Doug, to do this?

Doug: I just did a timeline, just because it’s coming out and I just wanted to look at it. They came to us in I guess maybe the beginning of 2015. They were like, “We’re thinking about doing this.”

John: Who is they that came to you?

Doug: It was Louie Provost over at Disney, who is still there, which is a miracle that we had the same executive, and Mandeville Pictures. We had done some work with both of them. We had had meetings with them. They were like, “We think you guys would be great for this.” Our initial response was, “Why? Maybe not.”

Dan: What you’re saying exactly, which is like, does anyone even know who they are? It’s so niche. Even to me, who was obsessed with it for a little period of time, it was again the fourth-most important out of four cartoons. It’s really not a big deal.

Doug: It was, I think, a big deal in our career too. We weren’t getting a lot of IP brought to us. To Disney’s credit and to Mandeville’s credit, they were very much like, “Come to us with anything, any version of it.” Dan and I started talking about it. We took the essence of the why even do this and put that within the picture of the film.

Dan: The original title of the movie was The Chip ‘n’ Dale’s Reboot That Nobody Asked For.

John: How many years ago was this?

Doug: 2015 was our first pitch.

John: This is way before Disney Plus.

Doug: This was sold as a feature.

John: A Disney feature film.

Doug: Exactly. We were both scratching our heads. We pitched this movie that was a noir and had elements of LA Confidential in it.

Dan: Just to give the premise of it really quickly, it’s basically Chip and Dale are these two chipmunks, who in the early ’90s, this Disney afternoon, they would basically do what’s happening right now, which is they would repurpose old Disney characters, put them in new outfits, new adventures, give them new personalities. This was one of them. Chip and Dale were Donald Duck’s foils in the ’50s, ’60s. They were just nonspeaking chipmunks who ate peanut butter.

Doug: They were background actors or secondary actors. We play them as actors who played these roles.

Dan: They basically get put into… The concept is that they are the actors who played the Rescue Rangers in this early ‘90s sitcom. Now it is 30 years later. They are washed up actors, over the hill. In a Tropic Thunder, Three Amigos kind of storyline, they get embroiled in a real world mystery plot, very reminiscent of a Roger Rabbit kind of world.

John: Great. There’s some animation, but it’s mostly a live action feature.

Dan: It’s live action hybrid. It’s as much as it could be a hybrid as possible, because it’s as if cartoons are real people who live in real Hollywood and the real world, like Roger Rabbit.

John: Roger Rabbit rules.

Dan: Exactly.

John: Fantastic. You have this idea. You’re pitching it to Disney. They’re saying, “Fantastic. That’s great.” The feature version of that is incredibly expensive, the theatrical feature, not only to make it, but also to release it. What happens?

Dan: There are so few slots. We’re writing this, and we’re like, “They’re not going to make this movie.”

John: Yeah, because there’s always going to be a princess movie to make.

Doug: There’s a princess movie, and then there’s the Marvel movies that you have to contend with.

Doug: Star Wars, all of it.

Dan: Again, this is a movie that like, do people really need to see… Are people clamoring to see this, when they have four Thors to make? We’re writing it and we’re really enjoying it, and the response is really positive. That’s not always the case, even when you’re proud of something. Eventually it gets to the place of-

Dan: It just peters out, because they’re trying to figure out how could this be a much bigger four-quadrant movie. We’re like, “That’s just not what this is. It’s a weird offbeat comedy wrapped in a mystery.” Then it just peters out and it just sits dormant.

John: It becomes dormant and eventually gets [crosstalk 00:16:16].

Dan: It gets put on the shelf, but to their credit, which you don’t always get, our producers at Mandeville were big fans. Somewhere they met Akiva Schaffer…

Doug: Akiva Schaffer.

Dan: …who’s wildly funny and a great director…

Doug: From the Lonely Island.

Dan: …from the Lonely Island. They were like, “He might be good for this.” They show him the script. He laughs at the title, The Rescue Rangers Reboot That No One Wants. He reads it and he’s like, “I do like this.” At this point, Disney Plus exists now. The combination of those two things gave it new life. Akiva was like, “I’m interested in this.” Disney was excited about him and the idea that maybe you could make a movie that doesn’t have to be-

John: The pressure’s off of it, because it doesn’t have to open on a weekend and make $8 million.j

Doug: It doesn’t have to be a four-quadrant, like Dan is saying, in the same way.

John: Aline, I want to talk to you about your film, because talk about movies they don’t make anymore or movies that’d be hard to make. What was the origin story for Your Place Or Mine? It feels like the kind of romantic comedy that used to be made theatrically a lot, and now it’s harder to make. How did this movie get set up?

Aline: The origin story was that in 2010 when we were making Morning Glory, I needed a place to stay in New York because my per diem wasn’t really covering all of it. Our friend Ted Griffin had a lovely apartment in New York I knew that he wasn’t using full-time, so I asked him if I could stay there. He was living such a bachelor life at the time, that I really enjoyed being a mom in a bachelor space. I thought it would be funny to do a movie about two friends, where the mom is living in the bachelor’s space, and the bachelor is living in the mom’s space. I had that idea for a long time. A lot of the ideas that I’ve ended up doing, I carried around in my brain for a long time. Crazy Ex was one too. What I do is I cradle these little puppies in my arms, and then I wait for someone that I want to raise the puppy with.

My old friend Michael Costigan partnered with Jason Bateman. They had a deal with Netflix, which I think originated around the Ozark series. I had breakfast with them at John Benny’s. It was similar to when I met Rachel and as I was talking to Rachel I went, “You know what? Crazy Ex, she’s going to dig it.” At this breakfast I said to Jason and Michael… I pitched them the idea. They really loved it. The setting up process was, because they had this relationship with Netflix, we just went to Netflix and told the story to our exec at the time, Sarah Bowen, who’s no longer there. It was really easy and straightforward. I didn’t do what I normally have done with pitches, which is to go everywhere and sit in a million rooms. That was a great relief. The development process, the style of development was very different. I don’t actually know to what… I know that part of that is the culture of these streamers. Part of it is the individuals that I was working with. It was a more straightforward, business-like process in an interesting way.

John: Did you feel like when you made your deal at Netflix that it was a deal to develop a script or basically like, “We’re going to have you write the script and we’re probably going to make it.”

Aline: It did feel more like that. We who have been doing this screenwriting gig for a long time have sold in a number of different configurations. Sometimes you’re pitching stuff and everyone’s going, “I don’t know. We’ll give this a shot. Let’s see what happens.” Sometimes you’re writing in a situation where they have an actor, they’re in a rush. They need to do it. You think it might get made. It’s your football to drop. In this case, there was a feeling that they wanted to do romantic comedies that were with stars, maybe bigger stars on the platform. That was the design of it. I felt like that was something that they had identified a need for. As a writer, that’s always the best situation to be in.

What Dan and Doug are describing is you’re making a dish that wasn’t necessarily ordered, in which case the dish has to be that much better. When you’re making a dish that has been ordered, with Devil Wears Prada, not only had that dish been ordered, but people were banging on the table saying, “Where is it?” There’s a relationship between your product and your project and their appetite, but a really great script can overcome what might be a natural disinclination towards the project, which is what Dan and Doug overcame with the inventiveness of their writing.

John: Dan and Doug, it sounds like, holding this metaphor of the dish no one ordered, it was like, “Oh, this is really, really good. We have nothing we can do with it.” Then the world changed, and suddenly, oh, there’s actually a place that this would be perfect for. It sounds like the kinds of movies that Aline likes to make and this idea that she had… Aline, your movie would’ve been hard to set up at a conventional studio, unless you’d actually already had those big actors attached, correct?

Aline: That’s correct. Even then, because it was a star-dependent movie, we had to then get stars. One of the things about being a writer is it’s a fast-moving river. It’s always been. It is now more than ever. The number of buyers, who’s buying, what they’re looking for, it changes really quickly. It’s also interesting, as I said, for John and I, who came up in a quite calcified system where there were only certain types of jobs. I know that people are bemoaning the lack of predictability and consistency in the marketplace right now, but I think there’s a way to look at that as opportunities. When there is this transitional stuff happening, there are people who need certain kind of content. If you can identify who’s looking for what, then you can figure out who wants to buy your particular brand of pierogis.

Dan: Also, something you were saying about cradling your puppies, even more so, nothing’s ever really dead. That’s the other part that is… It’s heartbreaking when things seem like they go away or they die, but they never really do. They’re always gestating in your mind. They’re gestating in the larger business. There very well might be another time where it just makes sense to come back to life in a totally different iteration or a different concept.

John: We’re going to have a question later on that’s really about that, when do ideas actually just come back, or do you just wait for the right time for that idea to come back. Let’s talk about, in addition to the studio features we’ve made, you’ve also made indie features. I’m thinking about Most Likely To Murder, which to me feels like a movie that if it had come out in a streaming time, probably would’ve gone to streaming and it would have had a better home.

Dan: That was a movie that we… I wish that it got more clear traction. I think if it had been made for a Netflix, it would’ve been something that made a lot of sense. We made it. We did it for Lionsgate, but without a clear plan. They were just launching a thing called Studio L, a wisp in the wind, that no one really has any idea what the hell that is anymore. For a moment they were like, “We’re going to make digital movies.” Also they were trying to make straight-to-video comedies. That was not what we were making. It didn’t even really fit in their business model. We ended up selling it as part of a deal to Hulu, but it didn’t get the launch that I think it would’ve gotten if it was something that-

John: My movie The Nines, we debuted at Sundance, had a big debut there, sold off of that. It went to theatrical, but it was just like it never found that home. Two years later, if it had gone to Sundance, a streamer would’ve bought and it would’ve showed up on a streamer, and I could say, “Oh, it’s on Netflix,” or I could point to where they could see it. People tweet at me now, it’s like, “Where can I see your movie?” You could download it on iTunes. It’s frustrating.

Doug: You can buy it on Amazon, which is sort of something, but it’s not-

Dan: The deal with Hulu just ran out, so we’re [crosstalk 00:24:01].

Aline: Side note is that Doug Mand delivers an incredibly hilarious performance in that movie. If you want to see Doug Mand on screen in a film, he’s really funny.

Dan: With one of the more egregiously terrible facial hair performances in history.

Doug: It’s more my facial hair that’s doing the performance and I’m just along for the ride.

John: Dan, you brought up straight-to-video. I had forgotten that term, weirdly, because it just-

Dan: It doesn’t mean anything anymore.

John: That was the equivalent I think of what we’re talking about with streamers, like different genres there. You could make a movie for theatrical or you could make a movie for straight-to-video. There was a pejorative quality saying something goes straight to video. There were things that that was the right place to put that genre of film.

Dan: There’s something great about, again, the marketplace of content now, where yeah, if you want to make a small movie for a particular audience, then great, that’s fine. That’s part of the market.

John: I want to wrap up this part of the conversation by talking about a thing that is different about the actual features or straight to video is really the back end, because there was a clear model for what the back end was going to be like for movies that were made for the actual release or made for home video, because there were residuals. There was ways that you could make your money out of these things. We can share as much as we want to share about what are deals are looking like for this. Aline, for your movie, I hope it’s a huge, ginormous success. I hope that Netflix takes out those little ads saying how big it is, like how Ryan Reynolds’s movies are so big. That won’t impact your financials very much at all. I see you shaking your head. As you are making your deal going into it, are you trying to account for that? How are you thinking about that?

Aline: They gave me an opportunity to direct a movie with big stars and adequate resources. I think in the long run that will benefit me, if you’re looking at the bottom line, which I don’t tend to do that much, but it will benefit me that way. That’s really how I think about that one. With Cruella, it was an outgrowth of the pandemic that it got released day and date during the pandemic. I ended up getting the best upfront definition, because it was on whatever you call pan-demand, which is our best definition. It was day and date with the release. Obviously, the release was depressed by the pandemic. That ended up having a backend that I just didn’t expect.

I think that that’s going to change and evolve and will probably be driven somewhat by actors, because I think the upfront money might evolve as these companies have more data about what the revenue is actually accruing to them from these packages, because right now it’s guesswork. The actors have been, as with Scarlett and Disney, the actors have been on the forefront of trying to figure out exactly how much money these folks are making and trying to draft off of that. My personal thing didn’t impact me that much, but I can see coming up Prada and 27 Dresses happened to come out in the middle of the DVD boom.

John: Your residuals on those movies but be absurd.

Doug: God bless.

Dan: Oh boy.

Doug: Just make it public, Aline. Let’s open the books up.

Dan: Just write it down and show us.

John: I don’t want to nail you down to a dollar figure, but [crosstalk 00:27:16].

Aline: It’s a lot.

John: Millions of dollars.

Aline: They were right in that zone. Really what money means for a writer is time to do stuff you love. Those were so meaningful to me early in my career in terms of, hey, I’m going to take a break and do Crazy Ex, which was a pay cut for me in certain respects, because I have a pretty steady residual stream. All these new models are going to affect writers in terms of the kinds of choices they can make. I will say that the opportunities that streamers have almost everyone that came up in my generation to do things that they’d always wanted to do, that there wasn’t necessarily outlets to make in either the network television or the traditional studio, which seemed to take turns being the sausage factory. It used to be that TV was grinding out mid-range hot dogs and then it was features that were doing that and then the TV became fancy and now it feels like there’s a little bit of a shift going underway. All of those changes that you have to track as a writer, in my particular case I was balancing the fact that they were giving me a great opportunity with I wouldn’t get the backend.

Dan: Rescue Rangers, we signed the deal as a theatrical and so there was no discussion of it whatsoever. There’s a writing credit.

Doug: The writing credit bonus.

Dan: The writing credit bonus…

Doug: [Inaudible 00:28:42].

Dan: …that we’ll get when this comes out. I don’t know when we’ll actually get it. Even all that stuff, the movie was in this weird little flux where it was all of a sudden going well, and then there was a moment where they were discussing, “Maybe we will switch it to theatrical.” Then COVID happened. Then they were like, “Nobody’s ever going to go to the movies again.” They started just assuming it was going to be Disney Plus again. Then they started signing all of the actors to Disney Plus, to streaming-only contracts. All of a sudden they got to a point where they’re like, “Oh, we’re back in a world where there is theatrical.” Now we couldn’t even switch back to theatrical if they wanted, because they can’t renegotiate the contract now.

John: It’s a weird time.

Aline: I know some people who made movies just pre-streamer to be in either independent films or festival films and then tried desperately to sell them to a streamer, and in certain instances it was too complicated to do that. They had to watch their movies come out and plunge like zeppelins that’d been stabbed with a pencil. I think streamers are really great for getting movies out there that are just not being made in any other way. I guess that’s probably the most banal statement I could possibly make. There’s just such a huge menu, budget range of things that are being made. It’s almost more like silent films, where they were cranking out, we’re going to make a Tom mix, we’re going to make a romance, we’re going to adapt Lady Chatterley’s Lover, we’re going to do a whole mix of things. John and I will tell you, features for a good 8 to 10 years were not that. It was a very, very limited menu and a very limited genre area that we were given to work in.

John: Let’s transition back to TV, because we have some questions from our listeners that you guys are incredibly well suited to answer. Megana, can you help us out with Christopher’s question here.

Megana: Christopher asks, “A recent deadline article on the 2022 pilot season cited networks as increasingly opting for, quote, ‘presentations’ instead of filming pilots. I’m familiar with this practice for unscripted shows, and to a lesser extent, one-hour dramas, but I’ve never encountered it before for sitcoms. I know John has some experience with the mechanics of a presentation from his DC show with the WB, but I can’t find anything about what a presentation would look like for a sitcom, especially a network sitcom which is already only around 22 minutes long.”

John: Doug, can you talk to us about… Didn’t you do a presentation for your show?

Doug: We did not. That show Pretty Smart for Netflix was a pitch. They saw a place for it. It made sense for their schedule.

John: Did you shoot a pilot or you shot series?

Doug: We went right to series.

Aline: Weirdly enough, I’ve done one.

John: Talk about presentation, Aline.

Aline: I did a presentation, I’m going to say 20 years ago, or maybe even more. It’s a fancy word for no money, to make a scratch track. It’s a bummer. It’s really hard.

Dan: It goes right in the trash. That’s the worst part is you make it, and it’s usually under different contracts, or a lot of the time it’s just different crews. It doesn’t even look the way that the show would look. It’s just a proof of concept.

Doug: This is how we got our break really. It’s where I think presentation should be, which is myself, Dan, and Adam Pally, all best friends, still are, and we had an idea for a sitcom, and then we went out with our own money, none of us had representation, and shot a cold open for the show and an opening credit sequence at under a thousand dollars and then sent it to everyone we knew. That was a proof of concept. I think that’s what presentation should be, as opposed to doing 22 minutes. Better to do like, give me that money and let me show you an example of, for a sitcom, what the comedy feels like, what these characters are like.

Dan: Our next one, we paired with a producer who financed a presentation. They financed maybe a 12-minute presentation for a half-hour sitcom. It was one of those things where again it was super useful. We still ended up selling it to the CW. Before, they were looking to only do dramas, but then Crazy Ex broke that cycle. It was super helpful. They’re great. It’s a lot of work and a lot of money.

Doug: You can’t say that this is what 22 minutes is going to look like, because you’re asking me to do it at a third of the cost, maybe even less. I don’t like the idea of them shifting to that, because that’s just saying let’s just squeeze out as much money as we can. I’d rather say give me that budget and let us do six minutes of the show.

John: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, that was famously a presentation where they shot it themselves. It was a proof of concept for, this is the chemistry between these guys, this is the idea, and that could change everything, as opposed to DC, when I taught that presentation, the idea was that it was a cheaper pilot, so basically you had your pilot script and then you would pick certain screens from that pilot script and have only those. We were shooting things that had to fit back into the original pilot. It was the worst of both worlds. The only thing I would say was helpful for that-

Doug: Wait, I’m sorry, so like Scene 1, Scene 5, Scene 12.

John: Yeah.

Dan: They wanted to use it. If they were going to make a show, they were like, we’re not going back and shooting this.

John: There you go.

Doug: That’s even more make-believe, isn’t it?

Dan: That is all the [crosstalk 00:34:02].

Aline: It’s such a vote of semi-confidence too. It’s like you match with someone on Hinge, and instead of going to dinner with them, you’re like, “I’ll meet you for coffee 15 minutes at 9 a.m.” They’re not going into it with… It’s such a meh. It’s so hard to make things even when everyone is so enthusiastic. When we did it, it just also allowed them to change things and give crazy notes. We ended up with an 11-minute presentation that is one of the craziest documents in my career everywhere. It’s somewhere in there, that closet, on a VCR cassette. It was bonkers. It’s in a weird way better to wait until people really care about what you’re doing and can give you a little support. It also strikes me as hilarious. You know how you can never explain to your parents what you do?

Doug: Oh, god.

Aline: Try explaining a pilot presentation to your parents.

Dan: I will say I think for corporations, shifting the development process towards that is stupid and ridiculous and it’s just a weird way to not pay as much money. I will say this forever. If you can get a little bit of your own money together to make your own pilot presentation, I do think a well-made piece of film can go much farther than a script can sometimes for someone on the come-up.

Doug: Especially if you’re not established.

John: [inaudible 00:35:25] Adam Pally on it. That can show his-

Doug: Exactly. We had an unknown Ellie Kemper in that presentation, at the time, she hadn’t booked anything at that point, and a bunch of people who ended up doing great things. This is always the advice we give to up-and-coming writers is to go out, find your community, and shoot things. It’s hard to get people to read your writing if know one knows you.

Aline: Now you can put them on TikTok. TikToks can go up to five minutes now.

John: There you go.

Dan: Basically a feature.

Aline: You can make something great with your friends and put it on TikTok.

John: Megana, what else do you have for us?

Megana: Jeffery asks about writing gender-agnostic characters. He says, “In my work in progress, my two main characters are women, and I want to encourage gender-neutral casting for everyone else. When describing what these characters do, I’m toying with the idea of using they pronouns for them. For example, Senator McMartin rushes in late for the news conference. They step to the mic, only to spot their former business partner in the front row. Do you think this would be a good general approach to avoid using a default he/she, or do I risk getting a reader who thinks I don’t know how to write? Would this be worth using a reader’s note before the script begins?”

John: Before we discuss this, I want us each to vote, good idea or bad idea. Dan, good idea, bad idea?

Dan: Bad idea.

John: Doug?

Doug: I lean towards bad idea.

John: Aline?

Aline: I lean towards an explanatory note.

Doug: Didn’t vote, Aline. I would’ve leaned towards that too if I knew that was an option, Aline.

Aline: Really political over here today.

John: I’m going to vote bad idea. I’ll give my context and then everyone can weigh in. I totally respect what Jeffery’s trying to do, but I also think that in 2022 they/them pronouns is for characters who identify as not being on the gender binary. To throw up your hands like, “I don’t care,” is actually worse in some ways. I think as a writer you’re making a choice about who you’re putting in there. You cannot be as specific as you want to be if you’re not actually even deciding with the gender of this character is. That’s my instinct here.

Dan: Thank you for taking the lead on that, John.

Aline: Sorry, the question is how do I leave it open to as many types… You can say Officer Rao, and then in parentheses you can say male, female, or nonbinary, parentheses. Then you can say, “I will be using he,” so that they know that… I’m assuming they’re trying to keep it open, not write a nonbinary character, because obviously those would be different things. If you want to encourage them to keep it open, you can give them a gender-neutral name and then note that it could be played by…

Dan: I also want to know when I’m reading someone, especially I haven’t read before, what they envision the character to be. I think that’s okay to do. Then when casting discussions come around, you can always pull back and go, “You know what? This could actually be XYZ and I didn’t think about that.” I think specificity helps. You’re painting a picture for these people with your words.

Doug: Specificity’s everything. It’s everything.

Dan: It becomes more obtuse and more like, okay. It’s a choose your own adventure of like, oh, this is who I’m going to imagine then.

John: Exactly. It’s hard to put that scene in your head if you don’t know what am I even looking at, who is this person. A line is going to read differently from this character versus that character.

Dan: Completely. It’s a non-decision in your script.

Aline: I disagree. I think there’s a lot of times, especially when you’re writing a smaller part, that you can write parentheses, any gender, or parentheses, any ethnicity, so that you’re leaving it open. We’ve done that. We did that a lot.

John: Certainly for characters that basically have essentially no lines, and they’re purely functional, sure, great. You’re doing that sporadically. As Jeffery’s describing, encourage gender-neutral casting for everyone else, you can encourage that when you hand in the script, but you cannot just write that in on the page.

Dan: It’s fine to put a note that says, “Hey, whoever finances and makes this project, please cast openly with gender-neutral casting as much as possible.” It just seems a little cart before the horse. It doesn’t belong in the body of the script in my mind.

John: Also, generally, I think by choosing not to make a choice, if you have a social goal in mind for this, you could make some choices to make some of these roles female that would not always be female, or could be nonbinary that would not otherwise be. Specificity there can actually push your gender forward. Megana, what else do you have for us?

Megana: Great. Margaret asks about page density. She says, “I have a rom-com that is currently 104 dense pages. I snipped and squooshed and killed orphans to get to that svelte size, but now I’m wondering if more white space would make it a more enjoyable read. Do you think slenderness in the hand, measured by number of pages, or ease of quick reading is more important? If the latter, do you have any thoughts about how to put a dense script on a white-space-expanding diet? Where would the extra space be most useful, margins or between lines or everywhere? Nowhere do I have more than four lines of action or description or dialog, but still it looks dense.”

Aline: I’m going to quote Craig Mazin here, which is the return key is your friend. I never do a line of description more than… Rarely more than two, but definitely not more than three.

John: If you read through a bunch of scripts, there’s a wide range of stuff. There’s not one perfect thing to do for this. Judy Kay, don’t change the margins. Don’t try to make your margins bigger. That’s not going to help anybody. Also look at maybe what kind of script are you writing? If you’re writing a script with a lot of dialog, there’s going to be some natural white space there anyway, just because the margins have set in for that. I worry you may be worrying about the wrong things.

Dan: Look, my feeling on page stuff is that it’s purely a psychological tool for the person who’s receiving the script. We’ve all made enough scripts to know that the page count is functionally meaningless. Our shooting script for Rescue Rangers was 175 pages. The actual practical thing, when they re-transcribe the thing you’ve actually put on screen, every little um, eh, huh, it becomes 175 pages, but the movie’s 90 minutes. It doesn’t mean anything, the page count really. It’s just the way that people will receive it in development. Do they feel like it moves? Do they feel like it flows? Does it feel too heavy in their hand? It’s just that dumb stuff. I go home on my weekend read and they have a pile of six screenplays. They’re going to go to the thinnest one first, because they don’t want to take more time.

Aline: It’s a sales document, you’re right. If you open it and you see big, chunky, 10-line paragraphs, you’re like, “No, I’m not in the mood for that.”

John: 100%.

Doug: I don’t want to be prescriptive on it either, but I do think that first page… If I see a first page that is all scene direction, and I like reading… If there’s anything, I’d be like, look at those first couple pages and see what can you thin out to draw the reader in.

Dan: There’s nothing worse than the actions… We’ve done a lot of action movies, a lot of action movie rewrites. When you come in on an action movie where you’re seeing just pages and pages of the action described, you’re telling me the kind of machine gun they’re using, I don’t care. It’s a slog of a read. It’s not particularly interesting. It’s never character-forwarding. That’s probably the biggest thing is that it’s very-

Doug: Character or story.

Dan: Exactly. It just becomes meaningless details. It’s not fun. It’s not a good read.

Aline: I think from a writing standpoint, don’t you guys also think that most of the mistakes people make is too much stuff, not not enough stuff? A lot of times when you’re reading it, it’s like, she’s got a purple T-shirt and a button-down and Levis, and she walks over to the car and she opens it with her right hand. You’re like, which of those things do I care about? Which one of those are you pointing out? You can figure out what color the car is and what shoes they’re wearing later if the important thing is that she’s right-handed because later someone’s going to get stabbed with a left-handed knife or something. That’s what you have to highlight. I think beginning writers often, and I would include myself as a beginning writer for sure, there’s just a tonnage of extraneous detail, because you’re trying to show how beautifully and exquisitely you’ve imagined everything. You can’t do that. It’s like lighting. You’re trying to direct everyone’s attention to exactly where you want it to be.

Dan: You just said it. It’s directing. When you get late in a process and you’re having production meetings and you need to get every single detail in someone’s head, that’s the time to really get granular. Most of that stuff doesn’t need to be in there. You’re just trying to give a vibe a lot of the time.

Doug: You have to ask yourself what matters, I guess. If you’re telling me about the clothing, this is a person who just wears yellow, or you’re telling me what hand they use to open the door, do they have a broken right arm so they have to use their left. I think you have to ask yourself those questions of does this really affect the story, the character. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t need to be there, most likely.

John: Megana, another question for us?

Megana: JJ asks, “On a recent episode, John mentioned how near impossible it is to get a musical going at the moment. I have a musical out to buyers right now, and it’s been a lot of passes so far. The feedback has all been positive. People love the script, but more than a handful of buyers have said they simply can’t get a musical across the line right now. I wrote it in 2019 before the unsuccessful theatrical runs of a few notable musicals changed the landscape. My question is, what do you do when a script that excited agents, producers, and the director at the time it was written is ready to hit the market at a less than friendly time for the genre? Is a second chance possible a few years down the road? Is it dead? I’m very bummed at the moment and not too optimistic about the remaining places we are out to. Has this ever happened to either of you before?”

John: Yeah, this just happened to be. JJ could basically be just me writing. I did take a musical out. We basically went to all the streamers. Going into it, I’d heard musicals are really tough because of Dear Evan Hansen, because of West Side Story not working, but also just a whole slew of things, and so that certain streamers are saying no. They didn’t want to hear a pitch, because they said no. Other places, like, “Oh, we’re excited to hear the pitch.” I go in, it’s like, “It’s just so good. No, we can’t do a musical. I can’t get this approved,” which is heartbreaking but it feels [crosstalk 00:45:40].

Doug: You told me this the other day, and my heart sunk, because I am in the thick of a musical that I sold with Rachel Bloom to Amazon. On the other part of the subject, this is a movie that Rachel and I had developed a handful of years ago, took it out to all the places that do this stuff, all nos. We were like, “All right, it’s dead.” Then several years later, there was an executive shakeup at Amazon. The junior exec who loved it got promoted. His boss left. He had a new boss. He was like, “I have different directives. I’ve been thinking about this movie for years. Are you guys still open to do it with me?” We were like, “Yeah.” It again came back to life in this way that we had totally put it to bed. We’re in the thick of developing a musical for Amazon. I hope that all these things are conditional, because I would like for it to be a real movie.

John: It sounds like your movie’s already a little bit set up at a place. That definitely helps. It’s already in the track. Whether it’ll get that green light is the question.

Doug: Exactly.

John: You also have the track record of you and Rachel working on it. It also reminds me of Rescue Rangers, which is basically like there was a moment in which this was the way, the place that we could make it, and then it just goes away again. With musicals, we are just putting a pin in it. We will revisit after… There’s musicals that are in the pipe right now that could be huge hits.

Aline: It’s original musicals that are the problem, because Mamma Mia, Glee, things that draw on existing songs do way, way better. Having backed ourselves against the wall with this, with Crazy Ex, the thing I will share, when we were testing the Crazy Ex pilot, Rachel starts singing 10 minutes in. When you test TV, you have dials. The episode starts, and people are into it. People always responded extremely well to Rachel. People are enjoying the pilot. You can see the enjoyment line going up, up, up, up, up. There’s a scene she quits her job. Then the second she starts singing, when I’m telling you nosedive, it was as if everyone in the testing had just yanked their dial to zero. I remember turning to Rachel and saying, “That’s a traditional show tune, so maybe that’s why.” Then later in the episode there’s an R and B song with a rap solo in it, which has Rachel in her underwear for most of it. Same thing, they’re loving it, the dial’s really high. The second people start singing, the whole audience cranks it to the left.

If you looked at it, audiences have an innate allergy to songs they haven’t heard before in that format. I’m not sure why that is. It is a humongous overcome. If you’re doing Bohemian Rhapsody or the Elton John movie or Mamma Mia, people get excited when they hear those songs. I wonder if there’s ever a world where you take the Olivia Rodrigo album, and before you even release it as an album, you already have some sort of script ready to go so that once that becomes a hit, you have something that you can put into production with existing songs that are already a hit. It has to be a hit somewhere else in order to live in a comfortable… It’s very, very difficult. While our show had a certain cult status, we were for many, many months the lowest rated show on network television.

Doug: I don’t know if we were going to get to this before. I think it’s all connected in terms of when you let go of a project after you’ve made it and maybe it has been passed on. To talk about Rescue Rangers for a second, something that Dan and I actually haven’t spoken about that much is the idea of open writing assignments and doing free work. We were brought in on a different open writing assignment and asked to do free work, being like, “What’s your take on this property?” We spent a lot of time breaking out a take. We were like, “Why would we do this? This is such a long shot anyway.” We really liked the take. Then they passed on it. Then when Rescue Rangers came around, we were like, “There are some parts of this that are helpful.”

I think that it just goes to show that… There was a feeling of like, all that work was for absolutely nothing. I don’t think that’s ever the case. That’s the bit of silver lining in it. This is not to tell people to go out and do free work ad nauseum. There is an aspect of like, oh, that came back. That’s not done. It doesn’t have to be someone else green-lighting the same, exact thing. There were elements of it that we were like, “Let’s look back at that,” and be like, “There are elements that we can pitch for the Rescue Rangers and create around them.” That was very rewarding, because we’ve done so much. We all have done pitching on things that never went anywhere, never got paid to do. That time spent developing an idea is not a wasted time.

John: I’ll say that this musical that I wasn’t able to get set up, I did have 12 good meetings with places, and I have relationships with those places that I didn’t before. I didn’t get the thing going, but at least I know which of those executives I like. I definitely know which executives I will never, ever, ever work with. There’s a list of two or three people I kept telling my agents, “I will never work with her.”

Doug: Great.

John: That was good too.

Doug: Also, there’ll be a hit musical in five years.

John: Exactly.

Doug: All of a sudden there’ll be a boom for musicals, and then this’ll come back to life.

John: The two things that are in production right now that will come out soon. There’s 13 at Netflix, which could be great, but no one knows the songs. Then Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell have a movie for Apple TV Plus, a Christmas Carol story, which is-

Aline: The two-part Wicked movie.

John: The two-part Wicked movie will also happen. That’s already known properties. On the animation side, I have Toto, which is a musical, but it’s also animation, which has special rules.

Aline: It has special rules. With respect to the projects, you have that, you own that. That’s in your computer and in your brain. My company is called Lean Machine, but I often had this joke that I was going to call it Dead Horse Productions because if I believe in it, I will drag it around indefinitely. A lot of the things that I’ve gotten made are things that I just would not give up on. Crazy Ex was one of those. Every single television network that you’ve ever heard of has passed on it multiple times. I am a big believer, it’s a good idea… John, you’ll be sitting at [inaudible 00:52:10] with someone and they’ll say, “I’m looking for this.” You’ll say, “That’s funny, because I happen to have one of those.”

John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a television show which I loved when it came out. My daughter had never seen it. We watched the pilot to Lost this past week.

Doug: Oh my god, [crosstalk 00:52:27]. We got to talk about this.

Dan: We were just talking about it.

Doug: I actually have this debate constantly. I’m sorry to interrupt your One Cool Thing.

John: I believe the pilot to Lost holds up remarkably well, incredibly well. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to the pilot script for it, which I never actually read. It’s very, very dense on the page. It’s not what I would normally like to read. It’s so good. It includes a bunch of scenes that are dropped out of the show. As I was watching it, I was just noting the act breaks in it and how long before we get to that first act being done. It’s just a genius thing. I feel like in many ways, the same… Aliens was the script that I always kept going back to to look at how you write action. I feel like people should need to look at the Lost pilot script again just in terms of how you do that show, because I’ve seen so many versions of that show that are trying to be the Lost pilot. The Lost pilot is just so much better, so smartly done.

Dan: The Lost pilot is spectacular. There’s so many episodes of that show that are spectacular. Can you divorce the ending from any other part of it? This is my fear and feeling, that the ending abandons so many of the things that were needed and asked of the audience that I don’t think it’s a fair ask to start it.

John: To start watching Lost?

Dan: I don’t think it’s appropriate.

John: Oh my gosh. I think Lost is an absolute delight. I encourage people to watch Lost. You cannot watch Lost without watching the Lost pilot. Really, what I’m encouraging everyone to do is just watch the Lost pilot. It’s on Hulu right now.

Dan: It’s a great pilot. It’s going nowhere, guys.

Doug: It goes somewhere for a very long time.

Dan: It leads to nothing.

Doug: I don’t completely agree with that.

Dan: It’s a winding road down into a dirt pit.

Doug: You might be sending your daughter down a path that will be ultimately depressing and unsatisfying, but that journey is fantastic.

John: I had David Lindelof on the show. One of the things he says is the the experience of people who watch Lost all at once is so different than the experience that we had watching it week after week. Things like when there’s two characters who get trapped in a jail thing for six weeks or something, six episodes I think, it’s excruciating, but the people who watched those episodes all together, it was like, oh, that actually tracks and makes a lot of sense. I do feel like a person who’s watching Lost now is getting a very different experience than we did having it strung out over the course of-

Dan: Also, they have access to all the spoilers immediately. Maybe that’s to the benefit, where the what’s in the box question isn’t as loaded, because they know where this is going. They’re signing up for it.

John: The single best cold open ever on an episode was when you get inside the hatch for the first time.

Dan: Oh my god, I think about that all the time. It’s seared into my brain. I’m like, “We’re going in. We’re going in.”

Doug: I sing that song to myself all the time.

Dan: Exactly. Again, I was just so obsessed with that show, to the point where it was actually one of the things that I started really connecting with my wife about when we started dating. We went to a Lost exhibit, where they showed us all of the props from the show. I was so deeply, deeply in love. We were getting into all the weird Fibonacci math equation mysteries. Megana remembers that.

Doug: You guys were made for each other.

Dan: There’s a personal aspect to this.

John: Doug, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

Doug: Yeah, I actually do. It is music-related. It is an app that’s been around I think for a while, but no one ever seems to know it when I talk about it. It’s called Radioooo with four O’s. It’s world music that is really fun. The music is curated by country and decade. You just go on and you can either let them pick randomly for you… This morning, I was driving my daughter to school. We were listening to music from Angola in the 1980s, and she loved it. You’re discovering things that you’re not getting on your Discover Weekly. It goes all the way from 1900 to 2020. It covers almost every single country in the world. It’s really, really great.

Dan: That’s awesome.

John: Dan, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

Dan: Aline knows that the pandemic, I became a real sauce boy. I love condiments.

Doug: I think he was always a sauce boy.

Aline: Gregor and I were threatening during the pandemic to start an Instagram account called Condimentally Yours.

Doug: We were like, “Wait, is this a full TV show?”

Dan: Condiments, spices, sauces are really my obsession right now. My favorite one-stop shop for Middle Eastern spices, because that’s my favorite cuisine, is New York Shuk.

John: It’s an online store or LA?

Dan: I think it has a brick and mortar in New York, but it’s an online store. It goes all over the world. It’s beautiful packaging, great website. You get your preserved lemons there, your harissa, get your hawaij, get your za’atar. Get all the stuff, baharat, a lot of really important things.

Doug: All things you didn’t know you needed.

Dan: Exactly. A lot of important secondary stuff.

Aline: Gregor and I are both children of sabras, so we have that Middle Eastern stuff in common.

Dan: Exactly. You can even get a harissa spice and just put harissa spice in stuff without the sauce.

John: Harissa’s great.

Dan: Harissa’s great.

John: That’s great.

Dan: I highly recommend you go to New York Shuk, S-H-U-K, and buy their stuff. I’m not being paid.

Doug: You should be.

Dan: I love them.

John: Aline, you have a One Cool Thing for us?

Aline: I do have a One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing is Megana, because I’ve been listening to… I listened to the 20 questions episodes. I find that I have a little leap of joy in my heart when I know Megana’s going to be on an episode, because I really enjoy hearing from younger writers, and especially younger women. I think there is lots to learn from writers that are older, but I honestly learn so much from not just writers but executives, the people at my company who are younger. I love to hear about what they’re experiencing and what the market looks like for them and how they’re breaking in. I love Megana and Craig. That’s one of my favorite duos. Then Megana and John have their own special magic. I really enjoy it when I have that little leap that you have when you are watching an episode of your favorite TV show and you see that Reese Witherspoon is guest starring on Friends or something. I think Megana is a rather modest person, but she’s actually, I think, inviting a lot of people into Scriptnotes. She works her butt off. Megana, you are my One Cool Thing.

Doug: Wow. What a voice too.

Megana: Oh my gosh. I’m sorry, I have to go. I have to go lie down. I don’t know how to process how happy I am. That’s so nice. Thank you.

Doug: No, we need you. That’s the whole point. We need your voice.

Megana: Thank you so much. That’s so kind, Aline.

Aline: I love it. I wish there had been someone like that when I was a young writer. I wish there had been someone that I could listen to who was also trying to figure out how to put all these pieces together. You’re trying to figure out an entire industry and your own voice at the same time. I was cleaning out some cabinets. I came across a file that I had of original ideas that I was going to pitch. Oh my god. It was so scattershot. I was trying to work in every genre and tone imaginable. They’re insane. I love that period of your life when you’re trying to synthesize all these things. I have kids who are on their way to being grown. My son is graduating from college. I think embracing that time in your life when you’re on the on-ramp… I really love to hear from people like that. It’s been a nice addition to Scriptnotes and the Gen X codgers that we are.

John: That was our show for this week. We are still trying to sort out our schedule. Next week is likely to be a best of episode as we get back onto our normal Tuesday schedule. Scriptnotes is always produced by our amazing Megana Rao, our One Cool Thing Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Pedro Aguilera. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust as long as I stay on Twitter. Dan, Doug, are you guys on Twitter?

Dan: Yeah, @gregorcorp, C-O-R-P.

Doug: I’m @thedougmand, M-A-N-D.

John: @thedougmand. Aline, you’re using Twitter right now?

Aline: I’m @alinebmckenna.

John: Fantastic.

Aline: You’ll find important things like what is the best Kansas song. I’ve got important things on my Twitter. I really do.

John: Stuff you’d need to know. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the ones we’re about to record on having a newborn in the house. Aline, Doug, Dan, thank you so much for coming on.

Dan: Thank you.

Doug: Thank you. This was great.

Aline: Woot woot.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Doug and Dan, you have very young kids. Dan, I know your baby was born at the very start of the pandemic.

Dan: Yeah, March 20th.

John: Wow, that’s just right in the heart of it.

Dan: Right at the start.

John: Doug, one kid, two kids? Where are you?

Doug: One child, born end of 2017.

John: A little more experience then on this. You had to be doing a lot of writing work while this new life was living in your house. I want to talk a little bit about becoming a new parent and trying to maintain your career and trying to maintain your life, because I remember when I had our daughter, that first month was just so, so, so bleak. Then the moments where I would try to sneak away and actually write, I felt guilty for abandoning my other half and my child. What are some strategies that, Dan, you’re implementing right now with your kid?

Dan: Honestly, this is a very ritzy strategy, but I have an office in my house. I had the place I would go and work. At a certain point, my daughter turned a cognition corner and no longer lost track of me when I closed a door.

John: Object permanence happened.

Dan: Exactly. She would just bang on the door, just completely just bang until I’d come back out. Working at home became actually impossible. Me and my wife rented a little studio apartment down the street. We’d just walk down the street to go write in this little studio apartment.

John: You throw some goldfish on the floor for your daughter.

Dan: Exactly.

Doug: A big jug of water.

Dan: We put her in a bubble and just let her roll around the house with some water and goldfish. Just a little bit of private space has been by far the thing that has enabled it. I know that’s not necessarily available to everyone. That’s my first advice. Doug, do you have any particulars?

Doug: I do think a room of one’s own is really important to get out. Right before the pandemic, a year before… I have an office as well. My wife is a writer. I would go to a workspace. I loved it. I just loved writing from there. Then coming back home, it was really hard when the pandemic hit, because the guilt is what I felt. I have a garage where I can work out of. The bathroom was inside. I would go in. I’d be like, “No, dad’s not home right now. I’m just here.” There was a guilt. It’s like, you’re home, why aren’t you with your daughter? These are amazing, precious moments. I think if you can create a space, even if that’s, now that the pandemic is not as intense… It’s still quite real. Go somewhere to work. I think that’s helpful.

Also, just be vigilant with your scheduling, just being like, “This is the time that I write.” I think we all waste probably a lot of time not writing when we say we’re writing. If you have an hour, write for an hour. You’ll probably find that you’re getting more done in that time. Don’t beat yourself up for that. Then when you’re with your child, I would say whenever you can not bring your phone in, that’s been a big thing. Your child can sense when you’re not there emotionally. You’re looking at your phone. I try to give my daughter at least 20, 25 minutes where my phone is in another room and I’m just there with her. That makes me feel like not such an absentee father.

John: We’re recording this in the space over my garage. It was an absolute godsend when we had a kid. We would just make a show like, “Papa’s going off to work, bye.” I would walk up the stairs.

Doug: Close the window blinds so she can’t see you.

John: My former assistant, Stuart, was working downstairs. At a certain point she became mobile, and she would come in and talk to Stuart, but she had no idea that I worked upstairs.

Doug: Oh my gosh.

Dan: Oh my gosh.

John: I’d just be very, very quiet. Then eventually she started to wonder, “Why is Papa’s car still here?” It was like, “Oh, he must’ve walked to work.” Not technically a lie. I did walk to work.

Doug: Yes, you did.

John: Eventually, when it became clear, like, “Does Papa work upstairs?” we had a conversation about, “This is workspace. This is home space. You’re basically not allowed up there.”

Dan: The sneaking around my child is the most ludicrous thing. If I have to stop back in during the middle of the day, I will use the backdoor, I will tiptoe. I will pray to God that I am getting out of her line of vision so that she doesn’t see me, because if she sees me in the middle of the day then it’s like, I got put in a half hour.

Doug: At what age did you tell your daughter? Was there any-

John: Blow-back?

Doug: “That’s what’s been going on this whole time.”

John: She was either four or five before she really understood that-

Doug: She still doesn’t know [crosstalk 01:06:14].

John: Then at a certain point, they stop caring completely. Aline, we should talk about… We have older kids now.

Aline: I’m on the other end of it, because my kids are 19 and 22. In case anybody is feeling really guilty about it, I left… A friend of mine gave me an office in his office when my Charlie, my older son, was 18 months old. I always had an office outside the house after that. I have neurotically asked my children many, many times if they felt deprived by having a parent, specifically a mother who was working. They insist that it was fine and they actually liked it. That’s either what they’re saying to me so that I can continue paying their rent or they actually believe that. If you’re used to writing and you’re used to expressing yourself and that makes you happy, in whatever way writing can make you happy, but if that is a form of self-care, just remember that a happy, fulfilled parent is a wonderful thing. Specifically, I hope that moms don’t beat themselves up about finding a workspace for themselves.

Doug: It’s a great thing for your child to see.

Aline: Yeah, is that you’re being productive.

Doug: Yeah, this is Mom working, this is Dad working. It’s also part of life.

Aline: Definitely. One of the things that August and I have in common is a deep love of babies. Man, I love a baby.

John: Oh god, I love babies so much.

Aline: I spend so much time trying to spend time with Gregor and Rachel’s baby, especially during the pandemic, I was getting tested as much as I could so I could go and see her and see them. One time Dan said to Rachel, “Aline does know that this is just a baby, right, and it’s not her baby?”

Dan: I just want to make sure you know.

John: [crosstalk 01:07:55] those contracts like all output isn’t shared.

Dan: Exactly.

John: You’re writing partners.

Dan: Exactly.

Aline: Man, I loved it. It’s nice also, you get to work and you get to go home and have this most magnificent thing to interact with that takes your mind off of work and who doesn’t care that you got notes about you need to dig deeper.

Dan: Doug said this, but a writing day for me, my writing process truly was like, ease in around 11, and then do nothing for 6 hours. Then in my mind I was like, I’m only good at writing for a really intense burst from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. That’s how I lived my whole life. I was like, “I’m a late-night writer.” Boy, that went out the window with a kid. To Doug’s point, it’s just like, no, I’m clocking in. It just got me much better at the idea of clocking in, clocking out. These are my work hours, and I need to be able to make this a functional day job in a very real sense, where it’s like I need to be home by 5:30 to start doing bedtime kid stuff.

Aline: That’s why we did the Crazy Ex room the way we did. We had so many parents. My kids were 10-ish and 13-ish. I’d just want to get out of there. We had a lot of parents in that room. As the show went on, we had more and more. I had learned from my kids being little, yeah, you become much more efficient, and you want to get the eff out of there. We also didn’t do a lot of post-room lingering. It does make you more focused and efficient.

Doug: I would also say, if you don’t have the means, also I really like writing in a library. I had been doing that a lot. There’s something about being around other people working. If it’s not a workspace, there are wonderful libraries in most cities and towns. You really feel like you’re clocking in. I like that feeling of… It’s work that I enjoy. In there you’re really like, “I don’t want to be here all day. I’m going to do an hour and a half, two hours.”

Dan: I don’t want to go the bathroom.

Doug: Yeah, don’t want to go the bathroom and I don’t want to look at… Looking at websites and browsing the internet in the library is a very just gross feeling. You’re just like, “Just let’s write. Let’s just do it.” That’s a resource that a lot of people don’t use.

John: One challenge with being gone for most of the day and coming back at 5, 5:30, that’s often the absolute worst time of day for a kid. That’s often the time when they’re most upset. I think sometimes a vicious cycle happens where you feel bad for being gone all day, but your kid feels bad because it’s 5:30 and they’re hitting unhappy hour, and so you’re the bad parent who’s returned. You may need to adjust your schedules a little bit just so you can get a little bit more happy time with your kid too.

Dan: I haven’t had that yet. Thankfully, she’s still pretty decent at that hour. I’m sure it’ll get worse.

John: It’ll get worse. Thank you guys so much again for this conversation about parenthood.

Doug: Thank you.

Dan: Thank you. Thanks, Aline.

Aline: Thanks, Scriptnotes peeps.

Links:

• Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers May 20th on Disney+
• Your Place or Mine coming soon!
• Los Angeles Plays Itself
• Presentations versus Pilots
• New York Shuk for Saucy Boys
• Radiooooo App
• Lost Pilot read the script here.
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Dan Gregor on Twitter
• Doug Mand on Twitter
• Aline Brosh Mckenna on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Pedro Aguilera (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.