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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Julia Turner: Hello, and welcome. My name is neither John August nor –

Craig Mazin: Craig Mazin.

Julia: But this is Episode 516 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. My name is Julia Turner, and I’m a deputy managing editor at the Los Angeles Times, and a co-host of Slate’s Culture Gabfest Podcast. And John and Craig have invited me here today to mark the 10th anniversary of Scriptnotes, 10 years –

Craig: Whoa.

Julia: By interviewing them about their first decade in podcasting. Hi, guys.

Craig: Hi.

John: Hello. Hi, Julia Turner.

Julia: I’m so honored to be here. This is a dream come true.

Craig: Oh, well, I would imagine the honor should be ours as you’re a legitimate journalist, and we are not.

John: Not even close.

Julia: We’ll get to your journalistic similarities later on in this conversation.

Craig: Hmm.

John: Hmm, all right.

Julia: Today, I’ll be grilling John and Craig about the legend and lore of Scriptnotes. And I’ll also be presenting them with some brilliant listener questions about the history of the show. Then we’ll have some listener follow up featuring a real life Scriptnotes love story.

Craig: Whoa.

Julia: And for our bonus segment, we’ll ask how would this be a movie about the first 10 years of Scriptnotes?

John: Oh, god, I’ve got some casting suggestions, so cool. Do stay tuned.

Julia: Might be low on pop, but I think there’s a couple ways to play it. We’ll get into it.

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: Before we dig in, I should clarify for your listeners that my primary qualification for this gig is years of obsessive listening to Scriptnotes, which has made it really, really fun this past week to see how Scriptnotes works behind the scenes. Listeners will not be surprised to learn that when I say John and Craig have invited me here, I mean that John has invited me here. Craig did you know that I would be here until this very moment.

Craig: I knew that you would be here at some point. Oh, boy, that’s so true.

Julia: It all works exactly the way it sounds like it works.

Craig: Yes.

Julia: I also got to take a look at the show’s infamous WorkFlowy doc frequently referred to on the podcast.

Craig: Hmm, yes.

Julia: And I have to say it reveals John’s robot tendencies, like –

Craig: Thank you.

Julia: Beautifully. John, having invited me to come in and interview you in the document had laid out a whole set of things that perhaps I might want to cover, and a loose order and also some intro text, all of which I think is –

Craig: You get it? You get it now?

Julia: Intended to be very generous and welcoming. But I –

Craig: Yeah, you know –

Julia: I’m allowed to tease you, John, because the joke on my podcast is that I’m the robot. So from one robot to another, I salute you.

Craig: John used to write these things in machine language. So it was just hexadecimals.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And I just begged him, I said, “John, please, please, let’s put it in human language.” And he did. He got a new compiler. It’s now in human language. I love it.

John: Absolutely. I, I try to just map out like the shape of the show. So that it feels like, oh, okay, this is how we’re going to get through it. But I would say like over the course of 10 years, I’ve tended to write more and more in the actual Workflowy about like the things I’m going to say just because I’m not a great spontaneous speaker. It’s just the secret truth behind Scriptnotes. And so I just love having things to look at and read off of.

Craig: Whereas I don’t like to prepare anything. And I sometimes don’t know how my sentences will end when I’m three quarters of the way in.

Julia: Well, I’m going to take some but not all of John’s suggestions. And judging by the fact that you don’t seem to have looked at the Workflowy yet, Craig L., my questions will be surprises for you. So –

Craig: I love surprises. Yep.

Julia: We can dig in. I’m going to start with a few questions about the history of the show. And then we can move on to discuss its impact on the world and also on you guys personally. And then if we have time, we’ll do maybe a lightning round of –

Craig: Oh.

Julia: Some questions on the mechanics of the show and a few wildcards. There’s a lot to get through.

Craig: Yay.

John: I’m excited.

Julia: But let’s start with the zoom out. First, congratulations on 10 years of podcasting.

John: Thank you.

Julia: And, John, why did you start the show?

John: I’ve been writing this blog for years and years and years, the johnaugust.com blog, answering questions about screenwriting. And it’s just a monologue when you’re a blogger. You’re just talking to the void. And for a while I had comments turned on so people could answer back, but I hated comments so I turned them all off. Craig had his own blog that he gave up at a certain point. And I just decided, like, rather than have me talking, us talking together would probably be better. And I was listening to a bunch of podcasts that I liked, tech podcasts, but also like the Slate Culture Gabfest and Political Gabfest, and it’s like, oh, we should do something like that, which is just me and Craig talking. So I pitched the idea to him, and he had no idea what I was talking about but said, “Sure, we could try that.”

Craig: I thought for sure he had made a mistake. But he meant to call someone else but he called me. So I said, “Yeah.”

Julia: Did – by the way. John, were there backups? Like if Craig said no, were there other advice-dispensing screenwriters out there?

Craig: Great question.

Julia: Or was there anyone you asked before Craig who shut you down we’ve never heard about?

Craig: Oh, yeah, that’s a better question? That’s a better question. I like that one.

John: Craig was the first person I asked. I don’t think I had a backup list because I didn’t really have a fully formed idea of what it was even going to be but I just felt like he’d be the right person to talk with. But Olean and I were kind of friendly at that point, so she would have been somewhere in there. Derek Haas and I knew each other. So there were probably some backup contenders. But I, honestly, I don’t think I would have done it if Craig had said no.

Craig: Hmm, aww.

Julia: Craig, why did you say yes? You make a lot of noise about how you don’t know what podcasts are still practically?

Craig: I didn’t. Yep. No.

Julia: And certainly not then.

Craig: I didn’t.

Julia: So why – what was in it for you?

Craig: Well, in terms of knowing what podcasts were, it didn’t really matter because I trusted John. He was very web-forward is how I would put it at the time. And in fact, I had called John early on when I was putting my blog together just to have some technical questions about blog design and things like that. So I had been working on this blog, and it had been a bit draining. It had become a thing during the strike. It was a raucous bar of comments during the strike. And the Wall Street Journal wrote it up, and it got unwieldy and drifted apart from its purpose. And so, I – and also, you know, we write. So we write for a living and then I had to like –

John: Yeah.

Craig: Suddenly felt like, oh, my god, in this like, job, I had given myself that I don’t make any money off of to write more. So when John called it was the perfect time because it didn’t involve writing. And also, you know, John was like, he’s a big shot, you know, and I thought, well, you don’t say no to a big shot.

John: So I would say, interestingly, at the start of this podcast, I was a higher profile screenwriter than Craig was, and Craig had made movies, but I had a bigger sort of platform and was probably better known. I knew that Craig actually knew a ton about the industry. He and I worked together to try to set this writer’s deal at Fox. And so, I knew sort of how his brain worked. And I really thought he would have strong good opinions that were not exactly the same as my opinions and it would be a good conversation.

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: You know, you both mentioned the blogging and the internet writing you were doing with sort of a similar audience of working screenwriters and aspiring screenwriters in mind. And, you know, the listener engagement in the show is such a big part of the show now. What’s the difference between that relationship you had sort of in the aughts web with written commenters versus the teens and 20s audio internet of audio listeners? What are the differences, similarities?

Craig: Yeah. Tell them about our commenters, John.

John: Yeah. So, I mean, comments on blog posts are just such a scourge because like, they’re going to be positive ones, but then just people will just write paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs. It’s like, “Oh, no, this is my space. It’s not your space.” And so, just be cool. Or you try to have like living room rules. The good thing about a podcast is like, we only can invite people in that we want to invite in even when we do live shows, we will stop a questioner if they’re just being a jerk. And the fact that it is really a conversation that we can invite you into versus you can just pile on at times is, I think, the big difference between writing online versus being on a podcast.

Craig: Yeah, it’s a bit like the difference between curation and moderation. All you can do on a blog is just go, “Oh, god, stop it or you’re booted,” but then they just change their name and come back and keep acting like jerks. And we can curate exactly what we present here. Which, weirdly enough, turns out that’s what people like. They think they want just unfettered access, but what they actually do want is a connection to a platform that has some kind of moderation so that there’s quality control.

Julia: All right, so it’s early days. You’re doing this show. You’re figuring out the format, and you’re figuring out whether you’re having an impact. How did you first begin to appreciate that you were finding an audience? Like what were the early inklings that this was not just you talking into microphones and in vain?

John: Well, with podcasts, you can see sort of how many people are downloading the show. So you get some sense of listenership through that, although in the early days, it was really hard to get good metrics. And like early podcasts really had no sense of how many people were listening to them. Now, you can get a better sense. For me, it was I think, probably when we went to the Austin Film Festival and did a live show there. And really could see like, oh, my gosh, these people know who we are. And they’re showing up because they do listen to the show. That was the first time I really felt the impact of it. Craig, did you have an earlier time?

Craig: No, no, I mean, to this day, I still repeatedly am shocked when people say they listen to the show. I know that people listen to the show. I don’t have access to those metrics. I mean, I suppose if I ask John nicely, he would tell me. But he just knows that I don’t really care. Like every now and then I’ll be like, “How many people do actually listen to the show?” And he’ll tell me and I’ll go, “No,” and then I’ll forget. But –

Julia: Wait. Hold on. How many people do actually listen to the show?

Craig: Yeah, how many people do listen to the show, John?

John: Megan is also on the line, so she can probably tell us, give us some specific figure, but it’s around 40,000, I want to say. Megan, correct me if I’m wrong?

Megana Rao: Yeah, it’s about 40,000 a week and then –

Craig: Good god.

Megana: Like, looking at the monthly metrics, like each episode usually gets to about 80,000.

Craig: What? Okay, well, that’s terrifying.

John: And I think the thing that’s been most surprising to me is I assumed that it would just be L.A. people who would really be listening to the show because it’s so Hollywood-centered and yet it turns out we have a lot of listeners in Europe. We Have listeners in Antarctica. We have listeners everywhere who are listening to the show because they want to write things for their own countries or to come to here. And also a ton of people listen to the show who have no interest in writing at all. And, I mean, Julia Turner, you’re not a screenwriter. So there should be no reason for you to listen to the show.

Craig: Yeah.

John: But you listen to the show, which is just terrific.

Julia: No. And I now edit the entertainment coverage of the L.A. Times. So your discussions are relevant to things that the journalists I work with cover. But that was much less true when I started listening to the show, you know, back when I was running Slate. So –

John: I’m sorry to play host here for a second, but do you know why you started listening to the to the podcast? I’m curious.

Julia: You’re allowed to play host on your own show anytime you want, John.

Craig: Right. Can I?

Julia: Well, I think Andy Bowers, who ran podcast at Slate, put me on to it. And I just love the way you guys, I mean, I am a culture critic on that show, right? So I’m, you know, the scourge of Craig’s mind, one of those baddies.

Craig: Yes, correct.

Julia: But I think it’s really interesting when you’re conducting criticism to know about how things are made, and why they’re made and what the mechanics are behind them. And so, I love learning about that from you guys. I loved the rapport, I mean, any chat show that you listen in on regularly, and I can say this, because I do one is just basically like a book club you like to go to where you don’t get to talk, like, you know, you just feel like you’re kind of hanging out with your friends. And I like the way you guys would kibitz and squabble and have interesting insights.

And then maybe it’s because I see parallels in this to journalism, but I love the way you guys balance appreciating screenwriting for the difficult creative art that it is, and knowing that a successful screenwriting career means having a lot of practical skills and –

Craig: Yes.

Julia: Qualities of temperament and comportment, for lack of a better word –

Craig: Mmm.

Julia: That are actually as important to your success as your creative genius. And I feel like you are so generous to the listeners we have who are aspiring screenwriters and encouraging their art while also encouraging them to be steely and practical. And something about that balance and the way you guys talk about screenwriting as a trade and a craft. It really appealed to me. I think there’s –

Craig: Thank you.

Julia: Aspects of that in journalism too where it’s a lot of people are writers and thinkers, you know, but got to turn things in on time. So long answer.

Craig: That is the problem for all of us, right. No, that’s a beautiful answer. And I think what I found along the way, it’s certainly, when I said yes to John, it really was because I admired him. And I thought, this sounded like fun. But what I found along the way was a natural instinct to save people from the trouble I had seen. And this business is full of trouble.

There is so much trouble in our business that if you’re a certain kind of person, and in this case, we’re both guys, there were layers of trouble we weren’t even seeing. So there’s so much trouble. And there’s so much trouble for writers and there particularly is a lot of trouble for writers in features. And so, trying to just save people some of the misery and strife, and also to debunk so much of the cottage industry of nonsense that had sprouted up to add insult to injury by taking money from people and preying on their fears and their ignorance and their worry and their desire and ambition. That felt great. I mean, the part of doing the show that makes me the happiest is the part where we provide this to new people, like you’re showing up, you’re new, maybe you don’t look like the sort of person that Hollywood has hired as a screenwriter before. There are no books that are really going to teach you how this business works. As far as I know, we’re the only game in town when it comes to telling you the truth. Uh, because Hollywood is very ashamed of the truth, and for a good reason.

John: I would say at the start of the podcast, I felt like there was an objective truth that we could sort of share, like this is our experience. This is how it actually really works. And I think one of the sort of journeys over 10 years is recognizing that we sort of don’t know everything and that our experience rising as screenwriters in the ‘90s is not going to match necessarily writers’ experience now, and that we sort of needed to invite more people onto the show to talk to us about their actual specific experiences, be it like genres that we’re not writing or for mediums that we’re not writing in that I think we just both developed a little bit more curiosity about how the other parts of this industry work.

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: Yeah, I’ve noticed that. And actually, that brings me to one question I wanted to ask, which is sort of how did the show find its format over time? And how has that evolved? You mentioned bringing in more people, but how did you find the right mix between interview episodes, advice episodes, you know, Three Page Challenges, all of the different kinds of recurring rubrics you have, how did that evolve?

Craig: Well, mostly John, I mean, I’ll tell you, the Three Page Challenge thing came out of something that I used to do on this old board called Done Deal Pro. And it had its roots in a basic theory, which is, ah, I could probably tell you, I think it was at the time five pages. I can tell you in five pages if you’re going to make it or not, because it’s just, you could tell, right? Like there are people, they just write five pages and you go, “No, no, no, no, do something else, just do something else.” But out of that came this interesting notion that there is a lot you can learn just from drilling down into a very small amount of pages.

The vast majority of the format of the show is John’s conception. In my normal life. I’m a bit of a bossy person. I’m a producer, I’m a director, I run shows. I’m in charge. I’m alpha. It is so lovely to just – I’m even the DM in our Dungeons and Dragons.

John: Oh, yes, he is.

Craig: But it is so nice to not be that guy and to let somebody else who’s incredibly competent, and good, be that person. And I can follow. I love following John’s lead on the show. It is my place on the show, and I’m extraordinarily comfortable with it. I’m a sidekick. I’m Ed McMahon.

John: Which, in terms of the format, I think I originally sort of pattern them off of the Slate show, so that the Gabfests tend to have three topics per week, and then the equivalent of a One Cool Thing, our inaudible recommendation at the end, and then some boilerplate. And so initially it was just that, but then when Craig had this idea of like, “Oh, what if we would like a Three Page Challenge?” “Like, oh, that’s great.” And that became our first like recurring statement, so every once in a while we’d come back to that. And then How Would This Be a Movie became one. We’ve tried other things like This Kind of Scene. Listener questions were always really kind of from the start were an important part of it. So it just started to evolve that way.

In terms of bringing on guests, originally, they were just like our friends, like people we knew and we’d bring them on. And I think increasingly over the last couple of years, we’ve just reached out to people we don’t know and we bring on complete strangers onto the show, because we want to learn about their experience.

Julia: We actually have a listener question related to guests from listener Todd. Megan, do you want to cue that up?

Megana: Todd asks, “I’d love to know from both John and Craig who’s the dream guest who they’ve yet to land?”

Craig: Mmm, mmm.

John: Mmm. The White Whales. I just saw the Matrix trailer and we’ve always talked about having the Wachowskis on. And we’ve never been able to make that happen. But I feel like we could get Lana Wachowski on to talk Matrix. That’d be amazing.

Craig: I mean, I would love to. It would be a lot of weird fanboy gushing for me. You know, who I would love to get on the show, and maybe I just haven’t asked her and I should, is Shonda Rhimes.

John: Well, with Shonda Rhimes, we tried it for many times, so I think we actually got pretty close to Shonda Rhimes once for a live show.

Craig: I see. And then she was sort of like, “Nah, I got 12 shows I got to do.”

John: Yeah, so it becomes like a publicist thing. And if her publicists gets involved –

Craig: Oh, yeah.

John: As a guest, it’s just doomed. We just know that it’s doomed.

Craig: Right.

John: But I think Shonda is great. James Cameron, obviously a talented filmmaker, but it’s hard to overstate sort of how important he was as a screenwriter for us coming up, just like sort of how much he shaped like the early ‘90s action writing is sort of a James Cameron thing. So I’d love to have him on the show.

Craig: Uhm, it’s a good one.

John: Any other folks that we’ve just kind of always had on our dream list?

Craig: I mean, you know, I don’t think about the show much in between. I’m so tired.

John: Yeah. So there you go.

Julia: All right. If you guys were starting the show today, what would you do differently?

John: I don’t know if it would be just me and Craig, just to be fully honest, two White guys in their 50s. I think we would have reached out so it’d be a three-person show rather than a two-person show. It’s just my guess.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, what’s the joke? What do you call a group of White men? A podcast. So, just like, yeah, I’m sure that’s true. That makes sense. And, you know, in, I guess, in a way, we are kind of like a legacy act, you know.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: I mean, by and large, when people put things together these days, I think in a reasonable and appreciable way, they’re trying to present a diverse group of voices. So you don’t put together a panel of all White people. You don’t put together a panel of all men. You don’t put together a panel of all people in their 50s. So we’re sort of a bit of a legacy act. And, you know, I’m okay with that. I think what is important, if you are a legacy act, is that you keep up and you also open the doors as much as you can.

One of the things that we’ve done over the years that I’m really proud of, is, as John said, bring people onto the show that aren’t the traditional voices. We try and feature people from all different walks of Hollywood life, not just successful people, but also up and comers and also assistants. We’ve gotten involved in how people are paid in our business, including not writers, the Writers Guild spends a lot of time figuring out what writers should be paid. Nobody but us, as it turned out, was worrying about what assistants were getting paid, other than the assistants I mean to say. And it was really gratifying to kind of connect with the assistants and work on that with them.

So we do our best to kind of help move the ball forward because we know the world has changed, and for the better. And I’ve changed for the better. I think just being part of it and being exposed to different people, it helps you see things from other points of view. Hollywood is, and has always been, an utter mess, but it is getting better. And I can’t say that that was always the case. For a while, I guess, when you know, John and I started at the same time in the mid-’90s, stretching through really to, you know, about 2016 or ‘17, it was just sort of a flatline of bad. And then there’s this sort of fairly impressive upward curve towards better. I’m not going to say good, but I’ll say better. And so, it’s been nice to at least go along with that and do what we can as a couple of older White guys. And yeah, I agree with John. If we had started it today, I don’t think it would be him and me. It would be him and someone else. Let’s face it.

Julia: I want to hear more actually about the work you guys did on assistant pay. I mean, I think you guys haven’t been shy on the show ever about expressing opinions about things in Hollywood that were terrible or should change. In addition to the assistant pay issue, you guys have tried to reform the way executives give notes and offered to give them advice on how to make their notes better.

Craig: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Julia: And, your podcast, I would argue, played a big role in kind of airing some of the concerns and grievances about agency behavior that presaged the WGA talent agency fight. You know, I’m curious how you think about that power you wield. In what ways do you think Scriptnotes has changed the world of screenwriting?

Craig: Geez.

John: Geez. I don’t know if we’ve changed the world of screenwriting. Because there’s always screenwriters, I mean, who have no idea that I host a podcast or this podcast even exists. What I do think we’ve done in our sort of limited way is because enough people listen to the show in the town, if we’re talking about an issue, at least someone is talking about that issue in their ears, and they’re thinking about it. And they might make some different decisions about what they’re going to do. And so, be those executives who invited us in to do that Notes on Notes session.

Or as we’re talking about assistant pay, for me personally, it was like recognizing my own blinders in terms of how I thought about assistants, having been an assistant, how I thought sort of like, oh, this is where you start and this is how you grow. And this is how it all works and not recognizing that the system was really fundamentally broken, and that I hadn’t been sort of inflation adjusting the expectations about sort of how that all works. And so, we weren’t the first people to discover that assistants were underpaid. I wanted to stress that. But we certainly were not shy to use our platform to push people to pay attention and to think about the ways they’re paying assistants and how they’re treating assistants to make sure that we could make some progress on that front.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah, I think we are both aware that people listen. At least, if I’m not aware of how many people listen, I’m aware that there are people that make decisions and run things who listen. And we, I think, handle that quasi influence fairly well. We don’t really go out of our way to change the world. But when we see things that seem pretty much like slam dunk easy ones, we go for it.

The nice thing about this podcast is that it is entirely pro social. This is not a, you know, profitable enterprise for me. I just want to underline that. So, we’re doing this because it’s a good thing to do. And when you’re doing something that is just for good, it is remarkably freeing, especially when you work in Hollywood where you start trying to do things for good. And then everybody gets in there and sort of throws a little muck on it and tries to steer it towards what would put money in their pockets, which I, you know, that’s a business, I get it. This is not.

So when things come along that we can kind of activate on, it’s really lovely to be able to do it. And we do it fearlessly. I was never concerned that any agency was going to yell at me for saying that they should pay their assistants more. You know, I had some interesting conversations in the days leading up to the divorce between the Writers Guild and the agents, with my agency, about the things I said about them, you know, and I stood by my words.

Julia: What kind of conversations?

Craig: Well, they took exception to some of my assertions and opinions. And I stood by them because they were correct. But it was a good conversation. And I just said, guys, this is how this is going to go. And this is the way the world is, and you can’t keep doing this the way you did it before. And there has to be an answer. I don’t know what that answer is. And I don’t know how to get to that answer. But I urge you to get to it. Because I would like to come back to my agency, because I do like my agency a lot. And I like my agent a lot.

And then, the nice thing about having a show like this is that I tend to get yelled at by everybody. So then I got yelled at by writers, because once we did sort of hit our divorce, and occasionally I would question the way the Writers Guild was doing things then the writers would yell at me. So if I’m being yelled by both sides, it’s a good day. And I have a feeling that for John, when no one is yelling at him on either side, it’s a good day for him. It’s just like we’re different that way.

John: Yeah, we are different that way. I’ll say one of the things about being a screenwriter, especially a feature writer is you just have so little control over the finished product. We’re there at the very start. And we are building the engine of the thing. And then it goes off. It takes off. And then we sort of see the finished movie. And maybe we had some input, but we didn’t have all the input we’ve wanted.

For me, what’s been great about Scriptnotes is every week like, it’s the show I want it to be. And so if I wasn’t taking notes from anybody else, it’s like, this is the conversation we had. And it’s what we talked about. And it’s not beholden to anybody else. We are not part of any network. We’re not part of any sort of overall structure. We don’t have to make money. It’s just the thing we wanted to make. And to be able to do that every week has been great. And to have a generation of producers who sort of come up through it and helped us do it, it’s been amazing.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So that’s been the real treat is like it’s a structured conversation every week between me and Craig. So it’s like therapy. But also there’s a thing, there’s a tangible thing you can say, oh, we accomplished that this week, and that’s great. Because so often, as a feature writer, you can spend a year on a project that just never happens.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Those pages just disappear.

Julia: That’s so interesting, because that sounds like you’re describing the satisfaction of creation and unfettered creation. Although, part of what strikes me about the role you guys have played in some of these Hollywood conversations is that it’s not the role of being an artist or a creative. You’re sort of quasi-journalistic because you’re reporting things out sometimes. You’re sort of an organizer role because you’re connecting people who have similar grievances sometimes. Sometimes you’re just making observations. Sometimes there’s a reforming zeal, I think would be fair to describe some of the umbrage taken with the agency practices.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

Julia: It’s a place in which you get to wear these other hats, but it sounds like your primary emotional satisfaction is actually the creation of the thing. Is that fair, John?

John: Yeah.

Julia: More to the point, how do you feel about those other roles that are wrapped up within it sometimes?

John: I think the advocacy thing was always there from the start, because, one of the real goals of the show is to debunk a lot of sort of the myths of screenwriting and sort of that everything had to follow the Syd Field formula or that the proper logline was the key to success, just all that sort of nonsense that screenwriters are constantly taught, and to really talk about the actual daily life of a screenwriter and sort of what really goes on and sort of dispel those other things.

Journalistic is sort of an interesting word, because I don’t think we’re reporting that much. We’re sort of reacting to what’s happening. So we will talk about sort of the stuff we see around us. And while we try to be accurate, we try to sort of be fair, I don’t see it fundamentally as a journalistic enterprise. It’s really just a conversation. And it’s hopefully, an entertaining conversation. It’s like, you described being the other person at the bar who’s overhearing a conversation but can’t contribute. That’s sort of what we want people to feel is that these two friends are having this conversation about things that are hopefully interesting to screenwriters and people who are interested in things about screenwriting.

Craig: I know that slogan.

Julia: Okay, fair, you’re not breaking much news unless it’s Craig Mason breaking the news of how many episodes of his next show to write.

Craig: Right, right. Yeah. Yes. Incredible, hot headline.

John: Yeah.

Julia: Do you have examples? I mean, in 10 years of screenwriting, there must be people who had no foothold in the industry who started listening to you 10 years ago –

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: Who now have successful careers, what kinds of interactions have you had with folks who’ve had that story?

John: Yeah, it’s been great. It’s terrific when you hear those success stories, or folks who read the blog, and then listened to the podcast, like Craig’s assistant right now, I guess, was like in high school or college listening to the podcast?

Craig: Yeah, it’s college.

John: It’s just – it’s impossible.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah, we – I do get these stories particularly when there are some sort of large event, if we go to a – if we do a live show or something like that, that’s where people come up and tell you these things. And sometimes it’s overwhelming.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: I don’t quite know what to say. You realize fairly quickly, and you’ve probably encountered this, Julia, because you’ve been doing your own podcast for so long and you have a connection to the public, that people who listen to you, especially for a show that goes on as long as ours has, they have a relationship with you.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You don’t have one with them. But they have one with you. And when you meet them, you are confronted with it. And it’s it can be very beautiful. It can be very emotional at times. There are times where I’m just overwhelmed by the things people say to me, I don’t know what to say in return because you realize that you have silently, and without any awareness, been an important part of another person’s life.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And that’s very gratifying and beautiful.

John: There are people who would drive across the country to come into a live show, which is crazy, but I also sort of get it because we’re talking about things that they’re interested in and they do feel like they know us because they do kind of know us. I mean, Craig and I are careful to keep some stuff out off of the podcast just for some little zone of privacy, but you are hearing our kind of unfiltered opinions. And that can be nice. It’s interesting, like some of the folks who I saw like the first live show, who then I see eight years later in another live show, you see oh, they actually grew up, they changed. They got married. They had kids. That’s kind of cool to see too. When we were just doing blogs, those were little forum posts. People are – you can connect with them. But like when you see them at a live show, oh, that’s that same person. I got to see sort of where they’re at in their life right now.

Julia: All right, we have a listener question from Dana.

Craig: Okay.

Megana: Dana asks, “Is it easier or harder to be a working, meaning paid, screenwriter now than it was 10 years ago?”

Craig: Well, I guess the first question would be feature or television, I’m going to presume feature because she said screenwriter. I think it’s harder. I think it’s harder because there are even fewer movies being made now than they were before. And the movies – where the movies have been expanding have been in the streaming area. I think that salaries have been pushed down quite a bit in those areas. I think a lot of the stuff that’s made is even more than it was 10 years ago, retreads, remakes, reboots, they’re adaptations of toys and things. Paramount just literally said that’s pretty much all we’re going to do just today. So I think it’s harder. And I think that doesn’t necessarily reflect some areas that have gotten better.

What’s gotten better? They are hiring more women. They’re hiring more people of color. The dark lining of the silver cloud there is that it’s the new hires that get paid the least. It’s the new hires that worked the hardest, and in many cases abused by being asked to do more and more work for free. So unfortunately, a lot of the people that are coming in, if they are diverse writers, they’re also being treated poorly. So that’s not a good outcome either.

I am not particularly optimistic about the future of feature screenwriting. It was always the worst place for writers to be in terms of how they were treated. And the way things are going, I don’t see that necessarily getting better. And of note, in the last five negotiations the Writers Guild has had, feature concerns have been minimal. They’ve mostly concentrated on television writers. I know that there’s an effort to at least think about trying to concentrate on feature writers. Problem is the Writers Guild is essentially a TV writers union, by demographics. So bad news feature writers, I don’t think it’s gotten easier. And I’m not sure it’s going to get easier from here, either.

John: So I agree with a lot of what Craig said. But that actually sort of points out like one of the areas of conflict that’s always been on the show is because Craig will say like the WGA doesn’t care about screenwriters and like, oh, I was actually on the board for, a two-year term, and was involved in all these negotiating committees so I actually know sort of the other side of that story, and sort of why these things happen and don’t happen. And so, I get frustrated when Craig says like the WGA doesn’t care because I was elected and I cared then and we did a lot. And so, there has been a lot of stuff that has happened for screenwriters through the WGA, but just not through the contract, and the focus on the MBA negotiation as the sole thing the Writers Guild does for feature writers, I think, is a very limited view.

Craig: I don’t – I don’t think that the Writers Guild doesn’t care about feature writers. I too was on the board and I too did things for screenwriters.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I think that you care about screeners. I think I care about screenwriters. I think some people care about screenwriters. I think the institution is designed to serve the membership. And the membership mostly is not feature writers. Also, feature writer problems are just harder to negotiate.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And they’re tricky.

John: It’s absolutely true. So I think on the pros and cons of being a feature writer now versus when we started is that when Craig and I started, there was a lot of development. So it’s not that more movies were getting made. Also, a lot of movies were being developed. And so you could work for quite a long time on movies that never shot, but you were still getting paid. And that was awesome. Now, for better or for worse, writers are being hired to write stuff for the studios or for the streamers. And those things are only for projects they think are actually going to get made. And so, the jobs you’re getting are these high-pressure cooker things for this thing has to work because it has a slot, it has a thing and it’s just a different environment than what Craig and I grew up in. Things are just changing and because the whole industry has warped itself just to make things for streamers.

Craig: Can I just say that one of the things I like about our show is that we do model, I think, a way to disagree.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Do you know what I mean? Like, we don’t always agree. I think we agree a lot.

John: Oh, yeah.

Craig: I don’t want to present us as Crossfire, but when we disagree, we figure out how to disagree. There’s precious little of that in the world right now. People just yell at each other and then just take sides and become teams and squads and things. And I’ve heard this fed back to us a few times from listeners that they just appreciate that we can disagree with each other respectfully and thoughtfully and that’s nice. I like that we can do that, and that’s a credit to you and to me. I’m going to take half the credit for that.

John: You deserve half the credit as well.

Craig: Thanks.

Julia: I have been part of some podcast fights that have led listeners to write in and be like, “Are you guys okay? Are you still friends?” Have you guys ever had a podcast contretemps that either caused your listeners to worry about your bond and/or actually tested your relationship?

Craig: I mean, we faked one once for our conflict show. That was great.

John: Yeah, the conflict episode. That was really great. That made people really, really nervous. People pulled over there car on the side of the road because they’re like, “Oh, no, they could crash.” Just true confession, during the middle of the agency campaign or sort of early in the agency campaign, it got really uncomfortable between me and Craig. And so when we would need to talk about this stuff on the show, we’d have to sidebar and really figure out, okay, how are we going to talk about this in ways that we can both honestly express what we want to say but doesn’t blow up our relationship or the podcast or everything else around us. And that was probably the hardest time over the 10 years for me doing this podcast was our genuine disagreements about what was happening in the agency campaign.

Craig: Yeah. And a credit to both of us again, because, I have values and I believe in the value of the questioner and challenging authority. I’ve always been that guy. I love dissent. And I’ve always had a weird relationship with the Guild because I love my union. It’s why we do the shows is because John and I both love and care about the status of screenwriters and television writers. So then there’s this organization that sometimes does really good things, and then sometimes just blows it. And I get angry at them. And I get angry at them, in part, because, I’ve also been on the inside as well. And during that whole time, it was challenging, and I appreciated that John was in a really difficult spot. And I think he appreciated that I was in a difficult spot. Because, I’m supposed to be me. And he’s, you know what I mean?

John: Yeah.

Craig: And he’s supposed to be him. And so, we had to negotiate it without feeling like we were abandoning principles or anything like that. And we did. And I will say that, underneath all of it, as dedicated as I am to challenging authority and questioning whether or not things are going the way they should, that John and I have been doing this for a long time. I would never, in any circumstance blow this thing up for that. I would not give the Writers Guild the satisfaction of being the cause of blowing this up. Hell no.

John: But I will say that whole period was probably toughest actually on Megana Rao who had to listen in on those conversations and deal with the stress and anxiety of, like, dad and dad are not getting along, so.

Craig: Yeah. You know what, Megana? It’s okay.

Megana: Thank you so much for acknowledging that because I was sitting here and I was like, this is incredibly triggering for me.

Craig: Aww.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Well, what happened was, we would start to argue about something and then eventually just because psychologically it was beneficial for us, we would triangulate and blame Megana. So, you know, I get it. I get it.

Megana: I do not. I call bullshit on that answer. That’s just not –

Craig: Yeah. No, I don’t. I definitely made that up.

Megana: Since I have invisible relationships with you of a decade long, I can tell.

Craig: Yes.

Megana: Because I know you so well. That’s not what happened.

Craig: Yeah. No, that is not what happened.

Julia: All right. I want to ask you guys a zoomed out question about the state of the industry. And it’s connected a little bit to that, that question about the changing status of feature writers. But just looking back on where the industry was 10 years ago, you launched Scriptnotes 18 months before House of Cards launched on Netflix –

Craig: Oh, wow.

Julia: I believe in the months around your show they were like quietly launching streaming services in Bolivia. But like broadly –

Craig: Wow.

Julia: Streaming was not yet the primary way that American entertainment consumers got their media. You were both pretty firmly film writers, if I’m remembering correctly.

John: Oh, yeah.

Craig: Correct.

Julia: I’d love for you guys to project forward 10 years. I mean, we’re living in a moment where as you guys say, it feels like the TV writer is ascendant and the film writer is under duress. But if you zoom out a level further and look at what the average 18-year-old is doing with their time and how much gaming they’re doing and Twitch they’re watching and how many YouTube personalities they aspire to be rather than movie stars, which they haven’t heard of, and maybe they do or don’t watch sitcoms. Where will screenwriting be in 10 years? How do you think that industry will have changed in 10 years by 2031? And what do you guys imagine your places in it will be?

Craig: Well, you know, my place will be obviously as the emeritus. I will be considered the grandfather of – I have no idea. I don’t know. I think that movies, theatrical, the theatrical experience is in trouble. I think that the combination of COVID, streaming and the dissolution of the Paramount decree is probably going to lead to a large amount of movie theaters being purchased by large corporations like Disney Marvel, Pixar. And they will – you know how Disney has got that lovely theater in Hollywood, El Capitan, I suspect that maybe in 10 years, the theatrical experience will be really more of an extension of the studio theme parkish experience, where there will be Marvel theaters that play Marvel movies and charge a lot of money for them.

I think that the generation coming up will bring their interests forward in terms of the kinds of comedy that shows up, I think that’s where we’ll see at first. My son and daughter’s generation have an entirely different concept of what comedy is. And I love it. I mean, it’s great. We will not recognize it. We will watch it. And as we should, as old people, we will say, “Ah, it’s not funny,” and then they will look at us and say, “You’re old, just go back to watching your Friends reruns old people.” And we will because that is the way of the world.

The structure the business will continue to accelerate along the paths of just piping things directly into your home. And even homes will change. As they build homes, I do think that where you used to have certain things that – like large dining rooms are no longer necessary. They will be eliminated entirely. Nobody needs a dining room. But you will have home theaters. People will just have little rooms with little seats, and a big screen TV. Because the movies are going to your house. It just feels like that’s where it’s going. I can’t imagine that it doesn’t accelerate even more than it has been, especially because you have entire studios like Paramount just giving up. They just gave up officially. Paramount, that made, you know, The Godfather, they’ve given up.

John: I am much more bullish on the future of roughly two-hour movie experiences that are shown outside of the house. I think that is an experience that will still be around in 10 years. I agree with Craig that with the fall of the Paramount consent decree, you’re going to see the big studios buy those things out. But I think people want to leave their house. They want a reason to leave their house and a movie, going to see a movie is a way to do that, especially for a teenager, it’s just the thing – it’s a place you can go and a thing you can do. I think that will continue.

I also don’t think that the home theater thing is going to be such the bonanza because I look at my own kid and she wants to watch stuff on her computer or on her phone. She just doesn’t care about it being on the biggest screen possible. So I don’t know if that persists. But for the writing of it, I think there’s still going to be writers who are writing those two-hour features. There’s going to be a lot of writers writing all the streaming television. I think that will persist and continue. I don’t see a real coming crisis for that.

Where it’s going to change though is like this blurring of lines, we have to talk about video game writing and how video game writing is writing. And it’s very analogous to what we’re doing. I think there’s going to be universe building that requires a tremendous amount of writing. And it’s going to be really murky and awkward to figure out what covers that and when it should be that becomes advertising and promotion writing or copywriting or toy making versus screenwriting. I think it’s all getting blurrier. And that’s only going to persist and continue in the next 10 years.

Julia: Right. I mean, I guess my question is, are the people who write games going to consider themselves screenwriters? Or, you know, the biggest celebrity in my kid’s mind is like some guy on YouTube who narrates his Minecraft world.

John: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Of course, like a Jacksepticeye, that kind of person. Yeah.

Julia: Yeah. And, you know, there’s no writer for that entertainment. And they watch hours of it, and they’re not watching whatever is on – I don’t even know –

John: Yeah.

Julia: What the popular Nickelodeon shows are right now because they don’t watch them or care about them, you know. Like, Are you concerned about the rise of content that’s not written in the way that you guys talk about writing things?

Craig: No. No, nope because it’s different. It’s just different. It is a lovely thing to watch. But to me, when my kids or your kids are watching a Twitch stream, or YouTube, just people putting makeup on YouTube or something, it’s a little bit like when my sister and I were just parked in front of the TV and watched The Brady Bunch, or I Love Lucy, meaning it wasn’t new. It was just sort of there. And it filled time and we enjoyed it. Now that was obviously scripted. This is not. But watching I Love Lucy and watching the karate movies on channel five and watching The Brady Bunch didn’t keep us from wanting new content that was scripted. We did like that. And similarly, I do see – or here’s something that, you know, John knows. So his daughter and my daughter are the same age, and we watch these things sweep through that cohort.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: And so, for whatever reason, what was it last summer?

John: Yeah, Criminal Minds.

Craig: Yeah. Every 15-year-old girl was obsessed with bingeing Criminal Minds. I don’t know why, but they work, which means it still works, right? It still works. And we know that as you get older you do gravitate more toward narratives. That’s always, I think, been the case. For my parents’ generation, they probably got more of their narrative from books, but they also would watch movies that we would find boring. I think that the world of narrative is not only alive and well, it’s thriving. There’s more of it than ever. It’s everywhere. And the people who make it and make money off of it are spending money in ways that we’d never thought was possible. Never. I mean, the amount of money that Amazon is spending on the Lord of the Rings show alone is mind boggling. And it’s not slowing down. And in a good way, the amount of money that they’re spending on reliable show runners who produce quality content is also skyrocketing.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: We will always, as a group of professionals in Hollywood, struggle with income inequality. Our income inequality is even more grotesque than the income inequality in the United States. But one of the things that I think John and I talk about and that I think we should continue to ring this bell as much as we can, is getting the salaries of writing staffs up. We think that the Writers Guild can solve all these problems, but I will point out for the one millionth time, writers are in charge of television writing rooms. It’s the writers who do the hiring. It’s the writers who figure out the budget and allot what they allot. So hopefully, the rising tide will start picking up a few more boats as it rises. But narrative is not going anywhere. If anything, there’s too damn much of it.

John: The other point I would make about 10 years down the road is ultimately, you don’t need a studio with a history and library necessarily to get started in this business. You just need a ton of money and there are people out there with a ton of money. So I think there will be new players that come online and it won’t just be mergers of the existing ones. Other folks are going to come online like Apple did, or Amazon did just because they have so much money they need to do something with that money. So there will be some new names that we – we’re not even thinking of 10 years from now.

Craig: I think Apple is going to buy Netflix.

John: Could be.

Craig: I’m just putting that out there.

John: Yeah, yeah.

Craig: Not, not anytime soon.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Don’t – don’t take that as a stock tip. I’m just saying eventually.

John: Like Peloton will inevitably start doing like scripted series. There are just companies that have big money and who will want to do things and ultimately those people will write those things and hopefully that’ll, you know, Megana.

Megana: Right.

Craig: Oh, no, come on, we can do better than Peloton for Megana.

John: Well, okay, all right. The next step.

Julia: We’re going to – we’re going to check back in 10 years and see whether in fact Apple has bought Netflix and Peloton has started making television shows.

Craig: Yeah, I think we should. Yeah.

Julia: Your predictions are officially recorded here.

Craig: Nice.

Julia: We got so many wonderful listener questions that I think are informed by that dynamic of people who feel like they know you as people and care about you as people and are curious about you as people. And I think we should ask a couple of those before we do our One Cool Things.

Craig: Sure.

Julia: Let’s take a question from John from London.

Megana: John from London asks, “From all of the guests you’ve had over the years, what’s the best piece of advice you’ve applied to your own writing? And what’s the one thing that someone has said that stuck with you?”

John: I am thinking back to Katie Silberman. So I don’t remember what episode she was on. But she came on to talk about her writing on Booksmart. And she prewrites. She will have two characters talking about nonsense and just really get a sense of character’s voices independent of the scene. And it’s one of those things like, I always felt I probably should do that. But I don’t know anybody who actually does do that. And her doing that got me thinking oh, I should try to write some unimportant plot scenes just for the character so I can hear their voices. And I’ve started actually doing that. So that’s a Katie Silberman piece of advice that I took to heart.

Craig: I don’t have any, just flat out. I don’t have – I don’t remember any of it. Yeah, I don’t. I love having these conversations. But I can’t – we’ve had a thousand of them. I can’t remember the individual things. This is why I think it kind of works. John really does plan and he thinks these things through and there’s so much intention. And I really do fly by the seat of my pants through it and try and be as experiential as I can within it.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Everything is a surprise to me. Everything is in the moment. So when we have these conversations, I do think to myself, oh, that was amazing. It was such a great – like we had a great one with Dave Mandel and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. And I just remember being delighted with it. But then if you ask me what did we talk about, I can’t remember. I’m old. And I can’t remember. I’m being as honest as I can. I think this is probably what no one ever does, right? They just pretend. They just make up something, right. And I have to just be honest. I can’t remember. How did you remember that?

John: Because I actually did it. But I also, it was in the WorkFlowy.

Craig: There we go. There it is.

John: I thought about the question ahead of time.

Craig: You thought about it ahead of time.

John: I did my homework. That’s really how I thought of it.

Craig: All right. You know what, I will say, I know that we talked to Lindsay Doran.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: And whether or not Lindsay Doran said this in our podcast, it is a piece of advice that has stuck with me ever since she said it. So I will repeat this advice. And it is that it is incredibly important to know what the central relationship of your story is. If you don’t have one, you’re in trouble. I, at least, think of everything through the lens of relationships. And what Lindsay points out, there are all these relationships and people can get stuck viewing everything kaleidoscopically. But humans need one. You can have other relationships, but they need one central one. They need the one that matters the most.

John: That’s me and Craig.

Craig: Yeah.

John: That’s the central relationship.

Craig: It is. Well, you know, I think the central relationship is me and Megana. But I appreciate that you do what you do.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: All right. We’re only taking questions from listeners in London, let’s hear it from Anna in London.

Craig: Great.

Megana: Ana in London says, “I’d be interested to know if there are any opinions you’ve expressed over the years that looking back now you’d like to edit, especially if you’ve changed your mind on a craft thing.”

Craig: Oh.

John: Oh, I’d be surprised if I changed my mind on a craft thing. Although, I think before I started this podcast, I had gone to a single space after a period. So I used to be a double space writer and I went to a single space.

Craig: Oh.

John: Single space is where it’s at now.

Craig: Yes.

John: But if there’s any opinions I’ve expressed that I want to take back, you know what, we tend to get like a lot of listener mail when there’s like a really bad opinion expressed. And then sometimes we’ve addressed it in follow up, actually, I’d say our follow up on this show is an important part of the history of the show. The early tech podcast I was listening to would always have follow up at the start of their show. And I really liked that. And it’s not a Slate thing. And that’s a thing that I took from other podcasts. And so, we try to address when we misspoke or said too much or said something that was incorrect or inaccurate. But I don’t know that I have an opinion that I want to go back and erase.

Craig: Yeah, I’m sure if I were confronted by a number of the stupid things I’ve said, I would be embarrassed by most of them. Obviously, since I can’t remember anything that I said, it’s hard for me to answer this question. I don’t remember what I’ve said either. But I can say that over the course of this show, I have learned things from John that I think have made me a better person. I’m still very different. I’m still much more fiery. And I get very passionate, and I get angry, which I appreciate. I value that. But I also think about people more. And I think about their feelings more. And I try and temper myself more because I think John sets a really good example that way. And also over the years, I think I have required myself to be a little less – there’s this kind of old guy thing that happens where you just start to insist that –

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Everybody that makes it makes it because they did it. And if you don’t, you didn’t, and it’s a meritocracy, brah, brah, brah. And I have weeded quite a bit of that out because it’s not a meritocracy. And I think the more that we discuss that and appreciate it, the better off we are. It’s not an ameritocracy. It’s not random. And that’s not what anyone is going for. But it is additionally challenging for a lot of people in a lot of different ways. And almost everyone has some kind of challenge. But some people have more than others. And so I’ve tried to – I change my point of view and the context with which I evaluate things. That certainly has changed over time.

Julia: I want to note as part of the beautiful synchronicity between you guys sometimes that among the things that John proposed is things I might ask about and that you might answer. One was what we got wrong, and a bullet under that was meritocracy. So –

Craig: Ah, there you go.

Julia: I take it.

Craig: See? And you know I wasn’t cheating because I didn’t read it.

Julia: I take it from the WorkFlowy that John agrees. Is that fair, John?

John: Absolutely. And I remember trying to defend meritocracy at some point on the blog, even pre-podcast and it feels as a White guy growing up and having some success you feel like, oh, well, I earned it. And it’s like, well, yeah, you did things that actually helped you. But it’s so hard to acknowledge, oh, but you’ve had many advantages coming into it. And I think over the course of the 10 years during the podcasts, and really just talking with a bunch of other writers, I’ve really learned a lot more about oh, these were the challenges that I did not face just based on who I came into this industry as and when I came in. So I think meritocracy is just a bad word that we just shouldn’t say.

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: All right, a couple last lightning-round questions. Craig, did you retire sexy Craig of your own volition or did John make you do it?

Craig: He’s not retired. Oh, no. Oh, no. Sexy Craig is right there. He’s right there with you in those moments when you’re alone, and your mind starts wandering, he’s there.

Julia: Oh, no. Have I started another fight, John? Tell him to –

Craig: Oh, yeah.

John: What’s John answer to this question?

John: It’s somewhere between a shudder and a cringe anytime Sexy Craig shows up.

Julia: It is somehow audible, as a listener –

Craig: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Julia: Even though you make no sound.

Craig: Yeah, inaudible shudder. You shudder already.

Julia: All right. Next question.

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: This one is from listener Chris.

Megana: Chris asks, “If you both ran for the presidency, who would be president and who would be VP? And who would you have in your cabinet?”

Craig: Oh, well, I mean, I’m, I’m not going to do any of that. So VP, for sure.

John: Yeah. I think Craig is the VP.

Craig: Yeah.

John: But the cabinet is going to be full of really fascinating people. A recent addition to the show, but also just a superstar is actually Nicole Black, she needs to be in there providing comedy and context and warmth. Love her. Alene has to be in there because she’s an all-star. I don’t know what department she’s running.

Craig: Department of good taste.

John: Yeah, that’s what Alene is doing in there. Does Malcolm makes the cabinet cut?

Craig: I hope so.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Because I need somebody to talk to.

John: We have a lot of really great guests who can come in there and help make things run properly. And also, we have friends with many show runners and the showrunners get stuff done. So it’ll be a somewhat chaotic country, but stuff will happen.

Craig: It’ll be organized by WorkFlowy.

John: That – there’ll definitely be a WorkFlowy behind it all.

Julia: All right, my last question, what do you each hope for the next 10 years with the Scriptnotes?

Craig: Hmm.

John: Hmm. Oh, that, it presupposes that there will be 10 years of Scriptnotes. And I have no intention of shutting it down. But also just recognizing that stuff happens and things change. And podcasting could change. If Craig got really busy doing his show. If I were directing a movie at the same time Craig was doing a show there could be no Scriptnotes. But if we make it to 10 years, I hope just continuing to evolve and feeling that there’s new segments that always feel like they always should have been part of the show that it feels like it’s a continuity, but you can see that was Scriptnotes in black and white and this is Scriptnotes in color.

Craig: Yeah, I don’t know what 10 years will bring. And if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. But I would imagine that somewhere along the line, somebody should really replace me, don’t you think? I mean, somebody should just gradually replace me. I think that would be great, you know.

John: I could also – I could also imagine at some point, the show is me and Craig. And so, there was at some point a suggestion, like, Craig and John should just give the show to other people to do Scriptnotes. Like –

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: As is Scriptnotes is the thing that is just independent of me and Craig.

Craig: Right.

John: But there probably would be a way to transition out and become the occasional hosts, or just how to be a thing that exists independent of us the same way that the Slate shows, even if all three hosts are gone, it’s still is the show, kind of. But we have no intention of doing that. We have no plans to do that. But if we were to move on at some point, I think we would try to do a gradual fade out and handover the torch to somebody else.

Craig: Like when Blue’s Clues changed the guy.

John: Absolutely. It was just too abrupt. You got to send Steve off to college in the right way.

Craig: Right.

John: And Craig I’ll send you off to college.

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. Oh, you sent Craig to “college.” And if I died, you know, like, if I died.

Julia: On that note, I think we have one piece of follow up.

Megana: Yeah. So on an earlier episode, I think you guys said that we have heard a lot of stories of screenwriters who’ve had professional success, but we haven’t heard any Scriptnotes love stories. So Isaac wrote in and he wanted to share his love story and prove you guys wrong.

Craig: Okay.

Isaac: Howdy, folks. Back some time ago, I was listening to one of your episodes and heard Craig mention that, though you both hear plenty of stories about people succeeding in their screenwriting professions with the help of this podcast, you’ve yet to hear any good Scriptnotes love stories. Well, back in 2019, I was walking to work and listening to a podcast where John mentioned a live recording was happening at theater of the Ace Hotel. And it just so happened to be taking place on that very day that I was walking to work. There were a few tickets left. So I nabbed one and left work early.

Once I arrived alone and introverted, I went to the bar and was immediately drawn to the bartender. She chatted me up and encouraged me to come back and talk more, which I did several times. I would pour out each drink in the bathroom and wait a few minutes so I wouldn’t actually get drunk. I had no interest in alcohol at that point. The show started. You killed it with Melissa McCarthy and Rob McElhenney. And I ran to the bar again the moment that it ended, but she was gone. I hung around, bought a Camp Scriptnotes shirt to kill more time, which I wear every week, but she never came back.

Back home, I came up with a simple plan to see her again, just go back to the Ace. Problem is I needed to buy a ticket to the event. And the only one in the near future was a $600 VIP ticket to the Sundance Institute presenting The Farewell. I was desperate and dumb. And worse came to worse, I just get to hang out with Lula Huang and Awkwafina for an hour, I crossed my fingers that I wouldn’t have any medical emergencies in the near future and bought the ticket.

The next day, however, I got an Instagram DM from the bartender. It turns out she had clocked me as well. And thankfully, I paid with the card, because she took that opportunity to memorize my name so she could look me up later. We joke now that both of the things that we did were sort of creepy if the other person wasn’t quite into it. But it worked out. We went to get coffee the next day, and I told her about the farewell premiere, but not the price because I’m not a psychopath. She said that she’s glad that she remembered my name and reached out because she was about to leave for a family vacation and wouldn’t be working at the Ace for a few weeks.

Yes, I still went to the Sundance event. It was wonderful and surprisingly opened up a lot of doors that were closed to me originally. The bartender, who turned out to also be an exceptional actor, and I saw each other as often as possible after the first date. And a little over two years and one seemingly unending pandemic later, I asked her to marry me. Anyway, I just wanted to reach out and thank you two for putting this podcast together. To this day, when we get especially starry-eyed about the future, we’ll look to each other, smile and say, fucking Scriptnotes.

Craig: Fucking Scriptnotes.

John: Ah, that make – that just makes my heart my heart sing.

Craig: Wow.

John: Yeah. And so, I love the Scriptnotes wedding. I love the Scriptnotes baby. I love, you know –

Craig: Oh, my god, look at that.

John: Any people brought together by these circumstances.

Craig: You think, John, that Isaac knows her name yet because he’s just calling her the bartender. Do you think maybe he never found out?

John: Yeah. Or maybe there’s – she could be in witness protection. And that’s obviously a possibility. Yeah.

Craig: Oh, either way, man. That’s pretty awesome.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s, you know what, that’s pretty – I’m glad.

Julia: Wouldn’t she still have a name if she were in witness protection? She would just have a new name?

Craig: Yeah.

John: Yeah. A false name.

Craig: Yeah, I think that that’s one of the things they try and do otherwise they know it’s, yeah, if you just like, “What’s your name?” “Bartender.” And they’re like, “Oh, you’re in witness protection.” Now, they get – she has a name, I just don’t know if he knows it. Look, if you want to stay with her because John and I have been married for a long time so we can tell – not to each other. But we can tell you.

John: Yeah.

Craig: One of the keys is knowing your partner’s name.

John: It’s really good. Name, birthday, just the basic facts. You know, be able to recognize her face in a crowd –

Craig: Yeah.

John: So you can actually see here. Yeah.

Craig: Oh my god, like there’s like this sad part where she never came back and he was hanging around. Aww, I, you know, I feel like even though Isaac is saying that it’s Scriptnotes brought him and his wife together really it was just alcohol. I don’t think it was us at all. I mean, if you – if you really interrogate what he’s saying, he’s saying that he left the show to go drink and talk to her. So we actually were kind of in the way. Fucking Scriptnotes.

John: And so it 10 years.

Craig: Oh, ah.

Julia: Ten years, a lot of impact.

Craig: Ten years.

Julia: Is time for One Cool Things? I don’t feel like I can say that unless John decrees that it is.

John: It is time for One Cool Things.

Craig: Whoa.

Julia: So who goes first, John? You go first?

John: I’ll go first. Sure. I have two One Cool Things. My first one is a hawk named Spencer. So Spencer is the hawk who flies around the new Academy Museum and scares away all the other birds who might poop on the amazing glass dome that they built there. So I just love that there is a trained hawk who comes out there twice a week to fly around there and scare birds away. I just love that we still use hawks to do things like this. So this is a story in the L.A. Times. For all I know Julia, you may have been the person responsible for the story, but it’s written up by Deborah Vankin. I just – it’s cool that there’s like a hawk flying around Los Angeles to protect our new museum.

Julia: I can take no credit for that story because I’m on maternity leave, but I was delighted to see it.

Craig: Good job, Deborah.

Julia: Deb is a specialist at finding – she did an amazing story this year also about how the Getty fights moths, which is apparently a terrible thing you have to fight at a museum.

John: Oh.

Craig: Ooh. Oh, yeah.

Julia: She’s got a sub beat of museums, and they’re animals.

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: Yeah.

John: My second One Cool Things is actually just kind of a humble brag. Not a humble brag, just to brag. I built this typewriter out of Lego and it’s so cool. It took me nine hours to do but it looks great. I love vintage typewriters. And now I have a vintage typewriter made out of Lego. You guys can click the link in the WorkFlowy and see what it looks like. But, uh, it turned out great. It was my first Lego kit I’d ever done as a grown up and I just loved it and it actually makes little clacky sounds and the cartridge moves as you type. It’s delightful.

Craig: I see in your Instagram that Alex and A. Smith says, “My money is on this being next week’s One Cool Things.” Correct.

Julia: I saw that on your Instagram.

Megana: I was just going to say I’ve watched John make this Lego typewriter the pictures do not do justice to how complicated this was.

Craig: You are talking to the guy that built the 5,000-plus Millennium Falcon. So –

John: Wow. So really nothing – doesn’t mean for you.

Craig: What I’m saying is LOL to your Lego typewriter.

Julia: Hmm, I don’t know. I also am engaged in some high-level Lego building over here with my 8-year-sons –

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: And have also been given adult specialized Legos. So maybe we need to have a Lego off.

Craig: Ah, I would totally be into that. The key to building Legos is to just commit.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Just commit.

Julia: You know, but I remember hearing before I had kids like, “Oh, Legos, it’s so terrible. There’s no creative building anymore. The kids just want to follow the rules and build these sets.” And like as a non-kid haver and non-Lego doer, I was very sympathetic to that kind of cranky Gen-X argument. It’s not like we were when we were little. And then having kids, these sets are so cool. Like, they’re really fun –

John: Yeah.

Craig: True.

Julia: And you learn a lot like, I mean, yes, there’s the problem that they make you buy new Legos and capitalism, etc. But I anticipated loathing Legos in parenthood and instead have found them a great source of parenting pleasure.

Craig: Yeah, of course, the sets are amazing. When I was a kid, and I didn’t have sets. I just had a huge, big bag of Legos. I built a large brick. I built the largest Lego brick ever. It’s the kind of thing that gets you institutionalized.

John: Yeah.

Craig: If people really consider what you’re doing as a child, “What does your son do with those Legos? He built one massive Lego. Okay, well, he’s a danger to society.”

I’ll tell you what is my One Cool Things and some people consider it dangerous to society like for instance, Stephen King who doesn’t get the genius of this, Ketchup Doritos. So in Canada there are all these ketchup things like they have ketchup potato chips, and they have Ketchup Doritos. And it sounds disgusting for I think a lot of people. I thought it would probably be disgusting.

Ketchup Doritos are wonderful. They’re the greatest thing ever. I have a bag of Ketchup Doritos that I keep in my trailer and I try and work through it slowly like over the course of a couple of weeks. So I’m like – I don’t eat out of the bag. I like take a handful, put them on the table, put the bag back, eat my eight Doritos and I feel super happy. Although I will say, I’m pretty sure that Bo steals a lot of the ketchup Doritos because there was a time I think she ate through one-and-a-half bags. Nobody can eat food like Bo by the way. Bo is my assistant, Bo Shim is very small, and she can eat more food than I can. It’s amazing. Regardless, Ketchup Doritos, I don’t know if you can get them in the US.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: But if there’s some sort of Canada deal where they can ship it to you from Canada, and you got a few extra bucks and you feel ketchup-ing it up, hmm, so good.

John: Well, then, it sounds great.

Julia: All right. I’ve got two One Cool Things as the vernacular has it. The first is just a book that I want both of you hosts to read and actually Megana too given her background as I learned about it on the show. Have any of you read Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, the book about the Sacklers?

John: Um, it is sitting on my Kindle to read. I’m excited to read it.

Craig: I have read it.

Julia: I found it to be such a great mix of really impressive reporting and really gripping storytelling. It’s very hard to write nonfiction that is both rigorous in its standards of accuracy and inquiry and reads like a fucking potboiler. And I could not put this book down. I found it so impressive on both levels. And it’s fascinating about the evolution in the pharmaceutical business and all of the terrible decisions that brought us the opioid epidemic.

Craig: So many.

Julia: But if you haven’t read it and those subjects sound at all interesting to you, read it. It’s not a beach read, but it’s a page turner, yes, page-turner.

Craig: it almost is a beach read. There are these moments where the stupid humanity of it all. Like, first of all, the way that they ended up with the name Purdue Pharmacy is incredible. So weird and shabby. And then the fact that the whole thing ultimately can be traced back to one poorly cited study in a journal that shouldn’t have even been in there. It’s awesome, and terrible, and wonderful. Definitely, great read.

Julia: All right, so that’s my first Cool Thing. And my second one, possibly stepping outside my role here as the ruthless journalist come in to interrogate you guys. But my second Cool Thing is Scriptnotes. You guys have built something really extraordinary here.

John: Aww.

Megana: Aww.

Craig: Aww.

Julia: And it’s been lovely over the years to hear all of its ramifications, all the different people you’ve touched, all the impact you’ve had, all the interesting knowledge you’ve surfaced. And as a longtime listener, that’s my Cool Thing in honor of your 10th anniversary is you guys.

Craig: Oh, Thank, Julia.

John: Thank you.

Craig: That’s so sweet. And thank you for doing this.

John: Yes.

Craig: This is awesome.

John: Now, Julia, you have the opportunity, but not the requirement to do the boilerplate at the end of the show. Do you feel like doing that or would you like me to do that?

Julia: Oh, man. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited Matthew Chilelli. Our outro today is by Matthew Chilelli. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes online as @clmazin, and I am always @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and the sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great, from the Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net, where you can get all the back episodes and bonus segments.

Craig: Thank you, Julia.

John: Thank you so much for doing this. And please stick around after this because you have a bonus topic for us to talk through which I’m very excited about on How Would Scriptnotes Be a Movie.

Julia: Very briefly, I know we have a cutoff, but I have one question I had wanted to ask you was, “What is the story of the Scriptnotes theme, where those notes come from? What’s the deal?”

John: So the Scriptnotes theme comes from, the bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, actually came from a short I did called The Remnants. It was a pilot for a web series, which we can put a link in the show notes to that, and I just wrote that as the opening jingle to The Remnants and I needed some intro music. So just like grabbed those, and so the actual name of that is Bloops and that became the basis for all of our outros. And so, all the outros should have that same pattern in there. And sometimes we get outros that are like really cool but you can’t actually hear the bloops in there. And they get dinged because we have standards.

Craig: Stuff I don’t know. The stuff I don’t know about this show is just a mountain of stuff I don’t know.

John: Oh, also, one thing we didn’t talk about, who came up with the name Scriptnotes? It was Craig Mazin.

Craig: Oh, also didn’t know that. Is that right?

John: Yeah, that’s true. You were the one who said Scriptnotes and –

Craig: Oh, okay.

John: Scriptnotes is meant to be – only the “S” is capitalized. There’s – the “n” is not capitalized, and it drives me absolutely crazy when people capitalize the “n” in it. So it’s, it’s one word, just to capital on the “S” whatever. And Craig –

Craig: When John sees it, he has a kernel panic.

John: I really do. Like, the camel case is not appropriate for this kind of work.

Julia: Why one word instead of two?

Craig: Yeah.

John: Just because I – it should be one word. I don’t know why. It just feels like it should be one word.

Julia: All right, mysteries, mysteries persist –

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: At the end of this conversation.

John: Just taste. Yeah.

Julia: Just taste.

John: And thank you, Julia Turner, for coming on to do this. But you should listen to her every week on the Slate Culture Gabfest which is phenomenal. And of course, subscribe and read the L.A. Times, which is a great local newspaper. Julia Turner, thank you so much for doing this.

Craig: Thank you, Julia. That was great.

Julia: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Hello, and welcome to the bonus segment of Scriptnotes. I’m doing the Slate Plus intro tone of voice here, but you guys will just have to roll with it. Today we are playing How Would This Be a Movie with the first 10 years of Scriptnotes. Is it a buddy comedy? Is it a bracing Hollywood critique? Is it kind of Norma Rae where you get the assistant’s better pay? And who plays each of you?

John: That’s the crucial question. All right. My choice for Craig –

Craig: Oh.

John: Is Paul is Paul Giamatti.

Craig: I mean, he’s a little too old.

John: He’s a little too old. That’s the problem. So –

Craig: I think you’re thinking of 10 years ago, Paul Giamatti.

John: I’m thinking 10 years, so like, Josh Gad, could you – who else could do it? Now, who do you want to play you?

Craig: I don’t know. Just somebody sort of Jewy and grumpy, who’s sort of Jewy and grumpy. There’s so many of us. I don’t know. I have no idea.

John: And maybe Craig plays himself honestly.

Craig: I mean, I am an actor.

John: You’re quite a good actor.

Craig: Thank you.

John: You are an actor. Yes.

Craig: Thank you. Thank you.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Maybe Craig plays himself. But I am played on the show by – I think by Jim Parsons of Big Bang Theory, that’d be my choice.

Craig: Yeah, that sounds reasonable.

John: Yeah, because he could do that sort of, like, good-natured, but gay and also can be robotic at times.

Craig: Yeah.

John: That’s –

Craig: I mean, he’s sort of got that market cornered, actually.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So I’m saying Jim Parsons. But what is the tone?

Julia: Yeah, yeah, casting is fun. But like what’s – yeah, how would it be a movie?

Craig: Hmm. It’s a boring goddamn movie. I’ll tell you that.

John: Yeah. So the drama-drama came out during the agency stuff, but much of that is especially good. It could be like one of those sort of backstage comedies like getting ready for a live show. Because that’s always sort of interesting and scrambly because here’s what tends to happen, especially an Austin is Craig would put together a dinner before the show.

Craig: Yes.

John: And we have like 30 or 40 writers around this big, long table, and we take forever to get our food and like, “Craig, the show is going to start in 10 minutes, we have to go.” And Craig is like, “Oh, great, Who should we have on as guests, and so that we bring really drunk people on the show?” So that stuff behind the scenes would be half the fun. Like, we’re sort of like, Game Night. It’s like Game Night, but without trying to put on a live show.

Craig: That’s not bad. I mean, there is a version where we do the show, but really, we’re spies or something, I mean, the whole thing is a cover. We’re not even screenwriters.

John: Yeah, no.

Craig: But –

John: That’s a very long con.

Craig: There could also be a version of this where we hate each other.

John: Yeah. Oh, I love that version –

Craig: Yeah.

John: Where like, it’s all we just detest each other. And so like –

Craig: Yeah.

John: So, you and I both know, it’s like some TV shows where they’d be cast members just despise each other.

Craig: Yes.

John: And could not actually – they could like, cameras rolling, they’re great. And they never spoke offset. That could be us.

Craig: I think that would be kind of fun. And then I guess in that regard, the hero of that show would be Megana.

John: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Or she’s like sort of trapped in the middle of the first shot.

Craig: Yeah, she’s like, so it’s from her perspective, like Megana wakes up, and she’s like, “Oh, my god, I got to go to work with – ” And everyone is like, “Oh, my god, you’re so lucky. You get to produce that show with those guys. They’re so great.” And she’s like, “Mm-hmm.” And then she gets there. And we’re screaming at each other and she’s like, “My life sucks. And then and then she falls in love.”

John: Yeah. But I think –

Megana: Ah, with who?

Craig: Exactly. See, you’re into it. So I’m feeling like, there’s another podcast that we’re super angry about because they’re getting into our stuff, and we hate each other but we hate other podcasts more. And you and the producer of that podcast –

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Start to commiserate over some drinks. And then it happens. And then the thing – it’s like Romeo and Juliet.

John: Yeah, so we may be begging the question, Craig –

Craig: Oh.

John: Because we’re assuming that this is supposed to be a movie, but I don’t think it really is a movie. I think it is a –

Craig: It’s inaudible.

John: It’s a series. I mean, it really is –

Craig: Great use of begging the question. Great use of everything.

John: Thank you. I want to take all the praise you can give me. I think it really is, though, a – it’s a comedy. I think it’s more like Veep, honestly, where like, we are incredibly dysfunctional.

Craig: Right.

John: And Megana is the equivalent of that chief of staff like trying to hold us all together.

Craig: Right?

John: And that’s Craig…

Craig: Perfect. It’s like the first – maybe it’s not the first comedy – but it is of a model where finally the millennials have to take care of the diapered up Gen-Xers. You know what I mean?

John: Inaudible.

Craig: Like, we’re just cranking and out of it. So out of it.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: And I like the idea that you are super racist behind the scenes.

John: I think that – well, you know, I’m Southern. I try to keep my accent hidden but I’m actually from the deep, deep south, the really racist south.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. And so like –

John: So –

Craig: When once the thing, like, you know, it’s Hollywood, nothing is ever what you think. Like I’m the nice one. You’re a dick. And then, Megana, she’s like, deal with that, but you know, I think it would be wonderful. That’s – how would it be a show?

Julia: Reverse Odd Couple where the odd couple you play on the podcast, you are the opposite odd couple behind scenes.

Craig: Correct. Reverse odd couple plus generational babies. Yeah. I love it.

Julia: Yeah.

Craig: Plus romance. Romance is the key.

John: Oh, so much romance. Yeah.

John: I’m really excited about this whole Megana romance angle. We do it to figure this out.

Megana: I’m excited about it, too.

Craig: I know. Megana, let’s talk. We got to figure this out.

John: Yeah. But it has to be like, like fumbles along the way. So it has to be like, sort of like –

Craig: Of course.

John: I mean, because it has build over the course of season like will they or won’t they? But then of course, stuff will sort of pull them apart and there’s terrible stuff about him too.

Craig: You know, I feel like that’s something that is from our time. I think that for millennials, there’s no will they or won’t they.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: It’s you will – we will.

John: Yeah.

Craig: But then what?

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s exciting.

John: But then it got awkward. Yeah.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. Now it’s like, oh, my god, am I on his Insta, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is great. Love it.

Julia: All right.

Craig: I’m just summing up an entire generation with the word Insta.

Julia: Okay. I think we can conclude that Scriptnotes should remain a podcast based on this conversation. But thank you for indulging my inquiry.

Craig: Of course.

Julia: And thank you listeners for supporting John’s effort to enrich himself at the expense of Craig.

Craig: Thank you. Hey, finally, someone gets it. We did it!

John: Yay!

Craig: Yay!

John: This was so much fun.

Craig: Whew! Whew!

Julia: Thanks, guys. This was really, really fun.

Craig: Thank you so much.

John: Thank you so much, Julia. This was amazing.

Links:

• Julia Turner on the LA Times and Slate Culture Gabfest
• The Matrix Trailer
• Scriptnotes, Episode 411: Setting it Up with Katie Silberman
• Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
• The Academy Museum Hawk Deborah Vankin for the LA Times
• Lego Typewriter, check out John’s finished project!
• Ketchup Doritos
• Check out the Scriptnotes Index for our first 500 episodes
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Julia Turner on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (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.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/there-is-no-conspiracy).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 512 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge where we take a look at the first three pages of scripts submitted by you, our listeners, and give our honest feedback. We’ll also be looking at lecture scenes, mega deals for creators, and the ethics of writing conspiracy thrillers. And in our bonus segment for premium members I’ll be taking with comedian Sara Schaefer about her three simple steps for getting your TV show on the air.

**Craig:** Oh man.

**John:** Craig, you’ll want to listen to this.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are only three? I’ve been doing like six steps.

**John:** Yeah. Spoiler, there are many more than three. It’s sort of part of the joke is that it’s incredibly hard and frustrating at every step.

**Craig:** Yup. Yup. It is.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So that’s an extra from the Schaefer Shakedown podcast which you should also listen to, but really it’s a great little bonus segment if you are a premium member. Stick around and listen to that after the credits.

But first Craig it’s great to have you back. We’ve been sort of hit or miss the last couple of weeks because you’ve been working, I’ve been traveling. But now we are back recording the show.

**Craig:** Yup. So it’s going to be a little bit like this while we’re making The Last of Us just because it’s hard to produce a television show. It’s a fulltime job, and then some. So every now and then I will be amiss. But hopefully I can get into a good rhythm and stick with you guys regularly.

**John:** Very cool. Now over the past couple of weeks it’s been a very good time to be a creator of television shows, or at least a very successful creator of television shows. Because you are that kind of person you are going to be able to make a mega deal with one of the streamers. There were three of them just in the last two weeks which were pretty exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Courtney Kemp, creator of Power over at Starz, made a new deal at Netflix listed as high eight figures, possibly rising to nine figures. I had to actually do the math to figure out like oh that’s a lot of zeroes.

**Craig:** It sure is.

**John:** That’s a lot of money.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s amazing news for Courtney who is a fantastic person. I got to know her a little bit a year or so ago. And this is – I guess we can call it the Netflix Effect. I mean, Netflix has definitely driven the price of the reliable showrunner up quite a bit. When we get these reports of high figures, possible rising to nine figures, it’s a little bit like dealing with these big sports contracts. You do have to look at how many years it covers. Typically it is about exclusivity. Sometimes inside of those deals there are incentives. They rely on the continuation of a show being produced, or such and such.

But generally speaking I think we can say that Courtney Kemp just made a massive mega truckload full of money and I am thrilled for her. I think it’s fantastic. As long as this lasts let’s just keep doing it.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s a good time to be a showrunner in television.

**John:** Indeed. People who have been doing this for quite a long time, Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame, reached a $935 million deal that will keep them at – what’s crazy it’s not actually for South Park. It’s for like things related to South Park. So they’ll be making 13 or 14 South Park movies for Paramount+ which is good.

Here’s the point where I think I’ve said this before on the podcast but back when I first starting out in Hollywood, so I was still in the Stark program. I was at a bar called Three of Clubs which still exists and a friend introduced me to this other guy who was also from Boulder, Colorado. I was talking to him. He seemed kind of down on his luck. I said what are you working on. He’s like oh I’m doing this Christmas card for this guy who works at MTV. I felt kind of bad for him because he seemed to really be sort of struggling. But that Christmas card was of course South Park and that was Trey Parker.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I said, “Troy, it was nice to meet you,” at the end of our conversation. That’s the last time I talked to Trey Parker. But you know what? Things are going great for those duos.

**Craig:** He’s doing OK. Yeah, so Trey and Matt have created an empire and what’s fascinating about what’s happened over the last few years is that something like South Park is – it’s the perfect storm for deal-making in the modern era. Friends we all know was this enormous drive for Netflix. And it was probably one of the reasons that HBO/Warner Bros suddenly said what are we doing. Why are we giving all of our stuff to Netflix? Let’s just make our own thing.

South Park, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, the things that they make, the world they’ve created has a library that’s enormous already and it will continue to grow. That is a perfect situation for a new streamer like HBO Max because it just creates tremendous value for everybody who is showing up and promises tremendous value to come.

We are starting to see what our work is worth. And that is exciting. Part of the deal that they made has to do with revenue sharing and ad sharing. It’s very complicated. Every time one of these things happens everybody else stops, looks at it, and goes well why don’t I have that. It will also continue to drive things up. It’s exciting.

I’m excited. I’m looking ahead to things. I am not worth a billion dollars. I can assure you of that. But those guys are.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So congratulations to Trey and Matt. It’s exciting. And they are brilliant. And the work they do is brilliant. And I have to believe – I’ve just heard that they’re good guys. I’ve never met them personally but I’ve heard they’re really solid guys. I have to hope and believe that the people that are important to the creation of their stuff are also being taken care of well.

**John:** Well I’ll tell you when I met Trey 25 years ago he seemed perfectly nice in the five minutes I had.

**Craig:** Oh, well, nothing changes, right? Yeah, hundreds of millions of dollars and success doesn’t change anyone.

**John:** Has never changed anybody.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** All the people we knew back when are exactly the same people they are now.

**Craig:** I have to say if there were a person to bet on not changing I feel like it’s those guys. Because you know so much of what they do is about taking the piss out of people and not being too serious and not being too self-important. So I hope.

**John:** So, you mentioned the Friends at Warners kind of situation, and the South Park situation is kind of weird and interesting because HBO and HBO Max/Warners had bought the library of rights to South Park and so they have it on HBO Max. But, this deal is with Paramount+. And so it’s a weird thing where they’re not getting the library back yet. So they can get all of the future sort of South Parky things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s honestly sort of more like when the cast of Friends renegotiated their deals for a million dollars apiece, to keep them there in the family.

**Craig:** That makes total sense. They seem incredibly reliable. I mean, year after year after year they just keep putting content out. And people like it. So, it’s a good blue chip story even as you say if the entirety of the library isn’t there, what’s coming is going to be there.

**John:** And plus they’re buying Casa Bonita in Denver which is very exciting for me as a Coloradoan.

**Craig:** That is so awesome. Awesome. Oh my god. Casa Bonita.

**John:** Finally we should talk about the $900 billion sale of Hello Sunshine which is the Reese Witherspoon production entity which has made a ton of really well regarded shows, some of which star Reese Witherspoon but some of which don’t. We have other friends who work for that company. Good on them.

**Craig:** Yeah, totally good on them. This one is a little confusing because they have made a lot of good shows but they don’t own those shows. So, this was an outside investment. This is private equity coming in and purchasing the company. And there must be a plan beyond just the show Hello Sunshine and I guess they also have a little bit of ownership in Little Fires Everywhere. But I have to believe that this is really about Reese Witherspoon expanding her brand the way that for instance Jessica Alba became a billionaire by expanding her brand. That has to be what’s going on here. That this is not just about television shows but about more.

**John:** Yeah. Because Reese Witherspoon is an influencer in the literary space as well, so her book club is successful. In many ways she’s kind of an Oprah for a new generation and that could be really sort of what this investment is for to enable more stuff along those lines to happen. So, this is a situation where it’s not about a writer-creator-showrunner but really a place that could make stuff for your entity.

**Craig:** In retrospect all will be kind of judged and evaluated when there are big gold rushes in Hollywood, and this is not the first time there’s been a big gold rush, there are winners and there are losers. There are good bets, there are bad bets. Sometimes the good ones turn out bad. Sometimes the ones that seem bad will turn out great. I don’t envy anybody that’s making billion dollar bets on things. I’m glad I don’t have to do that sort of thing. I just have to sit here and right.

**John:** Yeah. Back in our day when we were first starting out to make an overall deal at a place was kind of a big deal. We were very excited to do it. Actually I first got to know you because you and I made a deal for a bunch of writers over at Fox. We sort of pitched around town about doing this writers deal at various places and Fox was the one that took us up. And that was really exciting and important.

I think what’s changed so much is that with the rise of these streamers and they need so much content that outside of the feature space it does really make sense to lock down some creators to make sure they’re making stuff for you.

**Craig:** Yeah. And to take care of the ones you have. I hope HBO is listening. No, they’ve been very nice to me. When you and I were starting in the feature business I think you probably had at least a few moments like I did where you look over at the people in the television business and went, “What? You’re making how much?” It just seemed like these insane numbers. And oftentimes they wouldn’t have to do anything for those insane numbers. They were just like sitting in an office and, I don’t know, getting high and earning crazy amounts of money.

Well, it’s still that way except more. More money. The deals that were always good for television writers have become vastly better. The numbers are eye-popping. And this is going to continue while Hollywood is building a new kind of business. And that is excellent for creators. It’s important for us all as we go through this, and as I just mentioned with Matt and Trey, to continue to think about the people who are not creators, that are not showrunners, but who are doing creative labor in our business because it is fairly typical of Hollywood to start handing out crazy amounts of money to individuals and then sort of recoup some of that on the margin by cheaping out on everyone else.

So, hopefully that’s not what happens here and it’s important for showrunners to make sure that people are being compensated fairly.

**John:** What was different as we started is that a lot of producers would have deals at studios. And so you’d say like, oh, Mace Neufeld would have a deal over at Paramount and so you’d go there to make your movie there. There’s much less of that now. And so this is really taking the place of producers doing those things. The challenge is a lot of these writer-creator-showrunners they have limited capacity.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** If they’re actually creating shows they can’t sort of also do a bunch of other stuff. And so as a person right now who is taking out a project or looking at places to go with this project I’m really mindful of like, oh, I really like that person as a writer but I don’t think they actually have the capacity to produce this thing. And that’s going to be – I think we’re going to see more challenges around that area coming up in the next couple of years where people have these great deals and they’re so talented but they cannot actually make stuff with other people.

**Craig:** I suspect that for most of these deals these companies are actually paying for shows. They are not paying for empires. There are a few people that can empire run. So our friend Greg Berlanti is just the king of empire running. I think there’s no amount of shows that he’s not capable of producing. Courtney is the power behind Power.

**John:** And all the spinoffs of Power.

**Craig:** Correct. That franchise is kind of I think really what they’re paying for there. Although of course they would be thrilled to get even more from her and I have no doubt that she has more coming. And we know kind of what they’re looking for from Trey and Matt. They’re looking for the sort of things that Trey and Matt do, whatever is that next show. This is kind of a good thing I think. There was a time when the best paid people in the business were people that were not writing or acting or directing, which is crazy.

I think when we all look back on it we’ll go, “What? Why? Why those people?” It’s good that the money is now flowing into the pockets of the people who are creating the shows, who are key elements of those shows, like Mike Schur for instance. He has his show, and then he has another show. And that’s how it’s going to function. That’s what they’re paying for.

**John:** But he can also help out on other people’s – he seems to have the capability to help out on other people’s stuff as well. And Mindy Kaling has other shows as well. There are some of those people who are talented creators themselves who can also help out, but it’s different than sort of the old days where you had just a producer who was sort of running a fiefdom.

**Craig:** Yeah. And one thing that I think is really positive about writers and writer-producers being the people that get paid the most is that writer-producers really do care mostly – I would say most of them really do care about the show they’re making, or the two shows they’re making. They care less about amassing insane amounts. Nobody gets into the writing business to become a billionaire. If you want to be a billionaire go into the hedge fund business. We care about things.

So, that’s positive. Whereas I think the non-writing, non-directing, non-acting producers, a few of them truly did care, truly do care. Lindsay Doran is my favorite example. A whole bunch of them just wanted more. They were just amassing money and clout. And I will not miss those. There are people that I think became very powerful and also really were – like Jerry Bruckheimer is in many ways a creator. He’s like a showrunner of the movies. I mean, that’s why there’s this continuity among Jerry Bruckheimer films. But you and I know a lot of producers where it’s like, “What? Really? You?”

**John:** They’re really good scrappy – they’re good at attaching themselves to things. They don’t actually add a lot of value.

**Craig:** No. Their genius is in convincing people that they’re necessary and worth a lot of money when they’re not. So, bye.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** All right. Let’s take a little bit of follow up here. This is a listener question, a listener suggestion. So let’s take a listen to what Greg Beam wrote in.

**Greg Beam:** Hey John and Craig. This is Greg from El Paso. I thoroughly enjoyed the rebroadcast of The Worst of the Worst. As a relatively new listener I didn’t catch it the first time around and I was glad to hear your thoughts on why protagonists need to suffer so much. But I did want to suggest that – I think you could have taken your analysis one step further and to demonstrate how I’m afraid I’ll have to invoke the hero’s journey.

According to Joseph Campbell the outward transformation and corresponding triumph that heroes of myth experience is the external representation of a deeper inner transformation. The hero not only overcomes their personal shortcomings or the evils of their society but transcends all limitations of the human condition.

Doing so requires a stripping away, not just of all they have, but of all they are. The death of their individual identity. Their sense of self. Their ego. And only once the hero’s whole self has been hallowed out can they become a vessel to be filled with the light of god to recognize the oneness of all things. It’s a radical conversion of root and branch break with their previous mode of being and one that is only possible following a total loss of self.

Now this isn’t meant to critique or diminish narratives that don’t have overt spiritual content. They’re perfectly valid and valuable as they are. But being aware of the transcendental sources from which their patterns spring can in my mind and Campbell’s add some depth to our understanding of what these stories represent and how they work in our minds and hearts.

Anyway, no question here. Just a thought. Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Well, thank you Greg.

**John:** Yeah. So we were talking I think two episodes ago about you mentioned Song of Roland as that sort of first mythic quest in sort of a modern context idea. How do you respond – how do you feel about Greg’s suggestion that really the worst we should be thinking back to the archetypal, the demigod level of everything being not just destroyed externally but destroyed internally for that journey to begin?

**Craig:** Well interesting. The Chanson de Roland I don’t think he has any change whatsoever. He’s awesome. He continues to be awesome. And then he finishes awesome. There were some very simple things like that. But Greg is right. I mean, the old, very traditional, very basic narratives were far more broad in the character swings that occurred. You had to die to live. It’s kind of how it works. Jesus had to die to live. He didn’t have to get super sick. Whereas in Unforgiven William Money gets a fever. And he has fever dreams. And then he wakes up and he’s sort of a different guy.

The important thing is that the concept of being reborn – I think everybody is fairly familiar with the notion that that is a flexible and extendable concept. You can mush it around and drag it around and metaphorize it however you want. But killing something within you and having something being reborn in you, yeah, that’s basically underneath it.

I think the modern narrative tends to avoid full hallowing outs. But if Greg’s point is that you kind of need to know where it all comes from I don’t disagree. Look back at the old stories. You know, you don’t send a flood to kill a third of the people. You send a flood to kill everyone. And that’s how it used to be.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not hard for me to think of examples of non – well, they’re mythic movies but they’re contemporary movies, or contemporary-ish movies that do sort of destroy everything about the characters and rebuild them. So you look at Terminator and sort of what happens to Linda Hamilton’s character. She’s living a normal life and everything about her normal life has to be stripped away and destroyed and she has to become a completely new person because of what’s happened.

You look at The Matrix and Neo and everything he believed about his life can no longer exist. He cannot be the same person he was at the start of the movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that transformation is complete. I agree that it’s good to understand that in the archetypal, epic versions of these characters it’s going to happen. I think we cannot have that be the litmus test for most heroes in most movies. Because I think the audience just won’t accept that in a rom-com or some other sort of contemporary movie that a character would really go through such a huge transformation where everything actually has to be destroyed in their lives, or they have to be completely divorced from where they are because in many ways in our modern films we do want the characters to change and to grow, but we want them to be able to go back to the place where they began, you know, as a person who has learned something but not necessarily with everything they knew before destroyed.

**Craig:** I think that’s perfectly said.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s go to a question from Sarah Folks. Megana, could you read this for us?

**Megana Rao:** Sarah writes in, “I have a question about writing the ‘professor gives a lecture’ scene in movies. I’ve seen a number of films in which a high school or college student sits in a classroom and listens to a lecture, participates in a class discussion. Sometimes it’s math and the student looks bored. Sometimes the professor is reading poetry and the student looks enraptured. I’ve also watched scenes in which the professor is giving a lecture on the subtext of the film. For example this is a film about colonialism so the professor is giving a lecture on colonialism.

“Sometimes this works as in I would argue Kenneth Lonergan’s fantastic scenes in Margaret and sometimes it really doesn’t. But what is it that doesn’t work and what is it that does? How can a seminar/classroom scene build character and mood even if the student is just listening and when is it just lazy writing?”

**John:** That’s actually a really great question. And I think it’s actually a specific case or the general case of whenever you have your hero listening rather than talking, so there could be situations where there’s a coach talking, a pastor, a commanding officer. And those are scenes that are common and I don’t think we’ve really spoken about them very much on the show. They can be good. They can be bad, as Sarah points out. But maybe Craig and I we can figure out what are the characteristics of that kind of scene that work well and what are the kinds of characteristics or like oh you need to really rewrite that or rethink why you’re doing this scene.

**Craig:** Well, it’s easy to write the scene where the student is bored. You just write the professor being boring. And that’s the point. And you also know just by definition that that scene is not going to go on that long. Otherwise the audience will be bored. You just need enough to know that our character, our hero, is bored.

When you’re writing the version where they are enraptured/inspired/moved it requires you to write well. You need to write something that actually inspires and moves the people in the audience. So if you want to put Robin Williams in front of a classroom and have him talk about poetry it’s got to be awesome. And Tom Schulman made it awesome.

And that’s how you get them. Isn’t that awful? You need to write well. It’s such a pain in the ass.

**John:** Well here’s I think what you’re describing though is that the hero, the established hero of the film who is sitting in that audience is a proxy for us as the audience. So we have to be with our hero in experiencing this. And so if it’s boring then we’re bored with him. But more likely we’re enraptured or compelled or feeling confrontational to the speaker. We’re there with him. We’re responding the same way that he’s responding to what is being said. And that’s just going to be writing.

In many cases it’s like responding to a monologue. So, it’s a situation where whoever is talking is going to be largely uninterrupted and is going to be presenting this information. Now if that information feels like an info dump, that it’s exposition, there’s a ticking clock for how much exposition we’re willing to take. But if it’s something that is actually meant to engage and transform our listener, great, we just have to be able to see it. And so I think you should always be thinking about those scenes, not just focused on the person who’s talking but how and when is the camera going to be aimed at our hero taking in this information and processing this information. What is the reaction that we are seeing on the hero’s face as this is happening?

**Craig:** Yeah. And that means that that person who is hearing this needed to hear it. There was something in them that was missing and this lecture is filling it. Or there was something in them that they were wobbling on and this lecture is challenging it. But there has to be context. It can’t just be well this is a great freaking speech. It has to turn on whatever the character needed so that we understand this is the moment that matters. Now the character is changing.

**John:** Another thing that distinguishes some of these scenes from other scenes is like is that person who is speaking, the lecturer, is that a recurring character? Is that a character who is going to show up later on in the story or is this the one shot they have? If it’s the one shot they have then who that person is is not so important down the road. But in many cases that teacher character will recur and so be thinking about what are the beats and how are we going to see them in this way in this context in this classroom scene versus later on in the film. And what is the relationship really between your hero and this lecturer? That matters a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let me play a clip from Frankenweenie because Frankenweenie has a teacher character I created called Mr. Rzykruski who challenges the classroom and I think it’s an example of the kinds of things we’re talking about. So this is early on Frankenweenie, the character will appear twice more, but this is his first scene.

[Clip plays]

**Mr. Rzykruski:** Lightening is simply electricity. The cloud is angry. Yes, we make it storm. All the electrons are saying I am leaving you. I go to the land of opportunity. The ground says yes we need the electrons trained in science just like you. Come! Come! Welcome! So both sides start to build a ladder. This man, he comes out to look at the storm. He does not see the invisible ladders. When the two ladders meet, BOOM! The circuit is complete and all of the electrons rush to the land of opportunity. This man is in the way. Yiii!

[Clip ends]

**John:** So in this scene what was important is that we’re introducing this scary new substitute science teacher and he’s going to be doing an info dump about what electricity is because electricity has been powering these monster creations. But it’s really about the kids’ reaction to him. And they are so excited to have this scary man as their science teacher and how inspiring it is to Victor who is going to be the kid character that we’re following. So it’s setting up that there’s a new character here, but also that they’re responding to him sort of the way that we would respond to him. The kids in the classroom are the same place that we are in terms of like oh my gosh this guy is crazy.

**Craig:** And you needed those kids to be scared. It was important.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So that kind of guides the way that person is going to do what they do. So, I suppose if we had some kind of sum up advice for Sarah it would be boring is boring, that’s easy. And inspiring means there must be a space in the character that needs inspiration, that needs to have some kind of impact. Fear. Excitement. Enrapture. Shame. Whatever it is. They needed to hear this and then you have to write it well on the other side.

**John:** Yeah. So with Frankenweenie that scene had to exist in the movie or else a lot of the other dominoes wouldn’t have fallen correctly. But it needed to be a good scene that actually would last in the movie. So that’s the crucial thing.

All right, speaking of crucial scenes that need to stay in their movies. Let’s take a look at the first three pages–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Of some of our different scripts here. We have three entries here. So for people who are new to the Three Page Challenge if you go to johnaugust.com/threepage you can submit the first three pages of a script. It could be a TV script or a feature script. It goes into a big bucket and every once and a while Megana goes through all those scripts in that big bucket and picks several of them for us to discuss on the show. This is not a competition. This is just an exhibition. We are looking at pages that people submitted.

Sometimes they’re great. Sometimes they have real challenges. We tend to focus on the ones that have things that we can talk about, so either things that they’re doing really, really well on the page, or things that could be done better. So we have three of them to talk through. If you want to read along with us you can follow the link in the show notes to the PDFs you can download and go with us. But Megana if you could start us out with a summary of this first one. Trickster: Night of Kitsune by Hiroshi Mori.

**Megana Rao:** In 1920s Japan Tsuneko, a woman in her 20s, hides with her daughter, Etsuko, 13, in the backroom of a house as a mob of angry villagers accuse Tsuneko of being a fox devil. Her husband, Mongaku, relents to the crowd’s demands and the villagers drag her away. The villagers bury up to her neck in the middle of the town square. She’s then ripped apart by dogs. They tell Mongaku to behead her with a blessed spear, but when he approaches the body has already disappeared. We then cut to a Manga comic page.

**John:** Craig, what’s your response to Trickster: Night of the Kitsune?

**Craig:** I am a big fan of Japanese historical fiction. I just love the Samurai Era. I love the Meiji Restoration. I love all of it. So I was excited. I had many, many, many, many problems and all of them I think ultimately turned on Hiroshi Mori’s issue with action. And I don’t mean action as in the stuff that’s happening. I mean the things that aren’t dialogue. I had some dialogue issues, too. But this is a good example of a script that needs to be re-approached from the point of view of description and visuals. And it begins with the very first line, “SUPER: OVER IMAGES OF A RURAL JAPANESE VILLAGE. JAPAN, TAISHO ERA, 1920’S.”

First of all, if you’re going to put a super and there’s a date it must be a year at the minimum. It can’t be a decade. 1920s makes no sense. It’s 1921, it’s 1923. But be specific so that we understand that you cared enough to place it in a year. But most importantly “over images of a rural Japanese village.” That’s useless.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** It’s useless. You’ve got to paint the picture. You must fill my mind. And I know what – I happen to know what those villages look like, and they’re gorgeous, and they’re fascinating. And Japanese landscape is often beautiful because it’s an earthquake and volcano prone Pacific Rim nation. So is it kind of terraced? Is it on the shore? Is it among the mountains? Tell me. I need to know.

The house, “In the storage area of a wood farm house,” wood farm houses in 1920s Japan do not look like wood farm houses in 1970 the US. We need to know what. “TSUNEKO, late 20’s, with haunting, piercing eyes,” we don’t know if she’s male or female unless you are Japanese.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right?

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** We don’t know if Tsuneko is a female or male name, so give us a sense of gender.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about how you would do this, because I was looking for how is the easy way to do this, because you’re not going to say female. That feels clunky. So I think as quickly as you can in that next sentence find a way to flip stuff around so you can get a she or a her in there so we know a gender on this character who is so important.

**Craig:** Absolutely. So Tsuneko, late 20s, with haunting, piercing eyes. She crouches down next to…right.

**John:** That would do it.

**Craig:** That would do it. Tsuneko throughout is going to confuse me, emotionally. I don’t know why she isn’t more scared. She seems super calm. Then she’s screaming. Then she’s grumpy. And we go outside to a mob of ten villagers. Just so you know ten villagers isn’t a lot. Ten people on screen looks like three people. It’s kind of weird how that works.

And I want to know more about the mob. Because if you don’t tell me more about the mob then I’m just going to assume it’s like cliché mob.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about villagers and mobs, because there’s happy villagers and there’s angry mob, but they’re so cliché. You do need to just be specific. So one guy is identified as being a shopkeeper or something. Great. But I just need a better sense of what this is because I don’t really quite have a sense of the period either. Because you can say 1920s but I’m not quite sure what that looks like in Japan. How rural is this? Are these farmers? Is this a city? I don’t really know where I am.

**Craig:** Correct. The villagers are going to sort of tell you too much now. Villager 1, and Villager 1 and Villager 2, we talked about before not our favorite thing to see in a script. Villager 1 delivers one of the more expository speeches a villager can deliver. He says, “She is a fox-devil. She is a shape shifter. You had no money until you found her in the forest. You brought her here, made her your wife, and used her fox-devil tricks to make you rich.” Unless this villagers job is literally the village summarizer this is not how people talk, particularly in a high pressure violent riotous scene.

**John:** And Craig I kept wanting this to be night and it’s day throughout.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It feels strange to me that it’s daytime. It’s OK that it’s day. It can totally work in daytime. But it feels like a night scene to me and I feel like maybe I just have the expectations of torches or something. It feels strange. What was the inciting incident that got us to this moment right where we are? And I think all these problems sort of come back to a point of view problem. It’s the point of view, who are we supposed to follow? The husband who is the one who is ultimately going to go out there with the spear to decapitate his wife? Is it the little daughter? Is it–?

**Craig:** Tsuneko?

**John:** Who are we actually supposed to be following here? Because if we knew that then this whole thing could probably be shorter, tighter, and better.

**Craig:** I agree. And one reason to set it in the day counter to the typical mob at the front door of a home, and it’s very hard to do that scene in a way that hasn’t been done four billion times before, is perhaps to have Tsuneko look through a slat of wood or something and see them outside. Right now everyone is so disconnected. And Mongaku – what Mongaku says here, it’s really important to think always, just a simple question, what would someone say?

So villager one outlines in quite startling detail why the mob is here. And villager two confirms that. Adds on she made us poor. She tricked us out of our money. Get her. And Mongaku says, “Please. This is a misunderstanding.” Does that seem like something that would work?

**John:** No. Not in this moment. Not when there’s actually a mob there. You know, early on as things just begin to escalate a little bit, sure, but not when the actual mob shows up there to take your wife and kill her.

**Craig:** Yes. You would beg. You would tell them you’re sorry. You would tell them it wasn’t her. You would accuse somebody else. What you wouldn’t do is talk to them like they were grouching at you because they think you took their latte order at Starbucks when it was really theirs. “Move or we’ll burn your house down.” Um, they want to kill his wife. And what they’re saying is don’t make us burn your house. But it’s like well the house is not the big issue right now. I could build another one of those. I think it’s move or we’ll kill you. Right? Or we’ll burn you and your daughter alive, right? Or we’ll kill your daughter. It can’t just be the house.

So what’s happening, Hiroshi, is there’s just a lot of lapses in what I would call logical human psychology. You have to just really ask yourself every step of the way what would work. What would make sense? What would actually be said here?

**John:** Yeah. I want to pitch, going through this sequence and taking out all the dialogue until we get to, “This forest demon isn’t human. She can’t replace your mom. Forget you ever saw her.” If we took out all the actual real dialogue there other than maybe some pleading just to get to that point. Because it looks like they’re just trying to capture this woman and then you find out they actually think she’s a demon. That’s really exciting.

And so if we saw this action and the first time we get that they don’t think she’s even human is there that’s kind of interesting to me.

**Craig:** I agree. In fact here’s my – I like this, here’s our pitch. Here’s my pitch. My pitch is this thing opens with a woman buried up to her neck and she is swollen and she is dying and she’s looking at this little girl. And this guy sits down next to her and he says, “I know this is upsetting but I want to explain why we did this. She’s a forest demon. She’s not human. You need to forget you ever saw her. This is all good for the village. Here’s what she did.” He just calmly explains the whole thing and then says, “And above all she definitely was not your mother.” And you go, oh, that was her mom.

There’s got to be something about relationship that matters to the girl. It all has to be contextualized in terms of relationship or else it’s just stuff happening and it’s not particularly surprising or interesting.

**John:** Yeah. And that same dialogue delivered by a woman could be more compelling than by a man.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** There’s choices that could sort of make this feel more specific. And it all depends on sort of like what is it really tying into because at the bottom of page three we’re jumping forward and seeing there’s a Manga connection. So this may be a story within a story. Even so it needs to be–

**Craig:** It’s got to be a good story.

**John:** It needs to be super compelling. It’s got to be a good story because this is how you’re starting your movie.

**Craig:** 100%. It has to be awesome. Especially if the idea is that this is a story that somebody is actually drawing in a manga. Or it just happens that we jump ahead in time and that girl has been reincarnated as a young woman who draws manga. It doesn’t matter. Either way the opening here has to be incredibly compelling. That’s just how it goes.

**John:** Two little craft notes here. On page 2, “EXT. Village, Tsuneko’s dragged into a large two-story building.” So it’s apostrophe-S Tsuneko’s. I would say it’s a bad choice to do the apostrophe-S on things that aren’t a possession, especially in this case. Because you’re not saving anything and it’s just confusing. I can’t tell is it a thing that’s being dragged. It’s just confusing. Tsuneko is dragged. Or better yet, someone drags Tsuneko. Just show the active thing.

The next paragraph, “Tsuneko’s head bloodied and bruised sticks out of the ground.” Tsuneko’s bloodied and bruised head sticks out of the ground. Moving the head after the adjectives just makes the whole thing clearer.

**Craig:** Or making it a positive phrase and putting commas around bloodied and bruised.

**John:** Bloodied and bruised, yes.

**Craig:** But Tsuneko’s head, bloodied and bruised, shouldn’t run together. Also she opens her eyes and then she opens them again. There’s a continuity error even within the writing which is something you really want to avoid.

**John:** Yeah. And when you hear like “Tsuneko opens her swollen red eyes. Makes eye contact with Etsuko.” But what is the purpose? What is she trying to communicate?

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** This is a case where tell us why she’s doing it. Tell us what we’re supposed to feel because right now I don’t know. And that’s not helpful.

**Craig:** It’s not. And it also veers us away from this next bit which is pretty disgusting but I suppose where dogs eat her face. But if we understood that Etsuko was watching this happen then I would understand why I’m watching it. But if you take away the point of view of her daughter and just show her getting her face eaten which is a weird transition by the way from I’m looking at you to now my face is being eaten, then it just seems like you just want to show me her face being eaten.

Also, if someone’s face gets eaten by dogs they die.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t understand how she’s alive after that. Maybe because she’s a fox-demon.

**Craig:** But then if she’s a fox-demon then everybody should freaking the F out. Like apparently the fox-demon you can eat her face and she still lives. So, it just – yeah, there were multiple issues here and I think the most important thing to take away from this, Hiroshi, is fill the visual picture in. Ground all of the moments in relationships. Think about perspective always. And make sure that everyone says and does things that comport logically with normal human psychology in extraordinary, abnormal moments.

**John:** Yup. Agreed.

**Craig:** All right. What’s next?

**John:** All right. Let’s move on to Martha. If you could give us a summary, Miss Megana.

**Megana:** Great. So we meet plump 45-year-old Martha alone on Ladies’ Night at a Midtown Manhattan strip club. Martha is an enthusiastic and generous regular. She slips $100 bills into G-strings and everyone seems to know her by name. Martha asks Bobby who is “working tonight” and Bobby points him in the direction of the new go-go dancer, Derek. Derek’s friend tells him that Martha is a good time but she’s strong, so he should definitely have a safe word. Martha leads Derek out to her driver and car making several off-color jokes about how this might be the last time Derek sees his friends. In the back of the car Martha pours Derek scotch and condoms fall from the ceiling.

**John:** Great. So this is Martha by Caroline O’Riordan.

**Craig:** John, what did you think?

**John:** I liked that this was a big character. A big introduction on a big character. Martha is sort of brash and brassy and unapologetic and sort of seems very comfortable in her skin in a way that was interesting and compelling. I felt like the men in this story were not nearly as compelling and they didn’t need to be such bright spotlights. But I didn’t know really who Bobby was at all and this last stripper who got in the car. I wanted to have a sense of who he was just so I could sense what is the drama/comedy that’s going to be possible to happen next.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wonder just from the name Martha, I wonder if this is Caroline’s tricky way of saying Arthur. Because it reminds me so much of Arthur. A boozy bachelor who has a butler. And who goes around and lives the life of an utter reprobate. And then is going to meet somebody that kind of sets them straight. And so here we’re doing the distaff version of that. And I thought honestly what was working really well was I understood where I was. I could see the room. Geography made sense. Caroline was making sure that when somebody talked to somebody that they go there first.

The only thing I really would suggest she kind of look at is there’s a broadness in the rest of the world. I like how broad Martha is, but the rest of the world feels broad. So the guys, the issue with the male strippers is that they kind of feel like the waiters in Hello Dolly. Do you know what I mean?

**John:** I do. Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re like, ah, Martha. They don’t seem–

**John:** They’re not in reality. And they’re in sort of her heightened reality and they’re not real to us.

**Craig:** Particularly because they all behave equally the same. Like they all do the same thing in unison. I also think that her largesse should be larger. A wad of $100 – you know, when she got $100 bills from her bra. Generally it’s hard to see, you’ve got to really hit that number. When she throws money you’ve got to realize those are hundreds. That’s a big deal. She’s also been there for a while so it seems like she suddenly pulled that out and started throwing them around.

**John:** A line like, “Don’t worry, I’ve got a second one.” Basically she’s into her second bra roll.

**Craig:** Right. She finishes this wad of $20s and she’s like, “Sorry guys, that’s it. No more $20s.” And they’re like, “Aw,” and she goes, “And so I guess I’ll use these hundreds.”

**John:** Hundreds. Yeah.

**Craig:** Something to just really sell that this is like kind of a life-changing lady to be around when you’re a stripper because there’s a lot of money coming around. But keeping the rest of the world, like Bobby I think needs to be more grounded. The strippers need to be more grounded. Condoms should not fall from the ceiling.

**John:** I don’t understand where they came from the ceiling. I don’t get that.

**Craig:** Also how many condoms do you need?

**John:** You don’t need a lot.

**Craig:** Maybe like maximum three? You know, three seems a lot. Just, whoosh, condoms drop from the ceiling just seems a little broad. So, keep her broad, and keep the rest of the world super unbroad. Because what made Arthur wonderful, and I’m just again assuming that Caroline is kind of going in that direction, I could be totally wrong, is that he was pathetic. That ultimately he was sad. And you knew that because we were putting this life of the party guy in the middle of very regular New York. And that’s why it worked.

**John:** So a couple little small things on the page, just pickups, because I really didn’t mark this up very much because I thought it largely worked. First line, “It’s Sunday night at the “ultimate ladies night” in Midtown Manhattan. It’s not Friday, and this isn’t Vegas.”

**Craig:** I circled that myself.

**John:** I just thought I don’t know what that means. It’s not Friday, it’s not Vegas.

**Craig:** Also, you just told us it was Sunday in Manhattan. So why do we need the rest of this?

**John:** And the next line is great without it. So just drop that out. Third line, “Perched on a stool and cheering on the DANCERS like a blackout proud parent is MARTHA (45, white, big-eyed, plump).” I don’t get the blackout proud parent.

**Craig:** I don’t either.

**John:** So take out blackout. Proud parent, great. Because I get what you’re going for here is that she’s just really into it. She’s like a super fan here. 45, white, big-eyed, plump. Great. I got a visual for that. I would love to know a little bit more, I’m going to talk like Craig here, hair, makeup, and wardrobe. We can get a little bit more specific here. What is her purse?

**Craig:** Definitely.

**John:** How is she styled? If you want to go back and listen to my conversation with Lorene and Mitch about Hustlers, really sort of what these characters are wearing in these clubs is so important to tell us about who they are and why they’re there. I feel like you have the space here on page one to give us more about Martha because this is her movie.

**Craig:** That’s great advice. I also think Martha doesn’t really get a reveal. And with somebody like her you want one. She deserves one. To go back to Hello, Dolly, one of the great reveals in Broadway history when Dolly, even though we’ve seen her before, we haven’t seen her in her full glory. When she comes down the staircase at the restaurant. You want Martha’s reveal to be wow. To really be something. So I completely agree with those bumps there.

Here’s a moment where I think the first red flag on the kind of too broad rest of the world was when she tosses crumpled bills over her shoulder and stumbles away. “The boys lunge like bridesmaids vying for the bouquet.” Nah.

**John:** They can still have some pride, yeah.

**Craig:** And also because what you want is to see that behind her there is no party. The party is around her and what she sees through her eyes. And behind her is actually – they made an agreement to just divide it up. It’s cleaning for them. It’s sad.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve seen both Magic Mike movies and, yes, those guys are working hard for the money. But they’re not–

**Craig:** It’s work.

**John:** But it’s work. And they’re not just going to scrape or pounce on things.

**Craig:** Correct. Exactly. Bobby – I’d love to get a little bit more of a sense of his feeling about Martha. I don’t know what he thinks of her. “Martha,” she goes, “Bobby, great show. Your boys got me dripping as always,” which is pretty funny. “Martha, the reason I’m open on Sundays.” Well that just feels like a couplet designed to tell me that her name is Martha and his name is Bobby. You know? And Bobby has got to have – there’s no reason he should be matching his tone. He’s got to be like, “Mm, Martha.” You know, wow, I can’t throw you out. I wish I could, but I can’t.” It’s like you’re a huge pain in the ass and you’re just extra.

So we just need to see how the rest of the world is reacting to her. Even if he matches her energy, and then when she looks away he and the bartender look at each other like “oh my god, Martha.”

**John:** Yeah. The other woman in his club, like how are they responding to this high roller who is throwing all this stuff? And what is it like to be in her little bottle service area? There’s all sorts of fascinating things you could do here and you don’t have to do all of them, but I feel like it comes back to just making sure that the rest of the world feels realistic so that her bigness can really stand out.

**Craig:** Yeah. Last little thing I wanted to point out to you Caroline is that there’s no reason for Derek, the selected dancer, to not already know about Martha. Even if he’s new, he’s been watching her all night. So at some point earlier one of the guys would have said something. So, what could work is when they get into the car she’s like, “What did your friends tell you? What did the other guys tell you?” And he could be like, “Um, they said that you were a good time but that you’re stronger than you look and I should get a safe word.” Do you know what I mean? And then she sort of laughs and she’s like it’s so true. So that you don’t have to have this kind of feeling that Derek was just apparently checked out all night while this was going on.

**John:** Yeah. On page three he’s described as “half-naked, Derek shivering from the November air.” Be more specific about half-naked. Because is he still just in his G-string? Does he have his phone with him? Some of that information is kind of great because how vulnerable is he is a great thing to see.

**Craig:** Yeah, and again when Derek drinks the scotch, and you should point out by the way that he drinks, you don’t actually say that, he says, “Whoa, this stuff is intense.” That also feels like he’s from Iowa in 1920. He’s a male stripper. He’s drank before. Even if he doesn’t drink much or whatever, it just seems like he’s, again, he’s a waiter from Hello, Dolly. And you want him to be a guy who strips for a living in Manhattan. You know?

**John:** This is not Schmigadoon.

**Craig:** Correct. It’s not Schmigadoon. Bingo.

**John:** All right. Our final entry. The Many Lives of Newton Thomas by Sean Frost. Megana, can you give us the summary?

**Megana:** A mother and father carry a baby boy in a wicker basket out of a station wagon. They leave him in the basket at the entrance of a children’s home at night. They share a tearful goodbye with the father leaving several small trinkets for the boy before the parents drive away in the car. A voice over tells us that he’s imagined this night hundreds of different ways with the parents crying, held at gunpoint, or stopped before they can leave the baby.

We see the different iterations of the scene until the voice over tells us that he suspects that he’s afraid the truth is that his parents were sad but not distraught and decided to leave the baby of their own volition.

**John:** All right. Craig, what was your take on The Many Lives of Newton Thomas?

**Craig:** I really enjoyed this. I liked this, Sean. I thought that there was a really interesting concept here. There were a couple of little bumps in the road that I want to talk about that are somewhat technical. And I think the idea gets across faster and more effective than you might realize, because I think it was probably a bit too much of it.

I’ll start with the real simple things. “A tired looking MUTLI-STOREY BUILDING.” So we’ve got a type on the fourth word which makes us crazy. You also spell story “storey” which is in the British way.

**John:** So maybe he’s British.

**Craig:** Except that he says a parking lot and the British say a car park. So, you either have to be British or you have to be American. You can’t be both. What was interesting was I was confused at first and then when I got to Newton’s line, “I’ve imagined this night a hundred different ways,” I went ah-ha. And that’s fine, except for one bit of confusion and that is she’s holding a baby, wrapped in blankets, and she’s going to put that baby in a basket.

We understand that that baby is an infant. That’s what that is. But the baby says, “Vroom, vroom.” Babies don’t do that. They don’t talk and when they do talk it’s a lot of mama, baba, bebe, but it’s not vroom, vroom about a car. That’s more like a 1.5 or two-year-old, which is definitely not the sort of like I’m going to put you in a little blanket and put you in a little basket. You say baby boy. So I would change that bit.

But I thought it was interesting that the first part seemed kind of off and unrealistic. And then you found out why.

**John:** I took the vroom, vroom as being magical realism. It was impossible for the baby to say that, but it was sort of an imagined.

**Craig:** I would acknowledge that. That’s perfectly fine. But then I would acknowledge that somewhat improbably the baby says. But I thought there was a really interesting kind of iteration of things that happened. The one I would strongly suggest to get rid of is you say sometimes they cry, and so they’re sobbing as they put the baby down. Sometimes they don’t. And there’s a kind of the dad is stone faced and the mom is sad, but noticeably not crying. But the version that you propose is the one that’s probably real is the version where you say, “I do this cause I’m afraid what really happened was more like this.” And then you see that they are not crying and they are just sort of neutral.

And so I wouldn’t step on that. I would keep them happy or sad or scared or Iron Man comes in. And I would strongly recommend that in the bit where at the end, the reveal, Newton says – here’s what Newton says in voice over, “I do this cause I’m afraid what really happened was more like this. No tears. No guy running down the street – and definitely no Iron Man trying to stop a guy from shooting my Dad. Which is why I like to imagine it differently.” And I think maybe all you need is “I do this because I’m afraid what really happened was more like this.”

And then you just see them put the baby down, they don’t really care, and they drive away. And then you go back to the little baby. So the rest of it we’re seeing it. We get it.

**John:** Yeah. So as I was reading it the parents are so vaguely described, and it sort of makes sense that they be vaguely described, sort of generic versions, because he doesn’t necessarily know who they are.

**Craig:** He doesn’t know them.

**John:** But I went back and forth in terms of like should we see their faces or not see their faces. There’s a version of this where we don’t actually ever fully see their faces. But then we can’t really tell if they’re crying or not. So I guess you do have to cast people that you are seeing this. But maybe you just call out early in the scene description a somewhat generic like white man, white woman just so we get a sense of like they’re deliberately not specific. That he’s just sort of remembering them or imagining them as these people.

A bigger issue is I had is Craig how old is Newton our narrator?

**Craig:** Well, that’s a great question. I have no clue.

**John:** I have no clue. And it really does matter because if it’s being told by a ten-year-old versus a 30-year-old it’s a very different feel. And so I think we need to find a place on page one, either after Newton’s first line, or after his second line just to give us a sense of the age of the narrator because it really does change the read, sort of how we’re reading this. If it’s a kid narrating versus an adult narrating it.

**Craig:** That’s a fantastic point. I think in my mind I must have defaulted to young adult. But you’re absolutely right. We do need to know what we’re hearing there. And I don’t know if this is a movie or meant to be a show. It feels like a movie. And The Many Lives of Newton Thomas perhaps implies that here’s somebody who is imagining Walter Mitty style the different paths his life might have taken had it gone different ways. But it’s a really nice start.

**John:** Agreed. It’s a nice start.

**Craig:** It’s a nice start. Oh, one last thing, Sean. New Beginnings Children’s Home. Mm, we can see what you’re doing there. It’s too much. You don’t need that. You can back off the gas pedal on that one I think.

**John:** Yeah. Here’s the other thing. Beyond the name of it, every time we see a slug line with that, because it’s a really slug line and we’re going to be coming back to this a lot, even though we’re not going to really read it every time a shorter slug line I think will just get us through the page a little bit faster.

I would also cut on page two the masked figure says, “Do it or I’ll shoot.” The Mom reluctantly lays the Baby in the basket. The Masked Figure lowers their gun. The Dad sighs in relief. What? Just “do it or I’ll shoot.” Just get out of there on that line. You don’t need the rest of it.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** So both this script and our first script had draft dates on those. Don’t do those. Not necessary.

**Craig:** Don’t need them.

**John:** Have one date on your script. That’s great. But don’t tell us this is the second draft. We don’t care. It should be your best draft. This is the draft we’re reading. That’s all that matters is the draft we’re reading. So on the title page you don’t need to put what draft this is. Just put a date.

**Craig:** I agree. We don’t need to see your paperwork.

**John:** Nope. Not required.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So I want to thank our three entrants this week. Thank you for sending this out. And everybody else who sent in all of these Three Page Challenges, Megana went through a zillion of them. So thank you Megana for reading through all of these.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.

**John:** And if you have your own three pages you want to submit go to johnaugust.com/threepage. And we might talk about your pages on a future episode.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig, we’re running long but I want to get to one question. A question from Chris. If Megana you could ask that.

**Megana:** Chris asks, “In light of so many Americans believing that the COVID-19 vaccine injects sinister tracking technologies into the body or that the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting victims are all paid crisis actors I find myself wondering is it morally wrong to be writing conspiracy theory stories in this day and age? Have writers been inadvertently conditioning the public to think that massively coordinated government misdeeds are commonplace and that it’s good to always mistrust the government and the media because they’re all in on it? Could QAnon have happened without 11 seasons of the X-Files conditioning its viewers to be paranoid? And are we as writers making things worse every time we work a dark conspiracy into one of our stories?”

**John:** Oh, Chris asking a big question.

**Craig:** That’s an amazing question.

**John:** I think it’s a great question. I think we have some complicity in sort of narrativizing conspiracies and building a universe in which there’s always a twist and there’s always a secret bad guy organization behind stuff. So, yes, and here’s I guess the degree to which there’s any evidence to back this up is when you talk to prosecutors or defense attorneys for that matter when juries are in the courtroom and they’re seeing evidence they believe that CSI is real. They believe that all the stuff that they can do on CSI is the standards of how stuff should be working. And so they’re expecting evidence that is actually just impossible. And I think conspiracies are sort of a related thing to that in that people see things on TV and they start to believe oh maybe that’s how the world really works.

So I think I would be nervous writing a conspiracy thriller right now. But Craig I’m curious what you think.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I think we had talked in an earlier episode about the phenomenon of copaganda.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And presenting cops as kind of, I don’t know, just wildly differently than many of them are in the street and not paying any attention to the phenomenon of police brutality and cops as flawed or sometimes completely embedded with ultra-right wing philosophies.

The reason I love this question so much Chris is because I think it is at this point something that is – I’m not going to go all the way and say morally wrong. I’m going to say it ought to give strong, clear pause if you are thinking about writing a conspiracy theory story. Because we have absolutely fed into this. The insistence that the government is portrayed with The Shop. That’s my favorite phrase. The Shop. It’s even behind the CIA. It’s some secret thing behind the CIA and the NSA that basically can do whatever they want. They hear everything. They see everything. They’re completely all-knowing, all-seeing. They can do all this stuff.

Look at The Bourne Identity. The entire concept of The Bourne Identity is insane. It’s insane. And unaccomplishable. And we take that as commonplace. And the insistence that everything that happens in the world has occurred because humans wanted it to happen and that anybody that thinks otherwise is naïve and foolish that’s a problem. It has absolutely fed into this stuff.

I would at this point be so wary of writing a narrative that attempted to undermine what I think is the typical explanation and reason for things going wrong and that is stuff happening, stupidity as opposed to maliciousness. Confusion. Cowardice. Clumsiness. I mean, that’s why Chernobyl fascinated me. It was so human. There was no conspiracy. It was just human.

**John:** And to the degree that there was a conspiracy it was to try to cover up human mistakes.

**Craig:** It was just this mundane don’t blame me. You know? Which seems so true to all of this stuff. You know, I used to laugh at these people who insisted that George Bush did 9/11. And I’m like the same George Bush that couldn’t figure out how to plant one nuclear missile in the desert in Iraq? That guy? Really? No.

And the more we learn about government functions the more we realize that, you know, it’s not always well run. Sometimes it’s no better run than a bad job you had when you were 28. I’m really glad Chris asked this question. If people in Hollywood are writing these kinds of things right now I think they need to stop. And they need to really look at themselves and what they are encouraging.

There are conspiracies. We do know that Russia sends god knows how many bots to try to influence people. That’s a real story. Then investigate it like a real story. Do that. But don’t do the hyper-fictionalized government that knows all, sees all, and controls all.

**John:** Related I think we tend to create stories that are sort of one person against the system. And so the system is corrupt and only one person can bring it down.

**Craig:** Only I can fix this.

**John:** Yes. And I think that only I can fix this problem spills into real life because they start to believe like, oh, they don’t want you to believe this thing, they don’t want you to see this thing. You have to do your own research and really learn for yourself and basically don’t trust anybody. And I think what we’ve learned in this pandemic is that you do need to actually cooperate and work together to get stuff to happen and to get stuff resolved. And so beyond just the out-and-out conspiracy thriller thinking I think we need to just be aware of the degree to which we are feeding into this myth of one person alone makes a difference and that you cannot trust anybody else because the human condition is about trusting other people. That’s what makes us human.

**Craig:** And also just from a creative point of view robs you of relationships, partnerships, people coming together. We love that sort of thing for good reason. Because it mirrors our lives. Problems are not solved by one person. They are solved by people working together.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I’d love to see this change. And I’ve got to believe it is. Like I can’t imagine somebody sitting in a studio right now going, “Ooh, you know what we should do is a conspiracy theory. What really happened to those two planes that crashed, the Boeings?” No, no, it was because Boeing screwed up and they put the thing on the thing.

Yeah, you know, so hopefully.

**John:** I agree with you. I do think there is an awareness of this and I think we should just be vigilant about it and maybe just ask ourselves and ask the folks who are making our entertainment to really think twice before going full conspiracy.

**Craig:** Please think twice.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing comes from listener Tara and she sent through a link to a great collection of TV scripts and not just pilots. And so I will put a link in the show notes to this site. But basically it’s gathering up all of the TV scripts that this person could find online. And it’s really easy to find movie scripts because they’re out for award season. TV scripts, can be pretty easy to find pilots but not easy to find like here’s a random episode from the third season.

So, so helpful if you want to be writing television to just read the scripts and really understand how these scripts work on the page, how shows are formatted. You’ll find that showrunners tend to have a very similar format from year to year, season to season. If you want to copy a style copy the style of the shows that are actually produced. And I think you could spend many hours of your life reading these scripts and be a better education than probably any screenwriting book you could possibly pick up.

**Craig:** That’s a terrific resource. Thank you, Tara. My One Cool Thing is another game. I’ve just been hunting around. Sometimes I go through these dry spells where there’s just nothing good on the app store and then I picked up a couple. You know, the algorithm occasionally coughs up something at me and I go, ooh that.

This game has been around for a little bit. It’s called Circulous. It’s by Chain Reaction Games. It’s for iOS. It might be for Android. I don’t know. I don’t care about Android. And it’s sort of a puzzle game. You play a woman who has just been hired by a company called Circulous. It’s kind of like a Google/Apple corporation. And there is some sort of hacker enemy that’s trying to do stuff and you have to solve a whole bunch of problems.

So it’s kind of escape roomy in that regard. The puzzles are quite fair. They’re difficult but fair. What I love about it is the interface. It does this thing that a lot of games have tried to do and failed. You have your own laptop in the game. And you can tap on a thing that gets you to your laptop and you get notifications and you get emails and there’s like a little mini-browser inside to look up websites. And normally those are just awful in games, it’s almost like they had never seen. And in Circulous they’re quite good. They’ve actually done a really good job of creating that space that we’re really familiar with and making it feel quite functional and good.

So, I’m almost through with it. I think I’m creeping up towards the end but it’s really well done. I play a little bit each night before I pass out. So I highly recommend Circulous. Circulous from Chain Reaction Games.

**John:** Very nice. I will step in. It’s available at least on the Mac and iOS. So it may be available on other platforms as well.

And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Andrew Hart and it is the first appearance by Megana in an outro.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a good one. 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 I am @johnaugust. Craig also sometimes answers questions, but he’s not officially on Twitter anymore.

**Craig:** True.

**John:** 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 find the Three Page Challenges we talked through so you can download PDFs and read along with us. You’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter also at johnaugust.com. Inneresting has bunch of links to things about writing. So that comes out every Friday.

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 you’re about to hear with me and Sara Schaefer talking about three tips to getting your TV show on the air and the heartbreak that will follow thereafter.

Craig, it is a pleasure chatting with you.

**Craig:** Thanks. Good to be back, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Sara Schaeffer is a writer-producer-comedian and standup comic who has worked on a gazillion comedy variety shows, a lot of them on Comedy Central. Nikki and Sara Live. I’m literally going through your IMDb and you have so many credits Sara.

**Sara Schaefer:** It’s actually ridiculous.

**John:** So you know we’ve had people on the show before who have worked on a late night show, on a late night show for years and years and years, but you’ve popped around so many different things and sort of special events where it sounds like you’re getting together to put on one special event. Do you enjoy that?

**Sara:** Yes and no. So, I’ve hopped around so much in part because I’ve always been trying to get my own projects going, which is the big prize. I’ve done it once with Nikki and Sara Live on MTV. And that was an incredible experience and I’m always trying to sell another project that’s my own idea all the way to fruition. And so in order to do that because it is such a long haul to do that I’ve always taken jobs that are a little more short term. Well, I mean, a lot of times it’s not my choice. I will get hired on a show and it just doesn’t get renewed. Like talk shows. New talk shows are really hard to get going now if you’re not one of the institutional shows, or if you didn’t come from an institution. So I’ll just point to John Oliver and Sam Bee. They have been probably one of the only couple long-running shows. Even Amber Ruffin were talent that were incubated on another institution, like The Daily Show, or Seth Meyers. So that’s part of it.

But also I will hop around because I’m also a touring standup comedian. I’ve just always got my hand in so many different things. And so I like can’t be tied down, man.

**John:** No. We had Jen Statsky on the show recently and she was talking about her time.

**Sara:** Oh yeah.

**John:** I think she was on Fallon as well.

**Sara:** Yeah. She started right before I left the show. And I had a little goodbye drinks after my last day and she was there. And she was like, “I feel like we were going to become friends.” And I was like I know. I mean, and we’re still friendly with each other but like we didn’t have that long term working together friendship thing take place. But yeah.

**John:** One new show that you’re working on right now that will not get canceled because it’s entirely your show is the Schaefer Shakedown, the podcast.

**Sara:** That’s right. Nobody can cancel it. Because I’m the only person that works on it. There’s no money on the line. And there’s literally nothing involved other than my own desire to do it, so that’s good.

**John:** So Episode 7 of your show you shared your secrets for getting a TV series to air in three easy steps. And I thought we might listen to a little clip.

**Sara:** Sure.

[Clip plays]

**Sara:** Hi everyone. For today’s tutorial I’ll be showing you how to sell a TV show in just three simple steps. Step one, come up with an original idea or recycle an old idea that’s been done one million times, whatever your personal preference. Step 1A, tell your agent about the idea. Now if you’re curious how to get an agent I recommend checking out my other YouTube video entitled How To Get A Hollywood Agent in 600 Easy Steps.

So now that you’ve got your agent it’s time to tell them about your idea. Step 1B. Get feedback from your agent who will change the idea until it is good enough to pitch. To a network? No, not yet. You must first complete Step 1C. Finding a production. Now you will pitch your idea to various production companies. If one of them likes your idea you will work with them. Step 1D. Prepare the pitch with the production company. They will help you change the idea until it’s good enough for pitching. This can take several months to several years because they’ll also be insistent on finding a big name director or celebrity to attach. Sometimes big name directors and actors go on long vacations or are shooting a movie in New Zealand, so this can take time. While you’re waiting, I recommend taking up a hobby, like drinking.

[Clip ends]

**Sara:** That’s only the beginning.

**John:** Yes. So, I guess I’ll start with a question. Sara, how dare you? Because Craig and I have been doing this for 506 episodes and you just came out and just said it. You just laid the whole thing out. And what’s weird is that there are jokes in there. There’s funny writing within it but it’s also actually just honest about what the whole process is. And it’s just, ugh, I felt sick but seen as I listened to it.

**Sara:** You know, I always write, I fully write my podcast out. And then will riff as I go with it. But I was writing this episode and at first, I mean, I didn’t have this idea in my head. I always usually do on each episode I’ll do at least one little audio sketch like that one. And a lot of times I have the idea and then I’ll build the episode around it. But this time I was just writing my feelings about just being so frustrated with my career at this point. And so I decided to explain like you got to do this and this, because I was talking about how it’s hard for everyone in this business to make it, but if you have like just a little leg in, like if you’ve got fame, power, if you know somebody, if your dad is somebody important that it just greases the wheels a little bit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Sara:** And I was like if I could just get past the first step. And so I started to write that out. And then I was like oh this could be a funny YouTube tutorial. And I had to stop and rewrite that whole part and really think it through. So it really came from me just wanting to explain to people what you go through and it just worked very well in that format with the sort of monotone cheerfulness.

**John:** Step 1H part of it all. What I think is helpful is it’s a useful thing for young writers or people who are trying to make it in this business to send back to their parents to explain this is what I’m going through. Because there are so many steps where it’s like, yay, and I had a really good meeting, and they’re going to make an offer. Or you got a yes but there’s not an official offer. And you’re like what does that actually mean. And you explain it’s like, no, you’re waiting for the official offer even though you have the yes. It could be months and months and months before there’s anything like a deal. And that’s just to go to the next place which is to pitch to the next people.

**Sara:** Yeah. I think that is also why sometimes I feel defensive about that I’ve quit on my ideas sometimes. I go I didn’t quit. I got to a major obstacle that was so heartbreaking that I couldn’t move forward with it on my own anymore. It was too sad. Or I don’t even go out the gate with some ideas I have because I don’t have the energy to go through all those steps again and it’s so frustrating. And I think that I’ve had a lot of people, I had no idea that this video was going to go as far as it did. And I was like, oh, I really hit a nerve with people.

And I got a lot of people saying all those things you said like this is painful, I hate you, why are you trying to murder me. And then I got a lot of like I sent this to my family so they can understand. And everyone is talking about how far in the steps they’ve gone. I’m like I’ve gone all the way to the end once. And I’ve done every step between. And it’s just I think it’s the length of time it takes and how – and I say this at the end, at any moment it can just go away with no explanation. [laughs]

**John:** So in this pandemic, in this age of Zoom, I had a project which we were about to take out and then the pandemic hit, so it became all Zoom pitches. And there were so many times where we’d go out and we’d be pitching to a production entity or to a network or streamer and it would go through and it was like, yay, that was fantastic. And like, oh, they’re going to make a deal. And then, oh no, they changed the entire regime. It’s like twice we went to the same place and it’s like, oh no, the entire management structure has changed, which you referenced in this video. You could actually shoot your entire show and just like it never airs because the new people don’t want it on the air.

**Sara:** Yeah. That’s happened to multiple people I know where they went all the way, and it doesn’t make sense to me still, but even especially to someone who is not in this business. Why would a company spend so much money on something, it’s made, it’s in the can, and then to not put it on TV? It just is wild to me.

And I think you and I know reasons why. There is more money that has to be spent to take it all the way to that final step. And they maybe just want to cut their losses at that point. But it’s so demoralizing and just absurd.

**John:** Yeah. So in some ways it makes me nostalgic for Quibi and just the fact that anybody could get a show on Quibi. It was literally like “Are you alive? Here’s your show on Quibi.” But you actually talk to people who tried to do the Quibi shows and it was incredibly heartbreaking. And then to make one of those shows and like, oh, your network doesn’t exist anymore. Who knows when someone will ever see this thing again?

**Sara:** The tales of heartbreak that I’ve heard from putting this video out, and just from people – it was also, like you said, you feel seen and not alone. I felt seen back because so many people – major stars that I like love and I’m like what problem do you have in your life, Seth Rogan, like why – he retweeted it. And I’m like, oh, this spoke to him. And that just really made me go you know what it’s hard for everybody and it is easier for some people to get the wheels turning, but it’s crazy for everyone. And dreams die all the time. It is just a testament to how – you know, so many people were like oh I’m not even at Step 1C. And I’m like do you understand how hard it is to even get to Step 1A?

You have an agent. That’s why I said at the beginning I was like oh I know if I put this out people are going to go how do I get an agent. And I’m like that’s a whole other thing.

**John:** It is a very, very different thing. A thing I think I would add to a future incarnation, or if you ever make the book version of this is that same giant celebrity who you want to get on your project will make it so much easier to sell. That giant celebrity is a giant celebrity because he’s attached to every other project as well. And so trying to get that person’s sole attention, that’s a thing, too.

And so it’s not just the movie they’re shooting in New Zealand. It’s just will you be his or her first priority ever? And that’s really tough. And so, yeah, even this afternoon I was on a pitch to a production company. And I’m trying to get this production company onboard. And it’s just – you know, at every level you’re still just kind of hustling and you’re looking for that extra element that sort of makes it like, oh, it’s sort of impossible to say no to. And there never is an impossible to say no to.

**Sara:** Yeah. Got to be undeniable! There’s always a way to deny somebody the goods. I’ve learned to take every victory and every yes – to take every yes in this process as a huge victory, knowing that even if it doesn’t go all the way and no one ever sees it, you know, you did something. And it’s hard to do when you’re not getting – in those very first steps you’re not getting paid for a long time, so that’s tough.

And so it’s always a balance between finding a way to make – I always say this to people. You’ve got to have your money maker lane and your dream lane. Sometimes those lanes converge and sometimes they don’t. And, you know, that’s always been my way. It’s tough though because sometimes I have said no to jobs, money on the table, because it was just money and I had a dream that I wanted to work on. And sometimes that doesn’t pay off.

But, you know, I wrote a book. It came out a year ago. And a lot of people were like, oh, this sucks, I’m just going to just stick to books instead. And I’m like what?

**John:** Oh god. No.

**Sara:** It’s just as hard, if not harder.

**John:** Sara, I wrote a trilogy and just the pushing the boulder up the hill for a trilogy is like, oh, you think you’re done. It’s like, no, no, you’ve got two more of those to do. And support. And put it out there in the world. So, it’s tough.

**Sara:** When I went into writing a book I had no idea. And then I was like I wrote eight books in the course of this process. And when the book was done and it came out people were like are you going to make this into a TV show or movie? And I’m like, sure, I’d love to. But do you understand – and that has stalled that process.

But I had one really amazing actress who I loved who I had no idea that it had gotten into her hands. And she read it, loved it, and was like I want to star, produce, direct, I want it all. And I’m like, oh my god, here we go, but knowing this is probably never going to happen. But just the fact that she read it and liked it and I didn’t force it in her hands. Like somebody just gave it to her I think. I don’t know how it happened but I was just like this would be so amazing.

And I had a little celebration just for that moment knowing that it wasn’t probably going to go anywhere. And it hasn’t. [laughs] You know?

**John:** At least this went someplace. So, thank you again for this explanation of the steps of this which I think will live on for many, many years. It will keep getting passed around. So that is a thing we know will exist out there in the world. You’ve explained it once. It never needs to be explained again.

**Sara:** Yeah.

**John:** Sara Schaefer. Thank you so much. I would love to have you back on the show for a full episode.

**Sara:** Anytime.

**John:** Fantastic. Thanks Sara.

**Sara:** All right, thanks John.

**John:** Bye.

**Sara:** Bye.

Links:

* [Courtney Kemp’s Deal at Netflix](https://deadline.com/2021/08/power-creator-courtney-kemp-signs-netflix-deal-lionsgate-1234813246/)
* [Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park Deal](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/south-park-deals-trey-parker-matt-stone-1234995748/)
* [Hello Sunshine Sale](https://deadline.com/2021/08/reese-witherspoon-hello-sunshine-acquired-blackstone-venture-r-kevin-mayer-tom-staggs-1234807439/?fbclid=IwAR2BTj1Qpmgxv7-1rQIDJFObtsTE7noAIKfXqTX3FVaZ1p-s5qUN79BODGQ)
* [Frankenweenie](https://www.disneyplus.com/movies/frankenweenie/msxVowQvL18k)
* [Trickster: Night of the Kitsune by Hiroshi Mori](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F05%2FTrickster-Night-Of-The-Kitsune_3Page.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=1a05c101fbb1b815b66977e9a5a07369a818c6fa2e8e28426a6d08949f1fd148)
* [Martha by Caroline O’Riordan](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F06%2FMartha_Caroline-ORiordan3.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=b0776dca79a91180707f676b8f2900eaa4f962fedaedefde4cf9d6d4aee9578d)
* [The Many Lives of Newton Thomas by Sean Frost](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F05%2FTMLONT-Three-Pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=1e7a0d0abf0e46eb4b9f25ccead6588a5a7850829a1f50e6aa1bf69c717ad53d)
* [Collection of TV Scripts](https://sites.google.com/site/tvwriting/)
* [Circulous Game](https://www.chainreactiongames.org/circulous/)
* [Sara Schaefer’s Twitter Clip](https://twitter.com/saraschaefer1/status/1421622886574395393)
* [Schaefer Shakedown](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-schaefer-shakedown/id1565766154)
* [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/)
* [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 Andrew Hart ([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/512standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/craft-compendium).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hi. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 510 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today we are revisiting earlier conversations about the craft of screenwriting, start with what characters want, then looking at establishing point of view, and finally how we get our characters driving the story.

Craig, this is a clip show.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** Some of our younger listeners I’m realizing they may have never experienced the joy of a broadcast clip show.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Talk to us about what clip shows are.

**Craig:** Back in the day when we were young lads in the ‘70s and ‘80s the only television shows were network television shows. And the network pumped out, what, 22 something?

**John:** Sometimes 24. Sometimes 30. Yeah.

**Craig:** And enormous amount – for people who are young now – an enormous amount of episodes a season. And that still happens with shows like for instance our friend Derek’s Chicago Fire. So, what happened eventually is everybody would get exhausted. They would need a break, or they needed time, or an actor needed a break or got sick or something. And so what they would do is a clip show which basically if you were in season four of One Day at a Time you could just do a little thing like we’re doing right now. You and I get stuck in an elevator and we start saying, “Remember when we…”

And then they would show a flashback, but it was really just a clip from a show that had aired previously. And people liked it. That’s the crazy part. If you went to a restaurant expecting to get your usual and they were like, “We don’t have our usual but we have this garbage from six weeks ago,” and you went, “Yay!”

**John:** Yes! Now, I’m thinking about it and part of the reason why it was probably not so terrible to have clip shows back then is reruns were not the same thing. You couldn’t just go on streaming and find all the back episodes like you can in the Scriptnotes catalog. And so the only chance to see those moments again would be to have a clip show compilation.

So, “We’ve taken a lot of great vacations over the years, haven’t we dear…,” and then a montage of clips of how it all works together.

**Craig:** Great point. There was no YouTube. So you couldn’t just randomly access them. There was no back catalog to stream. If you missed an episode the only way you were going to see – there wasn’t even a VCR in the ‘70s.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So that was it. You had to wait for the clip show.

**John:** Yeah. And the clip show also would be showing you things you maybe never had seen because you just had never seen that episode for whatever reason.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it was somewhat new to you. So for some of our listeners some of this information may be new because we’re stretching all the way back to Episode 279. We’ll have Episode 358, 307. And so we’re going to send people off to listen to these three back-to-back extended segments of clips that Megana has picked out.

But at the end of the show we’ll be back to wrap up and sort of frame some stuff. We’ll do our One Cool Things. And for our premium members stick around after the credits when we’re going to discuss what we want versus what we need in our real lives.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, enjoy the show.

[Post Clips]

**John:** So Craig, listening to these segments about craft got me thinking about what elements of craft I’m still learning or still working on or at least have changed for me over the, god, 30 years whatever I’ve been doing as screenwriting. And one of the things that this pointed out to me I think in my conversation with Jen Statsky about Hacks she was talking about this one scene and she had done some kind of defensive writing. Basically it was a little bit overwritten, but it was overwritten to make sure she would have the runway to get the scene to land that way.

And I feel like I’m still sometimes stuck in a little bit of defensive writing, where like I’m trying to write scenes that are kind of idiot proof in a way, or at least are the safest versions of scenes. And I’m trying to get myself out of that defensive writing. Do you ever feel that?

**Craig:** No. That one I don’t have. I just try and write the scene as I think it should be and I don’t worry about anything else. But that’s if I’m writing for television, because I’ll be there. The difference between writing for something where you know you’ll be there and writing for something where you know you won’t is dramatic.

**John:** And that’s really I think where defensive writing comes in. You and I have both been in situations on features where it needs to be absolutely clear what is going to happen here and everyone knows what is important. And so in some ways you and I are anticipating it’s going to get cut down to this version of the scene, but I need to actually provide those little extra handles on it, then what we get will actually get shot.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think craft wise I’m probably still struggling a little bit with my need to understand the scene and see the scene and hear the scene completely before I start writing. I don’t know if it’s a struggle. Maybe that’s just the way I have to do it and that’s it. I wish that I could maybe be a little less self-conscious about that and just be willing to kind of sit down and write. But I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s a bug or a feature. That’s the god’s honest truth.

**John:** I completely get that. It’s that sense of like trusting that you’re going to be able to figure that out in the middle of writing it versus having a clear, cohesive plan going into the scene of how to do it.

And I’ve done both and I go through both ways. And sometimes I just know like, you know what, I’ll figure out what that is once I sort of hear the characters talking and sort of see how the jigsaw pieces fit together. But then again you hate jigsaw puzzles, so.

**Craig:** No, because they’re not puzzles. They’re just broken pictures. But I do find that even when I – really what it comes down to is psychology. I am comforted enough by own certainty that I now feel I can write. Once I start writing then all sorts of improvisation and discovery occurs regardless. But maybe that’s the blend I need is just to know what the rigorous structure, purpose, and place of the scene is and then inside of that safe confine I can play around.

**John:** Over the last few weeks I’ve had a chance to go back through some scripts that I’d written years ago because they’re sort of coming up to be shot now and it’s been interesting watching the decisions I made then versus the decisions I would make right now. And sometimes it’s that I felt I needed all of this connective tissue to make every little point sort of connect. And I was like, wow, I don’t think that’s going to survive through the edit and I don’t think I actually need it right now. So I was able to trim pages out and it wasn’t just like, you know, moving periods around and stretching margins. It’s literally I don’t need that link between those two things because it’s never going to actually make it into the movie.

So I think that’s just a thing you realize over time, too. It’s not even defensive writing, it’s just like I was being a little bit too perfection-y. I was making sure everything was just tied up with a nice little bow and I was like that’s not really what the writing is.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, we live and learn. I think we finally figure it all out just as we become completely detached from culture and start to get so old we don’t even know how people talk anymore in the real world. And then we die.

So, there’s probably ten seconds. Ten seconds where we’re perfect.

**John:** Pinnacle. At the acme.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And then it’s all downhill.

**Craig:** Yup. And then we just fall.

**John:** Coasting away. Time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Speaking of old things, I’m reading this book on extinctions and it’s great, which I’ll probably recommend as a One Cool Thing down the road. But in this last chapter they were talking about monsters from – I shouldn’t call them monsters – they’re creatures/animals from the age before dinosaurs. And the dinosaurs get all the attention because they look so cool, but there were other creatures that existed way before the dinosaurs which were perhaps actually cooler.

The two I’m going to single out are Dunkleosteus and the Carolina Butcher. Craig, you’re clicking through, can you describe what you’re seeing with Dunkleosteus?

**Craig:** Sure. Dunkleosteus looks a little like the war forged race in Dungeons & Dragons 5E.

**John:** Very much.

**Craig:** That of course is the race from Eberron, which is a different plane than your forgotten realms. I know everybody knows this. But it basically looks like a robot turtle fish.

**John:** Yeah. Or sort of like an armored shark, but if a pug if it were an armored shark, because it doesn’t have the snout. It’s just got an almost completely flat face. What you don’t see probably in this thing if you read the descriptions is it doesn’t actually have teeth. It has these two giant snapping bones. It’s like a nutcracker. It looks absolutely terrifying.

**Craig:** Yeah. That fish is on ‘roids. It is gorgeous.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Do not screw with that fish. I bet it tasted good, though.

**John:** Oh, so good.

**Craig:** And then there’s the Carolina Butcher.

**John:** The Carolina Butcher is – give us a description because this also seems like a Dungeons & Dragons creature.

**Craig:** Right. So the Carolina Butcher has a certain T-Rex like quality but it’s about the size of a very tall person, like the tallest, like Yao Ming-ish. And sort of stands on two feet. So it’s a bit like the lizard folk race from 5E, or maybe even the dragon born.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it looks like a man that could run over to you, slap your face with its arms which are somewhat useless, but because it’s so tall it’s about the size or your arms, and then just devour you in three gulps.

**John:** Yeah. So it is a relative of the crocodile. So the crocodiles are the distant cousins of what these things are, but there are whole species of these. And before there were dinosaurs these were the Apex predators.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And they were just running around on their back feet in many cases just chomping down on everything. And they are just wonderful nightmare creatures. And if we didn’t have dinosaurs this is what all the young kids would be playing with.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, this is – again, I just want to point out that’s what’s so cool about Dungeons & Dragons. Megana, you really need to, you know, you just need to start. You just need to start, Megana. You’ve got to just dive in.

**John:** It’s more fun when everyone does it.

**Craig:** I feel like Megana just literally disconnected her microphone, threw her headphones off. I just want to hear the sound of a car driving away.

**John:** [laughs] Craig, do you have any One Cool Things to share with us?

**Craig:** I do. My One Cool Thing is the town of Fort Macleod in Alberta. We came in – you know, when you’re shooting stuff you just think about yourself the whole time. It’s a selfish act to do. Because you have so much to do and everything is about what you’re going to see onscreen, and so you’re like why is that there, and how do I make this look like that. And it’s easy to forget that when you’re shooting on a location you are disrupting everyone’s lives. Granted, you know, of course we do everything legally and there are permits and permissions and all the rest of it. But you’re still disrupting people’s lives.

So, I just wanted to thank the town of Fort Macleod, Alberta for being such a lovely host. This is a pretty small town. It is closer to Montana than to Calgary. And there is in fact an old fort there. And it’s a lovely place and we came and disrupted their lives for a week plus. And we had a great time there doing what we needed to do and so thank you to Fort Macleod.

**John:** Very nice. So you arrived there with a village full of trailers and other things. You have to dress stuff. It’s just – I mean, for people who haven’t seen when a film comes to town, especially comes to a small town, it’s huge.

**Craig:** An army rolls in and we have, you know, multiple areas where we have our set location. We have our work trucks. We have our base camp which they call the circus up here in Canada.

**John:** The circus is pretty common.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s a very sizable set and lots of background actors/performers who I believe we pulled in largely from the surrounding area and from Fort Macleod itself. And they were all terrific and worked really hard. And so I don’t know why – this can’t possibly end up being an article on Kotaku, right? What I’m just saying right now. This can’t – IGN, please, you can’t make this into an article. There’s nothing there.

**John:** Craig, what’s so frustrating is they will go now through old episodes and things you said a zillion years ago and it’s like oh that will become an article now. I just feel like there’s some lazy stringers there who are sifting through the articles, the old transcripts.

**Craig:** I think they’ve got somebody who is just like whenever he talks about The Last of Us just wave a flag. I mean, I love the attention. It’s just like I have to be so careful now about what I say. I didn’t get yelled at or anything. I yelled at myself. I yelled at myself.

**John:** That’s what it is.

**Craig:** I just didn’t realize that the number of episodes would be a story. Anyway, Fort Macleod wonderful. Thank you very much for hosting us. You were lovely folks. And we appreciate it. And I hope that everybody there enjoys what they see on TV when it comes out.

**John:** That would be great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with segments produced by Godwin Jabangwe and Megan McDonnell. Going back in time.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** It is edited, as always, by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by William Brink. 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 I am on Twitter @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for the weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau, including the new 10th anniversary shirt.

You can also sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all of the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on want versus need. And if you were a subscriber to the back episodes you could actually listen to these original segments in their proper episodes and really know what the context was for these conversations. But I’m not going to pressure you.

Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I’m so relaxed.

**John:** Craig, what do you want, what do you need? Is that a meaningful question for me to be asking a human being in real life?

**Craig:** Of course. Of course. Those are maybe the two most important questions we ask people. What do you want and what do you need?

**John:** I wonder if want vs. need is a thing you see a lot in screenwriting books and a character wants a thing but they actually need a thing. And I wonder if it’s kind of a trap because it suggests that there’s a clean binary between sort of the [speaks French], like what you should – suddenly I’m pulling out the French here. But it’s a murky boundary between want and need. Sometimes it’s sort of hard to know the difference. But you think it is a useful framework sometimes for thinking want vs. need?

**Craig:** I actually think it’s a useful framework just for moving through life. When you’re dealing with people to understand what it is that they want and what it is that they need. It is important to at least understand where they’re coming from. The most important question to ask is what do you need because it’s going to be hard to do anything if you don’t understand what people need. I’m just talking about life now.

In screenwriting I’m with you. If we get super focused on need and want then we can – the scenes and the moments can get too purposeful. Too purposeful, weirdly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because part of the want and need thing is we actually don’t actually think about it much. We just feel it. It drives us subconsciously. We have to take time to stop and say what it is I want and what it is I need. That’s why people go to therapy.

**John:** That’s a good point.

**Craig:** Yeah. The fun part is the gap for me between what people want and need, or what characters want and need, and what they think they want and what they think they need. That’s an interesting space.

**John:** Absolutely. So it’s sorting out those urges and drives and instincts and behaviors and like what’s really propelling those. And that, I think, is useful analysis both for our characters and for real life. So, think about the decisions you make in your life and especially the bigger decisions about dating, about relationships, about where to go to college and like what do you want to do with your career. Should you stay in this city or should you leave this city?

Ask those questions in wants vs. needs in terms of what are your overall goals. But you also have to be introspective of like why am I even asking the questions. What am I hoping to get out of this decision? What are the real things I’m trying to achieve? Do I want money? Well why do you want money? Are you envious of people who have more money? Do you not feel safety and security? Are there primal things that are driving those decisions? And I think that kind of introspection is useful, divorced from just a clear want vs. need.

**Craig:** Yeah. We definitely hear from people when we’re writing that we need to know what our character wants. There’s some sort of like large wants, you know, I guess that cover the movie. But that’s really more for us to know. It’s kind of behind the scenes/backstage stuff. A lot of times the character just isn’t aware of it until they become aware of it. I like to look at Shrek because it’s such a clean, elegant storyline. What he thinks he wants is not what he really ends up wanting. It wasn’t even what he wanted in the beginning. What he wanted, of course, was to be loved. He just didn’t know that that was an option so he just went to a new want which is I want to be alone.

That’s not really – so there’s like the pre-want. There’s the want that you’ve lost. There’s the want that you think you want. It changes. I mean, what we want changes as we move through our lives and things smash into us. And maybe that’s what growth is. When we talk about growth it’s redefining what we want and also redefining what it was that we thought we needed, which turns out to be just something we wanted.

**John:** Got it. Craig, that’s very spiritual of you. I think you could be a spiritual adviser.

**Craig:** Oh god no. Is that what spirituality is?

**John:** That’s what spirituality is.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** I think you actually just delivered some spirituality right there.

**Craig:** There’s just psychology. There’s no energy. There’s no god or purple quartz.

**John:** So, I think about people who have obsessions or who try to optimize things and I feel like I really question why they’re optimizing. I’m thinking about my friend, Yurgin, who for the last 20 years has always been obsessed with getting the perfect audio setup for his home. And so it’s not just the turntable, but it’s like oh this speaker and this thing. And why are you doing this? Because I don’t think you will be able to hear the difference. And you’re not going to be able to enjoy the difference. Instead you’re going to spend tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of time and aggravation for something that is not going to bring you extra joy. And that’s sort of a fundamental framework for thinking about why you’re doing this thing that you’re doing. Is it actually increasing the joy in your life? Because that’s all you can sort of get out of doing that.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is something that we need or want with a character let’s say, and then there’s the manifestation of it. Sometimes what we need or want is something that we don’t understand or it’s socially unacceptable or it’s wrapped up in a weird self-loathing that we cannot acknowledge. And so it just comes out in this other strange way.

A character who is chasing the perfect audio sound that’s basically Moby Dick. It’s the same thing. And it’s a wonderful character to contemplate. And it’s a wonderful problem to contemplate. I love that sort of thing. Sometimes I think obsession is you want or need A but you can’t acknowledge it or understand it, so you decide you want to need B, which is unattainable by definition. And then you pursue it. That’s lovely.

**John:** Have you ever tried this reframing where instead of saying I have to do blank it’s like I want to do blank? And I do find it useful and sometimes just saying it aloud reveals sometimes that if I want to do something it’s actually stupid because I don’t actually want to do that. I don’t have to do that. I’m just doing this because either I feel like I have to or there’s some extrinsic force that’s telling me to do it even though it’s not important. I think reframing have-tos as choices can be useful for real life situations you’re encountering.

**Craig:** Yeah. I worry about if I start doing that I’ll never stop. Well, if you’re saying I’m only going to do it if I want to do it.

**John:** So here’s an example. I have to work out tonight. And it’s like, no, I want to work out tonight. And if I say I want to work out tonight the question is like well why do I want to work out tonight. Well, these are the reasons why. Great. It makes sense to do it. And therefore I enter into the workout with a different headspace.

**Craig:** A different space. There are certain parts of things where like I want to do a particular project, I truly, truly do. but while I’m doing it there are going to be days where I’m just like I don’t want to do it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So there’s like the large want, there’s the mini wants inside, and sometimes you just have to discipline yourself because, you know, you got to.

**John:** We’ve talked about this a hundred times on the show about our characters. That you have the grand I Want song stuff, but within scenes, within the actual choices you’re making minute-by-minute in real life you’re making smaller want decisions. And those are right there.

**Craig:** Yeah. And sometimes the little wants smash into the big wants and they contradict. And so that’s, you know, conflict.

**John:** Yeah. You want to be healthy and thin and you also want to eat five chocolate donuts. And that’s the tension.

**Craig:** That doesn’t actually seem like a real problem for me. I don’t see healthy and – we’re going to die. Right? We’re going to die. But, donuts.

**John:** Donuts.

**Craig:** Donuts are good right now.

**John:** Donuts are delicious.

**Craig:** Five is a lot.

**John:** If we go back to a really early episode, like Episode 5, How Not to be Fat as a Screenwriter, so you yourself have made certain choices to limit certain things.

**Craig:** Yes. I just want to live a little bit longer. That’s all. Just a little bit.

**John:** Last bit of advice I would offer to people is consider the value of satisfying, which is basically deciding what is good enough, and like good enough is good. And better is not generally better. And so look for what is the standard you want to hit and hit that standard and then not try to exceed it unless there’s a real good reason to exceed it.

**Craig:** I think we’ve done that with this bonus episode.

**John:** That’s really, for example, this was a clip show that was good for the people who wanted this stuff, but it met our time constraint needs. Craig, we’ve done it again.

**Craig:** We’ve done it again.

**John:** Thank you, sir.

**Craig:** Thanks, John. See you next time.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Episode 279, What Do They Want?](https://johnaugust.com/2016/what-do-they-want)
* [Episode 358, Point of View](https://johnaugust.com/2018/point-of-view)
* [Episode 307, Teaching Your Heroes to Drive](https://johnaugust.com/2017/teaching-your-heroes-to-drive)
* For more on character wants check out John’s blogposts: [Rethinking Motivation](https://johnaugust.com/2008/rethinking-motivation) and [What Does He Want](https://johnaugust.com/2007/what-does-he-want).
* Creatures before Dinosaurs: [Dunkleosteus](https://www.fossilguy.com/gallery/vert/placoderm/dunkleosteus/index.htm) and the [Carolina Butcher](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-species-crocodiles-there-was-carolina-butcher-180954636/)
* [Fort Macleod](https://fortmacleod.com/play-here/tourism/)
* [Get our new 10th Anniversary T-Shirts](https://cottonbureau.com/products/for-all-time#/10278066/tee-men-standard-tee-military-green-tri-blend-s)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by William Brink ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) (with segments by Godwin Jabangwe and Megan McDonnell!) 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/510standard.mp3).