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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/how-do-you-like-your-stakes)

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 402 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program we’re going to be talking about the idea of stakes, what it means for a writer, and what it means for a character. We’ll also talk a little bit about Aladdin, fandom, and of course some agency stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But first we got to hype up our live show again. That’s coming up really soon, June 13, at the Ace Hotel. It’s a Thursday night.

It is a benefit for the amazing charity called Hollywood Heart. Our guests include Alec Berg of Silicon Valley and Barry, Rob McElhenney of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and his new Apple show, but also we’ve added Kourtney Kang of Fresh off the Boat and a new show coming up. She is fantastic. I got to work with her on a project. So we’re so excited to have these TV moguls up on stage with us.

And there will be more stuff to do too. We have some prizes. We have giveaways. We have special shirts we’re making just for that night so people buy your tickets if you have not bought your tickets yet.

**Craig:** Yeah. And correct me if I’m wrong, and I’m not wrong so you can’t correct me.

**John:** You’re never wrong.

**Craig:** I’m never wrong. Not about these things. And we have McQuarrie on a loop saying, “I hate to say it but Craig is right.” Hollywood Heart, which is the charity that this benefits, is a legal charity. Meaning if you buy tickets you can deduct them from your taxes.

**John:** I suspect that’s true. Because – and the actual value you’ll receive is just knowledge and joy.

**Craig:** And power.

**John:** Power. Yes.

**Craig:** And love.

**John:** We’re giving away power. Yeah. Love.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I mean why wouldn’t you come to this? It’s a great cause. And you know what? We’re in a bigger place. We got ambitious here. We need to fill a bigger venue so we need you listeners. If you are in the Los Angeles area–

**John:** We need your physical bodies in that space.

**Craig:** Yeah, we need you.

**John:** So that we will feel together.

**Craig:** I mean, look, in all seriousness, you know me. I’m perfectly happy talking to an empty room. In fact, I’m happier talking to an empty room. In fact, no one come. But really here’s the thing: it’s for charity. We’re trying to help kids. So, that’s why you need to show up. It’s not so much for me. Show up for John and the kids.

**John:** Yep. And our guests because our guests are phenomenal.

**Craig:** And our guests.

**John:** And there could be one or two more coming, but we can’t say that yet.

**Craig:** We’re always full of surprises.

**John:** Great. So hyping is done. I had my showing up at a place experience this week. This was the premiere for Aladdin. So Aladdin came out this past weekend in the US and most of the world. So I went to the premiere on Tuesday and it was weird. So I don’t think we’ve really talked about movie premieres so I thought we could spend a few minutes talking about what it’s like to go to a premiere as a writer.

So I guess, let me start how the day begin, because obviously I don’t need hair and makeup because I look just the same no matter what.

**Craig:** Well, makeup. [laughs] You could use a little makeup.

**John:** I get a little blush – no, I do nothing. So basically I get in a car, the studio sends a car, so me, Mike, and my friend Dan, we all went to the premiere together. We hop in a car. We got to Hollywood. This is at the El Capitan. They block off streets around it because they actually have blocked off all of Hollywood Boulevard for this premiere. So it’s actually difficult to get there.

They try – the publicists try to get you there so early. So the premiere started at 6:30. They wanted the car to leave my house at 4:30.

**Craig:** Oh god. Come on.

**John:** I’m like 10 minutes away. And so I said, no, 5:30 at the earliest. So we get in the car there. We get to the place where they’re dropping us off. There’s a greeter there who was fantastic. She took us around and did everything. And I specifically said that I wanted to skip the red carpet, so we’ll get into why I wanted to skip the red carpet, but Craig what’s been your experience when you do a premiere and doing the red carpet? Do you actually answer questions along that red carpet?

**Craig:** I have. It’s only been for certain movies, but I have. It’s weird. Definitely – it was less weird for Chernobyl because they seem to want to ask a writer questions in television. [laughs] When you’re in the movie business, so you walk down this red carpet and all these – you know, people have seen this I suppose in movies. The red carpet and all those people have their cameras and they’re like, “Look over here. Look over here.” And then the writer walks down and it gets real quiet all of a sudden.

**John:** Yeah. So there’s usually a handler beside you saying like, “This is Craig Mazin, the writer of the film.” Or they point to specific people who are already going to be asking you questions. Sometimes there’s little video crews.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Sometimes it’s just a person with a microphone there to talk with you. And, hey, can you tell everyone at Cat Fancy Magazine about Frankenweenie? And it’s like, are there any cats in Frankenweenie? I’m like, yes, there is. Let me tell you about Mr. Whiskers.

**Craig:** Yeah. And sometimes you speak to people who are from other countries. And, look, it’s all part of the machine. I mean, the thing to remember about these premieres, which I think a lot of writers don’t quite get early on, is that the purpose of the premiere is not to celebrate you, or the director, or the cast, or the movie. The purpose of the premiere is to sell tickets. It is designed to create stuffing for magazines and websites.

And so the parts that get the most stuffing generated that’s where they care. Meaning typically actors.

**John:** Yeah. Because those are the ones who are going to actually move copies of magazines if there were still magazines, but like clicks on websites.

**Craig:** Correct. Like if Will Smith for some reason was not able to go that day, because he had something else going on, they would move the premiere. [laughs] You know, it’s like he’s the thing that’s going to get all of the attention, right? I mean, he is the biggest name. So, it becomes that.

I mean, I watched it first hand at The Hangover 2 premiere. It was extraordinary. And it was right across the street. So Disney runs its family premieres at El Capitan and across the street you have Mann’s Chinese where a lot of big premieres take place. And they close off the street and it’s madness and people are there to see – they’re there to see Bradley Cooper.

**John:** Yeah. They’re not there to see Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** No! No. No one even in my house is there to see Craig Mazin.

**John:** So, approaching this premiere, this is a movie that I had worked on, very hard. I had stopped working on the movie. I had seen it several times. I had given notes on it. But it was not fundamentally my movie. And I knew I did not want to be answering a lot of press questions along the way because I can smile and sort of like, “I’m so excited to be here,” give those generic answers. But it was just going to be awkward and weird.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And I didn’t sort of want to give some honest answers on certain things. And so I said like, OK, I will go but we’re going to skip the whole red carpet thing. And my handler was fantastic. She whisked me through this little back way so I didn’t have to do any of the red carpet stuff.

And then you get into the theater, which the El Capitan Theater is beautiful inside.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Intimate but beautiful. And there’s like two other people inside the theater. And so even after delaying going there so early we had about an hour to kill.

**Craig:** I know. I know.

**John:** For everyone who was on the red carpet to start it.

**Craig:** I know. The timing of it all is so weird. At some point they start yelling at everybody to go into the theater, but no one is going in. I’ve got to be honest with you. I do not like these events at all. And if I can avoid them I do. If I don’t have credit on a movie but I’ve worked on the movie and I get an invitation to go–

**John:** I don’t go.

**Craig:** I can’t remember the last time I went. I do not like premieres because they’re actually not fun ways to see a movie. It’s so much of a hassle. And I just care about the movie.

**John:** I’ll take that back. The one time I did go was the first Iron Man. And it was a fun premiere and I was happy for everyone involved. And so I was there to celebrate them, but I just loved that it was not about me at all.

**Craig:** And, you know what? I’ll take it back, too. There was one. I went to Hail Caesar, because I was just really excited. I wanted to see it early. And you know what? I was not disappointed at all. I love that movie.

**John:** That feels like a good movie to see with a big crowd and with a group around you. And that is actually genuinely the fun of seeing these movies is because in the previous incarnations where I’d seen Aladdin I’d seen it in a screening room by myself, or nearly by myself, and so I’m watching this thing that is supposed to be a comedy and it is not funny to me because I’m sitting here scribbling into a notebook about things that I would encourage them to work on.

And then to see it with a crowd it’s like, oh, yeah, those are jokes that I wrote. And those jokes are getting laughs. And you actually get spontaneous applause at moments. Yes, the crowd is sort of extra hyped up because they know the folks involved and they’re applauding people’s credits as they show up. But it’s also a joyous moment because also it’s new for people because none of them have been spoiled by reviews or other bits of spoilers that have come out about what actually happens in the movie. So it was genuinely fun to see it with that group.

I met one of the composers who did the great new song for it, so that was cool. So, I’m glad I went to the premiere of Aladdin is the short summary.

**Craig:** I’m glad you went, too. It’s good. I’m glad. You know what? We’ve got to stay positive.

**John:** We got to stay positive. And it looks like, you know, we’re recording this on a Friday but it looks like the movie is going to do pretty well for the weekend and that’s a good thing, too.

**Craig:** It’s Aladdin from Disney.

**John:** It is Aladdin from Disney. That was kind of built in to the whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean not to take anything away from the accomplishment, but we’re talking about degrees of success at that point. There’s no chance that people aren’t going to show up. It’s Aladdin. It’s A Whole New World. For You and Me.

**John:** Basically thank you everyone who went out to see it over the weekend. I hope you enjoy it. I’m happy it actually turned out in sort of the right kind of PG. It’s truly a PG that you can take younger kids to. And I’m happy with a lot of how stuff went in the movie.

**Craig:** How many murders, onscreen murders, do you get before you get bumped into PG-13?

**John:** I don’t know. There is one onscreen murder that I really, really argued to cut. Sidebar here for a moment. It’s a thing that you encountered in so many different cuts of movies you’ve seen before where there’s a scene that is wedged in there to establish a character and it breaks the flow of everything else around it. Just like, oh no, this guy is a bad guy. See how bad he is? And I really, really wanted that scene to go and they didn’t listen to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know, this is – it’s what happens. You see, I mean–

**John:** It’s a collaborative medium. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a collaborative medium and maybe – I think what you should do is maneuver yourself into a position where you don’t have to collaborate that much. [laughs] And I’ve said this on the show many times. There is a way of doing something where you are going to do it mostly by yourself. You are going to make mistakes but the mistakes will be consistent with everything else because it all came from one brain.

It’s the mix and match of it all. Somebody may have a great idea. You know what the problem is? That character we’re supposed to be scared of him, but we haven’t seen him do anything bad. We should establish how evil he is. Great idea. Execution-ally there’s no chance of success because that came from somewhere else. It’s like throwing some weird instrument into the middle of another song.

**John:** And that’s a thing that happens in the writing stage all the time, too. Even what I’m writing right now, there’s a scene that I would kind of love to establish a little bit earlier in the script but like there’s no place to put that without breaking everything else around it. So, you know what? I have to do the hard work of figuring out, OK, if it is coming in at this later moment how can I make it work as this later moment beat. Because it’s not the same scene that would be happening earlier in the movie.

**Craig:** This is the life of the writer.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Writing and editing. They’re closely tied together.

We need to talk about the WGA and the ATA. But I would propose Craig, because last week it went on a long time, maybe could I set a three-minute timer and when the timer goes off we’re just done talking about it?

**Craig:** I need ten seconds.

**John:** All right. I’m starting three minutes, but if it goes less than that that’s great. And go.

**Craig:** Well, last week I was praying to the skies that everybody get back to the table. And they’re getting back to the table. Can’t claim causality there. I’m just happy that it happened. I’m optimistic and I’m very hopeful that you guys in leadership and the agency people can find a deal together.

**John:** Craig, you said you prayed to the skies and heaven, so this is a religious conversion for you is what I’m hearing. That you now understand that there is an all-powerful creator behind these things?

**Craig:** Sort of. By the skies and the heavens I’m referring to myself. So I’m the member of a new religion. The religion of–

**John:** Craigism?

**Craig:** It’s Craigism. And our lord’s prayer, “I hate to say it, but Craig is right.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, wouldn’t it be so funny if your first disciple was Chris McQuarrie?

**Craig:** My only disciple.

**John:** We should also briefly mention, because we have two minutes left on this time, which we didn’t even need. So another thing that happened this week was – I saw you single this out on Twitter – a writer who had been represented at Gersh shows up for a meeting at Fox. They say like, “Oh, no, your meeting was canceled.” And Gersh confirmed that they had canceled the meeting after he had fired them. That was not a god look for that agency.

**Craig:** No. That’s just dishonorable behavior. And even worse it is ignorant. This is not – in theory this will have an end. And we will want to return to agencies. And new writers are going to want to go to agencies. And Gersh will be one of those agencies, except now if anybody were to ask me about Gersh I would say they’re not great because as an institution they thought that would be a good idea. That’s a terrible idea.

That implies a poor sense of judgment. And that’s shameful. Shameful and stupid.

**John:** I knew almost nothing about Gersh, but this is the only thing I’m associating with Gersh right now is this incident. And so that ain’t great.

**Craig:** Just a huge error on their part and petty. And revealing. This is the problem. You reveal something about yourselves. Why in god’s name would they have done – what did they think they were going to accomplish? It’s the judgment thing that makes me – so it’s not a question of like, boo, you’re anti-writer. If they want to be anti-writer and somehow manage to be successful at the same time I guess OK. But there’s no successful strategy encased in that move. None.

**John:** Nope. None. And also it speaks to the question of who owns a meeting. And so if a meeting is set up between a writer and the studio, to my thinking is a social contract between the two of them that is not a thing that the agency owns in any meaningful way. I don’t think you can own an intangible thing. That’s the frustration to me, too, is that they felt that they controlled that meeting rather than the writer.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. It’s so arrogant. And you’re Gersh. No offense—

**[Alarm timer sounds off]**

Whoa.

**John:** I literally set a timer. That’s three minutes. We’re done. We can’t talk anything more about it.

**Craig:** That’s good. The people at Gersh are so happy. They literally got saved by the bell. [laughs]

**John:** Literally saved by the iPhone bell. Let’s get to some questions from listeners. We have not answered listener questions for a bit.

**Craig:** Somebody at Gersh was like shorten that timer. All right, listener questions. Are we doing listener questions or we doing stakes? What would you like to do first?

**John:** Well, our first listener question is about stakes so I thought we might start with this. Why don’t you take Vera’s question here?

**Craig:** Sure. Vera from Germany, welcome Vera, asks, “How do I raise the stakes in a true story? I’m involved in writing a feature film based on real events. Our producers are worried there may not be enough personal jeopardy in the story and I worry there may not be enough potential for it. The story is about young researchers who learn something of global consequence. They are ridiculed once published and their lives changed drastically after, but they didn’t know that beforehand.

“Almost all our main characters are alive today and still relatively well-known. We’re even in touch with them and they’re supportive of our project. So we can’t make their past selves look worse than they are and wouldn’t want to. They were good. How can I raise the stakes for the characters beginning early in this story?”

John, what do you think?

**John:** Well, first off, Vera, this is a fantastic question because it’s the kind of thing you’re going to face all the time. You have the extra difficulty of having real life people in there so you can’t manipulate backstories in ways that sort of get to reverse engineer what you want them to have.

But let’s talk about stakes overall, because we’ve talked about stakes in previous episodes but it’s good to have a refresher about what we mean by stakes, what development executives mean by stakes, why you hear this term used so much, particularly in features. You hear it some in TV, but you really hear it in features.

I think there’s two main questions you’re asking when you talk about stakes. First is what is the character risking by taking this action? By making a choice to do a thing what are they putting at risk? The second question is what are the consequences if this character or these characters don’t succeed? So it’s both the action that they’re taking and also the consequences of failure. How bad is the failure if they don’t succeed?

Chernobyl, of course, has remarkable stakes throughout the three episodes I’ve seen so far. Characters are faced with these kind of stakes questions all the time. Craig, anything else about the definition of stakes we want to tackle before we get into it?

**Craig:** No, it’s a very simple concept. What are you risking and what happens if we don’t succeed? It’s as simple as that.

**John:** Yeah. So you’re trying to pick the answers to those questions and to me what’s so crucial and so often missing is proportionality. You have to pick stakes that feel right for these characters, this world, this situation. Not everything can literally be life or death. Not everything is the end of the world. And so often I think especially in our blockbusters we try to make everything be the end of the world. Superhero movies especially have to sort of be saving the whole world and they probably shouldn’t be so often.

If you think about the world of the characters, it could be the end of the world to those characters. And so then you have to carefully define, you know, what is their world consisting of. Is it their social grouping? Their standing? Is it their family? Is it their dreams, their hopes, their wishes, their goals? What is at risk for them that isn’t necessarily of global consequence?

**Craig:** Yeah. We are currently in a state of stakesflation in Hollywood where everything gets upped. It’s not enough to destroy a planet, now you must destroy the galaxy. No, now you have to destroy multiple galaxies. Now you have to destroy half of everything that is alive which I assume at some point someone is going to say, “Well, we have to move that up to next time Thanos snaps his fingers it needs to be three-quarters.”

But when you think back to the first blockbuster, generally Jaws is considered to be the first blockbuster film, and the stakes in Jaws are there people on an island that are being eaten by a shark. And our heroes have to stop the shark before it eats another person. That’s it. That’s it. And it captivates to this very day because the stakes there are really not so much about random people getting chewed up, it’s about a man who has a certain sense of self and purpose and that self and purpose is being challenged to the extreme by a creature that seemingly is beyond his ability to handle. That’s stakes. It’s personal. I love it.

**John:** That’s stakes. So obviously when we talk about stakes our key focus has to be our hero, our protagonist, and what are the stakes for that character. But it’s important to remember that there should be stakes for most of these characters and they don’t have to be the same stakes. In the case of Jaws there’s the stakes of if we do this then we could hurt tourism. If we acknowledge this problem there could be issues.

I’m thinking to Chernobyl. So, we have your scientists explaining, no, if we don’t do this thing the next thing is going to blow up and it’s going to be worse. And we have another scientist who is saying if we don’t figure out exactly what happened these other reactors could blow up. But we also have government officials who are saying we can’t let this get out because if we do let this get out then there will be a panic.

Everyone has a different sense of what the stakes are and they’re taking actions that match their own understanding of what are the most important stakes.

**Craig:** Yeah. For some characters in the show the stakes are love. I want to be with the person that I love. I don’t want to abandon them, even though it puts my own life at risk. For other people the stakes are I have to keep this government together. And if I fail to then there’s going to be chaos. Right. Everybody had their different competing interests. And in those moments, for instance in Chernobyl there’s a moment in Episode 2 where Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgård’s characters are on a helicopter and they’re approaching the power plant. And they both have stakes.

One guy is I have an order from the supreme leader of the Soviet Union. That is somebody with nearly absolute power. And I have to fulfill that because if I don’t I understand that my life and my position and my authority and everything I have is under severe threat. And the other character’s stakes are that’s going to kill us. Don’t go there. We’ll all die.

Competing stakes. Always a good thing to have.

**John:** And ultimately the helicopter pilot has to decide.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Who does he need to listen to in this moment? And he actually reverts to sort of a lower [unintelligible] hierarchy of needs to sort of get to, OK, I don’t want to die in the next two minutes and so therefore I’m not going to fly over this thing. I’m going to listen to the other person.

But I think that actually points to really the root of stakes which is needs and wants. I mean, wants are generally sort of the better way of thinking about it. But what is the character going after? And is the thing they’re going after a really primal survival kind of thing? In some movies it absolutely will be. In some movies it is life or death. It’s cliffhanger. It’s those movies where at any given moment you could die.

But for most characters in most movies it’s a little bit higher up the chain. So it’s about comfort, family, stability, self-realization, self-actualization. Their sense of identity is at stake if they don’t succeed in this venture and that’s the risk that they’re taking.

**Craig:** All these levels of things, what it comes down to is what can you make me believe. And when it comes to stakes I don’t really as a writer have to do much to make you believe at home that saving the planet from a space alien is high enough stakes. It’s just sort of baked into the scenario. Strangely, and this is something I wish our friends in the executive suites had a stronger grasp of, that reduces our interest because there isn’t much of a challenge to that question.

John, a space alien, is threatening to blow up the world, and we need you to solve it. OK. I mean, I’m on the world. What am I supposed to do otherwise? I don’t really have a huge choice there. But if I say to you, John, you have a dream of something that means a lot to you but to pursue it will put your relationship with your own family at risk. That is stakes that now I’m leaning forward in my seat and thinking, ooh.

**John:** So Craig let’s talk about another recent movie that did a great job with stakes and obviously this is a movie that had huge end of the universe kind of stakes but also had very personal stakes which was Avengers: Endgame, which I thought did a really brilliant job of blending the two. Because obviously it’s going to have these big superhero stakes. Half of civilization, half of all living things have been eliminated with a snap. And yet there were very clear personal stories that they focused on. The choices of – we see Hawkeye losing his family and sort of wanted to get his family back and so that was so important. But I thought what they did with Tony Stark and Tony Stark being reluctant to even pursue going after this solution because he didn’t want to risk this family that he’d been able to have in this intervening time. It was really smartly done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Markus and McFeely are experts at working what I would call understandable, empathizable, if that’s a term, stakes into movies where the apparent stakes are ka-boom and blech and pow, right. What they say is even something as dramatic and huge circumstantially as half of every living person dying in the universe they narrow it in. It’s like they kind of force you to tunnel into a relationship to that event through individuals.

What does this mean for me and the man I love? What does this mean for me and my brother? What does this mean for me and the sacrifices I’ve made in my own life to get to this point? All of it is – they just tunnel you into that so that the two things are enmeshed. And that is super important. I just think these broader stakes of something is going to blow up is ultimately irrelevant. There’s no Die Hard unless there is a man trying to win his wife back. It just doesn’t matter. I don’t care.

**John:** It doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** I don’t care about who is in the Nakatomi Building. I want John McClane to kind of earn some redemption and get his life back. That’s, you know, what I’m hoping for.

**John:** Yeah. And even movies that have similar kinds of plot devices the nature of the stakes is so key in why they work differently. So think about comparing the first Charlie’s Angels to a Mission: Impossible movie. They both have some of the same beats and sort of plot mechanics and sort of set pieces, but the Charlie’s Angels fundamentally like will this family be torn apart. Will they be able to save their father figure character? That’s a very different dynamic than what you see in a Mission: Impossible movie.

It gets down to those really granular details about what is the relationship between these characters. What do they really want beyond just the plot wants?

**Craig:** Yeah. And this kind of fine-tuning and understanding, this is where unfortunately we do drift out of the area of craft and into the area of instinct which isn’t really teachable. But what I would say to Vera is, in just garnering what I can from your question, Vera, it seems to me that you’re wondering if you have to make them look bad to create stakes and I’m not sure that that’s ever necessary. Those two things aren’t really connected. I think if they were good people but you understood watching it, and you may have to adjust, that they were risking something really important to them to put their research out into the world. And really important it can’t just be my job. Nobody cares. You can get another job.

It has to be how someone they love or admire looks at them. Or how it might disrupt their pursuit of somebody that they love. Or how it might affect who they think they are as a human being and what their value is. It’s got to be something I can feel in my stomach, you know? Then there are stakes. And, by the way, perfectly fine to create a movie with stakes and have a character “bet it all” and lose. That sometimes is the most interesting story at all.

**John:** Yeah. I think back to Erin Brockovich which this is based on a true life story. This character intervenes in these water poisoning situations. But it was the specificity of like what was in turmoil in her life that made it such a compelling story. And Susannah Grant had to look at all the possible stories to tell and pick the one that had real stakes for that central Erin Brockovich character. And her stakes were not the stakes of the people who were drinking the contaminated water. Her stakes are personal. They’re about her relationships. They involve her kid, her boyfriend, sort of the dynamics of her life.

So I would say look at the characters, the real life people you have in this situation. Try to mine for some interesting ways that they either fit together or that in taking the actions they are doing they’re not just disrupting their own lives or risking their own – I say lives, not their physical lives but their own status or place – but is going to have repercussions on those around them. And the degree to which they understand that, those are stakes.

**Craig:** Yeah. 100%. I think that that’s kind of what we’re dancing around here as we talk through all this. We’re really talking about character. I think sometimes this notion of stakes gets separated out by people who are analytic or – and by analytic I mean producers and executives who are trying to come up with something easy for us like, “Well what are the stakes?” And the truth is if the character is working, you’ll know what the stakes are. The character and the stakes should be embedded with each other. It should just be one in the same.

In the same way that the character and the story should be embedded with each other and be one in the same. And the dialogue and the character should be – character is the hub. Character is the hub of the wheel my friends. And stakes is just one more spoke emanating out of it. It’s all baked into character.

In the case of adapting real life, Vera, it’s OK to make changes in order to create some stakes. Sometimes you have to alter that but do it within the spirit of what you know really happened. And if in the spirit of what really happened there are no stakes at all, maybe it’s not a thing. But I suspect that there are some there.

**John:** I think there are. The last little bit I want to add on stakes is there’s a second kind of stakes which is not this overall story/character arch-y kind of stakes, but is very specific to a scene or sequence. And so an action sequence is the easiest way to think about that where if the character doesn’t succeed in this moment these are the consequences or the possible consequences. In those cases it is a little bit more craft, where you actually have to understand that the audience needs to be able to see what could go wrong or what the downfalls are of a mistake or a less than perfect performance in that moment.

When we had Chris McQuarrie on to talk about – on Episode 300 – to talk about the Mission: Impossible movies, he gets a lot into that. Which is basically how can this possibly end well. And to get the audience asking that question you have to make it clear what the jeopardy is. And sometimes as I’ve rewritten my own stuff or rewritten other people’s stuff it’s because it wasn’t clear in that moment, in that scene, what was the thing that could tip one way or the other.

So making sure that in those moments that is really clear to an audience.

**Craig:** Every scene is its own movie. And that means every scene has its own stakes. And all of that is connected back to a simple question: what is it you want? What do you want? Even if the scene is if that fiery gasoline trail hits that fuel tank then all those people are going to die, well, I want to stop that. It still has to come back to somebody wanting something. And ideally there’s somebody else saying, “No, I want it to explode.” And now we’ve got ourselves a scene. But even if the scene is I’m sitting down to tell someone that the nature of our relationship is changing there are stakes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s always there.

**John:** All right. Let’s move onto another question. This is from Daniel in Israel who writes, “I’ve been offered to write a TV pilot episode for a local production company. The thing I’m supposed to write the pilot around is essentially only a main plot point. Something someone might call an inciting incident. What I am lacking is the protagonist. Not his identity, but what he wants and what he needs in his life. What I’m trying to figure out is how to create this protagonist in light of this ‘inciting incident.” How would you construct a screenplay and its protagonist when all that you have to work with is this main plot point?”

So, a related question here really. Here Daniel is facing a situation where the plot of it, or at least the start of the plot is really clear. He’s trying to figure out who is the character to drive through this doorway into a story.

**Craig:** Great question, Daniel. And first of all, if we’re in a situation where somebody was just sitting around the house and thinking, “Oh my gosh, I have a great idea for a plot, but how do I come up with a character?” I would say you don’t have a great idea for a plot. Start with character.

But this kind of thing where somebody comes to you and here are your own stakes – there’s money. You’re trying to earn money as a writer.

**John:** There’s money, yes.

**Craig:** And they’re giving you an assignment. You have to figure it out. This happens all the time. I cannot tell you how many times I get a call where someone says, “We’ve got a script. It needs a little bit of work. Story works great. We just need characters. We need character work.” And I just think the story can’t be that great. If the characters aren’t good how is the story good?

So, Daniel, here is I guess the only practical advice I have for you is take your main plot point and ask this question: to whom would it be most interesting for this to apply? Because any random person can go into a situation and be confronted by a problem. But there are certain people who the nature of their lives and the position that they’re in and their past and what they want – they’re the best people to do this to. And typically it’s because this is the thing that will torture them the most. So, think of who that is and you may be off and running.

**John:** I agree. I think back to the How Would This Be a Movie segments we’ve done and they fall into two camps. There’s ones that have a really fascinating character and then you have to figure out like how would you actually build a story around that character. The other ones are the sort of plot machines. Oh, that is a really crazy thing that happened in the real world and you have to then approach it with like, OK, who is the character that should really be driving that story. So, it might be a real life event and there’s myriad characters around it, but you have to figure out whose point of view is actually the interesting point of view.

And I think Craig nailed it. It’s the character for whom the story is especially suited. Either because they are perfect for it, like they are the one person who could be the expert in the situation, or more often and more interestingly the person who is the least well-equipped to be doing this and is out of their element. And that is going to give you more conflict, more comedy if you’re going for comedy. It’s going to be the person who is relatable to the audience because they’re probably a good proxy for the audience in that they don’t have the information or the expertise to be grappling with this situation.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s call it the A side of things. In movies we talk about the A side and the B side. It’s sort of like an editorial term. Like the stuff that happens before, the stuff that happens after. So that’s the A side of it. And then the B side of it is for whom would the resolution of this plot point be the most interesting and satisfying? Think about it from forward and backward and you just might have yourself a solution there.

All right, let’s move along to Alex from New York, shall we?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** All right. Alice writes, “I’m in a script writing class and I’m trying to pitch a story where there is no three-act structure. My professor responded by saying that for this class we can only make something that follows the structure. She then pulled out a book with the title How to Write a Great Screenplay.” [laughs]

“And said our script had to contain the six key moments. Of course there are many great movies that follow the three-act structure, but I also know that many of my favorite movies don’t – Boyhood, Nashville, A Serious Man come to mind. I guess my question is do you need a three-act structure to write a great movie or is this a sign that I should drop out of this overpriced school?” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] I love people who answer their own questions. Obviously the answer Alice is you’re not in a very good screenwriting program. But I want to sort of move past that moment to talk about this idea of how you teach writing. Because it occurred to me this last week, my daughter for her English class has to write these five-paragraph essays. And Craig you remember these five-paragraph essays.

**Craig:** I sure do.

**John:** They have to have–

**Craig:** Thesis.

**John:** The thesis and then you have to–

**Craig:** The examples.

**John:** Exactly. Each paragraph has to be about a different thing of those things and has to summarize and have the evidence within them and then a conclusion. And I find it just a torturous form. And I want to push back against it, and yet I do feel like it’s important that she learn how to write this ridiculous form now so that she understands what it is and will hopefully never have to write it quite the same way again.

A thesis is important. A thesis, you know, a central idea behind which all of your essay hangs together – that’s important. And for screenplays an understanding of a three-act structure I think is important. That sense that movies do have beginnings, middles, and ends. And there is a natural flow through which you move through story.

But I don’t want to be as an adult be forced to pay money to take a class where someone holds up a terrible screenwriting book and says that you have to follow this template.

**Craig:** Someone has written a book How to Write a Great Screenplay. I’m going to go out on a limb here. Because I have not heard of this book. Therefore my conclusion, this is just supposition, is that the individual who has written the book How to Write a Great Screenplay has not written a great screenplay. What else do you need to know?

Now, when it comes to surviving classes and things like that, you can take any movie and slap a three-act structure on it. If you put a gun in my mouth and say, A Serious Man, divvy that up into three acts. I’ll do it for you. No problem.

**John:** Totally. Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s also a sign that it’s useless. It is a very fundamental thing. It’s a little bit like in math class when you were moving ahead and your teacher said, “No, sorry. You need to show all your work. You need to show me the 15 plus 24 equals, carry, the whole thing.” Can’t I just do it in my head? “No.” OK, fine. So that’s what it is. It’s a little remedial.

Our script had to contain the six key moments. Hey, Alice from New York, I don’t know what those are. John, do you know what those are?

**John:** I don’t know what they are.

**Craig:** Well, we’re doing all right. [laughs] You got Aladdin out. I got Chernobyl running. Things are going OK. Somehow we made it without not only reading How to Write a Great Screenplay. We’ve never even heard of it.

**John:** So, here’s what I will try to defend about this idea about teaching people this template-y thing. if the teacher were requiring you to just do an outline, like a one or two-page outline that talked about your story in those beats or like come up with a new story and make it fit those beats, that I could see being a valuable exercise because it might get you to think about whatever these elements are I suspect they are, you know, what is that transition between the first act and second act, which real life screenwriters do talk about. Where you’re really – you’re not in Kansas anymore moment. Where a character has crossed a threshold into a new part of the story. That does tend to happen in most places.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** One of these other elements could be kind of a reversal where the thing that looks like it was close is now actually much further away. That things have gotten much worse. That is probably a meaningful beat. And so if it was an outline thing, but to make you write and entire 100-page screenplay following this template I don’t think is a fair thing to ask.

**Craig:** No. Perfectly fine to suggest that this is how beginners can learn. This is an intro to screenwriting. But if somebody like you says, “Listen, as a paying customer of this institution I would like to attempt to do it this way.” Why in god’s name would they tell you no? Listen, do it that way. And if it stinks, and by the way, higher probability it will stink, because you’re trying something – you’re doing like a degree of difficulty dive here that’s different than the other dives – then people will tell you it stunk and you’ll learn something and you’ll move on. It doesn’t mean that three acts are going to save you from stinking, nor does it mean that not three acts condemns you to stinking. It’s just part of the learning process.

But I would say to your professor stop that. Just cut it out. That’s just bizarrely pedantic.

**John:** I agree. Chris writes, “I recently swapped scripts with a writer friend. Instead of offering me story notes he called out formatting ‘errors’ in my first couple pages such as how I bold slug lines, reference a song, italicize dialogue for emphasis instead of underlining, etc. I explained how I was under the impression that all these things were stylistic choices rather than hard and fast rules. That a writer should use anything to better paint a movie in the reader’s mind.

“As an underwriter he argued that script formatting must be much tighter so as not to give anyone reading it a reason to throw it away. Is this true or is my friend simply being overly nitpicky on things that are really a writer’s choice? I’ve read dozens of screenplays at this point and feel no two really format exactly the same way.”

Craig, where are you at?

**Craig:** This is guy is swapping with his friend. You know who likes that?

**John:** That guy, yes. That guy.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig. So we’re talking about swapping, huh Chris? You going to swap?

**John:** Apparently they’re talking.

**Craig:** Get out of here, Sexy Craig. You can’t answer this question. Angry Craig can answer this question. Umbrage Craig is here. How many times do we have to kill this? This zombie won’t – we shoot it in the brain. We cut off its head. We light its heart on fire. What do we need to do to stop this from happening, John? I’m at my wit’s end. What do we do?

**John:** I don’t know. So I feel like a lot of people do listen to the show, but I’m also aware when people like Chris writes in that not everyone listens to the show.

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**John:** There are a few people who don’t listen to the show, although I’ll say that I had some meetings this past week and I was just surprised like folks who aren’t writers who listen to the show. So shout out to those folks who are not writers who listen to the show.

But, yeah, I don’t know how we’re going to win them over. I think all we can hope to do is to our listeners remind them that, listen, the standard screenplay formatting is helpful. It’s helpful because it creates an expectation about how stuff is supposed to look and if you go wildly off of it we are going to wonder does this person really know what they’re doing. Even as we do the Three Page Challenges when we see things that are like that’s not how it’s done we will comment on that because it is useful because it can slow a reader. It gives a reader an excuse for putting it aside.

I don’t think that’s what you were doing, Chris. The things you were singling out are reasonable choices. Some bold slug lines. I like to bold slug lines. I didn’t always, but now I do. So I use italics fairly liberally. It’s OK.

I think we just need to always remind folks that the standards are there because they’re helpful and they’re sort of standard but they’re not hard fast rules. And anyone who tells you otherwise probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just stop giving your friends scripts. They’re useless. Sorry. Your friend is useless. I don’t know how else to put it. I mean–

**John:** Also, your friend is useless because your friend did not give you constructive notes about the actual story.

**Craig:** Exactly. Correct. All they did was demand that you conform to a system that they insist is real but I can assure you is utter nonsense. Nonsense. That’s what they did. You were looking for advice on the story, the characters, the theme, the dialogue, and they came back and said here are a bunch of things you’re doing that are incorrect factually.

And the only person that was doing something factually incorrect is your friend, who maybe shouldn’t be your friend anymore. Because, I’m sorry, I bold slug lines. And like you, John, used to not bold slug lines. I reference songs all the time. I italicize dialogue for emphasis all the time. I also underline. I use We See. I do all these stupid things.

And your friend, I guarantee you, is going to say, “By the way I heard on Scriptnotes that they were bagging on me, but you know what? They only say that because they’re successful. But if you’re not them then…” this is how he sounds by the way. “And then you’re going to send your script to readers. They’re going to throw it out. If they see that you italicize dialogue they’re going to throw it out.”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this. And all I can say is no. No, I’ve been doing it this way since I began when I was nobody. Nobody cared. You know what they cared about? Oh my god, I like a script finally. This month of just sifting through one desperate, soul-crushing failure of a screenplay after another and finally something showed up that was, I don’t know, at least mediocre. It made their day. [laughs] That’s all they care about it. That’s it. They don’t care about the rest of this. For the love of god.

**John:** So I’ll say if people don’t trust my authority as a screenwriter on this, let me go back to 20 years to when I was a professional reader. My job was to read screenplays. And I would read two a day and I would write up coverage on them. So I read 200 screenplays. And it was my job to be that reader who passed things up or said no to things. And not once – not once in 200 scripts – did I ever single out for formatting. Oh, it’s a really good story but warning executives it’s not formatted exactly the way you’d want.

No one cares about that. If you’ve never seen coverage – it’s only pedants who say this.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh, you know what? John, that – the guy that I was just listening to there, I’m going to call that, that’s Victory John.

**John:** Victory John.

**Craig:** Victory John. He knows when he walks into a room victory is assured. Victory John was great there. Nice work Victory John.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** Chris, get rid of your friend.

**John:** Craig, let’s take one last question. Can you read Garrett for us?

**Craig:** Absolutely. Garrett asks, oh god, do we have to do this one?

**John:** I think we can – it actually goes into an interesting place.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. Fine. Garrett asks, “So many fans are furious about the conclusion of Game of Thrones. I am nowhere near dealing with this problem personally, but how do writers surprise insatiate rabid fans who spend all their time figuring out where a series or movie will go? It seems as though super fans will be disappointed whether the ending is too predictable or completely out of left field.”

All right, John, dig in.

**John:** Garrett, I think you are correct. Again, I like people who ask a question and then answer the question within their question. There was no way to land that plane that would keep everybody happy. Some people were really upset by how it ended. Some people signed a petition to redo the whole season. That ain’t helpful. That’s not going to happen.

We’re in this weird time where a fan’s ownership of a piece of material and sort of their sense that the culture belongs to them is really challenging and somewhat problematic. As a person who loves the show I was excited to see the show do what the show wanted to do. And I was excited that the creators got to do what they wanted to do. But that’s not going to be to everyone’s taste.

Craig, how do you resolve Garrett’s question?

**Craig:** I think that the shocking part of it all is that it is impossible to get that angry about an episode of television unless you love that episode or that series. You love it. And the only way you can love it is if the people who made that episode made what you love.

This isn’t a case where some other showrunner came along and took it over and everybody goes, nah, they don’t have the magic. That’s fine. I get that. But in this case Dan and Dave who made this thing you loved, not for one episode or one season, but for years, and who gave up years, a decade of their life, while their children were being born and raised, moving back and forth between Los Angeles and Ireland over and over and over. Doing all of these things and throwing their heart and soul into all of this and keeping a massive cast together and a storyline that involved god knows how many characters. I wish I could impress upon people how many decisions are required to make one episode of television. It is insane.

And they did it into the 70s of episodes of television and they did it in the highest level. And the very same creative ambition and bravery that led them to this material in the first place and allowed them to do it in such a remarkable way in the first place is the very same creative bravery and ambition that led them to deliver an ending that they thought was right.

And if you don’t like it, that’s OK.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But why – the part that blows my mind, and this is where I agree with you Garrett, it’s a huge problem – is why people would suddenly say things like they’re bad writers. How dare you. How dare you. Not on the level of being insulting to Dan to Dave. They’re geniuses and they’re doing just fine. How dare you insult logic in such a crass and outrageous manner. To say that they are bad writers because they didn’t write a good episode of a show we love because they’re good writers.

I mean, get help. Listen, I get it. You can be super angry in an episode. I’ve seen episodes of things of shows that I love where I watch the episode and said I don’t like this. I don’t like the choices they made. But what I would never do is say because they’re bad writers.

I’m sorry, no one is going to bat 1,000. How about be happy for the good times and the joy they brought you, which is a decade of joy. Can’t we celebrate that? It just bums me out.

**John:** I don’t know who proposed this, but someone was pitching that HBO should film a reality show, sort of like a Project Greenlight, where they bring together eight of the biggest petition signers about wanting to do a new season and get them all together to write a new final season. And just film the whole thing.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** And what that process is like. Because that would be–

**Craig:** What a cruel, cruel joke to play.

**John:** That would be pretty amazing.

**Craig:** And I do. I see things where people say, “I figured it out. Here’s what they should have done.” And they’ll stick it somewhere and then people go like, “Yeah, amazing.” And I’m reading and I’m like that would have been the stupidest, lamest, who cares episode of nonsense in history.

Remember, again, they are somewhat victims of their own success. This is a show where people would spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince each other that Bran was really the Night King. And that level of engagement is amazing. You don’t get to it if the people making the show haven’t done an incredible job. And they did for so long. And to turn your back on them because you didn’t like the last – well, they betrayed us. No. No, you betrayed them. You betrayed them. You bought into that show. You loved it. You cared about it. You told them how great they were. Because they were. And then the minute they do something that’s slightly a – I mean, oh my god, people lost their minds because Jon Snow didn’t hug his dog, sorry, direwolf. Well, guess what? He does later.

And then I hope people go, oh, oh, if he had hugged him there then this hug wouldn’t have meant as much. Yes. Have a little faith.

**John:** That’s probably true.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I’d probably [cut] myself – I’m going to get petitions now to have my head chopped off. I don’t care.

**John:** Back in Episode 296 I sat down with Damon Lindelof. So we talked through Lost.

**Craig:** Lost. Sure.

**John:** We also talked through The Leftovers. And interesting to compare the response to those two endings because they’re both kind of big puzzle box shows and people were incredibly frustrated by the ending of Lost. People seemed to generally love the ending of The Leftovers. And I do wonder if some of it was expectation management. I felt like on The Leftovers Damon did a very good job from season one saying do not expect that you are going to have one answer that will completely resolve everything about what happened and why it happened. That will not come. And I think that softened the – conditioned things a little bit better. And so that may be one of the things that showrunners unfortunately now have to think about is not only how do I get this plane up in the air but how do I land this plane in a way that is going to – basically how do I tell everybody right while the plane is going up where I expect to land the plane and condition them for what they’re going to be getting into.

**Craig:** It’s hard to stop, especially when the joy of something is in the process of it. I mean, I’m a Game of Thrones fan. I’ve seen every minute of every episode of Game of Thrones. Including every minute of an episode that no one else has ever seen. And I’ve loved the journey. And to me the joy was the process. It was the unfolding of this story over time and the collision of characters and things.

Ending is essentially counter to the purpose of the entire venture. So, of course people are going to be a bit confused or put off by some aspects of it because it goes against the DNA of what that show is. That show, the joy of it, is in that it doesn’t end. The world gets bigger and crazier and wilder as things smash together and the stakes grow higher. That’s the joy.

So, I mean, guys, it’s almost as if you would have preferred that, I don’t know, a piano had fallen on them and there was no final season. Is that what you really want? I shouldn’t have asked that question. Now there’s going to be a petition to drop a piano on them.

**John:** So, I would say if you are considering writing into me and Craig and telling us why we’re wrong, I would urge you to first listen to Episode 235. That is the one where Benioff and Weiss came on our show at our benefit for Hollywood Heart. They were gracious to fill in for Lawrence Kasdan when he could not make it. And they talked about the making of Game of Thrones and Craig’s involvement in that early pilot process. And how this is mostly Craig’s fault.

**Craig:** Like most things.

**John:** Actually, you’re somewhat to blame, Craig. Because if you had not intervened when you had intervened maybe Game of Thrones wouldn’t have become a thing and then we wouldn’t have been frustrated by the events of the end of the last season.

**Craig:** That’s such a – you know what, John? There you go. You want to save yourself disappointment folks, stop watching things. Stop falling in love with things. Stop opening your heart to things because it’s much better to have never loved than to have loved and lost. Is that what you are saying? I’m sorry. No one can deliver it perfectly. And if you point me to something and say, “Well they did it perfectly,” I’m going to say to you no they didn’t. Because they didn’t. There’s no way to do it perfectly. You just do it.

And years later people will come – I swear to you people will come back to this years later and say, “Well actually, here’s a think piece about why it’s brilliant.” That’s just how our culture works. Inevitably.

**John:** Yep. Those are the stakes of making a high stakes show.

**Craig:** Oh wow. Segue Man, that’s beautiful.

**John:** Got to bring it all back around. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book I read this last week which I really enjoyed. It’s by Ryan North. It’s called How to Invent Everything. And the premise of the book is that you are a time traveler, whose rental time travel machine, has broken and this is the manual that comes in the little machine. And so, OK, you’re stranded in the past. Here’s how you have to invent all the things that get you back up to modern civilization.

So it goes down from basics of agriculture to metalsmithing to inventing logic. It’s just a very comprehensive guide to how you would get back up to as close as you can do modern day civilization if you were to be stranded in prehistoric times.

**Craig:** Before being eaten.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That is a very smart idea for a book. I like that. My One Cool Thing is also some reading material, but as you know big puzzle buy over here. So there’s a magazine. It’s an online magazine called PANDA Magazine which is short for P and A which is short for Puzzles and Answers. It is published by a gentleman named Foggy Brume. That is his real name.

**John:** I would not buy that as a character’s name. No–

**Craig:** It’s his real name.

**John:** I reject the premise of Foggy Brume.

**Craig:** Foggy Brume. Very nice guy. I’ve had the joy of puzzling with him myself a few times. And he puts out a monthly edition. And I think this is true frequently he does these big puzzle boats once a year where it’s like a big mega puzzle to do. And then each issue has a little sort of mini mega puzzle where you solve, in this case in this month’s issue there are 12 puzzles that are difficult and each one gives you an answer that you plug into one big puzzle to get a big answer. PANDAMagazine.com is where you can find this if you’re big into that sort of thing. It’s a good challenge.

Each magazine comes with a whole bunch of puzzles where he provides the answers so you’re not miserable. And then there are some that are more of like a contest where he will eventually publish the answers once the submission date comes and goes. So, PANDA Magazine. Foggy Brume. A good subscription for the puzzler in your life.

**John:** I love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Edited by Matthew Chilelli who also wrote our outro this week in the style of Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** Who did your Chernobyl music? It’s a woman with a hard to pronounce name.

**Craig:** So her name is Hildur, well I’m going to pronounce it like an American. She is Icelandic. So the cheap pronunciation is Hildur Gudnadottir. In fact it is like Gudnadottir. I can’t do it because I’m not Icelandic and I think Icelandic is the hardest language in the world to learn and speak or something. It’s hard.

She is brilliant. You’re also going to be able to hear her work in Todd Phillips upcoming movie Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** So she’s amazing. And, good news, I believe that – so HBO has confirmed they are releasing her original soundtrack for Chernobyl for download and other versions of it. And I think it’s coming May 31. I think that’s when it will be available. I believe given the quality of the work she did on Chernobyl that that original soundtrack, that original score, is going to become a staple in editing bays.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s going to be one of those temp scores that’s going to confound other composers for years to come I hope. Because it’s unique.

**John:** Nice. If you have an outro you’d like us to play you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. They go up about a week after the episode has aired.

Some folks have started to do recaps and discussion on Reddit so you can head over there and see what people are talking about for this episode.

You can find the back episodes of this show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons in the store at johnaugust.com.

You may also want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide at johnaugust.com/guide to see which episodes listeners recommend most.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

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

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The original post for this episode can be found here.

Craig Mazin: Hi folks. On today’s episode there is some language, some salty language, so if you’re in the car with your children go ahead and stop playing it or put the earmuff’s on them.

Male Voice: What the F are you talking about?

Craig: Wow.

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

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 400 of Scriptnotes.

Craig: Wow.

John: A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig: Oh my god.

John: Today on this, our quartercentenary, we are going to be talking about movie genres and sub-genres that aren’t getting made anymore, and how we can fix this. To help us out we are joined by a guest from exactly 100 episodes ago. Chris McQuarrie is a writer and director whose credits include The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, Jack Reacher, the last two Mission: Impossibles, the next two as well. Chris McQuarrie, welcome back.

Chris McQuarrie: Thank you very much for having me.

Craig: So the deal is every 100 episodes we have worked up enough tolerance to have McQuarrie back.

Chris: You know, Craig–

Craig: Here we go.

Chris: You weren’t here for the last one.

Craig: That’s why it wasn’t very good. [laughs]

Chris: And I miss that.

Craig: I can tell. Chris McQuarrie and I have been engaged in a, what, 15-year-long argument about everything.

Chris: About everything.

Craig: Literally everything.

Chris: I don’t think it’s even much – it’s not so much an argument as it is a–

Craig: It’s a love story at this point.

Chris: It’s the duelists.

Craig: Yes, exactly.

Chris: I think that’s how you would describe our relationship.

Craig: Correct. You wake up in the morning, you go to work, fighting this man you must fight.

John: So back in Episode 300 I was talking to you and we were both living in Paris because you were directing Mission: Impossible. It hadn’t come out yet. You were in the middle of shooting it. It turned out really well, so congratulations on that.

Chris: Thank you.

Craig: Amazing.

Chris: Thank you very much.

Craig: And two more to come.

Chris: Two more to come.

Craig: So the idea is you’ll make these until they kill you? Meaning the movies are going to kill you.

Chris: It’s more likely that they will kill me than they will kill Tom Cruise.

Craig: No, nothing kills Tom Cruise. You’ve proven that. By the way, openly attempting to murder him through film. I mean, everyone knows what you’re doing.

Chris: I have been described as his enabler. He describes me as his enabler. I’m not actually trying to kill him, I’m just trying to–

Craig: Could have fooled me.

Chris: I’m trying to just – no, he would – he would be doing most of this stuff–

Craig: Movie number one, let’s drown him. Movie number two, oh, hang him off a plane–

Chris: Well the drowning I don’t think he would try to do.

Craig: Oh, hang him off of a plane. Then let’s drown him. Then let’s make him hurtle from a roof. Oh, he broke a bone. Too bad. Keep going.

Chris: Yeah, that’s true.

Craig: Wow. You’re killing him in front of us.

Chris: I’m whittling him away. But when you see him in Top Gun–

Craig: That’s right, Top Gun Deuce.

Chris: Top Gun Maverick.

Craig: Maverick.

Chris: He looks younger in Top Gun than he did in Fallout. And I can tell you it’s not surgical because there was absolutely no time in between for him to do that.

Craig: So magic?

John: Just magic.

Chris: No. You know what it is? It’s incredible. It’s diet and exercise.

Craig: No, I don’t like that.

Chris: He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t drink booze. Look, we know what the agers are. Stay out of the sun. Don’t drink alcohol. Don’t smoke cigarettes.

Craig: You just said three things that I hate.

Chris: Love what you do.

Craig: Love what you do, exactly.

Chris: And there’s a book you can read called Younger Next Year and it’s all about–

Craig: I’m not reading that shit. [laughs]

Chris: You should definitely read it.

Craig: Not gonna.

Chris: Because guys our age, we all have to read it. And essentially what the book says is once you start rounding the horn into your 50s you just start–

Craig: Dying.

Chris: Not dying. It’s decay. And that the more you exercise–

Craig: Sweet decay. Sweet decay.

Chris: The more you exercise the more you hold off that decay. Tom has been on a regimen for 30 years now that’s–

Craig: I’m going to argue that none of us are going to do that. That we will be here at 500–

Chris: Sitting at this table I can tell you there are three guys sitting at this table who don’t work out the recommended one-hour a day, six days a week.

Craig: Not a chance. Nah, but you know what, we know words.

John: We do know the words.

Craig: I mean, the vocabulary between the three of us is astonishing.

John: It’s got to be a lot. All of those words. Craig?

Craig: Yes.

John: This episode is a milestone not only in that it’s 400 but it’s also the first episode we’re recording after Chernobyl has reached the air.

Craig: Yes, we are post-Chernobyl.

John: We are post-Chernobyl.

Chris: Has it reached the air?

John: Yes.

Craig: Last night.

John: We’re recording this on a Tuesday. Monday was the first night that it aired.

Chris: I cannot wait to see it.

Craig: You don’t have to wait. It’s on the air.

John: It’s on demand already.

Chris: No, I know. From where we’re sitting right now I will run home and watch it.

Craig: Very good.

Chris: This evening on HBO.

Craig: You’ve always been a big backer of the show.

Chris: I have deep personal feelings of resentment about Chernobyl.

Craig: Yes.

Chris: I wanted to make that show.

Craig: Here’s what Chris said. Chris said, “I would like to direct Chernobyl.” And I said, but Chris, you’re making Mission: Impossible. And he said, “No problem.” And I said, I think a problem.

Chris: Well, actually, before that though I wasn’t making Mission: Impossible.

Craig: Sure. And then you were again. And you kept saying–

Chris: But in the window where I wasn’t making it.

Craig: Right.

Chris: I went to HBO and said I’ll make it. And HBO, they were very polite but I could see in their eyes they were thinking, “Well if he wants to direct it who else can we get?”

John: No.

Craig: Oh no. I don’t think so.

Chris: For sure.

Craig: I think maybe what they were saying was, “So in post he’s going to be prepping a Mission: Impossible movie.”

Chris: I would have been–

Craig: I think that may have been what it was.

Chris: Is this why I can’t get a job doing anything else? This is why nobody else will offer me movies just because they all think I’m just going to be in post on Mission: Impossible.

Craig: No, it’s because I’ve gone around town just killing you.

So, Chernobyl on the air at long last. Five years. I looked in my little folder. Do you guys keep a folder of all your–?

John: Old drafts?

Craig: Yeah.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: And so the oldest document I have in my Chernobyl folder is from like May 12, 2014. Almost exactly five years ago. And it was actually very comforting because the header was “Stuff to Figure Out.” And it was just like what’s this about, who’s in it, what would the episodes be? It was just a bunch of questions that any idiot could ask. I guess they all start that way, don’t they?

Chris: No. I need to do that more often. I don’t ask myself those questions, which is probably why–

Craig: We’ll get into that.

Chris: Yeah. I will say this, the other thing I said, you remember you sent me the script. I was on the east coast getting on a plane.

Craig: Yes, you read them on a plane.

Chris: And you texted them to me just before the plane took off so I had two scripts to read. And I landed and I called you up and I said I would cut one word and I would change one word.

John: That’s why you did not get the job.

Craig: I threw a fit. How dare you?

Chris: Exactly. I guess the guy who they hired didn’t cut that word or change that word.

John: You’re not to do those things.

Craig: By the way, I tried to change that word many, many times and could never do it. I couldn’t come up with anything better.

Chris: Just couldn’t come up with anything better. Well, I could have made a suggestion.

Craig: Probably.

Chris: But more importantly that was a damn good script. Scripts. I read two episodes.

Craig: So now it’s a show and I don’t know what like ratings are per se, but the response has been very positive.

John: Part of the reason why you’ve gone for some episodes is you were talking at the UN. You were at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Craig: Yes.

John: You got to do all these amazing things.

Chris: Dear god.

John: You recorded a whole other podcast series with Peter Sagal.

Craig: Yes.

John: Which I started listening to which is great.

Craig: Yes, yes. So the idea there was because so much of what the show is about is the cost of lies and narrative and the way narrative distorts truth I felt that it was important that we hold ourselves accountable for the ways we changed things to be able to tell the story. So Peter Sagal of NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me and I recorded a companion piece. So after each episode airs on HBO or on Sky Atlantic over there in the UK then there is this little companion piece that comes along that you can download from Stitcher or Apple or any of those podcast places. I’ve learned, by the way, that Stitcher is a thing. I had to learn that for this.

And we just have a discussion about what we changed and why and illuminate other various topics of interest.

Chris: We did something like that on Valkyrie actually. Nathan and I did a second commentary track where we went through and said here’s all the things we changed and what really happened.

Craig: Why do you think people – I think it was incredibly – I thought very satisfying to do it. I felt honest and good. And I didn’t sense that, and John, you listened to it so I’m going to ask you. Did you feel like maybe by learning that some things had been changed that I had in any way undermined the experience of watching the show?

John: No. In the first episode you talk–

Chris: You mean the fact that Chernobyl didn’t really happen?

Craig: There is no place called Chernobyl.

John: It’s all made up in fairy land. For example, that a key character actually had a family and you portray him as not having a family.

Craig: Correct.

John: That is a big distinction in a character’s life, but it doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the event that happened.

Craig: Correct. And that kind of was the rule that we tried to follow which is I really did not want to change anything that would fundamentally make things more dramatic or–

John: You didn’t want to chat to make it more exciting.

Craig: I didn’t want to cheat.

Chris: Because the events surrounding Chernobyl need punching up. [laughs]

Craig: Yeah. Kind of like let’s just let the truth be the truth here.

Chris: Well, and I remember calling you and saying, OK, what of this, having done of adaptations of like what is true, what did you gin up? And we had had a conversation very early on before you started writing it.

Craig: Yes.

Chris: You were in London. We all went out to dinner.

Craig: Yes. And then I think you were on a plane to Alaska or something like that.

Chris: Yes. I was going to the Ice Cap, which didn’t happen.

Craig: As one does.

Chris: As one does.

Craig: That’s what McQuarrie does.

Chris: I was going to do research and I was on my way to the Ice Cap and from London to get to the Ice Cap you have to fly from London to Las Vegas, Las Vegas to Seattle, Seattle to Alaska, where you get off the plane and go across the airport to where the military C130 with skis on it is waiting to take you to this ice station.

Craig: Jews don’t do this. Ever.

Chris: And the Ice Cap – I got to Vegas and turned my phone on and there were all these text messages saying the Ice Cap is breaking up and they are going to evacuate the ice station and you’re not going this year. And I have never made it.

Craig: Well, at the very least it was a short flight from London to Las Vegas.

Chris: Well, I got to spend the night in Vegas.

Craig: Oh, hey!

Chris: Which is better than an Ice Cap.

Craig: This podcast is absolutely out of control. John’s eyelid must be twitching by now.

John: It’s fine. We’re vaguely on the outline still. I mean, the Ice Cap was a diversion, but–

Chris: Yes. I see on the outline it says lose the plot.

John: Lose the plot.

Craig: Exactly.

John: To get back on plot, we should also say that we actually have a live show coming up.

Craig: Yes.

John: Every year we do a benefit for Hollywood Heart, which is a great charity that provides services to homeless youth and youth with HIV. We always have great guests. This year we will again have great guests for our live show on June 13th. The big change this time is we are trying to sell out the Ace Hotel. Which is a much bigger venue.

Craig: It’s a great theater. It’s a big venue. It’s a great venue. Definitely please come see us. Buy tickets. We always deliver on the guests. Don’t worry about that. But really aren’t we enough?

John: We should be enough.

Craig: We should be enough.

John: But the guests are really the topping on the ice cream sundae.

Craig: The guests are the topping.

John: So it’s Thursday June 13 at the Ace Hotel. Tickets are available now and there will be a link in the show notes for those.

Craig: For charity.

John: For charity.

Craig: And this is a charity that our good mutual friend, John Gatins, is on the board.

Chris: Oh lovely.

Craig: So this is all part of Gatins’ world.

Chris: We love John Gatins.

Craig: We do.

John: Also in celebration of 400 episodes we have new Scriptnotes shirts. So I’m showing these to Craig and Chris right now. So this is–

Craig: Those are so great.

John: This is the light version of the shirt. This is Scriptnotes 400. It has a sort of blank VHS videotape, was the feel I was going for with these shirts.

Craig: You nailed it.

Chris: You nailed it.

Craig: That’s amazing. I love it.

John: The dark version of the shirt.

Craig: Ooh, dark is nice. Dark kind of gives me a little bit of an Atari vibe. Yeah, I love it. That’s a little bit Breakout. I love it. This is a good shirt.

John: Good shirt.

Craig: Percentage of proceeds that go to me?

John: Are none.

Craig: Consistently zero. 400 episodes.

John: Still not making any money out of this.

Craig: Still not making any money.

John: But at least you don’t have to pay money. Early on in the first like 50 episodes Craig would have to write a check for hosting fees and all that kind of stuff.

Craig: Now John drives a Rolls Royce that’s tacked on top of a Maserati.

Chris: Is it sponsored the podcast?

Craig: No, we don’t do ads.

John: We have no ads. We have nothing.

Craig: We are free in every freaking way.

Chris: In every freaking way. You do this out of the goodness of your heart?

Craig: This is the only thing I do out of the goodness – first of all, I don’t have a heart, as you know.

Chris: Or goodness.

Craig: Correct.

Chris: I was looking at John.

Craig: But I simulate – it’s how I simulate humanity.

Chris: Yes.

John: So these shirts which Craig gets no money for are available in black and white and navy. We also have hoodies this time, so check them out.

Craig: Ooh, I’m getting a hoodie. You know I love a hoodie.

John: We all love a hoodie. Now we finally get back on outline to talk about the feature topic. And so every once and a while we do a This Kind of Movie, where we took a look at a genre, a sub-genre of movie that is not currently popular and we discuss how we would make that movie in 2019 or really 2020, or 2021 realistically. As we’re recording this Disney just put out a list of all their upcoming movies through 2023.

Craig: Right. Which are all Star Wars.

John: They’re all Star Wars or princess movies. But if we wanted to try to make one of these movies what we would need to do to get those on the Disney schedule?

Chris: Oh, onto the Disney schedule?

John: Or really any schedule. Any schedule.

Craig: Witchcraft at this point I think.

Chris: Not true.

Craig: Oh, here we go. Oh, look, I’m having an argument with Chris McQuarrie.

Chris: It’s not an argument. An argument would be a conflict of two different opinions.

Craig: He’s arguing about us having an argument. [laughs]

John: No, no, we’re not having an argument. You don’t understand. This is not an argument.

Craig: How dare you?

Chris: I’d like an argument please.

Craig: I love that sketch.

Chris: See, an argument would be if you had an opinion and I had an opinion, but you’re not allowed to have an opinion anymore.

Craig: Ugh.

Chris: If you just avoid opinions and stick to facts.

John: 100 percent facts.

Chris: Yes, then I can’t get into any trouble.

John: Chernobyl.

Chris: Don’t have an opinion. And that’s why we are not arguing.

Craig: The truth matters. The truth matters.

Chris: Because I’m right.

Craig: Let’s get back to the topic at hand. It’s turning into The Morning Zoo.

John: In previous installments of this segment we have saved romantic comedies. I mean, I think we can all agree that romantic comedies were dead and then we brought them back to life.

Craig: We did. We resuscitated them.

John: I think we also did some work on westerns.

Craig: They’re back.

John: So I went on Twitter and asked people for other genres or sub-genres that need saving.

Craig: That have been sort of underserved.

Chris: So I have a long suffering script. A script that’s been sitting around for years and years and years. I don’t own it. I was commissioned to write it by a producer. You would put it in the category of it’s a redemption story, personal drama, you put it in that kind of Verdict sort of–

Craig: Oh, OK. What is the genre-genre?

Chris: It’s a drama.

Craig: Just sort of people?

Chris: It is a female-driven drama. Woman goes to prison.

Craig: OK, prison.

Chris: No, beginning of the story she goes to prison. Two scenes later she gets out of prison 14 years later and is trying to reconnect with her sister who was four-years-old when she went into prison and has been lost in the system.

Craig: OK.

Chris: OK. So the kind of movie that in 1973 would have been released every other weekend.

John: Totally.

Craig: Yes.

Chris: And Netflix. Post Mission: Impossible Netflix said we want to do this. And what Netflix is after now, they’re fairly genre-agnostic. They’re really looking for, A, content.

Craig: Yes.

Chris: They’re frantically trying to line their pockets with content.

Craig: That appears to be the case.

Chris: Before Disney fires up the whatever they’re doing. But also building relationships with talent. And they looked at this thing and said this is imminently cast-able. There is now, I can’t say who but there is a great actress interested in the role. And Netflix is just standing by and they’re going to do it.

Craig: That’s awesome.

Chris: The kind of movie that even two, three years ago would have been inconceivable. Another project that I was briefly attached to, I’m attached to it now as a producer, was a WWII movie, but a WWII drama. It’s not a WWII–

Craig: Shoot-shoot-bang-bang.

Chris: It isn’t Saving Private Ryan. It’s a guy behind enemy lines personal drama. Again, the kind of thing, you hear WWII and you just start falling asleep.

Craig: Even if there were explosions it would be a hard sell.

Chris: Yes. It’s dead in the water. And so you have with that mechanism if you can attach the right elements to a piece of material–

Craig: You can get yourself on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon or HBO.

John: With each of these categories I want to talk about venue basically. Is it still a big screen idea or is it something that is more designed for a smaller screen, be it streaming, be it some other way to do it. But also I want to talk about what is the essence of this kind of movie. What is the biggest difference between making this movie now versus when it was originally popular? Who are the characters and then with those characters who would you cast in this kind of movie? Who writes it? Who directs it? And what are the big obstacles getting in the way of making this kind of movie again?

Craig: All right.

John: So, let’s start with sports comedies. Sports comedies used to be incredibly popular.

Craig: The Ron Shelton area.

John: So Ron Shelton had Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump. But we also have things like Dodgeball. Happy Gilmore. Major League. Caddyshack. Bad News Bears. A League of Their Own.

Craig, I’ll start with you. What is the essence of a sports comedy to you?

Craig: Underdogs. Generally speaking we have underdogs. And usually there’s somebody struggling with a – you know, there’s a term in baseball, I don’t know if carries to other sports, the yips. Oh, yeah, actually in golf too the yips are when you just psychologically are struggling with something and so your game falls apart. So typically in these movies somebody with innate skill is struggling with something and so–

Chris: Tin Cup.

Craig: Tin Cup is the best example because it’s literally about a therapist helping a guy with the yips.

Chris: Bull Durham.

Craig: Bull Durham. I mean, all of them. All of them. There’s a romance falling apart in White Men Can’t Jump. And Caddyshack which is I guess probably the broadest of these there’s still a romance at the heart of it that goes bad and has to be put back together. So it’s really about – the essence of these things is an athlete’s personal life is disrupting their game. And they have to fix their personal life to fix their game.

Chris: Wow.

John: I think that’s a fair assessment.

Chris: I hate to say this. Craig is right.

Craig: Hold that. Repeat it.

Chris: Pains me. Pains me to say it.

Craig: Put it on a loop.

John: What’s so interesting is the sport itself is incredibly important for the marketing and sort of what the visual language of the movie will be, but it’s probably not very important for what the actual story will be. The sport rarely has a very direct connection to what the character’s journey is. The unique thing about that sport is probably not a big factor. I guess whether it’s an individual sport versus a team sport that’s a big factor. But, you know.

Chris: It can’t rely on the sport.

Craig: Right.

Chris: Somebody who doesn’t know anything about the sport ideally would be able to watch the movie.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Which means you generally–

John: You teach them the rules of the sport.

Craig: And one of the stock characters in these movies is somebody that doesn’t know the sport.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So they are the people that are asking questions or just looking around going well none of this matters, but that personal part matters.

Chris: Yes.

John: So looking at the biggest difference between doing it now versus doing it then, one of the things as we list these movies is they’re almost all male characters driving this. And so–

Chris: My next question.

John: So I think honestly centering this around a female character is going to probably be your best way in. Whether the whole team is women or it’s unusual for a woman to be in that sport. Something about a female athlete feels more promising.

Chris: Is that going to alienate the men as well? Are you trying to make a four-quadrant movie?

John: That’s a great question. I mean, I think we always use to think about big screen comedies needed to, if not four-quadrant than sort of broadly successful. But if you’re making it not for a big screen movie maybe it’s even better that it’s not kind of for everyone.

Craig: A League of Their Own was pretty much four-quadrant.

Chris: Without question.

Craig: Of this list it’s maybe my favorite of them.

Chris: Well, and Tom Hanks is a hugely important character in the movie.

Craig: Yes, he’s part of it.

Chris: And quite wisely not the dominant character in the movie. It’s also a movie directed by a woman.

Craig: It is. And so you can obviously if you’re centering your new sports comedy on let’s say a female, like a Bend it like Beckham which is a female sports comedy, which I think a lot of male footie fans enjoyed, you will have male characters. The fascinating thing about this list to me is how white it is.

John: It’s super white.

Craig: I mean, sports are one of the areas in American culture where people of color dominate in terms of numbers they’re far over-represented. And yet in this list they’re almost nowhere with the exception of White Men Can’t Jump. I mean, it’s crazy now that I’m looking at it. It’s pretty white.

Chris: I’m wracking my brain.

Craig: It’s kind of nuts. And if you keep going you’ll see it more and more and more. Like a lot of baseball movies take place in the distant past, so when Roy Hobbes is out there in The Natural it’s sort of like, you know, there they are, the nine white guys. And Dodgeball is just sort of lily white. I mean, it’s not lily white. That’s not true. Because Chris Williams is in it.

John: Yeah, but it’s goofy.

Craig: These are largely white casts. And it seems like they’re largely for white guys.

John: So I think we’re talking sort of women, non-white characters centering. Also, you know, there’s a chance that maybe the sport you’re picking is not a sport that is currently popular in the US. So if you’re to make an American cricket movie about like a cricket team that needed to sort of – that was part of the obstacle they overcome. Like they don’t even know what cricket is or sort of that aspect.

Craig: So it’s kind of like the – what’s it, the Jamaican bobsledding team, Cool Running. So Americans try and go to cricket but they’re basically in India or Pakistan getting their asses handed to them.

Chris: Adam Sandler is working on this movie right now. Yes, he’s working on this movie.

Craig: Cricket!

Chris: But when you’re pinpointing these things, you know, about women and diversity, are you suggesting the way to make an outlier or to get it made? Because I have to imagine–

Craig: I’d go get it made on that one, for me, because I actually feel like – I mean, it’s not that you can’t make a movie like this again in the same mold. But it will be in the same mold. There’s something so familiar about it.

Chris: Oh, of course.

Craig: And this list barely even scrapes the surface of what there is. So, it seems like something new would be great in some way or another. New is good. And I think in this category–

Chris: So the Bad News Bears, but done–

Craig: Well, I mean, and they tried to remake it.

Chris: But they tried to remake it–

Craig: They did. They remade it.

Chris: They remade it and they remade it kind of in the same mold but with none of the things you could do.

Craig: Well, that’s the thing.

Chris: The spirt of it.

Craig: This is one of those interesting areas where over time we’ve gotten less permissive. You could not make the actual – I mean, the Bad News Bears was Rated R. There was alcohol. There was smoking. There was racism. And they were children. That’s not doable now in any way, shape, or form.

Chris: No. Because it in no way reflected reality and movies have to reflect reality now.

Craig: Hold on, let’s wield the soap box on.

Chris: No, no, this is what I read. I got the email.

Craig: There it is.

John: But here’s what I’ll say. I feel like a sports comedy is still a movie. And that it’s more of a movie than it is a TV show, than a series.

Craig: Yes.

John: Because I feel like a game of sport, whatever sport you want to pick – I knew you were going to laugh, I said a game of sport.

Chris: Remember there was a TV show. Do you remember Ball Four?

John: I do not remember Ball Four.

Craig: Oh, based on, what’s his name, Jim Bouton’s book.

Chris: Jim Bouton’s book. Lasted for about seven episodes.

Craig: It turns out that in sports there is this built-in ticking clock. Are you going to win or not? I mean, there’s a big game in the beginning, there’s a big game at the end. There’s a big fight in the beginning and there’s a big fight at the end.

John: And Friday Night Lights is an exception but it’s not a comedy. It’s an ensemble drama that is centered around a football team.

Craig: Correct. About family life.

Chris: And the culture. And it’s high school. So it’s not pro and it’s–

Craig: But it started as a movie. Started as a movie.

John: It did. Next category, ensemble dramedies. So we used to make things like St. Elmo’s Fire, The Big Chill, Breakfast Club, Big Fish, Terms of Endearment. So we used to make things that had big casts, where a bunch of folks came together, where characters did grow and change but it was an ensemble. It wasn’t sort of one character’s story. Is that a thing we’re going to be making on the big screen soon? We’ll start with what is the essence of that kind of story. What is the essence of an ensemble dramedy?

Craig: Let’s make McQuarrie take a shot at that one.

Chris: It seems to me as I’m running through the list that you just – nostalgia is a big part of it. It’s my understanding that somebody did a breakdown of why people go to see movies and the number one reason was to have a nostalgic experience. An emotional nostalgic experience. I think that probably plays into sports as well, especially plays into why a lot of sports movies seem to go–

Craig: Back in time.

Chris: Back to that. And you look at The Big Chill. The Big Chill was very much a nostalgic movie.

John: It’s a reunion of friends who had separated. St. Elmo’s Fire, while it wasn’t a nostalgic movie, they were at a specific turning point in their life. They were kind of looking back at—

Craig: See, to me that’s it. We have a group of people that represent some kind of contemporary arrangement. Whether we’re catching them later or they were contemporary or we’re in their contemporariness like for instance The Breakfast Club. But they are at a moment where things are changing.

Chris: Yes.

Craig: And we watch that happen. That to me is the essence of these things. But for the love of god I cannot imagine anyone putting this on a screen anymore. It just doesn’t seem like they will. It’s a bummer.

John: Yeah, it’s tragic. I mean, on a big screen. I think you can absolutely make these for streaming.

Craig: No question.

John: But in so many ways though the one-hour series have sort of taken, even like short series have taken the place of these, where you can see those characters grow over the course–

Chris: Oh, This is Us.

Craig: This is Us.

John: This is Us as a movie.

Chris: Modern Family.

Craig: Correct. And interestingly Dan Fogelman–

John: Yeah, he tried to do it as a movie.

Craig: He sort of tried to do it as a movie. He tried This is Us as a movie and it didn’t connect with audiences. But he’s obviously incredibly good at it because tens of millions of people watch This is Us and it gets all these awards. There is something, I don’t know, we used to be able to go and watch this – maybe it’s just that we used to expect less. You know, we would go to the movie theater and we weren’t asking to have our brains blown out the back of our skulls.

Chris: I went to see Hell or High Water.

John: Oh, which is fantastic.

Chris: Which I loved. And I was talking to Tim Talbot shortly thereafter and I said did you see Hell or High Water? And he said, “Yes.” And what did you think about it? “That was a great movie.” In 1987 that would have been a good movie. But he’s right in that that sort of stuff – I remember going to the movies every weekend. It was not an event. Now when you ask anybody under the age of 25 why they go to the movies they will say in one form or another, “Because I have to go.” They want to be part of a discussion.

I tried to get to see Avengers, which I finally saw yesterday, as quickly as I could because I was tired of having a self-imposed media bubble. There were things in that movie I really didn’t want ruined. Getting to that state. Whereas the stories that we’re talking about, what television does so well now especially is there is a collective history.

If you tried to tune into Game of Thrones now you don’t understand and it wouldn’t – the number of people who are saying three years into Mad Men going, “Yeah, I tried to get into that show and I just couldn’t.” It’s like, of course not, if you turn middle of season three none of this makes any sense.

Craig: Start at the beginning. That’s true. But I do think that one of the problems for – like I remember going to see St. Elmo’s Fire. And my expectation was that I was going to see a group of people that were somewhat older than me dealing with problems. And I knew at some point somebody was going to like, I think Rob Lowe was going to light a torch on fire with some hairspray or something, and Demi Moore was in a corner super dramatic. And I think thought, OK, I’m going to see some sort of human drama. That would not do it anymore. Now when people go to the movie theater it’s like, well, this is going to pin me back and it’s going to blow my mind. And I’m going to see stuff and it’s going to be an event.

Chris: An event.

Craig: An event. I just think people go to the movies for a different reason now.

Chris: But don’t you think also what you can get from television is very different than what we could get from television.

Craig: No question.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: No question.

Chris: You could not make Game of Thrones as a feature film. Any of the content in Game of Thrones would be NC17.

Craig: Nor could you have made it for television prior to this kind of strange change.

Chris: Yes. It’s the networks. As soon as basic cable met the British model of television which was you make a good television show and when it stops being good you – when it reaches the end you stop.

Craig: Isn’t that nice?

Chris: Yes, it’s lovely.

Craig: You know what? This is going to be six episodes long. Great.

Chris: Yeah, or six episodes this season instead of 22 every season.

Craig: Which is why I take my hat off to people like Derek Haas who are still doing it, not just on one show, but multiple show. I mean, the amount of story that has to be generated by those guys is bananas. But, yes, the format has become not just flexible but there is not format. It doesn’t matter.

Chris: Yeah.

John: Let’s get back to movies. Next let’s save the legal thriller or the courtroom thriller. We’ll put these things together. So, obviously we have all the John Grisham based ones, The Pelican Brief, The Firm, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker. We have Michael Clayton. We have Primal Fear.

Craig: Love Primal Fear.

John: Love Primal Fear. Presumed Innocent. Disclosure. A Few Good Men.

Chris: The Verdict.

Craig: The Verdict.

John: The Verdict. I hadn’t thought of The Verdict.

Chris: One of the all-time–

Craig: Well, and 12 Angry Men.

Chris: Yes, oh my god.

Craig: Which is sort of the [unintelligible] courtroom drama.

Chris: Well, 12 Angry Men and And Justice for All.

Craig: And Justice for All.

Chris: We can probably go on.

John: We can.

Craig: Yes, I think we could.

John: So what is the essence of these kind of thrillers? So traditionally I think you have an authority figure who is generally the prosecutor or could be working for the defense who is very smart at the law who has to intercede in a specific situation. They generally didn’t commit the situation. They’re there to solve a problem and in trying to solve the problem they uncover something remarkable that puts themselves either in moral jeopardy or literal jeopardy. We don’t make these. We haven’t made them for a while.

Chris: No. Well, when we were talking about 12 Angry Men and The Verdict, both Lumet movies. 12 Angry Men is a morality tale, sort of a study of–

John: And it feels like a play.

Chris: Yeah, feels very much like a play. The Verdict is a redemption story. The Verdict is in a lot of ways a boxing movie.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

Chris: It’s the palooka who comes back for–

Craig: And I think that that’s a good distinction because some of these movies like A Few Good Men also feels like a boxing movie where basically a guy whose dad was a great boxer and who has decided to throw fights instead for a living is going to come back and take on the all-time champ and go down dying if he has to. So, there are those.

And then there are these movies that are they turn on grand questions of justice. What is justice?

Chris: That’s And Justice for All.

Craig: And Justice for All. Or A Time to Kill is very much like that. So those are two different, I mean they always have fireworks. They always have the certain venues that we know. And there is a verdict that is a little bit like the game in the sports movies.

Chris: The Verdict actually ended without the verdict.

Craig: Without the verdict. Well.

John: But here’s a distinction is like a sports movie they want to be a single movie because it’s not a thing that’s going to continue well over time. And so like Murder One was an attempt to take one case–

Craig: Kelley I think.

John: Over the course of a whole season and it just didn’t work. It wanted to be part of one thing.

Chris: I don’t want a mystery to last that long.

Craig: Right.

John: No.

Chris: And first of all the struggle in television, they referred to it for years as the Twin Peaks problem. That you can only lose audience. You couldn’t gain audience. Because when that show was on unless you videotaped it you couldn’t catch up on Netflix, you couldn’t binge it. And there was something fascinating about that. To think about it now, that television actually just spilled out into the universe and that was it.

Craig: And you either caught it with your hands or you missed it. It was gone on the floor.

Chris: Yes. It comes back to urgency. The urgency, how and why one watches a television show or a movie is very different now.

John: I think people should write a legal thriller, I mean, I feel like it’s the kind of movie that you could still imagine making today. I mean, what do you need to make a great legal thriller? You need a star. It is actually a star vehicle. It’s that person you cast as the central lawyer is great. You look at, you know, I think you can make Primal Fear at any point where you also have a great supporting character. Like you look at Edward Norton–

Chris: Well that’s a thriller, like that and Jagged Edge.

John: Oh, of course. Oh yes.

Chris: Have you watched that recently?

Craig: Yeah, it’s amazing.

Chris: I’ve been going back and watching the–

John: He is innocent!

Chris: Yes.

Craig: So great.

Chris: And the other one I went back and watched recently, which was fascinating artifact is–

Craig: Artifact.

Chris: Basic Instinct.

John: Oh yeah. We’re going to get to sexual/erotic thrillers. And that’s there.

Craig: Thank god.

Chris: Can we just skip to that?

John: We can skip to that next.

Craig: I think that there is some space for it, the problem is it is the most trod-upon ground. Because we have 4,000 episodes of Law & Order. And it will never stop. Neither will CSI. NCIS. That arena, the courtroom procedural aspects of it have been just beaten to death. So the question is how can you do it – I think you could go back all the way to 12 Angry Men and that kind of idea.

Chris: Yes. If you ask what they all have in common as I’m sitting here [unintelligible] is the discovery. There is some reveal. There is a hidden secret that sort of turns the case. Those are hard to do.

Craig: What’s the Dershowitz one with–?

Chris: Claus von Bulow.

Craig: Yeah. Claus von Bulow.

Chris: Reversal of Fortune.

John: Reversal of Fortune.

Craig: “No one shook Sunny.” That’s my favorite line.

Chris: And what I love about that is the reversal is the last line.

Craig: The reversal is the last line of the movie.

Chris: “You have no idea.”

Craig: “You have no idea.” And then weirdly Alan Dershowitz has had his own fascinating reversal. But that’s for other podcasts.

John: Absolutely. But I think we can make a legal thriller. And so do you make a legal thriller for the big screen? Maybe. A really good legal thriller I think could also be an awards contender. The same way like The Post was a journalism thriller. That was back in that space.

Craig: Yes. It has be specifically crafted for the Academy Awards. I would think you would need two huge stars. I could see—

Chris: Let’s talk about who those huge stars are.

Craig: Streep v. Washington.

Chris: Regardless of our genre.

Craig: Meryl Streep v. Denzel Washington. Two lawyers going head-to-head over something that is actually legitimately relevant to our society now.

Chris: Well, you’d be talking about abortion, gun control, really hot topic issues.

Craig: Police brutality.

Chris: Police brutality. And then the trick of making that movie is making a movie that is for both halves of the audience, not one.

John: Yeah. I don’t know that you need like a marquee issue. So if it was about sort of corporate control, some way to do it–

Craig: Yeah, you know, he’s not wrong.

John: Because you want a thriller. You still want the thriller. You also want the legal drama.

Craig: You still want the thriller aspect. Because the truth is the thing at the heart of A Few Good Men is not a hot-button issue. There’s an interesting theme to it, but it isn’t a hot-button issue. And maybe it would actually be better without one. Maybe I just want two people – you know what also was really good? The Insider.

John: You know who would also be really good in this? Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise could do a good job.

Craig: Well, he’s done it though.

John: He’s done it.

Craig: Can he come back and do it again?

Chris: Well, I would love to see Tom do a version of The Verdict. I’d love to see him do the broken down. Jerry Maguire is his Verdict.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Oh my god. We could talk about Jerry Maguire forever.

John: We can.

Craig: I’ve got huge love for that script.

Chris: Talk about a weird. What’s the pitch to Jerry Maguire? I’m going to make a movie about a sports agent who is having an emotional crisis.

Craig: My pitch for Jerry Maguire is imagine a man whose life is deeply flawed who has a moment of clarity where he describes exactly who he should be. And that’s the beginning of the movie. And then the entire movie is him trying to become that guy.

Chris: But would you have picked a sports agent?

Craig: No, but that’s fun. I get it.

Chris: No, I mean, it’s such a – the fact that the movie works and resonates–

Craig: There’s comebacks. Makes sense.

Chris: Well, that helps.

Craig: Finding a scum-baggy kind of job like sports agent. I don’t know any sports agents. I apologize.

Chris: Well, yeah, so you just blanket called them all scumbags.

Craig: A little bit. Sorry.

Chris: It’s the whole agent thing.

Craig: Should we go to the erotic thrillers.

John: Erotic thrillers.

Chris: Erotic thrillers.

John: We’ve got Fatal Attraction. We’ve got Basic Instinct.

Chris: Now what does an erotic thriller need? What’s the central elements of an erotic thriller?

Craig: I believe boobs are high on the list.

Chris: Yes.

John: Color of Night. Killing Me Softly. American Gigolo. Gone Girl I would say is an erotic thriller. Or has aspects of that.

Chris: Yeah.

Craig: Well…

John: It’s definitely a thriller. There’s a sexual aspect to it.

Craig: I don’t think of it’s an erotic – I don’t think of it as–

Chris: It’s a neurotic thriller.

Craig: Neurotic.

John: But it’s pulpy in the way that you want an erotic thriller to be.

Craig: Yes.

Chris: Sea of Love. Nice pull. So I’ve got to go back and watch that one.

Craig: It’s good.

John: So erotic thrillers, at the time it was sexual content on screen that you just couldn’t see other places. You certainly couldn’t see it on TV.

Chris: And now you can’t see it in theaters and there’s nothing but on television.

John: That’s absolutely true.

Craig: Or your phone. You can just see it on your phone.

Chris: Yes.

John: Literal pornography.

Craig: There should be a list of – there’s probably a website that has a list of perfectly reasonable civil Google searches that will absolutely blow your mind with the images that come up. I just feel like old people are always, you know, like–

Chris: There’s no parental control strict enough–

Craig: They’re just like, oh, I’m just searching for something normal. Yeah, and then look what just came up.

Chris: Yes.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So what distinguishes an erotic thriller from just–?

Craig: Porn.

John: From porn or from things that have–?

Chris: Sexual obsession.

John: Sexual obsession. All right.

Chris: Sexual obsession. So in Jagged Edge it’s the forbidden nature of the sexual relationship. There is an inappropriate boundary that is being crossed. Michael Douglas is investigating Sharon Stone so he should not be having sex with Sharon Stone.

John: Yeah.

Chris: And Glenn Close is representing Jeff Bridges so she should not be having sex with Jeff Bridges.

John: You know what we left off this list though is Fifty Shades of Grey which really would fit underneath this general category. So it’s romance–

Craig: A thriller?

John: But, I mean, it actually has thriller elements. There’s bad people doing bad stuff in it, too. Her life is in danger.

Chris: Yes.

John: So I think it would fall into this general category. So there clearly is a market for making that kind of movie. We just don’t make it–

Craig: Yeah. I mean, look, this kind of old school classic ‘90s, or early ‘90s/late ‘80s erotic thrillers were weirdly in their own way Puritanistic because they would basically reinforce that transgressive sexual behavior would automatically lead to blood on the floor. It’s all basically a lesson in staying monogamous and don’t get out of your lane and don’t give into temptation.

And people who were overtly sexual are equated with evil. And you see it come up over and over and over. If there’s any reason why we don’t make these now beyond the obvious, which is that there’s kind of no market for them, it’s probably that our sexual mores have kind of come further than anything else.

John: Yeah.

Chris: Can I point out one common thread? There are these erotic thrillers that are starring men as the protagonist and erotic thrillers that are starring women as the protagonist. The ones starring men, the men are kind of bastards. Fatal Attraction, Michael Douglas is sort of perfect in that role. You have a character who is violating the audience’s trust.

Craig: Yes.

John: Cheating on his wife.

Chris: If Tom Hanks was in Fatal Attraction and made the decision that quickly to have sex with Glenn Close you’d be like, what, Tom? Whereas Michael Douglas you kind of believed it.

Craig: Yeah. A little lizardy.

Chris: Yes. And I’m looking at Richard Gere who in that stage of his career loved playing an abrasive bastard. There was almost something where he was antagonizing the audience. Cruel Intentions, Ryan Phillippe in that movie is playing a version of Valmont and is enjoying being a bastard. Al Pacino in Sea of Love, that’s like The Verdict meets erotic thriller. He’s that drunken messed up cop. An element that I’m seeing in this is the casting and the writing of the male character they all seem to be – and, by the way, Douglas comes back in Basic Instinct – a little bit of it seems to be the audience enjoying watching this guy get his comeuppance for having broken the rules.

Craig: Right.

John: Yes.

Craig: Morality plays.

Chris: And casting the right actor in a morality play is a big part.

Craig: But they also in some way start to turn these men into passive movers. Because these women come along and tempt them and turn their heads and confuse them. You know, I don’t know, I just think it’s all a bit old-fashioned.

Chris: There was nothing confused in Michael Douglas’s performance in Fatal Attraction. They’re out having a drink after having had a meeting and he makes a decision instantaneously.

Craig: Sure. Yes, he does. But then the movie basically says, OK, fine, that happened. But look how crazy she is.

Chris: Have you watched it recently?

Craig: No.

Chris: Go back and watch it. There’s the whole thing that she’s pregnant. And all he’s trying to do is shut it down. She’s definitely got issues.

Craig: She won’t be ignored.

Chris: But Michael Douglas is not – he handles it the way a panicking male would, not the way the hero of a movie would. The other great thing about that movie is Anne Archer.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Amazing.

Chris: Anne Archer is this–

Craig: I do remember her being like–

Chris: She was the ideal. And for Glenn Close, that’s kind of an unconventional role for Glenn Close. And it’s interesting that she is in almost back-to-back erotic thrillers. And if you go back and watch, look at those two movies which are shot within a few years of each other. And by the way, The Natural was right in there, too. So you look at Glenn Close playing three–

Craig: This like luminous angel.

Chris: Yes, she’s the Madonna. She was this tough lawyer, a little bit corrupt, kind of compromised. And then playing that woman in Fatal Attraction.

Craig: Sort of on the edge, mentally on the edge.

Chris: Who you cast in an erotic thriller is a big, big deal.

Craig: Well, Glenn Close is pretty, pretty good at her job. I think we can all agree on that.

John: Although we’re probably not casting her in the next erotic thriller.

Chris: Expecting great things.

Craig: I don’t think we’re going to be seeing the likes of those.

John: Craig, can we skip ahead to something that you know especially well? Spoofs and parodies.

Craig: Spoofs and parodies.

Chris: Spoofs and parodies.

John: So movies like Airplane, Spaceballs, Not Another Teen Movie, Scary Movie series, MacGruber, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Superhero Movie. Tropic Thunder. Shaun of the Dead. Vampires Suck. Austin Powers. Blazing Saddles. We’re not making many of these movies now. And I have a theory why, but I’m curious what your theory is why we don’t make these movies.

Craig: As David Zucker would repeatedly say, “Spoof is dead.” And his thing is that he would say spoof is dead, he said it before spoof came back. Spoof was dead. I remember Jim Abrahams saying that he was mixing mafia, a Jane Austen movie, Jane Austen’s Mafia.

Chris: Jane Austen’s Mafia.

Craig: And he walked down the hall where they were mixing and on another mixing stage they were mixing There’s Something About Mary. And he just sort of watched a few minutes of it and then went back and said, “Yeah, we’re fucked. Our time is over.”

And it was over. And then the Wayans Brothers brought it back with Scary Movie. But following the success of Scary Movie, and 2, and 3, and 4, there was this sudden – suddenly they were everywhere. And the marketplace was flooded with a lot of cheap stuff. And honestly as one of the people that wrote Scary Movie 3 and 4, I mean, the pressure that we were under from the Weinsteins to make those movies as quickly as possible was brutal. And we couldn’t do them as well as we wanted to do them. And we did them with David Zucker and Pat Proft and Jim Abrahams.

So by the time all that unraveled it was mostly I think killed at the moment by just the marketplace being flooded. But also you got the sense pretty quickly that the Internet was essentially mooting the entire point of this.

John: Yes. That was my instinct.

Craig: Because every joke, I mean, we used to be like, OK, you want to make fun of this movie. Well, four or five nights from now Leno is going to do the joke. Well, now they’re doing the jokes while they’re watching things. There’s no more time. It’s over.

Chris: That’s very true.

Craig: It’s over.

Chris: Everything is – yeah, the Internet is a spoof.

Craig: The Internet is essentially a spoof machine.

John: There’s no way to make the movie quick enough to do it. And even like on YouTube they can do the crappy effects version of that joke anyway.

Chris: But Blazing Saddles is on this list. It is a spoof but it is a spoof with a higher purpose.

John: So it’s not a spoof of any one movie, it’s taking genre conventions–

Craig: Of a genre.

Chris: Of a genre.

John: And Shaun of the Dead is a great example of like taking the genre conventions and upending them in a way that’s—

Chris: Well that’s a mashup.

John: Yeah.

Chris: And a great one.

John: Fantastic.

Craig: It’s still I would say really hard now. I mean, Airplane was a direct spoof of a movie called Zero Hour from 1956 or something, or 1955, which no one had seen. That was sort of the oddity of Airplane that they just did this random thing. But somewhere along the line spoofs became connected to either genres as a whole or when it got really bad pop culture. And that’s when it just all to me absolutely fell apart.

There’s probably room for somebody to make a spoof of some weird movie that has been forgotten.

Chris: Well, but and Austin Powers is taking shots at movies along with Bond. Matt Helm. And some really–

Craig: In Like Flint.

Chris: Yeah, In Like Flint. When the phone rings, that’s directly taken from In Like Flint.

John: But you look at the ones of these that we feel like you could still make is that these films actually have individualized characters who sort of have an arc and have a point of view. And the movie doesn’t exist just to make fun of the movie that came before it. The character is existing within a world and is consistent within a world. So Austin Powers is a spoof of another kind of character, but is also a character himself. And Dr. Evil is a character himself.

Chris: Yes. And it’s a time travel comedy in a way. They both are, at least two of the three, are.

Craig: I mean, the people that kind of come the closest now to doing spoof and parody in their own way is Chris and Phil.

John: Lord and Miller. Yeah.

Craig: Yeah. Lord and Miller in a weird way do. I mean, Lego has certain spoof aspects to it.

John: Their Spider Man also has aspects of like it’s an awareness of where this is fitting inside the culture.

Chris: Meta.

Craig: Yeah, it’s Meta. Their Jump Street movies are kind of spoofing Jump Street.

John: Oh yes.

Craig: Like it’s a self-spoof. But it’s different. It’s not like, I mean, thank god, by the way. Because honestly nothing is harder than writing those things. I will never work harder in my life than I did writing Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4. It was just—

Chris: It’s one of the reasons Chernobyl is not as funny.

Craig: Yeah, I know. It took the jokes out.

John: It took all the comedy out of me.

Chris: You didn’t make the effort. I know.

John: Let’s take the jokes out of biblical epics, and/or sword and sandals movies. So things like Gladiator, Ben-Hur, Noah, Passion of the Christ. King in Heaven. Spartacus. Ten Commandments. Braveheart, to some degree. Lawrence of Arabia. Like we used to make these things. That was actually a staple of original Hollywood. We have the giant ranches here because we used to make these epics.

Chris: Giant movies.

John: Giant movies. We don’t make them anymore.

Chris: No.

John: So here’s–

Chris: Because they don’t win awards anymore.

John: They don’t win awards anymore.

Craig: Precisely.

John: Even though Game of Thrones is being show on smaller screens, it is that kind of sword and sandals thing.

Craig: Correct.

Chris: Yes.

John: And so we’re making them, but we’re making them for smaller screen.

Craig: TV. No question.

Chris: But is TV – I have a very large television. It’s not terribly expensive. I would imagine a lot of people have maxed their credit cards for a large TV.

Craig: You’re comparing your large TV to the TV you grew up, which was like the TV I grew up. That 9-inch black and white thing in the kitchen, with the single antenna shooting out.

Chris: It was a letterbox.

Craig: Correct. But my kids only know those TVs. But those TVs are still not – I mean, they’re not movies.

Chris: No.

Craig: It’s not a movie screen.

Chris: No. But most people, the way their viewing habits are now, we’re making a Mission: Impossible. We have an IMAX segment in it. And people are saying well why don’t you just shoot the whole thing in IMAX.

Craig: No one is going to watch it.

Chris: It’s never going to be seen again. You’re making this balance. And there are times I’ll be framing a shot and Cruise will walk up to me and go, “You know when this is on the big screen and I pull my phone out of my pocket—“

Craig: Here it is.

Chris: This is the screen now. It’s not that it will only be watched on television, but for the life of the film.

Craig: For the life of it. Primarily.

Chris: The theatrical lifespan of a movie is 12 weeks.

Craig: Whoa. 12 weeks. What is this hit movie you’ve got that’s in there 12 weeks?

Chris: I’m talking like by the end it’s in eight theaters

Craig: Yes. Correct.

Chris: I’m giving a conservative—

Craig: Really it’s four weeks is what it is.

Chris: Four weeks. Yeah.

Craig: It used to be months.

Chris: Yes.

Craig: It is now about four weeks.

John: So what is the essence of these biblical epics we’re talking about? So, if you’re talking about a Gladiator or a Ben-Hur, it is a character in a long ago time, typically a Roman time, who is coming up against an authority system. He is leading, it’s always a he in these movies, is leading–

Chris: It’s a Christ figure against Rome.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Christ figure against Rome.

Craig: That’s exactly what it is. Every single time. Christ figure against Rome. Doesn’t matter what you do.

Chris: Doesn’t matter if it’s Rome or not Rome. Doesn’t matter if it’s Christ or not Christ.

Craig: That’s what Braveheart is. That’s what Ten Commandments is. Even when it’s Jews it’s still a Christ figure against Rome. Some hero will rise in a kind of faded destiny way, usually out of nothing. And they have special powers, special abilities. They are spat on, tortured, hurt. Their family is killed. They are persecuted. And ultimately they do some incredibly self-sacrificial thing and the world is saved. And the last scene is people sitting around going, “God, he was awesome.”

Chris: He was a great man.

Craig: He was a great man.

Chris: And it’s always a man.

Craig: And it’s always a man. Patriarchy.

Chris: As a matter of fact there’s a biblical epic with a woman. Mary Magdalene is coming soon.

John: Yes.

Craig: Really?

Chris: Rooney Mara.

John: Rooney Mara plays that.

Craig: Wasn’t there already one of those that like [Murray Bowen’s] company did? Didn’t he do? Oh, I thought he did.

Chris: Maybe we’re talking about the same one.

Craig: No, no, that one was [crosstalk].

Chris: But, yes, I saw a trailer. Joaquin Phoenix is Jesus.

Craig: Ooh. Jesus is a phoenix. I’m down with that.

Chris: Pretty interesting. It’s an interesting Jesus.

John: Yeah. So I guess that’s the question. Is this type of movie really about the setting or is it about specifically that sort of Jesus against Rome kind of thing? Because even Braveheart you could sort of look at as Jesus against Rome.

Craig: Directly.

John: Yeah, so it’s the same concept.

Craig: No question.

John: And to what degree do they need to be big screen movies versus – in a weird way–

Chris: Time.

John: Time.

Chris: Time and distance. When you want to talk epic scale, Lawrence of Arabia is a giant event.

John: But isn’t a miniseries better suited up for this kind of epic storytelling? I think it could have been kind of a fluke that the only thing we had were movies. And so we had to tell the Ten Commandments as a movie.

Craig: And they were very long movies.

John: They’re very long movies.

Craig: Ben-Hur is endless.

John: But the better form would have been as a series.

Craig: I agree with you. I think that there is – these things will generally work better, live better, as series. I think it’s probably where they’re generally going to happen. But one of the few segments of audience that still reliably goes to movies are faith-based audiences.

John: Yes.

Craig: And I’m not a faith-based person. I don’t even really know what faith is. I mean, I know the definition. I’ve just never felt it before. But regardless, they will go to these things. And so you have this other weird segment of movie where every now and then you’ll look at like on Deadline what were the top five movies this weekend and number four is, wait, what the? What? It’s a Prayer for Jimmy? And what is this?

Chris: And it’s why they made that last remake of Ben-Hur.

Craig: No question. Oh yes, yes. Ben-Hur was—

Chris: Was a direct calculated aimed – it was very much targeted at that group.

Craig: I mean, nothing is more cynical as far as I’m concerned.

Chris: No, no, The Passion of the Christ caught everybody off guard.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yes.

Chris: Nobody expected. And that was kind of the thing. And remember it came out at a weird time of year. It was January, when January was–

Craig: A cold, dead January.

Chris: That’s the place where movies went to die.

Craig: January, February. By the way, is there any month now where movies go to die? I don’t think there is.

Chris: Yes. Back to school week. The first week of September is still – somebody’s going to do it. But that is–

Craig: Actually a great idea for just a movie is back to school week, let’s go see every movie. It’s just one horrible movie where all of the junk gets dumped.

Chris: Oh yes.

John: All right, let’s maybe wrap up with buddy cop, which was a frequent suggestion. Buddy cop, come on, there have been amazing buddy cop movies. 21 Jump Street. The Other Guys. Hot Fuzz. The Heat. Bad Boys. Men in Black. K-9. Lethal Weapon. White Chicks. Shanghai Noon. That idea that you have two mismatched people who have to work together to solve a crime and to do things. It’s a classic paradigm. You know, Abbott and Castello. We’ve always seen these two, this [unintelligible] go through things. But we’re not doing a lot of them now. So what’s – how do we get to it?

Craig: Well, you know what? I think the Too Fast Too Furious, I just always give Derek Haas credit for that. And let’s so also say RIP John Singleton, the director of Too Fast Too Furious. But the Fast and Furious franchise is kind of a buddy cop writ large with multiple buddies.

John: True.

Chris: Dragged Across Concrete is coming out.

Craig: Yeah. I think they still do these.

Chris: I don’t know that that’s a comedy.

John: Central Intelligence is essentially a buddy cop movie.

Craig: That’s right. That’s buddy cop. And there was just a movie, wasn’t there a movie with Regina Hall just out and – I think that they keep making these.

Chris: Oh, well the Sandra Bullock, Miss Congeniality.

John: Oh, The Heat.

Craig: Oh, that’s way back. But then there’s The Heat with Melissa McCarthy. Yeah, I think they still make buddy cop movies.

John: So I think we may need to step away from the idea of cops. So as long as there are two people who are tasted in a professional job of doing some kind of police-y thing.

Chris: The Odd Couple with guns.

John: An Odd Couple with guns. Thank you.

Craig: Odd Couple with guns. That’s pretty much what it is.

Chris: What it boils down to.

Craig: And they become each other’s family.

Chris: Yes.

John: And so as long as, you know, you can make them for the big screen. You have to have a certain production value and a certain size to make them for the big screen. Weirdly you don’t see as many of them in TV shows anymore. So I guess right now on the air we have MacGyver, we have Magnum PI which is sort of–

Chris: Yeah, cop shows on TV are definitely more dramas.

Craig: Procedurals. Well, because the essence of the buddy cop is that they don’t start as buddies and they end up as buddies. But you can’t end up as anything on a serialized show. You have to keep going. So it kind of has to be a movie.

Chris: Yes. A lot of this conversation seems to be about how technology has disrupted what we imagined the plain of cinema to be. There seems to be a really clear shift.

Craig: And just wait.

Chris: From no home video, to home video, to no home video again. Now it’s home theater. Now it’s home – it’s content. That’s where I think the line is blurring. It’s big screen/small screen.

Craig: And the amount that’s available now is – and the resources that are being poured into it. I mean, better or worse, however you want to chop up the money, there was just way less money. I mean, there were five studios and they gave you some studio. And there were three networks and they gave you some money.

But now we’ve got just billions and billions rushing in to make more and more stuff. It is transforming things. But there aren’t that many more screens. In fact, I’d probably argue there are fewer screens than there used to be.

John: Well, there’s not more time. There’s not more time for people to view things. And so even though we have new people coming in and new distribution outlets, we have new money chasing new things–

Craig: Time is a flat circle.

John: Yes. And so we don’t have the ability to watch more things. And so we have to choose how we’re going to do this.

Chris: I’m looking at the–

John: So I skipped over some things. Is there a genre there you want to tackle?

Chris: Westerns.

John: Let’s talk about westerns.

Craig: Hmm, westerns.

John: On this show we’ve talked about Unforgiven. We’ve talked about 3:10 to Yuma. We’ve talked about sort of westerns. But what is it about westerns that you think can be suited towards the big screen. Because also we had Scott Frank on who talked about his great Netflix show.

Chris: Yes.

Craig: Godless.

John: Godless. Which was sort of exploding what a normal western—

Craig: Meant to be a movie. Written as a script.

Chris: He struggled with it for years, right? He was trying to get it down to something movie size.

Craig: Well, and he does it with all of his movies. But, I mean, look, it was movie size. It’s just that what he was struggling was to get somebody to pay for it as a movie. Because essentially people kept saying well the western is dead, the western is dead, the western is dead.

Chris: And that which is the WWII movie is dead. You hear about this all the time. And then the number of times I’ve seen a dead genre—

Craig: Everything is dead until it’s not.

Chris: Yeah. Dunkirk was a really great example of a dead genre that people don’t go to see anymore.

Craig: My favorite example is nothing could have been a deader genre than pirate movies.

John: Oh yeah, of course.

Craig: Pirate movies. Not only dead—

Chris: Do you remember Pirates with Walter Matthau?

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes.

Chris: Oh my god.

Craig: But before they made Pirates of the Caribbean we had Cutthroat Island which had sank an entire, like a hedge fund disappeared.

Chris: It killed Carolco.

Craig: Yeah, Carolco. An entire company was dead. And before that–

Chris: Killed careers.

Craig: Careers. Renny Harlin. And then – and the thought of making a pirates movie was considered almost obscene.

John: Yeah.

Chris: Yes.

Craig: And…

John: Pirates of the Caribbean. Just takes one.

Craig: There we go.

John: It didn’t start a new genre. There weren’t like other pirates movies coming after that. It was only the one pirate movie.

Craig: Exactly. Everybody else was like you know what, let’s let them have it. We’re still not making pirate movies.

Chris: We’re still not making pirate movies. And it so specifically hinges around a kind of storytelling and a character. Johnny Depp.

Craig: And a brand.

Chris: Exactly.

Craig: I mean, just built in.

John: It was also supernatural. So you had a supernatural vibe to it which is different than other stuff.

Chris: But the western, Unforgiven represented a shift towards deconstructionist from which the genre never seemed to – 3:10 to Yuma was its own darker western. Godless was its own. What I miss – what I’d love to see is—

Craig: Shane.

Chris: The Magnificent 7. And Shane. Silverado. The Big Country. Movies that are more of an adventure and more a morality tale as opposed to – watch slow west.

Craig: It’s never going to happen. It’s gone. It’s over.

Chris: I will fight you on that.

Craig: Well, look, I think as a country and a culture we have lost the ability to go back to the kind of idealized west. We just know too much.

Chris: No, I don’t think it’s idealized. I think – you look at The Big Country, it’s not idealized. The country is rough, but a man walks into it who refuses to play by those rules. And I think that’s – if you take westerns there are two kinds. There are kind of westerns noirs where the west just chews you up and spits you out. And there’s the place where one can prove one’s self.

Craig: Sure.

Chris: And it’s this rough and lawless place where somebody, you know.

Craig: Maybe a book would do it.

John: A book might do it. I mean, I think it comes back to the discussion we had with the ensemble dramedies which his that we used to go to see those movies that didn’t have a lot of high stakes in them because that was fine. We needed to go see a movie.

Craig: What the hell else were you going to do on a Saturday afternoon?

John: And so I just wonder that this non-deconstructed western that is just truly a western whether it’s actually going to get people to go out to see it on a screen.

Chris: Hell or High Water.

John: Hell or High Water—

Chris: It was contemporary but it’s a western.

John: It totally is.

Chris: It’s a bank-robbing—

John: It’s a pickup truck western and I loved it for what it was able to do. But that was not a breakout smash hit. It was a good performer, but it was not—

Chris: I think it did OK financially and it got nominated for Best Picture.

John: It did, absolutely.

Chris: Which for movies of that size is kind of the – that’s your life blood to keep in the theaters for another—

Craig: John Lee Hancock has kind of made a western in a sense with The Highwaymen.

Chris: The Highwaymen. Sure.

Craig: But, again, Netflix. I mean, and that’s where John Lee lives now. You know, those are the movies he’s going to be making now because – and here’s a guy who made, I don’t know, $14 billion for Warner Bros and Alcon with The Blind Side. And today I don’t think they make The Blind Side for theatrical. That’s what’s happened. I fear that we have lost something kind of permanently in the economics of making these movies.

And it may have literally just come down to the cost of marketing. Because—

Chris: That’s everything.

Craig: Right. I mean, Netflix, the way they market their movie is they don’t. It’s just there.

Chris: When you turn on Netflix they’re like, hey, do you want to watch this?

Craig: Correct.

John: Absolutely. And they bought every billboard in Los Angeles but that’s just for us.

Chris: But here’s the upside to that. Here’s the less than dystopian way of looking at that. In the current culture where the business is suddenly waking up to the fact that they have to diversify, this is something I experience a lot on the movies that I get called in to come in and do fixes on. The business was predicated on a male director makes a $5 million movie that makes $50 million. Let’s give him $200 million in hopes it makes $1 billion. Women were not afforded those same undeserved opportunities.

Craig: Correct.

Chris: Which they are now.

Craig: And were punished—

Chris: And were punished – exactly.

Craig: If they didn’t do the impossible.

Chris: Whereas the way to look at Netflix is Netflix could be the farm system. Now there’s many more movies being made for lower budgets creating – and I see lots of women directing television now.

Craig: Way more opportunity.

Chris: The director lists that I’m now being handed for the TV shows I’m working on are 50/50 and you’re actually looking at, oh, that person is being hired for the quality of their work, which is very encouraging. Is it possible that what we end up with is – you know how the Oscars have sort of divided into—?

Craig: Yes.

Chris: You know, there’s Oscar movies and there’s money-making movies. Now could there be there’s Netflix movies and there’s feature films? And that the feature films because of marketing requirements need to be bigger movies that make more money. And then Netflix becomes the farm system that teaches people how to do stuff.

You could live within the Netflix bubble and make a 14, a 25, and a $60 million movie.

Craig: Yeah. I think we’re there. I mean, I think that’s where we are. The real question, is there any kind – well, question number one. Is there mobility from Netflix type of movies or other TV movies to the big ones? Or do people even want to go? Because here’s the thing. I think a lot of filmmakers don’t – you know, we were talking to Mari Heller about this. Mari Heller made this incredible movie, Diary of a Teenage Girl. It was amazing. And people came to her and they’re like here’s this huge superhero movie, you want to do it? And she was like I feel like I’m supposed to, because we’re trying to advance the cause of female directors and we’re trying to get into those big seats, but I don’t want to.

I want to do this.

Chris: Well, there’s no point in making it if – you look at her and that dilemma knowing that – having nothing to do with who is directing a movie how those movies get made. The script is not ready.

Craig: Yep. [laughs]

Chris: The movie is going in three weeks.

Craig: Correct.

Chris: You’ve never done anything like this.

Craig: The actor is kind of in charge.

Chris: The producer, whose name is on a bunch of giant movies, will not be there.

Craig: Correct.

Chris: And this is all going to be your fault. Do you still want to do it?

Craig: It is really terrifying.

Chris: Correct. And again, it takes a special kind of director to get into that kind of trouble and then accept the help when they bring it in. Because you are essentially now, it’s very embarrassing. You’re at a point where you’re in way over your head. And not because – this is not hubris. They’re promised support, and then it’s just not there. So now suddenly you lose control of your movie. It takes a lot having never been through the process to know that it’s all going to be OK in the end. When the movie works you’ll still get credit.

Craig: That’s a lot to have faith in.

Chris: It’s very wounding. So I can see somebody looking at that and saying—

Craig: Nah.

Chris: But there’s the other side of that is the grass is always greener. You’re going to have people making big giant movies. Michael Bay made Pain & Gain because he really wanted to make it. Michael Bay, some part of Michael Bay – I don’t care, any filmmaker you can name at that level – some part of them wants to make their little movie about—

Craig: Their podium movie.

Chris: [laughs] They want to make their podium movie.

Craig: They want to make their podium movie.

Chris: Yes, and the same thing I would imagine is just – the Duffer Brothers have some big feature they want to do.

Craig: Big ass dumb movie they want to do.

Chris: Yes, they’ve got some big ass.

John: Well, I think Duffer Brothers are a great example because Stranger Things had an effect on popular culture which was terrific and because it was a really popular series. But if that had just been a one-off movie I don’t think it would have had that effect on popular culture—

Chris: No.

John: The way that a movie that’s released on big screens can actually bend culture in a way. So Black Panther can bend culture.

Craig: We have proof of that. Because even though I admired it, Super 8 is Stranger Things.

John: It is.

Craig: And it just doesn’t work as a movie the way Stranger Things works as a series.

John: Yeah. And that was the case where J.J. Abrams wanted to make this smaller movie.

Craig: Well, what do you say we wrap this up by heading into One Cool Things?

John: Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

Craig: I do have a One Cool Thing. I hope that you have a One Cool Thing.

Chris: I have Two Cool Things.

Craig: Well, it’s called One Cool Thing, Chris.

John: He can do two. It’s the 400th episode.

Chris: I have to pick one?

Craig: No, you can do two.

Chris: One of my Cool Things is in the other Cool Thing.

Craig: OK, fair enough.

Chris: Neither of them may be cool.

Craig: They’re nested.

Chris: They’re nerdy.

John: Kangaroos.

Craig: My One Cool Thing this week is a recommendation from grand crossword nerd Trip Payne. And it is an app called One Clue Crossword. Very clever. So you get a little – it looks like vaguely a crossword. It’s not like a proper crossword. But there are no clues except for a picture. And all of the answers—

Chris: I’m already obsessed.

Craig: Are things that are contained in that photo.

Chris: Oh, come on.

John: Oh great.

Craig: And you’ve got to figure out what goes where in the interlocking grid.

Chris: Genius.

Craig: Starts off easy, gets harder and harder and harder.

Chris: By the way to everyone listening, this is the guy who does The New York Times Crossword Puzzle in 2.5 minutes on every Monday. You are like Mr. Crossword.

Craig: No, Trip Payne could – this dude literally was once the actual champion of all crossword puzzles. He’s amazing.

Chris: But it’s you and Megan Amram and David Kwong and Rian Johnson.

Craig: Shannon Woodward and Rian Johnson and Chris Miller.

Chris: And I was a fly on the wall watching you guys and looking at my time. I can’t type that fast. I don’t know how, right?

John: I tried, too, and I can’t.

Craig: Practice.

Chris: If you gave me all the answers.

John: I couldn’t fill it in.

Chris: If you were standing over my shoulder going, “Just type this,” I couldn’t. I couldn’t do the Wednesday in two minutes.

Craig: There was a great, one of the great, great crossword constructors of all time was a guy named Henry Hook. He would make crosswords for The Boston Globe I think. And he was notoriously fast. And one guy once raced him with a crossword, except the twist was that the guy had written the crossword. It was his crossword. And he lost to Henry Hook. Yep.

Chris: That’s amazing. So don’t you think that there’s some sort of a physical hand-eye component?

Craig: You get faster as you. What can I say?

Chris: Well, I definitely – because you’re able to track it on the app. Yeah, my times have improved but I’ve hit a wall. There’s no—

Craig: Yeah, you started too late man.

Chris: That’s the problem.

Craig: You’ve got to get in there when you’re a kid.

Chris: The brain is just rusty. You’re right. I should have done it.

John: So my One Cool Thing, this winter I had a cold and so I had my humidifier out. The humidifier worked great. And I found that I was still using the humidifier because I kind of liked the noise it made.

Craig: Nice white noise.

John: White noise. But like I didn’t need to have this thing out in my room and this fan spinning. So I ended up finding a really good white noise machine. I went on the Wirecutter and picked their best white noise machine. And you know what? They were right. It’s a really good little white noise machine. It’s called The LectroFan High Fidelity White Noise Sound Machine. $46 on Amazon. It’s a small little hockey puck that makes really good sound.

And the thing I learned is that some of these machines they just have a sample that they’re playing, a sample sound. This one generates it algorithmically so it’s always completely random.

Craig: That’s really random. Because I use an app.

John: For traveling I use an app.

Craig: And the app is on a loop. And what will happen is if you’re having a bad night—

John: You’ll hear the loop.

Craig: You start hearing the loop. And now you’re F-ed.

Chris: That’s got to be like delirium.

Craig: No, it’s super bad.

Chris: Horrible. Do you have trouble sleeping?

Craig: Not the way I used to. Not the way I used to. As I get older I find that actually I’m looking forward to going to sleep. I used to dread it. And now I’m like, oh yay, I get to give up.

Chris: Ooh, it’s nighttime.

Craig: I get to quit on life and just unplug.

Chris: I never realized that insomnia was just refusing to embrace surrender.

Craig: No question. For me, insomnia was always just like do not die.

Chris: In your sleep!

Craig: In your sleep. What are your nested Cool Things?

Chris: My nested Cool Things are I brought this computer bag.

John: It’s a good-looking computer bag. It’s a black bag.

Chris: It is a black bag. It is made by a company called eBags. And you can see how there’s one strap. There’s actually two, but you can undo this and tuck it in and it becomes—

Craig: Like a briefcase.

Chris: Like a briefcase bag.

John: Nice.

Chris: And usually the two-in-one king of thing really turns me off. This is great in terms of all its many pockets. My favorite one being this rather large pocket at the bottom.

Craig: Or?

Chris: The case itself comes with a hard shell so you can store all of your cables in here. I took it out and this is where I put my toiletries when I travel. Because you have to take all of your liquids out.

Craig: Right. You’ve got to pull out that stupid clear bag.

Chris: Yes. And this bag just places you right through security.

Craig: That’s great.

Chris: It’s a great bag.

Craig: You know what? There’s a topic, by the way – traveling for writers – that we’re going to have to cover. Because god knows I’ve done it enough this year.

Chris: Oh yes.

Craig: And I got travel wired up.

John: I’ve gotten much better because I’ve done all the book tours.

Craig: Right. Exactly.

John: You just pulled something from this. So what is this?

Craig: Is that a battery?

Chris: This is not a battery. This is a laptop stand. Because writing flat on a desk – when I travel—

Craig: It’ll screw your wrist.

Chris: It screws your wrist. This is made by a company called, I hope I’m pronouncing it correctly, AViiQ. Which is how one would spell AViiQ.

Craig: Naturally AViiQ.

Chris: And for people not watching it—

Craig: That’s everyone. [laughs]

Chris: It looks like a ruler. Right? Well I’m talking – that’s not. You guys are here.

Craig: I’m not looking.

Chris: And it’s like origami. It’s made of aluminum. It unfolds.

Craig: Oh, wow, that’s great.

Chris: And feel the weight of it?

Craig: Oh my god, I’ve got to get this.

Chris: It’s like a few sheets of paper.

Craig: And this I assume is made to fit say a MacBook Pro?

Chris: I’ve had every laptop from a Pro to an Air.

John: Oh my god, it’s so light.

Chris: Everything on it. You don’t even know it’s in your bag.

Craig: That’s great.

Chris: It’s great.

Craig: AViiQ.

Chris: AViiQ. Everybody just go and look at it online. Because there’s no way to describe it where it makes any sense.

Craig: I’m buying that. I’m buying that. That’s brilliant.

Chris: OK, good. I’m glad. And by the way—

John: It was worth the two things.

Chris: This bag, this computer bag, is like $130. It’s not extremely prohibitive.

Craig: It’s not cheap, but it’s not extremely prohibitive. It’s not made of Panda skin.

Chris: Correct.

Craig: The way one would expect Chris McQuarrie to roll.

Chris: And the AViiQ thing is like $20.

Craig: I like that.

Chris: It’s been a while since I bought it.

Craig: I hear you.

Chris: All right. It’s $10,000.

John: [laughs] It’s diamond-encrusted.

Chris: Yes. It’s made of conflict medals from—

Craig: Conflict medals!

John: As we wrap up this show we should remind people that they should buy t-shirts. The Scriptnotes 400-episode t-shirts are available. They should also buy tickets to our live show coming up at the Ace Hotel.

Craig: 400.

John: We’ll have links to both of those things.

Craig: That’s like eight years of podcasting.

John: It’s a lot of podcasting.

Craig: Oh my god.

John: It’s not even counting the special episodes, of course. So, the things that aren’t part of the number sequence—

Craig: Can’t believe it. Wow.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

Craig: Chris McQuarrie is?

Chris: Cryptically enough @chrismcquarrie.

John: @chrismcquarrie.

Chris: I’m in the midst of a Twitter moratorium.

John: It’s a good thing.

Craig: Tweet at him anyway.

Chris: Yeah. I answer questions in DMs now.

Craig: Be disagreeable with him. He loves it.

Chris: Yeah, I like being disagreeable.

John: You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs.

Some folks have started doing recaps and discussion on the screenwriting sub-Reddit. I don’t know if you’ve seen this, Craig?

Craig: No.

John: If that continues that’s great. But basically they’re just recapping what happens on the show.

Craig: Oh, I hope they recap this very moment.

John: You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

And if you’re doing that you should probably check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide at johnaugust.com/guide to find out which episodes our listeners recommend most. You were on Episode 300. We already have you penciled in for Episode 500.

Chris: Yes, done. I’m there.

Craig: No question. I mean, that’s our Diamond Jubilee.

Chris: OK, great. I’m there.

John: Chris McQuarrie, thank you very much.

Chris: Thank you guys.

Craig: And you know what, John? Thank you. 400 episodes.

John: It’s been nice.

Craig: Thanks man.

Links:

• Order your Scriptnotes 400 shirts, sweatshirts, and tanks (Light) and (Dark)!
• Join us for Scriptnotes LIVE on June 13th at the Ace Hotel to benefit Hollywood Heart. Buy your tickets here!
• Watch Chernobyl on HBO
• The Chernobyl Podcast with Craig and Peter Sagal
• Scriptnotes episode 300, From Writer to Writer-Director with Chris McQuarrie
• LectroFan High Fidelity White Noise Sound Machine
• One Clue Crossword
• eBags and AViiQ Portable Laptop Stand
• Find past episodes and Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
• Check out the Scriptnotes Episode Guide
• Submit to the Pitch Session here!
• Chris McQuarrie on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.