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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/getting-back-to-set).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 453 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Now, usually on this podcast we’re talking about writing, but today we are focused on the goal of our writing which is to make film and television programs. Ever since the pandemic began production has been at a dead stop, but now the industry is starting to make plans for getting back to set.

**Craig:** Yes indeed. We want to have an in-depth discussion on why it’s so challenging to reopen film and television production. And to do so we thought we should welcome back two of our OG guests. Is the G also for guests? I mean, they’re not gangsters. I think we’re going to welcome back two of our O guests.

**John:** O guests. Our first O guest, Aline Brosh McKenna. Welcome back to the program, Aline.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** That’s me!

**John:** You are the screenwriter extraordinaire. You are also the co-creator and showrunner of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Most excitingly we’ve just been able to announce your feature directing debut. Aline what is this movie that you’re directing?

**Aline:** It is a movie for Netflix. It is called Your Place or Mine. It is being produced by your friends Jason Bateman and Michael Costigan at Aggregate.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**Aline:** And Lauren Neustadter and your friend Reese Witherspoon at Hello Sunshine. And it stars Reese Witherspoon. And it is a comedy of the romantic variety.

**John:** I can’t imagine why you would be doing a romantic comedy. Aline, congratulations. I’m so excited to see you directing a big feature-feature film.

**Craig:** Well done, Aline.

**Aline:** Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m excited.

**John:** Our second guest also directs big feature-feature films. His name is Rawson Marshall Thurber, writer and director of Dodgeball, We’re the Millers. Last time we heard from him he was down in Georgia where they had just stopped production of Red Notice, the big movie he was shooting with Ryan Reynolds and Dwayne Johnson and Gal Gadot. But now you’re back in Los Angeles, Rawson?

**Rawson Thurber:** Yep. Got back on Friday.

**John:** So I want to talk to you about, you know, stopping production, thinking about restarting production. Both of you are sort of thinking about features, but Aline you have experience in television as well. So, I want to get into all the decisions and complications of trying to get back into production not knowing what’s going to happen next with the pandemic.

But, first, we have some follow up. Craig, previous episodes we talked about the secret mission that you were on that took you away for an episode of Scriptnotes. We can now reveal what your secret mission was.

**Craig:** So, we were working on the quarantine episode of Mythic Quest which is now available – I think it became available last night like around midnight or something via Apple+ TV, AppleTV+. I should know, because I’m on it.

**John:** You should know, because you’re an actor on this show.

**Craig:** I’m an actor on their network. I think it’s AppleTV+. The point is it’s the Apple thing. I think it’s great. And I’m not the guy that likes to pump up his own stuff, you know. I’m not like “I did a thing and it’s great.” I didn’t do this thing. I didn’t write it. I act in it briefly. But I think they did a gorgeous job and it’s beautiful. Made me cry. It made me laugh. It was all of those wonderful things. And it touches on the quarantine experience I think in the most authentic way.

It was really crazy to make it. It involved putting cameras on mounts in front of a lap top using Zoom and the camera and a special microphone. You have to do all this yourself. You have like a DP going, “Great, tilt down for me.” So then you go over and you tilt down with this not accurate mechanism and then somebody else goes, “Great, can you move your laptop a little so we can see the camera that you just tilted?” And then it involved these Rube Goldberg inventions.

It was all bananas. And it works great. So, I honestly hope everybody sees it. If not for anything other than the excellent writing by Rob McElhenney and Megan Ganz and David Hornsby. And the brilliant performance of Charlotte Nicdao who just breaks your heart. She’s so good.

**John:** Now, you were already in production on the second season when the pandemic struck, so this episode takes place in a gap between the two seasons?

**Craig:** Yeah. So they were in production for about two days. And then they shut down. It’s just the way the timing worked out. So this episode takes place in between season one and season two. Meaning that when season two arrives season two will be post-pandemic.

**John:** So it’s very much like the British model of having Christmas episodes that don’t quite take place in either timeline?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The pandemic is our Christmas is really what we’re coming down to.

**Craig:** It’s Pandemic-Mas. But I just think it’s really great. And people seem to be loving it. So, I’m very pleased with that because, I mean, they worked so, so hard. I mean, I’m in three scenes and those were really hard to do. To do all the scenes and then edit it and do all the mix – everything had to be done remotely. It was just bananas. So hat’s off to the Mythic Quest crew. They did an incredible job. And I hope people do see that episode.

**John:** Absolutely. I have two little bits of news here before we get into our main topic. First is I’ve gotten involved with these groups that work with foster kids, especially blind foster kids for research I was doing for this movie I hope to be directing at some point in the future. To help them out I am raffling off a 60-minute one-on-one writing session on Zoom, where we can talk about your script or your book or anything. The proceeds go to help these amazing foster charities. So there will be a link in the show notes for that, but it’s part of #FosterChallenge. If you just Google that hashtag you’ll find me.

Second off, this past week it was announced that Prince William and Kate Middleton, their best friends had a baby. They named their baby Arlo Finch, which seems impossible.

**Rawson:** What?

**Aline:** Did you get to the bottom of this?

**John:** No. And that’s why I’m bringing this up on this episode because I feel like somebody listening to this show must have some insight into why this couple named their child Arlo Finch. Because it seems like too great of a coincidence that they’re naming it after the hero of my trilogy novel series.

**Rawson:** That’s actually true?

**John:** It’s actually true. His name is Arlo Finch Bear.

**Craig:** Arlo Finch Bear.

**John:** Yeah, the husband’s last name is Bear which is a remarkable name anyway.

**Craig:** Oh no, I think his first name is Bear. It says Bear McClane.

**John:** Oh, Bear McClane. Well, very good. So his name is Arlo Finch Bear McClane.

**Craig:** Yes, so I guess it’s like he has two middle names because he’s fancy and English?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Arlo Finch Bear.

**John:** So, somebody listening to this program must have insight into the British aristocracy and can give me an answer on how this child was named Arlo Finch. Because there have been some other Arlo Finches born and the people have written to me saying like, “Oh, we just really loved the name so we’ve named her Arlo Finch.” But for a fancy British couple to name it, it just feels like too remarkable to go unexamined.

**Craig:** We’re going to solve this.

**Aline:** I mean, does this have to do with your close personal ties to the royal family?

**John:** I don’t think so. I know some people who know some people in the royal family, but they don’t know the right people in the royal family. So someone listening to this program will know.

**Aline:** Amazing.

**John:** So if you do know why you need to tweet at me or email me at ask@johnaugust.com. So that is the second most pressing thing for us to address in the podcast today. The most pressing though is let’s talk about production and getting back to set.

Let’s start with we had to leave set and maybe Rawson you could kick us off, because you were in the middle of production on Red Notice when you had to shut down. What were those last days and hours like as you were making the decision to pull the plug?

**Rawson:** Yeah, it was a very, very strange experience. We were day 38 of a 70-day shoot, so just a little past halfway. And we’d been tracking the pandemic for quite some time, not really sure how it was going to affect us or if it was. And we originally had a big opening action sequence set in Rome. We’d scouted it. Second unit was about a week away from shooting in Italy and then the outbreak happened in Italy. And we had to pull the plug there. And then we started scouting London. And so I was trying to rewrite the opening while we were shooting. And then we were going to shut down and go to London to scout.

At that point we weren’t really thinking that we would have to stop shooting domestically. So it was already a daily conversation, sometimes even an hourly conversation for weeks leading up to day 38 in which we pulled the plug I think after a Thursday shoot. We finished a sequence and our producer, Bo Flynn, and Dwayne Johnson gathered the entire crew together and let them know that we were going to take Friday off and reassess over the weekend. I think Netflix was huddling up at that point to figure out what they were going to do with all their productions.

And so when we left it was a very strange way of pausing, because most of us were pretty sure we weren’t coming back Monday. But I don’t think any of us really thought that it would be months, and months, and months, and months before we got back. So it was a strange way to end summer camp I suppose.

**John:** Now, Aline, through all of this you don’t have a TV show shooting right now, but this easily could have happened while you were doing Crazy Ex-Girlfriend where you would have had to just walk away from everything. And put yourself in that position. Imagine if this is happening. What are the conversations and who are you consulting with as showrunner about the decision to stop?

**Aline:** Well, it’s interesting. You know, as they say the best predictor of the future is the past. And none of us, including the somewhat old people on this podcast, we just have never been through this before. So, one of the really odd things about that experience was like who to ask. Who has the answer? And nobody does. And the answer is evolving. And the information has been evolving.

I’ve tried to not check my mail/computer/whatever constantly because you can sort of drive yourself mad waiting for the breakthrough. But, yeah, I mean, I think because your first responsibility is to protect the people who you are working with. That obviously comes first. And so that call seems like you have to stop. And the ramifications are enormous on a production in every single way.

You know, with a TV show you would be mid-episode on several things. So, it would affect not just what you were shooting but what you had shot, what you could shoot. It’s going to interrupt a lot of episodic storytelling. Because as Craig said on Mythic Quest they’re going to stick something in the middle. But do you address it? What timeline do you go to? Do you go backwards? Do you go forward? There are huge implications story wise. But it must have been really hard Rawson in that moment even to know who to consult. Because with such an evolving stream of information.

**Rawson:** Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think for us we knew it was serious and I think it was about, at least initially, about just hitting pause for a second while we all had the conversations that we needed to have. But it was very, very weird. Ending a show like that, ending a shoot like that, you’re saying goodbye to your AC and your boom guy. And hair and makeup. Everybody. And you don’t know if you’re going to see them on Monday or if you’re going to see them in two weeks.

And then suddenly this entire group of people that you’ve been working 16 hours a day with for sometimes five, six days a week, you’re talking to all the time and they’re just kind of gone. It’s a very strange way of doing things.

**John:** Right when it happened I thought it was like, oh, it’s going to feel like a snow day or a blizzard where everyone has to go away and then everyone is going to come back. And it’s become clear like not everyone is going to come back in the same way.

**Rawson:** No.

**John:** And you’re going to have to basically reassemble a new production.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**John:** But before we get into that production side let’s think about for folks who may not know how movies are made so clearly, or television shows, there’s the writing and preproduction and that is a thing which has probably been the least impacted. Because what we do as writers that hasn’t really changed that much. We’ve talked on the program about virtual writer’s rooms and the impact that that’s had. And it’s been weird but it’s not been catastrophic. That stuff is still happening. Pitches are still selling. All that stuff is being done on Zoom but it is happening.

Post-production like Craig was talking about with Mythic Quest, it’s possible. It’s really difficult, but it’s possible. People can work on those things on their home computers. Even animation can still keep happening. Chris Nee was on the podcast to say like weirdly animation on the stuff that she’s been working on continues.

But production is a special beast because it’s actually a physical act where people need to come together to do a thing. And that’s what is so challenging. They can’t all be sort of weird bottle episodes like what Craig did for this Mythic Quest pandemic. We’re going to have to find a way to get back to the set and back to something approaching a normal production flow.

So, Craig, do you want to talk us through sort of like the things that as we talk about reopening businesses in general, the things you’re looking to do? And then we can talk about why those are so challenging with physical production on sets?

**Craig:** We’ve been talking amongst ourselves anyway. I mean, everybody that works on stuff has been hearing rumors about how things are going to work. And there’s basic guidelines that we can kind of carry through from just regular life, so we know we want to repeat those. The easiest one is the fewer people the better. I mean, so when you’re talking about anything you’re talking about a lot of people. Any production is a lot of people. Way more than you think. I mean, the first time you walk on a set as a writer you go, “Why?” Later you find out. And then the first time you’re directing a movie you go, “Where are more people? I need more people. But don’t ask me anymore questions. Just do your jobs.”

So, they’re going to have to figure out how to break the crews down into skeleton crews, sort of essential crews, which you can do. And we know because we do this all the time when we have to. Classic example weirdly enough is nudity. When sometimes we’re dealing with nudity on sets you just break it down to the absolute fewest amount of people who need to be on the set so that it doesn’t turn into some weird peepshow.

So we know how to do this, but we also know that when you do it things go slower. So, right off the bat there is a cost that is going to have to get folded in. And one question that we as creators certainly are going to be confronted by is are we going to get the same amount of time we need to make the same product given that it’s going to take more time to make the same product?

So Rawson had a 70-day schedule. He’s shot 38 days. Will he only have 32 days given to him when he gets back?

**Rawson:** I can answer.

**Craig:** And do you have an answer to that?

**Rawson:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do.

**Craig:** What is it?

**Rawson:** Well, I think the math right now we think is about one extra day per five.

**Craig:** OK.

**Aline:** So that’s about 20%. Yeah.

**Craig:** That sounds right.

**Rawson:** We’re going to go back to our dear friends at Netflix and say, “We know it was 32, but we think it’s maybe 40.”

**Craig:** Yup. And that is a very significant increase in costs for them.

**Rawson:** Absolutely. Massive.

**Craig:** So that’s something that we’re going to – I think for projects like yours it makes sense to just sort of bite the bullet. For projects that are yet to be shot that’s where it gets a little dicier because then there’s a new normal of, well, this is what it costs to shoot a day. And the amount of money we had to give you hasn’t changed. So, shoot less.

**Rawson:** Yup.

**Craig:** So that’s one thing that we’re going to be dealing with. Obviously from a medical point of view people are going to need to be tested. Currently the tests are not particularly reliable. And also they take time. So, just because you test negative in the morning does not mean that you are not completely infected by four pm. So that’s going to be tricky. And then there’s physical isolation from each other. The most cramped, intimate space on a film or television set is the makeup and hair trailer. And that is going to look different.

And all of this is going to slow things down and gum stuff up until such time as there is a reliable vaccine or really effective treatment that reduces the danger of COVID to nothing more than the common cold.

**Aline:** One thing I think they’re doing, or they must be doing, or they should be doing is all these departments will have I think probably very good ideas about how they can reduce the number of people and still do the job at the level they would like it to be done. You know, all these different departments have expertise in their own areas and so they will be able to say, “Hey, I think we can economize here on smaller number of people. Or here are the best practices.” Because each department just has a really deep sense of expertise in their own area. So how do you deal with props? How are props disinfected? How are they transported?

How many shopping trips can you do away with on costumes? And all the folks in those departments will have ideas and thoughts. Because people want to get back to work. I think everybody will be presenting their best ideas about how to be safe, because everyone wants to go back to work but everybody wants to be safe.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about if this were a general business. Sort of the general practices for opening a business. You would say, OK, the people who can work from home work from home. And we talked about that with preproduction and post. Some of that can really be done from home. A real question about how much of the production office work can be done from home. Those are the people who are sort of organizing the paperwork and all the stuff that has to happen. Some of that can be outsourced but some stuff you do need a physical body there to do.

Social distance. Keep people apart. Yes, to some degree you can. But you can’t social distance hair and makeup. There’s things that really can’t be social distanced. But we can close break rooms. Sort of like close craft service. We can do some of that stuff.

We tell businesses that they should tell employees to stay home if they’re sick. And so they have paid time off. The challenge of our industry and production is that we are kind of gig work. And you don’t call in sick to things. So changing those standards.

Obviously masks are going to be important and a lot of people on a set can wear a mask. Most people on set can wear a mask. But not the actors who are in a scene. So how are you going to protect those folks who can’t wear a mask during those moments?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s also an amazing new excuse or strategy for poorly behaved actors who feel like throwing tantrums. Because there were certain kinds of tantrums you could throw and you’d have to really throw a big one that really stops stuff. But now you can just say, “My throat hurts. I’m not coming out of my trailer. My throat hurts.”

**John:** “I’ve got a tickle.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “And it could be because I don’t like this dialogue.”

**Craig:** I can think of one actor in particular who is sort of famous for this kind of behavior. And he, I’m sure, is looking at COVID and licking his chops at the thought of COVID-ing a production during the middle of a tantrum.

**Aline:** Jesus, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** That’s intense, man.

**Rawson:** And you’re not going to say who? Name him or her right now.

**Craig:** I’m not going to do that.

**Rawson:** Oh, come on. Boo.

**John:** Write it on a slip of paper and hold it up for the video.

**Craig:** I could do that.

**John:** All right.

**Rawson:** I want to see that.

**John:** Other guidance you would give for a business is to try to keep stable groups. And so if the same people are always around each other that’s safer than if people are constantly coming in and out of the group. But unfortunately in productions we’re always adding in people.

**Rawson:** Tom Hanks?!

**Craig:** [laughs] By the way, Tom Hanks, the one guy that can’t get away with it because he’s had COVID.

**Rawson:** Fair point.

**John:** He’s already gone through it.

**Rawson:** If that’s true, right? If the antibody thing works.

**John:** It feels like the antibody thing is–

**Craig:** It’s true.

**John:** It’s likely the case. But people should keep their bubbles kind of small and unfortunately on sets people are constantly coming in and out of production. The people you need for a day may not be the same – you might not have the same cast and crew day to day.

A sitcom with a really contained cast and crew is probably an easier, safer bubble to maintain than a giant production like Rawson’s.

**Rawson:** Yeah, I think just speaking for me and my production, it’s such a strange character, right? This sort of post-pandemic pre-vaccine pocket of trying to make your – or continue making your film. It’s a real strange challenge. And for us, well one thing I’m actually looking forward to is kind of a quieter set with less people. I know that’s like a very, very small silver lining. But it can get really cluttered and really full for no apparent reason. So the idea of shooting as though you are shooting a love scene for the entire show seems kind of strangely refreshing. So I’m looking forward to that in a small way.

**Aline:** Rawson, do you think it will effect scheduling? Like shooting outside is probably going to be the chances of transmitting outside are lower. And then certain types of scenes. So maybe people are also looking at schedules to realize, well, we’re shooting outside here so we can have a few more people here. And then here. So, yeah.

**Rawson:** That’s absolutely the case. We have a couple big scenes still to come. We have this giant 500-extra – or used to be 500-extra – masquerade ball kind of scene where Dwayne and Gal do this sort of really fun sexy dance number together. Kind of old school Hollywood style. And we don’t know how we’re going to do it, or if we can. And so I think it’s a combination of new methods and procedures of shooting, but also just speaking on the writing side of changing the script.

**Aline:** It takes place outside on a giant football field. And the dance is sort of like a square dance. Everyone is six feet away.

**Rawson:** Six feet apart.

**Aline:** So it’s sort of like, yeah, one of those. Or one of those courtly old fashioned dances.

**John:** Like a line dance.

**Rawson:** Yeah, a line dance.

**John:** A line dance would do it.

**Rawson:** A line dance. Nothing sexier than a line dance. I think we all know that.

**Craig:** So hot.

**Rawson:** But, yeah, it’s a sincere challenge to try to figure out how to execute it. And there are a lot of really good early ideas about how to do it.

**Craig:** There’s always going to be people that need to be jammed together to do this stuff properly. And what I do get worried about is there is a general macho attitude when it comes to production which is, oh, did you break your leg? Well, just here put some bungee cords around it and do your job. Nothing stops production. That’s kind of always been the case. The show must go on.

This has stopped production. When it returns I can easier see some people going, yeah, I don’t wear seatbelts. Do you know what I mean? We don’t have it. Let’s go. Let’s make a movie. There can be a kind of philosophical pressure.

And then what happens is the loosest arrangement becomes the normal arrangement, because everybody just kind of says, “Oh, they’re not doing it over there.” And then people are like, “OK, I guess we don’t have to do that stupid, annoying thing anymore.” And it can cause real trouble.

Even in prep, just writing in that stupid van is dangerous.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You know?

**Aline:** Well, might I also say right now with the nature of the disease is you’re not endangering just yourself. You’re endangering others. And that’s a thing that some people are struggling to metabolize in the general public is the idea that the mask is for others. But I think, you know, sets are cooperative and they’re communal. And I think and hope that people will understand that you’re looking to protect other people. And your actions are not just, you know, so it’s not like I’m just going to go out and break my leg. I can walk it off. This is really – look, in an ideal world this sort of strengthens people’s sense of interdependency and community and all that. But that really is what it is, you know?

**Craig:** We’re going to have to pay people if they’re sick. That’s the most important thing.

**Aline:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** We cannot get away with saying to people, “You need to tell us if you’re sick, because if you are you can’t work. Also, if you don’t work you don’t get your hours.” We can’t do it. Because they’ll lie. And I don’t blame them. They need to support themselves. And they should live in a system where they get paid, even if they catch a deadly pandemic, in order to protect all of us. That’s something that I just feel Hollywood has to do. Because if it doesn’t it’s just asking for trouble.

**John:** Now, let’s talk about as Aline was mentioning the people who in different departments are specialists. They are incredibly good at their one area of expertise. And within that area of expertise they can cover for each other if they needed to. So, if the head of the makeup department were to become sick or couldn’t come in to work that day, that person’s job could be covered. They’d make it work.

But there’s certain people on a set who are irreplaceable. And so the director – Rawson, if you got sick you would shut down. If one of your big actors got sick you would shut down. You would reschedule to the degree you could reschedule. But you would have to shut down. So, that’s a real challenge that production faces is that certain individuals if they’re gone everything just stops. And the challenge for that is not only how do you get the production running but how do you get insurance for that production. How do you get a bond on that production so that you can make it financially worthwhile to sort of keep going?

I’m sure that’s part of the discussions that you’re having on Red Notice is figuring out sort of how do you cover this on an insurance level and who is on the hook for if you do need to shut down again.

**Rawson:** Yeah. Absolutely. Those discussions are happening with our producing team and certainly Netflix. I mean, that’s something that’s going to come top down from the financiers in terms of the insurance side of things. But you’re exactly correct that, you know, everybody is important and safety – everyone’s health is incredibly important. But there is a difference between a PA waking up with a fever and staying home. You can keep shooting. But if number one, two, or three on the call sheet is ill, I mean, that’s a catastrophic issue.

**Aline:** Well, the testing – presumably the testing will get a little faster, getting the results more quickly. Because if someone gets a test and it takes five days to get the results back that’s a huge challenge in terms of presenting–

**John:** The challenge though is if Dwayne Johnson does test positive and you have to stop production that is—

**Rawson:** Who pays for that?

**Craig:** It’s a disaster. So then the other option that some people have been talking about is quarantining everybody together before the shoot begins. And just saying we’re showmancing together, all of us. And nobody leaves the compound.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about some of the different solutions that are being proposed and so what you’re describing is sort of the Tyler Perry scenario. So, Tyler Perry has his own film studio in Atlanta and he essentially can just move everyone to this former military base, shoot for several weeks, and everyone test before they go and they basically are locked down on this sort of basically like an island to shoot there. It’s not realistic for many scenarios, but it’s realistic for the things that he wants to shoot.

So, you can see his being able to do that. You can also imagine some true indie films that are sort of very small cast and crew who could do it that way as well. So, that works for certain kinds of productions. It does not work for Red Notice.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It doesn’t work for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

**Craig:** No. If you’re international or if you’re stage-bound here in Los Angeles it doesn’t make any sense. If you’re making Lord of the Rings it could work. I mean, if you’re going somewhere that has sort of proven itself to have managed COVID very effectively, like New Zealand, and you’re already going to be isolated because you’re in the woods, the forest, and your own sets. In those situations it’s camp movie anyway, right? Then I think it’s possible.

I mean, Aline, as you’re thinking ahead to directing your film have either you or Netflix started to have discussions about how it might work?

**Aline:** I’m not at that phase yet. And so I think there will be other things that roll out before. And so really people like Rawson are sort of on the frontlines. People who were in the middle of shooting, in active prep. And we will learn a lot about how things need to be from how they’ve been. But in that process I just – it’s very important to protect everyone as much as possible with the information that we have. And, you know, I wonder if some of those decisions that are made around the size of scenes and the scale and scope of things, you know, you can always go back to certain types of scenes and say how can I scale this back. It’s just, you know, Rawson is making a big action movie with lots of people in it. My piece is a little bit more self-contained.

But it’s a community that really exchanges information extremely well, right? Because crews move around and people will be already have been informing each other. So I think by the time I’m getting there we will have a lot more information on what some of the best practices are.

You know, one of the things about quarantining for a long stretch of time that I think about is one of the barriers to entry that we’ve discussed before for either I’m going to say women, but it’s also parents of young children is it’s a challenge to leave a child for a huge chunk of time, especially if you’re heavily involved in the day-to-day. Breastfeeding, or, you know. So that’s a challenge. I think for some directors that will be a real tough proposition is to be like 70 days or whatever. If it’s a big, huge movie, yeah.

**John:** In terms of the kinds of projects we might be picking, over the last two weeks I’ve had conversations with all the streamers about this one project I’ve been going at pitching. And the last five minutes of those conversations have all been about producibility. Basically like, oh, is this a thing that we could actually make? And the thing I’ve been pitching is uniquely well-suited for sort of a we’re on sound stages and we could do it like the Mandalorian where we have virtual sets. It is a very producible kind of thing. And that’s been an interesting thing for these streamers to hear about is that it’s very makeable in this environment. It’s not huge crowd scenes. It’s much easier right now to do a big space movie than it would be to do The Bourne Identity, where you have to have a lot of real locations and a lot of real physical interactions with things.

**Craig:** The Mandalorian is perfect, right? Because Mandalorian you have virtual sets and theoretically you can have an entire season with puppets and people in masks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In fact, season two may just be all Mandalorians and multiple base [unintelligible].

**Rawson:** Standing six feet away from each other.

**Craig:** Correct. They’ve got a full mask. It’s cool.

**Rawson:** It’s fine. They’re good.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re good.

**John:** Yeah. So the thing I’m pitching has tremendous amount of – there would be a tremendous amount of preproduction in it, too, and previsualizations of stuff. So, all that work could be done before we’d actually have to sort of turn cameras on and start shooting.

**Aline:** Can I ask a question that’s off the script a bit?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Not Aline.

**Aline:** How do you guys feel about the depiction of the world in a world where we all know COVID happened? Because that’s the thing I’m—

**John:** Let’s talk about it.

**Aline:** That’s the thing I’m interested in. If you’re watching your sort of delightful piece are you going to be distracted by people wearing masks which we’re going to be wearing for a long time? Are you going to be – look, I mean, we don’t generally script people going to the bathroom and washing their hands, but washing their hands is a whole thing. And someone was telling me that in the weeks leading up to this pandemic the number of men at the sinks had like exponentially risen.

I mean, our behaviors are going to be different. Like, when I watch a scene in a movie or television show where people blow out the candles it’s a horror scene now. And so I just wonder going forward when you watch somebody in something that is set after the pandemic and they shake hands for instance, which is something I was not a fan of before, but now is sort of – will have a different meaning.

What do you guys think in terms of storytelling and like Rawson are you going to adjust anything? Are any of you adjusting anything in anything you’ve written for that?

**Rawson:** I haven’t yet. But most of the things I’m working on after Red Notice aren’t sort of contemporary pieces anyways. So, I haven’t really had to address that mentally.

**Aline:** You’re doing a lot of period films over there? You’re doing your restoration comedy?

**Rawson:** No, I’m doing – I’m more – yeah, more like sci-fi fantasy, future stuff.

**Aline:** Got it. Got it.

**Rawson:** So it’s not quite the contemporary—

**Aline:** Or just everybody will slug it for last year. You know?

**Craig:** There is that. There is that. I mean—

**Rawson:** But I mean is it also – do you think that’s what people want when they’re watching a piece of entertainment, right? Do they want to be reminded of the pandemic? Do they want to see people wash their hands? Or do you turn that on to forget about that stuff? That’s another question.

**Craig:** I think it’s a trap. It feels like a trap to me, honestly.

**Rawson:** It’s a trap!

**Craig:** It feels like a creative trap. First of all, we’re not going to be wearing masks forever. We will go back to shaking hands. We will be hugging again. We’ll be packed into restaurants and bars and all the rest of it. It’s inevitable. It will either happen because there is an excellent vaccine or treatment, or we all get it.

But sooner or later the world will return. And so this will become a very topical moment. It will be a thing that happened for a bit. So, I can definitely see people setting things in this time. And also I think it’s reasonable to start to feather in people in masks in the background and stuff like that.

Look, I mean, the show that I’m writing right now is about America after a pandemic. And the only thing, when we had our sort of kickoff conversation the only thing that I said to HBO that I wanted to just consider is that people are much smarter about pandemics now, which is good news for us. We don’t have to explain as much. They get it. The nature of the pandemic is different. But, yeah.

**Aline:** Well, the other thing I think is interesting, kind of a side note, is when we were kids we grew up in a lot more of a monoculture, right? Everybody watched the same TV show that night. And that really has dispersed. But now this is not just the country, this is the world. And that’s why you’ll see like jokes about banana bread. Jokes about I’m an introvert/I’m an extrovert. There’s a lot of things that sort of everyone is having a common experience in a way that we haven’t had in a very long time. And I wonder about the effects of that also on—

**Craig:** Well it’s like after WWII there were movies about WWII. But, most of the movies were not about WWII. Because you sort of wanted, you know, like—

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** Get back into the swing of stuff. Look, odds are that traditional procedural television is going to give us some sort of NCIS: COVID show, right?

**Rawson:** Yeah. Unfortunately.

**Craig:** That’s inevitable. There’s going to be stuff like that.

**John:** Well, so, two different points here. Thinking about – I haven’t asked Derek Haas about sort of the Chicago shows, but the degree to which the Chicago shows – Chicago Fire, Chicago Med – acknowledge COVID-19. Or even if they don’t have an episode about it, does it take place within their universe? And my guess is it probably does take place within their universe, even if it’s not exactly right there.

A thing I’m writing right now is a relationship comedy. And a reality which we’re still kind of grappling with the central couple of this would have gone through the lockdown and quarantine together. And so that would change their relationship and are we going to acknowledge that or not acknowledge that within the course of discussion that sort of happens in the movie. That would have been a factor. Just like they would have gone through WWII or these things, even if it’s not about WWII. They went through this time and it was important.

So, when this first started I thought like, oh, it’s going to be like 9/11 and how on Friends they would sort of like passively acknowledge that it happened but never actually address it again. I think it’s a longer period of time, and so I think we’re going to have to – the audience is going to be expecting like, OK, if this couple was alive or was together during this time, this family was together during this time, it would not be the first time they were all in a house together. They would have gone through quarantine.

**Rawson:** I think there’s going to be a lot of readers unfortunately in Los Angeles who are going to have to put up with 16 zillion different romantic comedy lockdown where they went on their first date and then the pandemic happened and then they had to co-quarantine.

**Aline:** There absolutely will be baking sourdough in that case.

**Rawson:** I mean, oh my god. Just please – if you’re listening just hear my voice.

**Craig:** That’s the title. Sourdough.

**Rawson:** Please don’t write those scripts. Please.

**John:** All right. So as we’re recording this we’re on a Friday. On Monday there’s supposed to be some state guidance about what the state would like Hollywood productions to do. That will be important, but I think much more important is what studios and financiers decide to do. And really what the guilds decide to do. And the guidance of the guilds have their members about what is safe and what is not safe. Because it doesn’t matter what the state says. If actors don’t feel comfortable being on set—

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** If the crew doesn’t feel comfortable being on set production is just not going to happen. And I’ve been talking to showrunners this past week, July is floated out a lot about sort of studios are thinking about, OK, July might be a time to get started.

**Craig:** August.

**John:** Could slip to August. Yeah. But they’re starting to make plans for that. Some of the things I’ve heard a couple times, and I’m curious if you guys have been hearing this, too, is a shift to French hours?

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Generally how film sets work is that you shoot half your day – if it’s a 12-hour day you shoot up to lunch. You have an hour for lunch. Then you shoot after lunch.

If you shoot French hours you shoot straight through the day. And lunch just becomes a walking situation. Like you grab lunch along the way.

**Craig:** Shorter day.

**John:** A shorter day, which is awesome. But also not having to get people together for lunch—

**Aline:** So that would be a case where you go pick up a box lunch somewhere?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have yet to meet a director that doesn’t yearn for French hours. I have yet to meet any filmmaker that doesn’t.

**Rawson:** We’d been shooting French hours on Red Notice every single day.

**Aline:** Nice.

**Rawson:** It’s the greatest thing of all time.

**Craig:** Absolute joy. So, the question is—

**Rawson:** I can’t go back. I won’t go back.

**Craig:** Well, unfortunately we are all at the mercy of crews when it comes to that. The crew has to agree to do it. And I don’t know necessarily why crews are against it. Because it seems like, well, you’d be able to get home faster and your day is shorter. And honestly lunch sucks. It does. It sucks. Everything just stops and then cranking the thing back up again is a nightmare.

**Aline:** Well, some of those are more physically demanding jobs where you might really treasure that physical break.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Aline:** But when I’m directing I still eat at 9, 12, and 6. I’ll just go get food or order food or whatever. Because set hours becomes like you’re eating breakfast at 5:30pm.

**Craig:** Six in the morning. Yeah.

**Aline:** And that throws me off so tremendously. So I always eat at normal hours.

**Craig:** Well, really it just comes down to when you have a lunch break you don’t know what’s happening. So if the idea of keeping people safe is in some way controlling interaction, really hard to do during lunch. And food preparation. And people standing over their food and all that stuff. Who knows?

Yeah, for sure if you are a Steadicam operator and you’ve been shooting all morning someone else is going to have to come in. Because you’re not Steadicam operating 10 hours straight.

**Rawson:** Yup.

**Craig:** But for almost everybody else, I mean, god, I would love it.

**John:** There’s a lot of downtime on sets where as you’re moving between stuff there’s a chance where you could go to get the food that you need to go get.

**Craig:** Let’s put it this way. Smokers smoke. Right? So that means there’s always chances to take little breaks. But I personally – I hope that French hours happen. I mean, they’re a delight.

**John:** Now, some of the other repercussions of all this is once production starts ramping back up it will probably be slow to start. But then there’s a bunch of things that were in production that need to get back and finish, like Rawson’s movie.

**Rawson:** Yes please.

**John:** But there’s also a bunch of pent-up demand. There’s like a bunch of stuff that’s being written right now that will need to shoot. And I do think we’re going to get slammed for crews. I think it’s going to be very hard to put together a crew to shoot the stuff that we need to shoot. Because there’s going to be too much demand on those people. And some of those people will not become available because we don’t know that schools are going to be back in session.

So, a big chunk of the work force might be out because they don’t have anyone to take care of their kids. So I hope we’re all anticipating that it’s going to be tough to get crews when we do sort of get back up to sort of full speed here.

**Craig:** Stage space I think will be even harder.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think stage space is going to be the real – because stage space is already brutal. Because there are places where people want to shoot, because the tax breaks are there. So good luck finding stage space in the UK. Have fun.

**Rawson:** Very, very hard.

**Craig:** And even Georgia which is obviously a huge hub of production. Like all those spaces are being taken up. Crew, there’s a lot of crew in Southern California. I think if you’re shooting here you’re probably in pretty good shape. Because there’s a lot of people that are really skilled who don’t get enough work because of the way that production has fled. But even here stage space is going to be horrendous. It’s going to be Broadway like in the fight over who gets to be on a space.

**Aline:** I was thinking about Broadway queues the other day and people who had their shows in a queue and how that’s all going to be thrown up in the air and start again. Yeah.

**Craig:** Broadway is a whole other disaster. I feel so bad for everybody in that business.

**Aline:** It’s heartbreaking.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s really, really bad.

**John:** And Rawson your movie is for Netflix so you already have a distribution platform there. But we really do not know what is going to happen with the future of movie theaters and sort of getting movies back into theaters. I do believe we will get back to that place. Will it fully return? I don’t know if it’s going to fully return. The things that are still slated to come out, you know, theatrically this year, we don’t know. We don’t know if the Oscars are going to happen. We don’t know sort of any of that stuff.

But I don’t want to say it doesn’t matter, but in terms of production I don’t know that it matters so much. I do think we’re still going to make a lot of these productions of this size and this scale whether or not they’re going to be showing on those big screens or not. So, I’m not so nervous about that.

**Aline:** Well, there will be also a release bottleneck as you said once we get up and shooting. There will be a release schedule bottleneck.

**John:** Oh yeah. There will be.

**Aline:** My son is a very, very avid moviegoer. He saw 105 movies in the movie theater last year.

**Rawson:** Oh my god.

**Aline:** And this is his number one recreation activity. So, he’s already like really keeping up with the news about sanitizers, mask, dividers, whatever he has to do. There really isn’t anything that will replace for him that experience of going to a theater. But I do think we’re going to have, you know, obviously we’re going to have a dearth and then a flood.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** It’s going to be wild.

**Rawson:** Absolutely.

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. It is time for us to talk through the things we want to recommend to our listeners out there. Mine is weirdly pandemic-y which I don’t think would be a good recommendation, but I’ve actually really enjoyed it. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is this terrific book set within an outbreak and then 20 years after an outbreak. It falls within pandemic fiction but it’s just so really well written. I’m greatly enjoying it. So, I would check out Station Eleven.

If you’re going to buy Station Eleven I really encourage you to buy it from your local bookstore. If you’re in Los Angeles our local bookstore is Chevaliers which has just reopened. So get your books from there.

I’m going to be doing a special event for Chevaliers with other middle grade and YA author, sort of a virtual book signing, so I’ll have details about that. But support your local bookstores. We’re also going to be making sure to put up links to Bookshop.org for any books we’re recommending on the podcast, so you can buy them through your local bookstore rather than a giant retailer/reseller.

But there is one thing about Station Eleven which is also interesting is they had just started shooting. They were two episodes of five into shooting a miniseries based on Station Eleven.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** And what a weird thing to have a pandemic shut down your pandemic episode.

**Rawson:** Yeah.

**John:** And they will of course need to make the decision about within the world of this show did COVID-19 happen or is this – it’s so complicated. The meta levels of all this is so tough. But even as I’m reading the book I’m thinking like, oh, well people wouldn’t react that same way now because we’ve been through this situation. So that’s a weird case where the audience is going to be coming in with much more information than the characters in the story would have.

**Craig:** All right. Well, my One Cool Thing is so not cool and also the coolest thing ever. It’s cool and uncool at the same time. The Miracle Sudoku Solve. So, there is a guy named Simon Anthony who is he a member of Britain’s championship Sudoku team? Of course he is. And he will solve Sudokus, these really intricate, difficult Sudokus on YouTube. So he just records it and you can watch it.

And if you think that watching solve Sudoku is probably boring, I would think so. I mean, if it’s a regular one, yeah. But this is not. He gets one. He gets the special Sudoku that’s written by a guy named Mitchell Lee. Constructed, I should say. And you guys are familiar with the rules of Sudoku?

**John:** Yeah. So the numbers one through nine arranged in boxes. And basically you cannot have the same number in any row or column.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it’s a 3×3 grid. There are three boxes wide, three boxes down. And then inside each of those boxes is another 3×3 grid. So, inside of a box you can’t repeat a number. It’s one through nine. And then in the columns and the rows through the boxes you can’t repeat. And then what they do is they give you a bunch of numbers to start with and you have to deduce all the other numbers and where they go.

And, you know, it’s not my favorite. I’ll be honest with you. It’s not really solving the way I like to solve. However, he gets a special one. In this one there are a few other constraints. If any two little boxes that are separated by a knight’s move, you know, the little L shape, or a king’s move, meaning in any north/northeast around it those can’t contain the same digit. And the other rule is that orthogonally adjacent cells can’t contain the same digit, have to be contained consecutive digits, or something like that.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Here’s what matters. He explains all that and he goes, now, let’s take a look at the puzzle. And he hasn’t seen it yet. And it comes on the screen and we can see it, too. And it is a Sudoku grid with exactly two numbers filled in. Just two. A one and a two.

**John:** And a two.

**Craig:** That’s it. And he solves it. And people have been watching this–

**John:** Yeah, but Craig what’s important is he doesn’t think he can solve it and he’s convinced he’s not going to be able to do it.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** And then you watch the process of discovery as he does it.

**Craig:** Yes. He says, well, I’m going to try this for a minutes and then I’m going to stop this video and call Mitchell Lee and yell at him. And what happens over the next 25 minutes is as close to Rocky as puzzle-solving gets. And the joy that he experiences as he starts to unravel how this thing works is remarkable. I think at this point something like 700,000 people have watched this video of a man solving a Sudoku and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Because he himself is an utter joy of a human being. And you are watching somebody not only figure something out but experience joy. And it’s so nice to experience authentic joy. To see somebody have that in real time is wonderful. Especially these days.

So we’ll throw a link in the show notes if you have not already seen Simon Anthony solving Mitchell Lee’s Miracle Sudoku.

**John:** Now, Craig, that’s also a very good setup for our bonus topic for our Premium members which is going to be about puzzling and puzzle-solving. Because you and I discussed previously – people have to be a Premium member to figure out our previous discussion and our disagreement. And Aline has strong opinions on puzzling as well.

**Craig:** Ah, yes, of course.

**Aline:** OK.

**John:** Aline, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Aline:** So, for those of you who live on my side of town remember when you would drive up to the Target on La Brea and when you were driving back on the side street there was a food for homeless people. There was a big – remember that?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Aline:** So that’s the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition. They moved east and it’s now just called the Hollywood Food Coalition. And they serve that community. They do an amazing job. It’s a place that we have volunteered with the kids a few times. And it’s one of the places that I like to donate. And I have donated to the Los Angeles Food Bank since this has started. I think, you know, obviously this is disproportionately affecting people who have economic challenges and food is super important.

And it’s now just called the Hollywood Food Coalition. And I sent you the link to that. And in thinking about this I set up a monthly donation to them. They’re just a great organization. And when we do come back – they are still open – when we do come back if you’re looking for a place to take your kids especially to volunteer and hand out food, it’s a great one.

**John:** Cool. Hollywood Food Coalition. Rawson, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

**Rawson:** I have Two Cool Things if you don’t mind.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Please.

**Rawson:** I know. Glad everyone is sitting. The first one is semi-pandemic-y, just depends. It’s called the Wakanicci Robe. It’s the perfect robe. David Walton, this fabulous actor, and some friends created the perfect robe for me. And I have one and I love it. And if you’re padding around the house—

**Aline:** What is happening? Rawson, I need a picture. Wait a minute, I am also Googling this, but also we need a picture of Rawson in this.

**Rawson:** I’ll send you one.

**Aline:** OK.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**Aline:** Wakanicci.

**Rawson:** Wakanicci.

**John:** OK. Wakanicci.

**Rawson:** That sounds right. It’s an excellent robe. Highly recommend. It’s a bit pricey, but well worth it.

**Aline:** Amazing. Am I the only person ever to have recommended clothing on One Cool Thing up until this point?

**Rawson:** I was wearing it and my wife Sarah said, “That’s great. Do they make it for women?” And I said–

**Aline:** No.

**Rawson:** I said no. And she said, “Well then it’s not the perfect robe.” And she walked off. And I was like, damn. But apparently–

**John:** Rawson, I feel like we’ve discussed this before. I think robes are terrible. Robes are one of those things that feel like they should be comfortable–

**Craig:** I wear a robe every morning. Every morning.

**John:** That should be comfortable but are never comfortable.

**Craig:** No, they’re amazing.

**Rawson:** This might change your mind.

**Craig:** I love a robe.

**Aline:** Oh my god. I have to force myself to take the robe off sometimes at noon. Like, wait, I had a Zoom and I was like can I pull off this brown chenille robe as like some sort of cool wrap dress. And the answer was no.

**Craig:** I love a robe. I’m buying this robe right now. By the way, I also love that there are two sizes to this robe. The Nicci or the Waka. Nicci is men’s t-shirt large and smaller. The Waka is men’s t-shirt extra-large and larger. I mean, how great is that?

**Rawson:** You’re going to love it.

**Aline:** I’m only going to refer to Rawson in the future as Wakanicci.

**Rawson:** I can dream.

And then the other one, I saw this great documentary. I’m sure you’ve all seen it already. It’s a little bit, a few years old. But I saw it on Netflix and it’s called Winter on Fire. And it’s about the Ukrainian Revolution of 2014. And it’s 90 minutes long.

**Craig:** It’s awesome.

**Rawson:** And it is fantastic. I’m so glad you saw it, Craig. It’s heartbreaking and inspirational and riveting. And just one of the most intense experiences I’ve had watching television on the couch in a long, long time.

**Craig:** Poor Ukraine. It’s just they can’t catch a break.

**Rawson:** They can’t. Right?

**Craig:** They can’t.

**Rawson:** And I didn’t really understand, like with all the Ukraine stuff that happened 18 months ago or a year ago now, I didn’t quite understand what was really going on. And this documentary Winter on Fire, which was recommended to me by my friend [Nathan Middleton], it was stunning. And if you watch it at the very, very end there’s this moment where it looks like all hope is lost for protestors, our brave protestors. I think it was 93 or 94 days they were out there in the cold. And there’s this one man – one guy – who stands up and grabs the microphone and says this one thing. And it changes everything. And it’s unbelievable. Winter on Fire.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s pretty great.

**John:** Cool. That is our show for this week. As always, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael Caruso. 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. But for short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Aline, you are?

**Aline:** @abmckenna on Twitter.

**John:** Rawson Thurber?

**Rawson:** @rawsonthurber both on Twitter and Instagram, although I’m not really on either very much. Say h.

**John:** Hi. We have t-shirts. They are great and you can find them on Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. And you can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we are about to record.

But for everyone else, Aline, Rawson, thank you so much for coming back.

**Rawson:** Thank you.

**John:** You are original guests and it’s nice to hear from you again.

**Aline:** We are O. It’s actually @alinebmckenna. I’m an idiot. It’s @alinebmckenna.

**John:** Excellent.

**Craig:** And for whatever it’s worth the Wakanicci has been purchased.

**Rawson:** Yes! Craig, when you get it you have to send me a picture, or post it. I’ve got to see it.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Rawson:** And I’ll send you mine.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** And we are now in the Bonus Segment. So, I was talking with Craig earlier this week and I don’t know if it’s because of Miracle Sudoku that we were talking about this, or we were talking about jigsaw puzzles and Craig doesn’t consider jigsaw puzzles worth anything worthwhile at all.

**Craig:** Garbage.

**John:** Doesn’t consider them actually puzzles.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think you describe them as broken pictures?

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re just fixing a broken picture. That’s all you’re doing.

**John:** And arguably Sudoku is kind of just fixing a broken set of numbers. There’s not a narrative thread to it.

**Craig:** No, that’s not right. There’s a logical deduction to fill in things that are not there. Which is similar to a crossword puzzle. The problem with jigsaw puzzles is it’s all there. You’re just like, well, I need a piece that looks like this that fits here. Sort. Sort. Sort. Oh, here it is. It’s like just putting a vase back together. I don’t really understand. There’s no logic to it.

**John:** So, Aline and I are the founding members of the Hancock Park Puzzle Exchange. And so she and I each had jigsaw puzzles which we had solved with our families, and so we swamped them. And so the only time I’ve seen Aline during this whole lockdown has been at a distance when I went to her house to exchange some puzzles on her doorstep.

**Rawson:** My wife is all about puzzles. She’d like to join if that’s possible.

**Aline:** I’ve got some good ones.

**Craig:** They’re not puzzles.

**Rawson:** They are, Craig. They are.

**Craig:** Just saw jigsaw. Just say jigsaw pictures. Just say cut up pictures. [laughs]

**John:** Let’s talk about Aline. Ignore Craig for a moment.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** What makes a good jigsaw puzzle? Because you’ve done a ton over this outbreak.

**Aline:** You know what? What I like is that everybody in my family enjoys doing them, so it’s something you can do together. And it’s one of those activities that you can do and you can chat. My younger son who is a big puzzler, just overall a big puzzler, and has puzzled with Craig many a time, he loves them. His brain is spatial so that is interesting to him. And I think it works for people if you have different kind of visual brains. Colors. Shapes. So it’s a nice relaxing activity.

And the kind of puzzles that Craig and I do, or you know, the more cerebral puzzles are not as good for chit-chatting. And what’s nice about jigsaw puzzles is it’s something that you can put on music. You can talk. It bridges a number of age groups.

**John:** You can zone out on them.

**Aline:** You can zone out.

**Craig:** There’s no puzzle-solving that you could interrupt.

**Rawson:** Oh, Jesus.

**John:** So, I enjoy a jigsaw puzzle for the reasons that Aline is stating. It’s only using a very specific part of your brain and therefore the rest of your brain is available to do other things. And so you can have conversations. You can sort of be in a space together. We sort of got back into jigsaw puzzles because when we would visit my mom in Colorado we’d bring a puzzle so we could all be focused on a table together and be together without feeling like you have to talk at every moment. It just gives you a point of focus.

**Aline:** It’s particularly good if you have sons. Because, you know, there’s all these studies about how boys are easier to talk to if they’re doing something. And so it puts less pressure on the talking. So, we’ve had some nice chats. I also do it sometimes when I’m talking on the phone. So, it’s funny. I try and move things from Zoom to phone so that I can mainly do laundry, which I do a lot. I try and move those meetings so I can multitask. But puzzles are also good for – I actually find it easier to concentrate on what I’m talking about on the phone when I’m doing something that engages my brain a little bit.

**John:** Rawson, talk us through it.

**Rawson:** I’m sure this is poor form on the puzzle side, but I’m not a big puzzler or whatever Craig would call it.

**Craig:** Picture-er.

**Rawson:** Picture-putter back together.

**Craig:** Oh that. Yeah, picture repair.

**Rawson:** Yeah, picture repair. I’m not a big jigsaw guy.

**Craig:** Repairer.

**Rawson:** And like I said I’m sure this is poor form, but what I like to do is wait for my wife, Sarah. She’ll work on a puzzle for a couple days and there’s maybe 12 pieces left. And then I like to come in and just—

**Aline:** Oh no!

**Rawson:** And just kind of put the final pieces in.

**Aline:** Oh no! Rawson!

**Rawson:** It gives me a great sense of accomplishment.

**Aline:** Oh my god. That’s like the equivalent of eating the last piece of cake, man.

**Rawson:** [laughs] Oh, you know, I’m a simple man. I’m a simple machine.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So, hearing Craig talk on endless episodes and endless One Cool Things about different puzzles that he likes and why he likes different puzzles and hyping different things, I’ll say that during this interregnum where I’ve been doing a lot of puzzles I’ve come to appreciate levels of mastery of puzzles. Really good puzzles versus terrible crap puzzles.

And so the one we’re doing right now is absolute crap. And we should probably just abandon it. The pieces are too small. They don’t fit together precisely. It’s not interesting. There are big patterns where like this is all purple somehow. You’ve got to fill this in together. And that’s not rewarding. The great puzzles, and I’m going to put a link in the show notes to a Kickstarter that’s happening right now for Max Temkin who does Cards Against Humanity, he has these three puzzles that he’s been doing which are like the artwork is fantastic and designed to be a puzzle. It wasn’t like an existing piece of art that they cut up into puzzle pieces. This was made to be a puzzle.

And then the actual cut lines are designed to precisely fit this so that things don’t fall on one side of the line or the other. So everything fits exactly the way it should fit.

**Aline:** There’s a great article about how puzzles are made. It’s actually very intricate and very difficult. It was in the New York Times and I’ll send it to you. But one of my challenges is you know when you do a chunk and then you want to move it?

**John:** Transfer it.

**Aline:** Some puzzles won’t – well the pieces are too slidey.

**Rawson:** Would the hardest version of the jigsaw puzzle be just like black that’s cute or white that’s all one color?

**John:** All black or white. Where you don’t have any visual information and you can only work on sort of what the shape of the pieces are.

**Craig:** In a way that is the best jigsaw puzzle. Because it goes–

**John:** That’s the equivalent of Sudoku with nothing there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s the purest. It’s the only interesting thing about a jigsaw puzzle is that—

**Aline:** Craig, how do you feel about ventriloquists solving puzzles?

**Craig:** If they get their dummy to solve it. Like, wow, what a weird conflagration of non-talents.

**Aline:** What are other fun things that people think are fun that you don’t like?

**Craig:** Other than jigsaw puzzles, ventriloquism and mayonnaise, I think that’s probably – those are the three. I’m generally like, you know, I’m cool.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Just repair—

**Aline:** Is it really annoying when people are like, “What about aioli? What about–?”

**Craig:** Oh, it’s brutal. And I’m like, oh no, we don’t have that. What we have is Russian dressing. That is mayonnaise. That is.

**Aline:** Mixed with ketchup.

**Craig:** Correct. Aioli is mayonnaise. Russian dressing is mayonnaise. Spread is mayonnaise.

**Aline:** You’re not having it. Are you ranch? Do you like ranch?

**Craig:** No.

**Aline:** Interesting. I don’t either.

**Craig:** No, I don’t like ranch. I don’t like sour cream.

**Rawson:** I’m so glad I’m here for this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** I love sour cream. But you know what? Craig and I grew up in New Jersey around the same time. He’s a little younger than me. We didn’t have ranch.

**Craig:** No. Ranch didn’t exist.

**Aline:** No. Your creamy dressing was a blue cheese dressing with like big chunks of blue cheese in it.

**Craig:** Which I wouldn’t eat either.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** So Rawson is just young enough that he doesn’t remember a time before ranch dressing.

**Rawson:** I do not.

**John:** But I remember when ranch dressing was actually a fairly new thing you’d get. There would be a packet of like dry mix that you would have to mix up yourself to make ranch dressing.

**Craig:** Because it was patented by the Hidden Valley people.
**John:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** Is that right?

**John:** They are the only ranch dressing.

**Rawson:** Jesus.

**Aline:** What?

**Craig:** Yeah. There is an actual Hidden Valley Ranch. That’s where they made ranch dressing.

**John:** This discussion of ranch dressing is the whitest thing that’s ever been recorded on a podcast.

**Craig:** It’s pretty white.

**Rawson:** And that’s saying something.

**John:** It’s remarkable.

**Craig:** It’s pretty freaking white.

**John:** It’s remarkable.

**Craig:** Well, the jigsaw puzzles were already sending us down–

**John:** Yeah. We were in that zone.

**Craig:** We were in the white tunnel pretty deep. Yeah.

**John:** Oh, Rawson and Aline it is so good to see both of you. I miss you dearly.

**Rawson:** Likewise.

**Craig:** We miss you guys. But I love seeing you.

**Aline:** Yay.

**Rawson:** All right. Stay safe everybody.

**Aline:** Stay safe is the new goodbye.

**John:** Everyone stay safe.

**Craig:** Stay safe.

Links:

* Catch Craig on [Mythic Quest’s](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/mythic-quest-ravens-banquet/umc.cmc.1nfdfd5zlk05fo1bwwetzldy3?) special bonus [Quarantine Episode](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/mythic-quest-quarantine-special-explained-cast-talks-emotional-moments-1295570)!
* #FosterChallenge: John is raffling off a 60-minute one-on-one writing session on Zoom. Proceeds go to help amazing foster charities. [Donate here.](https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/johnaugustscreenwriternovelist)
* Please send info on [Arlo Finch Bear](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/1262424834555801600) to ask@johnaugust.com!
* [Red Notice](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7991608/)
* [Your Place or Mine](https://deadline.com/2020/05/reese-witherspoon-two-netflix-romantic-comedies-hello-sunshine-the-cactus-aggregate-films-aline-brosh-mckenna-the-cactus-1202932978/)
* [Hollywood Food Coalition](https://hofoco.org/)
* [Wakanicci Bath Robe](https://www.wakanicci.com/products/the-perfect-bathrobe)
* [Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom](https://www.netflix.com/title/80031666)
* [Station Eleven](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20170404-station-eleven) by Emily St. John Mandel from your local bookstore or [Bookshop](https://bookshop.org/books/station-eleven-9781594138829/9780804172448)!
* [The Miracle Sudoku Solve](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKf9aUIxdb4&feature=emb_logo)
* [Aline Brosh Mckenna](https://twitter.com/alinebmckenna) on Twitter
* [Rawson Thurber](https://twitter.com/rawsonthurber) on Twitter
* [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 Michael Caruso ([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](https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scriptnotes/453standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/there-are-no-slow-claps).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 451 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show Craig will offer some guidance on how to flip the script on tropes without landing on your face. We’ll also answer listener questions about phone numbers, slug lines, and short films. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will discuss personal videogame histories and the possibility that I was raised in a cult.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Craig has no idea what the Premium topic is until I read it aloud, so he’s excited.

**Craig:** I mean, both of those sound amazing.

**John:** Amazing. What else is amazing is if you are listening to this episode when it comes out on Tuesday then you are only two days away from our next live show.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Thursday, May 14, we will be having a live conversation with Empire Strikes Back writer Lawrence Kasdan to celebrate the 40th anniversary of that film.

**Craig:** Wow. 40 years. 40 years and I don’t know, can we do spoilers? 40 years of Darth Vader is Luke’s dad. We not only will only be talking to Lawrence Kasdan but I believe we will be able to share either visually or through some sort of method of relaying his handwritten screenplay. And I’ve been looking through it and it’s kind of amazing because sometimes there will be things he’s written and you’re like that wasn’t in Empire Strikes Back. And then sometimes it says, “Yoda, you will be, you will be,” and you’re like oh my god. It’s written down on paper. So, it’s pretty awesome. I mean, it’s kind of a cultural document.

I’m excited. And always fun to talk to Mr. Kasdan. He is a good friend of the show and the greatest living screenwriter.

**John:** Yeah. We like all of these things about him. So, we will be doing this on video, but we’ll also have audio for it. So, you can anticipate this being a future episode, but if you want to join us live at the time you can join us on Zoom. There will be a link in the show notes and more information as we have it for how you can participate in it. We probably won’t be inviting guests to actually come on and ask questions. But Megana will be monitoring the feed and if there’s questions that come up we will try to get those answered while he is there with us.

**Craig:** OK. That’s a good plan.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see. We’re winging it. So again this is done with the Writers Guild Foundation who we often do live shows for. So it’s exciting that even in this time we can continue to support their great mission.

**Craig:** You know, you and I, I think, are charitable people.

**John:** We try to be. We do.

**Craig:** We’re charitable. We like the charities. Now more than ever.

**John:** Let’s get to some follow up. Now, a few shows back I asked previous Three Page Challengers to write in with updates and so we have a first update from a previous Three Page Challenge entrant. Do you want to talk us through what Patrick wrote?

**Craig:** Sure. Patrick McGinley writes, “I sent in the first three pages of my science fiction script, Destination Earth, back in 2014. And you were kind enough to discuss them on Episode 159. I was never under the illusion that someone was going to make an expensive sci-fi spec without an underlying IP so I spent the last five years turning it into a feature length audio drama.”

That’s fascinating.

“It launched in March. All ten episodes are out now and you can listen to them at destinationearthaudio.com. In a recent episode you talked about how difficult it is to get a spec sci-fi or fantasy script made. I think audio dramas are a viable path. You can produce them for almost nothing and you can get your story out in a way that can be enjoyed as entertainment and not just read as a document. Thanks to your great advice over the years I made the jump to fulltime writer in 2018. I’m writing on a show that’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime.”

That sounds like it should be a planet, by the way, in a science fiction thing.

“I always draw inspiration from your podcast and it makes it easier to sit down in front of the blank page every day and do the work.”

Well that’s great, Patrick.

**John:** Yeah. I’m happy for Patrick. So that’s one success story. People continue to write in with your experiences after this Three Page Challenge. Even if it’s not great news. I’m curious what’s happened to people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now on this idea of the audio drama, I’m struck by a previous One Cool Thing of mine was the show Bubble which was a fiction podcast by Jordan Morris which I really enjoyed. And just last week it was announced that they are developing that as a series now. I think it’s over at Sony. So that seems like a viable way to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I know that basically every podcast that is vaguely adaptable into something is being sold. Remember when there was the graphic novel gold rush?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s podcast gold rush now. I mean, that’s what’s going on. So I get pitched a lot of podcasts. But what I like about what Patrick did was he just got super creative and flexible. Flexibility is not necessarily something that comes easily or like second naturally to writers. Sometimes we can be a bit rigid. We get fixated on our creative expression as a way of being artistic and it can’t not be that. And what I like is that Patrick was like well what if I do get flexible and turn away from film to this other entirely different format and thus bring it to life. And it’s a really smart thing to do. I think that’s really clever. And I wonder if this is going to be something that’s more popular. That instead of trying to bomb people with your spec scripts via cold queries and so forth you just start reading them out loud.

**John:** Yeah. I will say that just reading them out loud is unlikely to really engage people. Like if you look at the audio dramas that work, if you look at things like Homecoming which obviously became a big series, they were really good as audio things. And the people who created them had very smart instincts about how it could work in an audio format. So it’s not going to simply be I’m going to sit at the microphone and read this thing aloud. You’re going to have to shape it to fit the medium. But that is work that a writer can do.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, definitely if you just read it that would be bad. That would be sort of “oh I need to sleep, put on that boring man reading a screenplay.” But hiring some folks or just bringing some folks together who feel like just doing, you know, having some fun and reading something and adding some sound effects. I mean, production for something like a little audio drama is easier now to do in a professional manner than ever before in the history of mankind. And that’s not the case necessarily with making films and television, although they are somewhat easier.

But, yeah, go for it. It’s fun.

**John:** Now, on the topic of reading scripts aloud, last week we spoke about table reads. And Craig you had a strong opinion that you thought table reads for production in features was generally not a helpful process for you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Aline Brosh McKenna, our friend and the Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes, she writes in, “I was really interested to hear your conversation about table reads. I had a couple perspectives. I agree they can sometimes be detrimental in movies. Also sometimes on pilots where cast members don’t know each other and there are tons of execs. But for a TV comedy and series they can be super important. And on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend they were incredibly helpful. Not only to find where the laughs are, or aren’t, although that is useful, but to check the sturdiness of stories when you hear them out loud. We really relied on them.

“Also when I started writing I did multiple readings of all my scripts in my apartment with friends and that was probably the most useful thing I did and it’s something I always tell first time writers to try.”

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a great distinction being made here. If you are working on a show, a repeating ongoing show with a stable cast, and definitely this is the case with comedy because of the aforementioned joke issue, but you can actually get a much more reliable sense of how the script is going to be when you shoot it from that reading. That’s a helpful reading because everybody knows their character. They have the benefit of god knows how many episodes behind them.

When you’re dealing with features, they haven’t done it before, and they don’t want to do it for the first time in front of you. They want to do it, you know, for the first time when it’s safe and they have takes and there aren’t executives around. Great distinction there. I can’t imagine any sitcom, whether it’s something that’s kind of quasi-experimental like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or not, not having read-throughs. You just need them for those. And also for your features if you want to have friends then that’s for you. And no one is judging you. There’s no professional fallout if it’s a bad read. So it totally makes sense. But yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Your distinction about safety I think is really crucial. It’s not a safe environment in features generally and people do get cut and no one feels secure in doing it. Which if you’re coming back and this is episode seven of this series and you are a regular on it, you feel like you can be free and experiment in a table read and other people wouldn’t be able to do that.

**Craig:** Precisely. It looks like we’ve got another comment here that sort of jibes with that if you want me to take that one.

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** Anonymous writes, “In Episode 450 Craig commented that table reads are useless. Most actors couldn’t agree more. In television they’re often used as an escape hatch to fire an actor prior to shooting a pilot. An actor friend of mine went through three screen tests for one show. Yes, three definitely screen tests before being hired. The executive producer of the show, whose name I won’t use, even called my friend personally after hiring them to say how excited he was to work with them. The director echoed the sentiment and even execs at the network approached my friend prior to the table read and said they were excited to have him on, or her, on board. It’s this person.

“Then came the table read when apparently one exec who’d likely never even had read the script decided they ‘wanted to go in a different direction with the character.’ This happens all the time to actors. It’s almost a badge of honor to make it through a table read with a job when you’re a working actor but not a name actor. So the studio pays a handsome sum to the actor under contract to walk away, but they at least didn’t drop $4 million on shooting the pilot.”

**John:** Yeah. So what he’s describing here is it is expensive to fire an actor after the table read, but it’s much, much, much more expensive to have to reshoot a pilot because you don’t like that actor in that role. And so execs are sometimes taking this as an opportunity to go like, “I’m not sure this is really the right person,” and get rid of them.

**Craig:** And if I were a network executive, like a broadcast network, I would want to go ahead and commission a scientific study to find out how often we have done a good job making that decision. Because I suspect that perhaps a Pop-O-Matic would be just as useful. Do remember Pop-O-Matic?

**John:** I don’t. But as we get into the bonus segment you’ll understand why I don’t know what a Pop-O-Matic is.

**Craig:** Oh right. Because you were possibly in a cult. So there was a board game called Trouble when we were kids.

**John:** Oh I do remember Trouble. We had Trouble back in the cult.

**Craig:** And so the Pop-O-Matic was that little plastic dome with the die inside of it and you would push it down and it would go click-click and then the die would go boing because it was in this little flexible diaphragm thing. So, Pop-O-Matic is a great way to revolutionize dice rolling which as we all know was just excruciatingly difficult without it.

**John:** It is. The worst. I think it’s because you can’t lose the die because it’s inside the little bubble. That’s why it is. Because Trouble is exactly the same game as Sorry really, but it’s just the Pop-O-Matic makes it so you cannot lose the actual thing that tells you how far to move your little pegs.

**Craig:** That is a very practical explanation of why they put Pop-O-Matic in the world. I think the not practical and more commercial reason is they were like look at this gimmick. Look!

**John:** Makes a noise. Kids like making noise.

**Craig:** Sugar-fed lunatics watching this commercial at six in the morning on a Saturday will go bother their parents immediately.

**John:** Good stuff. Last week we also talked about virtual writer’s rooms which is where you are gathering together a group of writers and they’re meeting on Zoom or some other sort of video sharing service rather than being in a room physically together. And I wanted to make a decision between entirely virtual rooms, which is what people are encountering right now, and semi virtual rooms.

So Annie writes, “I work in a virtual room now and for all the reasons you mentioned on the podcast that’s not so much an alternative to a traditional room as a necessary evil to get us through this weird situation. But two years ago I was an assistant in a room where one writer had to Skype in for a few weeks while his visa was being figured out. It was pretty terrible. He had such a hard time being completely involved in the conversation, even with his writing partner in the room trying to help facilitate his participation. When he finally did come to LA his personality and presence were so much more than we’d experienced through the computer screen.

“I can’t imagine having a room with multiple writers in this situation. Plus, they’d be missing out on all the bonding that happens in the kitchen around lamenting snack options and comparing caffeine consumption, all of which actually becomes very important to the room dynamic.”

So what Annie is trying to draw a distinction between is if everyone is in the same boat, OK, you’re in the same boat and you sort of muddle through. But this idea that, oh, maybe I don’t have to move to Los Angeles from Milwaukee and I can just Skype into the room is probably not a realistic option for those writers who don’t want to come to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I mean, if you’ve ever had the experience of being in like a minivan type of vehicle and you have a bunch of friends who are in the second and third row and you’re all the way up in the front, you’re left out. They can’t hear you. You’re talking forward. You’re not part of the thing. And you’re in the van with them. Separation does have an impact. It just does. There’s nothing you can do about it. And the more you try and include yourself the more kind of frustrating it is for everybody. So I completely agree. This is a great indication to people that, yeah, while everyone has to do it, sure. But if not everyone has to do it, you want to be in the room.

**John:** Yep. Do you want to take this comment from Greg?

**Craig:** Yeah. Greg writes, “I’m working in a room for a big streamer right now and there’s one topic that keeps coming up that I wanted to add to your list – video lag. One day my connection was spotty and the effects of lagging in the room felt almost like I was having a stroke. I couldn’t control my voice or image and others were looking at me as though I needed some sort of professional help. Then my connection dropped the chat and it felt like a digital bouncer had forcibly removed me from the room. For the next ten minutes I worked in sheer panic to get back in and when I finally did I sat there sweating, wide-eyed, trying to pretend I was as calm and good-humored as everyone else for the rest of the day.

“I thought I was alone in this until it happened to one of the head writers. Her image froze. Then she logged back in on her iPhone, appearing next to her own frozen face.” That’s awesome. “We all laughed at this even as she looked confused and afraid and as we tried to explain to her what we were looking at she froze again. When her second video resumed it was of her rushing down a hall with sheer panic in her eyes. It was the look of someone trying to find a life raft off a burning island.” Greg is very dramatic, by the way.

**John:** Yeah, I was going to say.

**Craig:** “The worst part was that if any of us attempted to call out her terror in any way other by cracking a light joke it would have been like saying the emperor has no clothes. We would have imperiled the room, the comfort of the other writers and our productivity because Zoom chats are founded on the fundamental lie that we’re actually together when in fact we are alone and one second away from digital annihilation.” Again, I have to repeat, Greg is a very dramatic person. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. But I wanted to include Greg’s full description there because it is a thing I have experienced and feared is that like when you can’t get into a group, when a discussion is happening without you and you feel like you’re pushed to the outside of it it is really panic-inducing. And you always feel like, wait, will I be able to rejoin this thing? You might have flow that is now broken. Particularly if you’re trying to run the show and then you’re not able to actually get into the conversation. It is, you know, it’s scary.

**Craig:** Yeah, so I don’t know what’s wrong with me but when I’m on one of these things and suddenly my video glitches up and I get booted from the room I feel a slight sense of relief. [laughs] Like, oh good.

**John:** You have an excuse for why you’re not there.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like I can just go now and do whatever I want. And later just be like, yeah, Zoom right? Geesh.

**John:** I heard about this on Twitter but – not this last session but the session before – the six of us were playing Dungeons & Dragons and it’s like midnight and I felt an earthquake. I’m like, oh my god, there’s an earthquake. And the other five people on the chat were like, including you, were like, “There’s no earthquake.” And then the next nearest person felt the earthquake. And the next nearest person felt the earthquake. And it was such a wild moment because I was closer to the epicenter of the earthquake I felt it first and then there was a lag before it got to Phil and then to you. It was just such a wild experience that even though we were all there virtually we were physically in the same city and so therefore we were feeling the same effects.

**Craig:** Yes. And that’s something that you don’t normally have access to, right? It’s a weird thing. Because normally when you’re experiencing something together you’re together. And in that sense you could actually kind of chart the movement of the shockwave, which dissipated dramatically by the time it made it to me and to Chris Morgan.

**John:** It was a long way to get there. The other thing I’ve noticed with video lag that can be so frustrating is obviously the big networks have gotten much better at all the live from home stuff and they’re generally faking the live-ness of it all. They’re not really live from home.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But one thing I do watch which is more live is Drag Race has this Werq the World Tour where they’re raising money for drag queens. My daughter is obsessed with it. And so we watch it and it’s two very funny drag queens. One is in Los Angeles and one is in New York. And they have great patter, but just that one or two seconds lag really makes it awkward.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** And you just cannot do it. It’s tough.

**Craig:** It’s brutal. Timing is everything. And when you have a forced lag it’s over. There is no – it’s why sometimes they’ll bring a comedian on to one of the news shows, like the kind of talking head news shows. And their stuff always dies because of the time delay. It just kills it. The expiration date on a joke is precisely 0.0001 seconds after it is said. I mean, if you wait any longer than that it’s just like stale air, stale air. “Oh, OK. Yeah. That was funny, the thing you said a little bit ago.” It’s the weirdest thing. Yeah. Timing.

**John:** Timing.

**Craig:** Timing.

**John:** All timing.

**Craig:** Timing.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our marquee topic. Craig, talk us through what you want to tell us about tropes.

**Craig:** Well, you know, I’ve been working on some new things lately and especially now that I’m in television – television, there’s so much more material you have to shovel into the engine of creation because there are episodes. Everything in television is longer than it is in film. And so you’re thinking about a lot of scenes, a lot of moments, a lot of scenes, a lot of ideas. And over and over it’s inevitable that you’re going to start to bump into places where tropes could go.

**John:** We should probably talk about what do we even mean by tropes? Because it’s a term that you and I throw around, but other people might not know what we’re talking about.

**Craig:** Cliché is a word that people use. So these are the moments, dialogue lines, scene, sequences, things that we have seen over and over and over in movies and television. It’s the guy walking away slowly from the explosion that he caused behind him. It’s the person saying something mean about somebody and then saying, “She’s right behind me isn’t she?” It’s that stuff. It’s crawling through the air duct to get to a place.

**John:** Absolutely. So they’re moments of narrative that are almost like stock photos that we’re so used to seeing them that we can kind of anticipate what they’re going to be like. And you could just string them together in forms that look like popular entertainment, but as a viewer we recognize that they are clichéd moments or they are sort of stock moments. And cliché would be too hard of a thing to bang them on because they’re natural bits of storytelling device in some cases, but we’ve seen them so often that they no longer feel fresh.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Jane Espenson often refers to clams. They’re old dead jokes for example.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there are also things that maybe in and of themselves aren’t considered tropes, but when you think of them naturally in the course of writing a scene you get a whiff of familiarity about them anyway. I mean, it’s not necessarily a trope that when there’s a horse racing scene and a character loses they rip up their little bet slips, but I’ve seen it so many times. So it’s like a little thing is like is there another way to do it?

And so I just kept thinking like, OK, what I’m really trying to do is every time I run into something like that I’m asking myself, OK, don’t do that. But then there is a question. Well then what do we do? Because that trope emerged in your mind for a reason. It’s accomplishing something. So we’re going to talk a little bit about how to handle that.

And I think the first thing we have to acknowledge is that tropes are not inherently bad. In fact, weirdly they’re inherently good. That’s how they became tropes. So, I looked this up. Everyone has heard somebody at some wedding say, “Throw your hands up in the air and wave them around like you just don’t care.” This has happened four billion times. But about 41 years ago Sugar Hill Gang wrote “Just throw your hands up in the air and party hardy like you just don’t care” and that may have been the first popularized use of that and it was awesome. Because no one had heard it before and so it was cool.

That’s why it became a trope. Tropes become tropes because they’re surprising and they’re fresh and they entertain and they solve problems. They solve problems. It’s like the first time you taste Hamburger Helper. You don’t know it’s garbage. It helped the hamburger. It worked.

**John:** Or first time someone said like, “Well let’s never do that again,” when something disastrous happened. It was actually a novel response to that thing that had just happened. But if we say that now it is still and is a trope. It’s shining a light on this thing which just went wrong. It doesn’t work anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah. It does not work anymore. The problem with saying, OK, well then I’m not going to do that is that we are disallowing ourselves from using something that at the very minimum accomplishes a thing. Hamburger Helper does accomplish something. It just doesn’t accomplish anything original. So our job here is to replace the trope with something that actually also accomplishes something. Different and good is original.

Different and bad just sucks. And so we have to be careful when we say, all right, no tropes please. We also have to caution that when you zig where everybody else would zag there is the potential that you might do something that’s just boring or self-indulgent or confusing or unimpactful or not believable. So, the challenge today is to figure out how to not do the tropy thing but still get all the tropy goodness from the heart of it while being fresh and surprising and entertaining.

**John:** That sounds great. And I think part of the reason why we’re emphasizing that tropes are there in the first place is that people approach anything we write or anything that they see with a set of expectations. They have expectations about the genre, about the kind of thing that they’re watching. So, they’re aware of what they expect to kind of happen in this. And if you’re so trying to avoid every possible trope then it’s not even going to resemble the genre it’s supposed to be in.

If you’re trying to write a vampire thing and all the vampires aren’t hurt by sunlight, or wooden stakes, or any of that stuff then at a certain point you’re not writing a vampire thing anymore. So you have to be aware of what the overall scope of tropes is for this and how you’re making your choice about what you’re doing and what you’re not doing and how you’re hopefully aware of the tropes and remixing them in a way that makes it feel fresh.

**Craig:** That’s a great example. The vampires. Because vampires are just like drowning in tropes. But you want the vampire to bit someone in the neck. That’s a thing, right? OK, or at least bite somebody in a vein. So, that’s something you need to do. And as you’re creating your vampire story you may come to that place where suddenly the vampire has to bit somebody and drink their blood. So that’s a trope. And I think the first thing you should do is not just deny it. Not say, “Well in my movie vampires don’t do that.” Just first say to yourself, OK, I’m going to allow myself to play out the tropiest version possible in my mind. What am I getting out of it? What are the things that matter?

Is this character particularly scared? Are they excited to be bitten by the vampire? Is the vampire reluctant, guilty? Is the vampire ravenous? What are the things that at least I want out of my characters in the middle of this tropy thing? Learn from that. That’s the stuff that actually you can keep and use. Because tropes are just expressions of intention. They’re just often clever or once brilliant expressions of intention that now become stale from overuse. But keep the intentions.

So, first off, listen to the trope as it happens and learn from it. So you’ve listened to the trope in your head. You’ve heard what the intention is. And now it’s really important for you to say to yourself I’m not going to actually do it. I think sometimes we get into a self-delusional state where we think, well, I mean, you know, we can get away with it. We can do just one. Or, it’s not like it’s that tropy, because instead of the usual vampire biting somebody in the next in a castle he’s biting somebody on a neck in a rooftop bar in modern day New York. No, look, if you blindly walk into a trope, that is to say you didn’t realize it was a trope in the moment, which happens, and then someone points out and says, “Oh, yeah, you know, I’ve seen that,” then you go, OK, OK, got it. Let me change that.

But if you know, don’t do it. Just resist the siren song.

**John:** Absolutely. So I think what your call to action here is like just don’t be lazy. Don’t use the trope without examining what the trope does and why you would be using it. So don’t go for the trope without thinking about what the trope actually does. In the vampire example why is a vampire biting someone’s neck? Well, it’s biting the neck to feed. Is that the most interesting way to show feeding? Is it worth spending the shoe leather to change that vampire behavior and go at it a different way? Is there something about the biting of the neck that you’re going to do differently that is important to your story? For instance maybe the vampire doesn’t have these pop-out fangs and so biting the neck is actually really difficult because they just have normal teeth.

Like that’s a change that you’re making which could be worthwhile. But basically your challenge is to always ask yourself why am I doing this thing that is sort of a stock photo in this kind of story.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because ultimately the audience will be sitting there going, oh, OK, well you know, see you borrowed that. You’ve started to bring up techniques like, OK, so what do we do.

So let’s go through, I’ve got seven suggestions. But I’m sure there are many, many more. But we’ll start with the easiest one which is just reverse it. So if the trope says boy meets girl when they bump into each other and you want them to have a meet-cute and you want it to be in the middle of the street because that’s kind of where they are maybe you just reverse it and they each bump – or they amazingly avoid bumping into each other. Like they’re heading towards each other with all of the attributes of a bumping together scene and they miss each other. And in missing each other they kind of turn back and realize that they had a near miss. And that’s the way it works.

Any trope there is you can just simply try, at least in your mind, to just do the reverse. If we know that vampires feed on people by drinking their blood then is there a way that vampires as it turns out need you to bite them so that they drink your blood. Whatever it is, reversal is always at least a simple strategy. If it works, great. A lot of times it doesn’t. But a decent first shot.

**John:** Absolutely. So you’re taking a look at, again, this is all going back to what does the reader, what does the audience expect. If the audience comes into it with a certain set of expectations and you’re able to kind of acknowledge those expectations and flip them then the audience is going to be hopefully even more engaged because they know that you know what they are expecting and that you’re taking an action to subvert that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. With that in mind, one of the kind of more comedic ways to handle tropes is by being meta. So the idea is that the characters or the filmmakers are kind of silently acknowledging that they watch TV and movies, too. They know the trope. They are either – when they engage in a trope they’re commenting on it, or the movie is commenting on it, or it doesn’t go the way it’s normally supposed to go.

So parodies kind of truck in this steadily. We did something in one of the Scary Movies where it was the trope of somebody in a moment of kind of anxiety and the camera is moving around them in a 360. We’ve seen this so many times. And we were doing this and then the character kind of puts their hands out and goes, “Stop,” and the camera stops and they vomit. And so it’s like you just acknowledge that the trope is happening.

Lord and Miller are by far the masters of this. So if you want to study this kind of meta trope behavior look at 21 Jump Street or The Lego Movie or any of the work that they do. They’re brilliant at it.

One of the simplest methods of being meta about tropes is doing the trope exactly as it is except taken to its absurd extreme. So, classic trope. You remove the cover of a bomb and there are four different color wires and which one should I snip. We’ve seen it a billion times. But in MacGruber you take the cover off the bomb and there’s a thousand wires. A thousand wires. And that’s great. I mean, it’s essentially like you said, it’s playing off of the audience’s expectation.

**John:** Yeah. And again the movie MacGruber it’s a joke they keep playing again and again is that it’s about diffusing this bomb and then they don’t actually do any of the work to diffuse the bomb. They’re having a completely unrelated conversation when you know you are supposed to be focusing on the bomb.

**Craig:** Right. For drama, sometimes all you need to do to kind of subvert and untropify a trope is to just change the dynamics. So I’ll call it loud to quiet in this instance. So we’ve all seen a prison riot. There have been four hundred zillion prison riots on movies and TV shows and they all look the same. In the prison riot there is a bell ringing somewhere. There are prisoners running around in a violent scrum. There’s always two levels to the prison and on the top level they are throwing burning mattresses to the bottom level. Every. Single. Time. Burning paper, burning mattresses, and people are getting stabbed randomly. And everyone is screaming.

That is what a prison riot looks like in everything. OK. Well, if you’re writing something and it’s time for a prison riot is there a quiet prison riot? Is there a way to do a prison riot where basically the prisoners are methodic and strategic and careful, which is actually kind of terrifying to consider?

So just deciding I’m going to do the same thing but just way quieter, or way louder, may be enough to kind of detropify your tropy intent.

**John:** Absolutely. And that shift of dynamics could also, it doesn’t have to be the entire universe, but whoever the central character is in that we have an expectation of who that person is generally in that story and to put a different kind of person in that slot is incredibly helpful.

And so if you have the charismatic cult leader and we have an expectation of what a charismatic cult leader is, and instead you have somebody who seems just the opposite of that, or just dialed in a very different direction, that is fascinating because we understand the general dynamics of how this is supposed to work but that’s not the person we expect to be doing that. And that gives you opportunity.

**Craig:** Precisely. Again we are playing with their expectations. I mean, last week we were talking about comedy as a magician’s trick. It’s just subverting expectations. It’s misdirection. That’s what we’re talking about here.

Another method is just analogizing. You take the same kind of thing but if there is something that has been done to death and yet useful, find something else that has the same kernel of psychological payload but is just different in circumstance in a way we haven’t seen. Typical thing in a lot of movies, particularly sports films, is the wise old coach who used to be something but isn’t something anymore because something tragic happened to them like they lost the big game and now they’re a drunk. And they’ve got to pull it together to help the young hero. That’s pretty much a stock trope.

If you want that character, if you need that character, maybe just look at the drinking part and say is there some other kind of self-destructive addiction that I can put here that isn’t that. Because we’ve seen it. It’s been done a billion times. So what else? I mean, weirdly enough one of my suggestions was are they in a cult? Are they obsessed with following something? Are they and end-of-the-world prepper? Are they running from a crime they committed? Are they trying to win back an ex-lover who has clearly moved on? What are they doing with their lives that has consumed them and pulled them away from what they maybe should be doing?

So you don’t have to turn your back on the useful aspect of self-destructive mentor, but you just have to change the nature of it I think or you end up being tropy.

**John:** Absolutely. And so in this case we’re probably talking about that sounds like he’s either a protagonist or an antagonist. We’ve seen stories in which that coach figure is the central character, so The Way Back, the Ben Affleck movie recently, he’s sort of that central character. We’ve also seen that as the antagonist, the one who is helping but also challenging our protagonist along the way.

What we’re pushing for is to look at sort of what the outside frame is of that character and are there things about that stock version that you can strip away and subvert so that we can actually see something really interesting and find ways to sort of do the same effect but without the usual details that we’re used to in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. You just get different lines, you know, different expressions. It frees you in a lot of ways. It really does. It frees you.

OK, we’re getting closer to the end of our list here. We’ve got three more. Mourn the loss of the trope. So tropes make things easy. And sometimes would benefit from the inclusion of a trope. If your 16-year-old protagonist is struggling with her physical identity or her sexuality, I think it’s OK for a moment where she acknowledges that there is a world where tropes exist which is fantasy world, where ditching your glasses or getting a haircut makes you a new human being to everyone. That doesn’t work that way in real life. And it’s OK to acknowledge the trope as almost like you the writer and the character are mourning the loss of it. If only the trope would world. But it won’t.

**John:** So let’s take Booksmart as an example. So in that script you have so many opportunities for these two young characters to engage in tropes, and instead we don’t engage in tropes, or we actually push against those tropes. So you have two young women who want to have the perfect night of high school, of partying, and in some ways they are longing for that trope. They are longing for this idealized version of what a high school party night is supposed to be like. And again and again they are not able to achieve it.

They’re also aware that they’re sort of going for this impossible thing at the same time. So the script is very smart about not letting them do the things that they kind of want to do. And sort of the sadness that it’s never as simple as you sort of wish it could be.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you’ve said an interesting word there which is smart or intelligent. That there is an implied intelligence when you fight back against tropes. Whether we like it or not, and whether we intend it or not, the use of tropes implies a certain kind of lack of intelligent or intelligence horsepower, because it’s a borrowing. So you will seem smarter, which is good.

OK, two more. This is an easy one. Eliminate the lines. Because tropy dialogue is what we consider to be written dialogue. It’s never going to be heard as authentic because it’s been said by a billion other characters before. And now one talks like that.

**John:** It’s hack.

**Craig:** It’s hack. Nobody in real life talks in trope lines. So, don’t have your characters say them. But those trope lines became trope lines because they did express something authentic at one time. So, whatever that authentic feeling is, it’s OK to have your actors express it. It’s OK to have your characters feel it, just not out loud.

**John:** Just don’t say those words.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just sometimes all you’ve got to do is if the trope comes to mind just delete it. But change nothing else and it just might work.

**John:** Absolutely. And if you are able to find that line that so perfectly encapsulates what that moment is like, congratulations you have now created a new trope.

**Craig:** A new trope.

**John:** A new trope line.

**Craig:** A new trope line. And finally, and this is really I think the best advice, and it’s the one I try and use the most. Be real. Tropes or at least are psychological processing of them is such that they feel connected to a glossy or melodramatic representation of life. They feel movie-ish. They feel TV show-ish. So the lines are kind of fake witty. I mean, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character wasn’t really witty but he would always have these snappy little one-liners, you know, because it’s fake. The behavior is fake macho. Nobody walks away slowly from an explosion. That’s fake. The choices are fake brave. The emotions are fake sentiment. There is never a slow clap in real life ever. There are no slow claps. [laughs]

So the question you have to ask yourself is in the moment that you have created what would really happen. Think about that carefully and then do that. Because there are mechanical ways as we’ve described to change tropes, subvert them, hide them, acknowledge them, but nothing is as interesting, I think, ultimately, than letting a trope happen in your mind naturally, you arrive at a point. Your brain says, oh, the trope would fit right here. And then you say that’s great. But what would really happen? And then you might get something.

**John:** So we have many listeners who are film historians and so I challenge them, can you tell us where the slow clap came from? What was the first cinematic depiction of the slow clap? Because as Craig points out–

**Craig:** The first slow clap.

**John:** It’s a thing I only associate with movies and I think I’ve seen people try to do it in real life and it feels incredibly weird because it doesn’t actually make sense. It doesn’t work. And so if someone can tell me the history of the slow clap I’d be delighted to hear it.

But Craig’s underlying point here about being real, like what is the actual real behavior that people in real life situations would do is the cornerstone advice here. Is that the way you get to making your characters feel grounded within the universe of the story you’re telling is to be consistent within that world. And so we’re not saying nothing can be heightened. Obviously things are heightened. And so Veep is heightened. That’s not how real people would speak. Never Have I Ever, a show I just watched and really loved, is heightened. And that’s fine.

Social Network is heightened. People are speaking at a clip that they couldn’t speak at in real life. But within that heightened universe there is an underlying reality that you’re never reaching for sort of stock ways to get through things. In any of those things if they reached for a clunky line like “Let’s never do that again” it would thud. It wouldn’t work.

**Craig:** Yeah. It just wouldn’t. And so, yeah, you are allowed to be not realistic in your tone, but in moments where tropes would fit the best way to untropify the trope is to say what would actually happen here. Let’s not gloss this over with some tropy paint. Let’s embrace the realness of it.

I thought that, you know, the movie that we were looking at the other week, Bad Education, did a really good job. I mean, there’s so many opportunities for tropes in that movie.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And it seemed like, you know, they dodged most of them. I really do think so. I mean, you could feel like everybody was working hard, including the actors. Because, I mean, remember, some tropes aren’t just written. Some tropes are also acting tropes. Here’s one that I see all the time. In the place of somebody allowing themselves to experience something they just do a heavy breath out. No one does that. Normally in real life no one is like, [deep breath], well, but they do this sometimes. So everybody worked really hard to not do the tropy tropes and it’s appreciated. It really is.

**John:** It is. Here’s my actor tropy trope. I’m frustrated so I’m going to take off my reading glasses and throw them down on the desk and then rub my temples with my hands. That is my tropy trope.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I mean, I think there’s a pretty great – there’s a few great Denzel gifs. A lot of times I feel like tropes begin with Denzel. Like Denzel does something amazing and then everybody else is like, ooh–

**John:** Oh, I’ll Denzel that.

**Craig:** I want to Denzel it. And then it’s like, mmm, but Denzel Denzeled it. So you can’t Denzel it, because he Denzeled it. So, anyway.

**John:** Craig, I think you Denzeled this topic and for that I want to offer you a—

[Clapping]

**Craig:** Da-dum.

**John:** I don’t know what it means. But it’s a thing that happens.

**Craig:** Just sometimes, yeah, it’s a thing that happens. It’s just so funny. The whole psychology of the slow clap is that everyone is stunned. And no one is quite sure if they’re the only person who thinks what they saw was great. And then one brave soul is like not only am I going to express that this is great, but I’m going to do it so deliberately–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then everyone is like, yes, I will too. One by one. And then the applause. And then it has to turn into like the full applause.

**John:** Yeah. But it would be better if it didn’t turn into full applause and instead it was like they were keeping time, where everyone just starts clapping the same way, like are we supposed to start singing?

**Craig:** That’s terrifying.

**John:** That’s a way to subvert that slow clap trope.

**Craig:** That is absolutely terrifying. Yeah. And there’s always that moment where the person like when the slow clapping is happening the person on stage is like “what’s going on?”

**John:** Wait, what?

**Craig:** They’ve never experienced the slow clap phenomenon. [laughs]

**John:** Well, the challenge of the slow clap though is it’s also a mocking thing. You can make somebody by the slow clap. So it’s impossible to read what it actually is. And it’s a thing that just happened in movies.

**Craig:** In real life the only time you hear a slow clap is in a mocking reference to slow clapping. So, yes, in a movie if someone gets the slow clap their response should be like, “You know what, screw you man. I know what you’re doing.” Oh, slow clapping.

All right. Well, we’ve got some questions we can shuffle onto here if you’d like.

**John:** Let’s go for it. I’ll start with Paul in Wales. He writes, “I have a question about slug lines. I’ve seen them be bold, underlined, and with scene numbers if it’s a spec, but how about different colors? I’ve written a half-hour TV pilot that uses parallel realities, showing how different characters deal with the same problem. Because scenes from both realties are intercut I’ve given each reality a different colored slug line, pink and blue, and the rest of the scenes are in black. As someone with dyslexia I find this easy for myself to keep track of where I am in the story. Are there easier ways of showing a jump between realities on the page? I have written Reality A and Reality B in parenthesis at the end of each slug line. Should I instead put this before the INT or EXT?”

Craig, what’s your thinking on this kind of slug line questions and color overall in scripts?

**Craig:** The risk is just being distracting with the colors. That said, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. If you have something where you’re moving back and forth between various realities and you want to color code those slug lines, that to me is not a killer. If I were reading the script and enjoying it I think I would find that to be kind of a delightful help. If I were reading the script and thought it was boring then I would think of it as – honestly, I would just think I wish the writer had spent as much time on the writing as they did on the color coding.

So it always gets filtered through the quality of the writing itself. I am tempted to say that if the script is done properly and well you won’t need those. But, I don’t think it’s a huge problem. And if readers do say, “Listen, I really appreciate it,” go for it. It’s not like we’re dealing with the 1990s where everything was being Xeroxed on black and white machines. So, why not?

**John:** So when we had Greta Gerwig on the show her script for Little Women had pages in red, so the text was in red, for when we were in the past. And it was helpful because that was constantly playing with which timeline we’re in. And so she did not just the slug lines but the whole scenes would be in red when they’re in the past.

And that worked for her script and I thought it was a good choice for it. What Paul is suggesting I think could work, but I don’t know that going in color is really going to be more helpful than putting the past or present over it, or putting some little symbol, or maybe just bolding the ones that are in the present versus the past, or the different realities. The pink and the blue feels like a lot to me. And I do wonder and worry for Paul’s sake that someone who is picking it up is just going to go, “Huh,” and might toss it a little bit earlier than they should because they’re so thrown off by the color.

So I think a simpler choice that works is going to be better than a color choice which might work a little bit better honestly, but will just throw people off.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, I think it’s also – you could also say, look, as a little note beforehand, “I have dyslexia. This is how I am able to write and navigate through the script. So apologies if you find it distracting.” I think sometimes just being honest about those things and people will go, well, I’m not going to be a dick and just be like, well, I don’t care about your dyslexia. Throw. You know? And fling it virtually across the room.

I mean, I would probably give somebody a bit more of a break because I understand the intention. As opposed to I am self-indulgent and I think that I’m going to make things pink and blue. Do you know what I mean? So, yeah, you know, I think in general he should be – I would be – let’s put it this way. That’s not going to be the problem. Do you know what I mean? In the end ultimately if there’s a problem it’s going to be because of the writing.

Alexandra from West LA writes, “Could you do an overview of all the ways a screenwriter could make money screenwriting?” Such a good question actually, Alexandra. Thank you. “How is the screenplay market structured? Where is most of the money? I know as screenwriters we aren’t here for the money, but current insight on this could help funnel my overrunning cup of creative desires, especially as so many different storytelling formats open up. Thanks. Thank you.”

I like that she said thank you twice. Alexandra in West LA. So, John, let’s do a quick rundown on how you can make some scratch doing this gig.

**John:** All right. So, the classic ways screenwriters, we’ll talk about film and TV as one big pile of writing, the classic ways they make money is I write a script all by myself, a spec script, and I sell that to somebody for a sizeable chunk of money and they say, “Fantastic, we love this script. We will make this into a movie. We will pay you this amount of money for the script you’ve written. We will hopefully pay you some more money to do the rewrites on it.” And that goes out into the world. I will get some sort of residuals and profit participation on that movie when it gets made. That is a classic way that people get paid as screenwriters, but it’s actually not the way that most screenwriters make money.

Most screenwriters instead make money by being hired to write a specific project. And so it could be their original project that they have an idea for, they pitch it to a producer, to a studio. That financier says, “Great. I will pay you X dollars to write that script for me.” Or it could be based on a piece of property that the studio or the producer owns and they are looking for a writer to adapt this into a movie. They come to you and say, “Do you have an idea for how to do this?” And you pitch them your idea for how to do this and they pay you money to do it.

Those are classically the ways that screenwriters make money is by creating material themselves and selling it, or by being hired to write screenplay material for somebody else.

**Craig:** Yeah. So there is open writing assignments where you’re hired to rewrite things. There is roundtables where they bring screenwriters together to have a kind of group effort to punch up a comedy script for instance. Or talk about how a dramatic script might be improved, sort of development style. And in television there are similar entrepreneurial avenues. You write a spec script, you set up a show. You can also be hired as a high level executive producer or story producer for a show that somebody else started. And of course you could be hired as a staff writer where you are helping break stories in the room and then you are assigned a script.

**John:** Yeah. So in our earlier conversation today about like writers in virtual rooms, those writers are being paid for their time in that room. And based on how their contracts work that time that they’re in the room may also be applied towards the script that they’re writing, or that script that they’re writing may not be part of that time that they’re spending, that weekly money they’re getting for being in the room. But that is probably the bulk of overall writer income in the WGA is TV writers who are in the room writing on a show.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then there are sort of nontraditional areas. I mean, well screenwriters also can work on variety shows. So they’re working on jokes and sketches. You can write on game shows, which do need writing. And then there are things that you can do sort of independent. I mean, you can write for commercials. Is it screenwriting? Well, it’s writing for the screen. It’s not necessarily unionized, but there is that.

But basically that’s kind of the run of it. I’m sure we’re missing a few things. But by and large 95% of the money that we make as screenwriters is through open writing assignments, through rewrites, through original material, through working in a room, or collaborating with other people on a television show. That’s kind of the run of it.

**John:** I would also say that a not insignificant part of income that comes into writers is stuff that’s not really writing, but it’s teaching writing, or it’s doing other stuff that’s sort of adjacent to that process. And so Peter Gould who is a fantastic writer and a director on Better Call Saul was my screenwriting, actually my film basics professor at USC. And so there’s a long tradition of also teaching or doing other things. We talked about assistants and readers, there’s other ways that these writers make their living while they are writing.

**Craig:** Yeah. So there are kind of screenwriting-adjacent gigs that you can do like teaching for sure.

**John:** Great. Jason asks a question. “On his blog recommended changing your phone number to have a 323 or an 818 area code. Is this still necessary in 2020?” So he’s referring back to a 2007 post I had done about moving to LA. And back then I had recommended that, yes, you should change your number to an LA number just so that people think of you as being an LA person.

That is just dead advice. That is not relevant anymore. Because people keep their cell numbers from wherever they were.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So don’t change your number.

**Craig:** No. Nobody has a number anymore. You’re a name. So, the numbers are gone. There’s a comedian did some joke about getting arrested – it was Kathleen Madigan I think. She gets arrested and they give her one call, but they take all of her possessions. It’s like I don’t know anyone’s number. You took my phone. I literally have no – I can’t call my own parents. I don’t know their number. [laughs] And that’s kind of where we are right now.

**John:** Mm-hmm. I still dial my mom’s number as numbers. I think part of it is just so I don’t ever forget it, just because it otherwise – that’s the number I grew up with. I can’t ever let that go.

I feel like I would be losing a part of myself if I didn’t dial that number.

**Craig:** Every day I wake up thinking I would like to lose a part of myself.

**John:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** I’m all into Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

**John:** So while your phone number does not matter anymore, the area code for that, I will say that don’t use a goofy email address. So, I think proper email addresses are – Gmail is fine. Everyone has Gmail. AOL is still fine. Some people still use their AOLs. It’s fine. But never use Roadrunner. Never use like the free email that came with your Internet service when you first set it up. That always feels kind of weirdly unprofessional to me. So, pick something that is – if you’re putting your email address on the title page of your script, which is fair and genuine, you can do that, just make it an email address that you’re not embarrassed by.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, AOL is kind of a red flag. If you’re an older person and you’re using AOL and you want to make it some sort of a virtue of loyalty then that’s fine. Yeah, Roadrunner, Hotmail.

**John:** Yeah, if I see a Hotmail I’m like I’m a little dubious of this.

**Craig:** EarthLink.

**John:** Yeah. All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things that are sort of related. The first is a book. It is my friend Jordan Mechner who created Karateka and Prince of Persia and is an amazing videogame designer and screenwriter, he has a book out now called The Making of Prince of Persia, 1985-1993. It is a collection of all his old journals. And so he was a person who actually just kept a journal about what was going on day by day as he’s building what became an incredibly seminal game and helped change the videogame industry. And you’re just seeing this college kid working out sort of how to make this game and largely do it himself. Everything from how to sort of figure out the bit maps to some of the programming stuff, but really more the business and the logistics of how it should all fit and work together.

So, I really enjoyed it and I think the closest comparison I would have for it would be I remember reading Sex, Lies, and Videotape, the book, that Soderbergh wrote which is both his production journal and the script for Sex, Lies, and Videotape. It was like the first real screenplay I had read. But the actual production log, his sort of notes about what he was doing day by day were so helpful in seeing like, oh, you know what, it’s just a lot of hard work and he didn’t know what he was doing through a lot of it. And so if you are a person who aspires to make things I think you might really enjoy Jordan Mechner’s The Making of Prince of Persia, 1985-1993.

We’ll put an Amazon link there. We put Amazon links for most stuff. But we’re also going to start putting Bookshop links to things we can. Bookshop.org is a website you go to and it’s like Amazon but it actually feeds through local book stores. And supporting local bookstores in this time is incredibly important. It’s a really well setup system and so we’re going to try to be providing Bookshop links to anything we talk about on the show that we can find on Bookshop.

**Craig:** Yeah. It sounds good. It is a really cool read. And like Sex, Lies, and Videotape part of the fun of reading about Jordan’s process is that you’re looking at somebody who is dealing with enormous limitations. And so so much of the story of The Making of Prince of Persia is how do I deal with the fact that I have no resources. I don’t have a lot of money. I don’t have a lot of time. And I also have very little memory to work with to actually make a game that functions.

So, the way that a kind of deprivation can sometimes lead to creative epiphany is fascinating to me and so the story of how for instance the main antagonist of Prince of Persia is a direct result of a memory limitation and how that comes to be is really fascinating. So, it’s an interesting – it’s a really interesting journey. And Jordan is a great guy. So, well-chosen there, John.

My One Cool Thing this week is I think I’ve mentioned Maria Bamford as a One Cool Thing in the past before. She’s a standup comedian out of Minnesota. She is brilliant. She’s also odd. She’s like one of the great odd comedians. She has no problem being weird. Her eccentricity is sort of front forward. And she also has absolutely no shame about talking about her struggles with mental illness which were quite serious. And she did have to take a lot of time off because she does suffer from pretty significant mental illness.

And she talks about mental illness all the time. In this latest comedy special Weakness is the Brand she doesn’t talk about it a ton, but when she does it’s still pretty impactful and pretty – there’s funny and then there’s funny because, my god, that’s really, really true and you said it and it’s funny, which is different. I think she’s terrific. And so if you’re looking for some laughs and slightly challenging laughs, which is great, check out Maria Bamford: Weakness is the Brand.

**John:** Is it Netflix? HBO?

**Craig:** I believe it is on Amazon Prime.

**John:** Fantastic. Which is of course the–

**Craig:** Distant planet.

**John:** Distant planet where the Amazons actually came from.

**Craig:** Yes. Amazon Prime.

**John:** Amazon Prime. In our bonus segment we will talk about my cult history and our early experience with videogames. But until then that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Special thanks to Dustin Box and Chris [Sont] for their help.

Our outro is by James Llonch. 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.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments.

Craig, thanks for talking us through the tropes.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. And remember there’s no slow clap.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. So, our bonus topic. A couple of things made me think of this. First off is Jordan’s book. Craig, you are adapting The Last of Us. And I’ve been playing a lot of Animal Crossing.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So videogames are having a big cultural moment, but they’ve kind of always been a cultural touchstone. They’ve always been reflecting and sort of making the popular culture. And so I wanted to talk about our videogame histories. And I guess we’ll start with the distinction between videogames and arcades and videogames at home. Because I did go to the arcade with my brother some and I would play stuff, but I wasn’t a big arcade person. Were you an arcade person?

**Craig:** I wanted to be a big arcade person. My parents generally if they saw me deriving pleasure from something would put a stop to it. [laughs] So the arcade in the Staten Island Mall which I think was called something like Space Port. I think it was called Space Port. It was all I wanted to be in. I just wanted to be in Space Port. And they were like, no, that’s full of teenagers and trouble.

**John:** I just completely picture you on the most recent season of Stranger Things being one of those kids.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** In the Star Port Mall.

**Craig:** So Star Port – god, I really want to check. So the Staten Island Mall, which is still there. I lived about, I don’t know, like a ten minute walk from it, and it was just classic. It’s like a classic mall. And Space Port as I recall it was just poorly made up to look like you were entering some sort of space station.

**John:** Were there some black lights?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think there were. I think there were. I think there were some black lights. There was that carpet that had planets and crap on it.

**John:** Oh yeah. Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know that carpet.

**John:** Yeah. It’s good stuff.

**Craig:** And then a lot of delinquents. But I really wanted to. But mostly my early gaming was limited to the Atari 2600 and then games that I could play on the Apple II.

**John:** Yeah. So this is where we sort of get into the John was raised in a cult thing because so much of what people will talk about in terms of their videogame history but also their popular cultural history I don’t have the references for somebody who is my actual age. It’s like I did not live through the same timeline. And so I don’t seriously believe I was actually raised in a cult or I have missing years, but things like H.R. Pufnstuf or Fraggle Rock, people will bring up these things. Like, “Oh my god, I loved that,” and I have no idea what it is you’re talking about. It just didn’t exist for me.

And part of it was growing up in Colorado, you know, in a pre-cable universe you only have what the local stations would carry. And sometimes they wouldn’t carry those things. But it is just strange that there’s stuff I don’t know about that everyone else my same age seems to know about.

**Craig:** Well, Fraggle Rock was HBO, right?

**John:** So that’s cable again. So I didn’t have cable TV.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so I think that that’s fair. I mean, if you couldn’t afford HBO – I mean, first of all in New York we didn’t even have cable. I think New York was like the last place to get cable for some weird reason. We had these odd forerunners to cable like scrambled broadcast networks like WHT and weird stuff like that.

But if you didn’t have cable then you did miss out on things like Fraggle Rock. Honestly, I think I’ve only seen one or two episodes of Fraggle Rock. That wasn’t a thing for me.

So H.R. Pufnstuf was slightly before us.

**John:** OK.

**Craig:** A little bit older. Or at least the bulk of it was I think. It was like early ‘70s. Super early ‘70s.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I mean, I remember seeing some of it but I wasn’t super into it either.

**John:** Obviously there’s stuff which is just based on geography, but clearly I think a bigger factor for me was that my father was inherently a contrarian and so if there was a thing that everyone else was getting he would do the research and get the other thing which he thought was better.

**Craig:** Ah. Yes.

**John:** So I never had an Atari 2600. Instead we had the Sears Pong game.

**Craig:** Oh dear.

**John:** Which I had to Google to make sure that it actually was a thing and it really was a thing. But Sears came out with their own version of Pong and that’s what we had on our little black and white TV. We never had an Apple II. Instead we were an Atari family, so we had the Atari 800, then the 400, then 600XL.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So I would get whatever videogames would also be made for the Atari computer systems. But instead of Pac-Man we had Jaw Breaker.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** We didn’t have Chop Lifter. We had something that was kind of like it. So we would always have these things that were approximations. Or games that my brother and I would have to type out of the magazine. So they’d have these games written in Basic and you would type them out of the magazine.

**Craig:** Oh yes. I remember those. I remember typing those.

**John:** Yeah. And then you’d save them. Once we had a cassette drive you would save them to a cassette drive and keep them there.

**Craig:** Yes. I remember. God, that brings me back. Typing them in. And that goes to show you how poor those games were in terms of their visual appeal because you could literally type them from a magazine into your computer. And save them on a cassette tape which was always fun to watch.

Yeah, I went down this memory lane about a month ago when we announced that we were doing The Last of Us because someone asked me what are your favorite videogames of all time. And so I had to go all the way back to kind of the beginning and ask like, OK, in the early days – because it’s easy for me to say like now I love, for instance, Fall Out and Bio Shock and GTA. That’s easy, right?

But in the beginning the first game that I remember falling in love with that pushed into my brain something was Adventure.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** On Atari. It was magical.

**John:** So, again, Adventure is a thing I never actually played myself. But I can picture it. I can just picture swinging across that little pit. But I could only play it at friend’s houses.

**Craig:** No, that was Pit Fall.

**John:** Oh, Pit Fall. Then I don’t what Adventure is. Oh, Adventure is the dot where you’re moving through the castle?

**Craig:** Yes. So Adventure is the dot.

**John:** Yeah, I never had it.

**Craig:** So it’s the dot. You have three castles depending on the difficulty level. There’s a white castle, a black castle, a gold castle. There’s a white dragon, a black dragon, and a gold dragon. The dragons looked like ducks. I don’t know how else to put it. They looked like ducks and they made this sound. [Groaning sound] And you had a sword which was a dash and a less than sign. I’m pretty sure. And you were a dot. And there was a bridge. The bridge is why the game was magical.

Never let anyone tell you that Adventure was magical because of the sword or the dragons. It was the bridge. And the reason why is the bridge allowed you to move through things you otherwise couldn’t get to. So there was like a little maze section that was sort of invisible. But as you moved through it would reveal itself. And you had to get from one part of the maze to the other, but there was no way to get there unless you had the bridge. The bridge allowed you to travel through an area you couldn’t. And that bridge was part of how you could start to screw with the game and go places you weren’t supposed to go and get your dot stuck in a corner. Or, get to the first real Easter egg of all time. So much fun.

So, Adventure was the first one that kind of lit me up. And never looked back. But I am concerned that you were not raised in a cult but rather you were manufactured and certain things were just left out. [laughs]

**John:** That’s entirely possible. And so I would say that during the time when I should have been playing some of these early videogames we had the proto Internet very early. My dad was an engineer for AT&T. And we had a terminal in our home where you could dial in and dial in to BBSs, Bulletin Board Systems. And so I was on that really early before most people were on that. And so the time in the afternoon when I would have normally been doing videogame stuff I was doing this.

And so message boards and chat boards and sort of chatting with people online. That’s probably how I got to be kidnapped into the cult. I do remember because unlike modern Internet where you just connect anytime you want, there were only a certain number of lines going into a bulletin board system and so you would get the busy signal a lot. And if I couldn’t get to the main bulletin board I wanted to get to I would try other bulletin boards. And so did join some bulletin board that I recognized along the way was some sort of religious kind of cult bulletin board. But I could always get into it. So I would log in there and check my email messages within that culty bulletin board.

**Craig:** That does sound like cult stuff. Yep. Yep.

**John:** But early videogames I did love from the Atari system we had, Karateka which is Jordan Mechner, and then ultimately we made a new version of Karateka with Jordan 20 or 30 years later. Castle Wolfenstein I loved.

**Craig:** [Speaks in German].

**John:** A sense of story was great there. It was the first videogame I really played where I was a character in a story, which I loved. And they’re making a Wolfenstein now again. They will always make Wolfenstein.

**Craig:** Oh, they’ve made so – there’s been tons of them. And they’re quite elaborate now. But back in the day it was a flat green monitored scroller with levels walking upstairs. It was very similar to Aztec, another early game I played. And you had the key and you had to open the locker and it had a three-code digit. And they would occasionally say Kommen Sie. And you would have to shoot them with your little gun and it was, you know, it was – weirdly I got more enjoyment out of that then some of the new Wolfensteins which are rather elaborate and pretty impressive, like especially the one on the moon.

**John:** Now, Craig, have you gone back and tried to play any nostalgic games and what has been your experience going back to play those nostalgic games?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Like the simulations or the–?

**Craig:** Sure. Like the mime simulator and all that stuff. It’s pleasant. It’s pleasant because it’s nostalgia. But rather than play it now what you can do it is instead of going through all that rigmarole – I don’t actually want to play it. I want to watch it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I was able – so the other game that I said early on was – there were a few. There was Adventure. There was Star Raiders. And there was Aztec. And so I went on YouTube and sure enough somebody had kind of a whole play through of Aztec which is – well when did Raiders come out? ’81? So somewhere in that zone of 1982ish this kind of copycat game called Aztec came out. And it was so much fun to watch it again and remember the enormous amount of time I spent playing it. But I don’t need to play it myself.

**John:** Yeah. Dark Castle, once I finally had a Macintosh.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, of course.

**John:** Was of course important and classic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the Atari game which was like – it was called Star Raiders – was the classic thing where like you warped to the next place and you have to defend your star bases. Loved it. It was all good. And that was actually a game that came on a cartridge.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Which made me feel like I was actually part of a videogame universe at that time when it was cartridge rather than having to load something up off a tape.

**Craig:** Star Raiders was a great game. So Star Raiders, like so many videogames, was inspired by a popular movie. It was clearly designed to look like you were in an [X-Wing] Fighter fighting [Thai fighters]. But it looked good. I mean, it was first person. There was like a reticule. And kind of the whole system was really brilliant. And it was just a great, great game. It’s funny how over time things have sort of flipped around.

For a long time they were trying to make Halo into a movie. And I always thought how do you make Halo into a movie when it’s a rip-off of a movie? I mean, it’s a great game. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s Aliens. It’s space marines fighting Xenomorphs and it’s Aliens. And there are a lot of games like that. Then you’re like, well, if I adapt it into a thing…

So, now that’s starting to change because videogames are getting more and more creative I think. And certainly more and more ambitious. And they’re taking you to places you wouldn’t otherwise go to and they’re also going to different time periods and historical periods. It’s fascinating. So, I mean, look, I think one of the reasons why videogame adaptations have struggled for so long is that people have been trying to adapt things that were already adaptations so there was a familiarity and tropiness to all of it. That could start to change. I hope it does.

**John:** This last week we rewatched Starship Troopers which I had not seen since it came out in theaters. And it was fascinating watching it because I had forgotten how Aliens Xenomorphy kind of it was. And so a lot of things I think as being, oh, that’s a thing that was established by Alien or Aliens, Starship Troopers also did quite a number on as well. It was a better movie than I certainly remembered it being.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. It’s this weird tongue and cheek quasi – it’s hard to tell if it knows it’s being funny. I think it does.

**John:** My take on it was that the filmmakers knew that they were funny and none of the actors knew that they were being funny. And that’s actually probably what makes it work is that the actors are so earnest in this absurd thing that they’re doing.

**Craig:** Yeah. “It’s afraid!” Yeah.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Pretty cool.

**John:** Craig, so thank you for helping me deprogram my cult.

**Craig:** You will never be deprogrammed. You are the function of a program.

**John:** I am the program.

**Craig:** You are the program.

**John:** Thanks Craig. Bye.

**Craig:** See you next time.

 

Links:

* Join us Thursday, May 14th for a live talk with Lawrence Kasdan 4pm PT on Zoom here: [Online Conversation: Revisiting The Empire Strikes Back with Lawrence Kasdan](https://www.wgfoundation.org/events/all/2020/5/5/online-conversation-revisiting-the-empire-strikes-back-with-lawrence-kasdan)
* Submit to the [Three Page Challenge](https://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Jordan Mechner’s: The Making of Prince of Persia, 1985-1993](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005WUE6Q2/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0) and Bookshop.org
* [Maria Bamford: Weakness is the Brand](https://comedydynamics.com/catalog/maria-bamford-weakness-is-the-brand/)
* [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 James Llonch ([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/451standard.mp3).