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The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/unions-and-guilds).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 485 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we make good on our promise to explain Hollywood’s guilds and unions. Then we’ll tackle the problem of good and evil, law and chaos, as it relates to character alignment and whether it’s helpful for writers to be thinking along these axes. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will talk about the screenwriting guru/QAnon connection which is as obvious and obnoxious as you’d think.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh, I can’t wait. Can’t wait.

**John:** Yeah. But before we get into any of this, Craig, I know you are a person who loves puzzles.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** I suspect you also love mysteries.

**Craig:** I love mysteries.

**John:** I could see you in another life becoming a detective.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, I have a mystery for you to help me solve. And there is an answer. I promise.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** Since about Thanksgiving a thing I’ve noticed is when I wake up in the mornings my fingers smell sweet. Not like maple syrup, but kind of like an agave syrup. Just they smell genuinely sweet. And this was incredibly puzzling to me. I wondered what could be going on.

I found what the answer was. But I’m curious what your process might be towards figuring out what was going on.

**Craig:** OK. Well, I suppose the first thing I would do is to try and determine when the crime occurred. So, before I would go to bed I would very carefully smell and taste my own fingers to make sure that they weren’t already sweet.

**John:** And, yes, I smelled my fingers before going to bed and they did not smell sweet. It’s only when I woke up in the morning that they smelled sweet.

**Craig:** Interesting. So then the next thing I would do would be to figure out if there was something where maybe inside of my pillowcase or something that there was some sort of – maybe there was something in there that was rubbing off on my fingers. So I would check the bedding, for instance.

**John:** Yeah. And so I did check that. And I noticed nothing – like my pillowcases did not smell like it. My pillow didn’t smell like it. I couldn’t find that smell anywhere else. It was only on specifically my fingers.

**Craig:** Fingers. Next thing I would ask is are you wearing any sort of mouth appliance at night.

**John:** I am. I wear a mouth guard at night.

**Craig:** Ah-ha.

**John:** I could not imagine sleeping without a mouth guard.

**Craig:** OK. So now what I’m wondering is when you wake up in the morning and you’re smelling the sweetness on your fingers is it after you’ve removed your mouth guard or before?

**John:** It is both.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** So before I’ve taken it off I do smell it and I still smell it after I take it out.

**Craig:** OK, so it’s not for instance perhaps you’ve done a good job scrubbing and cleaning your mouth guard and gotten some residual toothpaste on it or something like that.

**John:** Yeah. That would be a natural thought, but no.

**Craig:** Right. And it’s not for instance that you’ve left any sort of toothpaste residue around.

**John:** No. Nothing. And I would say it’s not minty. I don’t want to – it smells more like kind of like a syrup. I don’t want to go typically maple syrup, but it’s that kind of sweet. Or sort of like baked goods sweet.

**Craig:** Hmm. Mm. OK. All right. I’m now engaging my literal gray cells. My little gray cells.

**John:** How about this. Why don’t we keep talking about the mystery as we go through this episode, so we can actually get to some of the screenwriting stuff? But we’ll come back to this mystery, because there will be answer by the end, I promise.

**Craig:** Great. Like in between–

**John:** You won’t have to flip to the back of the book.

**Craig:** Right. Like in between our topics. OK, great.

**John:** All right. So some follow up. In a previous episode we talked about, or I sort of brought up that I never see female characters grappling with ethical concerns. And some people wrote in with some suggestions. But one of the best ones I thought was Joshua who writes, “In Contact the character of Dr. Ellie Arroway, played by Jodie Foster, is ultimately forced to reconcile her atheism with a transcendent experience she cannot prove, culminating in a memorable congressional hearing where we see her struggling mightily to make sense of what she’s gone through and what it means for how she sees the world and herself.” Let’s listen to a clip.

**Male Voice:** Then why don’t you simply withdraw your testimony and concede that this journey to the center of the galaxy in fact never took place?

**Jodie Foster:** Because I can’t. I had an experience I can’t prove, I can’t even explain it. But everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real. I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever, a vision of the universe, that tells us undeniably how tiny and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are. A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves. That we are not – that none of us are alone. I wish I could share that. I wish that everyone, if even for one moment, could feel that awe and humility and that hope…but…that continues to be my wish.

**John:** So that’s not quite what I’m talking about in terms of an ethical concern. It’s a revelation that I don’t often see female characters have, but it’s not the ethical concern that I’m thinking about in terms of like 12 Angry Men.

**Craig:** Right. I love that movie, but that’s the part of the movie that I don’t particularly love because it seemed kind of forced in there. There was a slight sense of an engineered ethical conflict when in fact because we were sort of on the journey with her we kind of got it. There actually really isn’t – she’s not struggling mightily to make sense of what she’s gone through because there’s a pretty clear explanation. Aliens did stuff. [laughs] You know? How they did it and why they did it that way they kind of explain. So, there’s not really a question of did I see a ghost or was it something else. So, I agree with you, not quite what we’re getting at.

**John:** Yeah. But what I do like about that example is that is a character who is encountering a moment and her being male or female is not relevant to this. And that we more often see a male character in that spot. So I do want to give it some partial credit for that reason.

**Craig:** Partial credit.

**John:** Let’s also give partial credit to the eight sequence structure. So we talked about this in Episode 483 and we were very dismissive of this idea of an eight sequence structure. A colleague and classmate, Scott Murphy, he went through USC at the same time I did, we were in different programs. He was in the graduate screenwriting program and I was in the Stark producing program. But he said that at USC they actually taught that. And that’s how they taught that. And so he felt it was a little unfair that we were dismissing it based on kind of the first Google result I got, which I guess that is kind of true. I hadn’t done any deep research.

And he says that the first thing that I brought up was the most extreme version of sort of a labeling of what all those sequences would be. And that really the point in teaching eight sequence structure is to get people thinking about sequences rather than 30-page acts. And to really be thinking about sequences having a beginning, a middle, and an end, which sounds more like the kinds of things that you and I would say. There’s a notion of scenes, there’s a notion of sequences, and they build out to become bigger things.

So I want to give some partial credit to this idea of sequences rather than capital-S Structure.

**Craig:** I still don’t quite know what the value is in terms of teaching people how to create something, because while it is true that you can break these things down into sequences, I mean, you could also break it into sub-sequences and have a 16 sequence structure. But the real question is well what do I write in the sequence. So there’s supposed to be a sequence here but what am I supposed to do? And what if it doesn’t fit inside of this? And what if it’s just a simple moment? It feels pedantic.

**John:** And pedantic also in the sense of like I can understand why it is maybe a useful teaching way to get people to think about smaller blocks of story rather than 30 pages, you know, thinking about something that’s achievable, and beginning, middle, and end. But it’s also really clear to me how a way of teaching something can quickly morph into becoming a prescribed formula for how things have to work. And it feels like maybe that’s the mistake I was making at looking at this one sheet, but also what I worry about sort of over-generalizing this eight sequence structure is that this may be a useful way to teach people how to build up blocks that sort of become a bigger thing and understand what sequences are. But it’s not the magical formula.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think when you mistake the formula for the actual reality of the script that’s the problem.

**Craig:** I could definitely see myself teaching a class, something that would arrive at an eight sequence structure. But I would kind of want to begin with one sequence structure. Meaning let’s just talk about what your story is from beginning to end in a very big sort of bird’s eye view. So that we understand the rough movement of it. That’s one sequence.

Now let’s divide that into two sequences. So, halves of that big thing. Let’s talk about what happens in this first half. Now, great, we’ve done that. Now let’s divide each one of those again. And lo and behold, just like that, you’ve got yourself–

**John:** You’re getting there.

**Craig:** You’re getting there. You get yourself four and you do it again. And off you go.

**John:** Yeah. And we’ve often talked about there’s a fractal quality to storytelling is that like there should be movement within a scene. There needs to be movement within a sequence. Movement within whatever you want to call an act to get to this whole story. And so every scene is like its own little movie. Every sequence is like its own little movie. So I can understand, again, why it is helpful to be thinking that way as you’re teaching. I just worry then coming back and trying to impose that as capital-S Structure. And any time somebody brings up structure my [unintelligible] just immediately come up because I feel like that’s, you know, you’re giving us a formula and that’s not going to work.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s not going to help me make a thing.

**John:** So, one revelation of this past week is Megana has gotten in a bunch of emails about IP stuff and we now have an umbrella term for it. We’re going to call this Mockable IP.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** So the things like the Slinky Movie, mockable IP. Josh who is pitching sort of a packing peanuts or plywood thing, he said the criteria for a mockable IP is the product should be something real that a company sells. It should be something that makes zero sense as a movie but you can still see someone from the company pitching it to a studio executive’s office. And, third, that it will never, ever be a movie no matter what. Those feel like useful criteria for us to be thinking about with these kinds of IP.

**Craig:** Well, that’s where I disagree with Josh. It was number three.

**John:** You think some of these things will happen?

**Craig:** I think in fact they must be possibly a movie. For us to consider it, because otherwise again we can come down to things like gravel. For us to consider it it has to be something that you know what they might make this. If we talk about, like Slinky, we would do that all the time, and they did it. And we were scooped and they did it. And, yeah. So it has to be something that can be a movie.

**John:** Maybe this number three is like they could make it, but it would immediately be mocked. The mockability, I guess that is begging the question literally. But that’s a crucial part of this.

**Craig:** Right. And good use of begging the question. Thank you.

**John:** Really, I was so excited when I realized I could use that term properly for once. But I also want to, as we talk about this mockable IP, call out a clip that was on the Stephen Colbert show, the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, by a listener who directed it, Ballard C. Boyd. It’s a great – got to combine two things we love in Scriptnotes which is Queen’s Gambit, the Scott Frank show, and Rubik’s Cube. So this was The Queen’s Gambit Rubik’s Cube limited series they were pitching. Let’s take a listen to a clip.

**Female Voice:** I wasn’t just handed my seat. I had to overcome so much. Sexism. A sprained wrist. Temporary color-blindness.

**Male Voice:** You may be the greatest natural talent I’ve ever seen. But you must master the opening move known only to distinguished players. It’s called “turn the left bottom middle forward to the front-facing part. It’s not like chess.” We don’t get to have cool names for things.

**Female Voice:** It may be just a block covered in little stickers to you, but to me it’s the entire world. Oh, also drugs. I do tons of drugs. You don’t know me.

**John:** So we’ll put a link in the show notes to the full trailer for that, but I thought it was a delightful way to combine two things we love in Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** That’s one way to do it. We got some other suggestions in here I see.

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Erica suggests Scrub Daddy. Now, I got to say, that’s possible because it has a face. It’s the goofy sponge that has eyes and a mouth. And I think there’s like a Scrub Mommy and a Scrub Baby. So, I could see a scrub family.

**John:** Yeah, little Scrubbing Bubbles. I love them.

**Craig:** Yeah. Chuck says Fidget Spinner. No.

**John:** No. Because one company doesn’t own it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not a thing. It’s a thing, but it’s not.

**John:** I guess there was the Emoji Movie which no one actually owns, but still I don’t think fidget spinner is going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. But emojis are literally everywhere, all over. The fidget spinner was a fad that’s already gone. I don’t think it’s a thing.

Let’s see, Philip from LA suggests Pogs. No.

**John:** I barely remember Pogs. They were sort of – I was in a gap between Pogs. It was elementary school but I think I’d outgrown them by the time they became a thing.

**Craig:** Pogs came back in the ‘90s. And, no, no. Nope.

Danny from St. Louis suggests Preparation H. Now, Danny, now you’re just being silly. This is real. You have to take this seriously. [laughs]

I like Sophie’s though. Sophie I’m pretty sure is touching on something that has been in development. Chia Pet. Surely that’s been, like scripts have been written right?

**John:** Yeah. There must be scripts written about Chia Pet. Or at least parody scripts for Chia Pet.

**Craig:** Or at least parody scripts. And then finally Matt, we do get this suggestion a lot, Pet Rock. For sure. But Pet Rock–

**John:** Dwayne Johnson is in it. It has a meta quality.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it would have to be a period piece because pet rocks did exist happily in the ‘70s and never after.

**John:** Yeah. I had a pet rock for like a day and a half maybe. And then I realized that it was just a rock with some googly eyes attached to it. And I stopped paying attention.

**Craig:** I didn’t understand the joke. Because I was too young. I got a pet rock. I was like seven. And everyone was like there you go. And I’m like, OK. But, wait, why? And they’re like, “Well, it’s kind of making fun of the whole idea of toys.” What?

**John:** Why would you make fun of toys?

**Craig:** Right. What do you mean the idea of toys? Let’s just back up to that for a second. So this is my introduction to irony. Pet Rock.

**John:** I think all the things we’re talking about, they have to have eyes. That’s really what it comes down to. If you have to add eyes to it that’s a problem. So, there was an animated Rubik’s Cube cartoon at some point, but it was like Rubik’s Cube and then they added eyes to it. Well that’s disturbing. Versus like Pac-Man, he already had eyes.

**Craig:** Well, the Slinky doesn’t have eyes, but of course Slinky isn’t a character. It’s about the people that made the Slinky. What do you think about – you know what, that movie, the Seth Rogan animated movie that was basically all just food.

**John:** Food. Yeah. And so they added food to it, but I think they got away with it because it was just so–

**Craig:** Dirty.

**John:** It was such an absurd concept. And it was really dirty.

**Craig:** It was dirty.

**John:** It was really, really raunchy.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was dirty.

**John:** Like Towelie is one of my favorite characters in South Park and that’s just a towel with eyes.

**Craig:** A towel with googly eyes.

**John:** Who is really stoned.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** Really red googly stoner eyes.

**Craig:** I remember the paper clip guy from Microsoft that everybody hates. It’s a paper clip with eyes.

**John:** Oh yeah. Clippy. Yeah.

**Craig:** And eyebrows weirdly.

**John:** Yeah. Well it’s important because you can’t get full expression without that.

**Craig:** Right. Yes.

**John:** So, Craig, interstitial here, do you have any more questions here about my sweet, sweet fingers?

**Craig:** Yes. This may be violating HIPAA. Do you have diabetes?

**John:** I do not have diabetes. Happy to report I do not have diabetes.

**Craig:** OK. I have another question for you.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Does this happen every single morning, or some mornings?

**John:** Every single morning.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s interesting. One possibility was that it was related to a food you were eating.

**John:** That was a thought I had as well. I thought perhaps around Thanksgiving I was baking yeasty things that maybe there was something about the baking or the foods I was eating that were specific to the season. But it continued.

**Craig:** OK. I have another question for you. Even though you like I are in the brotherhood of the bald, do you put any sort of product in your hair or any sort of skincare product that might have an odor to it?

**John:** The answer to your first question is no. I don’t use Rogaine or any sort of topical hair product. So it’s not that. But, I do want to say that you are getting close to the solution there. Yeah.

**Craig:** Interesting. Wait, what about Mike?

**John:** No, it’s not Mike. So it is my own situation here.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** The second part of your question was a skincare product. And, yes, I put on a moisturizer. The moisturizer does not smell like that though.

**Craig:** I see. I see. I see. OK. All right. Well we should probably take another break.

**John:** We’ll continue on and we’ll talk about unions and guilds.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So this was something we promised we were going to do I think last week. And there’s actually two kind of news hooks for it this week because – we’ll put a link of the Deadline article of Hollywood Unions Celebrate the Inauguration of President Joe Biden and VP Kamala Harris. The Most Pro-Union President and Partner in the White House. So all the unions and guilds were very excited and little tweets about that.

And also Biden fired the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. And then the replacement person for that. So there’s going to be a new person there. And I will say that doing guild stuff that the people who have been running NLRB has been a challenge for the WGA. You don’t want to go to them for help because they might side with the other side. So, those were two things in the news just this week that are related to Hollywood guilds and unions.

**Craig:** It’s a big deal. And John is right. You can’t really overestimate the impact that these things have on unions and the way they not only just conduct their week to week business but also how they go into negotiations. Because ultimately when you’re negotiating with companies as a union or when you’re trying to figure out how far to push things with management in between contracts your leverage is that maybe they’re violating the law. Or maybe there is an issue of law that is undecided that could be decided in your favor. Or, maybe there’s an issue in the contract that’s undecided that could be decided by mediators or arbitrators or eventually be heard by the National Labor Relations Board.

And if that government body is skewed to be anti-union you are automatically and reasonably way more gun shy about all sorts of things. The meddling that the government can do to hurt unions is not limited just to how they decide disputes. Sometimes it comes down to just aggravating paperwork.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When I was on the board way, way back when in the mid-2000s the Bush administration changed the rules. So every union must every year file a financial report that is publicly available. And basically under the Bush administration they changed the rules so you just had to report way more information. It was more burdensome to the unions to put it all together. And also it just was like you had to just open your kimono completely. Everybody should be able to see everything. And it was, you know, designed ultimately to kind of put their thumb in the union’s eye.

Over the decades since the big unionization movements in the early part of the 20th century the government has steadily chipped away. Steadily chipped away at organized labor and their power. And this is a much needed course correction on that part.

**John:** Yeah. So in this conversation we’re talking about unions and guilds as they exist in Hollywood and really only in the US. And so that’s necessarily going to be very limited to this because while there are international Writers Guilds they are more like professional societies because they’re not true unions where they’re representing employees. And we’ll get into some of sort of why the unique way we do it in the US allows for writers’ unions that wouldn’t exist or make sense other places.

And I started to put together a lot of links to the history of organized labor in Hollywood and I realized we are not a history podcast. We are going to mess up way more than we’re going to illuminate, but we’ll have some links in the show notes to that. Important things to understand in terms of background, the film industry is about 100 years old. It’s centered in Los Angeles. Radio and television was originally based out of New York. Even though more production moved to LA, there was still a lot of late night TV and news largely stayed in New York. That still exists. You still see the shadows of that in sort of how the unions are set up.

Interestingly, the first of the Hollywood unions IATSE, created all of this because they were the teamsters who were part of Broadway, sort of vaudeville, Broadway stuff. So it goes even back before there was film there were unions that were involved in the film production.

And, Craig, I remember when you were on Karina’s podcast did you play Louis B. Mayer? I’m trying to remember who you played.

**Craig:** That’s right. I was Louis B. Mayer.

**John:** So, this is a thing I did not know and I’ll put a link in the show notes to this, too, but I hadn’t realized the degree to which Mayer and the birth of the Oscars was really a response and an anticipation of organized labor.

**Craig:** Yup. So Louis B. Mayer, sensing that the artists under this control were starting to organize and come together and talk, and thus threaten his hegemony – and he really was the king of the council of kings – he very brilliantly created the Oscars because his theory was if you are possibly in danger of having to compete for resources with artists hold up a shiny trophy and they’ll forget about you and just fight each other for it. And that’s exactly what happened. [laughs] And continues to happen to this day.

So, the entire awards industry is in and of itself a massive distraction that not only gets artists competing with each other, but gets them competing with each other in a way that allows the entertainment industry to also make money off of their competing with each other. It’s spectacular.

**John:** It really is a remarkable achievement.

**Craig:** Remarkable achievement.

**John:** So a thing that’s important to understand is that when you talk about unions they only make sense really when you talk about the fact that there are employers and there’s somebody that you’re negotiating with and against. And so you can negotiate with the studios individually, with the streamers individually, but you tend to negotiate with them as a group. And that group that you’re negotiating with is the AMPTP, the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which is the Academy, which I got that confused when I first got out here because it seems like they’re two big organizations that run movies and stuff. But AMPTP is the collective body that we negotiate with as unions and guilds for our contract.

And you look at the different kinds of unions and guilds that there are, there’s a wide range. So you have actors, you have writers, you have directors, all of whom are sort of doing kind of intellectual labor, artistic labor. And then you have much more sort of physical crafts and trades peoples. You have grips and electricians and teamsters who are driving trucks. And you have all the other sort of unions that are involved in actual physical production.

And they seem so disparate and yet there are some commonalities, so I wanted to talk through some of the commonalities before we get into sort of why the different unions and guilds are positioned so differently.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So what are some common threads, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, all of us are working gig work. So, typical union jobs you work at let’s say the Ford plant building trucks. That’s your job. Year in and year out, your job, welder on the line. That’s what you do. And you do it at one place for one employer. In Hollywood everyone is essentially freelancing for their entire careers.

So, you’re getting work from movie to movie, from script to script, from edit job to edit job. Everyone is constantly looking for the next thing because our businesses are organized around shows and movies, not around the steady production of a single product, like for instance a Rubik’s Cube.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we’re not all together on the same floor, nor do we have longevity in a position or vis-à-vis each other or with one product. We’re constantly moving and swirling around.

**John:** Yeah. And we should say this idea of skilled labor, like welding is a skill and there’s training that goes into it. The same way that somebody who is working as an editor has a certain skillset. A welder has certain skillsets. But that welder is going to probably be working at the Ford plant for years and years and years and years and really has one employer. Versus this editor who is going to be hopping around from various jobs to various jobs. And it’s cobbling together enough money to make a living through many jobs rather than just one job.

There are exceptions, of course. There’s people who have been on TV shows for forever, but in general you’re hopping from place to place to place.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those are pretty rare. And similarly where somebody that is in a union as a nurse will have the potential ability to work at dozens of different hospitals, clinics, healthcare centers, etc., we’re more like professional athletes who can work for a single organization of teams. And our teams are Disney, Warner Bros., Sony, Universal, and Paramount, and their associated television networks and things like that.

**John:** Yeah. So there’s an oligopoly in the sense that there’s a very limited number of buyers. And so the big names, I don’t know if it’s 75% of employment, they represent a huge amount of the actual employment is to and for those people. So they have a lot of power because they are the buyers of note.

What is interesting about us as writers and which we should get into this is that we are doing work-for-hire. So intellectual property is commissioned from us. The people who are hiring us to do the thing, they ultimately own the copyright. And therefore as writers, as artists, we are an employee of the commissioner. So same with like an artist who is working at Disney animation, they’re drawing stuff but Disney owns everything that they’re drawing for Disney.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this works against us and it works for us. I mean, the only good part of this and we are unique in this regard here in the United States is that we can be a proper employer, therefore we can have a proper union. And as a result of our proper union we do have certain benefits that are better than some of the benefits that other similar artists receive elsewhere even as they retain copyright in their country. Because these large corporations here are exceptionally good at exploiting reuse. They’re really, really good at it.

Do we get enough of the share of that reuse? As sufficient amount as we should? No. Is the insufficient amount that we get typically more than what other people get in royalties elsewhere? Yeah, it is. So, it’s an interesting thing. We have a tiny piece of a very large pie which sometimes adds up to more than the entire piece of a very tiny, tiny pie. A little miniature molecular pie.

**John:** And so we talk about residuals and we talk about back-ends on things and that is an important part, especially for writers to maintain a career, but there’s other kind of fundamental union things which are also important. So things like worker safety and safety on a set. These are things that come about because of unions. Minimum hours/maximum hours. Just other sort of quality of life issues that are only possible because we have unions. So, it’s very easy to be myopic and only think about this in terms of how this works for a writer, but unions help everyone in all these different trades.

So let’s talk about the different unions.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, in Europe a lot of these other things that unions do like enforcing safety and things like that the government does.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Our government is less interested in mandating things and so you do find situations where in order to attract production and employment people will just sort of look the other way. I mean, very famously we have a massive problem in our industry with lack of sleep. We know that. There should be a statutory cap on how much you can work, how many hours in a row. And that’s it. No more. We don’t have it. I don’t know what the number is. I don’t know if there is a number.

I’ve worked 20 hour days. I’ve done it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** On set. It was terrible. Because you didn’t have a choice. So, that’s the kind of thing where our unions have to sort of step in where our government has failed.

**John:** Absolutely. So, things like – that kind of worker safety, but also it’s through unions that we have healthcare. In other countries the healthcare would be a national priority.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And we don’t have that here. Pensions are also through a union. So these are crucial things that were one sort of strike after strike over the course of time for the different unions.

So let’s talk about what the unions are. There’s SAG/AFTRA, which used to be two separate actor’s unions which then got combined together. They represent actors, but both in film and television and in radio. Other performers under AFTRA, I always get confused sort of what the boundaries were between this. I would say my general impression, and I think Craig alluded to this last episode, is that SAG/AFTRA is often fighting with itself more than it’s fighting the town.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, SAG in particular has a long history of kind of the bitter internal feud between I guess you could call them the more militant folks and the more pragmatic folks. Pick your adjective. But they’ve been struggling with that for a long, long time. And that all came to a head when they merged with AFTRA which was something the pragmatists really wanted to do. AFTRA definitely covered things like voiceover work for radio. I could never quite tell exactly how the division worked. But they are combined now.

They are definitely a much larger union than the Writers Guild or the Directors Guild. That said, they don’t have the kind of employment requirements that we do. You don’t become a Writers Guild member for life. I mean, technically you do, but what happens is if you don’t work after a while you become post-current. So you’re still a member of the union but you don’t get any of the benefits. You’re not voting.

**John:** You’re not going to vote.

**Craig:** You’re not voting. That’s the big one. You don’t have a say on whether or not for instance a new contract gets approved. You need to have some employment skin in the game for that. Not so with SAG. I believe once you’re a member you’re a member.

**John:** And that really does change things a lot. SAG has not gone on strike, at least during the time that I’ve been working for here. If SAG were to go on strike it would shut down everything because we have not just actors in dramatic stuff, but all of our hosts in late night. Those are all going to be SAG people. And so it would be a big deal if it happened. It hasn’t happened. Could it happen? Sure. You never know.

Let’s talk about the DGA. So DGA represents directors the same way that the WGA represents writers, but the DGA also represents assistant directors, so the folks who are running – keeping the sets running properly. UPMs, that class of sort of folks who are making sets function is covered by the DGA, which is odd to me. It’s very different from what we’re used to in the WGA.

**Craig:** Yes. Well in particular because certainly the UPM job and the AD job are not primarily creative positions. They primarily are positions involved with the management of a production. Scheduling. Coordination. Budget. The employment of others. Management. This is going to come up again very quickly when we talk about the WGA and the reason we need to talk about it is because there’s a rule, it’s not a secret, it’s a rule – management is not allowed to be in a union. That’s just a rule. Which makes sense. You know, because if your boss could be in the union then you just get out-voted by a bunch of bosses and then what’s the point of the union?

So what is a manager roughly speaking the way the government defines it is somebody who is directly in charge of the hiring or firing of other employees, or the management of their time and how they do their job. That’s management. Well…

**John:** You definitely see that in the DGA. You see that in the WGA as we’re going to get to. But you also see it in this next, the biggest of the unions I think, we’re going to talk about which is IATSE. So IATSE is everything else you can imagine that is probably a Hollywood job follows under IATSE. And there are a tremendous number of smaller guilds within IATSE, locals, who specialize in one area of it. So there’s classically the Editors Guild, which is underneath IATSE, and over the last year has had real frustrations with sort of the lack of attention being paid to their specific specialty within there.

Within each of these places, though, you know, you’ll see that there are people who are responsible for hiring for other people. It’s just a thing that necessarily happens where you’re looking at, OK, I’m going to be in charge of this department so I need to fill my ranks. There’s a management function there. So it’s complicated.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think if you’re talking about sort of foreman type position, that’s acceptable. Some employees have a higher position of authority than others. So, I get that. You know, a pit boss that works for a casino is still an employee. And the dealer is an employee. And the pit boss is looking. But the pit boss is not hiring or firing the dealer.

And in IATSE there’s probably not a ton of situations where there’s specifically – I mean, technically it’s always the producer who is hiring or firing. Sometimes it’s the UPM in the DGA. IATSE is a great example of too much of a good thing. It is – you want a union to be sizable enough that you have collective strength. That’s the value of collective bargaining. If you have a union that represents six people at one Subway, it’s not that great. If you had a union that represents all Subway employees, I mean the sandwich, not the metro, then they can get something done.

IATSE, what they’ve done is conglomerate a lot of unions together because individually there may not be enough say onset painters to have collective strength. But then they create locals and they get bundled together. And then IATSE is the meta bundle of all the bundles. But the problem is that if you’re in one of these smaller locals, like for instance the Animation Guild. You’re just not going to be able to convince IATSE, all 100-and – I don’t know how many people are in it, 100,000? You’re not going to be able to convince all of them to go on strike so that your 30 members can get a slightly better deal. So you’re stuck. And that is not a great arrangement.

**John:** It is not a great arrangement. And something you’ve often brought up on the show, a somewhat analogous situation, is screenwriters, feature writers, within the WGA. And that folks who primarily write features in the WGA can feel like their issues are not getting as much attention as TV writers who are the bulk of the membership of the WGA. That’s changing now and there’s – obviously people do a lot more of both. You are now a TV writer. But it’s a genuine concern. And so you’re always having these conflicting instincts to broaden your base so that you can represent more kinds of people and sort of protect yourself. And to specialize so you can really focus on your core constituencies.

And there’s not going to be a great answer for that. You know, we often will talk about videogame writing is very much like screenwriting. There’s clear analogs between how those work. And maybe we should represent and protect videogame writing because that is clearly going to become something that is like animation. We want to make sure we don’t miss out on that.

But, are we going to do the best job representing those videogame writers? Is it pulling focus away? There’s a lot of writing that happens in reality shows. Not just where you aim the camera, but also all the narration. Shouldn’t all that writing be covered by the WGA? Sure. Maybe. But are we going to lose focus in trying to organize that work? So it’s always tough. It’s always going to be decisions and conflicts.

**Craig:** Yeah. And we’re hamstrung a bit by the law, again. For instance, we can’t necessarily compel union membership for people that are working in Canada. In fact, we can’t at all because they’re not here and jurisdiction sort of stops at the border. So, in videogames there are a lot of people, a lot of companies, that are foreign, international, and they’re not American. And there are a lot of writers that are working overseas. Also the entire videogame industry is vigilantly anti-union. So, one of the tricky things is to try and crack into those places is you’ve got a company where there are 400 people, all of whom would love to be in the union and they’ve all been told you can’t be. And they can’t. And then somebody else comes along and says, “We’re going to successfully unionize four of you.” That becomes hard to do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then there’s suddenly a ton of resentments and difficulties and problems. So, they just cracked down on all of it. They are brutally anti-union. And this, again, is why the more strength and pro-union impact you can have at the governmental level, and it has to be the federal level. They’re the only ones. This is all federal. If you get that federal level then some of these things start to tilt your way. If you don’t, running up hill in shoes made of ice.

**John:** The last sort of evergreen issue I want to make sure we talk about is that we usually think of unions representing the minimums. Basically trying to raise the minimums and protect the people at the bottom. Basically to set a floor on things. And that they’re not especially focused on what we’ll call above scale. So scale being the minimum you could pay somebody. Above scale being whatever beyond that. So much of the work that happens in the WGA is above scale. It’s beyond sort of scale payments. And Craig mentioned earlier in professional sports the player’s unions are sort of similar in position to us in that they are going to set minimums, but most of the members are working way above that and are going to have issues that are not the same as the lowest members. And there’s a natural conflict there. I mean, the degree to which you’re focusing on those bottom line issues for people making scale versus people above scale. And it’s challenging to balance those two demands.

**Craig:** It’s made more difficult by the fact that a number of the people in the Writers Guild who are making a lot of money are management. They just are. Showrunners who are hiring and firing other writers. They’re management. And so the Writers Guild is engaged in kind of an interesting dance. It comes more powerful vis-à-vis the companies by representing those powerful members of management, showrunners. And in theory that increased leverage helps them get more stuff for everyone. I don’t know if that’s true though. [laughs] So, it’s an interesting thing. And it does create kind of weird situations where you’ve got very wealthy people coming out there and saying things like, “Everybody needs to strike.” And you look at them and go, “That’s not a problem for you. You could strike for the rest of your life. You’re fine.”

There are tensions within our union because of the vast disparity of income which is even wider – well, I don’t know if it’s wider than the overall income disparity in our country, but it’s up there. I mean, we have writers that are scratching by and barely earning the right to have healthcare and making maybe $40,000 in a year gross. And then we have writers who are making $70 million in a year. So hard to hold that ship together perfectly, or even well.

**John:** Yeah. It’s an ongoing challenge. And it’s kind of always been this challenge. And it’s probably only accelerating. But let’s talk about the WGA because it’s also important to remind everybody that there’s actually two WGAs. So there’s the Writers Guild of America West and then there’s the Writers Guild of America East. They’re technically separate unions. They are sister unions. And luckily, thank god, we get along really, really well. We haven’t always gotten along really well.

I’ve been lucky to be on two negotiating committees within this last year and honestly Zoom makes it so much easier for everybody to be on the same conversation. Because traditionally what would happen is the WGA West handles all of the negotiations for the film and TV contracts. So we deal with the AMPTP and the WGA East basically takes that deal and their members vote yes on the deal.

Usually what would happen is that several representatives from the WGA East would come out and sit in on all these negotiation sessions and say, yes, great, and that would be it. Or raise their concerns about specific things that are of concerns to the East members. In these last negotiations we had a full contingent of East folks who were in all of those Zooms and were participating and that was great. So I think things are closer than they’ve ever been. But it’s important to understand they are different unions and they are kind of representing different priorities.

Theoretically any member of the West could also be a member of the East. But the East also represents. They’ve done a lot more organizing in online writing. So, organizing websites that have writers and they’re going through and representing those writers, which is great but also very different and I don’t know on the West side whether we’d want – it becomes an issue of how broad do you go. Would they be a good fit in the West? I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t understand this anymore. [laughs] It’s pointless. This exists literally because it exists. It’s just – it started–

**John:** It’s just because of history.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because of history. But it has long outlived its actual practical purpose. To the point where the Writers Guild West processes residuals for all Writers Guild West and East members, mails the checks to the Writers Guild East for them to just put in Writers Guild East envelopes and mail to their members. We are done to that amount of silliness. And the arcane nature of how the council and the board vote, it all is an unnecessary – what do you call it? Cruft? If that what it is in code? It’s organizational cruft. There shouldn’t be a West or an East. There should just be the WGA.

**John:** Yeah. So traditional arguments against it is that what I said in terms of East actually represents some kinds of writers that are not sort of classically West writers. And, yes, West represents some news folks too, but I don’t know that we do an especially good job of that. Traditionally it’s been like, well, how do you have national meetings? How do you actually have somebody – basically you can’t get everyone in a room together. In the age of Zoom it’s become much less important. And so the fact that none of these people have been in rooms for a long time, maybe it’s less important than it’s ever been before.

It’s hard to do that sort of on the ground work and have the meetings and do the stuff with membership when people are spread hither and yon. But it’s probably more possible – it is more possible now than it’s ever been before to conceive of some unification. But to me I would say having been on the board recently and been through this last bit of negotiations, it’s just not a giant priority for me. It’s I think a lower priority for me than it is for you.

**Craig:** It will remain a low priority until there’s a problem. And there have been problems and there will be problems again. And that’s when it will become – this has to be solved. We have writers all over the country. Basically if you’re west of the Mississippi you go to the West. If you’re east you go to the East. You’re right. You can switch. You can’t be in both at the same time. But you could switch. And it’s all just – we have two award ceremonies running simultaneously.

**John:** It’s goofy.

**Craig:** It’s just dumb. It’s dumb. And there’s duplication. We have two executive directors. Why? And sometimes it actually does cause problems when, for instance, in credit administration. If you are in a credit arbitration with a writer from the East there is a chance that the East may handle the arbitration instead of the West. Well what’s the difference? Well, there is I believe one lawyer on the staff of the Writers Guild East. There are about 12 lawyers just in the credits department of the Writers Guild West, all of whom are the ones that essentially take the lead on all of the negotiation, arbitration, and enforcement of credit rules with the companies. You want those guys running the arbitration because that’s what they do.

**John:** You want the cardiac surgeon who has done 100 of them rather than the first one.

**Craig:** And it just – let’s just fold it all together. You can have two. If you need an office over there, like people go to a physical office anymore. I mean, all that stuff is going away. So it would be ideal to solve this before it becomes a problem again. Because the actuality is when you look at the constitutions of the Writers Guild West and East, if the East wanted to cause a major problem it can. It has a way to do that. It hasn’t in a long time, happily. But it would be nice to get rid of it. Pointless.

**John:** Yeah. Last thing I probably should have stressed earlier in this conversation is that a frequent question I get is how do I join the Writers Guild. Or how do I join the Screen Actors Guild or anything.

**Craig:** Fill out this form.

**John:** It’s actually one of those amazing things where you don’t have to do anything.

**Craig:** They’ll find you.

**John:** They will find you. Once you’re hired to work on a project that is union-covered you will be required to join that union. A certain requirement has to be met. But you can’t join until you have to join and then you have to join and then you’re in. That’s really the simple explanation for it.

**Craig:** They will hunt you down. And one of the reasons they hunt you down is because when you become a member of the Writers Guild you are required to become a member of the Writers Guild. And therefore you’re required to send them quite a fat check for initiation. So, believe me, they get you. You’ll know. You’ll know. Congrats. Surprise.

**John:** Yup. All right. So that’s a quick overview. There’s obviously a lot more we could talk about with the guilds and the unions, but I want to make sure that we get some more time to resolve the mystery of the sticky fingers.

**Craig:** Mm, OK.

**John:** Not sticky, I should stress. Sweet, not sticky.

**Craig:** Sweet. Not sticky. Sweet. So, I was sort of getting close when I was talking about potentially some sort of hair product. So my theory is that you’re touching something that has that smell on it and it is transferring, but it’s happening while you’re sleeping. And I’ve already investigated the bedding, the begging material. It’s not that. It’s not your mouth guard. It’s not any sort of skincare product, as far as I can tell.

**John:** Going back, it is a skincare product. That’s the distinction. But none of the skincare products smell like that.

**Craig:** Oh, interesting. So perhaps there is a skincare product that when exposed to the air oxidizes and turns into a different smell.

**John:** That is essentially what has happened. That is the answer to the mystery. And so it is this facial moisturizer I put on. It’s like the last thing I put on at night. And it doesn’t have any smell at all. But somehow overnight it has like vitamin C in it or something. That changes – basically I don’t wash my hands afterwards because it’s just moisturizer. And the chemical reaction that happens is it smells sweet in the morning.

And so I was able to test this out by – that was my theory – and so what I tried is like, OK, I’m going to put this stuff on but I’m going to put it on with like a Q-Tip and not actually touch it. And so I tried that for two nights and then I went back to using my fingers. And that is exactly what is happening. It’s a chemical reaction to the moisturizer I’m putting on before bedtime.

**Craig:** Right. I have never done that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s important to moisturize.

**Craig:** Everyone says that. Everyone says it. I’m not going to do it. You know I’m not going to do it.

**John:** You’re not going to do it. You’re just not going to do it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I come from a long line of men that just stupidly don’t care about the largest organ in their body. It’s the skin.

**John:** Craig, can I ask you a question about sleeping? Because we played D&D till pretty late last night. And then I know you had to take your puppy out to pee. And yet when I look on Twitter like you were up hours before I was. So I worry are you sleeping enough?

**Craig:** Sometimes I am. And sometimes I’m not. And it’s really weird. So I didn’t have to wake up that early. I had my alarm set for a bit later. And I just happened to wake up that early. Sometimes when I wake up earlier than I should I don’t feel tired. And I’m fine. Right now I don’t feel particularly tired. I’ll probably sleep longer tonight.

There are sometimes where I get like eight hours and the alarm wakes me up at eight hours and I feel like I could sleep another 20 hours and I’m miserable. It’s really weird. I can’t quite explain it. But, yeah, I only slept I would say four hours last night.

**John:** Yeah. That would not be enough for me.

**Craig:** It’s just natural. Yeah, it’s weird. Normally I would be a zombie, but I don’t know. Coasting on adrenaline.

**John:** One of the tweets that I saw recently from you was about D&D alignments as pertaining to crossword puzzles. And so what I saw in your tweet from January 17 was you can imagine like a Tic-Tac-Toe grid and in it was different layouts of crossword puzzles and they’re identified as being lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good. And so it was a meme that you were sharing.

And I want to talk quickly about D&D alignment charts and that idea of the nine kinds of alignments and whether they have any relevance to the work that you and I do as writers.

**Craig:** Sure. So the classic breakdown in Dungeons & Dragons is there are three general axes of goodness. There’s good, there’s neutral, and there’s evil. So that’s kind of your moral approach. You are a person that is – you believe in some sort of moral positivity, you just don’t care, or you’re just actually evil. And then those are divided into kind of ordering mechanisms. There’s lawful, neutral, and chaotic. So, lawful, you tend to follow some sort of rigid code. Neutral, you sort of make decisions on the fly as you need to. And chaotic, you don’t follow any rhyme or reason. You’re all over the place. And you can apply those to any of those. So there’s lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good. Lawful neutral, true neutral, which is neutral-neutral, and chaotic neutral. And then lawful evil, neutral evil, and chaotic evil.

**John:** And so classically you see that arranged as a Tic-Tac-Toe grid where true neutral is the center square.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so my first exposure to I think morality or sort of the concept of regimented morality was in fifth grade playing D&D for the first time and seeing this alignment chart, which I don’t know that it pre-dated Gary Gygax and the original D&D or not, but it was my introduction to this idea of systemic kind of morality and approaches to these things. And we’ll put links in the show notes to a bunch of different memes about Arrested Development or Marvel, Harry Potter, or Star Wars, looking at that grid with classic characters from those mythologies and how they would fit into that grid. And it’s useful to some degree I guess. But I wanted to talk about sort of what’s good about it and sort of the pros and the cons of it.

I guess for me it’s useful to distinguish between approaches to a problem as a hero, so lawful good versus chaotic good. I can see the differences there. And imagining a lawful evil, like a really organized orderly evil versus a pure chaotic evil can be helpful. And so I think as I’m approaching my own writing to some degree I’m aware of that as an approach. I’m never – in no character breakdown have I ever written like somebody is lawful good for a screenplay. But it is somewhat useful as a framing device if you’re thinking of a character’s approach. What would you say?

**Craig:** I probably get – the only use I get out of it other than entertainment when somebody breaks down a show that I love into these characters. It’s the Game of Thrones alignment chart. Who’s in what? But I do think that it’s good if you find yourself feeling like you’re stuck between two easy, obvious polls and you can go, oh, this is just like a good guy or a bad guy. Well, it’s good to think in these terms and think about what would happen if – what does it mean to be chaotic neutral? And what would happen to my character if I took away their sense of morality? I didn’t make them evil. I didn’t make them good. I just made them not care. What would happen if my bad guy didn’t really follow a code, but also wasn’t a lunatic. And these things are interesting.

Look, the classic boring ones are lawful good, which is just like–

**John:** Dudley Do-Right.

**Craig:** Yeah. Superman. Lawful good. And then chaotic evil is just a monster like a wolf-man running around and biting people. It’s chaotic evil. But then you have these really interesting ones like chaotic good. And lawful evil. And true neutral, which is very rare. So it’s fun to kind of challenge yourself a little bit if you feel like you’re stuck. But, I mean, it’s a pretty blunt tool. I wouldn’t go too far.

**John:** It’s a pretty blunt tool. We’ve talked before about the Myers-Briggs personality assessment. And this is really kind of a version of that. Because like the Myers-Briggs you’re looking at two polls and sort of putting people on a spectrum between these two polls. And grouping them together in ways that sort of feel like, OK, if someone were lawful but they’re also good this is what the characters would be like. But you can really do that for any qualities that have two polls. Anywhere there’s a spectra of how they could come out. So you could look at this in terms of like how much is this person a planner versus an improviser? Are they serious or are they funny? Are they warm versus cold? Introverted versus extroverted?

You can really take any two opposites there and look at where a character is on that scale and as you combine the other things you kind of feel what they’re like. But I do just worry, even going back to eight sequence structure, it can just become a lot of busywork, a lot of ticking of boxes that’s not actually doing the work about what is making that character interesting, distinctive, and specific to this story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, in the end if you can neatly fit a character perfectly into one of those boxes then they’re not a person. They’re a box.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah. I would say the last thing that’s been helpful for me thinking about alignment or these opposites is that it’s useful – once you’ve figured out who your hero is, who your protagonist is, thinking about who the polar opposite of that character is can be really helpful in terms of thinking about your villain, your antagonist. What is it about that antagonist that is uniquely challenging to that protagonist? And that can be a useful starting place for thinking about who is the person to put opposite your hero.

All right. We have time for a few short questions. Let’s invite Megana Rao, our producer, on to ask some questions that our listeners have sent in. Megana, what have you got for us this week?

**Megana Rao:** OK. So Adrianne from LA asks, “These days every company has its own streaming service that exclusively exhibits its content. Disney has Disney+. Apple has AppleTV+. And now Netflix creates originals not shown anywhere else. How is this not a modern day violation of the Paramount decrees? And how does this all factor in with the termination of the Paramount decrees? Please help me understand. I’m so confused.”

**John:** Yeah. So it’s a separate piece of that. The Paramount consent decrees are about studios owning movie theaters. Basically said that the studios were not allowed to own movie theaters. That’s going to go away and studios are going to buy the movie theaters. That’s kind of inevitable.

What you’re describing, Adrianne, is a little closer to Fin-Syn which was the change in the ‘80s I’m guessing that allowed for networks–

**Craig:** I think so.

**John:** ‘90s? When was it?

**Craig:** I think it was the late ‘80s or possibly early ‘90s. Yeah.

**John:** Regardless, there was a time in which NBC could not own its own programming. They basically had to buy from somebody else. That changed. And that’s kind of more like what we’re talking about here. A form of vertical integration. I think it’s not great. But it’s where we’re at.

**Craig:** Yeah. So Fin-Syn or financial syndication laws were why networks licensed their shows. So the way network television used to work is a studio like say Paramount would produce a show like Star Trek. And Star Trek cost a whole lot of money to make. And the network that showed Star Trek would pay Paramount a license fee per episode of some amount to run that show in Primetime, or syndication, or whatever.

And, if you could make enough of those then you could rerun them and that’s where you make all your money, and so on and so forth. And then for the network their whole game was pay out less in licensing than they take in in advertising. That was how that business worked. It has not worked that way in decades. John is absolutely right. Fin-Syn is what you’re thinking of here.

Paramount decrees really just referred to the brick and mortar buildings where they show movies and obviously that’s also gone. So, hopefully that helps you understand. Basically imagine all the possible barriers there could be and then get rid of them all. There you go. That’s what we got.

**John:** Yup. Megana, what have you got for us next?

**Megana:** So Tara asks, “My script made the Black List, got me agents, and several generals, and we’re finally getting a little heat. I’ve been writing in my free time for 20 years, but the business end of this is all new to me at 46 years old. My team is brilliant, but here’s my question for you and Craig. We’re trying to build a package. We may be close to getting the perfect lead attached. And the perfect director is tentatively interested. Hopefully I’ve got meetings with them in the next few weeks. What should I ask them and what can I expect them to ask me?”

**John:** Great. First off, Tara, congratulations. That’s awesome that you’re getting this together.

**Craig:** Good job.

**John:** And I’m guessing this is a feature that you’re putting together. I mean, it could be a limited series. It could be a TV pilot. But when we say a package, don’t worry or mistake the idea of a packaging fee, the kind of thing we’ve been fighting against for in the WGA. A package is a grouping of great bits of talent together to make this thing attractive to buyers. So it’s awesome this is happening for you.

Those questions when you’re talking to a big actor or director is sort of what attracts them to the project. What are they excited about? What are the questions they have for you? What is it about their previous work that you have questions about? Talk about the thing you’re hoping to make. Talk about the sort of – just get a sense of whether this is a shared vision for things. That’s the most crucial thing is to feel like what is it going to be like working with this person.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I just want to point out that if I were on your team I would – this is a great sentence. My team is brilliant, and you can see them sort of sitting up straighter in their chairs. But here’s my question for you and Craig. And then they’d go, oh, dammit. You know, there is no special questions. There’s no secret handshake. I don’t know what they’re going to ask you. Because sometimes they ask great questions and sometimes they ask terrible questions.

I can’t tell if you’re talking about a feature or if you’re talking about a movie – it feels like you’re talking about a movie. So a lot of times with movies the directors barely want to even acknowledge that you are a human in the room, which is terrible, but true. And I hate that.

So, just have the conversation. And if you have the ability to decide in some way, to help decide who is getting this and who is doing it, then have the conversation and then just check your gut after. The only thing you need to make sure of is that the person that you’re going into business with, if you have any control over it, agrees with you about what this is, and what the tone is, and why it’s good. And if they don’t, then they’re not the perfect lead or director. That’s kind of what you’re about to find out.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s a longer conversation. Maybe we should put that on the list. What do you do when there’s a person who is circling your thing who you don’t really like? And I’ve been in Tara’s situation where there’s been a director and it’s like, ugh, how do you shake that person away without burning bridges? It can be challenging. So maybe we’ll ask Megana to put that on the list for follow up, because getting rid of somebody you don’t want is sometimes harder than attracting the person you do want.

**Craig:** True, true.

**John:** Megana, thank you for these questions. I see there’s a whole bunch more we have on the Workflowy, so thank you to all the listeners who sent in questions. Anything more you want to share, Megana?

**Megana:** No, I think that’s great. Thanks guys.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is type related. So, the New York Times has banner headlines occasionally for really big things. One of them was recently Trump Impeached and Trump Impeached Again. When you have letters that are next to each other you have to sometimes worry about how those letters are bumping into each other. In the case of impeached, when you have that uppercase, the E and the A next to each other looks kind of weird. There’s actually a lot of space. And so you’ll do some kerning to try to get those things a little bit closer. But then if they bump it feels weird.

So I’m going to link to an article that goes through the New York Times’ decision to build a special ligature, a special combination EA for headline situations where those capital letters are showing up next to each other so it forms one kind of letter glyph. And ligatures are pretty common in type overall. You’ll see them a lot with FL or FFL. There’s special combinations for those things because otherwise the letters would bump together in weird ways. I love ligatures and so I loved this little article explaining how and why they created a special EA for the word “impeached.”

**Craig:** Impeached. I also see they used it in Biden Beats Trump.

**John:** Yeah. Special.

**Craig:** Biden Beats Trump.

**John:** Feels nice.

**Craig:** I just like the sound of it. Thank you, John. My One Cool Thing this week is a website called Wordlisted from a gentleman named Adam Aaronson. There are a few resources on the Internet that allow you to – well, they give you a little bit of a helping hand if you are constructing a puzzle, and they can certainly give you a very big helping hand if you’re trying to solve a puzzle. And I probably cited some of them before like One Look for instance.

This one is quite the Swiss Army knife. First of all, it allows you to upload your own dictionary. And you’re like, what, I don’t have a dictionary. Well, a lot of puzzle folks create word lists. So, some terms that may have not made it into the dictionary or phrases, for instance, that they can sort of add on to the regular dictionary. And then you have all sorts of options doing simple pattern searches where question marks are missing letters and asterisks are missing strings of letters. There’s anagrams. Hidden anagrams where if you need to figure out, take the word MATE, how many words have an anagram of MATE inside of it. So, “steamed” for instance would be an example of that.

There’s letter banks where you put in eight letters and it tells you all the letters that come from just using those letters, with repeaters. There’s sandwich words. There’s replacements. Deletions. Prefixes. Suffixes. Consonancy. Consonancy is when two words have the same order of consonants but the vowels are different. Of course, there are palindromes.

And it’s all sortable by length or by alphabet. It’s a wonderful tool. And it’s free. So, thank you, Adam Aaronson. Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you. So you can find this. Wordlisted. We’ll throw a link in the show notes for you. But if you’re listening at home it’s Aaronson, that’s with two As. Aaronson.org/wordlisted.

**John:** Very nice. And right underneath that link we’ll also put a link to Rhyme Zone which is a thing I use as a writer all the time and I think it’s the best online rhyming dictionary. And so if you need to rhyme something, a very good tool for that.

As we wrap up, I need to give a special shout out to Megan McDonnell, our former Scriptnotes producer, who has her first produced credit this week. So episode three of Wandavision, the Marvel show that I think is just delightful, has a nice little credit that says Megan McDonnell, because she wrote it. So we’re very, very proud of Megan and–

**Craig:** Well, you know what? That’s your first credit. That’s a big deal.

**John:** Yeah. It’s awesome. First of many credits to come. So, congratulations to her.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** Scriptnotes is currently produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week, and thank you so much for people sending in outros, this new one is by Malakai Bisel. It’s great. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

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’ll find transcripts and sign up for the weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net. You get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re going to talk about right after this on QAnon.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** And we’re back. So James in New Zealand wrote in to say, “It’s been reported that one of the top QAnon influencers is a ‘failed Hollywood screenwriter.’ That started me pondering two things. One, what is a failed screenwriter? Most of us, present company included, have failed in some aspect of screenwriting. Two, do you think most screenwriters would be good at creating conspiracy theories? At its core it’s about writing a compelling story. I’m wondering if there’s a Save the Cat template for conspiracy theories.”

So, Craig, the confluence of things in our lives. So, many, many years ago there was a guy named Script Shadow who was a thorn in our collective sides, well before the podcast even started I think. But the QAnon guy is not the guy who is this guy, but there’s relations. Basically Script Shadow had reviewed one of these guys’ scripts and they sort of knew each other, the QAnon guy. And another listener wrote in with a longer explanation of sort of the history behind all this stuff.

I am not at all surprised that some of the QAnon folks are aspiring screenwriters.

**Craig:** Me neither. And this guy apparently was kind of haunting Franklin Leonard for a while on social media because he didn’t do well on the Black List. It’s not like Franklin sits there just digging into screenplays one by one and adjusting the scores and giggling. He doesn’t do that.

So, this was a grouchy guy that wasn’t getting the pat on the head that he thought he deserved, which is something that entitled people have in common. And so question number one. What is a failed screenwriter? I don’t know. I think if you abandon screenwriting, if you wanted to try and be a screenwriter and it didn’t work out and you didn’t get paid, or you got paid once and never again, and you leave it, then your attempts to have a kind of ongoing career as a screenwriter have failed. And that’s most screenwriters. I mean, honestly most people out there are failed screenwriters if they’ve written a script. Because very few screenwriters are able to kind of keep that going. It’s unfortunate. That’s the way it is.

Do you think most screenwriters would be good at creating conspiracy theories? No. Here’s the thing. I’m not surprised that a guy that was struggling to be a successful screenwriter was not struggling to be a successful conspiracy theorist because conspiracy theories are by definition overly complicated, pointlessly involved, illogical explanation of simple things. They are the opposite of elegant.

We are always trying to create elegant plotting that is simple, and compelling, and there’s not a lot of like weird rules stacked on top of each other of why this thing actually doesn’t work this way, but really this way. And that’s all these conspiracy theories. They’re terrible screenplays.

When you look at the QAnon screenplay for what’s going on you go, “Wait, what? That’s terrible. That’s just bad writing. That’s not how humans are. It’s not how organizations work. It’s not how anybody behaves. This is ridiculous. Ridiculous.”

Every single one of these conspiracy theories fails the “yeah, but why” test. Like, oh, didn’t you get it. There’s 17 flags behind him and Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. But why? What does that actually achieve? Nothing. Nothing! Oh my god.

**John:** So, Craig, you’re saying that a screenwriter wouldn’t be great at creating conspiracy theories, but a screenwriting guru, or a wannabe aspiring screenwriter guru, that does feel like the sweet spot. And that’s apparently who this person really was.

So this is a person who was not successful as a screenwriter but then ended up setting up a website about how to make it in Hollywood. Basically giving all his tips. And that feels like such a great connection there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because you’ve discerned a pattern for success and you’ve broken the code of Hollywood and now you’re going to expose the real secrets within it.

**Craig:** Grift. Utter grift.

**John:** And that feels exactly – yeah, but grift and self-delusion are all part and parcel with a conspiracy theory.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** It’s an elaborate mythology that you’re building and that you have the actual secret for seeing past the illusion.

**Craig:** Well, the level of either self-delusion or just outright, just shamelessness required to, A, not succeed at something, and then, B, subsequently take people’s money to inform them how to succeed at the thing you could not succeed at is mind-blowing. Mind-blowing.

So I looked at a couple of the articles and I saw the nature of the way this guy would post things. And it was terrible. It was just a lot of “don’t you get it.” A lot of these aimless questions. Like, “You might have missed it. Don’t you get it? Think about this.” Just open-ended.

You know, like when people accuse a television series of not being accountable to its own stuff, like it starts to make up mysteries and rules and things and then it never actually pays them off. And that’s bad. That’s all this stuff is. It’s literally like you never got anywhere. I mean, there are people who have been, I hope, that a lot of the people who were caught up in this silly cult now understand, OK, that’s what it was. And I hope that they didn’t lose too much money. I hope that they didn’t lose too many people in their lives and family members. I hope that they didn’t hurt anybody. I hope that they can just gently return to sanity. They deserve the right to return to sanity.

But now that they’re hopefully able to see they can see that this was just a ridiculous game of Lucy pulling an imaginary football away from Charlie Brown day after day after day.

**John:** I think who I’m angriest at are the people who clearly didn’t believe any of it, but were using it to maximize – the Ted Cruzes. Who clearly doesn’t believe a single bit of it.

**Craig:** Of course not.

**John:** But is using it, the furor over it, to advance his own aims. That drives me crazy. I want to both be able to punish him and provide a ramp back to normal society for the folks who got caught up in it like it was Lost. And didn’t understand this is not actual reality. And I’m curious to figure out what are the best ways to get people re-involved in a normal functioning society and feeling like what they do matters because it actually does matter.

To me it feels like them volunteering at a soup kitchen a couple Sundays in a row might get them thinking about the world outside of them that’s beyond their screens. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Well, you know, people got stuck in their homes. And they were frustrated. And they were afraid. And they were being fed a fascinating story. Obviously they were inclined to want to believe it. I don’t think anybody who has been voting for the Democratic Party their whole lives was suddenly grabbed hold of by Q and went, “Oh, wait, hold on a second.” The willful manipulators, the crooked Bible-thumping fake preachers are always going to make us angrier, always, with their deceit and their nonsense which is so blatantly tuned to earn them money.

A lot of the leaders of this Q movement were selling Q merchandise. And their platforms were monetized on YouTube. And Facebook. And Google and Facebook should not only be ashamed, but they’re the ones who need to do the penance. They’re the ones who have screwed us.

But, yeah, this QAnon guy, that’s perfect, isn’t it? Freaking screen guru selling consultation fee sessions while he’s also just – he’s like, here, let me go ahead and grift you like this, and with my other hand I’m going to grift these people like this, because I’m bad.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Sorry. We can’t always be hopeful. But, yeah.

**Craig:** Ugh. Ugh.

**John:** Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

 

Links:

* Ballard C Boyd for Stephen Colbert’s show [Queen’s Gambit Rubik’s Cube](https://news.avclub.com/stephen-colbert-has-the-next-the-queens-gambit-all-squa-1846107922)
* [Hollywood’s Unions Celebrate Inauguration Of President Joe Biden & VP Kamala Harris: “Most Pro-Union President” & “Partner In The White House”](https://deadline.com/2021/01/inauguation-hollywood-unions-celebrate-president-joe-biden-vp-kamala-harris-1234677017/) by David Robb
* [Biden Gave Trump’s Union Busters a Taste of Their Own Medicine](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/peter-robb-alice-stock-nlrb-fired.html) by Mark Joseph Stern
* [Impeached Ligature EA](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/21/insider/banner-headlines-letters.html)
* [Wordlisted](https://aaronson.org/wordlisted/) by Adam Aaronson
* [Rhyme Zone](https://www.rhymezone.com)
* [Wandavision](https://www.disneyplus.com/series/wandavision/4SrN28ZjDLwH?pid=AssistantSearch) check out episode 3, written by [Megan McDonnell](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6876585/)!
* [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
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Malakai Bisel ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/485standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/batman-and-beowulf).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Just in case your kids are in earshot and you don’t want them to hear swearing, this is the warning.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 482 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’ll discuss America’s favorite crime fighter, but more importantly how we talk about him, and the bundle of IP surrounding Batman.

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Then we’ll look at another unlikely but iconic hero, a Scandinavian king who is clever with words but also great with the sword. Bro, that’s Beowulf. And he was the Dark Knight way back when. Plus we’ll answer some listener questions and in our bonus segment for Premium members I will tell Craig about the Batman teaser trailer I wrote way back in 2001.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** And we’ll discuss what other heroes we would tackle if given the chance.

**Craig:** Well this is going to be fun.

**John:** A good episode. And a good episode for the New Year. Happy New Year, Craig.

**Craig:** Oh. Happy New Year. I mean–

**John:** Happy New Year. I’m optimistic.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, I understand that the calendar is not actually a thing. That we’ve just arbitrarily said this is the beginning and this is the end, because the sun, you could pick any point in the earth’s rotation around the sun and call it day one. But, oh man, this year. Oof.

**John:** Oof.

**Craig:** Oof.

**John:** Yeah. I’m optimistic about the New Year. I’m more optimistic about the back half of 2021 maybe, but still. I’ll happily turn the calendar to a new page. And get started with new stuff.

**Craig:** And I think in 2021 we’re going to hit 500 episodes.

**John:** We’re going to hit 500 episodes. We’ll hit like 10 years or something. It’s a lot.

**Craig:** Jesus Maria.

**John:** Many milestones. Plus I know you have a very busy year coming up. I have a busy year coming up. So, we know that 2021 is going to be eventful just personally.

**Craig:** It’s going to be fun. We’ll still find a way to play Dungeons & Dragons.

**John:** We somehow will. Priorities will be set straight.

**Craig:** Priorities.

**John:** Some follow up. Follow up on follow up actually. We’ve discussed the Rent a Family story. Maria from Argentina but now living in Tokyo writes, “Werner Herzog actually already made that movie released earlier this year called Family Romance, LLC. It’s not a documentary, but the protagonist is the actual owner of the family rental company and many of the actors are real employees as well, so it creates an even stranger dialogue on the meta level on the con within the con” as I was describing.

So there already is a movie, not just How Would This Be a Movie, there already is a movie by Werner Herzog about the Japanese Rent a Family situation.

**Craig:** No one needs to write it especially since Werner Herzog has already done it. You don’t want to follow in those footsteps.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It’s Werner Herzog for god’s sakes.

**John:** It would be foolish. And Craig would be forced to break out his Werner Herzog accent which he’s well known for.

**Craig:** [as Herzog] It’s not very hard to do. Why are you making another Family Romance movie when I’ve already made one? Mine is better.

**John:** It feels like Werner Herzog should have been in a Batman movie, but he’s not been which his just crazy.

**Craig:** Weird.

**John:** But let’s talk about Batman, because I have DC Comics on the brain, partly because of the Wonder Woman 1984 movie that came out this past week. But also the announcement that HBO Max/Warners is planning to build a whole stable of movies around their DC characters, sort of how Disney has done with Marvel.

Mike Schur, a friend, he tweeted, “Hoping they finally get into the Batman’s backstory. Like, yes, he’s a vigilante for justice and has this sort of brooding presence, but why? What happened? We fans deserve that explanation.”

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s funny. That’s funny.

**John:** That’s funny. You can’t talk about Batman, it’s always his origin story again and again and again. We’ve seen that damn alley outside a theater so many times. And the pearls dropping from the necklace. It’s just like it’s constantly an origin story. But Batman is actually a fascinating character. He’s a really weird iconic character because he’s just different from all the other characters.

So I want to talk about his history, how he fits into IP, what’s interesting about him as a character to write. And, Craig, have you ever written any scenes with Batman in your career?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. I have written half of one, which you’ll see referenced in the bonus segment. But I have written in the DC universe before. So I wrote a Shazam movie which was not the Shazam movie that came out. I helped out on another big DC movie a while back. And while I’ve never written Batman himself, he’s sort of always kind of there. So many of the things I like – Harley Quinn earlier this year was a One Cool Thing. He’s always a background character in that. So he has this weird looming presence over a lot of stuff.

So I thought we’d start by talking about sort of history and then get into sort of what makes him weird and unique as a character.

**Craig:** Sure. I think up until, and I could be wrong, but I think up until the mid-‘80s when the Tim Burton Batman movie came out was just, you know, another superhero. It was a high level superhero that everybody knew. I don’t know about you, but in the ‘70s when we all dressed up for Halloween in those weird vinyl aprons with the mask with the little horizontal mouth hole–

**John:** I can still smell what those masks smell like.

**Craig:** You can smell it. Everyone would stick their tongues through the little mouth hole and cut their tongue. And Batman was definitely one of those. And just like Superman or Spider-Man, or Wonder Woman, or any of them, he was in the League of Justice, the cartoon. And he was fine.

And then the Burton Batman came out, I think it’s sort of alongside the Frank Miller re-imagination, and suddenly Batman just became an entirely different thing and it was fascinating to watch.

**John:** Yeah. So we should stress that we are not Batman historians and so you do not need to write in with any of your corrections to things we get wrong about this.

**Craig:** Do not write in.

**John:** [laughs] Yes. Megana is on this call and just for her sanity and safety please do not write in with your corrections. But let’s briefly sort of talk through the timelines here. Because it starts in 1939. Detective Comics, written by Bill Finger, illustrated by Bob Kane. We move forward to the 1960s. We have that campy Batman series with Adam West. In the ‘70s we start to see Batman as this darker version and obsessive compulsive. We get The Dark Knight Returns which is really probably the first graphic novel I actually remember reading.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It sort of anchored this idea of like an older Batman and a really dark Batman. And sort of Batman as a political force and sort of questioning his role in society.

But at the same time you referenced the Tim Burton Batman which was such a different feel and take. It was dark, but his Gotham was constructed so differently. And then it became this series of directors. So we had Tim Burton’s Batman. Joel Schumacher’s vision. Chris Nolan. Zack Snyder. We now have Matt Reeves making a version of Batman. It’s a character that’s been sort of continuously re-envisioned but not reinvented because his backstory has always stayed exactly the same.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. His backstory is fixed. And also his powers are fixed. There’s really no flexibility in terms of what he is and what he does. He is a boy who is incredibly rich, because his parents are incredibly rich. They live in a city that is modeled after decrepit New York. Not fun New York. But crappy New York. So they live in a beautiful part of New York, but then there’s this bad part of town. There’s a guy who I think officially is named Joe Chill who holds up the mom and the dad. Tries to take the mom’s necklace. And ends up shooting the mom and dad, who had been out to the opera with their young child, Bruce.

Bruce Wayne suffers two terrible things that night. First, his parents are killed in front of him. Second, he had to watch opera as a baby, as a kid. That’s just miserable. That’s always the same. And you know what else is always the same? He doesn’t have super powers. And that never changes. And maybe that’s why he’s kind of fascinating to us.

**John:** Yeah. So there’s a relatability to him in that he’s just really good at doing the stuff he’s good at. So he’s really good at fighting. He’s really smart. He can figure stuff out. And so it has that sort of proficiency porn aspect of it. He’s just so good at doing the thing he does.

And so he seems like a self-made man, although he’s a self-made person who starts with a tremendous amount of wealth.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** A quote that sort of tracks into this. This was DC Comics’ Jenette Kahn writing that “Batman is an ordinary mortal who made himself a superhero. Through discipline and determination and commitment he made himself into the best. I always thought that it meant that I could be anything that I wanted to be.” And so there’s a relatability to him that’s different than Superman or Wonder Woman or Aquaman who are born into their greatness. In this case he is just a normal mortal human being who is just really, really good at things.

**Craig:** Well he’s a bit of an Ayn Randian kind of hero in that he starts incredibly wealthy but because he’s so smart and so resourceful and so clever and careful he manages to preserve that wealth and grow that wealth. And he uses his wealth and persistence and hard work and determination and sweat and tears and his ability to withstand pain.

**John:** Yeah. Seems like a supernatural ability to withstand pain.

**Craig:** Right. And he uses all of that mustering American ideal independence, standalone masculine thing to become the ultimate cowboy. And he doesn’t need your unions. And he doesn’t need government. He definitely doesn’t need government. The one thing that’s also incredibly consistent throughout Batman stories is that government is bad. Because the police department is either corrupt or incompetent or both. The mental health industry is a total disaster as all they do is just churn out one damaged super villain after another. In short, the city can’t get it done. The people can’t get it done. Only this individual can get it done.

**John:** Yeah. And so in many ways it feels like a very American kind of story because we are the country of the frontier and the going out on your own. We have this sort of cowboy mentality. It’s like the cowboy mentality transferred back to an urban core.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And where you need to have some lone ranger of justice there to protect the innocent and beat up the bad guys. But we often talk about hero’s journey/hero’s quest kind of things. He doesn’t seem to have a lot of those, at least in the normal ways. It’s not like he’s born with some great flaw that he overcomes over this quest. He’s always in a state of anguish and pain and a determination to save his parents in ways he never could have saved them before.

He’s not a hero who has a concluding arc.

**Craig:** No. His basic job seems to be to defend and preserve the safety of the people, the good citizens of Gotham. In this regard he’s a very strange hero because presumably there are other cities which also have problems. And he doesn’t seem to give a sweet damn about any of the other ones. He’s a homer. He loves Gotham. That’s his hometown. He loves Gotham. And he is constantly serving as Gotham’s true father. Not their lame stepfather, the government. God forbid the mayor or the police or social services were at all relevant or competent. In Gotham, no. Only he is Gotham’s true father. The father who can come at night and punish the bad by inflicting fear upon them primarily. Fear.

**John:** Exactly. And so his relationship to the law is fascinating. Because he wants to be a force of law, the one who is cleaning up the corruption and the filth of the streets. But he doesn’t actually believe in the law enforcement officers. Or he has a special connection to the law enforcement officers. There’s like the good ones, you know, Chief Gordon as commissioner, but nothing else beyond that does he sort of seem to believe in.

And yet at times he does kill. At times he doesn’t kill. His decision to not use a gun or to use a gun has changed over the years. So the moral code he sets for himself is both specific but changes in a way that a lot of these things about his origin remain fixed.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in that regard he’s an extension of our American fantasy of power. He uses a vast expenditure of money and he harnesses an enormous wealth of technological advancement to shock and awe. All to protect the homeland of Gotham. And if it sounds like I’m down on Batman I’m not because he’s not real. [laughs] Just, you know, I think people lose sight of these things all the time. I should probably mention Batman is not real.

Mostly I’m interested in what our fascination with Batman says about us. I will say that I am a huge fan of the Arkham videogames, which I think are amazing. And as a Batman experience they’re incredibly both enjoyable and also they drive home another fascinating thing about Batman. Batman himself personality wise is boring. Batman does not have a family. Batman is constantly fighting the most amazing collection of villains. Period. The end.

Spider-Man has a lot of cool enemies, but nothing like Batman. No one comes close to the variety of lunatics and larger-than-life villains that Batman is constantly dealing with, all of whom are kitschy as hell and so much fun. And that is also part of the deliciousness of enjoying the Batman story.

**John:** He has a good ecosystem around him. I thought we would wrap up this segment by listening to the audience reaction to the very first teaser trailer for Batman. So this is 1988 at Mann’s Chinese Theater here in Los Angeles. And someone found video from this and so here’s the audio from a newscaster interviewing people and their reaction to the Batman teaser trailer. This is the Michael Keaton Batman directed by Tim Burton. Let’s take a listen.

**Female Voice:** Oh, I can’t wait. I love Michael Keaton. He’s one of my favorite funny people. And I love Jack Nicholson. And I love the trailer. I love the whole thing. I’m ready to go.

**Male Voice:** That’s going to be live man. It’s going to be live. I’m going to come to see it.

**Female Voice:** The trailer was better than the movie we just saw.

**Male Voice:** How do you think Michael Keaton is going to be as Batman?

**Female Voice:** Sexy. [laughs] Very sexy.

**Female Voice:** Oh, he’s just a gorgeous guy. He has great legs and everything. [laughs]

**Female Voice:** Michael Keaton is a great actor, so I’m really excited to see it.

**Male Voice:** What kind of Joker is Jack Nicholson going to be?

**Male Voice:** Nicholson, I can say he’s great all the time. He is a joker, so he’s probably just going to be play himself.

**Male Voice:** I mean, with Jack Nicholson in it, I mean how you can you go wrong? I mean, especially his makeup. That’s great man.

**Female Voice:** Jack Nicholson is casted as the perfect Joker. Michael Keaton is adorable. And my husband will just be counting the minutes to see Kim Basinger.

**Female Voice:** The only thing I could change about it was letting me play the babe.

**Male Voice:** Kim Basinger. Yeah, I can see either you or Kim Basinger.

**Female Voice:** What’s she got that I don’t have?

**Male Voice:** So intense with the eye. Come swooping in on all these scenes. And that car, man.

**Male Voice:** I like the Batmobile. Yeah.

**Male Voice:** Why?

**Male Voice:** I don’t know, it’s pretty cool.

**Male Voice:** Yeah?

**Female Voice:** I love the Batmobile. It looks so cool. I wish I could ride in it.

**Male Voice:** And what was your favorite part of the whole trailer?

**Male Voice:** When Michael Keaton comes in and says, “I’m Batman. I’m Batman.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh, we were so young and innocent. Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in that world again where no one had a goddamned idea of what was coming out. There weren’t 5,000 articles. There wasn’t a campaign just to unveil the tire of the new Batmobile. And people were like, “Oh yeah, Batmobile, it’s cool. That’s why I like it.” It’s so nice. Aw.

**John:** Aw. The time before there were Batman movies.

**Craig:** The time before there was Twitter and the sort of like cottage industry. And no hot takes. Did you notice?

**John:** Not a single hot take.

**Craig:** You do that now and someone is going to be like, “Um, you know, I don’t think that – it doesn’t, you know.” Ugh.

**John:** All right. So Batman is a character we’re all familiar with because we’ve seen him 1,000 different times. But I want to transition to talking about a character who is at least as foundational but sort of less well known. And that’s Beowulf. And to help us out with that let’s bring on Maria Dahvana Headley. She’s a New York Times bestselling author and playwright. She’s also an authority on Beowulf, having written The Mere Wife: A Modern Day Adaptation of Beowulf, and an acclaimed translation of the original this past year which was in fact my One Cool Thing a few weeks back. Welcome Maria.

**Craig:** Hey.

**Maria Dahvana Headley:** Thank you. Thank you for having me on.

**Craig:** So much fun.

**John:** It’s very exciting to talk with you. So I absolutely adored your translation, because I tried to read an earlier version of it that was also acclaimed in its time and I found your version to be just so sparkling and present and fresh. And it felt like someone was just sitting across the bar/table from me telling me this story.

So, I strongly recommend it everybody. That’s why it was a One Cool Thing. But I’m wondering if you could give us a little backstory on what was it that I actually read. Because I think I have this vision that Beowulf is sort of like The Iliad and the Odyssey that it was an oral tradition story passed down for generations, but I don’t really know what it was I read. So what is Beowulf?

**Maria:** Well, you have a pretty accurate possible guess. We don’t know. We don’t really know what it is.

**Craig:** That’s the best answer ever. [laughs]

**Maria:** One manuscript is about 1,000-ish years old, written by two scribes. We don’t know who the scribes were. But they are correcting each other throughout. And it is probably, and in my opinion almost definitely, a transcription of an oral performance. Because it had throughout the poem it’s 3,182 lines of battles and lineage basically. And throughout the poem there will be stopping points where the narrator will be like, “Let me tell you what happened last night,” because he’s clearly, in my opinion, performing for a drunk audience that is shouting and he’s unamplified standing on a table. That’s just how I feel the poem is.

But not everyone has felt that way. Lots of people have felt like this is a normal poem about the sort of glorious traditions and that it should be done in a somewhat fusty language or in a “noble” language. J.R.R. Tolkien really felt this way about it. It’s the thing that inspired everything he did. All of Lord of the Rings was inspired by Beowulf. He was a big Beowulf nerd and he did his own translation which is done – it feels like reading Lord of the Rings. It just doesn’t feel as good.

**Craig:** Because J.R.R. Tolkien, was he a philologist? Is that the word?

**Maria:** Yeah. He was someone who really, really, really cared deeply about Beowulf. And what he cared about most deeply was the attempts to fall into the old traditions, rhyme and meter wise. And so he was driven bonkers by it. He was trying to translate a language, Old English, which does not translate directly to contemporary English. So what you’re reading in my translation and in anyone’s translation is a wild guess.

It’s like – and it’s definitely unlike some languages, this is a language that if you’re translating from Old English it’s so much about the translator, what the translator is choosing out of many different possibilities for most of the words.

**John:** So, anybody who is doing a translation of Beowulf is really doing an adaptation of Beowulf. Because it’s taking what is the sort of foundational story and trying to apply not just modern words to it but kind of modern concepts. And that’s why – it got me thinking about Batman. If you go back to the original issue of Detective Comics that introducing Batman as a character and took that as a foundational text, any new version of it is going to necessarily change some things to have it make sense with sort of modern audiences. And it’s hard to imagine a character who has been more transformed more times than Batman.

In your case, in telling this story of Beowulf, you’re looking at sort of how we approach this character, but also what is even the format of the story it takes place in. Because yours very much feels like an oral tradition. It’s some guy telling you a story like right across the table. But that’s a choice. It’s a way of presenting this sort of foundational text and introducing this character.

**Maria:** Yeah. I decided to do it like a long monologue essentially. Because I thought, OK, well then you can have the POV of the poet as well, which is really part of the original. But lots of people don’t put that in. They feel like it’s needlessly confusing. So they just sort of relate the Beowulf story like it’s history, like here’s the true thing that happened to my boy. Whereas I wanted a sense of POV.

**Craig:** I’m just curious, what do you think – when you do this kind of translation, do you run into a resistance that somehow by making it accessible you are cheapening it? Do people still equate accessible with less than?

**Maria:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** What’s the story with – like why do people do that? And how do you respond to that?

**Maria:** Well, it’s an interesting state of affairs. Like in the case of this translation a lot of the press surrounding it has been that I used a lot of slang. I use bro as the opening word of the Beowulf.

**Craig:** That’s so cool.

**Maria:** Which is a transgressive thing to do, but also a pretty accurate translation idiomatically of what that word means and what [unintelligible] means. But it’s transgressive because people feel like that’s a low word. And they feel like slang is low. Which is ridiculous because the entire English language is slang. It’s slang after slang after slang and all kinds of things have contributed to the language.

So, it’s an interesting thing. I think the tradition of believing that something that’s written in vernacular is low is a tradition that’s based on all kinds of hierarchy and prejudice and lack of accessibility to sort of ivory tower structures that have meant that diverse translators have not been able to get into the tower to do the translating and to give perspective on a lot of these ancient texts.

**Craig:** Right.

**Maria:** So it’s been an interesting experience. Other women have translated Beowulf and there have been maybe 15 other women have translated Beowulf into English. And their translations are really interesting but rarely get a lot of play. And often what has happened is that the old guard comes in and says, “Well, this is a minor translation and it’s not a real translation and it’s for children.”

Most of the women in the early part of the 20th Century who translated it ended up writing children’s translations of Beowulf, even though those are also the things that were taught in Tolkien’s primary school that got him into Beowulf.

**Craig:** Right. So in their own way their translations are more experienced than the other. That’s the kind of strange weird feedback loop is that the more accessible you make it, the more people read it, the more people learn, and that becomes Beowulf.

**Maria:** Yeah. And that becomes the cultural understanding of Beowulf is built completely on accessible translations rather than translations in the sort of Old English meter, for example, that are untranslatable.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Now, Maria, I want to talk to you about your character of Beowulf, and he’s so proficient and slays creatures with such aplomb. In your mind as you’re translating this is he supernatural or is he just a really good fighter with a sword? Because he seems to have at times sort of Hercules kind of powers. Other times he’s just really a good fighter. Where do you come down on the nature of him as a hero?

**Maria:** I think I come down all over the place. I’ve thought about it so much because it’s – one of the things that I think is really interesting when you first read Beowulf you think, wait, OK, this guy can sort of slay 30 at one blow, which means he’s not human. And the only other person who can do that is the major monster, Grendel. Grendel also can slay 30 in a blow. And they’re both mentioned with the same number of men.

So, you read that and you think, well, OK, if one of these is a monster the other one is also probably a monster. And so I kind of come down on the no one is really a monster end of the spectrum. The poem itself has a big talk makes you big kind of situation. So, if you talk – I want to say bigly so much – if you talk–

**Craig:** Do it.

**Maria:** If you talk with enough Trumpian volume about yourself, and indeed this is part of how I translated Beowulf’s speeches. If you talk that way about yourself you can sometimes pull it off. You can make other believe it. And even if it doesn’t really work in reality, the story they tell about you will be a story about somebody who swings it really hard.

So, I think it is as much a story about storytelling as it is a story about anything else. And the Beowulf character is a character that’s built on his own story about what he’s capable of doing.

**Craig:** I remember reading The Song of Roland in college and I was struck by how iterative it was a battle that there was this kind of almost hypnotic rhythm once the fight began of just like he killed this guy and then he killed this guy, then he killed this guy. Was this sort of like the action sequence way back when? Let me describe how – or like Sampson killed a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. I mean, was this the action sequence of the old days when you didn’t have moving pictures so you just had to describe violence over and over?

**Maria:** It’s an interesting thing. I mean, some of those ancient texts are almost like a ship’s manifest. You get the [unintelligible] and their lineage. And along with so I guess they’re the spoils of war itemized. And that’s often something that’s part of the poem, like remembering the names which is interesting when we think about the many ways in which we fail to remember the names of the dead throughout the 20th Century and 21st Century.

Yeah, the blow, blow, blow, blow, blow stuff is very much part of the Old English tradition as well. And in this story, I mean, it’s three big battles basically. But you also hear about a lot of other battles in which whole armies of men die and everybody is scattered and flattened on the ground and Beowulf swims away from one battle with 30 suits of armor in his arms somehow.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**Maria:** You know, things like this are happening.

**Craig:** Cool guy.

**Maria:** And you really get a sense of the cost of the big ego. If you are the king you have to choose your time to fight. And sometimes your time to fight – or if you’re the hero, the right hand of the king, which is what Beowulf is for most of the story, sometimes there’s just a big cost. You just have piles of bodies.

**Craig:** Just like Batman.

**John:** Just like Batman. And also just like Batman we see Beowulf in sort of two forms. We see his young form where he kills Grendel and Grendel’s mother and he’s the hero who shows up at the foreign kingdom and is the giant hero. But we also see him much later in life sort of like in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns where he is the aging king going back for one last battle.

To me it feels like there were two volumes or two different comic books that sort of got joined together at some point historically because they feel – they’re related but they’re very different stories. And there’s some sense of all the things he didn’t do in his life. It seems like he never had kids, never had a family, sort of never got to have the normal human life. As you’re translating this did it feel like two stories that got joined together or does it feel like it was always intended to be the arc of this one hero’s journey?

**Maria:** Well, again, there’s lots of debate about that in the Beowulf realm. Some people really feel that the last section of Beowulf which is a battle with a dragon. He’s a king for 50 years and we don’t get any information about that. We get Grendel’s mother. Than he gets home. He gets rewards. He tells his story. And then 50 years pass in a line. And he’s an old man. And we get this thing where he goes up against a dragon by himself and he has to fight the dragon. He’s sure he’s the only guy who can fight the dragon. And he goes in and he kills the dragon, but the dragon kills him, too.

And some people feel like that last third of the poem is just a meanness that was grafted onto it by someone. That it was just stuck on and this like mean situation involving darkness. But I think what it is is youthful sins get payback later. I think that the center of the poem, and this is something I’ve always thought about, when Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother she is acting according to the law of the time. She goes in, her son is killed, she goes in for a revenge killing, which is allowed. She kills one guy. And goes home.

She takes that guy home. She does a little bit of graphic display of his beheading and whatever.

**Craig:** That’s reasonable.

**Maria:** She only kills the one dude, an important guy who is equivalent to her son. And in sort of feudal laws that’s allowed. And what Beowulf does is he breaks into her house under the water. He goes in, like a mercenary, because he is a mercenary. And he comes in and attacks her in her own realm. And she’s an old woman. She’s been queen for 50 years just like Hrothgar, the king he’s serving has been king for 50 years. So she’s probably in her 70s. And Beowulf is maybe 20.

So he goes in, kills an old woman who is so ferocious and hardcore that she almost kills him. And that’s just against the law. Like it’s against the moral code of the poem. So my feeling that the dragon in the end, the last third of the poem, is the wages of sin. It’s sort of like, OK, you can do it, you’re strong enough, you’re big enough, you’re bold enough, your balls are big enough. And you do the thing and then 50 years pass and the whole time you’re having a bad feeling about it.

And I think that Batman has some things like that, too. He always has this sort of morosity. And the morosity is about am I – because he’s declared himself the arbiter of morality in Gotham. And then this difficulty of what if he got it wrong at some point. What if it was a fuck up? And I think the Beowulf story is about – the center battle is a fuck up that he shouldn’t have done.

**Craig:** It is interesting that Batman is constantly struggling with that and yet not really struggling with it, because in the end the dictates of the story are feed us justice. So, he will “wrestle” with it, but the people who generally pay are the people around him. So he gets off the hook. There is no dragon that eats Batman in the end. But a couple of Robins have died, I think.

**John:** And Beowulf ends with a handoff to a Robin kind of character as well. There’s a sense of a generational passing down finally at the end there.

**Craig:** Batman doesn’t pass on. So I think Batgirl at some point canonically is paralyzed. So, people are constantly dying around him. Commissioner Gordon gets killed a few times. And [unintelligible], I think he definitely gets killed. And Batman keeps going. And his anger fuels him to further on. And I kind of love the idea that the wages of – maybe not wages of sin, but truly if you’re living by the sword. Yeah, at some point you can’t be the best forever. And if you beat a 70-year-old woman, albeit a Grendel mom, a mom Grendel, when you’re a 70-year-old guy someone is coming for you. I like that.

**Maria:** Yeah. I mean, there’s always the sort of arc of what is coming for you. And throughout the Beowulf poem that’s discussed, as it is – I mean, it’s interesting thinking about Batman because Batman never becomes the king. He’s the Dark Knight the whole time. And being the Dark Knight means you have to serve. You don’t necessarily get to – I mean, he’s serving a larger moral god. But he still has to serve. He doesn’t get to be the king who is making all of the decisions in terms of his own well-being and in terms of the well-being of others around him. He’s often – I feel like he’s often in a tournament. It’s like more out of the Arthurian myths.

**John:** Yeah, for sure.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Maria, it is absolutely a delight getting to talk through Beowulf and Batman with you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

**Maria:** Thank you for having me on. I could talk about this all year. I love it.

**Craig:** Thank you, Maria.

**John:** Thanks Maria.

**Maria:** Bye.

**John:** All right, bye. So, Craig, that was actually delightful. We did not pre-interview at all with Maria. I just assumed she would be great talking about Batman and Beowulf and I was correct.

**Craig:** You were right. Yeah. Pre-interviews, why would we ever do that? We live on the edge?

**John:** We live by the sword and we die by the sword.

**Craig:** That’s right. We don’t give a sweet damn.

**John:** All right. Now it’s the time on the program where we welcome on our producer, Megana Rao, who asks the questions that our listeners have asked. Megana hi.

**Craig:** Megana.

Megana Rao: Hi, Happy New Year.

**Craig:** Happy New Year.

**John:** Happy New Year to you. What have you got for us this week?

**Megana:** So, Patricia from Canada writes, “I recently started working in the nuclear industry and am easily Google-able. My question is whether producers or network executives like those from a very family-friendly network, which is my genre, might have an issue with my day job if I were to sell my script that has received a bunch of interest this year before I started in the nuclear industry. And if they do are there options for me like using a pen name?”

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** All right, so Patricia basically is a Homer Simpson somewhere in Canada.

**Craig:** Right. I’m sure she’s a competent nuclear technician.

**John:** I’m sorry. She’s a competent Homer Simpson who has written a script that is now getting attention. She worried that if someone figures out that, oh, she’s actually a nuclear person that they won’t want to work with her. I don’t think so.

**Craig:** No. That’s not – I think people have this sense that Hollywood is incredibly, I don’t know, discriminatory against things that violate their tender snowflake sensibilities. Far from it in fact. I think people would be surprised how compromised people are. It’s a business, right? So billionaires with their billionaire companies are trying to make billionaire stuff.

No, I don’t think your employment in the nuclear industry is at all a problem. If you were, I don’t know, employed as a hacker for the Russian government, yeah, sure. But, no, people working in a nuclear power plant are doing a perfectly fine job. So, no, I don’t think so.

And as far as pen names go, just as a general note for – Patricia I think is from Canada so you have the WGC, I don’t know how they do it there. But in the United States the WGA, which administers credits, we do have a clause that says we can use a pen name but only if we’re paid under a certain amount. I think it’s $250,000. And if we’re over that amount then the studio has to agree to let us use the pen name which is obviously an awkward conversation. It’s an awkward thing to do regardless.

**John:** That said though, if she is just starting her career she can pick whatever name she wants to use as her professional name.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So a pen name in that situation is like I don’t want my name on this movie that I wrote but I don’t want my name associated with it, that is a different case than sort of like starting with a new name. Because I started my career as John August even though that wasn’t my born name just because it was an easier, better name.

**Craig:** Right. Like Diablo Cody is Brook Maurio and she wanted to go by Diablo Cody. And then at some point like Brook if you’re like, you know, I think people get it I’m just going to use my regular name now and everybody goes, “Cool. That’s good. That works.”

**John:** What next, Megana?

**Megana:** Great. So Jake in Dallas asks, “I agree with the principle that characters will carry your story to a more successful and satisfying conclusion than the plot alone. However, I have a story that has some solid plot and shaky characters. My question is one of time management and expectations. Is it worth it to dig in and try to build up these weaker characters to match the cool framework that is my plot, or am I kidding myself with a task like that? Meaning the fact that I don’t have strong characters in the beginning of my writing process might be an indication that the story itself is a weak and therefore not worth the effort to populate it with compelling people.

“I feel really good about the structure I built but I’m not sure about the occupants I plan on inviting into the building. The décor and furniture will be rad, so it’s just the pesky people I’m sweating.”

**John:** Oh Jake. What you’re experiencing is common. And I think a lot of writers are probably nodding a bit there. Because sometimes you think of a cool idea for a story and like, oh, you could sort of imagine the set pieces and how it all fits together and the plot and the twists, and then you realize like, oh, but who is actually in this story. And then you actually have to sort of unwind some stuff to figure out like who is the most interesting person to be in this story that you have plotted out in your head.

It’s worth the time. It’s worth the time to stop and figure out who are these characters, what is it that they are uniquely bringing to this cool plot that you have figured out. Because otherwise you’re going to have a cool mechanical clock that no one cares about.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s exactly it. The plot is not there for the audience. The plot is there for the character. It’s what the character is going through. So, if the character is weak it doesn’t really matter what the plot is. Then they might as well just be an observer or the plot is not designed to challenge the character and put the character in situations that are unique for him or her. So when you say maybe this is an indication that the story itself was weak, I would say that you probably want to take a moment to stop divorcing plot and character from each other the way you are and put them together. Because I don’t think when you think about how you’re day went today, Jake, that you’re going to think about yourself and then the things that happened separately. There’s the things that happened to you. And that’s what plot is. It’s something that is happening to a character, therefore one in the same.

**John:** Or because of the character ideally.

**Craig:** Exactly. Well, both, right? So something happens to you, you do a thing, now something new happens and then the da-da-da, and that’s how it works. So they’re actually part of the same thing. And you don’t want to get caught in this sort of scriptic Cartesian duality.

**John:** Yeah. I will say there are forms of writing that are less character-driven. Certainly spy novel books that are very sort of – they’re plot machines. And there are crime procedurals that are kind of plot machines. And if that’s the kind of thing you like writing that’s great, that’s awesome. And they can rely on sort of less characters doing things and just sort of the story doing things.

But it sounds like if you feel this tension right now the thing you’re working on probably should have a strong central character that’s driving it. So stop, think about who that character is, and rewrite it so that character can really be at the center of the story that you want to tell.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**Megana:** Mitch writes, “I work a manual labor job and I most often listen to you gentleman in headphones while my hands are preoccupied and I can’t pause and rewind to hear something clear. I’m pretty sure I heard you two quickly mention something about John earning his Arrow of Light in Boy Scouts, but I couldn’t find it when I tried to listen back. Is John August an Eagle Scout? If so, what was his Eagle project?”

**John:** All right, Mitch, I am in fact an Eagle Scout. I went all the way up through scouts and Arrow of Light refers to – although Arrow of Light could have actually been – is that the Webelos Bridge? I can’t remember which part Arrow of Light fits into, but I know I had it because I had all the patches. I had all of it.

Yes, I did scouts. Yes, I was in the Order of the Arrow which is problematic for Native American cultural appropriation. I didn’t get it at that point. I’m sure I would get it now.

My Eagle Scout project, so when you go up through the ranks in scouts one of the final things after you’ve earned all your merit badges is to do a project which involves 100 hours of planting and community service and getting people together to do stuff. I did an interpretive garden at my public library, so it was putting up signs for what the plants that were there so that people who visit the library could actually learn what plants were used in that garden. I also built a new sign in front of that library which was not good and was replaced about a year later.

But that was my Eagle Scout project. I actually have some ongoing shame about how not good that sign was and how I wish it were better.

**Craig:** That’s like your parents getting killed in the alley, you know, behind the opera.

**John:** That sign in front of the George Reynold’s Branch Public Library in Boulder, Colorado is my parents getting killed in the alley. You’re right. It’s foundational.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have these flashbacks about it. I like that they suffered through it for a year. That every day they came in and they all turned to Verna, who I assume was the senior librarian, and said, “Verna, come on.” And she’s like, “Uh, we can’t. He was an Eagle Scout.” “Oh, please Verna.” And then finally the big Christmas party they’re like, “Verna, it’s Christmas.” And she’s like, “You’re right. Let’s burn it.” [laughs]

**John:** I really think it probably was arson. I didn’t see it burn but I have a hunch that it just burned somehow magically and they replaced it with a much better sign.

**Craig:** I mean, if you put a couple of rum eggnogs in Verna she’s going to light something up. That’s how it goes.

**John:** She’s known for it. All right. Megana, thank you for these questions. They were fun.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**Megana:** Thank you both.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a long article by Olivia Nuzzi writing The Fullest Possible Story on Four Seasons Total Landscaping situation.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** So as you recall one of the weird, wacky things that happened in 2020 was there was a press conference held at the Four Seasons about potential election fraud in Philadelphia or in Pennsylvania overall. But of course it wasn’t Four Season the hotel. It was this tiny little place called Four Seasons Total Landscaping. It was weird and how it all happened is crazy. And so she digs into sort of what actually happened and how they ended up at this weird landscaping company and try to pretend it was their plan all along.

So, just as a last read in 2021 or first read in 2021 to remember what happened in that crazy year. It was a nice full accounting of a really surreal moment that feels like a Coen Brothers movie. Just a bunch of people making hasty decisions that turned out poorly.

**Craig:** Unbelievable. Unbelievable. My One Cool Thing, well, so we have a new puppy in our house.

**John:** I’m so excited. I did not know this. Tell us all about this puppy.

**Craig:** Her name is Bonnie and she’s fantastic. And you will meet her tonight, John. I will hold her up to the camera. She will be an NPC somehow in our D&D game.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And so I’m a big believer in crate training. If you are not a believer do not write in, because I don’t want to hear from you. But crate training I think is the key to why my older dog is such a wonderful dog. Obviously she doesn’t need the crate anymore. But she’s just an incredibly well-behaved, lovely dog. And that was a big part of it. And it also keeps, I think it keeps the new puppy parents sane as well.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** But, you know, dogs – traditionally puppies – do struggle a little bit with the crate initially because they can feel a little bit lonely in there. And so there’s this thing called the Snuggle Puppy. Have you heard of this?

**John:** No, but I can imagine what it would be and I think it’s probably – my guess is that it’s the 2020 version of the alarm clock and hot water bottle wrapped in a blanket?

**Craig:** Bingo. So, well, just with a little extra twist. So it is, of course, a plush little puppy animal and it’s got a little Velcro pouch. And you can stick one of these little, they have like these heat warmer packs, like the hand warmers you get on set when it’s freezing. You put that in its little belly and then it also has its little heart-shaped thing with a battery in it. And you turn that on and it makes a heartbeat little thump-thump. So the puppy can snuggle up against another dog that is warm with a heartbeat which is exactly what they’re used to.

And my goodness. I mean, we put her in there and we didn’t hear anything. You know, for like three hours. Just silence. It was pretty remarkable. And then when we came to take her out, you know, because it was time to come out of the crate and go potty and all that, she was like I don’t want to go. I want to stay in here. I’m tired. I want to stay with my warm friend.

So, huge thumbs up to the Snuggle Puppy people. That was great. Big fan. Not that expensive.

**John:** I’m a fan of crate training as well. Lambert, my current dog, was already well past that, but still like having a crate, a place he can declare as his own, where he can be responsible for defending that and not the rest of the house, game changer.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also really helps house train them as well.

**John:** Oh yeah. For sure. All right. And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week.

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 shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Maria is @mariadahvana. We’ll have links to all those things in the show notes.

You can find those at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. And you can sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments, including the one we’re about to record where I will go into the history of my Batman teaser trailer which was a different teaser trailer than the one we listened to earlier on.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, I’m going to play a teaser trailer for you and you probably have seen this trailer, but you don’t remember that you saw this trailer. And then we’re going to talk about it.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, we’ll put a link in the show notes to YouTube, but we can just listen to the audio for now.

Male Voice: Throughout the ages there has been one hero standing watch over us all. One hero protecting mankind wherever he is needed. He moves in shadows. Cloaked in mystery. And now in the summer of 2002 he will be called upon yet again to save the world. [Scooby-Doo sound]

**Craig:** Classic. So much classic marketing in that spot.

**John:** Thank you. So, let me tell you about the origin of this. And obviously if you’re listening to this just as the podcast version what you might not appreciate is we’re going through this mansion, this sort of spooky mansion, and we come upon the silhouette of Batman standing there. And we see his iconic sort of cowl. And he turns and it’s Scooby Doo. Because it always struck me that Scooby-Doo in outline actually looks a lot like Batman because he’s got the pointy ears that are sticking up there. And so he turns and you see that it’s Scooby-Doo.

So I always had this in my head as like at some point I really want to do a teaser trailer for Scooby-Doo when you reveal it’s Batman. And then I ended up being employed for a week, two weeks, to help out a little bit on the very first Scooby-Doo movie. And I said like, “I’m so excited to be writing these scenes, but more importantly I’ve always had this teaser trailer.” So I sent it through and they ended up making that and that became the teaser trailer for the first Scooby-Doo movie. A parody of Batman.

**Craig:** It holds all of the traditional elements. I mean, they don’t really do stuff like this now. I mean, it’s 20 years old. And I was doing similar things for Disney a little bit earlier, maybe like five or six years before 2001 when I wasn’t yet a screenwriter. Obviously you were a screenwriter at that point. But first of all it has that voice. For the kids, that’s a guy named Don LaFontaine. He is no longer with us. But he was essentially the voice of movie trailers and teasers. He did, I don’t know, 70% of them or something. It was insane.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** You would go to the theater and there would be seven trailers in front of the movie and four of them would have his voice or something. It was nuts. So it was Don LaFontaine. A misdirection in teaser trailers is incredibly common to the point where nobody was misdirected anymore. They were already onto it from the jump by the time you got to, I don’t know, whatever, 2009 or something. They were like, no, you can’t do it anymore.

And, of course, the ubiquitous needle scratch which became this fascinating sonic signifier that didn’t even mean anything to kids at that point, but yet they somehow understood it meant stop everything.

**John:** This trailer, I just wrote it up in normal sort of screenplay format with that dialogue and sent it through, and I was delighted how it turned out. What was also weird about these teaser trailers is they were completely disconnected from actual footage from the movie. Even now like when Chris McQuarrie has been on the show he talks about every day trying to shoot one thing that could make it into the trailer or the teaser trailer for the Mission: Impossible movies. But in this case it was just a whole special shoot which was just for doing this teaser trailer. And you don’t see that as much anymore where there’s no footage from the actual movie in it. It’s just a premise teaser trailer. Like this is a thing that is going to exist.

**Craig:** Yeah. So when I was working in marketing at Disney, this was like back in 1994 and 1995, this would come up quite a bit where you would do a special shoot. And in fact I was dispatched as a 23-year-old or a 24-year-old to the set of a movie called Mr. Wrong. Do you remember that movie, John?

**John:** Oh, I do. With Ellen DeGeneres.

**Craig:** Exactly. With Ellen DeGeneres and Bill Pullman. It was a comedy. It was ill-fated. It did not do particularly well at the box office. Although I remember reading the script. It was one of the early movie scripts that I read and I really liked it. And I was sent to talk to Ellen and Bill about making a special shoot, some sort of scene that we could shoot to help tease the movie.

And, you know, you rapidly learn as a 24-year-old that no one – they’ve got their hands full making a movie. They don’t want you there. So it was an uphill battle. But we would make those things. I remember The Ref, like I think the marketing campaign for The Ref was entirely a special shoot, which did not help The Ref which is one of my favorite movies. Yeah, they used to do this stuff all the time. Now we have our own trailer and teaser conventions that we cannot seem to break. So the modern version of the misdirect, Don LaFontaine, and needle scratch is a fairly well-known pop song that is played at a much slower speed by a different kind of voice so that it’s this really weird dreamy take on some pop song that we know and love.

And then some wahs and some booge and stuff like that. In 20 years from now people will look back and those, OK, yeah, that’s what they did then.

**John:** That’s what they did. Now, this was the closest I ever got to writing Batman and I don’t know that I’ll ever write Batman in anything, which is fine. But the announcement that Warners and HBO Max are going to be doing a whole big expansion of their thing and of course with all the new stuff that Disney has announced with the Marvel universe, it got me thinking what characters might you or I at some point want to tackle. And so I have a short list here. I’m curious what characters would be on your list.

Obviously we’re differently placed because we could theoretically do one of these things. I don’t think we will do any of these things. But here’s the list of things I would love to tackle at some point.

I really like ATOM as a character. After Ant-Man I’m not sure there’s a space for another guy who can become really small, but I always liked ATOM. I still love Wonder Woman. I get why people didn’t love this last one as much, but I dig her as a character. Thinking sort of mythologically, I’ve always really dug Perseus. I especially love Perseus’s backstory where as a baby he got shoved into a trunk and sent off to sea because his father worried that he was going to usurp him. I love that.

I love Hermes/Mercury as a god who again is just a cool trickster character. And then in terms of the non-superhero characters, I think Indiana Jones/Nathan Drake are great guys who like Batman are super good at the things that they’re good at, but also having a fun attitude. They’d be fun characters to write in ways that I think Batman would not be a fun character to write.

Any iconic characters for you, Craig? Any ones that you’d want to tackle?

**Craig:** I don’t think so. I like comic books. I was mostly a Marvel fan when I was a kid. But I think if someone said to me, “Here’s a blank check. Write any comic book superhero movie you want,” I might say to Kevin Feige I want to do a kind of mumblecore Galactus movie. [laughs] Where it’s like he eats planets but mostly he’s lonely and he has no one to talk to expect his heralds. His heralds start to resist him. I think Galactus’s sister was deaf or [unintelligible] or something like that. So he’s having weird chats with her.

Look, the dream adaptation is happening with other people and that’s Neil Gaiman’s Sandman which in a sense I’m glad that other people are doing it because I would be terrified, absolutely terrified, to tackle that material for fear that I would do it any harm. Because I hold it in such high esteem. So, yeah, I’m going to go with sort of bummed out emo Galactus.

**John:** Yeah. I think one of the good things we’ve gotten better at in the ‘10s and the ‘20s is taking characters who would be villains in normal situations and looking at what is their actual motivation and you put them as the protagonist in the story, the central character in the story. And Harley Quinn is a good example of that. Joker, whether you liked it or not, is an example of sort of looking at that character from his point of view and what it feels like to be in his shoes.

And so, sure. A planet-eating villain, go for it.

**Craig:** A mopey planet-eating Galactus, just bummed out. I eat planets because I’m depressed. I’m depressed because I eat planets.

Links:

* Werner Herzog’s [Family Romance LLC](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10208194/)
* [Mike Schur’s Tweet](https://twitter.com/KenTremendous/status/1343712071037272066?s=20)
* [1988 Batman Teaser Reactions](https://twitter.com/i_zzzzzz/status/1339728162306011137?s=21)
* [Why Does Batman Matter](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/black-belt-brain/201203/why-does-batman-matter) by Paul Zehr
* [Beowulf: A New Translation](https://bookshop.org/books/beowulf-a-new-translation/9780374110031) by Maria Dahvana Headley
* [The Fullest Possible Story on Four Seasons Total Landscaping](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/four-seasons-total-landscaping-the-full-est-possible-story.html) by Olivia Nuzzi
* [Snuggle Puppy](https://snugglepuppy.com/)
* [Maria Dahvana Headley](https://www.mariadahvanaheadley.com/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MARIADAHVANA)
* [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
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/482standard.mp3).